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)