What is the one-hundred-and-twenty-year mystery In Genesis 6? And can God really have regrets? What does the Bible tell us? What does the Bible not tell us?
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible)
The Bible is full of surprises because we don’t know everything. And because we don’t know everything, we are surprised when the Bible says something in one place and then says something entirely different in another place! Does that mean the Bible isn’t true? Nope. Sometimes a thing is true—like when your mom says you can’t ride your bike. And sometimes it is not true—because you can ride your bike. Why can’t you ride your bike? Well, maybe you haven’t learned how to ride it yet. Maybe you are in the house. Maybe you are at the top of the stairs. Maybe you are at the swimming pool and that would be a very bad idea to try and ride your bike there. Maybe it’s in the middle of the night and it wouldn’t be safe. But then there are times when you can ride your bike—like in the driveway or maybe in your neighborhood or to get to school. And those answers are all about something called wisdom. Wisdom is why something that is a perfect choice today might be the worst choice tomorrow—like riding your bike in the pool at night. Okay, that’s always a terrible choice. How about eating a big meal? It’s a fine choice on Thanksgiving but not right before you get onto the roller coaster. Eating a big meal on Thanksgiving makes the cook feel really good about all their hard work, but eating a large meal right before you get on a roller coaster is going to be a big mess for everyone, and maybe even on everyone! Am I right?
The Bible is full of this sort of thing. One minute it gives you a rule that is forever and ever, like no Moabite can ever be a part of the children of Israel, not their children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren up to ten generations. But then, when it came time for God to choose a king, He broke his own rule and chose David, whose great-grandmother was a Moabite. What the heck is that about?! That’s about wisdom, and wisdom is about doing the right thing. Sometimes rules can get in the way of making the right choice. Not always, but sometimes. Like, the fourth commandment tells us to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, but there was a group called the Essenes and they took it way too far. It is true that the Bible says no work at all for anyone and not even animals—but during the lifetime of Jesus, the Essenes thought it would make God happier if they allowed a person to drown than if they did the work to save his or her life! Sure, technically they were keeping the Sabbath but they were not being wise. Or even halfway decent. Jesus said that even if an animal needed help that you had better do the work. Wisdom is knowing when to keep the rules and when to break them. Just like God knew to break His own rule in order to make David king—even though He said it would be wrong “forever.”
So, what does this have to do with this week’s Bible lesson? A ton. Because we have a couple of surprises that people often notice don’t make any sense on the surface. But, I want you to enjoy the surprises in the Bible and know that it is okay to notice them. It’s also okay to ask questions about them. It’s even okay when we don’t have answers. These puzzles are there for a reason, even if the only reason is to keep us on our toes and to cause us to see how little we understand and how big God is compared to us. Remember that the Bible isn’t a modern history book full of absolute dates and facts but a theological history that tells us stories in order to teach us about God. And so, it works the way that people in the ancient world would understand—it wasn’t written the way we would write things. We weren’t invented yet. Our ancestors changed the rules about how to write books and stories so we have to do a little extra work to understand how they would have read the Bible. But that makes it all a lot more fun. And, it makes more sense of a lot of the things in the Bible that only seem to be wrong when we are paying close attention, on one hand, but not getting caught up in the details, on the other hand.
And about asking question. I am going to tell you a secret about grownups. Not all grownups like questions that they can’t answer. Some grownups are afraid of questions they can’t answer. Maybe they will be mean to you when you ask questions. I know that sometimes people get upset and they might say mean things, or make stuff up, when they get asked something when they really ought to just say, “I don’t know—isn’t it cool how the Bible makes us think about things like that?” So, if you have a question and if you make the mistake of asking someone who makes you feel bad about asking, just find a new person to ask. You can even ask me. I may not have an answer for you. I may have ten possible answers for you. But I promise that I won’t make you feel like you are doing something wrong by asking.
First, let’s talk about something I skipped over last week, because it was weird. And because a lot of people are confused about it and have come up with a lot of different possible answers but nothing that’s a for sure for sure kind of thing. This is what God says right after the Bible talks about the sons of God and the daughters of men getting married—and right before it talks about their children being famous and powerful men, without even telling us that all that meant. But we talked about that last time.
3 And the Lord said, “My Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt. Their days will be 120 years.”
And so, this is just shoved on the middle of those two things. And like the rest of it, it isn’t explained so people are pretty sure that you kinda had to be there to totally understand it. Remember that context is the stuff we know and that we see as normal, and we just wrongly assume that everyone knows and sees as normal. Well, probably when Moses was telling this story to the children of Israel in the wilderness, they were like, “Oh yeah. I totally understand what he is getting at here.” However, it does not describe what we say when we look at this. We might have something we were taught, and we might accept that as the only way of looking at it, but the truth is that all sorts of people have all sorts of different ideas about this 120 years and what it means. And, you know what? It’s okay to discuss it and question it and come up with different ideas and to discuss the pros and cons, which is what we are going to do here.
You have probably heard the two most popular theories. The first goes like this, “God didn’t want people living so long anymore and so after the flood, He decided that people wouldn’t live more than 120 years.” What are the up sides of this theory? Well, nowadays, people really don’t live more than 120 years. In fact, the oldest person alive today is from Japan and she is 118 years and four months old. Isn’t it funny how when you are very young or very old, you start counting months again? But, was this true after the flood? Not according to the Bible it wasn’t. In fact, seven generations went by after Noah’s son Shem before someone died who was less than 200 years old! Abraham’s grandfather Nahor died young but Abraham’s father was over 200 years old when he died too. And Abraham? He was 175 years old when he died. His son Isaac was 180 years old. Jacob was 147 and his son Joseph was 110 years old. So, it wasn’t until the 12th generation after the flood that anyone actually lived less than 120 years. Sure, their lives are getting shorter but that is a far cry from God’s announcement that “Their days will be 120 years.” And yet, God makes a lot of decisions in the Bible where we don’t see the results for a very long time so we can’t throw this out either. This is all a part of talking and thinking about the Bible.
How about the people who say that the 120 years was the time left until the flood? That’s certainly a possibility. I mean, it doesn’t say that’s what it means but then it doesn’t say anything about what it means! And it is really hard to figure it out because there is a word in that verse that is only ever used once in the Bible and we can’t find it anywhere else in any other book in the world. That word is yadon. Let’s look at the verse again:
3 And the Lord said, “My Spirit will not yadon with humans forever, because they are corrupt. Their days will be 120 years.”
Hmmm…it’s really hard trying to figure out what a word means when it only shows up one time and there weren’t any dictionaries to tell people what a word meant. Sure, you can look in a Strong’s concordance but that doesn’t tell you what words mean. It tells you how they are translated into English, which is totally different. So, Strong’s Concordance is a book of opinions about how words should be translated and has examples of how it is translated in different places because one Hebrew or Greek word can have entirely different meanings based on how it is used. Let me give you an example. Give me a definition of the word “bark.” Now, I want you to think carefully. What was the first thing that popped into your head? If you have a yappy dog, or a neighbor dog who keeps you up all night then you probably thought about the sound a dog makes. But what if you are a gardener and you love plants? You probably thought of the outer skin of a tree. Or maybe you love candy and you thought about peppermint bark. Based on how the word is used in context, makes the meaning different—and Hebrew and Greek are no different than any other languages when it comes to having words mean entirely different things based on how you use them.
But yadon is a big problem because this is the only place it shows up anywhere in the world, unless we haven’t discovered something else that uses it yet. So, what do we do? Jews and Christians have been trying to come up with the best meaning for, like, forever but all we can do is make guesses. Does yadon mean “stay with” or “protect” or “put up with” or “make excuses for” or “fight with” or “live inside” or whatever? We don’t know. But there it is and you can’t just leave the space blank when you translate the Bible so translators make decisions based upon what we know about God from other places in the Bible. So, when you read different translations, they won’t always agree and that’s okay. The important thing is that God is telling us that things had gotten really bad because humans are corrupt—and if you remember from last week, that means ruined. God is saying that things are about to change in a big way and He is about to do something big.
5 When the Lord saw that human wickedness was widespread on the earth and that every inclination of the human mind was nothing but evil all the time, 6 the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and he was deeply grieved. 7 Then the Lord said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I created, off the face of the earth, together with the animals, creatures that crawl, and birds of the sky—for I regret that I made them.”
What do we have here? Things are so bad that God is realizing that it isn’t just a small problem, but every single inclination of human minds was evil and not just sometimes but all the time. But what does that mean? Every inclination—I want you to think of a teeter totter on the playground. If two people weigh exactly the same and are the same distance from the center, then the teeter totter is balanced. Both of the seats are equally above the ground. That means that neither side of the teeter totter is inclined toward the ground, or tending to go in that direction. But that’s no fun, right? The whole fun of a teeter totter is to sit on it and push up with your feet so that one side will have an inclination to go up and the other side will have an inclination to go down. How is God comparing a teeter totter to how people were thinking? Well, instead of the inclination going back and forth—up and down in the case of the teeter totter and toward evil or good in the case of the human mind or thoughts, their thoughts before the flood were always going toward the evil and not toward the good. It’s like a grownup on the teeter totter with the baby. That’s just not normal or natural, or a good idea! Sure, there are mean people in the world, you know that, but even mean people tend to have some people they are nice to or they have some things that they are good about. I mean, most people no matter how horrible they are, are nice to their grandmas. Or dogs. Sometimes, pretty much everyone is nice and even the meanest people. And a whole lot of people out there are good most of the time.
But the Bible here says something surprising. It says that there was a point when God noticed that people had become so wicked that not just some of their thoughts were evil, but all of them were headed in that direction and not just on bad days but all of the time. Can you even imagine? I am not sure I can. I have never experienced anything like that where absolutely everyone was actually wanting to be that mean to everyone else all the time. A world like that would be a terrible place to live. It would be ruined. And that’s exactly what God meant when He said that humans had become corrupt. His beloved creatures were ruined. When they were created, He called them good but now they were the opposite of that. Ruined. How do you think God would feel about that? How would you feel?
How would you feel if you adopted a litter of cute little puppies—if you made a wonderful soft bed for them, gave them a nice warm house, played with them, gave them good food to each and loved them. But when you tried to train them, they would just nip at you. What if they refused to stop chewing on the furniture and insisted on peeing on everything and bit the people in the house! You would have to move them outside—just like God had to move Adam and Eve out of the Garden when they refused to obey and then refused to do what was right. But of course, you wouldn’t give up on the puppies just because they were outside. You’d keep trying to train them, hoping that they would snap out of their bad attitude so that you could enjoy them and maybe even have them in the house again. But what if those puppies, as they got older, became mean not only to the family but to each other? What if they were fighting and hurting one another? What if they were even killing each other? What if one dog was stealing all the food and the other dogs were starving? Well, obviously, what started out as a wonderful idea of having puppies and a happy family was totally ruined. And it wouldn’t be your fault because you gave them everything and really tried to train them. But the puppies really wanted to be bad.
You would regret getting those puppies and you would just be devastated, so sad. And you’d have to do something to fix the situation. After all, you couldn’t risk the dogs escaping from your backyard and hurting or killing the neighbors. The dogs would have to go. I bet you would be sad but not angry.
I think that is kind of what this situation was like for God. He had created humans because He wanted their companionship, and He did everything for them. But they had made the decision to fill the whole earth with wickedness. And although the Bible says that God was filled with regret, meaning he was sorry and sad that He had ever created humans in the first place, it never says that He was angry. That is very important to know because a lot of stories tell us that it says God sent the flood because He was angry. But you won’t find that here—you can search all you want and you won’t find it. What you find here is regret. God is sorry that things have become so terrible, and He has to do something.
The world before the flood is sometimes described by Bible scholars as a world of systematic oppression, which sounds way more complicated than it is. Aren’t you glad there are no tests? But it means that at every level—in the government, in the community, and even in the families, people were hurting one another. It means that it was legal, or allowed by the laws of the land, to do terrible things to each other and to the animals as well. It was a world with no rules about how we need to treat people. No limits on what people can and cannot do when they get angry or greedy. Nothing telling the strong that they can’t crush the weak, or the rich that they need to help the poor. There were no “ten commandments” and so there were no laws against stealing or killing or lying. And the worst part was that people lived for so long that the really powerful and famous men, the Nephilim, wouldn’t get weak after they got to be about fifty years old, or die once they hit eighty or ninety years old. Imagine the worst bully you can think of and then imagine having to live around him for seven hundred years, if he didn’t kill you first and he probably would. Think of all the new ways he could come up with to make your life miserable if he was alive that long! It’s horrible. And this is actually one of the reasons why some people think that 120 years was all about making our lives shorter so that the amount of evil one person could do would be cut off a lot sooner. Imagine if Hitler had lived eight hundred years! It’s too horrible to even think about.
In a world like that, what is there for God to do? God has to make a terrible decision—He has two choices, He can leave things alone and just hope they get better while men, women and children are suffering terribly while also hurting other people, or He can start all over again. It’s a terrible decision to have to make. What would you do? How many people could you watch being hurt before you decided to do something to start all over again after everything you ever tried didn’t work?
Although we see the story of the flood and Noah’s ark and people make it a children’s story and there are games and colorful books and toys, it’s really a very terrible thing and horribly sad. God regretted making everyone. He was grieved, which means that He was sad like when someone we love dies. Maybe you’ve had someone you love die or maybe a pet. It’s a terrible sadness. I hate that the world God made was so ruined that He felt that kind of sadness. Remember that He isn’t ever described as angry—just really sad.
7 Then the Lord said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I created, off the face of the earth, together with the animals, creatures that crawl, and birds of the sky—for I regret that I made them.”
So, the humans couldn’t be fixed—without commandments and a sense of right and wrong, without any laws, they went too far and things have become too evil. In a few weeks, we will talk about the flood stories from different cultures around the world. There are about 6,000 cultures separated by languages on earth, and out of those 6,000 cultures, sixty-eight of them have flood stories about the world getting wiped out by a flood. That’s a little bit more than one percent. Those other stories have something in common—angry gods wiping people out for some really stupid reasons. None of those reasons have anything to do with sin or hurting one another. Sometimes the people are too loud or annoying and the gods decide to get rid of them. Sometimes, a god is jealous of the humans. But nowhere are there any gods who are sad and doing anything to fix the problem of governments and communities and families hurting each other and ruining the earth. We only find that in the Bible. Remember, the Bible isn’t a modern history book or a science book. It tells us about God and how He is different from every legend and every false god in all the stories on earth. Moses did this so that the children of Israel would know that our God could be trusted to always do what was right. He isn’t like us, and He certainly isn’t like all those false gods killing human beings just because we can be annoying. We will talk more about that very soon.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.