AN INCLINATION — literally a FORMING, from yatzar, the potter’s verb for shaping clay (Genesis 2:7 uses it of the making of the human). So the noun is not quite ‘desire’ and not quite ‘nature’: it is the shape a person’s intention has been formed into, and what is formed can be re-formed. ⭐ Its most famous uses bracket the flood: Genesis 6:5 says every yetzer of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all day long, and Genesis 8:21 says, after the flood and as the reason for never repeating it, that the yetzer of the human heart is evil from youth (both already on these pages). The same word is what God says he already knows at Deuteronomy 31:21 — I know its inclination, what it is making even today — with the participle of the same shaping verb standing right beside it. ⚠ The shelf is scattered: KJV and ASV read ‘imagination’, Douay-Rheims ‘thoughts’, NIV paraphrases ‘what they are disposed to do’, and the NWT 1984 reads ‘inclination’, which is what this translation prints. Later Jewish writing built the doctrine of the two yetzarim, the good and the evil inclination, on this noun; the biblical word is narrower than that doctrine and is reported here, not adopted. → first discussed at Deut 31:21