The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim (30 page)

Why Noah and his immediate family were seemingly the only ones immune from this great watery judgment of God is significant. Genesis 6:9 says, “Noah was a just man.” According to Judeo-Christian teaching, Noah stood out among the rest of humanity as an example of righteousness and godliness in a world that had gone completely insane with perverse corruption around him. Like Enoch before him, Noah also “walked with God.” This is where most commentators and bible teachers seem to come to a screeching halt, falling far short of—as the late, effervescent radio personality Paul Harvey used to say—the rest of the story.

There was another reason why Noah was spared. And this reason goes far deeper than the surface issue of merely following God or being a “good believer.” The greatest cause of frustration over this issue is the fact that it seems to have escaped most commentators either through ignorance of the language of the text, or lack of desire to broach these topics beyond the surface message. Genesis 6:9 says that Noah was “perfect in his generation.” Is the text implying moral and spiritual perfection? Not in the least. Genesis 9:20-23 disproves any such perfection:

“20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. 21 When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked.”

(Genesis 9:20-23)

What was the first recorded act of Noah in the Book of Genesis, after the events of the Great Flood? He got drunk. (And who wouldn’t?) I think that if I had just spent the last 120 years building a huge barge as a repository for every species of animal in the known world, and spent four to six months in those closed quarters with my wife and kids, tending to the menagerie, and watching the total and complete destruction of living thing on earth, the first thing I would most probably do when all the puddles had dried up is thank God for my salvation, and hit that bottle of 21-year-old single malt Highland Scotch stashed in my overnight bag. Noah was as predictably human as you and me.

So why does the biblical account call him “perfect”? What is the meaning of this word? The Hebrew word is
tamiym
[
]
¹⁷
and comes
from the primitive root word
taman
[
]. This means “complete, whole, entire, sound, without blemish” (see also: Exodus 12:5, 29:1, Leviticus 1:3). In its primary meaning, it does not refer to any moral or spiritual quality or superiority, but to
physical
purity. Noah was uncontaminated by the bloodlines of the Watchers and their offspring, the Nephilim. He was also of the line of Abel, the seed of
Adam
[
] not of the serpent’s bloodline as carried through the descendents of Cain. Noah alone had preserved their pedigree and kept it pure, in spite of prevailing corruption brought about by the fallen angels.
¹⁸
What the language is telling us in Genesis
Chapter 6
is that Noah’s bloodline had remained free of genetic contamination, be it angelic or alien in nature. Noah was pure human being, through and through.

Flavius Josephus, a Palestinian, wrote
Antiquities of the Jews
to educate the Roman-Hellenistic world about Judaism and the history of the Jews. In it he recounts the tale of the Watchers, Nephilim, and Noah as follows:

“For many angels of God accompanied with women, and begat sons that proved unjust, and despisers of all that was good, on account of the confidence they had in their own strength; for the tradition is, that these men did what resembled the acts of those whom the Grecians call giants. But Noah was very uneasy at what they did; and being displeased at their conduct, persuaded them to change their dispositions and their acts for the better: but seeing they did not yield to him, but were slaves to their wicked pleasures, he was afraid they would kill him, together with his wife and children, and those they had married; so he departed out of that land.
¹⁹
”

Despite the rather warmed-milk version of events given by Flavius Josephus, the overt implication is, then, that all other human families on the Earth had been contaminated by the blood of the Nephilim, save for Noah and his children. And if the biblical implication is that
humanity was completely tainted by the blood of the serpent as represented in the lines of the Nephilim, it is no wonder that God pronounced such a universal fiat of judgment.

As for the fallen members of the Divine Council who descended to the earth to commit themselves to interbreeding with humans, participating in the abomination, God put them in custody “in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6). This is sometimes interpreted as Tartarus or the “nether realms” (2 Peter 2:4). In Greek mythology, Tartarus (
) is a deep, gloomy place, a pit, or an abyss used as a dungeon of torment and suffering that resides beneath the underworld. In the
Gorgias
, Plato (c. 400
BCE
) wrote that souls were judged after death and those who received punishment were sent to Tartarus, and it is only known in Hellenistic Jewish literature from the Greek text of 1 Enoch 20:2, where the archangel Uriel is the jailer of the 200 Watchers who sinned by cohabiting with human women and producing the bloodline of the Nephilim.
²⁰
It is, further, interesting to note that even Peter—“Saint Peter,” the big fisherman, the “rock” upon which Christ would build His church, the friend and disciple of Jesus and the apostle who wrote the New Testament Books of first and second Peter—refers to the Greek mythological place of punishment in the afterlife:

“4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to Tartarus, putting them in chains of darkness in gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment; 5 if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; 6 if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; 7 and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless 8 (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)—9 if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from
trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment. 10 This is especially true of those who follow the corrupt desire of the flesh and despise authority.”

(2 Peter 2:4-10)

The punishment was reserved for those fallen who had participated in the great seeding of the human bloodline, and would also explain why some fallen angels are kept in custody and others are free to roam the heavens and torment mankind. Such a severe and dramatic punishment presupposed a severe and dramatic sin, something infinitely more evil and more sinister than mere mixed marriages. It was nothing less than the fallen, perhaps even demonic, realm attempting to pervert the bloodlines of the human world. By genetic control and the production of hybrids, the serpent of the Garden of Eden, and those who left their place on the Divine Council, following him, were out to rob God of the people He had made for Himself. The serpent character in the Bible, as we examined earlier, was none other than the leader of the fallen. And were the purpose of this book to examine Lucifer, the Star of the Morning, the Glory of God, and a Prince of the Divine Council, we would say a lot more about the implications, but we’ll save that for another time. Suffice it to say that if the serpent from the garden who fathered the very first of the Nephilim in Cain had succeeded in corrupting in entirety the human race, he would have hindered the coming of the perfect Son of God, the promised “seed of the man,” who would defeat the fallen and restore man’s dominion (Genesis 3:15).

In what is considered to be the very first Messianic prophecy in the Bible, God said to the serpent character in the Garden of Eden:

“15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

(Genesis 3:15)

The bloodline of the serpent was manifested in Cain, his offspring conceived during the seduction of Eve in the Garden of Eden. The bloodline of the woman was manifested in her son Abel, whom Eve
conceived with Adam. The prophetic implication of this verse in Genesis is that the Messiah would be born through pure human bloodlines, the seed of Adam and Eve, uncorrupted by the blood of the serpent and his host of fallen Watchers. That is why you find the lineage of Mary, the wife of Joseph and mother to the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ, being traced through King David and all the way back to Adam, through the younger son Abel.

According to Christian theology, if the bloodlines of the Nephilim had by any means prevented the birth of the “only begotten” Son of God, they would obviously have averted their own doom. It was for this reason, according to Christian theology, that God drowned all of mankind in the Great Flood of Noah.

There is a state of what I will call “contingent dualism” at play here: Had the bloodlines of the serpent and the Watchers succeeded in contaminating all of humanity, there would have been no immaculately born Son of God, who the Jewish Messianic prophecies referred to as the “Kinsman Redeemer,” the seed of the man, the divine savior of our own bloodline who would take away the sins of the world. Because the bloodline of the Watchers was eliminated in the flood, the pure human genealogies would be allowed to continue through the pure human sons of Noah, producing a messiah of pure human birth.