Genesis 8:21 — “The intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth”: original sin or a statement of experience?

“And when the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart: I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.”

Genesis 8:21

Context: the first word after the flood

The sentence falls at one of the most solemn places in the primeval history. The waters have receded, Noah has come out of the ark, he has built an altar and offered of every clean animal. What follows is neither a word of judgement nor a doctrine about man, but a decision: God speaks “in his heart” and binds himself. He will not curse the ground again because of man, and he will not again strike down every living thing. The verse is the overture to the Noachic covenant, which the following chapter seals with the bow in the clouds.

With that the basic question is already posed on which the interpretations divide. One and the same finding — the evil of man’s devising — appears twice in this narrative, and it leads to opposite decisions. Before the flood it reads: “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5), and God resolves to blot man out. After the flood it reads almost identically, and God resolves to spare him. Between the two sentences nothing has changed in man; what has changed is God’s dealing with him.

Whoever reads the passage as an anthropological proposition must endure this tension: the same principle would be once a death sentence and once an acquittal. Whoever, by contrast, reads it as what it is in form — the grounding of a sovereign self-binding of God — has no problem. God grounds his future patience in the fact that a flood precisely does not remedy the underlying problem. Man remains as he is; therefore he will be dealt with differently.

The literary position is also to be noted. At this place Genesis does not set up a doctrine about the constitution of human nature, but tells a story in which God acts and speaks. The speech is an inner soliloquy in which nothing is defined but something is decided. To turn the grounding of a decision into a definition of man is to change the genre — and to load onto a narrative a burden it does not bear.

Finally, it is worth looking at what immediately follows. In Genesis 9 God institutes ordinances: he blesses Noah and his sons, gives commands about blood and about manslaughter, and grounds the prohibition of murder in the fact that man was made “in the image of God” (9:6). This is remarkable: immediately after the sentence that supposedly attests the total corruption of nature, the image of God in man is invoked as a present, legally weight-bearing fact. And commands are given whose sense presupposes that they can be obeyed.

The Socinian core thesis: a fact of experience, not a law of inheritance

The Socinian interpretation disputes nothing in this verse of what it says. It disputes that it says what is ascribed to it. It states that the devising of the human heart is evil — and the Polish Brethren never made light of that. It does not state where it comes from, when it begins, or whether it is reckoned as guilt before a man has acted. But it is precisely these three pieces of information that the doctrine of original sin requires, and not one of them stands in the text.

The first and strongest objection comes from the construction of the sentence. The Hebrew ki is a causal particle, and what it grounds is the renunciation of the curse. “I will never again curse the ground …, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Were the sentence a statement about an inherited guilt adhering to every man prior to his deed, God’s conclusion would be unintelligible: from universal deserving of damnation no renunciation of punishment follows. From the sober insight that catastrophes do not improve man, it follows very well.

The second objection is philological. Hebrew possesses precise expressions for the beginning of a life — mibbeten (“from the belly”), merechem (“from the womb”) — and it uses them elsewhere with complete matter-of-factness. Neither of them stands here. Here stands min-ne’urâw, formed from na’ar, the boy or young lad old enough to run errands and to serve in the house. The verse therefore dates the evil to the age at which one acts, not to the age at which one is born.

The third objection concerns the word yetzer, in Luther’s German the “devising”. It comes from the root yatzar, “to form, to shape, to mould as a potter” — the same root with which Genesis 2:7 speaks of the forming of man from the dust. A yetzer is a formation of the heart: a devising, a design, an intention. The word does not designate the substance of man, but what that substance brings forth. Between “what he devises is evil” and “what he is, is sin” lies the whole dispute.

What the Socinians conclude from this is no optimistic anthropology. They concede that mankind as a whole is as the verse describes it, and they concede that habit, upbringing and long practice in wrongdoing burden human nature with a “blemish”. They deny that this blemish is itself already sin, that it is transmitted by procreation, and that it abolishes responsibility. What a man does from his youth is to be imputed to him; and precisely for that reason it can also be forgiven him.

Exegesis: key terms and semantic field

Four observations carry the interpretation. None of them softens the gravity of the sentence; all of them merely require that it be left where it stands.

ki — the causal particle

The logic of the verse hangs on a monosyllable. Ki introduces the reason, and the thing that is grounded stands before it: the renunciation of the curse. God states why he will proceed differently in future, and his reason is a piece of information about the ineffectiveness of extermination. Whoever detaches the reason from its function and cites it as an independent proposition leaves out precisely that which gives it its sense within the sentence.

Some interpreters have wanted to understand ki here concessively: “although the intention is evil”. Even then the result remains the same, for even then the finding of evil is no ground of judgement, but the resistance against which God’s patience prevails. On both readings the sentence stands in the service of grace, not of damnation.

It is further remarkable that God speaks “in his heart” — exactly as in Genesis 6:6, where it grieved him that he had made man. The narrative sets both soliloquies deliberately side by side. It evidently means to show that the same recognition can lead once to destruction and once to preservation. A proposition about the nature of man would not have this mobility.

yetzer lev ha-adam — “the intention of man’s heart”

The noun yetzer derives from yatzar, the potter’s word of the Hebrew Bible. It designates a formation, something shaped — and transferred to the heart: that which a man devises, plans, contrives within himself. Luther caught it well with “devising”: not the being, but the inventing. Other translations say “imagination” or “intention”, and all three aim at processes, not at a condition.

The later rabbinic doctrine of the yetzer ha-ra and the yetzer ha-tov, the evil and the good impulse, attaches to this word — and it attaches in such a way that both impulses contend within the same man and that man can choose between them. Even where Judaism paints the power of the evil impulse in the blackest colours, it never conceives it as a guilt already established prior to action. The Racovian Catechism, which expressly regards the doctrine of original sin as a later introduction, stands here closer to the Hebrew text than does the Western tradition.

And the “heart” in Hebrew is not the seat of the feelings but of thinking and willing — the organ of decision. An evil heart is accordingly a heart that has decided, and not a heart that could not do otherwise. Precisely for that reason Scripture can speak of a “new heart” that God gives (Ezek 36:26) and yet summon man: “Make yourselves a new heart” (Ezek 18:31).

min-ne’urâw — “from his youth”

Here everything is decided. Na’ar designates in the Hebrew Bible the boy, the lad, the young servant: Isaac is so called when he carries the wood to the mountain (Genesis 22:5, 12), likewise Abraham’s servants and the young Samuel in the temple. It is throughout an age at which one walks, speaks, serves and obeys — or precisely does not obey. The expression therefore dates the beginning of evil devising to the point where there is any devising at all.

That the language could speak otherwise if it wished is shown by the very passages in which the tradition properly seeks its proof. Psalm 51:7 says “in sin did my mother conceive me”, Psalm 58:4 says “from the womb”. Where Scripture means the beginning of a life, it says so. Here it does not say so. This observation is no artifice of the Socinians, but a plain report of the vocabulary.

The Greeks of the Septuagint understood and translated it in just this way: ek neōtētos, “from youth”. And the same expression appears in the New Testament where it states exactly the opposite: the rich young man says to Jesus that he has kept all the commandments “from my youth” (Mark 10:20); Paul appeals before Agrippa to his manner of life “from my youth” (Acts 26:4). A formula with which obedience from childhood on can be asserted is of no use as proof of a prenatal corruption.

ra’ — “evil”, and what the comparison with 6:5 shows

A close comparison of the two parallel passages is instructive. In Genesis 6:5 it reads: “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” — with two intensifiers, “only” (raq) and “all the day” (kol-hayyom). In 8:21 both are absent. There it simply reads: “evil from his youth”. The sentence after the flood is the milder, soberer version — which fits ill with a reading that would make it the sharpest statement in the Bible about human nature.

In addition, 6:5 describes the generation of the flood, that is, a concrete historical condition, which the same text paraphrases with “the earth was filled with violence” (6:11). And in the midst of this generation stands a man of whom it is said: “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation” (6:9). A text that meant to teach an exceptionless determination of the nature of all men would hardly have named this exception three verses later.

Comparison of the interpretations

Sozzini and the Racovian Catechism: the verse under the magnifying glass

The Polish Brethren did not evade this verse. The Racovian Catechism itself introduces it as an objection against its own position — together with Genesis 6:5, as the “second testimony” of the other side — and answers it with an observation that fastens precisely on the structure of the sentence:

“In the second testimony, however, God does not really affirm that the striving of the human heart is evil from his youth; but supposing it should be so — which would be purely voluntary — this will no longer have such force with him that he should on that account punish the world with a flood, as he had done before; which likewise does not fit the original sin as they assert it.”

Racovian Catechism, ‘Original Sin and Free Will’

Three things stand in this answer. First: God does not here properly set up a thesis, but names a condition under which he will no longer punish in future. Second: what the sentence describes would be “purely voluntary” — that is, a doing, not an inheritance. Third and decisively: the statement stands in the service of the renunciation of punishment. A doctrine that derives from the same sentence the universal desert of damnation of all men reverses its direction.

One misunderstands this interpretation if one takes it for naive. In the same chapter the Catechism concedes without reserve that something is wrong with human nature — and it gives a cause for it other than inheritance:

“We nevertheless do not deny that the nature of men is afflicted, through the constancy of sinning, with a certain blemish and with an excessive inclination to sin; but we deny that it is in itself sin, or of such a kind that a man could not overcome himself after he has received the divine Spirit.”

Racovian Catechism, ‘Original Sin and Free Will’

This is the precise Socinian position, and it is as far removed from the Pelagian as from the Augustinian. There is a blemish; it is real; but it arises “through the constancy of sinning”, that is, out of the history of wrongdoing lived, and not out of a single deed in paradise. The same section says it conceptually as well: Adam’s fall “could not, since it was a single act, have the power to corrupt Adam’s nature, still less that of his descendants”.

Especially sharp is a further argument of the Catechism, which turns around the direction of proof of the other side. If the sentences of Scripture about evil from early on meant an innate corruption, they would not accuse the ungodly but excuse them:

“Indeed, in this way the ungodly would even be excused, since it would thereby be indicated that their wickedness was innate to them and not acquired by their own fault — although those words are said in order to accuse them all the more strongly.”

Racovian Catechism, ‘Original Sin and Free Will’

And the Catechism makes the counter-test on the language itself. If “from youth” and “from the womb” were determinations of nature, they would have to be so also where the same expressions designate the good — and then piety too would be an inherited possession:

“And conversely in Job, when he says: ‘From my childhood compassion grew with me, and from my mother’s womb it came forth with me’; and in David: ‘God, you are my confidence from my youth, upon you have I leaned from the womb’.”

Racovian Catechism, ‘Original Sin and Free Will’

Sozzini himself made the point in his treatise on justification not philologically but from the apostolic argumentation. If there were an inherited guilt, it would have to occur in Paul’s chief proof of the sinfulness of all men. It does not occur there:

“Therefore Paul too, when by reason, experience and testimonies of Scripture he convicted both Jews and Gentiles of sin, did not accuse the sin of the parents or of Adam or a corrupted nature, but imputed the guilt to those very persons who sinned.”

Fausto Sozzini, “On Justification”, ‘The Grace of God, Sin, and the Rejection of Original Sin’

With this the interpretation of Genesis 8:21 is placed in the larger context. Romans 1 to 3 is Scripture’s most detailed demonstration that all are under sin — and it argues throughout with what men have done and left undone: the Gentiles could know God and did not rightly use the knowledge; the Jews had the divine oracles and transgressed them. Not a word about a nature that would be guilty prior to every deed.

And finally Sozzini names the origin of the blemish where Genesis 8:21 too locates it — in upbringing and habit — without moral judgement being thereby extinguished:

“A man, however much he may be corrupted by bad upbringing or habit, necessarily feels — provided only that he possesses some distinction between right and wrong — since reason so commands, that what he holds to be right must be done and what he holds to be bad must be avoided.”

Fausto Sozzini, “On Justification”, ‘Free Will and the Foundation of Faith’

This is the anthropological sum of the Polish Brethren on this verse: corrupted by upbringing and habit — yes; without a standard and without responsibility — no. The man whom Genesis 8:21 describes is one whom one can reproach for what he devises. Precisely for that reason he is one whom God can forgive.

Logical arguments

From Genesis 8:21 and its context the following arguments follow:

1. Argument from the function of the sentence. The finding of evil is the ground of a renunciation of punishment, not of a condemnation. A ground that carries clemency cannot at the same time be adduced as the ground for the damnation of all the unbaptised without being broken out of its sentence.
2. Argument from the wording “from his youth”. Hebrew has its own expressions for “from the womb” and uses them elsewhere. Here it chooses min-ne’urâw, the expression for boyhood. The beginning is thereby set at the point of acting, not at conception.
3. Argument from yetzer. The word designates a formation of the heart — devising, planning, contriving — that is, activities. A statement about activities is not a statement about the substance of the one who performs them.
4. Argument from the doublet with 6:5. The same finding leads before the flood to extermination and after the flood to sparing. An anthropological law of nature could not ground two opposite divine decisions; a description of the factual condition very well can.
5. Argument from the weakening. 8:21 expressly omits the intensifiers of 6:5 — “only” and “all the day”. The verse from which the sharpest doctrine is to be gained is the milder of the two versions.
6. Argument from Noah. The same narrative calls Noah “righteous and blameless in his generation” (Genesis 6:9). An exceptionless determination of nature would not have an express exception in the same narrative.
7. Argument from what follows. Immediately afterwards God grounds the prohibition of murder in man’s having been made in the image of God (Genesis 9:6) — as a present fact, not a lost one. And he gives commands whose issuing would be senseless if obedience were impossible.
8. Argument from the usage of the formula. “From youth” serves in Scripture equally to describe the good: Job boasts of his compassion from childhood on, David of his confidence from his youth, the rich young man of his keeping of the commandments from his youth. A formula that can carry both proves no determination of nature.
9. Argument from justice. If wickedness were innate, it would be an excuse and not an accusation. But the words of Scripture about it are said in order to accuse. Therefore it cannot be meant that it is present without fault of one’s own.
10. Argument from the apostolic argumentation. Where Paul formally proves the sinfulness of all men (Rom 1-3), he accuses deeds committed and appeals to knowledge that was present and not used. The most obvious proof — inherited guilt — is entirely absent in him.

Biblical cross-references

Genesis 6:5 — the same finding, the other verdict

“Every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” — and the consequence is the flood. In 8:21 almost the same stands, and the consequence is the promise never to act so again. The juxtaposition shows that the sentences describe the condition of a humanity, not a law of its nature; otherwise one could not infer opposite things from them.

Genesis 4:7 — “but you must rule over it”

Even before the flood God says to Cain that sin is crouching at the door and desires him, “but you must rule over it”. Sin is described as an external power that desires man — not as an inner constituent of his nature — and he is credited with the ability to resist it. Precisely this demand presupposes responsibility.

Ezekiel 18:20 — “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”

The clearest principle of Scripture on the question of imputation. What Ezekiel says against the proverb of the sour grapes and the blunted teeth is an express repudiation of inherited guilt. Sozzini and the Racovian Catechism both adduce the passage as a principal testimony.

Deuteronomy 24:16 — the law against collective liability

“Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers; each one shall be put to death for his own sin.” What God ordains for human courts he will not himself fall short of. A principle of law that holds within the law holds all the more for the lawgiver.

Psalm 51:7 — the counter-proof of the tradition

“In sin did my mother conceive me” is the passage where the doctrine of original sin seeks its firmest hold. The Racovian Catechism answers that David speaks of himself and not of all, that he expressly traces the origin to his mother and not to Adam, and that he uses the manner of speech of the penitential psalm. Above all, however, the psalm employs an expression that Genesis 8:21 precisely does not employ.

Mark 10:20 — “from my youth” in the good sense

The rich young man answers Jesus that he has kept all the commandments “from my youth” — in Greek exactly the expression the Septuagint uses in Genesis 8:21. Jesus does not contradict him, but comes to love him. The formula itself therefore carries no statement about a nature, but about a life actually lived.

James 1:14-15 — the genealogy of sin

James describes how sin arises: each one is lured and enticed by his own desire, desire conceives and gives birth to sin, and sin gives birth to death. This is an account of origin in time, with the individual as the starting point. An inherited state of guilt would find no place anywhere in this chain.

Romans 2:6 — “to each one according to his works”

The standard of the judgement is the works of the individual. Where Scripture names the standard by which God judges, it never names descent and always the doing. What a man has devised from his youth belongs to it — what would be reckoned to him before his birth does not.

Objections and Socinian answers

Objection 1: “‘From his youth’ surely means: from the beginning — that is, from birth.”

The objection would be right if the point were an approximate dating. But the point is whether guilt exists prior to the first deed — and this question is decided precisely at the boundary that the objection holds to be incidental. The doctrine of original sin does not assert that men begin early to sin; the Socinians assert that too. It asserts that man is guilty before he acts.

Precisely this assertion the wording does not carry. Hebrew could have expressed it and does express it in other places: mibbeten, merechem, “from the belly”, “from the womb”. When the author of a statement about the beginning of life avoids the expressions available for it and chooses the expression for boyhood, that is no subtlety of the interpreter but a decision of the text.

To this comes the counter-test. The same formula stands in Scripture also where it designates the good — in Job, in David, in the mouth of the rich young man in Mark. Were it a statement about nature, it would have to be one there too, and then piety would be as much inherited as wickedness. Precisely this counter-test the Racovian Catechism expressly carries out.

And finally, the Socinian reading does not dissolve the sentence. It reads it as what it is: a hard piece of information about the actual history of mankind, in which there is no point of innocence after the beginning of action. That is grave enough. It is simply nothing about newborns.

Objection 2: “If corruption only begins with acting, whence its universality?”

This is the gravest objection, and the Polish Brethren did not dismiss it. The Racovian Catechism expressly concedes that human nature is “afflicted with a certain blemish and with an excessive inclination to sin”. The dispute is not about whether this inclination exists, but about where it comes from and what it means in law.

The Socinian answer names two causes. The first is the “constancy of sinning”: a humanity practised for generations in wrongdoing passes on to its children examples, habits and standards against which hardly anyone prevails. The second Sozzini names by name when he speaks of the man who is “corrupted by bad upbringing or habit”. Both explain the universality without assuming an inherited guilt.

In law the difference is decisive. An inclination that has arisen through habit makes resistance difficult — it does not abolish it. Therefore God can give commands, therefore he can call to repentance, and therefore it makes sense that Scripture holds their deeds before sinners. A nature that simply could not do otherwise one might lament, but not accuse.

And the universality is in any case not as seamless as the objection requires. The same narrative that speaks of the wickedness of all calls Noah “righteous and blameless in his generation”; it knows Enoch, who walked with God. Scripture speaks of the sinfulness of all as of a finding, not as of a law of nature without exceptions.

Objection 3: “Paul teaches in Romans 5 that sin came into the world through one man.”

The objection stands or falls with the translation of eph’ hō. The Racovian Catechism disputes the reading “in whom” on two grounds: Adam is named far earlier and is not to be understood along with the immediately preceding words, and the Greek particle in any case does not admit this interpretation. It is to be rendered “inasmuch as”, “because” or “in that”, as comparable passages show.

Then Paul says: death spread to all because all sinned — and that is a statement about actual sins. The Catechism supports this from the continuation of the text: “but sin is not counted where there is no law” (Rom 5:13). A sin that is forbidden by the law is not original sin, but the sin committed.

It is remarkable that the Polish Brethren nevertheless do not deny the connection between Adam and death. They maintain that the punishment appointed for Adam’s sin — mortality — affects all his descendants, “solely because they are descendants of Adam himself”. Something is therefore inherited, but it is mortality, not guilt. Precisely on this hangs Paul’s parallel: as from Adam comes death, so from Christ comes life — both without merit of one’s own.

With this the verse at issue here is not touched. Genesis 8:21 speaks neither of Adam, nor of inheritance, nor of death as punishment. It speaks of the devising of the heart from youth. Whoever carries Romans 5 into it reads a later history of interpretation back into an earlier text.

Objection 4: “Whoever denies original sin makes redemption superfluous.”

The objection presupposes that redemption is necessary because a nature must be repaired. The Socinian answer begins elsewhere: redemption is necessary because real guilt requires real forgiveness and because mortals do not have eternal life of themselves. Both remain fully in force if guilt is acquired instead of inherited.

Sozzini expressly developed this in his treatise on justification: the wages of sin is death, and we have “died through our own sins, in which we once lived”. It is not the origin of sin that grounds the necessity of grace, but its fact. Whoever is really guilty really needs forgiveness — and more, not less, if the guilt is to be imputed to him.

In addition, the Socinian doctrine at one point even makes grace greater. Where the tradition holds man incapable, it can impute guilt to him only conditionally; where the Polish Brethren hold him responsible, forgiveness is a real remission and not a mere course of treatment. And the power for the new life they too ascribe not to the will but to the divine Spirit, which the Catechism expressly names in the same place.

Finally, the argument can be reversed. Sozzini did so by pointing out that the doctrine of original sin serves in practice to “keep men fast in constant sins”. Whoever believes he simply cannot do otherwise has a good reason not to try. The call to repentance presupposes that repentance is possible.

Objection 5: “The whole church has read the verse otherwise since Augustine.”

The burden of proof is not disputed, and the reference to the history of interpretation is to be taken seriously. Only, the unanimity is smaller than the objection assumes. The Greek church consistently understood the consequences of the fall as mortality and weakness, not as inherited guilt; the Jewish interpretation, which stands closest to the Hebrew text, knows the yetzer ha-ra as an impulse that can be resisted.

Moreover, the appeal to Augustine has a well-known weak point: in essential respects it rests on a Latin translation that does not accurately render the Greek text of Romans 5:12. Where a doctrine hangs on a translation, the question of the original text is no rebellion against tradition but its duty — and the Reformation itself established this principle.

Sozzini grounded his rejection not in a taste for novelty but in the demonstration that the doctrine is absent from the argumentation of the apostles and contradicts the principle of justice of the prophets: it would be unjust that a man should have to atone for what he has not sinned, since God himself has confirmed that the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father. That is an argument from Scripture against an interpretation of Scripture.

And finally, this verse in particular does not require much courage. It is not a matter of interpreting a clear text against its wording, but of not loading a text beyond its wording. “From his youth” is no obscure expression. It is merely less than the doctrine requires.

Dogmatic consequences

Related verses

The following passages support, deepen or contrast with the interpretation presented here:

• Ezekiel 18:20 — “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”: the principle of personal imputation.
• Deuteronomy 24:16 — the express prohibition of collective liability in the law.
• 2 Chronicles 25:4 — a king who keeps to this principle: the law in practice.
• Psalm 51:7 — the chief proof-text of the other side and the Socinian answer to it.
• Romans 5:12 — eph’ hō: “in whom” or “because”? The question of translation on which the doctrine hangs.
• 1 Corinthians 15:22 — “in Adam all die”: mortality as that which is inherited.
• Ephesians 2:3 — “by nature children of wrath”: what physei means in Pauline usage.
• James 1:14-15 — the origin of sin out of one’s own desire, not out of inheritance.
• John 9:2-3 — Jesus expressly rejects the question about inherited guilt.
• Romans 2:6 — “to each one according to his works”: the standard of the judgement.
• Genesis 2:7 — the same root yatzar: man as one who is formed, not as a substance with guilt built in.

Summary

Since Augustine, Genesis 8:21 has counted as the Old Testament foundation of the doctrine of original sin, and yet it is the least suitable verse for that purpose that one could have chosen. For it stands not within a judgement but within a decree of grace: God renounces the curse upon the earth, and the wickedness of man’s devising is the reason he gives for it. A sentence that carries the sparing cannot at the same time carry the damnation of all newborns.

To this comes the vocabulary. The text does not say “from the womb”, although Hebrew knows this expression and uses it elsewhere, but min-ne’urâw — “from his youth”, from the age of the na’ar, who walks, serves and obeys or precisely does not. And what is called evil is the yetzer, the formation of the heart: devising, planning, contriving. What is described is a doing that begins early, not a being that would be guilty prior to all doing.

The Racovian Catechism treated this verse expressly and pointed out that God does not here properly set up a thesis about man, but states why he will not again punish the world with a flood — and that what is described would be “purely voluntary”. At the same time it did not dispute that human nature bears a blemish “through the constancy of sinning”. Sozzini sought the origin of this blemish in upbringing and habit and held fast to the point that Paul, in his great demonstration of universal sinfulness, “did not accuse the sin of the parents or of Adam or a corrupted nature”.

What this interpretation achieves is no trivialising of man. It takes nothing from him of his guilt — it gives it back to him. Whoever devises evil from his youth has devised it; he can be reproached and he can be forgiven. And the God who knows all this and nevertheless sets the bow in the clouds is the same who in the end wills not destruction but repentance.