Malice Ignored (Gen 6:13)
The Flood
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13 For the Earth has filled with malice that they are ignoring.
כִּֽי־מָלְאָ֥ה הָאָ֛רֶץ חָמָ֖ס מִפְּנֵיהֶ֑ם
As we saw two weeks ago, חמס ḥamas is most likely “malice,” not “violence.” This might explain why we have not actually seen any violence depicted on screen since Cain killed Abel nine generations ago.
There is a great detail of repetition here, not merely in v. 13 but in vv. 11–13. Scholars like to point to חמס and שׁחת (which we’ll see when v. 13 continues) as a kind of bookend to v. 11, where they appear in reverse order. One might point as well to the following reversal in v. 12, inside the 11–13 “envelope”:
וַיַּ֧רְא אֱלֹהִ֛ים אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְהִנֵּ֣ה נִשְׁחָ֑תָה כִּֽי־הִשְׁחִ֧ית כָּל־בָּשָׂ֛ר אֶת־דַּרְכּ֖וֹ עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃
The literary patterning, if we can call it that, is therefore somewhat more complicated than a simple reversal between vv. 11 and 13. Note that בשׂר ‘flesh’ is in both v. 12 and v. 13 as well, and we can throw מלא malé ‘full’ into the mix also. Within our verse itself we have לְפָנַ֔י l’fanai ‘to my face’ confronting מִפְּנֵיהֶ֑ם mi-p’neihem ‘from their face’. That latter expression, it seems to me, is more difficult than it sounds. Let’s talk it through.
DCH offers these variations on the use of this compound preposition:
21. מִפְּנֵי as preposition:
a. before, from before, lit. ‘from before the presence of’, but distinction from §21b sometimes uncertain.
b. because of, on account of, but distinction from §21a sometimes uncertain.
c. away from.
I don’t see (using the computerized index) that they classify our particular usage of this idiom in this definition. Under מלא ‘full’, they do list 6:13 as an occurrence of מפני meaning “on account of.” Since I want to think about the text instead of just repeating what I’ve always assumed it meant, I’ve decided to sharpen the “distinction from §21b” and say that this malice, though it may be coming “from before the presence of” all living creatures and even “because” of them, has gone from before their faces and they cannot see it any more.
Just as the notion that “their time is up” is to the face of God, this atmosphere of malice has departed from the faces of all living things, perhaps in all three senses of the idiom (per DCH), §21a, b, and c. Speiser translates לפני of our verse as “I have decided”; it seems reasonable to translate the opposite phrase, מפניהם, as “they are ignoring.”
The problem, in any case, is that the Earth is ruined (שׁחת). The solution is, regrettably, obvious:
So I am going to ruin the Earth.
וְהִנְנִ֥י מַשְׁחִיתָ֖ם אֶת־הָאָֽרֶץ׃
Wait, what? You’re going to drown the human beings, aren’t you? What do you mean “ruin the Earth”? Or — for the grammatical purists among you — doesn’t the ‑am suffix of מַשְׁחִיתָ֖ם mashḥitam mean he’s going to destroy “them”? The KJV translates exactly that way:
behold, I will destroy them with the earth
A few small points before we get to the bigger one:
I’m saying ruin because I’m trying to align all the mentions of the root שׁחת with a single English word.
הנה does mean behold if you’re writing in archaic English (more on it here). However, there’s no future tense in this phrase (“will destroy”); it’s a participle, a verbal adjective. And hinneh + 1st person suffix + participle is a specific Biblical Hebrew idiom that means “I am going to.”
What does the KJV (not to mention all the other standard versions) mean by destroying them “with the earth”? It doesn’t, obviously, mean using the earth to clobber them over the head. Some translations say “and” or “along with” the earth to clarify: Both them and the earth will be destroyed.
But, uh, they are going to drown, while the earth is just going to get wet. Here’s Claus Westermann:
The את־הארץ at the end of 13c is difficult. It cannot be an accusative particle following immediately on the third person plural suffix.
Ibn Ezra says this את totally is “an accusative particle”:
I think it is marking a second direct object of the verb: “I am about to destroy them [and] the earth.”
Rashi cites Exod 9:29 and 1 Kgs 15:23 to say that את can really mean from; then he adds the midrashic explanation:
They were really destroyed along “with” some of the earth. Three handbreadths of the topsoil was washed away—the depth of a plowshare.
Nahmanides offers a kabbalistic take, meant only for those who are in the know:
According to the Way of Truth, “the earth” here is like “the earth” of 1:1. With the destruction of that “world,” they too will be destroyed, both in this world and in the World to Come … The parable in Genesis Rabbah of the prince’s nurse alludes to this: whenever the prince (humanity) did wrong, his nurse (the earth) was punished.
Finally, Obadiah Sforno thinks this is when the sun stopped circling the earth around the equator, putting words in God’s mouth that clarify what he means:
I will destroy the earth along with them, moving the sun away from the equator to change the climate and shorten life.
All these comments, of course, are given in my Commentators’ Bible translation.
As you can see from the way I translated our phrase, I don’t think them is in the verse at all. I think that ‑am suffix is an “enclitic mem.”
What is an enclitic mem, you ask? It is a mem stuck on at the end of a word that isn’t a pronominal suffix, just a kind of leftover from ancient Semitic. We know it from Akkadian and Ugaritic and it’s clear from the work of Chaim Cohen ז׳׳ל that Hebrew had it too. You can read something about it in this essay by Gary Rendsburg on a problem in the book of Ruth; see n. 18 there for the details of Cohen’s article, which I can’t find to link for you except behind a paywall.
Is it really the Earth itself that’s going to be ruined? It is! As I’ve pointed out, and as we’ll see clearly when we get to 7:11, the P version of the story is about wiping the slate clean and starting creation afresh. Humanity will not start afresh, though. The Genesis 6 version of “Survivor” will start in v. 14 — next time.