Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of a biblical theology without ransacking our faith. Welcome back to my series about Genesis 6 and its historical interpretation. I was really kind of going to leave it at the last one, and then I realized there's still a lot of stuff that I think is really important to talk about in this topic.
We've already gone through the trends, and we'll see similar things up to today if we look at this historical interpretive narrative, especially when we look at the Reformation and all of that that leads up to today. But we didn't talk about the importance of the origin of sin or evil, which is really crucial to all of this.
So we can also ask about the rabbinic line of thought about Genesis 6 because we really didn't [00:01:00] cover that, and that's going to play into what we're going to be talking about with the origin of sin. Since we had so much to cover, I really chose to dive mostly into Christian interpretations and challenges to the Christian faith from pagans. But I did bring up that one Islamic interpretation that took the angelic view.
But we're going to turn to the rabbinic line of thought for a moment, because of this question about sin, and evil, and the origins of it, and how did the Jews of Jesus's time think about it, for instance? Now, Dr. Heiser has talked quite a bit about this, and he has said that the ancient Israelite would have seen the problem of evil and sin as the result of not just one fall, but multiple falls. So let's examine that more closely.
We will also talk about views from the Reformation. But I can't guarantee we're going to get into a massive amount of that, because we really want to focus on this [00:02:00] question of the origin of sin, and what that looks like.
And also, what's up with the angels versus the Son of God. This is generally like talking about six of one and half a dozen of the other. But yes, there can be nuance in that because people were often thinking in terms of ontology. And they did see angels as being different than gods at certain periods of time, especially in the Christian era. But, the angelic view isn't really functionally different than the Sons of God view, particularly if we aren't seeing those Sons of God from Genesis 6 as the gods of the nations.
As we've seen, some people will take the Sons of God and try to make this weird false dichotomy of Elohim, meaning "gods" all the time, as if it's this ontological [00:03:00] reality and the word gods is only an ontological term. There's no ontological reality that we can really tell from scripture, except for the clear and obvious fact that God and the lower spiritual beings aren't actually the same, just like humans and God aren't the same.
And beyond that, there's probably a hierarchy, and we can say a few things about that, but it's a little bit limited, because it doesn't lay it all out very specifically. So, yes, even though some Church Fathers took the presumption that calling them angels was preferable to calling them gods, because of the connotation, and maybe even an idea of demotion there. Like, gods might have some authority of a kind that angels don't. And fair enough. But look, not all Elohim are gods. [00:04:00] And really, the gods of the nations is a functional thing. It's more of a job description than anything. And you can see that as either God assigned them to that function, or they took that function upon themselves, or people assigned it to them.
And it doesn't really matter which of those is the real option here, or if it's a little bit of all of it. The fact is, the gods are functioning in the way of a god. And even if God assigned them, That doesn't give any legitimacy to their rule as gods because we see the Bible presenting God as the Sovereign One who brings the rains and makes the judgments and is the one worthy of worship.
So honestly, from my perspective, I don't care if we're using the term angels or sons of God. Besides, as I said, the sons of God of Genesis 6 arguably don't [00:05:00] have anything to do with ruling as gods of the nations. Maybe they're the same, maybe they're not. But either way, it doesn't actually matter for the story in Genesis 6, is what I'm saying.
Okay, so let's do a little brief dive back in time. One book I'm going to mention is called Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity, the Reception of Enochic Literature. This is by Annette Yoshiko Reed. This is her revised dissertation. So, yes, it's expensive. And this is not a book that most people are going to read or bother to go find and get. And I'm probably not going to be able to hit very much from this book today. So I might do a whole episode talking about what she says in that book because it's really interesting and again, it's pretty inaccessible to most people.
But okay, I actually want to back up just a minute here [00:06:00] and ask, how much influence on Christianity does the rabbinic interpretation have? And it depends on who you ask and what lines of texts you're going to study and who we're really talking about here. As we can see in my previous analysis, it's not really necessary to have a rabbinic influence to explain what we see in the views of Christians. Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't an influence, because surely there is this back and forth between Christians and Jews of the early centuries, and they both influenced one another. And certainly, a lot of allegorical interpretation was done in order to distance Christianity from Judaism.
For instance, read the Epistle of Barnabas, that was an early text, and which really made a sharp line of distinction between Jews and Christians, and said that it's Christians, [00:07:00] not Jews, who are the inheritors of the promises. And it even goes so far as to say that the Old Testament Mosaic Law was never meant to actually have a physical, literal meaning, but only a spiritual one.
So, yeah, we have things like that, and early Christian writings, like Justin Martyr and many others, show that there's a big push in the conversation here. And allegorical interpretation was one way in which they could distance the church from those silly legalistic Jews, while finding a way to make the Bible still applicable for behavior and life.
But I don't know as though, in my opinion, I'd say that the primary motivation for dropping the Angelic View of Genesis 6 is because of the rabbis. I mean, after all, they were trying to drop it, too, just for different reasons. So, if one side did it [00:08:00] and the other didn't, then that would be one thing, but that's not what we see happen. They actually went the same direction, mostly in parallel, in my opinion. Now, the fact is, the New Testament applies Sons of God to believers, and so to understand the continuity of Sons of God from Old Testament to New Testament, it can be a little easier to go with the Sethite view. I did just release a blog post that talks about the Sons of God from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and I'll try to remember to drop a link of that in my show notes today.
So let's talk about targums. A targum is an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible, but translation might be a bit of a loose term there. Because, really, they're translations, but they make interpretive choices, and to some degree, sometimes, [00:09:00] they make crazy interpretive choices, and they go way beyond anything that we see in the Hebrew Bible. So they're a really good source of seeing how people were interpreting things. And there are Targums in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So, they're fairly old, but the ones we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls predate the most well known Targums. So, the most famous ones we have today are later than the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Targums do tend to go with the human view as opposed to the Enochian literature. And this might be evidence of early Jewish interpretation that goes against the angelic view. It's at least proof that the views are not uniform. But that shouldn't be a surprise, because this is Jewish interpretation, and they love to have different ideas.
Now, yes, I've been saying that the earliest interpreters [00:10:00] are all angelic. And well, that depends on what we're talking about when we say earliest. I'm defining it as the obviously earlier interpretations, as in, before Jesus. If you want to extend that a bit and say that into Jesus in the first century is early, then okay. And so there are Jewish interpretations that go with the sons of God as rulers. But again, we don't see it before the first century, and it's slightly debatable even then. What's crucial here is seeing the Mesopotamian context of Genesis 6 and that's going to help us understand a lot of this as well. And that's the kind of thing that Dr. Heiser brought out.
Now, here's the thing, and why I've been so clear in saying that all the early interpretations are angelic is because, well, for one thing, I'm talking legitimately early, and for [00:11:00] another thing, I'm not focused on various Jewish interpretations and their directions. I'm focused on Christian ones, which, yes, of course, those come from Jewish interpretations, obviously. But there's trends and tendencies, and the Jewish interpretations that go with the human view are a separate stream of tradition from what we can trace in Christianity. Again, not saying they can't influence each other, because they didn't hear Egon tell them not to cross the streams, but I do think Jewish interpretations and Christian interpretations of Genesis 6 develop separately.
The varied interpretations and discussions between rabbis come from an earlier history of non-uniform Judaism. So again, we should expect to see various ideas and not a complete agreement at least once we get to the first century and beyond. I would argue [00:12:00] that with the New Testament evidence, it is the angelic view that is being affirmed there. And the human view just doesn't track with what we see with the New Testament authors. Plus the fact that even in these human views that we'll see here in a minute with Jewish interpretation, well, there's still giants. And while, yes, giants could happen in various ways, and maybe they're talking about really awesome, cool people, what we see in Christian and even early allegorical interpretation is that you don't get that allegory early on without also having some angelic influence tagging along.
And the other thing is, when you see these interpretations and they go into unique detail, or they differ from what we see in, say, the Greek translations, then what they're doing is making things up again. So, things like the Targums are shifting interpretation over to [00:13:00] some new idea, and they're trying to promote that in the Targum. We see this all the time in Jewish writing. It's not just that we lost detail in the earlier accounts and these later accounts include it. It's that the later accounts were making things up that weren't there before. So, if anything, even the Aramaic Targums are pointing to an earlier tradition that wasn't saying what they're trying to argue for.
Plus, again, these are still later than First Enoch. Some Targums may be concurrent to the other Jewish writers that I've mentioned. Like Josephus and Philo, but they are pretty hard to date, and they've been redacted, and it's at least possible that the human view has been inserted by a redactor, after the view had gained traction amongst the Jews.
At any rate, we still have the Talmud that promotes the angelic view. I'm going to read from the dictionary of [00:14:00] Old Testament, the Pentateuch, about the basic stream of Jewish interpretation. It says, quote, Semachus translation of the Old Testament into Greek rendered sons of God as sons of the powerful, and Targum Onkelos, 2nd century AD, and Targum Neofiti, 2nd to 4th century AD, both went in a similar direction. Genesis Rabbah 26. 8, from the 5th to 6th century AD, cites R. Simeon ben Yochai, who lived from 130 to 160, as insisting on the interpretation, sons of nobles, and placing a curse on anyone who promulgated the angel's theory. By the time of the medieval rabbis, this interpretation had become entrenched. Rashi, Ramban, and, Ibn Ezra all favored [00:15:00] identifying the sons of God as rulers or judges. End quote.
Okay, so a bit of a word about our most famous Targums that we like to talk about. We have Targum Onkelos. It uses the term Sons of the Rulers. And it has giants. This Targum is probably earlier than the other ones. Maybe around 50 to 150. And it links to some Dead Sea Scrolls. But we do know it was redacted in the 4th or 5th century. So, again, it's hard to tell what's original and what's not.
It says, quote, It came to be, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, that daughters were born to them. The sons of the rulers saw that the daughters of man were fair, and they took for themselves wives from whomever they chose, or wanted. Adonai said, My spirit will not continue to judge man forever. This [00:16:00] evil generation shall not exist before me forever, since they are flesh and their deeds are evil. His days shall be a hundred and twenty years. I will give them a period of 120 years for them to repent. There were giants on the earth in those days, and also later, when the sons of the rulers came to the daughters of man, and they bore children to them. These were the mightiest ones who ever existed. They were men of renown. End quote.
Okay, so let's go to Targum Neofiti. This uses Sons of the Judges and has a very human view here. For the dating, we don't really know. Maybe it's the 1st century. Maybe it's the 4th century. Maybe it's the 7th century.
Okay, so quoting from Targum Neofiti, it says, quote, And it came to pass that the sons of man began to multiply on the face of the earth, and female daughters [00:17:00] were born to them. And the sons of the judges saw that the daughters of the sons of man were beautiful in appearance, and they took wives for themselves from among whomsoever they chose. And the Lord said, None of the generations yet to arise will be judged according to the order of the judgment of the generation of the flood. Behold, the order of the judgment of the generation of the flood has been sealed before him, to be destroyed and blotted out from the midst of the world. Behold, I have put my spirit in the sons of man because they are flesh and their deeds are evil. Behold, I have given the span of one hundred and twenty years, in the hope that perhaps they might do repentance, but they have not done so. There were giants on the earth in those days, and also later, when the sons of the judges went into the daughters of the sons of man, and they bore children to them. These are the giants [00:18:00] that were there from the beginning of the world, giants of distinguished names. End quote.
Alright, now we'll go to Targum's Pseudo Jonathan. Here we have a tale about two fallen angels, we have Nephilim, we have leaders, and sons of the great. So this one kind of confuses some things here. It was probably written between the 8th and 12th centuries.
Targum's Pseudo Jonathan says, quote, And it was, when the sons of men began to multiply upon the face of the earth, and fair daughters were born to them, and the sons of the great saw the daughters of men were beautiful, and painted, and curled, walking with revelation of the flesh, and with imaginations of wickedness, that they took them, wives of all who pleased them. And the Lord said by his word, All the generations of the wicked, which [00:19:00] are to arise, shall not be purged after the order of the judgments of the generation of the deluge, which shall be destroyed and examined from the midst of the world. Have I not imparted my Holy Spirit to them, or placed my Holy Spirit in them that they may work good works? And behold their works are wicked. Behold, I will give them a prolongment of 120 years that they may work repentance and not perish. Shamchazai and uziel, who fell from heaven, where on the earth in those days, and also after the sons of the Great had gone in with the daughters of men, they beared to them. And these are they who are called men, who are of the world, men of names, end quote.
All right, so now we're going to talk about the Babylonian rabbinic tradition. Reading from Lexham Bible Dictionary, it says, quote, In the [00:20:00] Babylonian Talmudic tradition, it is the giants of Genesis 6 4, the Nephilim, who appear after the flood. For example, rabbi Johanan suggests that Og and Sihon were the sons of Ahaija, the son of Shazi, who were the chief of the angelic Watchers in first Enoch six three. They survived the flood and lived for generations until Moses' Day. Rabbi Hisda suggests that Og survived the flood by holding onto the This is further embellished in the Targumic tradition, which states that Og held onto the Ark and Noah and his family fed him through a hole. End quote.
Continuing the Lexham Bible Dictionary about Rashi, who lived from 1040 to 1105, it says, quote, These rabbinic interpretations are not supported by biblical [00:21:00] text, but may stem from Deuteronomy 3 11, where Og is described as being the last of the Rephaim, i. e., Nephilim. The medieval exegete Rashi identified the Nephilim as giants, but understood the sons of God to refer to judges and rulers. Compare Rashi's comments on Genesis. While the angelic interpretation for the sons of God waned through the medieval period, identifying the Nephilim as giants remained the norm. End quote.
Okay, so let's go to that book that I mentioned. I'm going to quote from Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity.
Reed says, quote, From the Middle Ages to early modern period, the early Enochic pseudepigrapha were largely lost to the West. To an even greater degree than in ages past, the mystery surrounding Enoch came to be [00:22:00] associated with lost books and secret scrolls, wisdom suppressed, and writings forgotten. Even as the books themselves were gone, the ancient allusions remained. End quote .
So people were talking about the Book of Enoch and secrets revealed to Enoch without necessarily having the Book of Enoch or really even knowing that it exists or that it could have been accessible.
So this is a good explanation for why this stuff with the Sons of God and Genesis 6 is kind of new to many people. It doesn't mean it was genuinely lost. But when a society turns its attention one way and not another way, well, it kind of makes sense. So here we have the sons of God and the Sethite and human view becoming paramount because they're not focused on the Enochic literature in ways that the earlier church [00:23:00] was. And we have a very big question on the origin of evil.
All right. So now scholars use the term reception history to talk about a text's use or disuse through time. So if the early church was influenced by a text that later went out of vogue, like first Enoch, then it makes sense that there's a disconnect between early and later knowledge or understanding or interpretation. In fact, we should actually expect that.
This also means that there has been not enough understanding of how the text has been influenced and used between Christians and Jews throughout time, because the Jewish reception history was even less understood before Reed came along and did her dissertation.
So, she's focused on this reception history and the narrative of the fallen [00:24:00] angels who teach humans wicked things and corrupt mankind. And that's a really crucial piece of all of this. Not just that the Sons of God were angelic, but that they taught humans wicked things and they actively corrupted mankind, which, by the way, is a perfectly viable explanation to why the Flood is judging humans and not angels. Because hey, the humans were corrupted. So, yeah, there's still the judgment on the humans, that's still the point of the flood.
I've just seen too many people suggest that there's no explanation for how the sons of God are connected to the flood and judgment of man, because they're not men. And I'm like, come on guys, do better. Just go read the book of First Enoch to get the whole story and see how it is about humans and their corruption. It's the whole point. And again, [00:25:00] this is really, really useful for the conversation about the origin of evil. And as I brought out in previous episodes, the origin of evil is not always a major concern in the statements that we've read.
Not everyone is focused on the origins of evil in the passage. But, Dr. Heiser brought out this important element as a really crucial distinction and reason that they understood the passage in the first century as they did. Dr. Heiser said that if you asked an ancient Israelite why the world was the way it was, they wouldn't just say the fall of Genesis 3, but they'd refer to three divine falls.
Now, I don't know if somebody would actually have explained it that propositionally in that nice, neat little package like that. But clearly if the Divine Sons of God are [00:26:00] instrumental in corrupting humanity, that's a core piece of the package and a core piece of the interpretation.
One thing I like to bring out is the fact that Jewish literature and the Old Testament are very cyclic. They use patterns and spirals into worse things through time. There is never a suggestion that Genesis 3 isn't part of that narrative of sin. Of course it is!
And of course it's where we see the start of it, but it doesn't explain how bad it got and why all of humanity has issues. When you're only focused on Genesis 3, that's why you have to insert things like, oh, the nature of humanity changed somehow between Adam and the rest of mankind, even though Adam sinned, so how does he not have a ability [00:27:00] to sin? That doesn't make any sense.
The text does not explain a change in humanity itself, like biologically or in nature, after Chapter 3. It just doesn't. You're reading into it if you see that. If you want to talk about a sin nature in our propensity to sin and the fact that when you're born into a world of death and sickness and other people sinning and all of these terrible things around us, then that's going to make us a little more likely to sin and all of that, then yeah, because we are influenced by our environment.
So when we're born into an environment that is wicked, we're going to be influenced by that environment, right? So if that's the kind of thing we're talking about, okay, but that's different than saying that Adam was some pure human and that he wasn't like us. I don't think the [00:28:00] Bible is saying that at all. In fact, I think the Bible is saying that Adam is just like us. He is our archetype. You can't be an archetype if you're not like us. And he was an archetype of us before the fall and after it.
All right, so going back to Reed, let's talk about Enoch being used by Jews and then mainly Christians and no longer Jews so much. She says, quote, This study argues that the Book of the Watchers influenced many different pre rabbinic Jewish groups, including, but not limited to, the authors of later Enochic Pseudepigrapha, the Qumran community, and the Jesus movement. Around the 2nd century CE, we find a shift in the use of the text. Abandoned by early rabbinic Jews, it continues to be read and copied by Christ believing Jews and other early [00:29:00] Christians.
So this is key to what we're looking at with Enoch and its use by Christians. This means it will greatly influence the interpretation of Genesis 6.
Her book is more than Christian reception, though, and it's very interesting how it shows a dynamic of Jews and Christians, or rabbis and Christians, or whatever, however you want to put it, because Christians preserved the text and Jews later found it again, and things like that.
And just a cool quote. Reed says, quote, Traditionally, research into late antique Judaism and Christianity proceeded on the assumption of their parting of the ways in the first or second century CE. When studying later periods, scholars have typically examined these religions in isolation, assuming that their separation was decisive and that their subsequent interaction was limited to mere polemics [00:30:00] and mutual misperception. Our evidence, however, tells of the continued interpretation of Jewish and Christian traditions long after the second century. This has led scholars from a variety of fields increasingly to question the regnant model of a single early and determinative separation between the two religions. Although we still await new models for understanding the complex interaction between Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, it has become clear that we lose too much by studying one tradition without reference to the other. Long after the death of Jesus, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the failure of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, the histories of Judaism and Christianity remain meaningfully intertwined. End quote.
So, her work is kind of key to the people who say that the rabbis [00:31:00] influenced Christians to go with the Sethite view. But as we've seen, the rabbis are really going with the human judge's view rather than the Sethite view.
Why did they use the text of First Enoch? Now, remember that the meaning and the use of a text is far, far more important than the propositional facts within the text.
But Reed says, quote, I will show that there is a remarkable unanimity in the way that most Jews from the period, including followers of Jesus approach the Enochic myth of angelic descent. A variety of authors draw from the Book of the Watchers' extra biblical elaborations of Genesis six, one through four, but, the motif of illicit angelic instruction is generally ignored in favor of other approaches to explaining the origins of sin and suffering. [00:32:00] End quote.
Okay, so what that is saying is you can have the influence from First Enoch, but not every piece of the influence. Rabbinic Jews abandoned the text, and Christians embraced it.
Reed says, quote, Around the second century, Rabbinic Jews appear to have abandoned the Enochic books and polemicized against the angelic interpretation of Genesis 6, 1 through 4. At the same time, The Book of the Watcher's distinctive version of the angelic descent myth was being embraced by early Christian apologists such as Justin Martyr. Within his writings, the motif of illicit angelic instruction resurfaces once again to play a pivotal role in the eitiology of human culture and its tragic distance from the divine. Justin not only reinterprets the Enochic myth of [00:33:00] angelic descent, but he locates it within a Christianized history of culture, in which demonology contributes to the construction of a Christian identity in contradistinction to both Jews and pagans. It is this redeployment of the instruction motif, I will argue, that renders the Enochic myth of Angelic Descent newly relevant for Christians living in the turbulent centuries between the Bar Kokhba revolt and the Edict of Milan, thereby helping to explain the popularity of this apocalypse among the church fathers, such as Turtulian End quote.
So in other words, what we have going on in early Christianity is a split in Jewish and Christian interpretation of Genesis six and the split is that the Jews were using it as a polemic against Christians. Christians were keeping with the ancient angelic view. [00:34:00] And Jews were saying, Huh, okay, we're gonna go the other way then. We're gonna take a human view.
Jews began taking positions CONTRA the angelic view, and Christians began using this as a description of why demons were demons, which, we can understand how this is playing into Christian identity formation, because Jesus, and Jesus followers, exorcized demons, and this was a centerpiece of messiahship.
So, the explanation of the origins of evil are here, but also we have demons and bad spirits and things around them and signs for the Messiah. Was the Jewish move away from this due to the Christians? Well, it's hard to see how that didn't play a part, right?
But then, of course, First Enoch began to be rejected in the church [00:35:00] for different reasons than the rabbis were rejecting it. There were different circumstances, and the Roman Empire became a factor much more than Jewish opposition. Christian identity formation didn't really need to rely on dismantling paganism at this point, so much in the ways that it used to, but there's the fall of Rome, and we need a narrative explaining how that's not the fault of Christianity, but rather paganism. And so we get to Augustine and the City of God, like we talked about last time.
But, before we go beyond that, we still need to go back to 1 Enoch and compare 1 Enoch to the Book of Jubilees. Remember that Enoch presents the sons of God, or the angels, as coming down to teach illicit arts, and the Book of Jubilees, changes that. [00:36:00] Instead, the angels were coming down to help man repent, and they were themselves tempted by man, rather than corrupting man themselves. And if you've been paying attention, we saw that in some of the Christian views that I've brought out.
Reed says, quote, Even before Jubilees retells Genesis 6, 1 through 4, the reader, or hearer, knows that the Watchers were sent to Earth by God to teach righteousness, Jubilees 4. 15, and only later the angels succumbed to lust for human women, 4. 22. The ramifications are striking. In the Book of the Watchers, human sin and suffering resulted from the descents of Watchers. Their teachings corrupted humankind. First Enoch, 7 1, 8, 1 3, and 9 6. And their sexual dalliances resulted in the Giants [00:37:00] antediluvian rampage. 7, 2 through 5, and 9, 9, and in the Earth's infestation by evil spirits, 15, 8 through 16, 1, 19, 1 through 2. Jubilees, however, progressively absolves the Watchers from blame. By depicting their intentions as good and their descent as divinely mandated, Jubilees characterizes these angels not as evil, so much as weak, and thus disobedient. As Vanderkam notes, Jubilees protects the reputation of Heaven by distancing it from evil. As a result, however, the wicked angels seem more like wayward men. End quote.
So this is a helpful step to the human view in a way, and it makes marriage and intermarriage a really big [00:38:00] deal.
Reed goes on to say, quote, The motivations for this choice are exposed by the homiletical interpretation that concludes the account, Jubilees 5, 13 through 18. This passage places the imprisonment of the Watchers and the watery punishment of earthly creatures on the same level as two pieces of evidence that prove the same principle. There is no injustice, Jubilees 5, 13 says. God judges the great and the small alike, and he shows no favoritism. Jubilees 5, 15 through 16. Even to his own angels. Interestingly, the text then turns to stress the special situation of Israel. Regarding the Israelites, it has been written and ordained, If they turn to Him in the right way, He will forgive all their wickedness and will pardon their sins. It has been written and ordained that he will have mercy on all who turn from [00:39:00] all their errors once each year, on Yom Kippur, Jubilees 5, 17 and 18. From a rhetorical standpoint, the example of the fallen angels underlies the need for Jews to turn from their wicked ways because they alone, of all creatures, whether on earth or in heaven, have the option of repentance. As in later rabbinic traditions about Israel and the angels, the elevation of the former corresponds to a diminishment in the status of the latter. Not only are angels fallible, but they, unlike the Jews, have no hope of divine reprise. The typological parallel between angels and humans also serves another aim, namely, to support Jubilee's extended polemic against intermarriage. As Betsy Halpin Amaru has demonstrated, The Watchers here function as the negative exemplars [00:40:00] of those who marry whomsoever they chose. Jubilees 5 1, and 7 21, with no thought to the maintenance of genealogical purity. Accordingly, the author betrays some anxiety about the lineage of humans from that time. He describes the sexual mingling of angels and women only after assuring us that Noah's line is free from such corruption. First Enoch 106 and 107, and marked only by proper unions, which means at this stage in history, marriage between cousins, Jubilees 4, 27 through 28, and 33. Subsequent to the description of the watcher's sexual exploits, however, the genealogical lines become muddled and the orderly patterns of the earlier birth notices become disrupted, thereby evoking a chaotic situation akin to the mingling after Azazel's descent [00:41:00] in the animal apocalypse. First Enoch 86 2. What lies implicit in the pattern of birth notices becomes explicit in the account of Noah's testament to his sons and grandsons in Jubilees 7 20 to 39 23. Noah cites the example of the Watchers to exhort his progeny to avoid the three sins that caused the flood, fornication, impurity, and sin. And Injustice, Jubilees 720. He explains that it was due to fornication that the Watchers had illicit intercourse, apart from the mandate of their authority with women. When they married whomever they chose, they committed the first acts of impurity. Jubilees 721. This impurity caused blood to be spilled on the earth. 722 to 23, and cross reference 1 Enoch 7, 3 5. Which, in turn, caused the minds of [00:42:00] humankind to be filled with nothing but the thoughts of injustice. Jubilees 7, 24. Cross reference Genesis 6, 5. The point is clear. At the root of the evils that led to the Flood lies the impurity caused by the improper choice of marriage partners. The typological interpretation of angelic sin thus echoes the implicit critique of impure priests in 1 Enoch 12 to 16. Jubilees, however, uses this typology to address the marriage practices not only of priests, but of all Israel, and its critique is anything but implicit, end quote.
Okay, that was a lot of reading. I get that's a long quote. There is a transcript that you can go and read it if that's helpful to you. But you see, there's a distinction between First Enoch and Jubilees. They're very alike, but the differences [00:43:00] are going to matter.
Even though there's a change in the Watcher's original intentionality of teaching mankind bad things, they're still seen as a bad influence with the demons and the spirits of the Nephilim in Jubilees. They were leading Noah's sons astray, and Noah pleads for judgment. God is about to bind them all up, but he gets an objection from Mastema, the leader of the spirits.
And in Jubilees 10 8, Mastema says, Lord Creator, leave some of them before me. Let them come to me and do everything that I tell them, because if none of them is left for me, I shall not be able to exercise the authority of my will among humankind. For they are meant for destroying and misleading before my punishment because the evil of humankind is great. End quote.
So, spiritual beings are meant to lead mankind astray, but only [00:44:00] because mankind are already evil. Okay, so God compromises, and he leaves one tenth of them unbound, so demons are a reason for mankind's evil and being led astray, even after the Flood.
This is from the Book of Jubilees. So, you see, Dr. Heiser isn't wrong in saying that the answer to wickedness is so much more than Genesis 3. And the reason I think he says the ancient Israelite, which would be before the Jew of the 1st century, would have the same narrative is because you can see the same story in 1st Enoch and in Mesopotamia. And we know that the Jews were in Mesopotamia.
So I think that's why we're gonna see that the earliest interpretation we have of Genesis 6 is going to involve the narrative of angels teaching. That's just what they had in their head, even if they didn't write it really explicitly in [00:45:00] Genesis as we see in something like 1 Enoch.
There's a distinction. In Enoch, the Watchers are blamed for human misery caused by demons. And in Jubilees, the Watchers aren't responsible after Noah. But there's definitely a human element, and Mastema wants the demons at his disposal as a kind of judgment against mankind who's already evil.
And of course we get this in the Flood. The Flood occurs because of human evil, and after the Flood, God says, Well, yeah, humans are still wicked. That didn't actually change.
Another quote from Reed. She says, The author of Jubilees recasts angelic descent so as to downplay the Watcher's role in the corruption of humankind, to reassert human responsibility, and to demote the fallen angels from supernatural corrupters to fallible creatures, whose sins and [00:46:00] punishments are comparable to that of humans. Like the Animal Apocalypse, Jubilees also projects contemporary anxieties about intermarriage back into primordial times, citing the mingling of Watchers and women as proof of the dangers of exogamy. Jubilees' apparent motivation for reconceptualizing angelic descent is also consistent with the second century Enochic writings, namely, the assertion of human responsibility. Like the references to the fallen angels in the Book of Dreams and Epistle of Enoch, its reworked version of the angelic descent myth reads like a narrative exploration of the dictum that sin was not sent upon the earth, but man created it by themselves. Not only does Jubilees undermine the Book of Watchers' angelic eitiology of sin and suffering, but it uses strands from the Enochic myth of angelic descent to weave an [00:47:00] alternative answer to the problem of evil. Far from positing that the effects of angelic transgression still ripple to this day, Jubilees explains present day sin and suffering with appeal to the Satan Mastema and his demons who torment mankind in accordance with the will of a just God in full control of his orderly cosmos. End quote.
Okay, again, I get that that's a long quote, and it's a scholarly quote, and it might be hard for you to kind of follow along with what she's saying there. Plus, it's hard to understand without the context of what she's saying in general. Because you have the Book of Enoch, and it has different sections. And the earlier section is earlier, and the later section is later. And you can see a change within the Book of Enoch itself, with kind of the view of angels and what they're capable of, and what they're actually doing.
So, that's going to be for another [00:48:00] episode. I will actually go into and unpack some of that so you can see it for yourself, because that's really helpful in understanding the narrative of what people used to believe, to what they kind of believed later. And you have that really easily with First Enoch versus Jubilees. Again, similarities, but also differences that are going to matter for the interpretive options you're given.
And please, if this is all a bit complex and confusing a little bit too much for you, go ahead and reach out to me with questions. I'd love to actually unpack this a little bit further if I'm not really clear, because I'm covering a really wide thing here, and if it's not clear to you, I would like it to be clear.
So, regarding the origin of evil in Second Temple Judaism, now this is the time around Christ, right? What we shouldn't do, [00:49:00] just like I said, about how we should expect different explanations and narratives in Jewish literature and interpretation, because that's just what they did. What we shouldn't do, is presume that there's only one answer to the question of sin, and evil, and wickedness, and that everyone believed that one answer.
So I think Dr. Heiser's explanation of the ancient Israelite believing this as the origin of evil and the proliferation of evil maybe is a better way to say that, that can be a slightly different thing than what we see when we get to the second temple. Because by then there's a multitude of ideas that they're dealing with.
In her book, Reed lays out a series of different views as, quote, prevalent explanations for human sin and suffering in Second Temple Judaism, end quote..
So the first [00:50:00] explanation is the corruption of humankind by the fallen angels. That's what we see in the Book of the Watchers. That's what we see in Mesopotamian context as well. So that would be during the time of the exile that people would be thinking these things.
Second option is the Two Spirits Doctrine, which attributes the activity of evil to the plan of an all powerful God. We see this a lot in the Dead Sea Scrolls literature. You see it in passages like 2 Samuel 19, 9, and Sirach 33, 14 15.
Third option for the question of sin and evil is the equation of evil with primordial chaos. That's what we see in the book of Daniel.
Fourth option, the disobedience of Adam and Eve, interpreted as the first sin and as the cause for the human propensity to stray from righteousness. You can look at 4th [00:51:00] Ezra 3, 14 through 22, Romans 5 12, 1 Corinthians 1521 through 22, and cross-reference second to Baruch.
Fifth idea is the idea of the wicked inclination of the human heart. And later on you have this as a rabbinic concept, the evil inclination. You can see this in 4th Ezra 3, 21 through 22, and 25 and 26, and 430.
Okay, so those are the different ideas that people would be tossing around during the Second Temple Period. And again, the oldest one we have is going to be the one that Dr. Heiser is talking about, with the Three Falls, and the idea that there's a proliferation and kind of a spiraling of evil. And that helps explain something as extreme as the flood. An important point, [00:52:00] the Book of the Watchers in First Enoch is hardly the only, or even necessarily most common explanation for the origin of sin and evil during Jesus's day.
Though even when we have the distinctions and differences in a book like Jubilees, there's still the influence of demonic elements. Just like how in mainstream American Christianity, we certainly see Satan or the Serpent in Genesis 3 as still being involved and not just humans. That doesn't mean that humans aren't to blame still. In the later Enochian literature, like the last part of 1st Enoch, for instance, the sexual liaisons are mentioned, but not the teachings of the Watchers.
And so the moral of the story of all of that is don't try to paint history with too broad of a brush.
There's so much more we can talk about with the origin of evil and these different ideas that I'm sure we'll get to another [00:53:00] time. But what you can see is that it's a really big deal with sin and its origins and this story. And there's so many points that kind of make sense for Augustine to have gone the interpretive direction that he did, that it's hard to cover them all. So, that's why I wanted to kind of cover this one here.
At first blush, it's also interesting that he found it possible that there were sons of God who were good and virtuous, and how could it be that humans are just sinful from birth, right? But, remember what he said about the Spirit of God. It's the Spirit of God that is allowing men to be sons of God, and thus, avoid all of that sinful nonsense.
Alright, I don't want to leave this episode without talking about some of the Reformers, but when you're reading about the Reformers and their views and the things that they've said, you can remember how influenced they were by Augustine and his doctrine of [00:54:00] original sin, which I really haven't laid out in any place, which I really haven't talked about directly. But it's pretty common to understand what he meant about original sin and all of this kind of idea of human depravity and things like that that we get.
But we have some interesting quotes from the time of the Reformation. Let's talk about Martin Luther. He talks about a first and a second table and what he means by that is a division of the law. Because, of course, Martin Luther was all about thinking about law and justice and things like that. It's like, you know, Moses comes down from the mountain and he has the Ten Commandments on two tablets. The first tablet is going to have the first three commandments, and Jesus summarizes that with the command to love God. The second table, or tablet, has commandments four through ten, which is about human's relationship To [00:55:00] humans, and Jesus summarizes that with the command to love one's neighbor.
So what Martin Luther said about Genesis 6, 1 through 2 is, quote, sins against the second table were now added to those against the first. The original world had wisdom, godliness, worship, and religion, superb in appearance, but adulterated and false. Therefore, since wickedness contrary to the first table was a boil, there followed the depravity of which Moses is going to speak in this chapter. Namely that men first polluted themselves with their lusts and then filled the world with tyranny, bloodshed, and injustice . Accordingly, when the ungodly world has scorned both tables in this way, God, who is a consuming fire and a jealous, deuteronomy 4 24, comes to inflict judgment. He punishes [00:56:00] ungodliness in such a way that everything turns to ruin, and neither king nor subject remains. Therefore, we may assume that the closer the world was to Adam's fall, the better it was, but it has deteriorated from day to day until our times in which live the dregs, and as it were, the ultimate dung of the human race. End quote.
An interesting quote from Johannes Brenz, who was a prominent Lutheran theologian who lived from 1499 to 1570. He helped develop the Lutheran conception of the real presence in communion. He's talking about Matthew 24 and asking, is eating and drinking really sinful? Well, people didn't have wine and meat before the flood and they still sinned. So he's got kind of a practical view here.
Johannes Brenz says, quote, Compare what Scripture says here with what [00:57:00] Christ relates later on in Matthew 24, 38 and Luke 17, 27. For in the days before the flood, says Christ, people were eating and drinking up to the day Noah entered the ark. What then? Is it a sin to eat and drink? And at that time, before the flood, how could they have had raucous dinner parties when wine was not yet in use, nor eating flesh or fish? My reply is that eating and drinking are not only not sinful in themselves, but they are even ordained by God for sustaining the life of the body. However, to eat and drink so that you become a glutton, pursuing idleness, neglecting your responsibilities, and holding God's word in contempt, well this is nothing but impiety. And even if wine was not in use prior to the flood, nor flesh, or fish, still, the fruits people enjoyed were extremely tasty and sweet, and the water was delightful to drink, [00:58:00] because obviously it was not yet tainted from the flood. And although the earth had been cursed on account of sin, people were not yet forced to exert so much labor in cultivating the land as they had to do after the flood. So, people were conducting themselves then in idleness and were preoccupied with conviviality. From these arose their contempt of God's word and neglect of their calling. Observe, therefore, how complacent feasting leads in the regions to destruction at the hands of foreigners, as in Isaiah 5 and Daniel 5. End quote.
Now, we do have the human ruler's view in the Reformation. A quote from Wolfgang Musculus, who lived from 1497 to 1563. He was of the Reformed tradition, initially a Benedictine monk, and one of the second generations of the Reformed faith.
He says, quote, [00:59:00] Here Moses documents a specimen, as it were, of that corruption which began to increase as mortals multiplied on the earth. But these beings are variously explained. Some read it of fallen angels. That is, evil spirits that took visible forms and had relations with women, which the ancients called Incubi and Succubi. They think they are called either Angels of God or Sons of God here on account of their spiritual nature. But their opinion fully deserves to be rejected in this place. Others, including some recent writers, identify them as Seth's offspring, whom they wish to have called Sons of God because they were from the nation of the godly. Others, whose opinion seems more likely to me, explain it neither of Seth's offspring, nor of the nation of Cain in particular, but more generally of the sons of great and powerful leaders, who began to abuse the power of their elders, to the point that their lusts made [01:00:00] them arrogant. Thus, having violated every law of purity and honor, they violently took from among the daughters of common, everyday folk, and each would choose women for himself, whether married or virgin, relatives or strangers, all for no other reason than to abuse them to satisfy their lust. End quote.
Now we'll read a quote from somebody who shows a very big influence from Augustinian ideas. This is from Dirk Phillips, who lived from 1504 to 1568. He was an Anabaptist, talked about the seven ordinances, and very strict adherence to church discipline.
He says, quote, The ordinance is the divine uniting of two persons who are born pure and holy out of God the Father, through faith in Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. That is then a true Christian marriage, which may stand before the Lord in his congregation. [01:01:00] For thus it was instituted in the beginning by God himself in Paradise, but that after time this good, divine ordinance has come into great misuse. For the children of God looked upon the daughters of humanity, that they were beautiful and fair, and took as wives those whom they wanted, and did not observe the first ordinance God made with Adam and Eve in Paradise, but looked much more on beauty of the daughters, for they were all spoiled and becoming flesh. Therefore, they followed the desires of their evil flesh. Now, when God saw that, he said, My spirit will not always be judge among people, for they are fleshly. From this it is clear what an abomination it is before the Lord, to break his ordinance and to act against it. End quote.
Okay, a couple of more quotes. We have one from Huldrick Zwingli, who lived from 1484 to 1580. He was [01:02:00] Swiss, very important to the Reformation. He rejected the sacraments as a means of grace, said they were symbolic. And he had a milder view of original sin.
And Zwingli says, quote, Moses does not say merely that they had taken wives for themselves, but he magnifies the guilt of those who seized wives and daughters sheerly from lust. Indeed he explains why such shameful deeds inundated the earth so that even pious people clung to carnal affections for this is the power of the flesh. This its character, that even the pious and the sons of God were thus knocked off course. They were guided more by the affections of the flesh than by the fear of God.
Okay, so two more quotes, one from Peter Martyr Vermigli, who lived from 1499 to 1562. He was reformed, he was [01:03:00] Italian. He was a former Augustinian monk and a Catholic priest, and he seemed to have arrived at Protestant values through reading Augustine himself. He had a very strong doctrine of predestination and an obvious Sethite view.
He says, quote, There are some, with whom all usually agree, who think sons of God here rather signifies men from the family of Seth. They are spoken of in this way because they had privately given up divine worship and pure religion, and they are described here as even having fallen into disgrace by this time. These sorts of men are called Sons of God in a special sense, because as many as received that name would have the power to be made God's sons. And after a fashion, they would be one sort of angel. Namely, God's messengers, for it belonged to them, not only to offer sacrifices, but also to preach and to teach people. So [01:04:00] now according to this explanation, you see the world of human beings divided into two congregations. One descended through Cain and earthly people, carnal impious, and wholly estranged from God. The other derived from Seth, in which piety and divine worship flourished. End quote.
Finally, let's not leave out John Calvin. A quote from the Dictionary of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, says, quote, Calvin represented well the reactionary revulsion when he commented on the passage, that ancient figment concerning the intercourse of angels with women is abundantly refuted by its own absurdity. And it is surprising that learned man should formally have been fascinated by ravings so gross and prodigious, end quote.
He also says, quote, At that time, it was as if the world [01:05:00] was divided into two parts, because the household of Seth cherished the pure and lawful worship of God that the rest had abandoned. To be sure the entire human race had been made for the purpose of calling upon God, so that pure religion should have reigned everywhere. However, because the greater part of them had prostituted themselves either to contempt of God or to depraved superstitions, it was fitting that the small portion that God had adopted to himself for special privilege should remain separated from the others. It was based ingratitude, therefore, that Seth's offspring mingled themselves with the Cainites and other godless people because they wontonly deprived themselves of the inestimable grace of God. End quote.
All right. So there you have it. That was a lot in this episode. And again, if you have questions, if you [01:06:00] have things you'd like me to kind of address again or from a different angle or kind of expound a little bit, feel free to contact me and see what I can do there. I will be talking more about Enoch and the origin of evil and sin and how that is seen, but you can see that we have a progression through time of ideas and ideas that build upon ideas, right? And when we're talking about the original context of Genesis 6, what we want to get at is that earliest context. And I think that's what we're seeing when we look at 1 Enoch, when we look at the Mesopotamian context of that as well.
And again, it's not that other streams of interpretation don't continue to hold onto some of those elements, but there's a distinctive difference. And that difference is really crucial to how we can see the nuance of interpretation and how it shifts through time.
[01:07:00] So hopefully that was really helpful to you. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I love these deep dives of historical interpretation and in the future, I'll be excited to do some more about that, but we'll be still diving into early on in Genesis as well as things about the flood, especially leading up to the flood and the context of that, and First Enoch, and all of that kind of thing. So I hope you look forward to that. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you guys for sharing the episodes, for rating my podcast, for giving me feedback, for all of that.
For those of you who are interested, I do now have a store open. You can go to my website at GenesisMarksTheSpot. com. Find the things I have on sale. I will be adding to that later as well. So, give it a look if you want. Go to my website and sign up for my newsletter. Which I always get out very haphazardly. But, I do what I can. Thank you guys for [01:08:00] listening. And I wish you a blessed week and we will see you later.
