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)