2 Peter2chapter 2

The teachers described made money. Peter says they exploit people with fabricated stories, which describes a trade: a persuasive man attaches himself to a house church, gathers a following, and lives off it — the same abuse the earlier letters warned about, now grown bold.

The first judgment named is angels who sinned, cast down and held in chains of gloomy darkness. Peter uses a word that names the deepest pit of Greek myth, and the sequence — angels, then the flood, then Sodom — is the sequence of Genesis. The house reading takes this as the Watchers of Genesis 6, the sons of God who crossed a line and were imprisoned for it, as 1 Enoch describes at length.

The alternative reading, that these are simply the angels who fell with Satan before creation, is named here rather than dismissed; the reason the Watchers reading is preferred is the tight link Peter makes to Noah's generation and the parallel in Jude, which quotes 1 Enoch by name.

Balaam is the third example and the most pointed, because he was a prophet with real ability who sold his services. The two proverbs at the end — the dog returning to its vomit and the washed pig going back to the mud — were common folk sayings; the first is in Proverbs, and both are the kind of blunt farmyard line everyone had heard.