Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Every intention of the heart, and one man who found favor
Genesis 6:1-8
1 When men began to multiply on the surface of the ground, and daughters were born to them, · WEB
A boundary is crossed that the text refuses to explain, the human heart is assessed in the bleakest terms in Scripture, and God grieves.
Four verses describe something and decline to identify it. God's sons saw that men's daughters were beautiful, and they took any that they wanted for themselves as wives, and the Nephilim were on the earth in those days.
Honest readers have long differed about who is meant, and the text supplies markers rather than a name. The phrase is used elsewhere in the Hebrew Scriptures of heavenly beings Job 1:6. The verbs describing the taking are the language of seizure by those with the power to seize — they saw, and they took any that they wanted, which is the same sequence used of the woman and the fruit. The consequence in the next verse is a limit set on human life. And the whole passage stands immediately before the corruption of all flesh.
What the text plainly states is that a boundary was crossed and that the flood follows. Beyond that it says nothing, and the restraint is not an oversight in a book that elsewhere explains far less interesting things at length.
God's response is My Spirit will not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; so his days will be one hundred twenty years. The figure has been read as a new limit on the human lifespan and as a countdown to the flood, and the two readings both have something to stand on — lifespans do decline afterward, though not to this figure for centuries, and the flood does come within such a period. What is not in doubt is the first clause, and it is the more important one. God's Spirit striving with people has a term. Patience is real and it is not indefinite.
Then the assessment, and it is the bleakest sentence about human nature anywhere in Scripture: every imagination of the thoughts of man's heart was continually only evil. Four absolutes in one line — every, thoughts, continually, only. Nothing is left outside it. This is the verdict that makes what follows something other than an overreaction.
And then the most startling line in the chapter: Yahweh was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him in his heart.
The sentence has to be taken as it stands rather than explained away, and taken as it stands it is not a confession of error. Scripture elsewhere states directly that God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should change his mind Numbers 23:19, and the same word is used there. What this verse describes is not a revised opinion but a response — grief, in the heart, at what his creatures have become. The God of this book is not indifferent to the ruin of what he made, and the judgment about to fall is announced by someone described as sorrowing rather than as angry.
And against the four absolutes, one clause with a name in it: But Noah found favor in Yahweh's eyes.
held with reason What this mark means