Nephilim, The Flood, and Covenant
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we’re picking up our conversation from last week about the myth of the Nephilim. We didn’t actually talk about this last week, but it was the next logical step in what we were talking about.
I’m told that there’s a very pernicious theological rumor, shall we say, about the Nephilim and the sons of God in Genesis 4. Rachel, do you want to give us a rundown on what people are saying out there?
Rachel: Sure. In Genesis 6 we come across the word Nephilim in Hebrew, which does appear in other places in the Bible. From that appearance of this other people, there have been those that have said that this was actually angels coming down and taking human women and propagating a new species or race that is superior, but also potentially demonic because these are fallen angels.
Emily: They’re a corrupting influence.
Rachel: Right. So apparently this was the way that angels corrupted themselves. The fall of angels was choosing to come down to take human women and somehow be able to propagate a species, even though the Bible tells us that in heaven we will be like the angels and not have children.
Something happened to create this special species that is described later in the book of Numbers as “giants.” Here they’re called the mighty men, which is a term that the Bible uses frequently for those that do great and valorous deeds, both good and bad. This is the term used for Nimrod. He wanted to be a mighty man before the Lord, or he was, and that was not good for him. So they take this one word, but if you actually read Genesis 6 you do not get that at all.
When I first heard this and read the text I went, “Okay, so there’s a word there. Why does that make demon-babies or angel-babies?” They get these ideas by reading in the New Testament in two places in 2 Peter and in Jude, where the writers reference the fall of angels. That’s basically the only two places in the Bible really where we hear that, and even then we’re not given the details. Therefore, they grab from things outside of the text and have created this.
Probably the main source of the myth, as you call it, or the alternative explanation, is from the fact that in the book of Jude he actually references a couple of sources outside of the Bible and what we would consider the canon of scripture.
One of them is known as 1 Enoch, and we find bits of it in the Dead Sea scrolls and such, so it was before the time of Christ and was around during Jude’s time. He paraphrases it in his letter, not when talking about the angels but at a different point, and therefore people go and read 1 Enoch and find that story there. That’s where it seems to have originated. It says that some angels went down and took wives, and other angels gave away secret knowledge, and all of these different kinds of things produced the fall of the angels to be demons.
They’re taking kind of a general association of 1 Enoch and the angels being talked about in Jude to say, “Ah, we know who the Nephilim are! That must be what they are,” but again there’s nothing in Jude that actually says that is what is happening. Enoch speaks of a number of different ways that the angels fell, and no one thinks that the book of 1 Enoch is scripture. So it’s clear that Jude is using bits of those things, but typically it’s to make his point against false teachers, not to encourage us to read those texts.
What we do want to see though in the text is at the beginning of chapter 6 we’ve had the line of Cain and we’ve had the line of Seth. Both of those have been set up for us as two distinct lines. Then we come to chapter 6 and the first verse tells us there are two groups. There are the daughters of men or the daughters of Adam, mankind, and there are the sons of God.
Suddenly the two groups are no longer distinct but rather the sons of God look at the daughters of men and see that they are good or beautiful and are enticed to marry them. It’s from their unions that we hear of these Nephilim, which literally means “fallen ones.” The same word is used for miscarriage or cast out or cast down. We don’t exactly know why that’s the term used for them.
Emily: Right, because it’s never been thought that the sons of God in this context were somehow unfallen. They’re the children of Seth that’s the line that’s carrying the promise, but they’re not exempt from the theological truth of the fall in Adam.
Rachel: Right, unless you take the previously-discussed myth that says the sons of God are actually angels. Again, we have one scripture reference that can support that, which is that in Job at the beginning it speaks of the sons of God coming to his presence, and most believe that that’s referring to angels. But Adam is also called the son of God.
Emily: Even in this genealogy in Genesis.
Rachel: Right. He is said to be in the likeness of God.
It’s very clear from the text that God’s concern is what men are doing, not what angels are doing, which we’ll see in Genesis 6:5. It’s not, “Oh, there’s Nephilim” and then in the next verse God is suddenly talking about men. Those things we should put together and not keep them separated. The point is he says he’s not going to abide with men forever or strive with men forever. He’s seen the wickedness of men. He’s seen that they want to live forever and have a forever name, but he’s going to shorten their life. He’s going to shorten their days.
That again speaks of men who are in the covenant relationship. They are those who should be obeying the Lord, and instead he looks and sees they are becoming just like the rest. So instead of this union we might say pulling the daughters of men up to the covenant relationship, instead they pull the men down.
While in this very humanistic union they produce mighty men, great men, men with names that seem like they’ll go forever, but instead it actually produces the destruction of all of them. We’re supposed to see that contrast of men again trying to do it their own way and doing what looks good to them, and instead we see the mightiest of the mighty are going to be thrown down.
Emily: This is the beginning of a long theme through scripture of the men of the covenant being distracted and enticed and intermarrying with unbelieving women, which God never speaks well of afterward.
Rachel: No. From Adam on, a man’s failure in his covenant with his wife seems to directly correlate to his failure with his covenant with his God. We’re covenant-keepers across the board or covenant-breakers across the board.
Emily: And in this case always covenant-breakers.
Rachel: Yes. To be a covenant-keeper, God first has to be our covenant God and keep us. So I suppose we could say we see God’s faithfulness, not just to keep us in covenant with himself but with others as well, to be able to hold our commitments.
As we are saying here that the Nephilim are actually human sons, human offspring of Seth’s line and Cain’s line, it’s important to understand then that they were not on the boat with Noah, and they did not therefore have magical powers from demons or angels or any such thing, so we have to understand that they all died in the flood. That is the point of the worldwide flood. They were amongst the wickedness.
When we see them show up again in the book of Numbers where the spies go to look at the land and they come back to say, “There are Nephilim there! They are huge and we can’t possibly take them on!” they’re not the same group that has suddenly reappeared to challenge the sons of God again. This is not a single genetic alternative race that exists in the world. They died in the flood because they were wicked, but they did not alone cause the flood because of being demons, and they do not get to continue to be a source of our blame-shifting. “Oh, the Nephilim made me do it. Oh, the Nephilim are working in the world. There’s a conspiracy!”
We need to be very clear that the Lord does not allow such mixing, and he punishes humans for their sin as they are in covenant in him. That’s not the same way that he interacts with angels or demons.
Emily: The punishment of God on the earth is specifically connected to God’s curse on the earth from Adam’s sin. It would not make covenantal sense for someone else to be responsible for that destruction. That falls squarely on the shoulders of mankind.
Greg: There is one other thing that I mentioned before we began. This introduction of a second race – and the word ‘race’ contains it all – this would be another sentient series of genetically-developed beings who are still on the planet, and who are they today? Are they amongst us?
I actually saw something on my YouTube feed where it was exactly that. “Where are they? Are they who you think they are? Maybe somebody you know is one.” I didn’t click on it because I don’t need that kind of nonsense, but you can see where this goes really easily.
Rachel: It honestly reminds me of the show Battlestar Galactica, where there’s that alternative race, and you keep finding out all your favorite characters are actually a part of it and they’re all about to destroy everybody else somehow.
Greg: Yes. Battlestar Galactica had its roots in Mormonism, and Mormonism originally was extremely racist, so…
Emily: The dots are all connecting.
Greg: When we don’t want to take responsibility for our sins as human beings, we’ve got to put it on something physical or metaphysical, something outside of us that’s making us do bad things. “The devil made me do it” was Eve’s original plea, and people are still there. They’re still looking for some selective depravity.
“There are particular groups that are evil, that are the source of all problems,” whether it be the Jews or the blacks or the whites or women or men. You go down the list of who, in Marxian terms, it’s popular to blame right now.
If you can put a theological twist on it and say, “Yes, because they’re demonic,” then I’m automatically good, no matter what a lousy human being I am. Compared to them I’m pretty good, and I can stand on the good guys’ side and claim that, and it doesn’t require true repentance of sin or faith in Christ, just some glib acknowledgement of God and family and country and such. Then all those people are evil and we should do something about them, like genocide. So this is a relevant conversation.
Something related to this very much, in terms of a proper interpretation, is what was really going on here. Here are the children of Cain, and we’ve seen that they rushed very quickly into dominion and advancement of technology and all of that, but pagan culture eventually burns itself out because as it begins to question everything – the reality of God, social bonds, honesty, truth, reality itself – eventually it gets to the point where as a culture it stagnates or even begins to fall apart, which is what should happen, and the godly should let it, honestly. We don’t need to do any rescue jobs.
But what happens if at that moment you come in as a godly people and intermarry with such a group? Here they are true apostates, but you come in and you give them godly education, godly science, a believe in the real external universe that works by cause and effect, you give them habits of self-discipline and all of the outward training, but no faith because you’ve compromised your own already. What happens then?
Emily: It’s not that you can give people faith anyway, right?
Greg: But you don’t make an effort to evangelize, and you don’t stay away from people who haven’t confessed Christ. You embrace them.
Emily: You embrace their unbelief specifically.
Greg: Yes. Almost 100 years ago there were mighty men who rose up in this world. Their names were things like Lenin and Stalin and Hitler, and later Castro and Mussolini. Most of these men came out of a Christian background. Some of them were seminary students or they’d been church acolytes or choir members. They’d had education in the best Christian western universities.
They had the discipline and the training, but they had none of the faith. In fact, they hated Christianity, and what we got were some really scary people – people who made the world tremble – because they had the outward advantages of Christianity and none of the faith.
To go back quite a bit earlier, we can think of the expansion of Islam during the early Middle Ages. We’re often asked, “Isn’t Islam a creative kind of culture because of this invention and that invention?” Rachel, you want to take off from there? I see you shaking your head.
Rachel: Sure. What we see if we actually go back and look into about the first 300 years of the Islamic empires is that all of the great inventions that we love to credit them for were actually created by the people they subjugated, who were themselves Jews or Christians. Their advances in creating the first hospital was by a Christian. Their use of sea power was because they forced people from Egypt to run their ships, and once those people were gone the ships just sat in the water.
What we see by about 1000 AD is that the Muslims suddenly realized that they had lost their distinctiveness and they wanted to be more Muslim again, so what they did was turn around and say, “Anything that’s not Muslim and not Quaran we want to basically stamp out.” They did that and they’ve never recovered culturally, and most historians can’t figure out why, that when we started advancing in the West they didn’t. They didn’t try to join our advancements until the 1800s, and then they were just kind of smashing it on the top.
Every single attempt they made pretty much failed because the people had no understanding of what all this stuff was that they were being given and they had no value for it. So their culture as a whole got a few of the outward parts of the West in the 1800-1900s, but it didn’t help them, and instead we got the groundwork for modern terrorism that hates the West.
Greg: When I was a kid, Islam was a joke. They were people who wore towels on their heads and rode camels. That’s all we knew about them, because they were no threat. But about that same time oil was being discovered, and we paid a lot for the oil. And these wealthy shahs and sultans and such had nothing better to do with their money than to send their kids out for an education, so they sent them to America and they sent them to wherever they could go. Since they were not necessarily intellectually talented in the beginning, literally any junior college would accept them.
My junior college, which was a nice college but was not prestigious by any means, had a number of Muslim students, who the professors generally didn’t like by-and-large, but their fathers were paying for a Western education, and of course in engineering and in the hard sciences. So we basically funded the rise of a generation that can work computers in Islamic territories, because of oil.
Now God had all that planned, but it’s the kind of thing that normally we call a cultural accident. It was certainly not part of their faith. Their culture was not creative. Once again, even if an apostate culture helps out a pagan culture, dangerous things can happen there. Free trade is one thing. Being smart is something else again.
Emily: This has warnings for us in the rise of Christ-less conservatism as well, because we’re looking at the benefits of a disciplined life and even now there are things coming. You can just feel it.
Rachel: There are those even on the non-Christian side that will pick up elements of Christianity and say, “Oh, I see its usefulness. I will now implement this part of it, but I don’t want the rest.” I think sometimes because we’re looking for allies, we’re too quickly satisfied with that. We say, “Well, at least they have my same moral code,” or any of those types of things that don’t really hold up in the long term.
Emily: It’s important to draw distinctions of what – and I hesitate to use the word fear, because that’s not really what I mean – but it’s not like you can’t be friends with these people. It’s that the gospel is what’s going to change hearts, and hearts are what need to be changed.
We can think of Jonah going to Nineveh. He had a very simple message and it wasn’t, “Hmm, you’ve got good technology here, but let me show you how to use it.” That was not it. It was not, “Restore the nuclear family.” That was not it, either.
Greg: Or “Discover your Noahic roots,” or “Let us prove that the flood actually happened and that there’s an ark up there in the mountain someplace.” These are the things that we waste our time on sometimes that are not the gospel. They may have their place, but they’re not the gospel.
That brings us to the flood. Do you realize there are still Christians who don’t think the flood was worldwide?
Rachel: I think there’s quite a few.
Emily: I’ve heard that sometimes. Just like I forget that there are Christians who don’t take the normal 6-day view of creation. It’s not that they’re not Christians. They’re just wrong. Everybody knows where we stand on this podcast, I think.
Greg: I hope so. So this is Genesis 7:10 –
And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
That’s the time of the water-fall. That’s not how long the flood lasted. The flood lasted nearly a year. Skipping on a bit –
And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life.
There had to be a reason for that. If they could all just flee to the mountains or into the next valley it wouldn’t be necessary.
And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in. And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.
Now, there is such a thing as viewing a scene locally and talking about all you can see is from where you are standing. However, if you’re standing in Mesopotamia and all the high hills are covered, that water’s going a long, long, long way beyond those hills, because otherwise it won’t cover them. It will go down the other side and they won’t be covered. It’s not that the little hills were covered but the mountains were bare. No, everything was under water, and if that’s so then we’re dealing with something that is universal.
Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
“It was just the high hills.”
“No, it was the mountains, too.”
And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark. And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.
Emily: That’s a level of specificity that precludes hyperbole, I think.
Greg: I think so. Peter says, “…the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.” It was a judgement upon the world.
Now, things that can contribute to our understanding of this are little things like population growth, simple exponential population growth. Given 2 people and 656 years, you start getting millions of people. We’re told again and again that the patriarchs had sons and daughters, so we’re looking at 4 or 5 per family, and that goes high real fast. By the seventh generation we’re pushing it.
This is not some local tiny population confined in the Tigris-Euphrates River valley or some such place. This is a worldwide population and that’s what God had said earlier back in Genesis 6. The earth was corrupt before God. The earth was filled with violence. God looked upon the earth and behold it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth.
And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
Then there’s this boat. If it’s not a universal flood, you tell Noah, “Get moving. Get beyond the mountains. Get as far away as you can and you’ll be safe.” Unless you want to assume – as many liberals have done – that these are primitive stupid people who don’t know their world is any bigger than the little river valley they’re in.
Emily: That makes zero sense. If you have somebody who’s too primitive, you don’t tell them to build a boat. You tell them to move. They can walk.
Greg: Exactly. So this is what we have.
We can also look at archeological data, land fossils where they shouldn’t be, ocean fossils on mountaintops, whole forests that have been swept down and fossilized or turned to coal. This was the view of the church and of intellectuals in the West until Lyell came along with his uniformity of natural causes. I forget the name of the book.
He was Darwin’s mentor and he was the first one to say, “What if it wasn’t the flood? What if all these sediment levels that we see in canyons and such were laid down one at a time over a long, long time? Let’s count how long that would be. Oh, let’s say it would be millions of years, and then we don’t need a flood to explain these things. This is just the normal way things developed.”
He was very smart about one thing. At no point did he say, “And therefore the Bible is wrong,” because he knew if he said that, that would draw attention. He just said, “Here is an alternate hypothesis, a different way of looking at the data that will explain it just as well or better, and let’s just think about what this would mean.” He set the stage for Darwin to come along several years later and say, “And let me tell you how life developed in terms of those millions of years.”
They were looking in the mid-1800s. To that point, people assumed a universal flood and they assumed that weird geological formations and layers of silt that were stacked gigantically high were simply the result of the flood. They believed in a universal flood.
Now to suggest such a thing, if you put it in those terms, is right out. When Lyell and Darwin and their cronies started this whole evolution thing the assumption was that no kind of catastrophe is allowed. All things continue as they were from the beginning of creation. Now they feel settled in enough that they’re willing to allow some catastrophes like the asteroid strike that killed all the dinosaurs.
100 years ago that would have been right out because that’s a catastrophe, and by definition uniformitarianism does not allow for catastrophes, because if that kind of thing can happen then we can’t read the record and who knows what’s going on, and we have to be able to read the record because we’re human and smart and rational and all that.
Emily: We need to be able to explain it all. We can’t permit anything unexplainable.
Greg: Exactly. And the possibility that large parts of the earth were once covered with water fits into the system if you go back millions of years when the planet was first taking shape. I remember when I was a kid, I think elementary school actually, and I don’t know what the book was. It might have simply been an encyclopedia or something, but it showed hypothetical different phases of the earth taking form, of North America particularly.
It showed how at one point this was under water, and at another point this was under water, and another point this was under water, and another point this was under water. It was sheer speculation but it was in a text designed for older children to read as just matter of fact. This is the way it was.
You’re not supposed to believe in even that kind of thing, but what can’t happen is a flood sent by God in response to man’s ethical sin. That’s just unbelievable.
Emily: That implies judgment.
Greg: Yeah. If there were a God, he wouldn’t do that. He would not interfere, he would not need to interfere, he would not care to interfere. That’s Deism.
The Enlightenment had its version of God, but it was not a God who could ever bring judgement. He was above such things, just as the rational leaders were above petty moral judgements. Huge ethical judgements they made plenty, like France is evil and the monarch is evil and feudalism is evil and all that, but who should be sleeping with whom was above their notice and so they assumed above God’s notice.
Emily: I was just reading The Brothers Karamazov and I got past the passage where one of the characters says, “Oh, the more I love mankind in general, the more I hate individual people, and vice versa.”
Greg: And so we come to a new beginning, because we’ve got eight people left and a renewed covenant. In the face of some of the theological trends we’re seeing I think we should just take a moment and note that the covenant that God made with Noah is the same covenant he completed with Noah after the flood. These are not two different covenants – one special grace, one common grace, or any such thing.
The Bible is fond actually of reiterating, “God made a covenant with Abraham…” and then with Isaac and then with Jacob, and then slushing all together and saying, “God’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” and that kind of thing. “God made a covenant with his people at Sinai,” and then in the next generation, “God made a covenant with him, not with the people who came out of Egypt, but with you,” but it’s the same covenant. Covenant renewal and rephrasing covenants and redefining them for the new situation is common in scripture.
Emily: And we can see specific continuities in the Noahic example of animal sacrifice after the flood, and God speaks of the curse on the ground, which is a callback to the curse on the ground in Genesis 3.
Rachel: I particularly found the sacrifice aspect of it most compelling because it reminded me that this covenant is beginning with the need for the shedding of blood, which means there is sin that needs to be dealt with first in this covenant, and therefore it’s not just a generic covenant over all people, but it is particularly focused at those under the blood that the covenant calls for.
I think a lot of people pick up where God starts talking and they miss the foundation of why he’s talking. He smells the sweet savor and he is pleased and then he begins to talk.
Emily: I’ve heard people question whether there can be a distinction between interacting with Noah as the head of his family versus Noah as the head of all mankind. Like is he the head of the church or of mankind in this situation? But this happens at a specific time when they are in fact the same group of people.
Rachel: I don’t think there’s a need to distinguish.
Greg: Yes. These are the covenant people who have been saved by water, Peter says. He calls the flood a type of baptism, and everyone on the ark was baptized. There are eight of them, the number of resurrection. Peter draws attention to that in both of his epistles.
This all begs the question of is common grace, or whatever you want to call it, actually something separate and distinct from saving grace, and I would argue that they’re not. I don’t like the phrase common grace, but I’ll use it. Common grace is the overflow of special grace. When God comes and saves a people, the blessings overflow for the sake of those people and of his purposes and for the future.
You can think of the wheat and the tares here. God does not pull up the wheat for the sake of the tares that are going to become wheat eventually. He blesses the people in a nation of fundamentally ungodly people for the sake of the godly people, because he would bless his people and other people get the benefits. We all know the benefits of growing up in a godly household, even when a child does not at first or perhaps ever receive Christ as Savior.
There is always this overflow of God’s goodness and grace, which will make the person more accountable in the end, or maybe a means of pushing him and leading him towards repentance, the goodness of God that leads to repentance.
To assume that there is some kind of other grace just because – you said it, Emily. You said the whole planet and whole cosmos basically is tied up to man by covenant. It’s also tied up to Christ by covenant. There is no way that God considers creation outside of Christ now, unless he wants to consider just in Adam, which is not good, but he doesn’t. He considers it in Christ and in him all things cohere. So anything that happens anywhere in the universe is for Jesus’ sake, and therefore for the church’s sake.
Emily: I would argue this ties in to the later arguments in Romans, where Paul says, “As in Adam all died, so in Christ all are made alive.” That’s not a statement to universalism, but it is a statement about the category of mankind and everything bound to mankind by covenant.
Greg: And so with that as a background, we come into a new heaven and a new earth, but they’ve been completely transformed by the flood waters. Noah and his family have passed through a water boundary. They inherit a new heaven and a new earth, a new promised land, and things will go great now, right? Well, no, because God actually says in no uncertain terms, “I’m not going to curse the ground anymore because the imagination of man is evil from his youth.”
We might be inclined to think, “Well, that’s a good reason to keep on cursing things, if man from his youth is sinful,” but no, the point is the flood’s externals, like destroying an entire world, aren’t going to fix the sin problem. We’re doing a checklist of things that won’t work. Destroy humanity – okay, that didn’t work. That didn’t solve the sin problem.
Emily: Not that God thought it would, but he wanted to show us that it wouldn’t.
Greg: Put man in a perfect outward environment with all of the right religious and moral trappings and have God live in their midst. That will fix everything, right? No. Okay, let’s scratch that one off the list.
When we go down the list of ways that we would try to fix the world, we see that God’s tried them. As you say, not in the sense of actually seriously thinking they would work, but he’s used these to push us step-by-step from spiritual kindergarten into the full light of the gospel when Jesus comes, so that we know that all of our great ideas on how to fix things don’t work and that man needs a heart change.
So we start here with let’s let the State have the sword and execute criminals – murderers particularly – and let’s have a patriarchal sort of government, and let’s spread out and have kids in a brand new world undefiled by technology, except whatever we carried over from the old world.
Emily: So being Amish doesn’t help?
Greg: Yes, being Amish doesn’t help, or being a noble savage.
Emily: And I know that’s a caricature of what the Amish are.
Rachel: And also you can’t just say, “Oh, we just need to be part of our good covenant family. That will fix us,” which is often very common. “Let us just go and be our own little family and do our own little thing and homeschool on a piece of property way out there.” They were completely by themselves as a single family, and we only get really a spiritual assessment of Noah, not of the rest, and we certainly don’t get a good view of Ham.
Greg: And within about 125-150 years there are enough people around to decide that in fact this whole covenant family, God of Noah, creator God, Elohim – that’s not how we need to structure our society. We need to self-identify. “Make us a name and unite, lest we be scattered abroad.” They refused to believe God’s promise and they wanted to unite.
Oftentimes we skip over the fact that they formed a city, and the city is built around what we call a ziggurat. The language is sort of vague and yet it’s clear enough if you ignore what’s been supplied by the translators. “Let us build us a city and a tower whose top is unto heaven.” The translators supplied, “may reach into heaven.” That gives the idea that they were trying to build it up really high, and some people have speculated so that they could get above flood waters when they came back.
That’s not what they’re saying. The heaven they’re talking about is not the sky. They’re talking about where God lives. They wanted to build a magical artifact that would bring them into heaven itself.
Emily: The fundamental unit of government of the world.
But we have to stop there because we’re out of time. We’ll talk more about the ziggurat next time. I look forward to it very much. I have notes from my freshman year of college when I was taking Western Heritage and it’s all ziggurats all the time everywhere, so I’m excited about next week.
Thank you so much, both of you, for this conversation. It’s been a delight. I’ve learned a lot. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thanks also to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, you can visit patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
If you’d like to get hold of us with any comments, questions, bouquet, brickbats, haltingtowardzion@gmail.com is the best way to reach us.
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SHOW NOTES:
Scripture: Genesis 6-11