1And it happened as humankind began to multiply over the earth and daughters were born to them, 2that the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were comely, and they took themselves wives howsoever they chose. 3And the LORD said, “My breath shall not abide in the human forever, for he is but flesh. Let his days be a hundred and twenty years.”
4The Nephilim were then on the earth, and afterward as well, the sons of God having come to bed with the daughters of man who bore them children: they are the heroes of yore, the men of renown. 5And the LORD saw that the evil of the human creature was great on the earth and that every scheme of his heart’s devising was only perpetually evil. 6And the LORD regretted having made the human on earth and was grieved to the heart. 7And the LORD said, “I will wipe out the human race I created from the face of the earth, from human to cattle to crawling thing to the fowl of the heavens, for I regret that I have made them.” 8But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD. 9This is the lineage of Noah—Noah was a righteous man, he was blameless in his time, Noah walked with God—10and Noah begot three sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth. 11And the earth was corrupt before God and the earth was filled with outrage. 12And God saw the earth and, look, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its ways on the earth. 13And God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh is come before Me, for the earth is filled with outrage by them, and I am now about to destroy them, with the earth. 14Make yourself an ark of cypress wood, with cells you shall make the ark, and caulk it inside and out with pitch. 15This is how you shall make it: three hundred cubits, the ark’s length; fifty cubits, its width; thirty cubits, its height. 16Make a skylight in the ark, within a cubit of the top you shall finish it, and put an entrance in the ark on one side. With lower and middle and upper decks you shall make it. 17As for Me, I am about to bring the Flood, water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh that has within it the breath of life from under the heavens, everything on the earth shall perish. 18And I will set up My covenant with you, and you shall enter the ark, you and your sons and your wife and the wives of your sons, with you. 19And from all that lives, from all flesh, two of each thing you shall bring to the ark to keep alive with you, male and female they shall be. 20From the fowl of each kind and from the cattle of each kind and from all that crawls on the earth of each kind, two of each thing shall come to you to be kept alive. 21As for you, take you from every food that is eaten and store it by you, to serve for you and for them as food.” 22And this Noah did; as all that God commanded him, so he did.
CHAPTER 6 NOTES
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1–4. This whole passage is obviously archaic and mythological. The idea of male gods coupling with mortal women whose beauty ignites their desire is a commonplace of Greek myth, and E. A. Speiser has proposed that both the Greek and the Semitic stories may have a common source in the Hittite traditions of Asia Minor. The entourage of celestial beings obscurely implied in God’s use of the first-person plural in the Garden story (compare 3:22) here produces, however fleetingly, active agents in the narrative. As with the prospect that man and woman might eat from the tree of life, God sees this intermingling of human and divine as the crossing of a necessary line of human limitation, and He responds by setting a new retracted limit (three times the formulaic forty) to human life span. Once more human mortality is confirmed, this time in quantitative terms.
2. man. Here it seems better to render the generic haʾadam as “man” both because in the patrilineal imagination (compare the immediately preceding genealogy) males are seen as the begetters of daughters and sons, and because the term “daughters of man” is played against “sons of God.”
comely. The Hebrew also means “good” but it very often occurs in the sense of goodly appearance, and is sometimes explicitly paired with the word for “beautiful.” The same term is used for Eve’s perception of the tree of knowledge (3:6).
3. abide . . . is but. Both pertinent Hebrew terms are cryptic, and the translation is somewhat speculative.
4. Nephilim. The only obvious meaning of this Hebrew term is “fallen ones”—perhaps, those who have come down from the realm of the gods; but then the word might conceivably reflect an entirely different, un-Hebraic background. In any case, the notion of semidivine, heroic figures—in Numbers the Nephilim are thought of as giants who are offspring of miscegenation between gods and women—again touches on common ground with Greek and other mythologies.
come to bed with. The Hebrew idiom is literally “come into,” that is, “entered.” It involves a more direct reference to the mechanics of the sexual act than “to know” and thus has a more carnal coloration, but at the same time it seems to be perfectly decorous. The English “entered” would be too clinical, and, in any case, the Hebrew idiom refers to the whole act of intercourse, not merely to penetration. Of the three expressions used for sexual intercourse in Genesis—the other two are “to know” and “to lie with”—this one is reserved for sexual intimacy with a woman with whom the man has not previously had carnal relations, whether or not she is his legitimate wife. The spatial imagery of the idiom of “coming into” appears to envisage entering concentric circles—the woman’s private sphere, her bed, her body.
heroes of yore. The Hebrew style of this entire clause reflects a certain epic heightening, hence the archaizing turn in the translation. One suspects that these words are either a citation of an old heroic poem or a stylistic allusion to the epic genre.
5. was great. With a minor change in vocalization, this adjective could be read as a verb, “multiplied”: in any case, the whole phrase echoes the “multiply over the earth” of verse 1. The nature of the evil, distinct from the preceding tale of human-divine miscegenation, is not specified, and God’s subsequent indictment uses only general terms (“corruption” and “outrage” / “lawlessness”). It is noteworthy that the sundry Mesopotamian Flood stories, on which this account draws heavily, present the Deluge as the gods’ response to overpopulation or as an arbitrary act, whereas here it is evil, not humankind, that multiplies and fills the earth.
heart’s devising. In the Bible the heart is usually thought of as the seat of intelligence, only occasionally as the seat of emotion; thus many modern translators use “mind” here. But man’s evil heart is pointedly meant to stand in contrast to God’s grieving heart (the same Hebrew word) in the next verse.
6. grieved. The same verbal root, ʿ-ts-b, is reflected in Eve’s pangs, Adam’s pain, and “the pain of our hands’ work.”
9. lineage. The listing of Noah’s three sons in the next verse supports this sense of toledot, but it might also mean “story.”
11. filled with outrage. Humankind had been enjoined to multiply and fill the earth, but the proliferation of human population leads to a proliferation of lawless behavior. This is one of several verbal echoes of the Creation story, suggesting, first, a perversion of creation by man and, then, a reversal of creation by God.
13–21. God’s pronouncement of imminent doom and His instructions about the ark are the longest continuous speech up to this point in Genesis, considerably exceeding the triple curse in chapter 3. Most of the length is dictated by the necessity to provide specifications for the construction of the ark and the arrangements for the animals. But the writer also uses the speech as a vehicle for realizing God’s awesome presence in the story: the language is not arranged in actual verse but it sounds a drumroll of grand formal cadences, stressing repeated terms and phrases that are rhythmically or semantically parallel.
13. destroy. The Hebrew verb is identical with the one used three times above in the sense of “corrupt” and so inscribes a pattern of measure for measure.