The Bible underneath it
Does God Change His Mind?
Verse 29 says he never does. Verse 35 says he did. Same chapter, same Hebrew word.
The point in one sentence
The Bible says God does not change and does not repent, and the same Bible reports him regretting, relenting, and reversing, once within six verses of the denial, using the same Hebrew verb.
The chapter that argues with itself
- "And also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man, that he should repent."
- "And the LORD repented that he had made Saul king over Israel."
Both verses are about the same event, Saul’s rejection, and both use forms of the Hebrew verb nacham. Read them together. Verse 11 of the same chapter opens with God saying "It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king." The denial in verse 29 sits inside a chapter that affirms the thing twice.
The wider pattern
Unchanging, except
Each cell links from its reference at BibleGateway. The left column is doctrine; the right column is narrative.
| God does not change | God changed |
|---|---|
| Malachi 3:6: I am the LORD, I change not | Genesis 6:6: It repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth |
| Numbers 23:19: not a man, that he should repent | Exodus 32:14: the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people |
| 1 Samuel 15:29: will not lie nor repent | Jonah 3:10: God repented of the evil... and he did it not |
Also Jeremiah 18:8, where relenting is stated as standing policy
The pattern extends to doctrine itself. Punishment crosses generations in Exodus 20:5, then Ezekiel 18:20 announces that "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father." The law is eternal in Psalm 119 and Matthew 5:18, and in Hebrews 8:13 the first covenant "decayeth and waxeth old" and "is ready to vanish away."
What is true on the other side
Anthropomorphism is the ancient and serious answer: the regret texts describe God’s relational responses in human language, while the unchanging texts describe his character. It is not an invention of embarrassment; theologians have said it for two millennia. But in 1 Samuel 15 the same author uses the same verb both ways in one chapter, so the reader, not the text, decides which occurrences are literal, and the assignments always land where the doctrine needs them.
Progressive revelation explains Ezekiel and Hebrews: God taught what people could bear, then more. Notice this is the exact structure of the Latter-day Saint explanation for doctrines that changed, and it carries the same cost: at any moment, you cannot know which current teaching is the eternal part.
What the Joseph Smith Translation does with this
A Latter-day Saint has an answer here that no other Christian has, and it is a real one. Joseph Smith revised Genesis 6:6, and in his version, published as Moses 8:25, "it repented Noah, and his heart was pained that the Lord had made man on the earth." One word moves and the flood verse stops being a problem. Grant that fully.
Then notice the scope. The revision does not touch 1 Samuel 15, which is the chapter that argues with itself, and it does not touch Exodus 32:14 or Jonah 3:10. The one repentance verse Joseph reached is fixed, and the rest stand as the King James prints them. There is a whole page on what that revision does and does not carry: The Bible Joseph Rewrote.
Why this should make you question
A being outside time who knows the end from the beginning has nothing to regret and nothing to relent from; regret is what it feels like to learn something. The texts read exactly as they would if written by people whose picture of God was still developing, because each author wrote the God they knew. The alternative is a God who does not change, described by a book that cannot make up its mind about it.