Mount Hermon

No. Genesis 6:1 to 6:4 describes the sons of God taking wives among the daughters of men and gives no location at all. The mountain is named by 1 Enoch, which says two hundred Watchers came down in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon and swore an oath there, and reads the name out of that oath.

1 Enoch is a Second Temple study resource on this site and never Scripture. Wherever the two records meet on this page, the page says which book is speaking.

1 Enoch is a Jewish book from the centuries before Christ. It survives complete in Ethiopic and is attested in Aramaic among the Dead Sea Scrolls, where J. T. Milik and Matthew Black published the Aramaic fragments from Cave 4 in 1976. Jude 14 to 15 quotes its opening prophecy almost word for word and names Enoch the seventh from Adam as the speaker.

The early church argued about what that meant. Tertullian defended the book around AD 200, Jerome reported that some rejected the letter of Jude because of the quotation, and Augustine held that the prophecy was genuine while the writings circulating under Enoch's name were not authoritative. Quoting a book is not the same as receiving it as Scripture. This site treats 1 Enoch the way Jerome did, as worth remembering and not as authority.

It uses the picture without naming the mountain and without calling 1 Enoch Scripture. Jude 1:6 says the angels who abandoned their proper dwelling are kept in eternal chains under darkness, bound for judgment on that great day. 2 Peter 2:4 says God did not spare the angels when they sinned but cast them into chains of darkness, and the very next sentence moves to the flood.

That is the order 1 Enoch tells the story in, and both apostles write as though their readers knew it. Neither writer says where it happened.

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. Philo, Irenaeus, Tertullian, 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, 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. Both sides agree that Genesis 6 describes a corruption grave enough to bring the flood.

The Gospels say only a high mountain and a mountain, and 2 Peter 1:18 says the holy mountain. Every identification is an inference from the surrounding text.

The Tabor tradition is the older one. Cyril of Jerusalem places the scene on Tabor in his twelfth catechetical lecture in the middle of the fourth century, Hilary of Arles calls it a tradition around 449, a basilica was built there, and pilgrims have gone ever since. Readers who prefer Hermon point out that Matthew and Mark set the preceding scene at Caesarea Philippi at its foot, that Hermon reaches about 2,814 m against Tabor's 588 m, and that Tabor carried a settlement in the first century, which sits awkwardly with going up by themselves.

Adam Clarke laid all three options out in 1832, including John Lightfoot's preference for a mountain near Caesarea Philippi, and chose none of them. This page does the same.

Because four peoples named it and Scripture records what each called it. Deuteronomy 3:9 says the Sidonians call it Sirion and the Amorites call it Senir. Deuteronomy 4:48 gives Siyon. Judges 3:3 and 1 Chronicles 5:23 give Baal-hermon, the name that says what was worshipped on it.

Barnes read the three names stacked in 1 Chronicles 5:23 as three parts of one mountain rather than three mountains, which fits a ridge with three summits. Psalm 42:6 speaks of the peaks of Hermon in the plural for the same reason.

Psalm 133:3 compares brothers living in harmony to the dew of Hermon falling on the mountains of Zion, and the two stand about 190 km apart, so nobody reads the verse as a weather report. The commentators answered it in three ways.

John Gill held that the Zion in view is the Sion of Deuteronomy 4:48, which is Hermon itself. Adam Clarke took the same line and added Henry Maundrell's report from 1697 that the dew there soaked a traveller's tent as though it had rained all night. Spurgeon read it as a comparison rather than an identification, with moisture carried from the higher mountains to the lesser hills and brotherly love descending the same way. The verse works on any of the three.

It was the town at Hermon's southern foot, built around a spring that rises out of a cave. A sanctuary of the Greek god Pan stood at the cave and gave the place its older name of Paneas. Herod built there for Augustus, and his son Philip refounded the town and named it for Tiberius and for himself, which is the name Matthew 16:13 uses.

Jerome describes the site in his commentary on Matthew and names the springs of the Jordan there. Epiphanius Scholasticus asked in the sixth century why the Lord went so far north into Gentile country to ask who He was. The page leaves that question with the reader.

The text makes the link twice. Numbers 13:33 says the spies saw the Nephilim, the descendants of Anak who come from the Nephilim. Deuteronomy 2:20 to 2:21 says the Rephaim were as tall as the Anakites.

Deuteronomy 3:11 calls Og of Bashan the last of the remnant of the Rephaim and records the measurement of his iron bed, and Joshua 12:4 to 12:5 says he ruled Mount Hermon. This site's tradition reads that family line back to Genesis 6:4 and the seed war of Genesis 3:15. Scripture states the relationship and does not explain the mechanism.