He Walked With God

The Book of Genesis can be regarded as one long genealogy with narrative interruptions.  True, the stories take up the bulk of the book, but the passages listing the generations from Adam through the sons of Jacob provide the framework for those stories.

I’ve always found the genealogical lists in Genesis of one patriarch begetting the next to be the most boring parts, and I tend to skim over them; but there are a couple places where we get more than a name and an antediluvian lifespan; we get a brief, tantalizing comment raises even more questions than it answers.

That is what we get with the great-grandfather of Noah, Enoch:  the man who Walked with God.

Genesis chapter 5 gives us the generations from Adam to Noah, through Adam’s third son, Seth.

When Seth had lived 105 years, he became the father of Enosh.  And after he became the father of Enosh, Seth lived 807 years and had other sons and daughters.  Altogether, Seth lived 912 years, and then he died.  (Genesis 5:6-8 NIV)

Each generation follows the same format:  this patriarch lived so many years and became the father of that patriarch; after which he lived for so many more years and had other children.  Finally we get a grand total.

For centuries, millennia even, scholars have tried to tally up all these years to come up with a definitive timetable of the Bible.  The Venerable Bede, an English theologian and historian of the 8th Century combined this method with cross-referencing known historical dates from Greek and Roman history with events from the Bible and came up with a date of 3952 BC for the Creation of the Earth.  Bishop Ussher came up with the better-known date of 4004 BC, but hey, what’s a half-century or so give or take?

Personally, I’m leery of trying to fit the ages of the Patriarchs into an exact chronology.  That way, I think, lies madness.  It has been suggested that some – or maybe all – of these ages are meant to be taken symbolically; and that the phrase rendered “…the father of” could also be translated “…the ancestor of”.  In any case, I think that the precise Age of Mahalelel when he begat Jared is one of the least important things one can get out of the Bible.  Then again, since I live for trivia, who am I to judge?

Each genealogical entry in this chapter ends with the words, “…and then he died.”  A mournful refrain, emphasizing Adam’s legacy to his descendants.

Then we get to Enoch:

When Enoch had lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah.  And after he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters.  Altogether, Enoch lived 365 years.  Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.  (Genesis 5:21-24)

A few things to take away from this:  First of all, Enoch seems to have been pretty randy for a patriarch; most of the ones on the list (although not all) waited until they were at least a hundred before they began begetting sons.  Second, the repeated line that “Enoch walked with God.”  What does that mean?  We’ll be getting to that in a bit.  Third is his age:  365 years; and there are 365 days in a year.  Co-incidence?  Or do we have some numerological symbolism going down here?  Hard to say.

But the thing that jumps out at everyone is this:

It never says he died.

“God took him away.”  He did not pass “Go”.  He did not collect $200.  He went directly to Heaven. Only one other figure from the Bible, the Prophet Elijah, can make that claim; (two if you count Moses, as some rabbinical traditions do, but that’s a story for another day).

According to some rabbinical scholars, Enoch was the most righteous man of his era – the only pious man of his generation – and that he was taken way lest the world corrupt him.  But apart from the vague note that “…he walked with God”, we aren’t really told what he did.  There’s got to be more than that.

And… there sort of is.  There is a work called the Book of Enoch that was composed sometime between about 300 BC and the First Century AD which purports to be written by Enoch before the Deluge.

The Book of Enoch has a lot of material in it expanding on the early chapters of Genesis and talking about angels and cosmology and things of that nature.  The movie Noah borrowed liberally from the Book of Enoch for some of its weirder imagery.  It also describes a vision of Enoch’s in which he is given a tour of the Heavens (all Seven of them) and the Earth.

A few other books are also attributed to Enoch.  2 Enoch, sometimes called “Slavonic Enoch”, comes to us as a series of medieval manuscripts written in Old Slavonic translated from a now lost Greek original.  It is believed to have been written before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, but not long before it.  A 3 Enoch also exists, but is attributed to a priest named Isaac living during the First or Second Century AD.  Then there’s the Book of Jubilees, purportedly dictated by Enoch to Moses on Mt. Sinai, which gives further info on the Fallen Angels, the Nephilim and the Antediluvian World.  Hey, they could have met.

3 Enoch also suggests that Enoch did not just enter Paradise, he was transformed into an angelic being and became Metatron, the highest-ranking archangel according to legend, and official scribe to the Almighty; sometimes called “The Voice of God” and played by Alan Rickman in the movie Dogma.  And please don’t ask him if he’s an Autobot or a Decepticon.  It bugs him.

None of these books were considered authoritative by the Jewish scholars who compiled the Hebrew Scriptures canon, although they were deemed interesting enough to be included in the Septuagint, the Greek Translation on Scriptures written in the 2nd Century BC.  Personally, I suspect that the translators involved with the Septuagint realized they had a good gig going and once they’d finished the holiest books, they milked it out by working on whatever they could get their hands on.

The Book of Enoch contains a lot of messianic language and seems to have been popular and influential in the Early Christian Church.  Enoch uses the phrase “the Son of Man” to refer to a messianic figure, which is how Jesus used the phrase, and some of the teachings of Jesus have parallels in the wisdom portions of Enoch.

The Book of Jude, one of the shorter epistles of the New Testament and a rare non-Pauline one, directly quotes from it, (which is one reason why some of the Early Church Fathers felt entirely sure about Jude).

Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men:  “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone, and to convict all the ungodly of all the ungodly acts they have done in the ungodly way, and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”  (Jude vv. 14-15 NIV)

The author of the Book of Hebrews, although he does not quote the Book of Enoch, cites Enoch as one of the great heroes of faith in his epic ode to Faith in Hebrews chapter 11.

For a long time, Biblical scholars thought that it was written by an early Christian, but fragments of the book have turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Qumran community.

Although a few of the earliest Church Fathers also quote Enoch, sometime after the First Century opinion changed.  I suspect that the trippy mysticism of the Book of Enoch seemed too much like the heretical Gnostics.  The Church followed the precedent of the Jewish authorities and excluded the Book of Enoch from their canon.  They went even further and had it destroyed.  For many centuries the book was only known from schnibbles and bits quoted in places like the passage in Jude and some of the Early Church Fathers.

The Ethiopian branch of the Orthodox Church, isolated from the rest of European Christendom, never rejected Enoch, though, and regard both it and the Book of Jubilees as part of their canon; as does the Ethiopian Jewish Beta Israel sect.

Around 1770, a Scottish traveler and explorer named James Bruce spent several years in Abyssinia, searching for the source of the Nile, and came back with three complete copies of the Book of Enoch, translated into Ge’ez, an Ethiopic language; the first complete copies of the Book seen by Western scholars in over a millennium.

Despite this, Enoch himself remains a mystery.  When the Bible says “he walked with God”, does that mean he lived a godly life, or that he actually experienced God face-to-face?  Was he a seer and a visionary, as the Book of Enoch claims?  Was he the only uncorrupted man on earth as the Learned Rabbis have said?  Was he really Too Good to Live?  Is he a Transforming Archangelbot who works these days as the Scribe of Heaven?  And what kind of drugs was he on, anyway, and did St. John of Patmos have access to the same stuff?

Perhaps it’s best to leave the last word to the writer of the Book of Hebrews:

By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death; he could not be found, because God had taken him away.  For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.  (Hebrews 11:5)

All Agog

The French President was frankly puzzled.  He had received a call from the American President who hoped to enlist his country’s aid in America’s Global War on Terrorism.  The American appealed to their common Christian faith, and then added:

“Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East.... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

The French President made polite diplomatic noises to the American, but as soon as he got off the phone he had his staff contact one of the top Biblical scholars at the University of Lausanne with an urgent question:

Who the heck are Gog and Magog?

The answer he got probably didn’t help him much, because I remember wondering the same thing when I first encountered those mysterious names and was frustrated by the lack of useful information.  This is one of those annoying places in the Bible where the text makes a throwaway reference to something the original readers were probably very familiar with, but then later readers spend the next couple thousand years speculating on what it meant.

Depending on who you ask, Gog and Magog could be giants, or demons, or chieftains, or symbolic personifications, or harbingers of the Apocalypse.  Or all of them at once.  Take your pick.

They first turn up in the Book of Genesis in one of the many genealogical lists that pop up in the first few chapters.  This particular genealogy lists the descendants of the sons of Noah, and is sometimes called “The Table of Nations”, because it purports to show how all the nations of the region known at the time descended from Noah’s sons.  Broadly speaking, the Sons of Japheth settled in Europe and the North; the sons of Ham moved South to Africa, and the sons of Shem, the Semetic people, got the Middle East and Asia.  A lot of the assumptions classifying humanity into three “races”, (Black, White and Asian) owe their own genealogy to the Sons of Noah.

But back to the list:

The sons of Japheth:  Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech and Tiras.  (Genesis 10:2 NIV)

Yes, this passage is where Gomer Pyle got his name from.  We aren’t told if Gomer ever settled in Mayberry, NC, or joined the Marine Corps.  We are told even less about Magog; we’re just given his name.

Some ancient Greek text associate Magog with the kingdom of Lydia in western Asia Minor, modern day Turkey.  The First Century Jewish historian Josephus said that Magog was the ancestor of the Scythians.  A later medieval writer said that Magog moved to Scandinavia and became the first King of Sweden, (which the Swedes thought was actually kind of cool).  Irish chroniclers also claimed descent from Japheth through Magog’s Scythian children.  Other writers blamed Magog for begetting the Goths, the Finns, the Huns and the Slavs.  Still later, others equated the descendants of Magog with the Mongols and identified Gog and Magog as provinces in the legendary Kingdom of Prester John.

Note that these are all northern tribes; (Japheth’s descendants were thought to have spread out north, remember); and that all of them were considered barbaric, and in most cases unusually war-like.

Gog does not turn up in the Table of Nations, but there is a guy named Gog mentioned in 1 Chronicles chapter 5 as one of the descendants of Reuben, one of the twelve sons of Jacob.  He has no connection to the Son of Japheth as far as I can tell.

Magog might have just remained just a name on the Table of Nations and a source for 1960s sitcom characters but for the wacky prophet Ezekiel.

The word of the LORD came to me:  “Son of man, set your face against Gog, of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal; prophesy against him and say:  ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am against you, O Gog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal.’” (Ezekiel 38:1-3 NIV)

It could be that this “Gog” is a descendant of the tribe of Magog; but the prefix “ma-“ in Hebrew can also mean “place of”; so perhaps Ezekiel is talking about “Gog, from the Land of Gog.”  Which would be redundant, but since Ezekiel is using the names as code words for an otherwise unnamed enemy and other names from the descendants of Japheth as its allies, I suppose it really doesn’t matter.

The prophecy goes on to describe Gog as commanding vast armies and predicting that he will sweep down from the north with his hordes to conquer all the lands to the south.  Barbarian hordes from the north, remember?  This is why later readers liked to associate Gog and Magog with Scythians and Huns and Visigoths and Swedes and such. Then, in his pride, Gog will attack the land of Israel; at which point God will say, “enough is enough, butt-head!”

“I will summon a sword against Gog on all my mountains, declares the Sovereign LORD.  Every man’s sword will be against his brother.  I will execute judgment upon him with plague and bloodshed; I will pour down torrents of rain, hailstones and burning sulfur on him and on his troops and on the many nations with him.  And so I will show my greatness and my holiness , and I will make myself known in the sight of many nations.  Then they will know that I am the LORD.”  (Ezekiel 38:21-23)

Hoo-hah!  Real apocalyptic stuff.  And that’s just a sample; chapters 28 and 29 of Ezekiel are full of stuff like that.  At the time he was writing, Ezekiel was one of the exiles carried off to Babylon when King Nebuchadnezzar  conquered the Kingdom of Judah.  Shortly before this particular prophecy, he and his fellow exiles had learned that the city of Jerusalem and its Temple had finally been destroyed.  So in this section, Ezekiel is anticipating a day when the people of Israel have returned to their land; and when “the Nations”, future enemies of Israel, will again try to attack it.

Not surprisingly, this and related passages of Ezekiel have been regarded as prophecies of the End Times.  Nor is it surprising that John, in writing his Book of Revelation, evoked Ezekiel in his own psychedelic imagining of the End of the Ages:

When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth – Gog and Magog – to gather them for battle.  In number they are like the sand on the seashore.  They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the comp of God’s people, the city he loves.  But fire came down from heaven and devoured them.  (Revelation 20:7-9)

Here Gog and Magog have been split into two different guys, but John is essentially summarizing the prophecy in Ezekiel, except where the earlier prophet has Gog representing a foreign nation or group of nations arrayed against Israel, John seems to have Gog and Magog symbolizing spiritual and moral evil assaulting God’s people from within as well as from without.

In the Qur’an, Gog and Magog are referred to as Yajuj and Majuj; and there is a story of how a righteous king named Dhul-Qarnayn built a huge wall to hold back their hordes from attacking. The name Dhul-Qarnayn means “possessor of two horns”, and some scholars have identified him with Alexander the Great, who portrayed himself on his coinage wearing ram’s horns.  The story of the Great Wall holding the barbarians back is doubtless what led some scholars to think of the Mongols and the Great Wall of China.  Regardless of who built the wall and who was behind it, the Qur’an states that eventually that wall will crumble and the imprisoned hordes unleashed to bring destruction on the earth.

In British tradition, however, Gog and Magog are neither nations nor kings; they are giants.  Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain tells a story about a hero named Corinus who wrestles a giant named Gogmagog and chucks him off a cliff.  There is a group of hills just south of Cambridge called the Gog Magog Downs, said to be the transformed body of a giant who had been rejected by a river nymph.  I guess rejection will do that to a guy.

But the giants Gog and Magog also appear in British legend as downright benign characters in London, where an old tradition names them as guardians of the city.  Images of them are carried in the annual Lord Mayor’s show.

But for the most part, Gog and Magog are associated with destruction and battle, which is why George W. Bush invoked them in his conversation with Jacques Chirac.

Interestingly enough, though, when Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, was in college, his nickname in Yale’s Skull and Bones club was “Magog”.

Just sayin’, is all.

Simon vs. Simon

He was a sorcerer and a charlatan; he was demonized as the source of every heresy to trouble the Early Church; he loved the most beautiful woman in the world, and it is said he was the arch-enemy of the first pope.  And he had his very own sin named after him.

But who was Simon Magus?

He appears very briefly in Acts chapter 6; a man named Simon in the city of Samaria who boasted great powers.  He was one of many prophets and would-be messiahs who popped up in Palestine during the First Century.  The text tells us that he practiced sorcery and had attracted a wide amount of attention in the region.  He billed himself as “The Great Power” and people attributed his magic to divine power.  Then Philip showed up.

Philip was a follower of Christ who, like many others, had fled the city of Jerusalem fleeing the attempts by the Temple authorities, (and by later convert Saul in particular), to suppress the Church.  He was one of the seven deacons, chosen by the Twelve Apostles to perform administrative functions and organize the Church’s charitable mission while the Apostles themselves devoted their attention to teaching.  (One of Jesus’ original disciples was also named Philip, but this seems to have been a different guy).

The name “Philip” is Greek, so perhaps he was a Greek convert to Judaism who had become a follower of Jesus.  Or perhaps one of his parents was Greek and the other Jewish, as was the case with Paul’s student, Timothy.  Or possibly Philip was just the name he went by among his Gentile friends. 

Philip came to Samaria and began preaching the good news of the kingdom of God.  The text tells us that many were baptized, both men and women, including Simon.

Was Simon sincere?  The text tells us that he “believed and was baptized” and offers no judgment on this, although it does remark that Simon was impressed by the “signs and miracles” he saw Philip performing and that he followed Philip everywhere.

It seems very likely that Simon saw Philip’s message as The New Thing, and rather than denouncing it, as the Jewish religious leaders in Jerusalem did, he sought to latch onto it so he could incorporate it into his own schtick.  Or perhaps he really was moved by Philip’s preaching, and his initial acceptance of the message was sincere.

The Apostles back at the Home Office in Jerusalem heard about Philip’s success, and sent Peter and John to take a look.

When they arrived, they prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit had not yet come upon any of them; they had simply been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus.  Then Peter and John placed their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.  (Acts 8:15-17 NIV)

This deserves a little more attention.  Frequently the Book of Acts refers to believers “receiving the Holy Spirit” but does not go into great detail about what this means. It was an intense, ecstatic religious experience in which the person felt full of spiritual power and excitement.  In some cases, the text describes them speaking in different languages, “speaking in tongues.”   The church tradition in which I grew up doesn’t like to talk a whole lot about this aspect of the Primitive Church, because we Lutherans tend to be wary about things like enthusiasm; but other churches, coming out of the Charismatic Movement and other churches of the Pentecostal tradition, make the expression of the Holy Spirit central to their worship.

Whatever the specifics, what Peter and John did had a noticeable effect on the Samaritan believers, and Simon was impressed.  Afterwards, he came up to the apostles with a bag of cash and asked them how much it would cost to teach him the trick.  Bad move, Simon.

Peter answered:  “May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money!  You have no part or share in this ministry, because your heart is not right before God.  Repent of this wickedness and pray to the Lord.  Perhaps he will forgive you for having such a thought in your heart.  For I can see that you are full of bitterness and captive to sin.”  (Acts 8:20-23)

Did Simon repent?  According to the text, he backs down, and contritely says “Pray to the Lord for me so that nothing you have said may happen to me.”   (v.24)  So maybe his heart was in the right place, but he just didn’t fully grasp the Gospel message.  Lord knows that Peter certainly missed the point on more than one occasion during Jesus’ ministry. 

Some historians have suggested that Simon was actually Paul of Tarsus and that the story in Acts 8 is based on disagreements the two had early on, but that the name was changed after the Pauline and Petrine factions of the Church resolved their differences.  I don’t think I can buy that interpretation, though.  The picture we get in Acts 8 of the opportunistic charlatan trying to buy magic powers jibes with neither fanatical Pharisee we get in Saul’s earliest appearances, nor the driven Apostle for Christ we see in the rest of Acts and in his epistles.

The Book of Acts makes no more mention of Simon and we have to turn to other sources to learn what happened next.

In his book Antiquities of the Jews, the Jewish historian Josephus makes mention of a sorcerer working for procurator Felix, the Roman administrator in Caesarea at about this time.  Some Latin texts of his work call the sorcerer “Simon” and identify him with the Simon of Acts chapter 8; but the guy mentioned by Josephus was a Jew from Cyprus, not a Samaritan.  Simon was not that uncommon a name; Peter’s name was originally Simon for that matter.

About a century later, the Early Christian writer and apologist Justin Martyr and later on Bishop Irenaeus added to the story of Simon Magus.  Both men associated Simon with the Gnostics, a sect of Christianity which grew up during the Second Century and which the orthodox Church Fathers considered heretical.

I can’t really do much justice to the teachings of Gnosticsim, partially because their precise doctrines varied from branch to branch, and partially because they wrote very little that has come down to us, and much of what we know about them comes from hostile sources like Justin and Irenaeus.  The Gnostics claimed to possess an oral tradition of Secret Knowledge derived from Christ himself in addition to the plain vanilla Gospel taught by the Mainstream Church.  Among other things, they taught a form of dualism where Matter is inherently corrupt and on the Spirit is wholly good and that the only way a fleshly human can attain the Realm of Perfection is through the pursuit of gnosis, or knowledge.

According to Justin and Irenaus, Simon Magus was the founder of Gnosticism. Simon taught the existence of what he called the Ennoia, or the First Thought of God, a divine emanation which took on an existence of its own.  This Ennoia became bound to a human form as a mortal woman of exceptional beauty, who was re-incarnated many times through history.  Helen of Troy was one of her incarnations.  Another was Simon’s girlfriend, who also happened to be named Helena.

It occurs to me that this might have been the origin of part of the mediaeval Faust legend, another dabbler in Dark Arts who desired the Helen whose face did launch a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium.

The Church Fathers took a dim view of Simon’s girlfriend.  The Third Century writer Hippolytus said that she was a prostitute from Tyre and that Simon made up the Ennoia story to justify shacking up with her.  Oh, and that the Gnostics were big on Free Love.  Damn Gnostic Hippies.

Simon also, it was said, taught that he himself embodied all three aspects of the Trinity, appearing to the Jews as the “Son of God,” mediating for sin; to the Samaritans as the “Father” and Creator; and to the Pagan world as the “Holy Spirit”.

He supposedly went to Rome, where he was opposed on several occasions by Peter.  Finally, according to Hippolytus, Simon told his disciples to bury him alive, promising that he would rise from the dead on the third day.  They did.  But he didn’t.

The apochryphal Acts of Peter, written in the Second Century gives a different version of Simon’s death.  It describes the running duels of Magic vs. Miracle between Simon the Sorcerer and Simon Peter in greater detail.  In order to prove himself a god, Simon levitates high over the Forum in Rome.  Peter prays that God stop him, and Simon plummets to his death.  That pisses off the Emperor Nero, who had bet five bucks on the Magus, so much that out of spite he crucifies Peter upside-down.

That’s the ending that legend and popular tradition gives to Simon.  But I prefer to leave him the way the Book of Acts does:  apologizing for his foolish request and asking for forgiveness.

Simon did leave one other legacy behind him.  Traditionally, the sin of selling church offices, and profiting off the selling of spiritual functions, has come to be called simony.

Mrs. Cain

“You’re a Pastor’s Kid,” a friend once said to me; “Maybe you can answer this one.  Where did Cain get his wife?  I’ve never gotten a straight answer.”

“The Bible doesn’t say,” I replied.  “Anyone who gives you a straight answer is Making It Up.” 

I’m not sure if it was the answer she wanted to hear, but I think she appreciated my honesty.  Often when Christians are arguing with skeptics we feel a need to have an answer for everything.  We forget that “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer if we truly don’t know something.  There are a lot of places in the Bible where information is left out; presumably because the writer of that part felt it was unimportant; or perhaps just overlooked it because it was less important than something else, or perhaps most likely, because the writer didn‘t know either.  Cain’s Wife is one of these.

Of course, that doesn’t stop us from speculating.

There are two possible explanations I can think of for where Cain got his wife.  One is that she was specially created for him, as Eve was for Adam.  This, to me, seems overly complicated.  The other is that Adam and Eve had other children besides the ones specifically mentioned in the Bible and that Cain married one of his sisters.

But wouldn’t this technically be considered incest?  Yes, that’s probably a big reason why people don’t like to talk about Cain’s wife, and why Bible skeptics like to bring it up.  The explanation I’ve read is that the prohibition against brother and sister marrying had not yet been established.  Besides, what the hell else were they supposed to do?

But what about inbreeding?  Wouldn’t family members intermarrying that close together result in all sorts of genetic problems?  The Author of Genesis is as silent on the subject of genetics as he is on the name of Cain’s wife.  My own idea is that the first couple generations after Creation still possessed a greater measure of the Divine Creative Force, resulting in a kind of innate biodiversity which made it possible for them to interbreed without the problems of inbreeding.  And if this sounds like the purest moonshine, yes it is.  Like the Author of Genesis, I know little about genetics either; probably even less, since Moses used to herd sheep and would have had some idea of practical animal husbandry.  This is just a piece of whimsy on my part, and I don’t expect anyone to take it seriously.

But did Cain have a sister?  The Bible doesn’t mention one.  If you think about it, though, Adam and Eve lived together, according to Genesis, for something like 900 years.  And although the Bible doesn’t go into details about it, you have to assume they invented sex.  Do you really think they would have stopped at two kids?

The Jewish Midrashic tradition says that Cain and Abel each had twin sisters and that these were the women they were going to marry.  The Midrash is a tradition of biblical commentary which explores the text to plumb deeper meanings.  In some cases the midrashim  are interpretations of the Law or applications of Mosaic Law to situations Moses never dreamed of.  Sometimes they take the form of parables illuminating some aspect of the text.  And, as in this case, some Midrash are stories that expand upon existing Biblical narratives.

The sister Abel was promised, Aclima, was the more beautiful of the two and Cain wanted her.  Their father Adam suggested they both offer sacrifices as a means of letting the Lord decide.  When God favored Abel over him, Cain’s jealousy deepened into murder.

The apocryphal Book of Jubilees, thought to be written around the 2^nd Century BC, tells a similar story.  Here, the girl the two quarrel over isn’t a twin but their younger sister, named Awen.

Another midrashic version says that Abel had two sisters – that they were triplets –- but that Cain only had one.  Abel felt that he should get both, but Cain argued that, being the older brother, he should get the spare.  How the sisters felt about this doesn’t seem to be mentioned.  However many sisters Cain and Abel had, the one Cain married is the only one who gets mention in the text; what might have happened to the others is unknown.

Cain took his wife and went out into the Land of Nod, which means “Wandering”, so it doesn’t necessarily mean a geographic designation.  Referring to sleep as the “Land of Nod” is an unrelated pun.

According to Genesis, Cain eventually settled down long enough to build a city so that his son, Enoch could have a home.  Presumably, that’s where his wife ended up.  Legend, however, insists that Cain himself was doomed to wander the earth, and wanders still.

If you look up at night and look at the full moon, the shadows on its face might resemble a man with a bundle of sticks on his back.  Or it might look like a rabbit; but in medieval folklore it’s a guy with some sticks, and this burdened traveler is Cain, cursed to wander through all eternity.

They Might Be Giants

The pious Iowa revivalist found himself in a discussion with a skeptic.  “You don’t really believe all those stories in the Bible about giants and such, do you?” the fellow scoffed.  The minister vehemently asserted that he did, and pointed to a verse in Genesis to support him:  “There were giants in the earth in those days.”

Some of the most tantalizing stories in the Bible are the untold ones; the passages that make a passing reference to something but never tells us any more.  Of these untold stories, perhaps the most intriguing is the introduction we get to the story of Noah:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.  ... There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.  (Genesis 6:1-2, 4 King James Version)

This passage presents us with two mysteries:  Who are these “sons of God” and who are the giants they begat?

Well, if you grew up in the ‘70s as I did, the first question has only one answer.  They were space aliens obviously.  At least that’s what Erich von Däniken used to say.

The phrase translated as “sons of God” literally means “sons of the powers”, and in some places, such as Job 1:6 and Jude 6-7, it refers to angels.  In this particular context it certainly sounds like the text is referring to some kind of demigods or semi-divine beings, especially since the offspring of these beings are described as giants.  This interpretation doesn't fit so well with the traditional Jewish and Christian views of God.  Perhaps this passage, like a few others in Genesis, might be cultural relics of a time before the Hebrews adopted monotheism which the writer who compiled the Book of Genesis neglected to fix.  If that’s the case, the Holy Spirit could have used a better copy editor.

Orthodox Judaism interprets the phrase differently; as “sons of nobles“.  Similarly, an ancient Christian tradition holds that “sons of God” refers to the godly descendants of Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, those who had a Covenant Relationship with God; and that the “daughters of men” belonged to the line of Cain.  This seems possible, but doesn't capture the imagination quite like the notion of angelic space aliens getting it on with sexy earth girls.

The apocryphal Books of Enoch, written between the 3rd and 1st Centuries BC, expands considerably on the Genesis 6 passage.  Ostensibly written by the patriarch Enoch before the Flood, it identifies the “sons of God” with angels called Watchers, whose job was to watch over humanity. Uatu the Watcher from Marvel Comics is probably related to them.

Some of these Watchers were the ones who began fooling around with human women and who also taught humans forbidden knowledge like astrology, weapon-making, and cartooning; (well, “the art of writing with ink and paper“). The movie Noah plays around with this idea and represents the Watchers as huge creatures whose angelic forms are encased in rock and earth, embodying their fallen state.

Which brings us to the children of the sons of God and the daughters of men.  King James follows many ancient translations and calls them “giants”, but the Hebrew word used in the passage is “nephilim”, which means, depending on your point of view, either “fallen ones” or “those causing others to fall.”  (Or, it could be related to the Aramaic word “Nephila” for the constellation of Orion, which brings us back to space aliens.)

But were they giants?  A more prosaic interpretation suggests that the Nephilim of Genesis were giants in a metaphorical way rather than a literal one; that they were simply “mighty men of renown”, the same way we might call a corporate CEO a Titan of Industry, or a mathematical genius a Colossus of Intellect, or a college football star the Big Man on Campus.

I suspect that the identification of the Nephilim with giants comes from the only other place in the Bible where they are mentioned.  In the Book of Numbers there is a story in which Moses sends twelve spies into the land of Canaan to do reconnaissance.  Their initial report was not promising:

But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes and we looked the same to them.” (Numbers 13: 31-33 NIV)

Are these the same Nephilim from Genesis? The reference to Anak, who was one of the Canaanite kings, would suggest that they were, or at least were descended from them.  Then how did these ancestors of Anak survive the Deluge that wiped out the rest of humanity?  I don’t know.

But another strong possibility is that the spies were exaggerating.  “These guys were huge, man!  They were like freakin’ King Kong!”  It’s not all that implausible to suppose that the Canaanites, living as they did in a Land Flowing with Milk and Honey, had a better overall diet than the nomadic Israelites and were on average taller; but all that stuff about looking like grasshoppers?  I don’t think so.

That’s the last mention we get in Scriptures of the Nephilim.  Maybe the writer who compiled Genesis didn't know any more about them than a name passed down in oral tradition.  Or maybe the writer was more interested in recording the history of Abraham and his ancestry, and that he regarded these half-mythical beings as peripheral to his story.

Either way, the giants of those days stuck in people’s minds.  In 1869, when a farmer in upstate New York digging a well uncovered what seemed to be the petrified remains of one of these giants, it seemed vindication at last for the Genesis account.  The “Cardiff Giant”, of course, was a hoax, perpetrated by the same scoffer who had argued with the Iowa revivalist, and who decided that if people wanted to believe in such things, he would give it to them.

And so, for a time at least, there really were giants in the earth.

Adam's Ex

I have to admit:  I’m cheating.

Having said I was going to blog about obscure stories in the Bible, my first week I wrote about the Creation -- not exactly unknown here -- and this week I’m writing about a character who isn't even in the Bible.  Well, not technically.

Although Lilith is never exactly named in the Bible, she does have an association with Adam. She‘s part of the pop theology which has accumulated around Creation these past few millenia.  Some people think she was in the Bible, and some others think she should have been.

The name Lilith is thought to derive from Lilitu, a type of female spirit or demon from Babylonian and Assyrian mythology associated with the night wind. An ancient Mesopotamian tablet depicting a nude goddess with bird’s feet and wings has been thought by some to represent Lilitu, although other scholars identify her with Ishtar or other goddesses of the region.  There’s also an incident in the Epic of Gilgamesh in which the hero rids a goddess’s huluppu tree of a snake, a zu bird and another garden pest which some translators have identified as a Lilith.

It  seems likely that Lilith entered Hebrew folklore during the Babylonian Captivity, where she was seen as a demonic spirit who preyed on women and young children.  She was frequently portrayed as a beautiful woman, sexually preying on men as they slept giving them wet dreams and enticing them to grow hair on their palms.  I made up the last part.

The only place in the Bible that comes close to mentioning Lilith is a passage in Isaiah describing the destruction of Edom.  It describes the land becoming a desolate place, inhabited by unclean beasts and supernatural terrors.  This is how a modern Jewish translation puts it:

“Wildcats shall meet hyenas, / Goat-demons shall greet each other; / There too the lilith shall repose / And find herself a resting place” (Isaiah 34:14)

The King James Verison renders the word “liylith” in the original Hebrew as “screech owl”; which is perhaps appropriate given Lilith’s associations with the night and with birds of prey.  Other translations translate it as “night creature”, “night hag” or “vampire”.

Over time, Lilith developed two aspects: the slayer of newborns, and the seducer of men. The latter can be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls,  which contain a reference identifying  Lilith with the warnings in the Book of Proverbs against seductive women.

The former is reflected by a Hebrew tradition that an amulet bearing the names of three angels, (Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, which would make a great name for a law firm), would protect a newborn boy in the crucial eight days before his circumcision, , when he was vulnerable to evil influences.

But what does any of this have to do with Adam?

As we've seen, the Creation account in Genesis 1 suggests that Man and Woman were created at the same time, but the account in Genesis 2 states that Adam was created first and that Eve came later.  The Genesis Rabbah, a Jewish commentary on the Book of Genesis written some time after the Babylonian Talmud, explains this apparent discrepancy by postulating a First Wife for Adam, created with him on the Sixth Day.

(Personally I don’t have a problem with assuming that the “male and female” from chapter one refers to Adam and Eve from chapter two; but these learned rabbis did; and this is how they reconciled the two texts).

In the Middle Ages, sometime between the 8th and 10th Centuries, a book titled The Alphabet of ben Sirach identified this hypothetical First Wife as Lilith.  The book was a series of acrostic proverbs modeled after those in the Apocryphal book Wisdom of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus; along with commentary.  Many scholars consider the work to be satirical due to the number of fart jokes in it.

According to the Alphabet, Lilith was Adam’s first wife; but because they had both been created from the earth, Lilith refused to take a subordinate role to her husband.  Specifically, She Wanted To Be On Top during sex, and Adam insisted that she could only be Underneath.

Lilith’s demand for equality has made her popular with modern day feminists, although I doubt that the author of The Alphabet intended her as a role-model.  She left Adam and took up a new career devouring children.  And things for Lilith kind of went downhill from there.

In Medieval Jewish and Christian folklore, Lilith became known as the mother of all manner of supernatural creatures, some demonic and monstrous, like giants and trolls; some just otherworldly, like elves and fairies. C.S. Lewis alludes to this idea in his Narnia books, when he has a character comment that although the White Witch claims to be a Daughter of Eve, she is actually descended from Adam’s first wife, Lilith.  The Victorian fantasy writer George MacDonald, who was one of Lewis’s inspirations, wrote a novel called Lilith in which she is portrayed both as a seducer of men and as an enemy of children, but who nevertheless receives a chance for redemption.

But back to the legend.  God had to try again making a new mate for Adam, and this time he created the woman out of Adam’s flesh so that there would be no question as to who had seniority and who was in charge.  This fits in with the way a lot of people interpret the story of the Creation of Eve; that being formed out of Adam’s rib is supposed to symbolize Eve’s inferiority to Adam.

I don’t read the story quite like that.  As I see it, the Genesis account’s depiction of Eve being created out of Adam’s rib is not a matter of who wears the pants in the family; (which at that point in the story was neither; pants came later); but rather to portray Eve as a part of Adam; “Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” as Adam himself puts it.  And the story concludes with a passage later quoted by Jesus and which is frequently used as a wedding text:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.  (Genesis 2:24 NIV)

To me, that verse says nothing about which one is in charge, but rather that both form a partnership.  The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 provides us with a brief glimpse of the ideal of marriage.  Perhaps the bickering Adam and Lilith of legend is closer to the reality, but it’s a cynical view.

Some have claimed that Lilith was “left out” of the Bible; which is rather like complaining that Rudolph was “left out” of the poem “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”  Even though the Lilitu of Sumerian myth existed before the writing of Genesis, she did not become associated with Adam until much, much later.

Some feminists have tried to rehabilitate Lilith, claiming that she was originally a goddess of childbirth and fertility, like Ishtar or Isis, who was vilified when patriarchal religions gained ascendancy.  I suppose it’s possible that the name Lilith was once associated with such a deity; but I don’t see that having anything to do with Adam.  And for all Lilith’s assertive independence that we might admire, her portrayal in legend is to my mind more misogynistic than anything in Genesis.

Sadly, we don’t see much of Eve’s character in Genesis.  She gets the spotlight in one story:  the story of her Temptation; and she doesn't come off very well in it.  We don’t really know what she was like apart for her apparent willingness to believe talking snakes, and she quickly recedes into the background. Which is a pity, because I’d like to know more about her.

Brash, ballsy, bad-girl Lilith grabs our attention, but I can’t help but feel that her story diminishes both Eve and Adam.  I guess I prefer to think of Adam and Eve as the First Couple.

And Adam certainly has enough screw-ups to his name without having him be a jerk to his ex on top of everything.