Thursday, November 4, 2021

Charles Halton on God Changing (‎נחם nḥm) His Mind and Genesis 8:21

  

In a sense, God is said to “change his mind” precisely because, as Wholly Other, “he does not change his mind.” The interpretive tool here is the same as that articulated throughout. The very language that is used, being “sorry,” “relenting,” “repenting,” and “changing” of mind seeks to express Yahweh’s answerable and unalterable love which is expressed in his compassion, mercy and forgiveness, and equally, that he is adamant in his demand for justice and goodness. (Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 61)

 

It never ceases to astonish me that theologians are able to get away with this kind of rhetoric. In what other discipline can someone say, “In a sense, Y is said to be X precisely because, according to my ad hoc assumption, X means the very opposite of what X means”? In any case, Weinandy says that when it appears God changes God’s mind, God’s mind doesn’t change at all. What has happened is that humans have changed their behavior, which then results in an alternative response from God. In my judgment, this interpretation is impossible to square with the narrative flow of many biblical texts. . . . in The narrator of the book of Genesis tells the reader something intriguing in Genesis 8:21. At this point of the story, Noah has survived the great flood God brought upon the world to punish it for evils, human and angelic. The waters have subsided and Noah has exited the ark. He has built an altar and offered sacrifices to God. The narrator tells us, “And when the LORD smelled the pleasing odor, the LORD said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind’” (8:21a). With this statement, God changes the way God has related to creation since Eden. After Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, God cursed the ground. With the flood, God cursed the ground again by destroying everything that lived on top of it. But in Genesis 8:21 God says that “the divine policy of injuring the Earth because of humans—operative since Eden—has now been reversed.” (Norman Hahel, An Inconvenient Text: is a Green Reading of the Bible Possible? [Adelaide: ATF, 2009], 82)

 

This is an entirely new way of interacting with humanity and the greater universe. The pattern of how God acts in relation to the world changed in the most fundamental of ways. It cannot be explained as a mere response to something humans did. That is, God did not act out of a static condition and the only reason the world seemed to change is because humans altered course. Humanity keeps on sinning after the flood, as we learn from the rest of Genesis and the Bible at large. Humans remain fundamentally the same after Genesis 8. God does not. God will no longer punish the ground for what humans do. God decides to deal with humanity’s continued waywardness in a new way. Humanity, in the most essential of ways, remains static. It is God who alters course.

 

Some commentators try to explain this passage in a different way. They say God does not change the divine mind but merely has “regret” or sorrow at the bad choices of humanity. This interpretation has the same weakness as other attempts to downplay the humanlike behavior God exhibits in Scripture: it argues against the clear meaning of the words in the text. In this case, the word for “change of mind” is nḥm. In an extensive analysis of this term, one scholar says, “the only element common to all meanings of nḥm appears to be attempts to influence a situation: by changing the course of events, rejecting an obligation, or refraining from an action” (Heinz-Josef Fabry, “nḥm” in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. J. Botterweck et al., trans. David E. Green [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998], 9:342). The verb nḥm signals a break from the past, a change from a previous way of acting. It is not merely to have some sort of abstract, psychological feeling. Feelings may certainly be involved, but nḥm most fundamentally indicates a purposeful and conscious change of mind. (Charles Halton, A Human-Shaped God: Theology of an Embodied God [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2021], 116-17)

 

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