[Avodah] My Noah Problem

[Zev Sero]

Jonathan Baker wrote:
> So, any of you religious minds have any thoughts on 
> my Noach problem?  http://thanbook.blogspot.com
> 
> How do I reconcile the God who keeps saying "oops"
> in the Flood story: "oops I shouldn't have created
> Man", "oops I went too far in destroying", with
> the common medieval God-images of the omnipotent,
> omniscient God?  It's the "etz pri -> etz oseh pri"
> problem writ large.


The root of your problem is in the word N-Ch-M (vayinachem,
ki nichamti), which you translate in the conventional manner
as regret, which implies that He realised He had made a mistake.
That's precisely why Rashi (6:6-7) takes care to translate the
word differently. He first cites Onkelos's translation, as
"to take comfort", and then gives his own, "to consider a future
course of action". In other words, He did not regret his past
actions, but took note of them and their result when considering
what to do next.

Think of someone planning out a game of strategy. "I'll do this,
and then he'll do this so I'll do that, and then when he does this
I'll do the other". All this is planned out before the first move
is made, and the early moves are not mistakes, even though the
later moves are caused by what the opponent does.

One may object that if this is so, then why does the decision to
bring the flood come after the world turns corrupt, and why does
the decision not to bring any more floods come after the effects
of the first one become apparent. But the premise of this
objection is the fallacy that He acts in time. We're biologically
incapable of comprehending a lack of time; in our minds everything
has to happen after one thing and before another. But when He is
described as making a decision "after" something happens, it can
only mean that the event played a part in the decision, so that
the decision comes logically after the event, not temporally.

The fact that humanity would become corrupt played no part in the
decision to make humanity in the first place, but it did play a
part in the decision to bring the flood; therefore the logical
place to tell us about it comes between the two decisions.
Similarly, He decided to bring only one global flood, but no more
than one, because the destruction of such a flood would be too
much to inflict twice; i.e. the fact of the destruction was not
a reason to keep the number of such floods down to zero, but it
was a reason to keep it down to one. Therefore the logical place
to describe the destruction comes between the decision to bring
one flood and the decision not to bring more than one.

Kach nir'eh li.


-- 
Zev Sero               Something has gone seriously awry with this Court's
zev at sero.name          interpretation of the Constitution.
                       	                          - Clarence Thomas