Andralamousia
The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. Genesis 6:6 NASB
Grieved – We’ve explored the theological bias that treats this verse as anthropomorphic. Hopefully, that’s settled. God really does feel. When the verb ʿāṣab is used to describe God’s reaction to the corruption of creation, the Hebrew synonyms help us see just how deeply His grief reaches.
The root ʿāṣab relates to physical pain as well as to emotional sorrow (cf. ʿăṣîb in Biblical Aramaic, “sad”). Words similar in Hebrew are ḥîl/ḥûl “to writhe,” ḥārâ “to be hot (with anger),” yāgâ Niphal “to grieve,” lāʾâ “to become tired, weary,” kāʿas “to be irritated, angry,” mārar “to be bitter, despairing,” qûṭ “to feel a disgust,” qûṣ “to feel a disgust,” tāwâ II, “to trouble” (Ps 78:41), and the noun rōgez “turmoil.”[1]
But that’s not the end of the story (even if it is the end of the earth). The verb is a waw-consecutive + imperfect, a hitpael form. It is a reflexive, that is, the description turns back on the subject. The grief isn’t an outward movement toward men. It is an inward movement, affecting God Himself. Furthermore, the waw-consecutive tells us that this grief extends through time, as if God felt the grief in the past, is feeling the grief in the present, and will feel the grief in the future. God’s sorrow over the creation is eternal. Even to this day, He feels the pain of Genesis 6.
But even that isn’t the end of the story. Consider andralamousia.
“When God consigns the whole world to destruction, with the words, ‘I have decided to put an end to all flesh’ (6:13), Rashi comments: ‘Whenever you find sexual sin and idolatry, andralamousia comes to the world and kills good and bad (indiscriminately).’
Andralamousia is the term, borrowed from the Greek, for summary mass execution, the same notion as was indicated by the word shetef, ‘flood.’ Rashi here draws on the acknowledgement in many sources that there may indeed be a disaster in which individual merits are entirely ignored.”[2]
“The Flood, then, in its most radical imagery, becomes for all time a paradigm of the problem of God’s dealings with man . . . Shetef expresses the rash haste with which tyrants punish their populations. ‘When a king condemns his people, no one praises him, because they know that there is shetef—an angry surge of passion—in his judgment. But God is not so.’ Human beings, in a condition of shetef, become blind to individual differences and circumstances. There is a lack of curiosity about this condition that is the very definition of cruelty. God is not like this, asserts the midrash: He can always maintain high moral ground in any questioning of His judgments. It is undeniable, however, that the savage imagery of the shetef is to be found in descriptions of God’s dealings with the world.”[3]
The Flood isn’t a moment of punishment. It is a perpetual symbol of failure. Every rainbow may be a promise that the earth will never again be wiped clean by water, but at the same time those brilliant colors in the sky remind God of the colossal failure of creation, a wound that will last for eternity. Rainbows are God’s grief refracted by light.
Topical Index: grieve, ʿāṣab, andralamousia, mass execution, rainbow, Genesis 6:6
[1] Allen, R. B. (1999). 1666 עָצַב. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., pp. 687–688). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 44.
[3] Ibid., p. 46.
