Bible verse wall art
Genesis 8: “Lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off”
After months shut inside the ark, Noah gets his news from a bird. A single leaf in a dove's beak tells him the world outside is coming back to life.
Genesis 8 print
Genesis 8 · King James Version
11 Lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off
The waters go down
Chapter 8 opens with a turning point: God remembered Noah and every living thing with him in the ark, and sent a wind over the earth. The rain stops, the springs of the deep are closed, and slowly the waters recede. In the seventh month the ark comes to rest on the mountains of Ararat, a range in what is now eastern Turkey.
Noah waits. After forty more days he opens a window and sends out a raven, which flies back and forth until the ground dries. Then he sends a dove, and it finds nowhere to land and returns to his hand.
What does the olive leaf mean?
Seven days later Noah sends the dove again, and in the evening she comes back with the leaf described in verse 11, the words on our print. The detail “pluckt off” matters: this is a fresh leaf, torn from a living tree, not driftwood floating on the water. Noah knows that the waters have dropped enough for trees to grow on lower ground.
The choice of the olive is also meaningful. Olive trees are hardy, slow-growing and extraordinarily long-lived, and in the land of Israel they were a basic source of food, light and medicine. A living olive means the ordinary life of farming and harvest can begin again.
A week later the dove goes out a third time and does not return, a quiet sign that she has found a home. The next verses bring Noah, his family and the animals out onto dry ground.
From Noah's dove to a symbol of peace
The dove holding an olive branch became one of the most widely recognized symbols of peace in the world, used by early Christians in the catacombs and, in the twentieth century, by Picasso and peace movements. For Christians it also recalls the Holy Spirit descending like a dove at the baptism of Jesus. The print is a gentle choice for a baptism, a new home, or a family coming through a difficult time.
The flood in the rest of Scripture
The story continues in Genesis 9 with the covenant and the rainbow. Isaiah 54 recalls the waters of Noah as a model of a promise God keeps. In the New Testament, 1 Peter 3 links the ark carrying eight people through water to baptism, and Jesus uses the days of Noah as a warning to stay ready (Matthew 24).