Years ago I read this article about the meaning of hamas in the Bible. I share it with you here.

Hamas

By the generation of the flood the whole earth had become corrupt, or polluted, and was filled with hamas (Genesis 6:11). The wide range of meanings of the word hamas in the Old Testament encompasses almost the entire spectrum of evil. The term can stand for evil of any sort (Psalm 11: 5, Proverbs 13:2); it may simply stand for falsehood, as in “false witness” (Exodus 23: 1, Deuteronomy 19:15, Psalm 35:1) and it occurs with mirma (Isaiah 60:18; Jeremiah 6:7, 20:8), with the two together meaning something like “plunder and pillage.” Hamas has a very close connection to bloodshed as can be seem from Ezekiel 9:9. Like bloodshed, the term hamas can be used in a physical way, for hamas (or the pollution from it) can cover clothes (Malachi 2:16) and hands (Job 16:17, 1 Chronicles 12:17). In Genesis, the earth was filled with hamas and had itself become polluted because all flesh had polluted its way upon the earth (Genesis 6:11–12).

It was the filling of the earth with hamas and its resultant pollution that prompted God to bring a flood to physically erase everything from the earth and start anew. The flood was not primarily an agency of punishment, but a means of getting rid of a thoroughly polluted world and starting again with a clean, well-washed one. Then, when everything had been washed away, God resolved (Genesis 8:21):

I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every living thing, as I have done.

BSP 8:1 (Winter 1979) p. 27

He then went on to give Noah and his sons the basic laws, specifically the strict instructions about the shedding of blood, to prevent the earth from becoming polluted again.

Bible and Spade 1 - – Bible and Spade.