Genesis 6:6
What does Genesis 6:6 mean?
Yahweh was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him in his heart.
The short answer
Genesis 6:6 records one of the most startling sentences in the Bible: "Yahweh was sorry that he had made man," and "it grieved him in his heart." Just before the flood story begins, the narrator pauses to tell us what is happening inside God. And what is happening is not fury. It is sorrow.
That matters, because we tend to assume the flood is a story about divine rage. But the Hebrew words here point somewhere else. The word behind "sorry" carries the sense of mourning—the language of grief, not merely regret. And the word behind "grieved," as scholar Jerome Creach points out, is the same verb used in Genesis 34 to describe how Dinah's brothers felt after she was assaulted. It describes someone who has been wounded, distressed, cut to the heart. God, in this verse, is not a judge slamming a gavel. God is more like a parent standing in the wreckage of what a beloved child has become.
Even the judgment that follows in verse 7—God's decision to blot out what he had made—flows out of this sorrow rather than out of simple wrath. Creach notes that the decision comes in direct relation to divine grief. The flood, in other words, begins with a broken heart.
And the story does not end there. Walter Brueggemann reads this same grieving God forward into Isaiah 65, where the one who was once sorry over creation now pours out unexplainable newness—a new heavens, a new earth, a city of real joy. The God whose heart could be broken in Genesis 6:6 is the same God who refuses to let heartbreak have the last word. Grief, in Scripture's telling, is not where God stays. It is where God's mending of the world begins.
What scholars say
Creach answers the question of what God is actually feeling in Genesis 6:6, tracing the Hebrew vocabulary of mourning and wounded distress behind the verse; Brueggemann then carries that grieving God forward to Isaiah 65, where sorrow gives way to streaming newness.
“As 6:7 says, “So the L ORD said, ‘I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.’” God’s response to human evil in this case is not anger or wrath but sorrow. The description of God’s “condition” is one of divine pathos. God mourns or grieves (as in 38:12; Jer. 31:15). Another description of God occurs at the end of Genesis 6:6 with a word that means to be distressed, indignant, or saddened ( yit‘aṣṣēb ; note this same verb appears in 34:7 to describe the feelings of Dinah’s brothers after she is raped). Hence God’s decision to “blot out from the earth the human beings” (v. 7) comes in relation to divine sorrow.”
“The God who speaks (and so enacts) newness is the one who generated the first heaven and first earth, but who was then "sorry" that the world came to evil—the God whom humanity "grieved . . . to his heart" (Genesis 6:6). But not now! Now the creator streams out newness that is beyond explanation. In Isaiah 65:17, the newness of God comes into sharper focus. To be sure, the cosmic backdrop lingers. But now it is Jerusalem as joy and delight. The newness consists in an actual human city, not the remoteness of "heaven" or the vagueness of "earth" but rather a city of bricks and mortar, of law and government, of commerce and labor—real people living real lives together.”
What it means for you
If God's first response to evil is grief, that reshapes how we think about our own failures—and about the world's. It suggests we are not dealing with a distant deity keeping score, but with someone whose heart can actually be affected by what we do. That is both sobering and strangely comforting: our choices matter enough to wound God.
It also gives us permission to grieve well. When we mourn over cruelty, injustice, or our own regrets, we are not far from the heart of God. And Genesis 6:6, read alongside Isaiah's promises, reminds us that sorrow in God's hands is never the final chapter—newness follows.
Genesis 6 in context
Genesis 6 opens with a bleak assessment: human wickedness has become pervasive, and every inclination of the human heart bends toward evil (6:5). Verse 6 is God's inner response to that diagnosis, and verse 7 announces the decision to blot out what he has made. But the chapter immediately pivots: Noah finds favor in God's eyes (6:8), and the rest of the chapter turns toward the ark and the preservation of life. Genesis 6:6 sits at the hinge—between the world's corruption and God's costly, grief-shaped response to it.