The Sons of God and the Flood

Genesis 6.1-4   "When mankind began to increase and spread over the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of the gods (God) saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; so they took for themselves such women as they chose. But the LORD said, 'My life-giving spirit shall not remain in man for ever; he for his part is mortal flesh; he shall live for a hundred and twenty years'. In those days, when the sons of the gods (or God) had intercourse with the daughters of men and got children by them, the Nephilim were on earth. They were the heroes of old, men of renown."

The story has progressed beyond Adam and Eve and their sons Cain, Abel and Seth, through generations with exaggerated life spans, the oldest, Methuselah almost reaching a thousand years old. There is no natural explanation, but we are in the realm of folklore. The end of this line is Noah, who we will shortly meet in the flood narrative. We can't say that females were not being born, because wives were married and bore each generation so the daughters in the story above are simply mentioned there as the focus of the story. The sons of God were in Hebrew Bene Elim. The second word,being plural (i.e. ending in -im) is why NEB translates the term 'sons of the gods'. Although the normal Hebrew term for God is also plural (Elohim) it is the standard name for God in the singular. We know from other ancient near eastern texts, such as from Ugarit, that bene elim were divine beings in the divine court. This is evidence that an earlier strand of mythology lies behind the Bible, and especially Genesis, so that scholars read Ugaritic myths with great interest. I had a class on Ugaritic with Prof Terry Fenton in Manchester University in 1968, reading the Baal text and the story of king Keret. The bene elim appear in these polytheistic myths. The  various parts of the section do not appear to fit, but the final compiler undoubtedly had a purpose. The divine beings were randy, the women needed not to be immortal. Were the heroes /men of renown the offspring of these unions. It doesn't quite say so but the reference is otherwise inexplicable.

The passage continues with a discussion about the great flood. As I write Stephen Fry has been accused of blasphemy (and vindicated) for saying God is capricious and responsible for creating an unjust world. Given that members of his family were killed in the holocaust, it was a reasonable response. We have already seen God repenting from the creation of humanity, with the worry that they become as wise as the gods (the 'we' in the verse). At the beginning of the flood narrative, God repents from creating humanity at all because of their wickedness and decides to kill them all in a great flood. But one man is righteous and is allowed to survive, with his family. Instructed to build an 'ark' (boat) they took on board animals to repopulate the earth afterwards. This was a fresh start. At a great cost to life, human and animal. So the human race, according to this story, is descended from Noah's three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth (and of course their wives). Genealogies track their tribal descendants, Shem in the middle east (Semites), Ham in Africa and Japheth further north. Canaan was son of Ham, a non-semitic neighbour and enemy in Palestine.

Dating these stories is difficult. There were mesopotamian flood stories which may have been encountered by exiles in Babylon. There were two intertwined narratives, one bring the animals into the ark two by two, the other having seven pairs of clean animals (and perhaps linked with the levitical laws of holiness which are usually dated after the exile. There was a great concern about intermarriage after the exile (see especially Ezra and Nehemiah) so some categorisation of foreign nations would be natural. The genealogy was then the way to define relationships.

One post-flood story is enlightening. Noah planted vines, made wine and became drunk. He lay naked on his bed: whilst two sons covered him up without looking, Canaan did look at his nakedness and was cursed. This explains the enmity between Hebrews and Canaanites that we see in lawcodes like Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Canaanites were not regarded as semitic and intermarriage should not take place. We will return to intermarriage in a later post. The attitude to male nakedness is so peculiar that it is worth quoting in full:

"When Ham, father of Canaan, saw his father naked, he told his two brothers outside. So Shem and Japheth took a cloak, put it on their shoulders and walked backwards, and so covered their father's naked body; their faces were turned the other way, so they did not see their father naked. When Noah woke from his drunken sleep, he learnt what his youngest son had done to him, and said, 'Cursed be Canaan, slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers'. And he continued: 'Bless, O LORD, the tents of Shem, may Canaan be his slave. May God extend Japheth's bounds, let him dwell in the tents of Shem, may Canaan be their slave" (Genesis 9:22-27).

It seems unfair to blame young Canaan for his father's indiscretion. Canaanites shared the Hebrew language and even their alphabet in the early stages and mythology of Baal and Asherah. Within the Ham genealogy are Cush, Egypt (Mitzraim), and mighty Nimrod ancestor of Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians. Again the quote is curious and may indicate post-exilic authorship:

"Cush was the father of Nimrod, who began to show himself as a man of might on earth; and he was a mighty hunter before the LORD, as the saying goes 'Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the LORD".

Nimrod was an ancient city. The name has led to folklore about his relationship to the tower of Babel, and to Abraham but most of that is creatively derived from Genesis. Several interpret the phrase as "a mighty hunter against the LORD" as Nimrod represented the Hebrew enemy. Relationships were represented by genealogies in the Pentateuch so all the know peoples of the world are incorporated into this family tree of Noah, the Levant for Semites, the south and East for Ham and the west for Japheth. This was not an account of a Palestine herdsman, or even a priest. It required deep understanding of what we would today call globalism. Above all the world of foreigners are all related to each other, a genuine family, however mythic. The human race were the human family. The author was a geographer who had pieced together a list of nations beyond Babylon, Egypt and Greece. The list is neutral: only Canaan is the one that stands out.

The genealogy adds details of Canaan:

Canaan was the father of Sidon, who was his eldest son, and Heth [the Hittites], the Jebusites [in Jerusalem], the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Archites, the Sinites, the Arvadites, the Zemarites, and the Hamathites. Later the Canaanites spread, and then the Canaanite border ran from Sidon towards Gerar all the way to Gaza; then all the way to Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim as far as Lasha. (Genesis 10:15-19).

Many of the names we don't recognize but it is clear that Semites only occupied the hills, not the coastal plane. Scholars will disagree about whether this was the situation in the early years (pre- 1000BCE) or in post-exilic years (after 500BCE). In my view, given that the flood narrative owes a debt to Babylonian myth (as also does the creation account) the detail is post-exilic and represents the  returned Judaic community struggling with the aboriginal community.