Noah Facts #4: The Flood Did Not Judge Polluters of the Environment, but Polluters of God’s Image

Posted on March 5, 2014 by admin

The Noah movie starring Russell Crowe is raising the topic of the Flood and just why it happened. I thought I would add to the conversation so if you watch the movie, you can do so with wisdom and discernment.

I’ve written a Biblical fantasy novel called Noah Primeval. I’ve researched this topic extensively. Noah Primeval has been a category bestseller on Amazon for 3 years. It’s first in a series of novels called Chronicles of the Nephilim.

Buy the novel Noah Primeval, here on Amazon.com in Kindle or paperback. The website www.ChroniclesOfTheNephilim.com has tons of way cool free videos, scholarly articles about Watchers and Nephilim Giants, artwork for the series, as well as a sign-up for updates and special deals.

The War of the Seed

In the older Noah script I read, (and we’ll see if it’s the same in the movie) man is depicted as violent and evil. But there is also a tie-in with the environment, as if God’s judgment on destroying the earth is predominately because man was a polluter of the environment, an obvious analogy of the modern Global Warming narrative that we Westerners are destroying the earth from our carbon emissions.

I had complained in my viral blog post critiquing the script that this was an important subversion of the original Genesis sacred story, which was NOT about polluting the environment, but about polluting the image of God in man. We will see if this message is still as strong in the movie.

But let’s take a look at what the Bible actually teaches about the issue.

In the last post, I made the point that the Watchers came from heaven and were not only seeking to corrupt and violate the heavenly/earthly divide, but to pollute the human bloodline in order to stop the coming Messiah. Noah was uncorrupted in his flesh. And guess who came from Noah’s bloodline? Israel, God’s people, and ultimately, Jesus, the Messiah (Luke 3:23-38).

So how did these Sons of God know about the Messiah so early in the primeval history? Because when God cursed the Serpent in the Garden (and that serpent is Satan, a fallen angelic being — Revelation 12:9), he said, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your Seed and her Seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15).

“Seed” means “offspring.” God here is prophesying a cosmic War of the Seed, where the “offspring of the Serpent” or Seed of the Serpent will war with the Seed of Eve. And Messiah is the ultimate Seed who would crush the head of the Serpent (Revelation 12:10; Luke 10:17-20). Jesus is called “The Seed” to whom God made his promises (Galatians 3:16).

So since the fallen angels knew about this prophecy through Satan, who was one of them, it would make sense that they would seek to corrupt that Seedline of Eve with their own seed to stop Messiah from coming, by corrupting God’s image.

In Judaism, the high priest was the one who mediated between men and God. But there was a problem that had to be fixed. And that was that the high priests were also sinners who needed to atone for their sins as well, over and over.

So the system was imperfect. It needed a perfect sinless high priest to atone for sins once and for all. It needed a God-man hybrid.

Think about it. The whole point of the Messiah was that he would be fully human in his flesh, but fully God in his “seed.” This is why the Virgin birth is so necessary. If his human flesh was already tainted by fallen angelic seed, then he could not be fully human. But the mediator between God and man must be fully human, uncorrupted flesh like Noah, or he cannot mediate for humans. In the same way, the mediator had to be fully God or he could not mediate on God’s behalf.

Look at this New Testament passage and see that reality expressed through Jesus being a “high priest” who sacrifices for our forgiveness or atonement:

Hebrews 7:26–28
For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest [Jesus], holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself. For the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever.

The fallen Watchers were trying to corrupt the bloodline of Messiah with their own mocking pre-emptive tainting of the Seed of Eve with the Seed of the Serpent. This War of the Seed is exactly the story I try to tell in my Chronicles of the Nephilim, starting with Noah Primeval.

But What Does the New Testament Say?

The New Testament confirms divine/human cohabitation as evil and worthy of punishment because it actually alludes to this very violation of fleshly categories and resultant punishment in 2 Peter and Jude. If you compare the two passages you see the sensual violation of human and angelic flesh that we read about in Genesis 6:

2Pet. 2:4-10
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell (tartarus) and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly;… then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.

Jude 6-7
And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day— just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in gross immorality and pursued strange flesh, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.

Both these passages speak of the same angels who sinned before the flood of Noah, and who were committed to chains of gloomy darkness. 1 Peter 3:19-20 calls these imprisoned angels “disobedient.” According to our study, the angelic sons of God are revealed as sinning in Genesis 6, so these must be the same sinning angels referred to by the authors of the New Testament.

Both Peter and Jude link the sin of those fallen angels with the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, which is described as indulging in “gross immorality” by pursuing “strange flesh.” The Greek word for “gross immorality” (ek porneuo) indicates a heightened form of sexual immorality, and the Greek words for “strange flesh” (heteros sarx) indicate the pursuit of something against one’s natural flesh. The angels who visited Sodom were clearly spoken of as enfleshed in such a way that they were physically present to have their feet washed and even eat food with Abraham and with Lot (Gen. 18:1-8; 19:3).

Angels on earth can have a physical presence. Bible students know that the men in Sodom were seeking to engage in sexual penetration of these same angels who visited Lot in his home. So here, men seeking sex with angels is a violation of the heavenly and earthly flesh distinction that the Scriptures seem to reinforce – a replay of Genesis 6.

Some Christians believe the passage is referring to homosexuality, but it’s not so much that. Peter and Jude link the angels sinning before the flood to the violation of a heavenly and humanly separation. The New Testament commentary on Genesis 6:1 affirms the supernatural view of the Sons of God as angels having sex with humans.

So, who exactly are the “Seed of the Serpent”? Ultimately, they are all those who are on the side of Satan, just like the “Seed of Eve” would be all those who are “in Christ” or on the side of Messiah.

In a previous post, I explained that the people in Canaan were considered from the cursed line of Ham. We know that the Canaanites worshipped evil gods and engaged in child sacrifice and all kinds of moral perversions. So the Canaanites are considered the Seed of the Serpent for one.

But there is more to it than that. Because the Nephilim of Genesis 6 were the hybrid offspring of the sexual union of angelic Watchers and humans. So just who were these Nephilim, these literal Seed of the Serpent? I’ll explain in the next post.

Noah Facts #3: Did Angels Have Sex with Humans Before the Flood?

Posted on March 3, 2014 by admin

The Noah movie starring Russell Crowe is raising the topic of the Flood and just why it happened. I thought I would add to the conversation.

In my last post, I explained Noah’s drunken nakedness as matriarchal incest rape by Ham of Noah’s wife.

The Flood Was God’s Response to the Corruption of God’s Image.

Genesis 6:1-4
When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the Sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

Genesis 6 is the opening lines to the story of Noah’s flood. It talks about man reproducing upon the face of the earth and “Sons of God” taking women as wives. Their offspring were the Nephilim. But who are these Sons of God who had sex with human women?

In short, the Sons of God are angels called the Watchers.

The first two verses make a point to contrast the essential identities of the Sons of God with daughters of men. The contrast is of “God” with “men.” It doesn’t say “Sons of Seth mating with Daughters of Cain,” it doesn’t say, “Sons of kings mating with daughters of commoners,” or anything like that. It says “Sons of God mating with daughters of men.” The contrast is the heavenly with the earthly. So we are talking about mating that unites spiritual angelic beings with earthly human beings.

Strange and bizarre, yes, I know. Strange — like God separating a huge sea so Israelites could pass through, or bizarre — like a hybrid God-man resurrecting from the dead to save the world.

If anyone wonders whether the phrase Sons of God could be a metaphor for “godly men” or “divine kings,” put that to rest right away. Everywhere the phrase Sons of God is used in the Old Testament, it means angelic beings from around God’s heavenly host. (See Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7; Psalm 82:6: 2Kings 22:19-23 – here the phrase is not used, but the concept is). You can read more about this in my novel Noah Primeval.

In fact, there are different names used interchangeably in the Bible for the Sons of God.
They are called the God’s “host of heaven” who surround his throne (1Kings 22:19)
They are called Watchers (Daniel 4:13, 17, 24)
They are called Holy Ones (Daniel 4:13, 17, 24)
They are called angels (Hebrews 2:2; Psalm 148:1-2)
They are called God’s “divine council” (Psalm 82:1)
Sometimes they are called “assembly of the holy ones” (Psalm 89:5)
They are even called “gods” at times (Psalm 82:1, 6; 89:6)
Sometimes, all these terms are used together to make the point (Psalm 89:5-8)

So the Sons of God in Genesis 6 are renegade angels, divine beings from God’s heavenly throne who came to earth and had sex with human women.

Right after these Sons of God mate with humans and the Nephilim are born, we read:

Genesis 6:5–6, 11-14
The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually…Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God… Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

So we see that right after these intermarriages, mankind is thoroughly evil, which is deserving of judgment in itself. But that is not all we see. We also see that all flesh is corrupt and filled with violence.

Notice “corruption” is mentioned three times, making it a very important concept for the writer. (Saying “the earth was corrupt” is not a statement about environmentalism, it is a way of saying “all people on earth.”)

Now if the writer had intended to just say that all mankind was corrupted spiritually he would have used the word for mankind (adam), but he did not. He used the word for flesh (basar) – “all flesh was corrupted” — which distinctly points to the physical body.

So there is a corruption of flesh going on by the angels mating with humans. These angels are evil corrupters.

This corruption is highlighted even more when we see that Noah is described as a “righteous man, blameless in his generation.” Now, yes, Noah walked with God and that gave him a righteousness with God. But the Hebrew word for “blameless” is the same word that everywhere else in the Old Testament is used of the physically unblemished animal for ritual sacrifice. (38 times).

God seemed to be requiring physical perfection in sacrifices that symbolized the obligation of purity for atonement. The writer is making the point that Noah’s flesh, or his genetics, was not corrupted by the tainted genetic “seed” of the Watchers (Seed of the Serpent).

So the Sons of God were mating with human women and giving birth to a corrupted bloodline called the Nephilim. This corruption was most likely these fallen angels’ attempt to defile and desecrate God’s separated creative order.

Since man was created in God’s image, they were seeking to corrupt the image of God. Nothing but capital punishment will do for such a capital crime.

But more than that, I believe they were seeking to pollute the human bloodline in order to stop the coming Messiah. Noah was uncorrupted in his flesh. And guess who came from Noah’s bloodline? Jesus, the Messiah (Luke 3:23-38).

In my novel, Noah Primeval I have the fallen Sons of God seeking out Noah to try to destroy him because he was uncorrupted by them as God’s chosen one.

How did they know about the coming Messiah? I’ll explain in the next post.

Noah Facts #2: What Was Noah’s Drunken Nakedness About? It Ain’t Peeping Ham

Posted on February 28, 2014 by admin

Continuing the conversation about all things Noah, thanks to the upcoming movie with Russell Crowe. I thought I would add some positive elements to the conversation with some factoids and research about the Biblical Noah so you can be prepared to watch the movie with wisdom and discernment.

Noah’s Nakedness: It’s Worse Than You Realized. Ham is a Rapist.

I hear the new Noah movie does show Noah getting drunk after the Flood and exposing his nakedness. Well, guess what all you literalists who think Noah should be a sinless character, it’s in the Bible (Gen. 9:20-21). Noah the righteous got drunk. Which means even men considered righteous by God are sinners and blow it. I don’t know what the movie does with this, but there’s so much more to the meaning than a mere scene of Post Traumatic Stress.

In my novel series Chronicles of the Nephilim, Noah’s son Ham rapes his own mother (Noah’s wife) that results in the curse of the fruit of that maternal incest: the child Canaan. This brutal scene is not mere voyeurism of depravity, it is the very theological foundation of the future of Israel. And that foundation is not imagined fantasy, it is the actual Biblical basis of the Jewish claim on the Promised Land of Canaan, as odd and controversial as it may seem. But Genesis is no stranger to odd and controversial stories.

Here is the text from the Bible:

Genesis 9:20–27
Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.” He also said, “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.”

Literalists have a difficult time with this passage for several reasons. They do not like to admit the fact that Noah becomes a drunk after being the worlds’ greatest Bible hero of that time. They read Genesis 6:9 that says Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation, and that he walked with God as being a description of Noah as some kind of moral perfectionist one level less than Jesus. But as explained in the appendix of Noah Primeval, they miss the fact that righteousness was having faith, not moral perfection.

Secondly, having faith was not perfect faith because all Biblical heroes falter in their faith.

Thirdly, “blameless” was a physical Levitical reference to genetic purity (as in “spotless” lamb) that was most likely a reference to being uncorrupted by the fallen Sons of God (more on this in a later post).

Fourthly, walking with God did not mean being sinless. Noah was a sinner with imperfect faith and obedience as every believer is. His broken humanity is how we identify with him and draw our inspiration.

The real problem for literalists who do not consider the ancient Near Eastern poetic language of Genesis is in concluding that an entire nation was cursed simply because one of its forefathers saw his dad without clothes on! While it is technically possible that ancient Mesopotamians had some holy taboo about a parent’s nakedness that we are simply unfamiliar with, there is nowhere else in the Bible that affirms the absurdity of such a taboo.

There are however, several places that explain the concept of “uncovering a father’s nakedness” as a figurative idiom for having sexual intercourse with his wife.

Bergsma and Hahn’s masterful article “Noah’s Nakedness and the Curse of Canaan (Genesis 9:20-27)” elucidated for me the notion that I used in my novel that Ham had forced maternal incest with his mother, Noah’s wife.(1) They explore the different scholarly explanations of “uncovering Noah’s nakedness” and disprove them: voyeurism, castration, and homosexual paternal incest. There are simply no references in the Bible anywhere that reinforce any of these interpretations.

The only one that is reaffirmed and makes sense is that Ham’s uncovering his father’s nakedness was an idiom or euphemism for maternal incest.

They explain that the definitions of uncovering nakedness in Leviticus 18 are tied to the practices of the Canaanites (sound familiar? Canaan is cursed?). And the Biblical text itself explains that in a patriarchal culture, uncovering a man’s nakedness was an expression that actually meant uncovering his wife’s nakedness.

Leviticus 18:7–8
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother; she is your mother, you shall not uncover her nakedness. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife; it is your father’s nakedness.

Likewise, they explain, “Lev 18:14, 16; 20:11, 13, 21 all describe a woman’s nakedness as the nakedness of her husband.”

They then prove that “seeing nakedness” and “uncovering nakedness” are equivalent phrases and are the usual expressions of sexual intercourse in the Holiness Code of Leviticus (18:6; 20:17). It could not be more explicit than Deuteronomy 27:20:

Deuteronomy 27:20
‘Cursed be anyone who lies with his father’s wife, because he has uncovered his father’s nakedness.’

Biblically, “uncovering a man’s nakedness” was an idiom for having sexual intercourse with his wife.

What then of Shem and Japheth walking backward so as not to see Noah’s nakedness? Surely, this is not a reference to avoiding maternal incest, but a literal covering of Noah’s body with a cloak?

In that case, the literal and the figurative collide in a metaphor of meaning. The authors explain the apparent incongruity this way:

The brothers’ actions play on the broader meaning of the phrase. Not only did the brothers not “see their father’s nakedness” in the sense of having intercourse with him, but also they did not even dare to “see their father’s nakedness” in a literal sense. Where Ham’s act was exceedingly evil, their gesture was exceedingly pious and noble. (2)

The final clincher to making sense of this bizarre passage is the curse of the son Canaan. Throughout Genesis 9, Ham is oddly and repeatedly referred to as the father of Canaan. It is a strange repetition that draws attention to itself and is finally climaxed with Canaan being cursed instead of Ham for Ham’s dirty deed.

Well, if Canaan was the fruit of that illicit union of maternal incest between Ham and Emzara, it makes perfect sense within that culture that he is cursed. It may not sound kind to our modern ears, but it is perfectly consistent with that Biblical time period.

Ham sought to usurp his father’s patriarchal authority through maternal incest which was “uncovering his nakedness.” The fruit of that action, the son Canaan, is a cursed man. And that cursed man is the forefather of a cursed nation. Remember, in the ancient world, family bloodlines were all about survival and keeping them protected.

The writer of Genesis, whether Moses or a later editor, was clearly showing the origins of the evil curse on the land of Canaan that they were about to take from the Canaanites. Canaan was cursed to be a servant of the Shemites, or Semites of Israel, and that one justification of their conquest of the Promised Land.

In short, the Canaanites are the Seed of the Serpent at war with the Israelites, the Seed of Eve (more on this in upcoming posts), and they deserve to be dispossessed of their land by the God whom their ancestors rejected and by whom they were cursed.

Of course, there is much more to the story than that, for there were giants in the land of Canaan as well, giants that were the descendants of the Nephilim, the original Seed of the Serpent.

I tell this story in the novels Joshua Valiant and Caleb Vigilant to see how that all fits together. But what is this “Seed of the Serpent” thing? Look for the next post for an introduction to the Giants.

Buy Noah Primeval to read more of this interesting Biblical research about all things Noah, and for a well-researched retelling of the War of the Seed of the Serpent with the Seed of Eve. It will make the Bible stories come alive like never before.

FOOTNOTES

(1) John Sietze Bergsma, Scott Walker Hahn, “Noah’s Nakedness and the Curse on Canaan (Genesis 9:20–27)”, Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (2005): 25, ed. Gail R. O’Day, 25 (Decatur, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005).

(2) Bergsma, Hahn, “Noah’s Nakedness,” 33.