The Two Crimes Bereshit Rabbah Says Drowned the World

The flood is usually read as a single verdict against humanity. The rabbis of Bereshit Rabbah do not see one verdict. They see two simultaneous indictments, working from opposite ends of society, that finally collapsed the case for keeping the world. The leaders committed enormous sexual crimes. The general population committed petty thefts. The rabbis treat both as necessary parts of the same drowning.

What makes the midrash striking is its insistence that neither crime, by itself, would have triggered the flood. The deluge was the moment the top of the society and the bottom of it converged on the same conclusion. The grand sin and the trivial one met in the middle, and there was nothing left to save.

Why the rabbis refused to translate benei haelohim literally

Genesis 6:2 reads, "the children of the great men saw the daughters of man, that they were fair, and they took for themselves wives, from whomever they chose." The Hebrew is benei haelohim. Bereshit Rabbah 26:5 records that Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai used to curse anyone who translated the phrase as "sons of God." The Aramaic for "God" is unambiguous. A literal translation would commit blasphemy by inventing a class of divine beings the Torah does not recognize.

Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai instead reads elohim as "judges," pulling from Exodus 22:8, where the same word names human magistrates. The crime of Genesis 6 is therefore the crime of the judiciary. Leaders. Officials. Men with the authority to settle disputes used that authority to take whatever they wanted. The rabbis say plainly: any moral breach not started by prominent men is not a breach. The flood begins at the top.

The midrash then catalogs what the leaders actually did. They raped brides on their wedding nights before the grooms could touch them. They took married women, men, and animals. Rabbi Huna, in the name of Rabbi, says they wrote marriage contracts for males and for animals before the world was destroyed. The judges legalized the abominations they were committing.

Why the verse says "injustice" instead of "theft"

The same midrashic collection reads Genesis 6:13, "the end of all flesh has come before Me," with the same forensic care. The verse identifies the flood's trigger as the earth filling with hamas, usually translated as injustice. Bereshit Rabbah 31:5 stops on the word and refuses to let it mean ordinary theft.

Rabbi Hanina defines hamas as monetary wrongdoing in amounts smaller than a peruta, the smallest legal coin. The smallest unit of theft. So small that no court would hear the case. The rabbis paint the scene with a basket of lupin beans in a market. One person takes a few. Then another. Then another. Each act is too small to prosecute. The basket empties. The owner cannot name a thief.

The midrash hangs this reading on a phrase from Job 4:20, mibli mesim, "without a judge." The flood generation engineered a society in which the crimes were too small to bring before a judge. The cumulative damage was catastrophic, but the individual case files were empty. God, the midrash says, saw what no court could.

How does a society commit a crime no court can see?

The two midrashim solve each other. The leaders had abolished the categories the judges were supposed to enforce. The general population had reduced their thefts below the threshold the judges could prosecute. Once the top of the system was committing crimes too large to bring against itself, and the bottom was committing crimes too small to bring at all, the courts in the rabbinic reading of the pre-flood world had no jurisdiction left.

The rabbis hear this as a complete failure of the social contract. The flood is not just a punishment for individual sins. It is a recognition that the legal system itself had been hollowed out. Bereshit Rabbah is unwilling to let the destruction be read as arbitrary divine wrath. It is the consequence of a courtroom no one could enter anymore.

Why the rabbis insist the leaders moved first

Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai's principle, that no moral breach happens until prominent men begin it, is the load-bearing claim across both midrashim. The petty thefts at the market only become possible after the senior crimes have already normalized the larger violations. The marketgoer who skims a few beans is in some sense imitating the judge who took the bride. Both are operating in a world where the law has been emptied of force.

This is also why the rabbis link the verse about the children of the great men so quickly to the verse "the Lord said: I will obliterate man." (Genesis 6:7). The two verses are almost adjacent. The midrash hears the second verse as the divine reaction to the first. Once leadership commits this kind of crime, the rabbis say, the rest of the destruction follows almost mechanically.

What the lupin beans actually mean

Bereshit Rabbah leaves the reader with one of its most uncomfortable images. A market stall. Beans worth less than a small coin. A line of ordinary people, each taking just a little, each individually innocent of any chargeable crime. And above them, in palaces, judges drawing up marriage contracts for unspeakable arrangements. The flood is the moment the rabbis admit those two scenes are the same scene.

The collection does not separate the indictments. It pairs them on purpose. A world drowns when the powerful break the largest rules and the powerless break the smallest, and the courts that should connect the two have already been closed.