Genesis 6:6

The context

The flood narrative opens with a diagnosis: every inclination of human thought is only evil continually. Verse 6 gives the divine response to that diagnosis in the language of interior emotion, regret and grief. It is the last note before the announcement of judgment and the one exception found in Noah.

What it establishes

The verse presents God as personally affected by human evil rather than indifferent to it, and it does so with the vocabulary of grief. Whatever the metaphysics, the narrative insists that the judgment about to fall is not a cold calculation.

What it does not establish

It does not settle what divine regret means. The sentence uses human emotional language for God, and the tension with passages denying that God repents is real and old. It does not say whether this is accommodation or a literal change.

Short note, first pass, October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

• The biblical account of Noah was derived from the Babylonian myth of Utanapishtim — your mythical God didn't “inspire” it.
• So you believe in a book full of contradictions, one that endorses slavery, incest, murder, drowning babies, genocide and stoning homosexuals?

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.