Noahic Clickbait
So no, I haven’t seen the movie, and no, this is not a review of it. Aside from that resulting in a couple of hours that I couldn’t get back, there would be the problems caused by the possibility of me writing a review of an Aronofsky film that might run counter to the analysis of soi disant hipster film dude critics. And, as everyone knows, one of my top priorities is to keep those guys from looking at me in scorn and contumely. So a review is really something I cannot risk — risk emotionally, I mean.
Me, avoiding the theater.
But one good thing about the movie is that — as a number of people have pointed out — everybody is talking about a Bible story. That’s something, right? Well, maybe. The possibility exists that we might talk about it all wrong, with our latter case being worse than the beginning.
And that brings me to the focus of my labors this morning. One person on Twitter has been having a little bit of fun with my view that the setup for the Noah story was the fact that “angels get it on with our wimmin,” and so, thought I, why not? As the spelling of wimmin might indicate, this view of mine can easily be represented as being worthy only of those who go up to the high mountain meadows of Tennessee in order to chase the powers of the air with butterfly nets. So let’s talk about it, shall we?
The basic debate concerns the identity of the “sons of God” in Gen. 6:1. The phrase is bene elohim, and the question is whether or not that refers to celestial beings or to the godly line of Seth.
One of my fundamental rules for Bible study is that we must allow the New Testament to interpret the Old Testament for us, and to do so authoritatively. Related to the Noah story, for example, the apostle Peter tells us that the ark was a type of Christian baptism (1 Pet. 3:18-21). You find that kind of thing in 1 Peter, but you don’t usually find it in commentaries on Genesis, evangelical or otherwise. We have a deep resistance to letting the New Testament do this for us.
So if you are following my set-up, you will have guessed that I am going to argue that I take Genesis 6 as talking about angelic beings because the New Testament interprets it that way. And that would be correct. Let us start there.
Jude, the Lord’s brother, says this:
“And the angels which kept not their
first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in
everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.
Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them, in like manner
giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh,
are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire”
(Jude 6–7).
Here we have angels who did not stay put in their appointed habitation, and as a result have been imprisoned in “everlasting chains under darkness.” Peter, in his treatment of this, refers to the “spirits in prison,” and identifies them as creatures who had been disobedient in the time of Noah.
Back to Jude. He moves on to discuss the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities around them. He says that they were guilty of fornication and “going after strange flesh.” But the key is that he says the cities of the plain did what they did “in like manner.” They went after strange flesh “likewise,” in the “same manner,” or “in the same way.” In the same way as what? Grammatically, the cities of the plain sinned in the same way that the angels who left their own habitation did. They too “went after strange flesh.”
Jude doesn’t mention Noah by name in this close connection, but Peter, in a passage parallel to Jude’s, does.
“For if God spared not the angels that
sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of
darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; And spared not the old world,
but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing
in the flood upon the world of the ungodly . . .” (2 Peter 2:4–5).
The revolt of man that precipitated the Flood (ha) was a big deal. It was an important event in God’s history of the world, even though He doesn’t tell us a great deal about it. We can tell this by the fact that when Christ died and went down to Hades, He singled out the disobedient spirits of Noah’s time to preach to. That preaching is not gospel preaching — the word refers to the work of a herald, not an evangelist. Out of all sinners available from Old Testament history, He makes a point to announce to this group their final defeat.
Immortality for man was to be achieved by Christ’s resurrection, and not by rebellious man’s early experiments in genetic engineering and crossbreeding.
“For Christ also hath once suffered for
sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put
to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he
went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were
disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of
Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls
were saved by water. The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also
now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the
answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus
Christ” (1 Peter 3:18–21).
See? Inerrancy is more fun that it sounds!
So, with that as the backdrop, we at least know that there might be motives for interpreting things this way other than a cornpone’s unwashed desire to “protect our wimminfolk.” And we are freed up to go to look at the text from Genesis.
“And it came to pass, when men began to
multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and
they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My
spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet
his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the
earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in
unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same
became mighty men which were of old, men of renown” (Genesis 6:1–4).
The first verse says that Adam began to multiply on the earth — mankind. It says that daughters were born to Adam — mankind. Then it says that the sons of God saw that they were beautiful. The phrase bene elohim is used elsewhere, and it is used of celestial beings.
“Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them to present himself before the Lord” (Job 2:1).
“When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:7).
They married any of the women they chose, and God’s response to this was a judicial declaration that man is emphatically mortal. This rebellion was apparently an attempt at by-passing the need for the tree of life. Men were living a long time in those days, but they still were dying, and so this was their immortality project. God responds to this with a promise of death. It can be taken as a new limit on the life span of individual men, or perhaps that the Flood was going to come in 120 years, and put an end to their quest. In either case, God answers their aspiration with a promise of death.
Now if the sons of God here were sons of Seth, then questions immediately crowd around. Why are all the women on one side of the intermarriages, and the males on the other? Why does it say daughters of Adam, instead of daughters of Cain? Why were the offspring of such unions so remarkable — Nephilim, giants, men of renown? And why would God address this kind of sin with a global cataclysm? And most importantly, why would the New Testament identify the sin as one of sexual perversion instead of covenantal degradation?
One penultimate thing — not worthy to be used as an argument in its own right, but worth mentioning at the tail end like this. Pagan myths and stories are not to be relied upon in the details, because there were so many distortions and accretions that crept in. But we can recognize that there are nuggets of truth in the pagan stories — as we do when recognizing the Flood accounts that the tribes of earth have all remembered. These details have to be fit into the scriptural account, and if they are confirmed there, then fine. If they do not, then we are free to set them aside. But at least such things are suggestive.
For example, the pagans have a long history of explaining their great kings as being the offspring of gods and human women. What the pagans would identify as gods, biblical writers would describe as celestials. And an account of a primordial union between Heaven and earth produced the Titans. These Titans were defeated in a war with other gods, and were thrown down to Tartarus, a deep pit in Hades. The word Tartarus is the same word Peter uses in describing where the Noahic angels were imprisoned (2 Pet. 2:4). And it is curious (at least to me) that one of the Titans was named Iapetus — Japheth, one of Noah’s sons.
Okay, last thing and you are rid of me this morning. There are objections to all this, of course. But I think the objections can be addressed fairly simply. Jesus says that angels do not marry (Matt. 22:30), not that they cannot. The angels that did so left their proper habitation, which the angels in Heaven do not do.
Another objection rightly asks about the Nephilim that show up in postdiluvian histories. What about that? Three possibilities, and I am off to work. One is that the same sin happened again, after the Flood, but not on so large a scale as to require massive judgment. That is possible, and in some cases, likely. Another is that the bloodline of the eight who were saved was compromised, and carried that corrupt genetic information through the Flood. But why would God do that, if the point was to wipe it all out? The last option, and the one I prefer, is that postdiluvian giants were fully human, NBA scale, and, towering over everybody else, were (naturally enough) named after the earlier giants.
So now you know!
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