Did God regret creating mankind?
The end of Parashat Bereishit tells of the spiritual deterioration of mankind, to the point where the Almighty decides to destroy the earth, sparing only Noach and his family. (This story continues, of course, in next week's parasha, Parashat Noach.) The Chumash tells us, "The Lord regretted that He had made man on earth" (6:5). Many commentators note the obvious philosophical difficulty in this statement. How can God do something that He later regrets? The human being, with his inability to foresee the future, can act mistakenly, in a way that he does not realize will turn out to be the wrong decision. But how can we attribute such limitation to God? Many writers add that a verse later in the Torah explicitly denies the possibility that God will do something and then feel remorseful: "God is not man to be capricious, or mortal to change His mind" (Bamidbar 23:19; see also Shemuel I 15:29).
Ibn Ezra easily resolves this difficulty by claiming that God did not, in fact, change His mind. Rather, "The Torah spoke the language of human beings, by which one who destroys what he had made appears to have regretted [the initial creation]." God did not regret making man; He only appeared to have regretted making man by virtue of the fact that He created man and then destroyed him.
Rabbenu Yosef Bekhor Shor tackles this problem differently, by differentiating between three forms of remorse. The first type is sheer fickleness, where an individual simply does not remain firmly devoted to his decisions. Secondly, a person may decide to act a certain way but then find himself unable, rather than unwilling, to carry out this decision. Neither of these two instances of regret, Bekhor Shor writes, can ever be ascribed to the Almighty. He will never change His mind due to His own whimsicality or because of forces beyond His control. There is, however, a third form of remorse, which even the Almighty can experience, so-to-speak. Namely, when someone decides to do something to the benefit or detriment of someone else, he might change his mind due to a sudden change on the part of the other party. A decision to help someone may be retracted if the intended beneficiary suddenly becomes hostile; conversely, a plan to punish might be annulled if the criminal shows signs of change. Similarly, God will change His plans, as it were, should man's conduct dictate such a change. As Bekhor Shor explains, God created mankind for His own honor and glory, for people to serve Him. Once the people on earth did not fulfill this obligation, He naturally decided to destroy them.
A particularly novel approach to this verse is suggested by Rav Yaakov Mecklenberg, in his "Ha-ketav Ve-ha'kabbala." He suggests that the word "va-yinachem" in this verse, which we generally translate to mean "He regretted," should actually be read as, "va-yerachem" – "He had compassion." He cites two instances elsewhere in Tanakh where the Targum translates the verb "n.ch.m." as if it were written "r.ch.m." (Hoshea 11:8, Yona 3:9), and he applies this technique in our verse, as well. According to Rav Mecklenberg, this verse refers to God's decision to delay the flood one hundred and twenty years so as to allow mankind the opportunity to repent and improve. As Nechama Leibowitz notes, however, neither this verse nor those that follow deals with the one hundred and twenty-year reprieve. This section deals only with God's decree of destruction, and thus the interpretation suggested by the Ha-ketav Ve-ha'kabbala seems difficult to accept.