Turns out, even God has had those thoughts about humanity.
We find a fascinating glimpse into this in Bereshit Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic interpretations on the Book of Genesis. This particular section, 28, grapples with the verse "I will obliterate [emḥe]" (Genesis 6:7) from the story of Noah and the flood. But it’s not just about the flood; it’s about unrealized potential and the weight of divine expectations.
The text immediately dives into a play on words, connecting "I will obliterate [emḥe]" with "I impose My will [mamḥe]." The message? God imposes His will on creation, but creation can’t impose its will on Him. It’s a statement of divine sovereignty, but it also hints at a disappointment, a feeling that humanity hasn't lived up to its intended purpose.
Rabbi Elazar uses a powerful analogy: a king with storehouses of inferior grain. The people slander the king, assuming his reluctance to open the storehouses means they must be full of good produce, and that he is simply stingy. So, the king opens the storehouses, revealing the rotten grain. The people are horrified and discard it. The parallel is clear: if even the "best" of humanity, the generation of the Flood, proved so corrupt, how much more so would those not created have been? Ouch.
As we find in Menaḥot 86b, there's a connection to the verse from Ecclesiastes (7:28): "One man out of one thousand [elef] I have found." The text equates elef, thousand, with alfa, a primary source. The interpretation? God found only one truly superior man: Noah. Again, the emphasis is on scarcity, on the rarity of true righteousness amidst widespread corruption.
The passage then takes a surprising turn. “I will obliterate man whom I have created,” implies, according to this reading, that there were men whom God didn't create, even though He intended to. It was God’s original thought to create one thousand generations. But how many were actually obliterated before they even came into being? How many were never created?
Rav Huna, citing Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili, says the number is 974! His source? "He commanded the word for one thousand generations" (Psalms 105:8) – referring to the Torah. Since only 26 generations passed from creation to the giving of the Torah, a whopping 974 generations were deemed unfit to exist.
Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥman offers a slightly different calculation: 980 generations. His source is the same verse, but he connects it to circumcision: "He commanded the word for one thousand generations, [the covenant that He sealed with Abraham]" (Psalms 105:8–9). Circumcision, a sign of the covenant, was commanded to Abraham, the twentieth generation from Adam.
So, what does this all mean? It's not just about numbers. It’s about the potential for good, the disappointment of unrealized potential, and the high bar set for humanity. It speaks to the idea that God has always strived for a perfect creation, a perfect relationship, and the Flood story becomes a testament to how far humanity strayed from that ideal. It's a sobering thought: how many unrealized versions of ourselves, of our world, have been lost due to our failings? And what can we do to ensure that future generations live up to their potential, and to God’s hopes for them? It's a question worth pondering, isn't it?