hearts. Indeed, the nearly total obliteration of the human race that follows supports that reading of this verse. Two considerations, however, keep us from saying that God regarded the human creatures as utterly corrupt, depraved, and incapable of any good whatever. First, among the masses of human beings, God found Noah “a righteous man, blameless in his generation” (6:9) and his family—his wife, three sons and three daughters-in-law—to be people who could become the progenitors of a new human community.