Biblical Commentary

On Genesis, Part 28: Speculative Altruism

In our last presentation of this commentary on Genesis, which was titled A Father of Nations, we hope to have illustrated at least some of the cohesion between the promises of Yahweh God to Abraham which Moses had recorded in Genesis, and the interpretation and application of those promises in the ministry of Paul of Tarsus which are recorded in at least several of his epistles. Paul, having professed that his struggle was for the twelve tribes of Israel and the promises which Yahweh God had made to the fathers, which he interpreted “as it is written”, referencing the very promises to Abraham which are found in these chapters of Genesis, had clearly taught that the Gospel messages of the promises of redemption and mercy and eternal life in Christ were pertinent to the children of Israel alone [1]. Then, in relation to the covenants of God, Paul also explained that they too were exclusively for the children of Israel, an Israel which he himself had described as his “kinsmen according to the flesh” [2].

So Paul is certainly a witness to the exclusivity of the New Covenant with the children of Israel, and he had told the Romans, in an epistle which was demonstrably written before his arrest in 58 AD, “that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world”, and later in that epistle, concerning the Gospel of Christ, he asked a rhetorical question and made another profession where we read: “17 So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. 18 But I say, Have they not heard? Yes verily, their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.” [3] Here are two professions from Paul’s epistle to the Romans, that in his time the Gospel of Christ had already been disseminated throughout what he had perceived was the entire world. Yet at this time, there is absolutely no evidence of any Christians outside of the Roman world, and the other apostles, those who were not with Paul, were still in Antioch or with James in Jerusalem [4].

On Genesis, Part 27: A Father of Nations

Discussing Genesis chapter 16 we described The Vanity of Ishmael, which shall continue to be manifest as we proceed through these subsequent chapters, and as we hope to discuss later in this commentary on Genesis, it is also manifest in history unto this very day, once his descendants are properly identified in the modern world. In that last presentation, we had postulated that the first aspect of Ishmael’s vanity was that he could never fulfill the role for which Abram and Sarai had believed he would be born, which was to be Abram’s heir, the seed of the promises which Abram had from God. So while the plan for his birth had originally belonged to Sarai, Yahweh God clearly had another plan, as we shall see here in Genesis chapter 17, and here His plan shall finally be fully revealed to Abram and Sarai. This is another example of many in Scripture, that Yahweh provides information to men only on a need-to-know basis, as He sees fit, and in any event, the actions of men fulfill His will whether or not that process can ever be perceived by the men themselves. The prophecies exist only so that men may look back and see that Yahweh is God.

As we proceed here, Ishmael continues to be a subject of Genesis and shall remain in our discussion, and while Hagar had already received a promise of her own, that her seed through the unborn child in her womb would become a great nation, here we shall see that Abraham was destined to be a father of many nations, and Ishmael had no share in that promise or in subsequent related promises. Another aspect of the vanity of Ishmael, the fact that all of his seed would apparently be, or become, bastards, we may not discuss again until later chapters of Genesis, where both his descendants and those of Esau are described in Genesis chapters 25, 28 and 36.

On Genesis, Part 26: The Vanity of Ishmael

As we had discussed while having seen The Victories of Abraham in Genesis chapter 15, Abram was given great promises by Yahweh God, who also made many of those promises while binding Himself alone in an unconditional covenant, which is a sure sign that they shall be fulfilled regardless of the deeds of men. Among these is a promise that his seed would ultimately displace the current inhabitants of the land which he had been promised. Those inhabitants were listed as ten tribes of people, five of which were descended from Canaan, at least in part, which are the Hittites, Amorites, Girgashites, Jebusites, and Canaanites, these last whom, for reasons we have already stated, we would venture to identify more specifically as the Sidonians. The other five tribes were not descended from Canaan, and ostensibly, they were not even descended from Adam through Noah. The origins of two of these tribes are known from Scripture, which are the Kenites and the Rephaim. They are the descendants of Cain, and a particular family of the Nephilim. While the other three are unknown, it cannot be assumed that they are of Noah, since the purpose for the genealogies and the writing of this history in this manner was so that the children of Israel in the time of Moses could know the nature of their enemies and be able to identify them as they come to possess the land which Abram was promised, as opposed to the identification of their surrounding kindred nations who are listed in Genesis chapter 10. For that reason, we must account the Kenizzites, Kadmonites and Perizzites as having been aboriginal, and also related to the ancient Nephilim, as the meanings of some of their names also suggest. That same assertion would also be true of the Zuzims, or “roving creatures” who were mentioned in Genesis chapter 14.

So ostensibly, it is for this reason that Yahweh had instructed the children of Israel to completely eradicate or drive out all of these ten tribes, because, as we have also documented in our presentation on The Vanquished where we discussed these tribes, the Canaanites had a proclivity to practise miscegenation, which is race-mixing, with their neighbors, and these tribes were all dwelling together in Canaan for at least six hundred years until this point where Abram is promised their displacement. So in essence, and regardless of what we may think of Canaan himself, considering the circumstances of his birth, the Canaanites were breaking that same law that Adam and Eve and the children of Adam had transgressed in Genesis chapters 3 and 6, which is not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Their first fathers were given this law by Yahweh God, and they have no real excuse for not keeping it, except that they had forsaken Him at a much earlier time than this.

On Genesis, Part 25: The Vanquished

In our last presentation in this Genesis commentary we had discussed The Victories of Abraham and how, with Yahweh God as his Shield, as we read in the opening verse of this 15th chapter of Genesis, the patriarch was able to overcome the kings of Elam and Mesopotamia, to rescue his nephew Lot and recover his estate, to gain the blessings of Melchizedek the king of Salem, and also to overcome the king of Sodom and dispense of his goods without having profitted from the Sodomites. That in itself should also be an example to us, as Sodom is once again prevalent in our society today. [I know, it is a pun, but it is an appropriate pun.] All of these things were personal victories for Abram, which were made possible only because he had been granted the mercy and favor of Yahweh God.

Doing that, Yahweh had once again made several additional promises and an unconditional and one-sided covenant with Abram, where Yahweh had placed all the burden of fulfillment on Himself, while requiring nothing of Abram. This is made evident where it is described that His essence had passed through the pieces of dead sacrificial animals in the manner in which ancient covenants had been made. We had established that this was a binding covenant and described its significance from several ancient sources. The first of these was a letter of official business by an official in the government of ancient Mari in what is now Syria. While the letter itself is difficult to date, Mari is generally said to have flourished from about 2900 to 1759 BC, so the letter probably predates the time of Abram. Then we cited an oath given to be made by soldiers of the ancient Hittite empire, which thrived for several centuries beginning shortly after the time of Abram. Then, after citing a recollection of oaths described in Homer’s Iliad, which recounts events from about the beginning of the 12th century BC, we cited a Hittite treaty which is dated to the 14th century BC, and finally, an event from Scripture which is recorded in Jeremiah chapter 34, which described men of Judah who had bound themselves to an oath in the same manner which Yahweh had done here in Genesis chapter 15. All of these witnesses together serve to prove that our interpretation of this chapter is certain: that the covenant which Yahweh gave to Abram, that his seed which would come from his own loins would become a people as numerous as the stars and ultimately inherit the earth, is absolutely unconditional and shall indeed be fulfilled on those same terms, “as it is written.” When Yahweh instructed Abram to do something, Abram had acted only because he believed that Yahweh would do these things for him, and he was successful in all of his endeavors.

On Genesis, Part 24: The Victories of Abraham

In our last presentation in this commentary on Genesis, we left Abram in The Wild West as the kings of Elam and Mesopotamia had pillaged Sodom and Gomorrah. Where the supposed defenders of those cities were faced with the prospect of battle, we read that “the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, and fell there [in the valley of Siddim]; and they that remained fled to the mountain.” So in their end, the depraved Sodomites proved to be cowards, and could not stand before the formidable invading armies. There it was also evident, that Sodom and its companion cities were not considered a part of the land of Canaan, but had been subjects of the kings of Mesopotamia, who at this time were themselves subject to the king of Elam, according to the account as it is presented here in Genesis chapter 14. That Elam had subjected the kings of Mesopotamia at this time is apparently something that the secular records have not revealed. However as we also explained, the history of this period in the 19th century BC is incompletely represented in surviving records. The only way in which any of the history of distant antiquity can be known is with the discovery and deciphering of ancient inscriptions.

But even without ancient inscriptions to support any particular event described in the Bible, we hope to have exhibited thus far in our Genesis commentary that the Scripture certainly is reliable, once it is properly correlated with what we can know from the historical and ancient records. Wherever there is ancient history which can be known, the knowledge does not conflict with the words of Scripture, and more often than not, supports Scripture. While the churches have never properly made the necessary correlations, all those who claim that the Bible is not historical are liars. Moses was not a fool writing fairy tales. Rather, he was educated as a prince in Egypt, and his books were respected for 2,000 years, as attested to in the words of Manetho, Hecataeus of Abdera, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo of Cappadocia, Flavius Josephus, and there is no reason to disrespect him today. While critics may find fault in each of those men, they were nevertheless serious scholars and historians of their own time, who were in turn respected by Christian scholars in Europe for many centuries. Attempts to discredit this history are only a couple of centuries old, and they all have one source: the Jewish culture of critique through which Jews have sought to subvert and deconstruct everything of value in European Christian society. But the pompous arrogance and abject ignorance of churchmen over those same centuries have failed to defend Christianity from the constant onslaught of Jewish propaganda, and now all of Christendom is in peril. But of course, the words of Moses are also upheld by Yahshua Christ. So even at the precipice of Sodom and Gomorrah, the substance of the unconditional promises of Yahweh God inform us that until the very end Abram shall remain victorious.

On Genesis, Part 23: The Wild West

In our last presentation of this Genesis commentary we discussed The Sojourn of Abram, who had departed from Haran and travelled through Bethel, or ancient Luz, even as far as Egypt, upon which leaving he had returned to Bethel. Doing this, we also speculated as to why he may have been settled in the land of Canaan, apparently because at least most of the city-states of the region were subject to the Egyptians. So Abraham and his descendants would remain under the Egyptian sphere of influence, if not directly under Egyptian control, until the time of the Exodus. Ostensibly, that would shelter them from the turmoil of the rise and fall of the Canaanite empires to the north and east which was about to transpire over the subsequent centuries, namely those of the Hittites, the Hurrian Mitanni Kingdom, and the Babylonian empire of the Amorites.

As the Akkadian empire of the 3rd millennium BC had weakened, a host of contenders sought to take its place, such as the dynasty of the Gutians, and the so-called fifth dynasty of Uruk, and the so-called third dynasty of Ur, which came to the end of its rule shortly before the birth of Abram. But these aspiring empires were all short-lived, and as the Hittite and Hurrian kingdoms began to rise to the status of empire, the Amorites had exploited the opportunity of a power vacuum to become influential in Mesopotamia, where they established themselves in Babylon and rose to assume the so-called First Babylonian Empire. That is how academics refer to the Babylonian empire of the Amorites, and although in the past we ourselves have preferred to use that designation for the empire of Nimrod, here in this Genesis commentary that would only cause confusion. The later Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar was at least mostly Chaldaean in substance, and during the time of the Amorite dominance even most of Babylonia had apparently remained ethnically Kassite, or more commonly in English, Chaldaean.

On Genesis, Part 22: The Sojourn

As we have calculated and presented it in our Genesis chronology, some time around 1880 BC the patriarch Abraham was called by Yahweh to leave Haran, which we believe, for reasons we explained in our recent presentation on The Call of Abraham, was evidently his ancestral homeland before his father had moved to Ur. In Haran, Abraham had also been given many promises by Yahweh, or at that time, simply God Almighty, the one true God who could not have been known to him previously. However this had actually transpired we can only imagine, but Abram, as he should be called at this point, must have readily been convinced that this god who had spoken to him is the true God, because he is portrayed as having immediately acted in accordance with His calling.

In a sense, Abram was very similar in certain ways to his ancestor Noah. Noah had overcome a world of sin which was inundated by water. Abram in turn was chosen to overcome a world of sin which was inundated by lies. As Paul of Tarsus had explained in Acts chapter 17, Yahweh God had “26 … made from one every nation of men to dwell upon all the face of the earth, appointing the times ordained and the boundaries of their settlements,” which is a reference to the division of nations seen here in Genesis chapters 10 and 11, for which “27 to seek God. If surely then they would seek after Him then they would find Him…”, yet it is evident that none of them ever sought Him up to the point at which Yahweh had called Abraham. Ostensibly, Abraham was chosen as a vessel to carry the heritage of Adam through a deluge of lies. While Noah was an example of the importance of preserving the genetic purity of the race of Adam, Abraham was called as an example of the importance of seeking the Will of God and, once it is found, of maintaining the Word of God within that race. But while we cannot know whether Abraham had sought God, it is clear that he became obedient to God once he was addressed by Him.

On Genesis, Part 21: The Call of Abraham

The chronology of Genesis is quite important to us, since if the chronology conflicts with ancient history, from things which we can know with certainty from archaeology and ancient records, then we cannot defend the historical validity of Genesis. But if we carefully piece together a chronology from Biblical, archaeological and historical sources, as we hope to have done here, then we may establish the fact that the Biblical chronology does not conflict with ancient history, and therefore we can defend Genesis as being historical – so long as it is understood to be historical only within the context of the Adamic race, which is the White race. Doing that, we may also better understand the state of the world out of which Abram had been called. So in our last presentation here, The Tower of Babel, we hope to have demonstrated as facts both the date of the flood of Noah as having been several hundred years before the earliest records of the Sumerian language, and that there are no records of other languages which precede the division of languages described in Genesis chapter 11, an event which is stated to have happened in the days of Peleg.

So our date for the flood, as we can best reckon it, is about 3187 BC. The popular sources we have cited for the earliest appearance of the Sumerian language places it about 2900 BC. Our date for the life of Peleg is that he was born around the 2793rd year of Adam, and died about the 3132nd year of Adam. This places his life, as we reckoned it, to have been from about 2656 BC to 2317 BC, and the popular sources date the earliest record of the Akkadian language to 2500 BC, very close to the middle of that period and therefore with all certainty reflecting the truth of the statement that “in his days was the earth divided”, as we read in Genesis chapter 10 (10:25). No other Western or Near Eastern languages are attested before these, in spite of conjecture concerning findings such as the so-called Vinča symbols or other ancient relics. However concerning those things, we must also bear in mind that the Nephilim have an unbroken history in the Near East and in Anatolia which is of far greater antiquity than that of the original Genesis chapter 10 Adamic nations. Apparently, what we know as Sumerian may have also been their language. The cities of Sumer and the Levant had various kings from among the Nephilim, such as Gilgamesh or Og of Bashan. We hope to discuss the presence of the Nephilim further when we encounter passages which mention them in Genesis chapters 14 and 15.

On Genesis, Part 20: The Tower of Babel

The Roman Catholic, Orthodox and denominational churches have for centuries upheld the myth that all races of hominids on this planet have come from Adam, and that the various races were derived from the different sons of Noah, actually asserting that Noah’s sons had each spawned different races of so-called man. Doing this, they blatantly ignore the fact that the ancient Hebrews had several words for man, including adam, enosh and ish, and that they applied those words only where they were appropriate. The word adam describes a particular race of man, which today we call White, and these are the men who descended from Adam through the sons of Noah. The word enosh describes a mortal man, an adult male hominid, without any connotation of race. They also ignore the fact that there were other so-called men in Scripture who were not descended from Adam, such as the Nephilim and several other groups which are mentioned later, in Genesis chapters 14 and 15. No Nephilim could ever properly be called an adam, but either the sons of Adam or the Nephilim could be referred to as enosh. The later Greek, English and other languages lost this important distinction, and the churches willfully ignore it.

In our last presentation in Genesis, The Appearance of the Sons of Noah, we hope to have sufficiently demonstrated the truth of our assertion, which is that if it can be proven that any one of each of the nations of the families of Shem, Japheth and Ham were originally White, then it must be accepted that all of the sons of Noah were originally White, in spite of the conditions of any of those nations today. Doing that, we presented solid, and even irrefutable, evidence from ancient literary, archaeological and scientific sources demonstrating that the ancient Cushites were White, the ancient Egyptians were White, the ancient Canaanites were White, at least apparently, the ancient Ionians, or the sons of Javan in Genesis chapter 10, were White, the ancient Elamites or Persians were White, the ancient Syrians of the north of modern Syria and Anatolia, whether they were of Aram or Asshur or some other Biblical tribe, were White, and that other Genesis 10 families, such as the Assyrians, Aramaeans, Medes, Arians and others, were also White because the ancient records attest that they were homogeneous and physically indistinguishable from these others.

On Genesis, Part 18: The Hebrews

In our last presentation, The Shemites, we had asked a few questions which we had only answered in part, such as “what defines a Semite? And what is a Hamite, or a Canaanite?” Those we answered by stating, perhaps in different words, that the only proper classifications of those people are along Biblical terms, in agreement with Genesis chapter 10, since Genesis is the very source of those terms. But then we also asked another question, which is related to these because of the manner in which modern academic sources classify languages, and that is “what language is Hebrew?” This question we shall address presently, before proceeding to discuss Eber, the first Hebrew.

All throughout the Christian epoch, the history of the ancient Near East has been viewed through exclusively Jewish eyes, and this has had a profoundly damaging impact not only on Biblical studies, but on all modern historical, archaeological and linguistic inquiry into the cradle of civilization found in ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant. But as Paul of Tarsus had also explained, in 2 Corinthians chapter 3, the Old Testament cannot even be understood unless one is a Christian, and therefore no Jew can possibly understand it. But Christians, if they follow Jews, they will also fail to understand it, as Christ had said of the Pharisees of His Own time, in Luke chapter 6, “39 … Can the blind lead the blind? shall they not both fall into the ditch?” Collectively, Jews have innate biases which naturally restrict their understanding, and lead them to errant identifications and faulty conclusions regarding history, language and archaeological findings, along with a tendency to pollute everything they study with their own Talmudic reasoning, which is always naturally antithetical to God.

On Genesis, Part 17: The Shemites

In our recent discussion of the Hamites and the description of Nimrod and the first Adamic empire, of which ancient Akkad was a part, we had discussed the first Akkadian empire and the presence of a historical Cush in Mesopotamia in the 3rd millennium BC. Then in our separate discussion of the accursed tribes of the Canaanites, we had described the rise of several Canaanite empires in the early 2nd millennium BC, namely the Babylonian Empire of the Amorites, the Hittite Empire, and the Mittani Kingdom of the Hurrians. These Canaanite empires were relatively short-lived, as compared to those of Egypt and Assyria, but it is quite possible that they were not the only Canaanite empires which existed in ancient history.

For example, there is ancient Ebla, the importance of which was not even discovered until the site of the city was excavated after its discovery in 1964. Evidently, Ebla had dominated what is now northwestern Syria from the mid-to-late 3rd millennium through most of the 2nd millennium BC. Ebla was about 34 miles southwest of Ḥalab, or Aleppo, which is said to have been the seat of another kingdom, Yamhad, although it is apparent that the empires of Yamhad and Ebla had each covered the same general territory at the heights of each of their power, along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in modern northwestern Syria. As a digression, in this sense an empire is only a city-state which subjects to itself other city-states within a particular region, whose inhabitants were not necessarily of the same tribe, and these empires were quite small compared to the empires of later history.

On Genesis, Part 16: The Curse of Canaan

In our last presentation of this commentary on Genesis we had discussed the first three of the sons of Ham, which are Cush, Mizraim and Phut. Now we shall discuss the youngest, or at least, the last one mentioned, which is Canaan. As we had explained when we presented Genesis chapter 9 and Thy Father’s Nakedness, since Canaan was cursed as a result of Ham’s having seen “the nakedness of his father”, as we read the account in Genesis chapter 9, then that phrase must have been a euphemism for another act, and therefore the birth of Canaan must have been the result of what is seen in the law in Leviticus chapter 20 where it says in part that “11 … the man that lieth with his father's wife hath uncovered his father's nakedness.” Having done that, we had also presented passages from Leviticus chapter 18 which further explain that the nakedness of a man’s wife is also the man’s nakedness.

But we cannot imagine that Canaan was cursed merely because Ham saw his own father naked, as we had also explained, with examples from Scripture, how in ancient times men had regularly seen one another naked even throughout the course of a typical workday, at least in certain vocations or activities. So that alone would not justify the curse of Canaan, but Noah certainly would have been justified to curse Canaan if Ham had violated his wife, which was also Ham’s own mother, and if Canaan was the result of such a union. Subsequent events in Scripture also justify Noah’s curse of Canaan, as Yahweh had upheld his words so that they became prophetic of the fate of Canaan. When Yahweh upholds a man’s words, it is because the words are just and the man had uttered them righteously. This we read of the young prophet Samuel, in 1 Samuel chapter 3: “19 And Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him, and did let none of his words fall to the ground.”

On Genesis, Part 15: The Hamites

In our last presentation where we had discussed the opening verses of Genesis chapter 10 we described the nations which can be identified with the sons of Japheth as they may be found in Biblical, historical and archaeological records. Now we shall endeavor to do that same thing with the sons of Ham, and then of course with Shem. Then after presenting the data needed to connect these Genesis 10 patriarchs to historical nations, we hope to have a supplemental discussion concerning the ancient characteristics of many of those nations.

But before proceeding here we shall briefly discuss some false reports concerning certain of the tribes of the Japhethites. There are popular Jewish so-called historians, notably Arthur Koestler, who have identified certain of the Turkic and other tribes who migrated from Central Asia into Eastern Europe in the historical period with tribes of the ancient Japhethites. In his book, The Thirteenth Tribe, Koestler cites a letter which was allegedly written by one Joseph ben Aaron, who is said to have been a 10th century king of Khazaria and one of the kings who supposedly converted to Judaism, who had identified the Turkic tribes as having been descendants of the Biblical Togarmah. Among these tribes he mentions the Uigur, Dursu, Avars, Huns, Basilii, Tarniakh, Khazars, Zagora, Bulgars and Sabir [1]. In the same book, Koestler explains the term Ashkenazi as it relates to Jews and says in part that “the term is misleading, for the Hebrew word Ashkenaz was, in mediaeval rabbinical literature, applied to Germany”, however he also states that certain “learned Khazar Jews” who had emigrated into Poland from Khazaria in the east had also called themselves Ashkenazim [2]. These claims, which had all evidently originated from medieval Jewish rabbis, are unsubstantiated. The rabbis in various places throughout the medieval world had often identified the nations whom which they had intercourse with Biblical tribes in a rather arbitrary manner, with no other basis for the identifications but their own poor opinions. Without archaeological evidence, or any supporting body of early literature, the various identifications are all mere conjecture.

On Genesis, Part 14: The Japhethites

It was quite early in my Biblical studies when I had realized the importance of the table of nations descending from Noah which is found in Genesis chapter 10. The gravity of understanding the character of the nations which are listed in this chapter cannot be overstated. That is because Noah and his family were saved from the complete destruction of the children of Adam for one reason only: that they were perfect in their genealogies, which is their descent from Adam, or what we would call today their race, at a time when the balance of that race was described as having been corrupted, because they had committed miscegenation with the Nephilim. Therefore we must realize the importance of preserving that race, as it is the will of Yahweh God which He had expressed in the preservation of Noah. While we cannot preserve it without Him, as Christians we have a duty to love and to keep His commandments. This is indeed a Christian obligation, as Christ had said, where it is recorded in Matthew chapter 5: “19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” When He spoke those words, He was speaking in reference to the law and the prophets. That does not bode well for modern churchmen, who shall have no excuse for ignorance.

Any honest man who studies archaeology and history and who reads Genesis chapter 10 from the perspective of classical antiquity, where one must consider the nations of the sons of Noah in their ancient forms rather than in their modern conditions, must ultimately face the fact that all of the descendants of Noah were originally White, or what was called in the past Caucasian or considered to be related to modern Europeans. As a digression, the words of the prophets also explain the modern condition of those nations, and we may make some references in that regard as we discuss them here. In the 19th century, White Europeans were termed Caucasian because learned men who studied this aspect of history had realized that to a great extent, the early settlers of Europe had migrated from Mesopotamia and the ancient Middle and Near East by travelling through the region of the Caucasus Mountains. That view is oversimplified, but for many of our Keltic or Germanic or even Slavic ancestors it is certainly true. Others had come from the east at an even earlier time, in which most of them had migrated by sea rather than by land.

On Genesis, Part 13: Thy Father’s Nakedness

Presenting Part 12 of this Genesis commentary, titled Solid Ground we hope to have elucidated from the situation of his descendants as it is described in Genesis chapters 10 and 11 and from the context of these chapters which describe the flood of Noah, that the most plausible location for the flood is the Mesopotamian Plain, and that the most likely landing spot for the ark after the flood is the foothills of Ararat which border that plain on the north. Here we should add one word of caution, that although we are confident of that assessment, we can never be absolutely certain given the relatively little information which we have in Scripture. But to this day, zealous denominational Christians and archaeologists both amateur and professional have sought Noah’s ark in the great heights of Mount Ararat, which has an elevation of over 17,000 feet. However we have found that the term ararat in Hebrew describes a mountainous region, and not merely a single mountain peak. The truth is that the ark must have landed on a foothill in that region, so that it would have even been possible for Noah, his family and the many animals with them to have survived after the flood, and that the wood from the ark either rotted away in its place, or more likely, it was repurposed by Noah and his family, or even others who lived in the region at a later time. The process of hewing logs into beams and planks by hand is quite arduous, and already-hewn logs from the ark would have been valuable for that reason alone. As we hope to establish later in Genesis, there are more than five hundred and thirty years between the time of the flood and the events of Genesis chapter 11 and the division of the sons of Noah, so it would be natural for his descendants to slowly spread into the plain south of Ararat, which is much more suitable for agriculture and husbandry than the mountains. As we have said, the site of ancient Babylon is about 250 miles from the southern edge of those mountains, and that is where the descendants of Noah are found in Genesis chapter 11.

On Genesis, Part 12: Solid Ground

Having discussed the onset, or perhaps, the onslaught of Noah’s Flood and The End of Sinners in Genesis chapter 7, we shall now move on to the aftermath of the Flood and the emergence of solid ground in chapters 8 and 9. However here the phrase solid ground relates just as much to our interpretation of the scope of the flood and subsequent events as it does to the experience of Noah. For one to acquire a proper understanding of the entire Bible depends upon a proper view of Noah’s flood. Claims that the flood covered the entire planet, that even the highest mountains on the globe were completely covered with water, are simply ridiculous and lead to very childish, and dangerous, views of the balance of Scripture. But these views persist, and have actually come to dominate denominational Christian thought, in spite of the fact that they are directly refuted by many passages and circumstances which are explained in Scripture itself.

At this point the denominational Christians may argue that races and cultures throughout the whole world have flood stories. But that does not mean that those floods were Noah’s flood, and since those races never had recorded histories, or even calendars, until they were encountered by Europeans, the dates of their own flood legends cannot even be determined. The truth is that numerous floods have impacted various regions of the world all throughout history. In 1931 in China, floodwaters as high as 53 feet covered approximately 69,000 square miles of land, put several large cities under water for several months, and the death toll is estimated from over 400,000 to as many as 4 million. But this was not Noah’s flood, and it certainly was not the first such flood in China. If it were not for the modern technology which the West had shared with China, perhaps many more Chinese would have died. Not that we care about Chinese, because they did not descend from Noah, nor from Adam, but this is only one example of many such historical floods.

On Genesis, Part 11: The End of Sinners

Aside from the explicit description of fornication between the Nephilim and the daughters of Adam which is found in the opening verses of Genesis chapter 6, there are only implications and subtle indications in Genesis as to the full extent of the sins of men and angels. However since all flesh had become corrupted, according to verse 12 of Genesis chapter 6, and since not only the children of Adam, but even the beasts of the land had to be destroyed for that same reason, it is evident that there must have been some truth to the account of the treachery of the Nephilim in the corruption of the beasts underlying what is found in the Enoch literature. But evidently, Noah and his family had never taken part in those sins, as Noah was perfect in his race, which describes his sons as well as himself, and therefore their flesh had not been corrupted. So the Adamic man which Yahweh God had created would be preserved through Noah and his sons, while the rest of the race would be destroyed for their iniquity. Out of all the sins of men, race-mixing with another race, in this case the Nephilim, is the explicit reason given in Genesis chapter 6 for the destruction of the entire race of man.

Yet the Nephilim themselves were not entirely destroyed in the flood of Noah, where it becomes apparent that Yahweh God deals with fallen angels differently than he deals with sinful men. This is evident even in the King James translation of Genesis 6:4 where we read in part that “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that…” So while all of the children of Adam were destroyed except for the family of Noah, various of the descendants of the Nephilim are mentioned in Genesis chapter 15, Numbers chapter 13, and as late as the time of David, in the account of Goliath and his brothers 1 Samuel chapters 17 and 21 and 1 Chronicles chapter 20. These are some of the giants, or Nephilim, who were in the earth “in those days and after that”, referring to the time following the flood, and with that we also see that while the flood was evidently a far-reaching event, it was only a local flood, covering a limited region of the earth’s surface, and not the entire globe or planet. We certainly cannot assume that those Nephilim had survived on the ark of Noah, because Yahweh God brought the flood upon man for mixing with the Nephilim, and Noah was being separated and preserved because he did not mix with them, so having Nephilim on the ark would defeat the whole purpose of the flood. That is also the obvious reason why there is no mention of Nephilim on the ark.

On Genesis, Part 10: The Sins of Men and Angels

The pitiful condition of the surviving portions of the Enoch literature and other apocryphal or pseudepigraphal works, such as the Genesis Apocryphon of the Qumran sect, may not present an absolutely reliable picture of all of the details of the sins of men and angels, but compared to the words of the apostles of Christ we may at least understand some of the underlying truths which they have preserved to some degree. So, as we discussed in our last presentation here, Perfect in His Race, the apostle Jude in his one brief epistle had warned of infiltrators into the Body of Christ who would introduce corruption, and had associated them with the fallen angels of antiquity. Both Peter and Paul had warned similarly. Then, as we had already mentioned in Part 8 of this commentary, Giants and the Sons of God, in Colossians chapter 2 Paul of Tarsus wrote in reference to the humiliation which is found in the worship of angels, where he must have been speaking of those same fallen angels. Then in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, speaking of the pagan worship of the nations of Roman Europe, he wrote “18 Behold Israel down through the flesh: are not those who are eating the sacrifices partners of the altar?”, and in reference to that same thing a little further on, he continued and wrote that “20 … whatever the Nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and not to God. Now I do not wish for you to be partners with demons.”

So in those two passages, Paul had equated the pagan religions with the worship of both angels and demons, and the meaning of his words cannot be completely reconciled with the writings of the Old Testament without the Enoch literature. So in Charles’ edition of 1 Enoch chapter 19 we read: “1. And Uriel said to me: ‘Here shall stand the angels who have connected themselves with women, and their spirits assuming many different forms are defiling mankind and shall lead them astray into sacrificing to demons as gods, (here shall they stand), till the day of the great judgement in which they shall be judged till they are made an end of.’” This in turn accords with the words of Christ, where we read in Revelation chapter 20 that the devil, the beast, and the false prophet shall be cast into the Lake of Fire, and in Matthew chapter 25 where He attests that the goat nations – those nations who are not His sheep – have their destiny in the “everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” Only their origin explains the reason why they are not found written in the Book of Life.

On Genesis, Part 9: Perfect in His Race

According to all of the evidence which we had discussed in our last presentation, The Giants and the Sons of God, we would assert that we have justification based on the merits of many valid reasons for our interpretation of the text of Genesis chapter 6. Therefore, where in the Masoretic Text it mentions “sons of God” in verses 2 and 4 of the chapter, we would amend it to instead read “sons of heaven”, or perhaps “angels”. Then where the popular translations have the word “giants”, we would interpret the Hebrew word nephilim to instead read “fallen ones”, which Wilhelm Gesenius himself had admitted was a valid reading, even if it was not the reading which he preferred, and as he also admitted, that it was also the choice of more than one presumably academic interpreter of the past. Doing this, the Genesis chapter 6 account is fully reconciled with the words of Yahshua Christ and his apostles in the New Testament, where if we ignore the witnesses which lead us to these conclusions, then Genesis remains in conflict with Christ and the apostles, or at the very least, it offers no support for many of their statements. But as Christians, we have an obligation to understand Genesis through the understanding which Christ has provided, and therefore we shall not disregard the evidence by which Genesis agrees with His words. This is what Paul of Tarsus had meant when he asserted that “16… we have the mind of Christ” in 1 Corinthians chapter 2, that word for mind describing the perceiving and understanding which we can have through His words. Therefore we have no obligation to cling to the Masoretic Text if valid and more ancient sources are found to better agree with the words of Christ.

In his one short epistle, the apostle Jude warned about certain men who had infiltrated the body of Christ, and admonished Christians to defend “the faith having been delivered to the saints”, whereafter he wrote: “4 For some men have stolen in, those of old having been written about beforetime for this judgment, godless men, substituting the favor of our God for licentiousness and denying our only Master and Prince, Yahshua Christ.” Here it is evident that first, these men can not in any way be appropriate candidates for conversion to Christianity even if they had entered and joined Christian assemblies. Then secondly, Jude is identifying them with “those of old having been written about beforetime for this judgment”, where it is evident that their origins cannot be from of Israel, or even from of God, as Christ had also said to His adversaries that “ye are from beneath” and “ye are not of God”, among other things which had denied them the claim that God was their father, as it is recorded in John chapter 8. These things, along with the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares and other things which had been explained by Christ, all make it evident that there was a race, or races, of men whose origin is other than that of Adam, and who were condemned from the beginning. So, speaking directly of certain men, Christ had also said that “Every plant which My heavenly Father has not planted shall be uprooted!” The only way to account for these things in Genesis is in our interpretation of this chapter, and in the identifying of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Serpent of the garden with the fallen angels of Revelation chapter 12, which is also the identification provided by Christ Himself. Furthermore, where Jude wrote “those of old having been written about beforetime for this judgment”, he must have been referring to writings which are now deemed apocryphal, such as Enoch whom he cites later in his epistle, because these condemnations are not found explicitly on these same terms in our Old Testament canon as it is presently.