AGAPE · Chapter 18 of 41

When the Order Was Broken

The creation order was simple. God made one man and one woman. He built the woman from the man and brought her to him. The two became one flesh, they knew each other, and under the blessing of God they were fruitful and filled the earth. Genesis 6 tells how, in the generations after Adam, that order was trampled, and how God answered. The account opens with a sentence that has been argued over for thousands of years, and it is worth taking slowly.

Genesis 6:1-2 And it came to pass, when man (adam אָדָם aw-dawm') began to multiply upon the face of the ground (adamah אֲדָמָה ad-aw-maw'), and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw the daughters of man (adam), that they were good; and they took for themselves women (ishah אִשָּׁה ish-shaw') of all whom they chose.

Who are “the sons of God”? Many readers expect a hidden code here, and some have filled the gap with angels or giants from other worlds. Scripture itself gives a plainer answer, and it gives it in the chapters just before.

Who Are the Sons of God?

Before reading Genesis 6, it helps to ask how the rest of Scripture uses the words “sons of God.” Again and again, from the Torah to the apostles, it gives the name to people who belong to God and walk in what He teaches.

Luke traces the line of Yeshua back to the beginning, and the last words of his list are these:

Luke 3:38 the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.

The line Luke traces to God runs through Seth. The Torah gives the same name to a whole people: “Israel is My son, My firstborn” (Exodus 4:22). And Moses opens the chapter on clean and unclean animals with the same words:

Deuteronomy 14:1 You are sons to the LORD your God; you shall not cut yourselves, and you shall not make a baldness between your eyes for the dead.

To be sons of God, in the Torah, is to live by His teaching, down to how one mourns and what one eats. The apostles say the same in their own words: “For as many as are led by the pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirit) of God, these are sons of God” (Romans 8:14); and John writes that the children of God are known by whether they practice righteousness (1 John 3:10).

The book of Job also uses the phrase, of the heavenly court that comes to present itself before the LORD (Job 1:6; 38:7). But Job is speaking of a scene in heaven. Genesis 4–6 is speaking of the family of man on the face of the ground, and there the plain meaning of “sons of God” is the meaning Luke, Moses and the apostles give it: the people who belong to God.

A Land Near the Presence of God

Adam was sent out of the garden, but he was not sent out of the presence of God. Outside Eden, God still spoke with people directly. He spoke to Cain before and after the death of Abel, and Cain answered Him (Genesis 4:6-15). Offerings were brought to Him, and He looked on them (Genesis 4:3-4). Then Cain was sentenced, and he named what he was losing:

Genesis 4:14 Behold, you have driven me this day from upon the face of the ground (adamah), and from your face I shall be hidden; and I shall be a wanderer and a fugitive in the earth, and it shall come to pass that anyone finding me will kill me."

Genesis 4:16 And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

“The face of the ground” near the presence of the LORD was a place where people still talked with their Maker, brought Him offerings and heard His answer. This is the heart of these chapters. Cain lost that place and went out to Nod, where he built a city (Genesis 4:17), and where his descendant Lamech sang of killing a man for wounding him (Genesis 4:23-24). The skills of that world grew quickly: Jabal was “the father of those dwelling in tents and with livestock,” Jubal of those who play the harp and pipe, and Tubal-cain “a hammerer of every cutting tool of bronze and iron” (Genesis 4:20-22).

Those who stayed near the presence lived a different life. After Abel’s death a new son was born:

Genesis 4:25-26 And Adam knew his woman (ishah) again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth: "For God has appointed for me another seed instead of Abel, because Cain killed him." And to Seth, to him also a son was born; and he called his name Enosh. Then it was begun to call upon the name of the LORD.

Seth was given instead of Abel, whose offering God had accepted. He was born near the presence of God, to parents who had walked with God in the garden and still knew His voice, and in his family “it was begun to call upon the name of the LORD.” Read with the rest of Scripture, this is the most certain reading of the sons of God in Genesis 6: Seth was raised as a child of God, and his line was the family of God’s teaching. That is why Genesis 5 follows his line, generation by generation, and why Luke ends that same line with “the son of God.”

A Rich Life in the Age of Long Lives

Genesis 5 records something else about this line: its years. Adam lived 930 years, Seth 912, Enosh 905, Kenan 910, Mahalalel 895, Jared 962, Enoch 365 before God took him, Methuselah 969, Lamech 777 and Noah 950. These were the lives of the family that lived near the presence of God. Genesis records no such years for the line of Cain.

What Genesis says of that land is a picture of plenty, not of hunger. God had told Adam that the ground would be worked with toil, but He had also said, “you shall eat” (Genesis 3:17-19), and He Himself made garments of skin and clothed the man and the woman (Genesis 3:21). Cain worked the ground and brought “of the fruit of the ground,” and Abel kept sheep and brought “of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat” (Genesis 4:3-4). Even the difference between clean and unclean animals was already known before the flood, for God told Noah to take “of every clean beast … seven seven” (Genesis 7:2), and after the flood Noah offered “of every clean beast and of every clean bird” (Genesis 8:20).

Those who lived near the presence of God had fields, flocks, clothing, worship, and the teaching of God passed from father to son. Their food, their health and their whole way of life were surely richer than the life of those who went out from His presence. Genesis does not say this in one sentence, but it follows from what Genesis says about the two places.

The same kind of weighing applies to the sheep they kept. In the Torah the fat of an offering belongs to the LORD, and the meat of a peace offering is eaten by the one who brings it, before the LORD (Leviticus 3:16-17; 7:15; Deuteronomy 12:7). God does not eat the sheep, and the meat is not thrown away. No verse says in so many words that the families before the flood ate mutton, and some read Genesis 9:3 to mean that no meat was eaten until after the flood. But Genesis 9:3 opens every moving thing to all mankind; it does not prove that no one ate the meat of an offering before. When Abel’s flock, the fat he offered, the clean and unclean animals Noah already knew, and the garments of skin are weighed together, that those families ate the meat of their sheep is a well-grounded inference.

From Seth to Noah

The numbers of Genesis 5 can be added, and they tell a remarkable story. Counting from the creation of Adam, Seth was born in the year 130, Enosh in 235, Kenan in 325, Mahalalel in 395, Jared in 460, Enoch in 622, Methuselah in 687, Lamech in 874 and Noah in 1056. Adam died in the year 930, so he was still alive when Lamech, Noah’s father, was born, and he lived through the first fifty-six years of Lamech’s life. The teaching of God did not have to pass through a long chain of strangers. It could pass from Adam’s own mouth to the father of Noah.

Noah was 600 years old when the flood came (Genesis 7:6), and so the flood came in the year 1656. By then Adam had died in 930, Seth in 1042, Enosh in 1140, Kenan in 1235, Mahalalel in 1290 and Jared in 1422. Enoch “walked with God, and he was not, for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). Lamech died in 1651, five years before the flood. Methuselah died in 1656, the very year of the flood. Of him Scripture says only, “And all the days of Methuselah were nine and sixty years and nine hundred years, and he died” (Genesis 5:27). It does not say that he died in the waters.

So not one of Noah’s direct fathers is said to have died in the flood. The line of Seth, kept in the teaching of God, ran unbroken to Noah, and through Noah’s house God brought eight souls safely through the water.

They Saw, and They Took

The straight line from Seth to Noah was not the whole family of Seth. Each father in Genesis 5 “begot sons and daughters.” Over the centuries Seth’s descendants grew into a great people, and as they multiplied, many of them turned their eyes to the world outside, to the daughters of man (adam), the people who lived away from the presence of God.

That is what Genesis 6:2 says, and its two verbs are worth hearing. The first is laqach (לָקַח), “took.” The second is bachar (בָּחַר), “chose.” In Genesis 2 the same verb laqach was used, but God was the one who took: He “took one of his ribs,” built the woman, “and brought her to Adam.” The man received his wife from the hand of God. In Genesis 6 the order is reversed: the sons of God saw, and they took for themselves, of all whom they chose.

The words also sound like the garden. There the woman “saw that the tree was good for food … and she took of its fruit and ate” (Genesis 3:6). In Genesis 6 the sons of God “saw the daughters of man, that they were good; and they took.” The children of God’s teaching chose by the eye, and not by the teaching.

Genesis 6:3-4 And the LORD said, "My spirit (ruach רוּחַ roo'-akh) shall not abide in man (adam) forever, in that he also is flesh (basar בָּשָׂר baw-sawr'); and his days shall be a hundred and twenty years." The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man (adam), and they bore to them; they are the mighty ones who were of old, the men (ish אִישׁ eesh) of the name.

God says that His spirit (ruach) will not abide in man for ever, “in that he also is flesh (basar).” The judgment is spoken over man. And the text says that “the sons of God came in to the daughters of man (adam), and they bore to them.” The verb “came in to” is bo, the same verb Scripture uses for a husband going in to his wife. The words of marriage and of bringing forth children are all here, but the taking is one that they chose for themselves, not one that God gave.

The Mighty Ones, the Men of the Name

Genesis calls the children of those marriages “the mighty ones who were of old, the men (ish) of the name.” The word for “mighty ones” is gibborim. They were men of renown, and Genesis never calls them anything other than men. Scripture does not explain how they came to be so strong, but the plainest explanation fits everything it does say. When the sons of a line that had lived for centuries near the presence of God, well fed and well taught, took wives from the world outside, their children grew strong and tall and became famous.

History shows how strongly food and the conditions of life shape the body. A worldwide study of adult height, published in 2016 by the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration in the journal eLife, compared people born in 1896 with people born in 1996. South Korean women had grown by about 20 centimetres, the largest gain for women anywhere in the world, and South Korean men by about 15 centimetres. No new kind of human being appeared in Korea in that century; the people simply ate better and lived better. This reading of the mighty ones is a persuasive one. It needs no beings other than men, and it agrees with how bodies grow in every age.

Every Inclination Only Evil

When the family of God mixed with the world, the world swallowed the family. Then God looked at the whole of humanity.

Genesis 6:5 And the LORD saw that the evil of man (adam) was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the day.

The word for “inclination” is yetzer (יֵצֶר), the shaping or forming of a thought, from the same root as the verb used for God forming Adam from the dust in Genesis 2:7. Man, whom God had formed, was now forming only evil in the thoughts of his heart, “only evil all the day,” and the sentence allows no exception.

Corruption and Violence

The account comes to its verdict a few verses later.

Genesis 6:11-13 And the earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh (basar) had corrupted its way upon the earth. And God said to Noah, "The end of all flesh (basar) has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.

The passage turns on three Hebrew words. The first is shachat שָׁחַת shaw-khat', “corrupt,” which appears three times in two verses: the earth “was corrupt,” “it was corrupt,” and “all flesh (basar) had corrupted its way.” The second is chamas (חָמָס), “violence,” which appears twice, in verse 11 and again in God’s words to Noah in verse 13. The third is the phrase kol basar, “all flesh.”

The word basar is the “flesh” of “one flesh” in Genesis 2:24. God had made the man and woman one flesh. Now “all flesh” had corrupted its way. And then the verb shachat, which has described what man did, becomes God’s verb: “behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.” The Hebrew for “destroy” here, mashchitam, is from the same root. What man had corrupted, God would destroy.

Genesis names both corruption and violence, side by side. It does not narrow the sin of that generation to one kind. Both belong to the verdict: the corruption reached into the very union God had made, and violence filled the earth that He had told them to fill with life. One Hebrew verb, the verb for “fill” (male), stands in both places: it is the word of the first blessing in Genesis 1:28, and the word of “the earth was filled with violence” in Genesis 6:11.

As in the Days of Noah

Yeshua spoke of those days when He taught His disciples on the Mount of Olives about His coming.

Matthew 24:37-39 For the parousia παρουσία par-oo-see'-ah(coming-presence) of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away — so will the parousia(coming-presence) of the Son of Man be.

He described the days of Noah by what people were doing: “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.” None of these things is evil in itself; marriage is His blessing from the first chapter of Genesis. But the people of Noah’s day went on with all of it, “and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away.” It is the same discourse in which Yeshua warned that anomia ἀνομία an-om-ee'-ah would be multiplied and the love of most would grow cold (Matthew 24:12).

The warning is the same in every age. The children of God fall when they choose their life by what the eye sees in the world and not by the teaching of God. The Torah gives this warning to Israel when it forbids marriage with the nations that would turn a son away from the LORD (Deuteronomy 7:3-4), and Paul gives the same warning to the ekklesia ἐκκλησία ek-klay-see'-ah: “Do not be bound together with unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 6:14).

And Even Then, God Waited

One more line comes from Peter.

1 Peter 3:20 who formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few — that is, eight psychai(souls) — were brought safely through water.

Peter speaks of a time “when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared.” The judgment did not fall the moment the corruption began. God waited for as long as the ark was being prepared, and Peter elsewhere calls Noah “a herald of dikaiosyne δικαιοσύνη dik-ah-yos-oo'-nay(righteousness)” (2 Peter 2:5). In the end, eight souls came through the water. But the patience was real.

The Line of These Chapters

We began with a blessing spoken over fish and birds, and then over a man and a woman: be fruitful and multiply, and fill. We saw the man formed from dust and the woman built from his side. We read “one flesh,” and heard Paul call it a great mystery about Messiah and the ekklesia. We saw one spirit grieved in Isaac and Rebekah, a wife of the covenant, made one with spirit, through whom God sought a seed of God, and the believer joined to the Lord as one spirit with Him. We followed the word yada, and ginosko γινώσκω ghin-oce'-ko, its partner in the Greek of the New Testament, from “Adam knew Eve” through Hosea and Jeremiah to Nazareth, to the warning “I never knew you,” and to the words “This is eternal zoe ζωή dzo-ay'(life), that they may know You.” And we have seen the order broken before the flood, when the children of God chose by the eye and the world swallowed the family.

Behind all of it stands a God who made marriage as the picture of His own covenant. When His people were unfaithful to Him, He did not simply abandon them. He spoke as a husband, and some of the most tender words in Scripture are His. The God whose patience waited in the days of Noah is the same God whose love speaks in the Song of Songs and in the prophet Hosea, the love of a Husband who would not let go.