Numbers 23:19, 1 Samuel 15:29, Malachi 3:6, and James 1:17 stack hard on the idea that God does not and cannot repent or change. Genesis 6:6, Joel 2:14, and Jonah 3:10 show God actively repenting — changing his mind about punishment, grieving the creation of humanity. The Bible contradicts itself on whether Yahweh is mutable.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
19God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should repent. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good?
14I, Yahweh, have spoken it. It will happen, and I will do it. I won’t go back. I won’t spare. I won’t repent. According to your ways, and according to your doings, they will judge you,” says the Lord Yahweh.’ ”
Who knoweth if he [God] will return and repent. Joel 2:14
Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not? Jonah 3:10
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The entry stacks two sets of texts. One denies that God changes: Numbers 23:19 ("God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent"); 1 Samuel 15:29 ("the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent"); Malachi 3:6 ("I am the LORD, I change not"); James 1:17 ("no variableness, neither shadow of turning"). The other has God repent or relent: Genesis 6:6 (grief over making humanity); Joel 2:14 and Jonah 3:10 (God relents from threatened punishment). A third, conditional group leaves it open ("who knoweth if he will return and repent"). (Psalm 110:4, cited in the entry's first answer, in fact reads "the LORD hath sworn, and will not repent" of the priesthood promise — an oath-irrevocability statement, not a general denial of divine mutability; it belongs to the catena only loosely.)
The classical harmonization, with roots already in the second-century apologists, articulated by Augustine and systematized by Aquinas, invokes divine impassibility and immutability as metaphysical doctrines and treats the "repent" texts as anthropopathism — accommodated language describing God in human emotional terms without implying that God literally changes. On this view Numbers 23:19 and Malachi 3:6 state the metaphysical truth, while Genesis 6:6 and Jonah 3:10 describe, from the human side, how unchanging divine purpose meets changed human circumstances: God's settled will always was to spare the repentant, so when Nineveh repents, what looks like God "changing his mind" is constant divine character responding consistently. Gleason Archer's *Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties* and the broader Reformed scholastic tradition run this, and it is genuinely coherent as a theological system.
The difficulty is that the harmonization privileges some texts as literal and others as figurative on grounds external to the texts, and one chapter makes the privileging visible. 1 Samuel 15 asserts both positions within a single narrative. Verse 11: "It repenteth me [*nichamti*] that I have set up Saul to be king." Verse 29, on Samuel's lips: "The Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man, that he should repent." Verse 35: "and the LORD repented [*nicham*] that he had made Saul king over Israel." The narrator frames Yahweh's regret in verses 11 and 35; verse 29 is a rhetorical assertion within a speech denying that Yahweh will reverse the specific judgment against Saul. The same Hebrew verb, *nacham*, carries both the regret and its denial in the span of one chapter — hard to reconcile by appeal to genre, since both stand in narrative prose. The harmonizing reading must take verses 11 and 35 as accommodation and verse 29 as literal, even though the narrator (the more authoritative voice) speaks the former and a character speaks the latter.
Critical scholarship reads the difference as theological diversity rather than a single coherent doctrine. Terence Fretheim, in *The Suffering of God*, argues that divine mutability and pathos are positive features of Hebrew Bible theology, not embarrassments to be neutralized; Yahweh genuinely responds, grieves, and relents. Walter Brueggemann's *Theology of the Old Testament* organizes much of Israel's testimony around Yahweh's responsiveness, holding it in tension with the counter-testimony of constancy without dissolving either. The "does not repent" verses themselves use *nacham*: Numbers 23:19 and 1 Samuel 15:29 deny precisely the verb that Genesis 6:6, Jeremiah 18:8-10, Joel 2:13, and Jonah 3:10 affirm of God — and Jeremiah 18 makes relenting conditional and reciprocal by design ("if that nation... turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do"). Open theists such as Gregory Boyd, in *God of the Possible*, press further, treating the relenting texts as the more numerous and narratively embedded data and the immutability statements as the ones a later philosophical theology elevated. R. W. L. Moberly's work on Mosaic Yahwism likewise resists flattening the portraits.
Whatever framework one adopts — source-critical, canonical-dialectical, open-theist, or classical — the texts themselves say both that God relents and that God does not. The impassibility harmonization succeeds only by deciding in advance that the metaphysical statements are literal and the narrative ones figurative. That is a defensible theological choice, but a choice imposed on the corpus, not read out of it; reverse the privileging and the relenting texts become literal and the immutability statements hymnic hyperbole. The corpus does not adjudicate between them.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction in the text, resolvable only by privileging one set of statements over the other on extra-textual theological grounds.
Sources for this reading
Terence E. Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective (Overtures to Biblical Theology; Fortress, 1984) pp. 45-59on divine repentance
Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Fortress, 1997) pp. 359-372on Yahweh's pathos
Gregory A. Boyd, God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God (Baker, 2000) pp. 75-87on God changing his mind
Gleason L. Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Zondervan, 1982) pp. 120-122on God's 'repentance' as accommodation
R. W. L. Moberly, The Old Testament of the Old Testament: Patriarchal Narratives and Mosaic Yahwism (Fortress, 1992) pp. 92-104
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The entry stacks two sets of texts. One denies that God changes: Numbers 23:19 ("God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent"); 1 Samuel 15:29 ("the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent"); Malachi 3:6 ("I am the LORD, I change not"); James 1:17 ("no variableness, neither shadow of turning"). The other has God repent or relent: Genesis 6:6 (grief over making humanity); Joel 2:14 and Jonah 3:10 (God relents from threatened punishment). A third, conditional group leaves it open ("who knoweth if he will return and repent"). (Psalm 110:4, cited in the entry's first answer, in fact reads "the LORD hath sworn, and will not repent" of the priesthood promise — an oath-irrevocability statement, not a general denial of divine mutability; it belongs to the catena only loosely.)
The classical harmonization, with roots already in the second-century apologists, articulated by Augustine and systematized by Aquinas, invokes divine impassibility and immutability as metaphysical doctrines and treats the "repent" texts as anthropopathism — accommodated language describing God in human emotional terms without implying that God literally changes. On this view Numbers 23:19 and Malachi 3:6 state the metaphysical truth, while Genesis 6:6 and Jonah 3:10 describe, from the human side, how unchanging divine purpose meets changed human circumstances: God's settled will always was to spare the repentant, so when Nineveh repents, what looks like God "changing his mind" is constant divine character responding consistently. Gleason Archer's *Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties* and the broader Reformed scholastic tradition run this, and it is genuinely coherent as a theological system.
The difficulty is that the harmonization privileges some texts as literal and others as figurative on grounds external to the texts, and one chapter makes the privileging visible. 1 Samuel 15 asserts both positions within a single narrative. Verse 11: "It repenteth me [*nichamti*] that I have set up Saul to be king." Verse 29, on Samuel's lips: "The Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man, that he should repent." Verse 35: "and the LORD repented [*nicham*] that he had made Saul king over Israel." The narrator frames Yahweh's regret in verses 11 and 35; verse 29 is a rhetorical assertion within a speech denying that Yahweh will reverse the specific judgment against Saul. The same Hebrew verb, *nacham*, carries both the regret and its denial in the span of one chapter — hard to reconcile by appeal to genre, since both stand in narrative prose. The harmonizing reading must take verses 11 and 35 as accommodation and verse 29 as literal, even though the narrator (the more authoritative voice) speaks the former and a character speaks the latter.
Critical scholarship reads the difference as theological diversity rather than a single coherent doctrine. Terence Fretheim, in *The Suffering of God*, argues that divine mutability and pathos are positive features of Hebrew Bible theology, not embarrassments to be neutralized; Yahweh genuinely responds, grieves, and relents. Walter Brueggemann's *Theology of the Old Testament* organizes much of Israel's testimony around Yahweh's responsiveness, holding it in tension with the counter-testimony of constancy without dissolving either. The "does not repent" verses themselves use *nacham*: Numbers 23:19 and 1 Samuel 15:29 deny precisely the verb that Genesis 6:6, Jeremiah 18:8-10, Joel 2:13, and Jonah 3:10 affirm of God — and Jeremiah 18 makes relenting conditional and reciprocal by design ("if that nation... turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do"). Open theists such as Gregory Boyd, in *God of the Possible*, press further, treating the relenting texts as the more numerous and narratively embedded data and the immutability statements as the ones a later philosophical theology elevated. R. W. L. Moberly's work on Mosaic Yahwism likewise resists flattening the portraits.
Whatever framework one adopts — source-critical, canonical-dialectical, open-theist, or classical — the texts themselves say both that God relents and that God does not. The impassibility harmonization succeeds only by deciding in advance that the metaphysical statements are literal and the narrative ones figurative. That is a defensible theological choice, but a choice imposed on the corpus, not read out of it; reverse the privileging and the relenting texts become literal and the immutability statements hymnic hyperbole. The corpus does not adjudicate between them.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction in the text, resolvable only by privileging one set of statements over the other on extra-textual theological grounds.
Sources for this reading