Genesis 6: Before the Great Flood
A drastic solution
If you're like me, you either had or wanted to have a cool little toy: a plastic "replica" of Noah's Ark, complete with giraffes and rhinos and elephants and tigers and kangaroos and whatnot (geography be damned). They're still popular; Playmobil has one for under $50 at Walmart, complete with Noah and the whole fam damily. Other sets come in plastic, wood, plush, antique, and even a "vintage" '70s version that was a premium from Arco gas stations.
The Arco ark and some of the animals you could get with a purchase of gasoline; from a Pinterest page
Little animals are fun! But an authentic version would have to include the flood waters around the boat, and the bloated corpses of all the humans and animals that died in that catastrophe--wouldn't it?
Holding that image in our minds and hearts, let's begin the first of four chapters about the "Great Flood" of Genesis and its aftermath.
The Story
In a "bridge" passage many readers find obscure, the writer tells us that "the sons of God" had children by "the daughters of men," somehow ticking off the god in the process. The children of these unions became "giants" and "the mighty men... of old."
Then comes the wickedness, the people whose very hearts were filled with evil thoughts. The god was sorry he had made these humans, and decided to destroy not only them, but the animals, "creeping things," birds, and all--all, that is, except for Noah (and his family) and the animals that Noah brings with him.
Noah had three sons, the names of whom many know by heart: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. After another indictment of the wickedness of humans, the god drops the bomb on Noah: "I will destroy all things in the world made of flesh."
Then he gives Noah some super-specific details aboutof the size and construction of the three-story boat in which Noah and his family and the animals are to be saved, setting off a controversy that lasts to this day: how could that possibly have worked?
The god repeats the stuff about wickedness and its destruction and how everything's gonna die, and then lays out the deal for Noah and his family: do this, and I'll save you.
Again with the animals, and food for them and the humans, and Noah's assent. The first few verses of Chapter 7 will talk more about the number of "clean and unclean" animals that Noah is to include.
The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men Beget Giants
Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial, came down firmly on the side of the fantastic in his The Sons of God Saw the Daughters of Men That They Were Fair.
Before we get to the Flood and those cute little animals, we have to bridge the gap between the genealogy of Chapter 5 and the words of the god to Noah.
One of the most widely-accepted modern versions of the Bible, the New International Version (NIV), tells us that "the sons of God" saw "the daughters of humans" and, after their union, produced nephilim.
Or did they? Neither the NIV nor the KJV (King James Version) links the nephilim causally to the union of the Sons and the Daughters; it just says, "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward--when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them."
It is widely assumed, however, that these nephilim (which, following very ancient tradition, the KJV translates "giants") were in fact the children of the S of G and the D of M.
So we have three terms to puzzle out here. And to do so, let's consider two approaches: the fantastic and the realistic.
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Most people, including virtually all True Believers, go with the fantastic. The sons of God, they say drawing on other Bible verses, are angels. In The Book of Job, for example--one of the oldest in the Bible--we read, "Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them." Meaning, these were all angels, including Satan. Likewise, later in Job, we find the god speaking out of a whirlwind and asking Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid, and "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" There could be no one there but angels at the time!
Now, if the sons of God were angels, they could only be fallen angels. You can't picture Michael or Gabriel or those holy guys running around getting married to women. (Lots of other verses have been used to declare the angels sexless, but let's not bother with those, since they're all in the New Testament.)
Okay, let's stipulate that the sons of God are angels. Then who are the "daughters of men"? That's easy. They're--the daughters of men! Women. Simple. No one disputes this. Which daughters of men? Or should I say, the daughters of which men? We'll address that in a minute.
Now, about those giants. Assuming they are the offspring of the Sons and the Daughters (like the Mamas and the Papas?), they were "mighty men which were of old, men of renown." The Hebrew name for these "giants," nephilim, is tricky. It seems to come from a root meaning something like "fallen," so why giants? Well, the first major translation from the Hebrew was into Greek, and is called The Septuagint. The Greek translators were seeking a word that was imbued with the oddness of these fellas, who show up a couple of other times as well, in the Book of Numbers as men "of great size"; this, with the "weird" aspect, led to the choice of "giants" to translate nephilim.
Remember, it's possible that the "giants" merely lived alongside the "mighty men... of old." In that case, they would be two separate kinds of being. But isn't the idea of angels and women giving birth to giants more, I don't know, fantastic?
(Incidentally, a variation on this idea states that the whole story was swiped from a non-Jewish myth, and that the sons of God were the lesser gods of a different pantheon. Same story, different culture.)
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And now, for a more prosaic explanation. Some make the perfectly rational suggestion that the "sons of God" were the line of Seth, a generally more godly lot than the descendants of Cain, from which came the "daughters of men." A variation on this is that the "sons of God" were any godly people, no matter who their great-greats were, and the "daughters of men" any ungodly women. (No explanation is offered for why it couldn't have been Daughters of God and Sons of Men.)
In any case, the "giants" they produced would just be pretty accomplished guys, like "giants of industry" or something. (The Chinese believe that a child with parents from two different "cultures"--in their case, from northern China and southern China--will be extraordinary, having negotiated his way between cultures and customs throughout his childhood.)
This theory makes perfect sense. It's also boring.
In a close variation of this idea, the "sons of God" are rulers. Think of the elevation of Pharaohs or Roman (or Chinese or Japanese) Emperors to the status of divinities. This being so, the daughters of men would then be the daughters of common men. This reading is also quite possible--and quite dull.
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Now, remember, the True Believers delight in an odd variation of the "post hoc fallacy." This says that, "Since Event X came before Event Y, Event X must caused Event Y." In the TBs' version, there's a twist, which could be expressed as "Since Event X came before Event Y, Event Y must have caused Event X." (Be sure to notice that I switched X and Y in the second part of the last definition!)
In this case, it means that the coming of the Christ (Event Y) necessitated the situation described in the first few verses of Chapter 5. Since Satan (remember him?) must do everything in his power to prevent the redemption of humankind, he sent his fallen angels in to corrupt the human race. This paved the way for Christ, of whom conservative scholars say the ark of Noah is a "type." (Biblical typology is the idea that people or events in the "Old Testament" were foreshadowings, prefigurings, placeholders as it were, for the people or events of the New Testament. Thus, Noah's Flood is a type of baptism, and the ark itself, which saves Noah and his family--and, incidentally, the animals--is a type of Christ. The things that were prefigured--in my example, baptism and Christ--are called antitypes.)
Of Cubits and Critters
The Building of Noah's Ark (painting by a French master of 1675).
Whoo, boy! Never have instructions been so precise and so unfathomable at the same time.
Body parts have often been used to measure things: the Greeks and Romans (and we) used the length of a foot, now standardized to a whopping 12 inches (how big is your foot?). Horses' heights, incidentally, are measured in hands, now set at four inches. But the closer we get to the ancient Middle East and its neighbors (Egypt, Mesopotamia, India) the more we see a preference for the forearm (from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger), called a cubit, which, sadly, has never had an international standard.
And that's where the trouble begins. The length typically ranged from 17.48 to 20.83 inches--not a huge difference, until you multiply it by 300! That many of the shorter units would equal about 437 feet; of the longer, almost 521 feet, making the difference between the ark's lengths using a shorter or longer cubit almost 84 feet, or about the height of 8.5 stories in a building.
The second-century CE rabbis standardized the Biblical cubit at just over the longest figure used in my examples: 21 inches. Using that generous figure, then, the ark was 525 feet long, 87.5 feet wide, and 52.5 feet high. This gives a deck area of nearly 138,000 square feet, or less than two and a half football fields. (I have seen calculations of volume in cubic feet, around 2.5 million of them--but you can't just stuff passengers up to the ceiling!)
Let's talk about those passengers. In Chapter 6 Verses 19-21, the god tells Noah to take "two of every living thing," and food for all of them. He specifies "fowl... cattle... and creeping things..." by which I understand birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians, and probably insects and such. (The 19th-century German lexicographer Gesenius gives the Hebrew word remes as unequivocally reptile, but I doubt that the reptile/amphibian distinction had been made yet.) The god also uses the phrase "after their kind," which phrase we'll examine in a moment.
Now, there are today some 6,400 known mammal species, and around 10,000 species of bird. Assuming (as many True Believers do) that there is no evolution, there had to be at least 16,400 species on that ark. (If you think the statement about "no evolution" is a straw man, see below.) We won't count Mr. and Mrs. Noah and the kids for now. And I say "at least" because there are some species we haven't discovered yet, and probably many more have gone extinct.
The creeping things present a problem. We won't even try to count insects, worms, and whatnot. But reptiles and amphibians are fair game, right? There are over 10,500 known species of the former, and 8,000 of the latter, so add 18,500 to our 16,400 for nearly 35,000 species. Now multiply by two. (We'll write off the "clean beasts" of which the god commands seven pairs to be brought in the next chapter, as scholars suggest it's only a handful of species).
That's 70,000 critters in the space of two and a half football fields! (Not to mention all their food!) Sure, mice, and frogs (90% of the amphibia) and most birds are really, really small, and sort of could be stacked, in cages or on perches or something--but how would you like to have lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes, cows, caribou, bison, buffalo, crocodiles, alligators, pythons, and so on in that much space for over a year!
Here's a doozy from Dr. Scofield in the note to verse 19 in his Reference Bible: "Modern ships carry hundreds of live beasts, with their food, besides scores of human beings." Hundreds? So What?! We’ve got 70,000!
Another helpful website suggests that "the vast majority of these [species] are capable of surviving in water and would not have needed to be brought aboard the ark." Without food?
Now, I must tell you, some True Believers claim that it wasn't a pair of every critter. They play with the wording "after their kind" in a way that seems to ignore the words "two of every living thing," like this:
[T]he types of animals shown [in art] boarding the Ark are almost always inaccurate. You regularly see two lions, two tigers, two zebras, two horses, and two of every other popular animal that the artist could squeeze into the frame. But Noah did not need to bring both horses and zebras since these creatures are from the same kind--he just needed to bring two of the horse kind. Similarly, since they are both members of the cat kind, Noah did not need to bring two lions and two tigers; he just needed to bring two representatives of the cat kind. [Emphasis added]
Hear this: This passage is from an organization that has built its mission on denying evolution; this "explanation" seems to dash that denial to bits. In order to squeeze all those beasties onto the ark, they would suggest that some unknown ur-cat evolved into lions and tigers. True, there are "ligers" and "tigons"--lion-tiger hybrids distinguished by which species is the sire and which the dam--but they don't occur in the wild, and though the females are fertile, the males are not. The existence of these hybrids does not negate the speciation of their parents. And yes, zebras can produce hybrids, but the offspring are usually stunted in growth, and infertile. (And donkey-horse match-ups produce the mule, which is also usually infertile.)
This same group has on their website:
Evolution is the supposed process by which the first cell evolved into the diversity of life we see today. Natural selection and mutations are considered its driving force. However, evolution has never been observed, and natural selection and mutations cannot add the information necessary to change one kind of creature into another.
Note the weasel word "kind" in that statement. They're hedging their bets. But elsewhere they say unequivocally,
So, if evolution can't explain how humans came to be (or any other living thing, for that matter), what can? The Bible. Yep, God's Word.
The Bible provides an eyewitness account of how the universe and all life came to be. There's no speculation or strange interpretation needed. You can just read how God created everything in six days a few thousand years ago. Simple. Factual.
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My whole essay is written to say: balderdash. I want my myths to be scientifically accurate. Don't try to tell me that there is no evolution, but that the ark carried these sort of genetic blanks that could be stamped with all the many species sans evolution-- especially if you are a young-earther and expect me to believe that this all happened in a matter of "a few thousand years"!
No, the ark as described is not big enough to accommodate the load that has been put on it by this story.
Noah's Ark (1846), by the American folk painter Edward Hicks.
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And now for the Texts and Footnotes.
The Text: The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men Beget Giants
6:1 And it happened when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
6:2 That the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took as wives all whom they chose.
6:3 And the LORD said, "My spirit shall not always strive with man, since he also is flesh: yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years."
6:4 There were giants on the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God lay with the daughters of men, and [the women] bore children to them, their children became mighty men of renown in the days of old.
6:3 one hundred and twenty years: There are two ways to understand this. Some say that the god is stating the age to which a person should live--long, but considerably shortened from the earlier days. (It's an odd coincidence that the Chinese also used to believe that 120 years was a "normal" lifespan: 60 active or yang years, and 60 yin years in retirement.) The other interpretation is that the god is here issuing a warning: Noah has 120 years to try to turn things around, presumably by preaching, after which--if he fails--comes the deluge.
The Text: The Wicked to Be Punished
6:5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
6:6 And the LORD repented that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
6:7 And the LORD said, "I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth: man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, for I repent that I have made them."
6:8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.
6:8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD: Not just a Bible verse, but a really catchy gospel number! In all his generation, Noah was the only human qualified to bring his family aboard the ark.
The Text: The Generations of Noah
6:9 These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.
6:10 And Noah fathered three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
6:11 The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
6:12 And God looked upon the earth, and saw that it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
6:13 And God said to Noah, "The end of all flesh has come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through [mankind]; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
6:9 walked with God: Only two men in the Bible are said to have "walked with God": Noah and Enoch (of Seth; see Gen. 5:21-24). For his holiness, Enoch was taken up bodily into heaven; for Noah's, he was spared from the flood.
The Text: Ark Design 101
6:14 "Make an ark of gopher wood; make rooms in the ark, and seal it inside and out with pitch.
6:15 "And this is how you shall make it: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.
6:16 "Make a window in the ark, and in a cubit shall you finish it above; and set the door in the side of the ark; make it with lower, second, and third stories.
6:14 ark: The English word "ark" is almost unknown outside of the Bible (and related theme parks). Even in the Bible, it can be a boat, a basket, or a box: a boat for Noah; the basket in which Moses was found; and the Ark of the Covenant, a sacred storage chest that was recovered in 1936 by Indiana Jones. By analogy to the last example, the word is used to describe a cabinet in modern synagogues; from the first we get the nickname for a life car, a "watertight container used in marine rescue operations." But mainly, if you hear "ark," it will probably be Noah's, or the one of the Covenant (which, by the way, uses a different Hebrew word from the first those of Noah and baby Moses).
6:14 gopher wood: This is the only mention of "gopher" in the Bible, and is simply a transliteration of the Hebrew word used. No one quite knows what it is. Early translations--the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate--take it not as the type of wood, but as the shape of the wood. The Septuagint calls it "squared timber," and the Vulgate "smoothed (possibly planed) wood." Jewish sources make it "cedar"; modern translations, like the NIV, lean toward "cypress." Gesenius notes the similarity to the Hebrew word kopher, meaning "pitch," so it would just be "pitched wood" or perhaps a wood known for its pitch or resin, which would include pine, fir, cypress, cedar, and others. Gesenius cites others who note that G - F - R in gofer is fairly close to the K - P - R in kyparissos, the Greek original word for cypress (I would prefer not to get into voiced, unvoiced, and plosive sounds here).
6:14 rooms: actually, "nests," understood here to mean "cells"
6:15 cubits: See the mini-essay "Of Cubits and Critters" above.
6:16 window: The KJV version makes it really hard to figure out what's going on with the "window." "Make a window in the ark, and in a cubit shall you finish it above..." The NIV makes this much clearer: "Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around." Not only is this a better description of the ark, but it solves the problem of the stench of 70,000 critters, and the disposal of their excreta, as well!
The Text: The Noahic Covenant--A Preview
6:17 "And, behold, I, even I, will bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh that has the breath of life; and every thing that is on the earth shall die.
6:18 "But I will establish my covenant with you. You shall enter the ark: you, and your sons, and your wife, and your sons' wives with you.
6:18 you, and your sons...: So while yes, we are all descended from Adam and Eve, we are also all descended from Noah and his unnamed wife (whom I therefore call "Mrs. Noah," as does Tennessee Ernie in the video I shared).
The Text: Round 'Em Up!
See the mini-essay "Of Cubits and Critters" above.
6:19 "And bring into the ark two of every living thing, to keep alive with you; they shall be male and female.
6:20 "Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after its kind, two of every sort shall come to you, [so that you can] keep them alive.
6:21 "And take with you you all food that is eaten, and you shall gather it; and it shall be for food for you, and for them."
6:22 Noah did it; whatever God commanded him, that's what he did.
Note: This portion actually extends to Chapter 7 Verse 5, which includes specific directions about the type of animal (clean or unclean) and the number of each type to be included.
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And there ya have it. Next time, The Deluge: Genesis 7: The Great Flood Begins.
'Til soon!