Explaining these words, Hugh writes in this manner: ‘All this about the corruption of the men of that time Moses repeats and inculcates rather often, to show the increase of the crime and the just anger of the avenger. That he says “before the Lord” marks the person of the judge — namely, that God knows as a judge, who is said “not to know” a matter except when it has been proved before him; for although in himself he knows, yet he does not know it for vengeance. But this deed was so manifest that it needed no proof. Or “before the Lord,” who attended to their sin; for they sinned so carelessly that they did not even reckon it to be sin.’ Thus Hugh.²

Cajetan, treating the same words: ‘Weigh,’ he says, ‘the progress of sin. For first there was both the declining and the depravation of the sons of God from concupiscence; then the great malice of man; and at last the earth was corrupted. The malice of men is described as having advanced even to the corruption of souls, so that the evil morals of those men may be understood to have been wholly irreparable — and this before the supreme Judge, who is the witness of the inmost truth. And the greatest corruption of souls is intimated by the corruption of the earth; for it is signified that the corruption of souls was so great that it was poured out even onto the earth, as though men were corrupted not only inwardly, according to their senses and affections, but outwardly too, according to their external actions and works, which were so vicious and corrupt that they even infected, polluted, and corrupted the earth — that is, the places in which these things were done.’³

That phrase, then, ‘The earth was corrupted,’ can be understood of the earth itself, which men, by living corruptly, also corrupted. For just as, on account of the sanctity of the men dwelling in them, or of the things there transacted, certain places themselves are named and held holy, so, on the contrary, on account of men’s crimes, their places are reckoned polluted and accursed. Credit is given to this by what is written in Leviticus, chapter 18: ‘With a male,’ says the Lord, ‘thou shalt not mingle with feminine intercourse, for it is an abomination. With no beast shalt thou couple, nor be defiled with it. A woman shall not lie under a beast, nor mingle with it, for it is a crime. Defile not yourselves in all these things, with which all the nations are contaminated which I will cast out before your sight, and with which the land is polluted, whose crimes I will visit, that it may vomit out its inhabitants. For all these execrable things the inhabitants of the land who were before you committed, and polluted it.’ Or the word ‘earth’ can here be understood and taken for man, either by a synecdoche, as the container being put for the contained — that is, ‘earth’ for the men inhabiting the earth — or so that man himself is called ‘earth’; for as a little above man was called ‘flesh,’ because he had become wholly carnal, so now (as Chrysostom interprets) he is called ‘earth,’ because he was wholly earthly — that is, fixed upon the desires of earthly goods and pleasures.⁴

For that ‘corrupted,’ the Hebrew is the verb Sachath, signifying to dissolve, destroy, corrupt. And Lyra indeed, and Tostatus, interpret this kind of corruption of the earth to have been on account of carnal vices of every kind, even those that are nameless and against nature, which at that time reigned most widely and most strongly. And the corruption of the soul is most discerned in the nameless vice, in which is most corrupted the order and institution of nature, which refers intercourse to the begetting of offspring; which order he wholly perverts and corrupts who uses that kind of intercourse which cannot be referred to the begetting of offspring, but is undertaken for the sake only of pleasure, and that indeed a most impure and most vicious pleasure to be enjoyed.⁵

In what is subjoined, ‘And filled with iniquity,’ for the word ‘iniquity’ the Hebrew is Chamas, which word signifies fraud, rapine, violence, subversion, and oppression. And that ‘before the Lord’ Tostatus interprets as ‘publicly,’ as it were in the sight of God and of heaven and earth; for they sinned publicly, without any shame. Which God reproached to the Jews through Isaiah, chapter three: ‘They have proclaimed their sin like Sodom, and have not hidden it.’ So in the second book of Kings, chapter 12, God threatened David through Nathan: ‘I will take,’ he says, ‘thy wives before thy eyes, and give them to thy neighbor, and he shall lie with them in the sight of this sun,’ that is, openly and in the sight of all Israel. Or that ‘before the Lord’ signifies the utmost irreverence and ingratitude of those men toward God, who, although they believed God to be present to them and to discern not only their deeds but even the hidden thoughts of the mind and its inmost recesses, nevertheless sinned shamelessly and irreverently. For to sin, or be corrupted, ‘in the eyes of God’ seems to sig-…⁶

…nify him who is mindful of God, and who thinks him present to himself, yet offends him. For there are others who sin wholly forgetful of God, and who, as David says, ‘have not set God before their sight.’⁷