Numbers 23:19 states God does not lie or repent/change his mind, yet many other texts (Genesis 6:6, Exodus 32:14, 1 Samuel 15:11,35, Jonah 3:10, Jeremiah 18:8-10) explicitly say God repented, relented, or regretted a decision — a direct internal contradiction.

The objection equivocates on 'change.' Numbers 23:19 sits in Balaam's oracle, contrasting Yahweh with a fickle human king who promises then reneges under pressure ('God is not a man, that he should lie... hath he said, and shall he not do it?') — the point is the reliability of God's stated covenant blessing, not a metaphysical claim that no relational or emotional register is ever attributed to him. Classical theism (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.9-10, actus purus) locates unchangeability in God's essence, will, and ultimate decree; the many nacham ('sigh/breathe deeply,' i.e., grieve or relent) texts describe, in anthropopathic and covenantally responsive language, God's real engagement with a genuinely changed human/moral situation as perceived from the temporal, human vantage point — an interpretive key the text supplies itself in Jeremiah 18:7-10 ('if that nation... turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil I thought to do'), an explicitly conditional-prophecy hermeneutic embedded in the canon. Calvin (Institutes I.17.13) called this divine accommodation 'the lisping of God to us as nurses lisp with infants.' Honesty requires conceding that this harmonization is a theological/philosophical move, not something the bare Hebrew grammar alone dissolves by itself — a real and long-debated tension (even Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, treats these as non-literal anthropopathisms for the same reason), which is why this is flagged as a genuine but non-fatal difficulty.

A God who is both ontologically immutable (and hence utterly reliable — the very ground of Numbers 23:19's promise-keeping) and relationally responsive (hence genuinely engaged with covenant partners, not a frozen abstraction) is more coherent and more worthy of trust than either a static deity incapable of relationship or a mutable deity incapable of being relied upon; analogical predication (Aquinas) allows both truths without contradiction.