HEBREW WORD STUDY – GRIEVED TO THE HEART – LABU ‘AL VAYAT’ATSAV ויתעצב  אל לבו  Lamed Beth Vav   Aleph Lamed    Vav Yod Taw Ayin Sade Beth  

Genesis 6:6  “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.”

This is a very curious verse because on the surface it appears that God regrets creating man because of his wickedness.   I remember as a child my Sunday school teachers saying that God destroyed man because of his wickedness by water, next time he will destroy him by fire.   Even as a child I could not help but think, “Poor God, He just can’t seem to get it right, man always ends up wicked. We are really bad today, so God must really regret having created man.”  I don’t know about you but this idea of God regretting or repenting that He created man just did not add up.  The commentators I have read usually end up saying something unintelligible (to me at least) and quickly move on.  

When you look at this in the Hebrew it is even more perplexing. The word used for repentance is nacham.  The Hebrew word for repentance as we understand repentance is shuv where we get the word teshuvah  which is the major theme of the High Holidays and means a turning away from sin. The word nacham means grief.  We all know that Godly sorrow works or brings repentance (II Corinthians 7:10), but that tells us that Godly sorrow is not repentance, it only brings about repentance.  Actually, there is no word in English  even in other Western languages which can adequately translate nacham because it includes so many different nuances.  The Koreans have a word called Han which is an expression of their culture and  is quite similar to nacham in its embodiment we find regret, grief, grudge, hatred or lamentation.  

What makes nacham difficult to translate is that it expresses grief, comfort, compassion and hope all in one word.  This is what God felt in Genesis 6:6 about creating man. It is only our Western arrogance that causes us to throw in the word repentance to express nacham and our refusal to admit that the English language does not carry the poetic quality of the Semitic languages to express four emotional concepts in one word.  

To rightly and adequately translate this verse we must admit that the English language is inferior to the Semitic language in its poetic expressions and use four English words to express just one Semitic word.  In this case we should render Genesis 6:6 as, “And the Lord felt grief, comfort, compassion and hope because he made man from the ground.”   Then the last phrase uses an old Semitic idiom which is another poetic expression that has no equal in the English language, “It grieved Him at this heart.”  Actually, it is more correctly rendered, “And He was grieving unto His heart.”  In other words the grief was directed to His heart. One rabbi put it this way, “And God was sad.” 

I was listening to some radio talk shows where people were calling in commenting of the grief expressed by the families of Americans lost in a recent storm and then I watched on the news the  grief expressed by the families for those lost in an Airline crash.  The Orientals sounded hysterical in their grief while the Western families calmly expressed their grief with chocked voices.  There was even the suggestion that we Americans were somehow more superior because we could control our grief.  Grief is grief no matter what culture you are from.  We Americans, however, work very hard at trying to keep our grief away from our hearts so we can put on a brave show.  Also, we know that once our grief reaches our hearts, we will feel the immense pain.  As long as we can keep our grief away from our hearts, we are safe. The Orientals realize that that is impossible and make no such attempt to hold it back, they know it will eventually reach their hearts, so they just let their grief flow to their hearts. When grief reaches your heart that is when you begin to wail and weep uncontrollably.  But still, that is not what it means to grieve to the heart.  One rabbi explained it this way, “It is a grief so deep, that you cannot even weep.”

I recall a mother telling how she felt when she heard her son overdosed on drugs.  Up to that point she had no idea that he was even on drugs.  What she described was nacham or grief to the heart.  All at the same time she felt grief over her son’s plight, but at the same time relief that he was still alive, compassion for her son’s state, and hope that he would recover (nacham). Then she sat down and just grieved to her heart.  The grief was so great that she could not even cry, she just sat there in state of shock.

That is what happened to God in Genesis 6:6, that is what happens to God when you sin, He is stricken with grief over your plight, but He is relieved that you are aware of your sin, he feels compassion over the situation that sin put you in and he feels hope that you will receive the cleansing blood of His Son.  Then He just sits back and is grieved to His heart,  He is so overwhelmed by grief, the grief is so deep that He cannot even weep for us.