Noah
The Lord saw how
great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was
nothing but evil all the time. The Lord
regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened.
6:5-6
What an awful summation of the state of Man and
God, who had not only just entered the scene full of light, joy and
expectation. What a terrible picture of
a God whose heart is filled with pain and sadness. How did He get himself into this
situation? He that is omnipotent and
omniscience; He that could easily get himself cheered up calling in the best
entertainers, musicians and performer in the world (He is God, he can do
anything. He can get everything He
wants, can’t He?). Indeed, only a
biblical empathetic God, who is inextricably involved in human affairs, can be
thus described. Certainly not the god of
the philosophers, nor for that matter, the one of
common popular conception.
Pinchas Peli (20th Century)
Although a complete comprehension of the line “God
regretted” is impossible unless one subscribes to the theory that Torah on
occasion employs a human mode of speech…we will try to explain…Regret is not a
change of viewpoint when the premise for that viewpoint has remained
constant. Rather, it is a
re-consideration of one’s plans and attitudes based on a changed set of
circumstances…When the Torah describes God as having reconsidered, it tells us
that God continued to desire that He could carry out what He had originally
planned, but what had now become impossible due to the conduct of the other
half of the partnership between God and Man…
Yitzchak Arama (15th Century)
The Torah speaks in the language of men. The purport is that they rebelled, and
grieved His holy spirit with their sins.
The sense of the expression at His heart is that He did not tell this to
a prophet, a messenger of God…In Bereshit Rabbah there is a significant matter
concerning this, expressed by a parable which the Rabbis bring of an agent and
an architect. This constitutes a great
secret which is not permitted to be written down. The one who knows it will understand…
Ramban (13th Century)
The term that God was angry only at the evil of
man. i.e. “man’s evil was great.” His regret concerned only the creation of man
(and only on earth) not the creation of the universe as we know it. Destruction of the earth was not called for
as long as someone on earth remained alive.
Moshe Alshich (16th
Century)
The heart of God denotes the most intimate
expression that can be used to describe God’s relationship to man…Man’s
continued existence would have been a misfortune for the earth; for this reason
“God regretted.” But His heart –
speaking once again in anthropomorphic terms – had remained the same. He was grieved that He had to abandon His
heartfelt hopes for man’s continued happy existence on earth.
Samson Raphael Hirsch (19th Century)
The text’s account of God’s decision to destroy His
creation may be read in at last two ways.
One would identify human corruption as the cause of God’s decision to
destroy the world by water. This, as was
noted…is the usual reading of the text.
However, another reading would place the primary reason for God’s
decision not in God’s disappointment with human beings, but, rather, in His
disappointment with Himself. God’s decision
may have been directly evoked more by His regret and sorrow with His own
actions than with the deeds of those whom He had created…it seems to be more
engendered by His own dissatisfaction with His abilities as a Creator than with
the sins of one of the species he had created.
Byron Sherwin (Contemporary)