Also due to the present reality, the holy God decides to wipe out the human race with a flood. He,
who in His essence is immutable, is portrayed as altering in His feelings, due to the change in humanity,
and thus changing in His actions.
20
That decision, in turn, brings Him grief. He has to destroy the work of
His hands, the people whom He loves, and with whom He longs to have fellowship.
Genesis 6:6 (and v. 7) is not to be interpreted, again, as saying that Yahweh "regretted" or "was
sorry" that He had made people on the earth, in the sense that He did not foresee how awful the human race
would become, and now wishes that He had never made man. There is no hint of Yahweh wanting to
retract His previous act of creation, since He now regards it as a mistake. In addition to the matter of the
foreknowledge of God, there are other relevant considerations. How can He regard the making of man a
mistake, when He has, from eternity, before the foundation of the earth, predestined people for salvation,
for everlasting life with Him (e.g., Ephesians 1:4, 1 Corinthians 2:7-9)? He does not think of the existence
of the human race as a regretful error on His part, because He has already (Genesis 3:15) promised to send
the Savior to rescue fallen humanity. God loves people so much that He thinks they are worth saving, at
the cost of the life of His own Son, who Himself would become a man. There had been many godly people
before the flood who lived to God's glory, as His true servants. In Genesis 6 Noah stands forth, with the
believing members of his family, as a righteous man. He walked in close fellowship with His Creator, as
had his ancestor Enoch, whom God took alive to heaven (Genesis 5:21-24). God does not regret having
made man.
For Exodus 32:14 this paper suggests the translation "And God relented concerning the disaster
which He spoke of doing to His people."
21
God backed off from His threat to consume the Israelites and
leave only Moses, out of whom He would make a great nation. He did not wipe them out; however, God
did chasten them, by means of a plague, as reported at the end of Ch. 32 (v. 35).
The "relent/back off" translation well fits the context in Exodus 32. Further, this rendering of
nacham in the niphal is either the preferred, or a possible, translation in numerous other Old Testament
20
Herbert Leupold, Exposition of Genesis, Volume I (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1942), p. 261; John Davis,
Paradise to Prison: studies in genesis (Salem, WI: Sheffield, 1975), p. 116; Lange, Genesis, p. 287.
21
John Durham, in his Exodus (WBC 3; Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987), p. 424, translates "Thus was
Yahweh moved to pity concerning the injury that he had spoken of doing to his people."