Genesis 6:5

The divine observation that 'God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually' provides the moral rationale for the flood and stands as the Hebrew Bible's most radical statement of universal human moral corruption. The repeated intensifiers — 'great,' 'every imagination,' 'only evil,' 'continually' — construct a portrait of total moral pervasion with no qualifying exceptions (except Noah, verse 8). The reference to 'the imagination of the thoughts' ('yetzer mahshevot libo') grounds the diagnosis at the level of mental formation — evil is not merely behavioural but cognitively constitutional. Jesus's post-flood citation of Genesis 6 in Matthew 24:37-39 makes this text eschatologically normative: the generation of the Son of Man's return will mirror the generation of the flood in moral obliviousness. Romans 3:9-18's catena of OT passages condemning universal sinfulness stands in direct theological continuity with this antediluvian diagnosis.