“I will obliterate [emḥe]” – I impose My will [mamḥe] upon My creations, but My creations do not impose their will [mamḥim] upon Me. Rabbi Elazar said: This is analogous to a king who had storehouses of inferior grain. The residents of the province began slandering the king, saying that he had a bad disposition.7They said he was stingy, because he never opened the storehouses, which they assumed were full of good produce.
What did the king do? He opened for them the best of them, and they filled the entire province with rotten produce. They [the residents] began gathering it up and discarding it into the river. So too, if these, the most notable among them, did so, the iniquitous among them all the more so.8If the generation of the Flood, which was composed of the best of all the possible men that God considered creating, were so corrupted, it was all the more so the case that the generations that were not created would have been corrupted.
“One man out of one thousand [elef] I have found” (Ecclesiastes 7:28) – this is like what we learned: The primary source [alfa] for wine.9This is from Menaḥot 86b, and the verse thus means: I have found one superior man, i.e., Noah. “I will obliterate man whom I have created”10The implication is that there were also men whom God did not create, though He had intended to. – it was God’s original thought to create one thousand generations.
How many of them were obliterated?11How many were not actually created? Rav Huna said in the name of Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili: Nine hundred and seventy-four generations. What is his source? “He commanded the word for one thousand generations” (Psalms 105:8) – this is the Torah.12There were twenty-six generations from the creation of the world until the Torah was given, but it was originally intended to be given to the thousandth generation.
Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥman said: Nine hundred and eighty. What is his source? “He commanded the word for one thousand generations, [the covenant that He sealed with Abraham]” (Psalms 105:8–9) – this is circumcision.13Which was commanded to Abraham, who was the twentieth generation from Adam.