Just out of curiosity, I'm hoping to get some feedback not so much on the content of the posts (which I hope people are giving anyway if they have thoughts on it) but on my own personal writing style. I know I have a tendency to get a little too relaxed in my writing which leads to run-on sentences and general verbosity. So far, I haven't been editing my work for anything but spelling, but perhaps it might serve the purpose of clarity if I tightened things up a bit?
As I said, feedback would be nice, and I can even take brutal criticism so long as it's both honest and constructive. (Did anyone but me actually notice that the last paragraph of the August 31st post was one huge sentence? Whether you noticed it or not, did it make it difficult to read?)
Thursday, September 01, 2005
According to all that God commanded him (Gen 6:11-22)
The SAB notes the supposed absurdity of destroying all living things to make the earth less violent. I'm not sure "absurdity" would be the right category, as it should be fairly obvious that without life, there is no violence and suffering. (Note that God's not the only one to come up with the idea of removing the source of the problem.) I think I do get the gist of what is being pointed out here, though, which is that the flood itself seems like a violent act. I don't know that anyone can deny that fact, and the best that anyone can do is suggest that the good of wiping out that violent and corrupt culture outweighed the violence of the act of wiping it out.
I was reading a philosophy book on the "problem of evil" the other day, and I realized that the theodicy that I tend to operate under is that since we (Jews and Christians) assume that God is omnipotent and good, and evil and suffering exist in the world, the only explanation must be that God has a moral justification for allowing evil to exist. One writer in the book who was talking about this concept claimed that it was a position that is neither provable or unprovable, which means nothing conclusive about the nature of God, but allows theologists in general a loophole to believe in a good and omnipotent God while still accepting that evil exists. Sometimes, I find it quite easy to see the justification behind what God does, but honestly not always. That doesn't mean that the justification is not there, though.
So now come some of the first of the scientific obstacles involved in this story. The SAB points out that a wooden vessel 450 feet long would be larger than any modernly-known wooden vessels, and most vessels of that size are very leaky and require support structures to hold them together. One thing that should be said in response to this (and it may make no difference scientifically, but it should actually be said in general) is that contrary to popular images of the "ark", there's no real reason to assume that this is a ship at all. A lot of Biblical scholars have taken the stance that this is something more akin to a barge, just a big wooden box sealed up with tar. Really, this passage must be a hard one for translators to deal with, as the Hebrew word for "ark" only appears elsewhere in Exodus 2, and the word for "gopher wood" is found nowhere else at all. (I thought it was rather funny to find that it's not even really a translation; the Hebrew word is actually 'atsei-gopher!) So we only really know the size, not the shape or the materials it was made out of. In the end, though, I'll honestly have to say that a lot of this has to be left up to God's hand on the whole matter, as I suggested way back a month ago. (If you didn't like that post, you're not going to like the rest of this one either.)
I'll actually be quite honest about all of this flood stuff, at least as far as I know the details, and I'm sure others who know more things will be more than glad to put them in the comments. The SAB notes the absurdity of an eighteen-inch square window in the ark being the only source of ventilation, but doesn't explain why. Have you ever been in a crowded room even with good ventilation? It gets stuffy. Now imagine an entire building that measures about 100,000 square feet stuffed to the gills with animals of every sort with only a tiny square window in the whole thing to give fresh air. It's not pretty.
Now, also contrary to popular view of the story, Noah is actually commanded to bring seven of some types of animals onto the ark in the next chapter. This is suggested to be a contradiction, and while it is confusing, I and many others tend to view the later instruction of "seven" to be a further specification, and something necessitated to allow for Noah's sacrifice in chapter eight.
There are a few interesting oddities to be noted about this, one of them being the concept of "clean" beasts before the creation of the kosher laws. Apparently the term refers to animals acceptable for sacrifice rather than acceptable for food, and Noah apparently knew which was which. The other oddity is one to give some fodder for the skeptics. Many textual critics of the Bible talk about the possibility that the Bible is actually edited together from multiple oral histories, and indeed, I believe it may be so. This particular story has a number of other much more subtle inconsistencies in the vocabulary that I wonder if a person would notice without having it spelled out for them? In any case, I'm admitting they're there, but I'll not go into details, leaving it up to the reader to figure out on their own or research elsewhere on the Internet.
The last hard part to swallow for this chapter is the final instruction to bring food on board for Noah's family and the animals. We find when we look ahead that Noah and all these creatures were in the ark for about a year. Let's take one animal: the elephant. An elephant apparently eats 150-200 pounds of food a day. Taken over a year, that's about 27 tons of food at minimum. Now we have two elephants (yes, I know there is more than one species of elephant, but there were at least two, and my point is that even using minimal estimates, it staggers the imagination) so double that and add drinking water, and then consider that 60 tons of food should eventually become 60 tons of elephant dung, and you see that just these two animals create a logistical nightmare. So I admit right now, without even going into further details that I could go into that this whole ark thing is physically impossible.
That said, let's get full Biblical context. I'll quote a couple verses.
I was reading a philosophy book on the "problem of evil" the other day, and I realized that the theodicy that I tend to operate under is that since we (Jews and Christians) assume that God is omnipotent and good, and evil and suffering exist in the world, the only explanation must be that God has a moral justification for allowing evil to exist. One writer in the book who was talking about this concept claimed that it was a position that is neither provable or unprovable, which means nothing conclusive about the nature of God, but allows theologists in general a loophole to believe in a good and omnipotent God while still accepting that evil exists. Sometimes, I find it quite easy to see the justification behind what God does, but honestly not always. That doesn't mean that the justification is not there, though.
So now come some of the first of the scientific obstacles involved in this story. The SAB points out that a wooden vessel 450 feet long would be larger than any modernly-known wooden vessels, and most vessels of that size are very leaky and require support structures to hold them together. One thing that should be said in response to this (and it may make no difference scientifically, but it should actually be said in general) is that contrary to popular images of the "ark", there's no real reason to assume that this is a ship at all. A lot of Biblical scholars have taken the stance that this is something more akin to a barge, just a big wooden box sealed up with tar. Really, this passage must be a hard one for translators to deal with, as the Hebrew word for "ark" only appears elsewhere in Exodus 2, and the word for "gopher wood" is found nowhere else at all. (I thought it was rather funny to find that it's not even really a translation; the Hebrew word is actually 'atsei-gopher!) So we only really know the size, not the shape or the materials it was made out of. In the end, though, I'll honestly have to say that a lot of this has to be left up to God's hand on the whole matter, as I suggested way back a month ago. (If you didn't like that post, you're not going to like the rest of this one either.)
I'll actually be quite honest about all of this flood stuff, at least as far as I know the details, and I'm sure others who know more things will be more than glad to put them in the comments. The SAB notes the absurdity of an eighteen-inch square window in the ark being the only source of ventilation, but doesn't explain why. Have you ever been in a crowded room even with good ventilation? It gets stuffy. Now imagine an entire building that measures about 100,000 square feet stuffed to the gills with animals of every sort with only a tiny square window in the whole thing to give fresh air. It's not pretty.
Now, also contrary to popular view of the story, Noah is actually commanded to bring seven of some types of animals onto the ark in the next chapter. This is suggested to be a contradiction, and while it is confusing, I and many others tend to view the later instruction of "seven" to be a further specification, and something necessitated to allow for Noah's sacrifice in chapter eight.
There are a few interesting oddities to be noted about this, one of them being the concept of "clean" beasts before the creation of the kosher laws. Apparently the term refers to animals acceptable for sacrifice rather than acceptable for food, and Noah apparently knew which was which. The other oddity is one to give some fodder for the skeptics. Many textual critics of the Bible talk about the possibility that the Bible is actually edited together from multiple oral histories, and indeed, I believe it may be so. This particular story has a number of other much more subtle inconsistencies in the vocabulary that I wonder if a person would notice without having it spelled out for them? In any case, I'm admitting they're there, but I'll not go into details, leaving it up to the reader to figure out on their own or research elsewhere on the Internet.
The last hard part to swallow for this chapter is the final instruction to bring food on board for Noah's family and the animals. We find when we look ahead that Noah and all these creatures were in the ark for about a year. Let's take one animal: the elephant. An elephant apparently eats 150-200 pounds of food a day. Taken over a year, that's about 27 tons of food at minimum. Now we have two elephants (yes, I know there is more than one species of elephant, but there were at least two, and my point is that even using minimal estimates, it staggers the imagination) so double that and add drinking water, and then consider that 60 tons of food should eventually become 60 tons of elephant dung, and you see that just these two animals create a logistical nightmare. So I admit right now, without even going into further details that I could go into that this whole ark thing is physically impossible.
That said, let's get full Biblical context. I'll quote a couple verses.
And I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot. -Deuteronomy 29:5The thing is, even without these verses, it should be fairly clear that if it's God's will that somebody would be able to get by for a long time on a little provision, then He will see to it that they manage to get by. Building the ark was a huge project, and it no doubt took Noah a long time to put it all together, but it was nothing compared to what God had to do to make it all work out. Why it was done that way, I do not know, but like many moments in the Bible, we see God asking a small step of faith from someone, and then He supplies the rest in a miraculous way.
For thus saith the LORD God of Israel, The barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the LORD sendeth rain upon the earth. And she went and did according to the saying of Elijah: and she, and he, and her house, did eat many days. And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the LORD, which he spake by Elijah. -1Kings 17:14-16
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
It repenteth me (Gen 6:6-10)
Okay, I've got to tell you this is one of the more difficult things to deal with in the Bible. Jewish theology takes a very hard-line stance that God does not change, period. (It's actually for this very reason that many Jews reject Christian theology, as they view the incarnation of Christ to be a "changing" of God's essential nature, which is easy to understand.) If God doesn't change, and indeed, even Christians believe that God doesn't change His mind at least, then what does it mean here and in a number of other places that God "repents" of something?
Probably, you have to look at the nature of the word itself. Interestingly enough, in the Hebrew this is a word with the same root that Noah's name comes from, and Noah's name means "rest" or "comfort". Actually, this word is translated most often as either "comfort" or "repent", and slightly more often the former. But enough Hebrew, I need to get to the point, or at least a point. What can we say about a word that can be translated as either "repent" or "comfort"? What do these terms have in common? I think the operative idea behind both senses of the word is "This has gone on long enough, so we will put a stop to it."
On a personal note, I myself have been doing a study of the concept of repentance, both for my personal spiritual walk, and for my understanding of theology. When a person becomes a Christian, theologically it is understood that one's salvation comes from the Lord, and only from the Lord. There is nothing one can do to earn it, one merely accepts it from God. Yet somewhere in the midst of this, there is a call for the believer to repent from sin. Is repenting from sin something one does in order to become a Christian, or is it something one does as a result of becoming a Christian? In either case, even if one has been a Christian for some time, repentance is something one has to deal with over and over, since becoming a Christian does not imply immediate perfection. So what is repentance? Repentance is deciding that the bad situation in one's life has gone on long enough, and it's going to stop. That may be repenting from a life separated from God, or it may be repenting from a particular habitual sin. A person probably never made a conscious decision to have habitual sin, nor did they purposefully separate themself from God, but they decide it's time to do something about it.
Here, God is looking at the world He created, and He's saying, "Alright, this has gone on long enough. The world is now so much of an evil place that something needs to be done, and I will comfort the good men of this world by ending the existence of the bad men." And I think, but I can't say for sure without reading through the list, that that's what God means whenever He "repents": that He is going to stop something from continuing.
The SAB goes onto say that the flood as a very concept is "cruel and violent". I actually agree. This is one of the first of many times in the Bible that God does something that I find quite shocking. The real question in the end is whether such an act was warranted. I think verse 5 was trying to hint at that, that evil had reached epidemic proportions, and there was really nothing left to do.
Was Noah perfect, though? The SAB quotes the KJV as saying "Noah was a just man and perfect." However, this is somewhat of a misquote. The KJV does not have a period there, and the rest of the sentence is important in two ways. The full sentence: "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God."
What does "...perfect in his generations..." mean? Here's a thought I have heard that makes sense in light of yesterday's post: Noah had a clear genealogy going back to Adam that didn't include any Nephilim. One of the things that God may have been trying to do is rid the world of the polluted genetic material of these "giants", and Noah, as well as being a pretty good guy, was also someone whose family was 100% human. It may have simply meant that he was a good guy in comparison to everyone else in the world, too.
I think the thing that really sets Noah apart is that he "walked with God" however. It seems pretty clear from the Bible as a whole that the thing God esteems most in a person is their devotion to Him. Noah is a person who wants to do right in the eyes of the Lord, so he spends time devoted to Him. That's what really makes him the right person for the job.
Final note before I wrap this up: I don't think Shem, Ham, and Japheth are triplets, and I've heard it suggested that in fact they may not have been born in that order, either, but were listed according to the importance of their descendants, Shem being the father of the Middle Eastern people, including the Jews, Ham being the father of the Canaanites, whose land eventually becomes Israel, and Japheth, whose descendants don't play a big role in the events of the O.T.
Probably, you have to look at the nature of the word itself. Interestingly enough, in the Hebrew this is a word with the same root that Noah's name comes from, and Noah's name means "rest" or "comfort". Actually, this word is translated most often as either "comfort" or "repent", and slightly more often the former. But enough Hebrew, I need to get to the point, or at least a point. What can we say about a word that can be translated as either "repent" or "comfort"? What do these terms have in common? I think the operative idea behind both senses of the word is "This has gone on long enough, so we will put a stop to it."
On a personal note, I myself have been doing a study of the concept of repentance, both for my personal spiritual walk, and for my understanding of theology. When a person becomes a Christian, theologically it is understood that one's salvation comes from the Lord, and only from the Lord. There is nothing one can do to earn it, one merely accepts it from God. Yet somewhere in the midst of this, there is a call for the believer to repent from sin. Is repenting from sin something one does in order to become a Christian, or is it something one does as a result of becoming a Christian? In either case, even if one has been a Christian for some time, repentance is something one has to deal with over and over, since becoming a Christian does not imply immediate perfection. So what is repentance? Repentance is deciding that the bad situation in one's life has gone on long enough, and it's going to stop. That may be repenting from a life separated from God, or it may be repenting from a particular habitual sin. A person probably never made a conscious decision to have habitual sin, nor did they purposefully separate themself from God, but they decide it's time to do something about it.
Here, God is looking at the world He created, and He's saying, "Alright, this has gone on long enough. The world is now so much of an evil place that something needs to be done, and I will comfort the good men of this world by ending the existence of the bad men." And I think, but I can't say for sure without reading through the list, that that's what God means whenever He "repents": that He is going to stop something from continuing.
The SAB goes onto say that the flood as a very concept is "cruel and violent". I actually agree. This is one of the first of many times in the Bible that God does something that I find quite shocking. The real question in the end is whether such an act was warranted. I think verse 5 was trying to hint at that, that evil had reached epidemic proportions, and there was really nothing left to do.
Was Noah perfect, though? The SAB quotes the KJV as saying "Noah was a just man and perfect." However, this is somewhat of a misquote. The KJV does not have a period there, and the rest of the sentence is important in two ways. The full sentence: "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God."
What does "...perfect in his generations..." mean? Here's a thought I have heard that makes sense in light of yesterday's post: Noah had a clear genealogy going back to Adam that didn't include any Nephilim. One of the things that God may have been trying to do is rid the world of the polluted genetic material of these "giants", and Noah, as well as being a pretty good guy, was also someone whose family was 100% human. It may have simply meant that he was a good guy in comparison to everyone else in the world, too.
I think the thing that really sets Noah apart is that he "walked with God" however. It seems pretty clear from the Bible as a whole that the thing God esteems most in a person is their devotion to Him. Noah is a person who wants to do right in the eyes of the Lord, so he spends time devoted to Him. That's what really makes him the right person for the job.
Final note before I wrap this up: I don't think Shem, Ham, and Japheth are triplets, and I've heard it suggested that in fact they may not have been born in that order, either, but were listed according to the importance of their descendants, Shem being the father of the Middle Eastern people, including the Jews, Ham being the father of the Canaanites, whose land eventually becomes Israel, and Japheth, whose descendants don't play a big role in the events of the O.T.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
The sons of God (Gen 6:1-5)
The "sons of God" is an understandably confusing phrase. It occurs five times in the O.T., and six times in the N.T., and in many of the places it appears, it's clear what it's referring to. Unfortunately, this is not really one of those times. In those appearances in the N.T., it's really a reference to our (Christians') relationship status to God due to our response to the person of Jesus Christ. I think we can pretty much rule out that interpretation here. All O.T. instances of the phrase outside of this chapter occur in the book of Job, where it is pretty much universally accepted that it is referring to the Heavenly spirit beings that we call "angels". Now, some people have tried the suggestion that "the sons of God" and "the daughters of men" refer to the descendants of Seth and Cain respectively, but I'm not sure there's good evidence for it. Whatever is going on, though, the fact that it's mentioned in two verses sandwiching a verse in which God says He's not happy with what's going on seems suggestive that it's not good.
Oh, but to answer the question that the SAB poses regarding the number of "sons" God has, you have to look at the subtleties of the language and the theology. Note that the verses calling Jesus God's only son actually say "only begotten son," and that word is important. Every other being called the "son" of God was either created by God ex nihilo, or was "adopted" into His family. In a sense, all human beings are God's children, but this terminology is talking about a special relationship, as is the relationship we find a few chapters from here between Abraham and Isaac, where I'll probably talk a little bit more about this.
Back to God's actual words in that sandwiched verse, He says of mankind that "yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." The SAB points this out as a possible contradiction to a verse in the Psalms claiming that men live to be only seventy. There's a lot that can be said about this. One thing is that of course either number being thought of as an estimate of how long a person might live is clearly an average. Not every man is going to live to be exactly 70, many will die young, some will live to be well over a hundred, so any specific counterexamples to this number are hardly breaking the general rule. It may very well be that the life expectancy at the time around the flood was quite different. Before the flood, we see the average life span of those people whose ages are given is right around 900 years old, while after the flood, the life span seems to quickly drop to about half of that, and continues dropping, tending towards the lower 100s (although admittedly never quite getting there). But lifespans aside, there is another possible meaning to this verse, and I think it's a likely one. When God says "yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years," what He may in fact mean is that the flood is going to come 120 years after the events being talked about here. Note that in the end of chapter 5, Noah is 500 years old, and the flood comes when he's 600, so it may be that the story is saying, "Around the same time that Noah was raising Shem, Ham, and Japheth, there was some stuff going on in the world that was making God very unhappy."
So what was making God so unhappy? I'll engage in some slightly wild speculation aided by verse 4. We've got giants, we've got "sons of God", and we've got some notable sexual unions happening. What is this all about? Believe it or not, it's a fairly commonly accepted concept that what's happening is procreation between human females and fallen angels. There is a theological doctrine that says that before the world was created, some of the angels in Heaven decided to rebel against God, and God kicked them out. (As some have pointed out to me, a lot of this we owe to Milton's "Paradise Lost" more than the Bible, but there is some Biblical basis for it.) After the fall, these creatures managed to gain free access to earth. The whole idea related to this short passage is that some of them figured out how to have sex with humans, and eventually, they somehow had children that, for whatever reason, were giants. (In the Hebrew, the word nephilim, translated "giants" actually comes from a root word meaning "fallen" or "cast down". It's also used in Numbers 13:33, where it's much more clearly referring to giants.) This was apparently an important part of the whole problem of the earth that led to God causing the flood.
Let me finish today's post with a look at verse 5, and what the SAB says concerning it. I think it's odd that in comparing this verse to 8:21, it's cited as an absurdity rather than a contradiction, but I guess sometimes it's a personal judgment call. Here, God says He's going to destroy every living thing because of the evil of men's imaginations, in the later verse, God says He's going to be nicer because of the same thing. I think you have to look at 8:21 more carefully.
Oh, but to answer the question that the SAB poses regarding the number of "sons" God has, you have to look at the subtleties of the language and the theology. Note that the verses calling Jesus God's only son actually say "only begotten son," and that word is important. Every other being called the "son" of God was either created by God ex nihilo, or was "adopted" into His family. In a sense, all human beings are God's children, but this terminology is talking about a special relationship, as is the relationship we find a few chapters from here between Abraham and Isaac, where I'll probably talk a little bit more about this.
Back to God's actual words in that sandwiched verse, He says of mankind that "yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." The SAB points this out as a possible contradiction to a verse in the Psalms claiming that men live to be only seventy. There's a lot that can be said about this. One thing is that of course either number being thought of as an estimate of how long a person might live is clearly an average. Not every man is going to live to be exactly 70, many will die young, some will live to be well over a hundred, so any specific counterexamples to this number are hardly breaking the general rule. It may very well be that the life expectancy at the time around the flood was quite different. Before the flood, we see the average life span of those people whose ages are given is right around 900 years old, while after the flood, the life span seems to quickly drop to about half of that, and continues dropping, tending towards the lower 100s (although admittedly never quite getting there). But lifespans aside, there is another possible meaning to this verse, and I think it's a likely one. When God says "yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years," what He may in fact mean is that the flood is going to come 120 years after the events being talked about here. Note that in the end of chapter 5, Noah is 500 years old, and the flood comes when he's 600, so it may be that the story is saying, "Around the same time that Noah was raising Shem, Ham, and Japheth, there was some stuff going on in the world that was making God very unhappy."
So what was making God so unhappy? I'll engage in some slightly wild speculation aided by verse 4. We've got giants, we've got "sons of God", and we've got some notable sexual unions happening. What is this all about? Believe it or not, it's a fairly commonly accepted concept that what's happening is procreation between human females and fallen angels. There is a theological doctrine that says that before the world was created, some of the angels in Heaven decided to rebel against God, and God kicked them out. (As some have pointed out to me, a lot of this we owe to Milton's "Paradise Lost" more than the Bible, but there is some Biblical basis for it.) After the fall, these creatures managed to gain free access to earth. The whole idea related to this short passage is that some of them figured out how to have sex with humans, and eventually, they somehow had children that, for whatever reason, were giants. (In the Hebrew, the word nephilim, translated "giants" actually comes from a root word meaning "fallen" or "cast down". It's also used in Numbers 13:33, where it's much more clearly referring to giants.) This was apparently an important part of the whole problem of the earth that led to God causing the flood.
Let me finish today's post with a look at verse 5, and what the SAB says concerning it. I think it's odd that in comparing this verse to 8:21, it's cited as an absurdity rather than a contradiction, but I guess sometimes it's a personal judgment call. Here, God says He's going to destroy every living thing because of the evil of men's imaginations, in the later verse, God says He's going to be nicer because of the same thing. I think you have to look at 8:21 more carefully.
And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.Note that God doesn't say that He won't destroy the world because of this evil in men's hearts initially; He first says He won't "curse the ground". I think this primarily hearkens back to the curse from chapter 3, which given this verse, may in fact show to be more of a punitive thing than I had said in my commentary there, but it's hard to say. In any case, I think the point that God may be making here is that the world keeps growing steadily more and more evil, and in the end, evil is largely its own punishment. Why does God need to add any more of a burden on to the life of man to remind him of the fallen state of the world, when mankind has to live with itself day after day? Not that things will be rosy and cheery and all good, but that things are just going to be largely left to their natural processes. Furthermore, in the case of the flood, which is tacked on as an ending clause to this verse, I think God is saying that once is enough.
Monday, August 29, 2005
And called their name Adam (Gen 5)
This is going to be fun, since despite the large number of notes in chapter 5 of the SAB, most of them are of the same nature, and so I think we can dispense of this whole chapter in one post. Let's see...
The first point that the SAB brings up is the verse I've used for the title here. "So the woman's name was Adam, too!" The SAB notes as an absurdity. Well, the answer is, "Yes." Sure, it's not something you get from a surface reading of the KJV, but most people know that "Adam" is the Hebrew word for "man", so in a symbolic sense and in a very real sense, we are all "Adam."
As I noted before, the Bible can admittedly be a bit sexist when it comes to details, and daughters are indeed very rarely mentioned. So while verse 4 contains the first mention of daughters, there may actually have been various children of both genders before Seth was born. I myself had often assumed that this genealogy was mentioning firstborns only, and that they were coincidentally only sons, but what's really very likely going on here is we're tracing the male lineage of Noah from Adam. Sons not in the lineage and all daughters are not worth mentioning by name apparently. Even Noah's wife and three daughters-in-law aren't named despite their apparent importance to the story that unfolds after this.
So the big repeated note throughout this chapter is essentially, "Man, these guys sure lived to be pretty old!" I've heard a lot of theories about why these guys had such extended lifespans, and suffice it to say that most of them boil down to simply being so soon after the fall. They were living in a world that was new and fresh, and there probably weren't all the modern problems of disease that we have in modern times. Most theologians do believe that Adam was created to be immortal, so it took some time before the system really broke down and people started dying of natural causes. Whatever it is going on here, we'll see a contrast in the next genealogy. While having no particular value, I nonetheless present a little diagram I threw together last week when I was looking ahead at this chapter:
Enoch is an odd one, isn't he? The SAB has a lot to say about him, and indeed, he's strange. Let me address the three questions raised by the SAB in response to Enoch's story.
(1) Must everyone die? I suppose the SAB ought to have included the references to the prophet Elijah that it did in the second question here. (And it might have considered even discussing some odd interpretations of John 21:22 that are out there.) Yes, there are in fact two people in the Bible that didn't die: Enoch and Elijah. This coming despite the two verses quoted in the right-hand column. While the verses on the left are in some cases misunderstood, I'm going to focus on those two right-hand verses. When the Bible says "...death passed upon all men," we have to realize that there is room for exceptions. If there are a bunch of people going to sea in a leaky boat, and you say to them, "Everyone in that boat is going to drown," that doesn't mean that they can't get out of the boat and be safe. For whatever reason, Enoch and Elijah were allowed to "get out of the boat" if you will. The second verse is another matter that, if indeed a skeptic were to reject my reasoning here, the SAB needs to add some more notes to passages like John 11. Not only do we have a couple folks (at least) who don't die at all, but contrary to being "appointed unto men once to die," we have about half a dozen people in the Bible that die more than once, Lazarus being simply the best-known of the bunch. The real sense of this verse, as taken by theologians and run-of-the-mill Christians, is that under normal circumstances, people have one physical death to look forward to. The Bible gives us less than ten people that have non-normal circumstances in regards to the matter of death, so that's well over 99.99% of the world conforming to a literal interpretation of Hebrews 9:27.
(2) Has anyone ever ascended into heaven? This is a simpler one. My take on this is that nobody has ascended into Heaven and thereafter given testimony of it on earth. We do know that two people ascended to Heaven, and in fact, a lot of others ascended after their death, but what Jesus is saying in John 3:13 is that if you're looking for someone to tell you what Heaven is like, you've got nobody other than Jesus with that firsthand knowledge. (Of course, the SAB could consider this verse next to 2Cor. 12, although it describes an event after Jesus left.)
(3) Was Enoch the seventh from Adam? Yes, if you count Adam as #1, which is not at all unreasonable to do.
As a last note for this chapter, I'd like to take a side trip into Hebrew and talk about the meaning of these names. Maybe you've heard this before, I find it all fascinating. We know from the text that "Seth" means "appointed", and "Noah" means "comfort". The other names all mean something as well. The most interesting name on the list is probably Methuselah, whose name some have said means "his death will bring it." Methuselah died the same year as the flood.
The first point that the SAB brings up is the verse I've used for the title here. "So the woman's name was Adam, too!" The SAB notes as an absurdity. Well, the answer is, "Yes." Sure, it's not something you get from a surface reading of the KJV, but most people know that "Adam" is the Hebrew word for "man", so in a symbolic sense and in a very real sense, we are all "Adam."
As I noted before, the Bible can admittedly be a bit sexist when it comes to details, and daughters are indeed very rarely mentioned. So while verse 4 contains the first mention of daughters, there may actually have been various children of both genders before Seth was born. I myself had often assumed that this genealogy was mentioning firstborns only, and that they were coincidentally only sons, but what's really very likely going on here is we're tracing the male lineage of Noah from Adam. Sons not in the lineage and all daughters are not worth mentioning by name apparently. Even Noah's wife and three daughters-in-law aren't named despite their apparent importance to the story that unfolds after this.
So the big repeated note throughout this chapter is essentially, "Man, these guys sure lived to be pretty old!" I've heard a lot of theories about why these guys had such extended lifespans, and suffice it to say that most of them boil down to simply being so soon after the fall. They were living in a world that was new and fresh, and there probably weren't all the modern problems of disease that we have in modern times. Most theologians do believe that Adam was created to be immortal, so it took some time before the system really broke down and people started dying of natural causes. Whatever it is going on here, we'll see a contrast in the next genealogy. While having no particular value, I nonetheless present a little diagram I threw together last week when I was looking ahead at this chapter:
Enoch is an odd one, isn't he? The SAB has a lot to say about him, and indeed, he's strange. Let me address the three questions raised by the SAB in response to Enoch's story.
(1) Must everyone die? I suppose the SAB ought to have included the references to the prophet Elijah that it did in the second question here. (And it might have considered even discussing some odd interpretations of John 21:22 that are out there.) Yes, there are in fact two people in the Bible that didn't die: Enoch and Elijah. This coming despite the two verses quoted in the right-hand column. While the verses on the left are in some cases misunderstood, I'm going to focus on those two right-hand verses. When the Bible says "...death passed upon all men," we have to realize that there is room for exceptions. If there are a bunch of people going to sea in a leaky boat, and you say to them, "Everyone in that boat is going to drown," that doesn't mean that they can't get out of the boat and be safe. For whatever reason, Enoch and Elijah were allowed to "get out of the boat" if you will. The second verse is another matter that, if indeed a skeptic were to reject my reasoning here, the SAB needs to add some more notes to passages like John 11. Not only do we have a couple folks (at least) who don't die at all, but contrary to being "appointed unto men once to die," we have about half a dozen people in the Bible that die more than once, Lazarus being simply the best-known of the bunch. The real sense of this verse, as taken by theologians and run-of-the-mill Christians, is that under normal circumstances, people have one physical death to look forward to. The Bible gives us less than ten people that have non-normal circumstances in regards to the matter of death, so that's well over 99.99% of the world conforming to a literal interpretation of Hebrews 9:27.
(2) Has anyone ever ascended into heaven? This is a simpler one. My take on this is that nobody has ascended into Heaven and thereafter given testimony of it on earth. We do know that two people ascended to Heaven, and in fact, a lot of others ascended after their death, but what Jesus is saying in John 3:13 is that if you're looking for someone to tell you what Heaven is like, you've got nobody other than Jesus with that firsthand knowledge. (Of course, the SAB could consider this verse next to 2Cor. 12, although it describes an event after Jesus left.)
(3) Was Enoch the seventh from Adam? Yes, if you count Adam as #1, which is not at all unreasonable to do.
As a last note for this chapter, I'd like to take a side trip into Hebrew and talk about the meaning of these names. Maybe you've heard this before, I find it all fascinating. We know from the text that "Seth" means "appointed", and "Noah" means "comfort". The other names all mean something as well. The most interesting name on the list is probably Methuselah, whose name some have said means "his death will bring it." Methuselah died the same year as the flood.
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