OK, so I've apparently started traveling into the back roads of Genesis, the parts that start wearying the more faint-of-heart of those who determine to read this thing straight through. Near the beginning of Chapter 6, I'm starting to feel as though I'm reading the Epic of Gilgamesh or some other ancient Near Eastern text. Heck, Gilgamesh even has a flood :). But there is a point there...it seems to indicate that perhaps something really did happen, along the lines of poor suffering Japan or Indonesia five years ago. And perhaps there was a trend in their literature as there is everywhere else of describing the people of the past in hyperbolic terms. There isn't a neat and tidy, fully literal way to consider this part of the text, but what we do know is that it can still teach us something.
Today's reading traces the line of Seth, the "good son", to Noah in a very formal, repetitive format beloved of certain of the writers of the ancient Hebrews, the "begats". The funny thing is, the writers know just how to break out of the mantra-like repetitive listing to give a sense of who was important and why. Already just from reading this list, I can see the point that humanity was never broken up into "good people" and "bad people", Cain and Seth. There was always a mixture of sin and goodness in both. Cain's descendents, as I read in the last chapter, bear names and descriptions that give us a sense of how the world was developing. Cities were born, music and musical instruments were born (Jubal), metallurgy was born (Tubal-cain). A few of Seth's descendents (Enoch, Lamech, Methuselah/Methushael) bear names that are very similar to the descendents of Cain, giving the idea that "trendy" names have always existed and that you cannot judge a person's character or lineage from their name only.
People in this list were described as living an absurdly long time. I'm not sure if this was to make sure everybody had lots and lots of children so they could populate the earth, as I heard once, or if it was to give a sense of heroic, Titan-esque almost demi-god status. The local pagan types are said to have described some of their historic kings that way. No matter what one believes about this, symbolic, literal, it still brings a point that God wants to make, which is that He sustains His creation and everyone's birth and death are in His hands. People are born and they die, and the cycle of time keeps going. Adam does not die until after his perfectly righteous son Abel does...the first death on earth is not a punishment for anything, even the very Fall of Mankind. It's a martyrdom. And Seth is described as being in Adam's image, as Adam was made in God's. Being someone's "image and likeness" is to be their child.
I wonder why I've never heard of the character of Enoch much before. He's described, in a very mysterious but telling way, almost as a Christ/Elijah/Mary prefigurement. He is said to have lived 365 years,"walking with God" the whole time. The Holy Spirit and the human authors seem to indicate that he symbolically "walked with God" one year of life for every day of a year...his life was completely filled with God. And then "God took him". Simple as that. No dying, just "God took him." Not to heaven itself, necessarily, but someplace good. Adam and Eve "walked with God" in the garden before the Fall...they were so close to Him. The writers did not know much else about the man Enoch, but they had come to know him as a man very, very close to God. The other people who God assumed or who Ascended under their own power, were singularly close in relationship to God, and I'd love to know more about this man. There have been saints, people for whom God is an intimate friend, since the earliest times.
Then again, humanity here is also driving relentlessly downward in terms of our fidelity to Covenant #1, the covenant that bonded us to God like a wife to a husband. At the beginning of chapter six, it emphasizes that "daughters" were born to men. One ancient commentator I read once said that perhaps this could mean that even the sons were so effeminate that they were referred to as "daughters", which would give a sense I think, but I think it's simple enough that the daughters (the real female ones) existed as a temptation for the "sons of God/gods/heaven". Here we start sounding really Gilgamesh-y. The local pagan-y types believed their gods could assume human form and/or angelic-like humanoid form and referred to them as "sons of gods". Angels might be what the text is talking about coming and taking human women wives, but this doesn't seem to fit at all, as Jesus said that angels don't marry. It could be and probably is a lot simpler...the "sons of God" being the descendents of Seth, the good guys, and the "daughters of men" being from Cain's lineage, the rebellious ones. Either way, it is a reminder that even the good men were starting to get mixed and blended in with the badness around them.
Children produced by the mixture of darkness and light, black and white, are, in this case, a very very dark shade of grey, very very deep in shadows. I'd never heard the term "Nephilim" before, but this is about as Gilgamesh-y as the Bible gets. The men of the past were so awesome they lived hundreds of years, and when they turned bad, they were heroic and renowned in their viciousness and brutishness. Some have described them as giants, and said that Goliath was the last one, but I don't know what to think. It is not impossible. But it is also very very possible that these were very violent (Nephilim could mean "the violent ones" apparently) and selfish people who focused on making sure they were men of renown, that they would be praised for their strength and ruthlessness. Some people talk about this as giving credence to the idea that marrying outside of the faith is a sin, but I'm not sure that the marrying is the issue. What the children of Seth found when they married the daughters of Cain was a distraction and lure away from the godly life. They stopped living righteous lives, partly out of being tempted by living with unbelievers. If one is distracted away from godly life for any reason, that is sinful.
The results of this shocking level of "watering down" the goodness and righteousness in humanity are immediate - God prepares to bring about the justice in deserved smackdown form. The amazing mercy of God is evident in the face of what must be far, far more repugnant to him than it is to me ("no desire [mankind's] heart conceived was anything but evil" - hyperbole but reminds me that sin, no matter how small, stains us and prevents the good from shining through). God didn't regret us, not really...but what we did certainly grieved His heart to an unbearable degree. His justice needs serving and it needs serving now. But his amazing mercy gave them one hundred and twenty years to get back right. Not forever, not as long as the people before, but much more than justice would demand. It is this very mercy that creates the difference between Judas in today's gospel, who ran out the door into the darkness after having his sin recognized, steeled in his resolve to do Evil, and Peter, who was recognized in the very same sin, repented, and stuck around long enough for Jesus to forgive him and make a new covenant with us all.
Once again, the ray of hope shines out of the shadows with Noah. In the litany of "begats" in chapter five, Noah is born like all the others, but his father names him Noah (relief) in a specifically mentioned way. Naming a person in the Bible gives them a mission, and Noah's was to bring relief and consolation to those who were struggling to maintain a relationship with God in this culture by making a brand new covenant. His father lived a symbolic 777 years, a symbolically perfect long time. Righteousness has continued to exist through the generations, even when the darkness seemed overwhelming. Enoch and Noah were two of the first candles in a string of them through the centuries.
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