Genesis 6:5-8 says God regretted/repented having made man and was grieved at his heart — but an omniscient being who by definition foresaw exactly how humanity would turn out cannot genuinely 'regret' a decision without either not really being omniscient or performing an insincere emotional display.

This uses the same interpretive tool relevant to Numbers 23:19 and the wider relenting-texts cluster: nacham (וַיִּנָּחֶם, 'to sigh/breathe deeply,' conveying grief or a change of disposition) is anthropopathic language, attributing to God, in the only vocabulary available to finite human narrators, a real moral response to humanity's corruption ('every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually,' 6:5) — not a claim that God is newly informed or surprised. Classical theism (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.19; Augustine, City of God) holds that God's decree to create, together with his foreknown response to sin, judgment (the Flood), and mercy (Noah), form a single, unified eternal act of will; from God's eternal vantage there is no sequence of 'plan failing, then improvised plan B,' while from the narrative's temporal, human vantage the text truthfully conveys God's genuine moral opposition to sin using the nearest available human analogy — someone who deeply regrets a choice. This is accommodation, not insincerity (Calvin's 'lisping'), the same literary device by which Scripture speaks of God's 'arm,' 'eyes,' or 'walking in the garden' without implying literal corporeality. It should be conceded that this move requires a philosophical framework beyond grammar and lexicon alone, and that not every serious biblical interpreter shares it — open theists (e.g. Gregory Boyd) read such texts more literally, positing genuine openness in God's experience of the future, an honest minority position within evangelicalism itself showing the text is genuinely, not merely superficially, difficult.

A God whose immutable, eternal decree includes, without contradiction, a real and reliable relational engagement with the unfolding moral drama of creation is more coherent and more worthy of worship than either a distant deity indifferent to the moral order or a temporally-limited deity blindsided by events; Genesis 6 depicts a God who takes human moral evil with maximal seriousness while never abandoning his purposes — the Noahic covenant follows immediately.