So, the sons of God, those are the believers, right?
Are they only men? You only have male believers before the flood?
And only male believers from one lineage? Like really?
Any human interpretation of the sons of God in Genesis 6 is ignoring
or is ignorant of the original context for those verses; for Genesis 6:1-5.
And that context is Mesopotamian religion, specifically, the Apkallu story,
which we're going to talk about in this session,
and again, which you should have read about for this class.
That means by definition, if you have a commentary, that is taking some other view
that doesn't interact with the Apkallu material, that doesn't interact,
I mean, to be fair, that material is only really been collected,
and sifted and put into published form in terms of an article since 2010.
So it's been actually very recent. I mean, I used to work for Logos,
I got all the resources free. I have tons of commentaries,
I have found to date, two commentaries, two that even referenced the term Apkallu.
They don't talk about it, they don't discuss it, they just have the...
you can find it in a search in the book. That's it.
Okay, by definition, if your commentary does not discuss this material,
it is interpretation out of context. It is obsolete,
by virtue of again, the research that's been done more recently.
Now, I know of publications that commentators could have dipped into this material for.
There's one by Anne Kilmer. There's another one by Helge Kvanvig.
That's older than 2010. But I'm just telling you; if you go to,
"I want to see you if what Mike says is in the commentaries." It's not.
It's not, it could have been, had they done better research.
But it's not. Now since 2010, again, when all of this material was sort of...
we had a Mesopotamian scholar, somebody who does cuneiform; Amar Anus,
go back, and looked at all the Mesopotamian flood stuff,
with a specific question of; hey, I wonder if the sons of God, Nephilim giant thing,
if that's part of these flood stories in Mesopotamia.
He collected all the information, put it together, and wrote an article on it.
It's called "On the Origin of the Watchers." You can get it on my website,
and get it on the internet for free. It's a great article.
If you are talking about Genesis 6:1-5, and not interacting with that material,
you're interpreting out of context, there's just no other way to say it.
So I want to try to summarize that material that you've read through,
add a little bit to it here, maybe some points of explanation in this session.
But essentially, that's the punch line. That's the thrust of what we're going to do here.
And what you typically get are the Sethine view.
So let's click out to that... my little mouse here.
And this is going to be from Unseen Realm, from your reading for today.
Let's close that.
The Sethine interpretation; this is the idea that the sons of God are the line of Seth,
and the sons of God are just human.
And so somehow that means the ungodly element are the women of Cain.
Again, the text never says that, it never says any of that.
It never makes these identifications.
And I go through the litany of why this view, I mean, the deep flaws that it has,
in these pages, I'm not going to rehearse all of them to you.
But you know, it takes you into some really goofy places.
So, the sons of God, those are the believers, right?
Are they only men? You only have male believers before the flood?
And only male believers from one lineage? Like really?
The sinners, they are the women, right?
The men of Seth are good and all the sinners are from the other line of Cain.
Again, the text never says any of this. This is a contrived, invented view,
to distance from the supernatural element of Genesis 6.
Now, up until, you know, IV century, someone go back to the III century
with Africanus, Scipio Africanus. Or is Julius Africanus?
I always get the Africanuses mixed up. There's two of them.
He was the first one to sort of depart from a supernatural interpretation
in terms of you know, church thinkers, Agustin was the big one
who departed from this view. And since he was so weighty as a theologian,
his view carried today. Now, I mean, he had an axe to grind.
When he became a Christian, he hooked up with a sect called the Manicheans.
Had a Parting of the Ways with them, they revered The Book of Enoch.
So, you know, Agustin sort of just turned against all that.
That, you know, was part of what was going on here in his head
to get away from the supernatural view of Genesis 6.
But up until that point, for centuries, this was a no brainer.
And my argument is that it is a no brainer,
it's a no brainer if you understand the original context,
and you observe that the people in the ancient world actually did know,
they knew that ancient context and interpreted accordingly,
and this includes the biblical writers.
Now, the Sethine view ultimately, I'm not going to read through the criticisms of it,
you read that for tonight, but ultimately, the Sethine view,
if these are just people, it cannot account for the Nephilim in Genesis 6:4.
If there's nothing unusual going on here, how do we get Nephilim?
And this is why many people also have seen this problem,
the people who hold the Sethine view have seen this problem.
And so we have to get away from Nephilim meaning
what the ancients thought it meant, which was giants.
And now it has to mean something else.
Okay, "those who fall upon" or "the fallen ones" or whatever.