Genesis: Chapter Six (The Flood)

In which God devises a devious plot to commit genocide, but somehow save everyone in the process.

This chapter begins with a note about the expanding human population and polygamy. The "sons of God" recognized the beauty of the "daughters of men," so they "married any of them they chose." (6:2) Here we see another separation of the females of the human race from God. Men are the sons of God while women are the daughters of men. God dissassociates himself from women, but to men, he is a paternal figure. God is willing to admit a direct and loving relationship between himself and the male of his supposedly favorite species, but to the females, he remains distant, unrecognizing. As a matter of fact, in order for the human population to expand like it's mentioned here, there had to have been women. It's a fact of life that God confirmed already, and yet only one female name has been printed so far.

God decides that humans live too long and in 6:3 he shortens human life down to 120 years. 120 years is a little closer to actuality than the 930 years that Adam supposedly lived, but it's still a rarity, even in these days of advanced medicine. It also throws a major kink in the theory that one Biblical year is the same as one lunar cycle (28 days). By the latter logic, humans now live to be only ten years old before they die. I've had dogs that lived longer than that. Since Chapter Five involves sex and pregnancy among five-year-olds (in a more modern context, that's kindergarten age), this logic has it that people will produce offspring when they are halfway through their very brief lives, then die right around the time that their kids are making kids.

6:4 mentions a group or possibly race of people called the Nephilim, but describes them very loosely: "They were the heroes of old, men of renown." This makes them sound like war heroes. Having not heard of any wars so far in the Bible, I decided to do some more research on these people. Remember that the version of the Bible I'm reading is the New International Version. I decided to check out some other sources for possible clarification through translation differences.

TheNew International Reader's Version says, "The Nephilim were the heroes of long ago. They were famous men." The New King James Version doesn't use the word Nephilim at all, and instead uses an entirely different definition in 6:4 -- "There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. The Amplified Bible (whatever that is) agrees almost word-for-word with the New King James Version.

So the Nephilim are either people that others hold in high esteem or they are literal giants who are very large. Other sources on the Internet suggest that the Nephilim are actually angels, and I agree that the word Nephilim shares common sounds (though I'm not sure of the etymology) with seraphim and cherubim, two other types of angels.

The King James Version contains a really strange sentence that seems to come out of nowhere and say nothing: "The sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them." This seems to want to explain the origin of the Nephilim, but it doesn't. It says that men and women copulated and "bore children to them." If this is supposed to explain to me the origin of the Nephilim, then I don't understand the sentence. The only way I can interpret this and make heads or tails of it is to think that maybe men and women sacrificed their children to these giants, but then we still have no explanation of how the Nephilim came to be. The same sources who tell me the Nephilim are angels say that this intimates that human had sex with Nephilim, resulting in enormous offspring.

No matter. I'm not reading the KJV. I'm reading the NIV, and that says the Nephilim are just well-respected members of society, and it sounds a lot like the way we think of war veterans. So that's what I'm sticking to until it makes more sense to use an alternate theory.

Directly after mentioning these amazing "heroes of old," God decides that every man on Earth is evil, "and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain." (6:5-6) God regrets ever having made man, and that hurts his feelings. His resolution? "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth." That's right. Genocide. All men. And then some. "Men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air." (6:7) So it's mass genocide of every living thing on Earth. Awesome. This should become the plot of a Roland Emmerich disaster movie.

Movie Trailer Voice: In a world where man's heart was only evil all the time... *Shot of giant Nephilim devouring a human infant* One man stood against all odds... To help God destroy all life on Earth.

That's right. Because "Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time," (6:9) "Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord." (6:8). It's reiterated that Noah has three sons named Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

God tells Noah that there's going to be some trouble coming soon for the human race, and that Noah should build "an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out." (6:14) The boat should be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall. God tells Noah to give it a roof with an 18-inch skylight. The ark should have "lower, middle and upper decks." (6:16)

Then God entrusts Noah with the secrets of the world's destruction. "I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth," God says in 6:17, "to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish." God will spare only Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their wives. Well, them and a male and female of every other species of animal on the planet.

Over the course of this chapter so far, God has decided that all men are evil except for one, that it hurts him to know he created all of that, that he should destroy all humans, all birds, all lions and tigers and bears (Oh, my!), but in the end, he should actually leave some of everything in existence around so that they can produce more. In other words, even if the two animals of each species are evil as well (not mentioned; they're just innocent bystanders), they get to live on to watch all of their brethren die. So what God is really doing here is just making an example of everyone. Noah, Shem, Ham, Japheth, their wives, the animals... They all get to watch as God eviscerates the entirety of the rest of their species for generic reasons (they're evil, but God isn't saying what makes them evil, probably because God made them and therefore God made them evil; we've already seen in Chapter Three that God can't stand it when he's wrong), and then get scared into ever being evil again, whatever that means.

Noah is also supposed to "take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them." (6:21) Let's talk mathematics. The boat will be 450 feet by 75 feet by 45 feet. That's 1,518,750 cubic feet of space. In that, Noah is supposed to cram two of every animal on the planet, five humans, and enough food to feed them for... How long? God doesn't say. But it does say in 6:22 that "Noah did everything just as God commanded him."

Magic.

Tune in next time for the exciting conclusion to The Great Flood.

Chapter Seven