Yahweh observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil.
(Genesis 6:5, NLT)
In my linguistics courses at uni we would call these three italicised words quantifiers. They are words which determine what scope a sentence has, and these three say there is no limit to humanity's evil! It would have been enough to use just one of these words, but the author of Genesis used three just to hammer in it.
God looked into the minds of every person on the earth, and it broke his heart. Their actions were disgustingly evil, but for everything they did there must have been a thousand more options they also considered. Every thought and every imagination of theirs was evil. Every thought. Every imagination.
And it wasn’t like God happened to look at an unlucky time, for everyone was consistently, always, like this. And neither were their thoughts mildly evil, scoring 4.5 on some ten point scale. No, they were totally evil in every way. If you could ever find a scale that could do it justice they would all rate absolutely zero. In God’s eyes there was not even the smallest speck of goodness in humanity.
But so that we won't think that those evil people all died with the flood, God has more to say. Just a little later, as God promises never to flood the whole earth again, he says that nothing has really changed. Indeed that's why he makes that promise, because humanity would soon be sinning as much or even more than before.
I will never again curse the ground because of the human race, even though everything they think or imagine is bent toward evil from childhood.
(Genesis 8:21, NLT)
