But a book doesn't have to be canonical to be important.
The biblical writers quote books that are outside the Bible all the time
to make specific points.
Have you ever wondered why when you read Genesis 6... let's just go look at it.
You go Genesis 6, you've gone back, let's close that.
You get the weird Sons of God, Nephilim stuff;
"the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, verse 4, and also after,
when the sons of God came into the daughters of man
and they bore children to them.
These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown."
Look at the next verse.
"The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,
and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."
How in the world do you go from a transgression of supernatural beings,
they're the villains,
to all of a sudden in verse 5, humanity is hopelessly corrupt?
I mean, it really looks like... I used to wonder this a lot like
what are the first four verses have to do with verse 5?
They're totally disconnected if you don't know the backstory.
Again, in the backstory all of these elements are there.
You have interference of the sons of God with humanity.
And in the Babylonian version, they teach us wonderful things. You know,
they teach us about, you know, drugs and they teach us about astrology,
and they teach us about dark arts, they teach us how to do all sorts of things.
And we're Babylon; we are the greatest civilization on the earth.
We conquer everyone, okay?
But to the Israelites is like, what these guys did, the sons of God,
these divine beings, coming down, and cohabiting with women and all that stuff,
and producing Nephilim.
What this was the result of was in our case, we're just Israel.
In our case, their descendants tried to wipe us out at Canaan.
So they were lethal threats. And what they taught people, corrupted humanity.
It led to the proliferation of depravity.
And since Enoch knows the Mesopotamian story, if you read the Enoch version,
he has all of that laid out.
And that's the literature that Peter dips into in 2 Peter.
So when Peter dips into the angels that sinned and the flood story
to castigate false teachers, it's very logical for him to do so.
Because the idea in ancient Judaism was that again,
the reason why we have so much evil and sin is yes, Adam and Eve fell.
There was a divine rebellion, so he's part of the blame,
humans are part of the blame.
But then when you get to Genesis 6, it's like what happened here
led to the explosion, the proliferation of depravity throughout the earth.
Again, whoever wrote Enoch knows the full backstory that's behind Genesis 6:1-4.
Whoever wrote Genesis 6:1-4, Moses or somebody else,
they know the story too, but they've condensed it
and they don't bother to tell their readers all the backstory
because they just assume their readers know it. They just assume that.
You know, unfortunately, for us, we don't know any of this stuff.
We don't know about the Apkallu story.
We don't know that Genesis 6:1-4, 1-5 is responding to that Mesopotamian story.
We, you know, we don't know what Enoch is doing.
In fact, we tell people not to read Enoch because it's not a biblical book,
and it's not. It's not inspired. It shouldn't be part of the canon.
But a book doesn't have to be canonical to be important.
The biblical writers quote books that are outside the Bible all the time
to make specific points.
Okay, Peter knows this literature.
And because he's read it, he has a fuller picture of what Genesis 6:1-4 means.
How it operates, why it's there,
why the first four verses makes sense of the fifth verse,
the human wickedness, it juxtaposed to the sons of God event.
Peter understands that, and he uses it in his discussion to avoid false teachers.
It makes perfect sense across the board for him to do this.
The thing is we are cut off from the context,
both by being cut off from the data,
and fortunately, as of 2010, we at least had a scholar
who marshaled it all together and publish it in an article you can actually get.
We're cut off from the data, but our tradition, the way church, you know,
evangelicals, and all traditions of Christianity have approached Genesis 6:1-4,
to strip out the supernatural elements
and say there's nothing going on here with angels or supernatural beings,
citizen move along.
And trying to explain away the Nephilim, trying to explain away what Peter's doing.
Nobody did any of that in antiquity
because they understood what the thing was about.
Okay, we are living on the other side. We're living on top of 2000 years of avoiding it,
of cutting it off, of obscuring it, of hiding it, of running away from it.
It's there for a reason and it's going to bleed into other parts of the Bible,
other parts of the Old and the New Testament.