Genesis6chapter 6

Genesis 6:1-2

when men began to multiply on the face of the earth: The phrase sons of God, bene ha-elohim, is used elsewhere in the Old Testament of angelic beings, as in the opening chapters of Job. On that reading, taken by Missler, Heiser and the wider Genesis 6 school, these are fallen angels taking human wives, and Jude and 2 Peter are read as referring back to it. The other long-standing reading, held by Augustine, Calvin and much of the Reformed tradition, takes them as the godly line of Seth marrying into the line of Cain.

Genesis 6:3

God sets a limit and grants a span of time before judgment falls. Most take the hundred and twenty years as the countdown to the flood rather than a new ceiling on human life, since men in the following chapters still live far longer than that. The word translated strive carries the sense of contending, or of remaining. Peter looks back on this stretch and calls it the longsuffering of God waiting while the ark was a preparing.

Genesis 6:4

The Hebrew word is nephilim, which the Septuagint rendered gigantes and the King James translators gave as giants. The verse says they were in the earth in those days and also after that, and the same word turns up once more in the whole Bible, in the spies' report at Numbers 13:33. Joshua 11:22 then records that the Anakim were left in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod, and the champion Israel meets in 1 Samuel 17 comes out of Gath. Whatever they were, the text sets them directly alongside the unions of the verses before.

Genesis 6:5-7

The verdict is total, that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The word translated repented does not mean God changed his mind about right and wrong, and the older writers took it as Scripture describing God's grief in terms a man can feel. The next line says it grieved him at his heart. Jesus points back to these days when he describes his own coming, and what he names is not the violence but the ordinary eating and drinking that went on until the day Noah entered the ark.

Genesis 6:8

This is the first time the word grace appears in the Bible, and it lands on one man in the generation already marked for destruction. It is spoken over him before anything at all is said about his character. Verse 9 will call him just and perfect in his generations, and a good many of the commentators rest weight on that order.

Genesis 6:9-10

This is the third of the eleven times Genesis divides itself with the line these are the generations, after the heavens and the earth at 2:4 and Adam at 5:1. Each division narrows the field, and this one narrows it to a single household of eight while everything else is being wiped away. Missler built his reading of the whole book on that structure. The phrase used of Enoch in chapter 5 is now used of Noah, and the three sons named here carry the narrowing forward, since Shem's line is the one Genesis follows down to Abram.

Genesis 6:11-12

The earth is called corrupt three times across these two verses, and it is said to be filled with violence here and again in verse 13. The word behind corrupt is the same root as the word behind destroy in verse 13, so the earth had already ruined itself before God said he would ruin it. God looks and beholds, which is the phrasing of the sixth day in chapter 1, and the verdict has gone from very good to all flesh had corrupted his way.

Genesis 6:13-14

God tells Noah what is coming and then tells him to build the thing that will carry him through it. The Hebrew word for ark, tebah, is used in only one other place in Scripture, of the basket of bulrushes daubed with pitch that carried the infant Moses through the water. Gopher wood is named once and nowhere else, so the species is unknown, and the word for the pitch spread within and without is close kin to the word used elsewhere for atonement.

Genesis 6:15-16

The dimensions are exact, and shipbuilders have noted that the ratio is close to one used for stable ocean-going hulls. There is one window above and one door in the side, and chapter 7 adds that the LORD shut him in, so the single way in was closed from the outside. Jerome read the three hundred cubits as the letter Tau and a sign of the cross, while Clarke works the measurements out in feet and leaves the figures alone. Everything is specified and nothing at all is left to Noah's judgment.

Genesis 6:17

The announcement is doubled, I, even I, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the repetition as establishing its certainty, pointing to Genesis 41:32 where Joseph says a dream was doubled because the thing is established by God. The word for flood used here, mabbul, is applied to this event and to no other inundation anywhere in Scripture. What is announced is the end of everything that breathes under heaven.

Genesis 6:18-19

This is the first time the word covenant appears in the Bible, and it is spoken before the flood rather than after it, so the promise stands over Noah through every year of the building. God names his sons, his wife and his sons' wives inside it, which is a household kept alive on the faith of one man. Peter takes those eight souls saved through water as the figure that baptism answers to.

Genesis 6:20-22

Noah is not sent out to catch anything, since the verse says two of every sort shall come unto thee. What he is told to do is gather food, so the man saved by grace spends those years feeding what he is saving. The chapter closes on one line, that according to all that God commanded him, so did he, and Peter calls him a preacher of righteousness, which makes the building itself a sermon that ran for decades.