In the Genesis Flood story, seven pairs of clean animals entered Noah’s Ark.
Genesis 7:2 instructs Noah to take seven pairs of every clean animal, each consisting of a male and its female. It then says to take one pair of animals that were not clean. Genesis 7:3 separately mentions seven pairs of birds, again male and female, so that their kind could be preserved across the earth.
This wording is often shortened in retellings to “two of every animal.” That phrase captures the male-and-female pairing but does not include the special numerical distinction Genesis makes between clean and unclean animals. The clean-animal instruction is connected to the story’s later sacrifice, when Noah builds an altar after leaving the ark.
English translations vary slightly in how they phrase “seven pairs”; some translate the Hebrew idiom as “seven,” meaning seven pairs or seven each. The answer here follows the common explanatory reading of seven male-female pairs.