Noah

The reading that they were angelic beings is the older one, and it is what 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 assume. Josephus wrote in the first century that "many angels of God accompanied with women, and begat sons that proved unjust." Philo, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Julius Africanus, Eusebius, Ambrose and Jerome all hold it. This site's tradition follows that reading and teaches it at full strength.

The reading that they were the godly line of Seth marrying into the line of Cain is held by Augustine in City of God 15.23, by John Cassian, by Cyril of Alexandria, by Chrysostom, and later by Calvin, and it became the majority Western reading. It is presented here in the words of the men who held it, with respect.

Chuck Missler put the angelic reading this way in "The Gospel in Genesis" (1996): "Some authorities suggest that this might be an allusion to the Sons of God who came down to corrupt the daughters of men, resulting in the Nephilim (Fallen Ones) of Genesis 6." Michael S. Heiser argued the same case from the ancient Near Eastern setting in "The Ancient Near Eastern Context for Genesis 6:1-4" (drmsh.com, 2015): "This article deals a death blow to any non-supernatural (or non-mythic as some prefer) interpretation in the sense that, if you care about interpreting the Bible in context, no human interpretation of the sons of God can work."

Both sides agree that Genesis 6 describes a corruption grave enough to bring the flood, and Genesis names two causes in the same passage: the transgression of 6:1-4 and the violence and corruption of 6:5-13. The full study takes the argument at length.

1 Enoch is a Jewish work whose parts date from the third century BC to the first century AD. Aramaic fragments of most of it were found at Qumran, Jude 14-15 quotes its opening chapter, and it is canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. On this site it is a labeled Second Temple study resource and never Scripture.

It adds no facts to Genesis. It adds a frame. In its tenth chapter the warning to Noah and the sentence on the Watchers are spoken in one breath: “Then said the Most High, the Holy and Great One spake, and sent Uriel to the son of Lamech, and said to him: ’Go to Noah and tell him in my name “Hide thyself!” and reveal to him the end that is approaching” (1 Enoch 10:1-2, R. H. Charles's translation). Later God tells him, “And now the angels are making a wooden (building), and when they have completed that task I will place My hand upon it and preserve it, and there shall come forth from it the seed of life” (1 Enoch 67:2).

Its last chapters go back to his birth. Lamech tells his father that he has “begotten a strange son, diverse from and unlike man, and resembling the sons of the God of heaven” (1 Enoch 106:5) and has to be told the boy is his own. Enoch names him and gives the reason: “for he will comfort the earth after all the destruction” (1 Enoch 107:3). That frame was in circulation before the New Testament was written, and it is the frame 2 Peter 2:4-5 and Jude 6 write inside.

Genesis says the waters covered "all the high mountains under all the heavens" and stood fifteen cubits above them, and that every living thing on the face of the earth was destroyed. 2 Peter 3:6 says the world of that time perished in the flood. A flood over the whole globe is the reading held through most of church history and it is the widely held belief today. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown put the traditional case plainly: the language is not consistent with the theory of a partial deluge.

Some readers, including believing scholars, take the universal language as covering the whole world known to Noah. Albert Barnes said so in the nineteenth century, writing that the land means the portion of the earth's surface known to man and that this is all Scripture warrants us to assert. Theophylact of Ohrid read 2 Peter 3:6 the same way in the eleventh century. Bernard Ramm, Davis Young and Hugh Ross hold versions of it today. An evidence-based reading belongs on the page, and it may never be used to erase the traditional one.

The age of the earth and a chronology counted from the genealogies are handled the same way here, as widely held beliefs rather than as this site's assertion. Genesis was written by Moses for Israel in the exodus to teach them who the LORD is, and it was not written to answer every question a modern reader brings to it.

The rain fell forty days and forty nights (Genesis 7:12). The waters then prevailed for 150 days (7:24) before they began to go down. He entered on the seventeenth day of the second month of his six hundredth year (7:11) and the ground was fully dry on the twenty-seventh day of the second month of his six hundred and first (8:14).

That is a year and ten days, which Adam Clarke worked out as a complete solar year. He did not leave when he saw dry ground. He waited for God to tell him to come out.

Which month "the second month" of 7:11 actually names is itself disputed in rabbinic tradition. The Babylonian Talmud, at Rosh Hashanah 11b-12a, records a dispute between the tannaim Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua: Rabbi Eliezer holds the world was created in Tishrei and reads the flood's start as the seventeenth of Marcheshvan, while Rabbi Yehoshua holds it was created in Nisan and reads the same date as the seventeenth of Iyar. Both readings agree on the count of days; they differ only on which season those days fall in.

The text names Canaan, Noah's grandson through Ham, not Ham himself and not any race of people. The words speak of one man's line and its place among his uncles, Shem and Japheth. Reading this curse as marking a whole race of people has no basis in the text itself.

Why the grandson and not the son is an old question and the church has always asked it. Justin Martyr in the second century answered that the Spirit of prophecy would not curse a son whom God had blessed. Chrysostom answered that Ham did not suffer less by watching his son bear it. Ephrem asked what sin Canaan could possibly have committed. Adam Clarke supplied the textual note that settles the reading: the Arabic version has "Ham the father of Canaan" at verses 25, 26 and 27, a reading found in no other version and plainly a gloss.

The same chapter carries the answer the church's own greatest reader of the passage gave. Augustine, in City of God 19.15, wrote that God gave His rational creature dominion "not man over man, but man over the beasts," and that the word slave appears nowhere in Scripture until this scene.

Both instructions are in the text. Genesis 6:19-20 gives two of every living creature. Genesis 7:2-3 then gives seven pairs of every clean animal and seven pairs of every bird, and the second instruction is the more detailed one, given as he was about to go in.

Jamieson, Fausset and Brown give the reason from the story itself: the extra clean animals were reserved for sacrifice. Noah offers burnt offerings from every kind of clean animal and clean bird at Genesis 8:20, and without the seven pairs that altar would have ended a species. Read forward, Genesis 7:2 is a man carrying his worship supplies through a year of judgment.

God says the bow is the sign of a covenant He is making with Noah, with his descendants, and with every living creature that came out of the ark. The animals are named four times in seven verses. The remarkable line is Genesis 9:16: "I will see it and remember." The sign is given to God, not to us.

The Hebrew word is qeshet, the ordinary word for a war bow, and it is a weapon in nearly all of its seventy-six occurrences. What God hangs in the sky is a bow set down. Matthew Henry added that a rainbow is only sunlight, so the sign has no glory of its own, and pointed to the rainbow around the throne at Revelation 4:3.

The promise is also specific. It retires the flood and not the judgment. 2 Peter 3:7 says the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment.

Because He is asked what His coming will look like, and He answers with this story. The thing He picks out is not the wickedness. It is that nobody noticed: "And they were oblivious, until the flood came and swept them all away."

Luke records the same saying and sets Lot beside Noah. Eusebius of Caesarea drew out the pattern in the fourth century: the flood did not come before Noah entered the ark, and fire did not fall before Lot left Sodom. J. C. Ryle added a caution worth keeping, that the passage is about the second coming and not about death.

The parallel is real and worth stating plainly. Atrahasis has the gods send a flood because the noise of humanity disturbs Enlil's sleep, and Enki warns the hero through a reed wall. The eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh has Utnapishtim build a boat, survive, release birds and make an offering. The church knew of the parallel long before Assyriology existed: the site's own quote pool holds Cosmas Indicopleustes, writing in the sixth century, reporting the Babylonian historian Berossus at second hand, with ten kings before the flood and a hero he calls Xisuthrus. Berossus, a priest of Bel in Babylon, wrote his Babyloniaca in Greek about 281 BC, dedicated to the Seleucid king Antiochus I. The tablet parallel became public on 3 December 1872, when George Smith read his translation of the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London.

The differences are as sharp as the likenesses. Genesis gives a moral cause, violence and corruption, and a righteous man. Atrahasis gives noise and a god's irritation. The Mesopotamian gods quarrel, panic at the flood they started, and swarm the sacrifice afterward. Genesis ends with a covenant for every living creature; Gilgamesh ends with immortality for one man and his wife.

Three positions are held on the relationship. Genesis draws on an older Mesopotamian tradition, which has been the standard reading in the university field since the generation after the tablets were read. All the accounts remember one real event, and Genesis preserves it accurately while the others carry it in polytheistic dress, which is held across conservative and evangelical scholarship and is the reading this site's tradition takes. Or both descend from a tradition older than either, with neither borrowing from the other. This page names the positions and rules between none of them.