The god of the flood story is a very stern, but merciful god. He says of his creations, “It repenteth me that I have made them.” In this way it seems as if the earth were an experiment gone horribly wrong and he is deciding it’s time to throw out the Petri dish, so to speak and start over.  To me this indicates a god who doesn’t necessarily know what’s going to happen.

At the same time, he shows mercy to Noah, because “Noah was a just man, and perfect in his generation.”  This seems to indicate that perhaps he is still a merciful god, not willing to punish the righteous along with the evil.

He once again shows that he is merciful when he “remembered Noah…and made a wind to pass over the earth and the waters assuaged.”  Again he shows mercy in his promise that he “will never again curse the ground any more for man’s sake for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more everything living as I have done”. This would lead me to think that perhaps he feels he acted hastily?

I would say that this god isn’t all powerful. He doesn’t have the power to act over men. He may be all knowing; perhaps he predicted that men would become evil? If that is the case, he may have known that men would become evil once again. I kind of wonder why he would be willing to let future evil live when he felt the need to eradicate it once. Of course he doesn’t say he’ll never destroy all creation again, jus that he won’t flood the earth. Being a stickler, he has left other possibilities open.  He has also left it open to flood just one city, or region if he should chose.