ACTS BIBLE
Creation week 6 · Genesis 6:1-22
Increasing wickedness, Nephilim, and God's command to build the ark.
Cain's line has been running five generations and it ends in a man writing a song about killing somebody. Seth's line has been calling on the name of the LORD. Genesis 6 is where God renders judgment on what the two lines produced.
The verdict is one of the heaviest sentences in Scripture. The LORD saw that human wickedness was widespread, and that every inclination of the human heart was nothing but evil all the time.1 Not most people. Not most of the time. Every inclination, all the time.
And then a line that should stop us: the LORD regretted that he had made man, and he was deeply grieved.2
Four verses into the chapter, the sons of God see that the daughters of mankind are beautiful and take wives for themselves, and the Nephilim are on the earth.3 We read that as angels. A great many Christians do not, and they are not liberals.
Augustine took the sons of God to be Seth's godly line marrying into Cain's. So did Calvin. It is the majority Reformed reading and it has been for centuries.4 Their objection is short and it is not weak: Jesus says that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.5 If angels do not marry, the angel reading is dead on arrival.
So answer it.
Look at what Jesus actually said. Angels in heaven. That is the qualifier, and it is the whole hinge, because Jude describes angels who did not keep their own position but abandoned their proper dwelling, and he says it in the same breath as Sodom and Gomorrah, which committed sexual immorality in the same way as these.6 Peter puts the angels who sinned directly beside the flood and Noah, in that order.7 Two apostles connect angelic sin to this chapter, and one of them says the sin was of the same kind as Sodom's.
Then the phrase itself. Sons of God, bene ha-elohim, appears in Job three times, and every time it means angels standing before God.8 A phrase is allowed to mean elsewhere what it means here.
And the Sethite reading has a hole in the middle. If this is godly men marrying ungodly women, why does the text say the offspring were Nephilim, powerful men of old, men of renown? Mixed marriage produces compromise. It does not produce a category of person the text has to name.
Now the part where we do not overreach.
The word Nephilim appears twice in the Bible. Genesis 6:4, and Numbers 13:33, where the spies say they saw them and felt like grasshoppers.9 Twice. The common Old Testament word for giants is Rephaim, which turns up across eighteen verses, and there are Anakim and Emim besides.10
So when someone says the Bible is full of Nephilim, it is not. It is full of giants, which is a different claim and an easier one to defend. Keep the two apart and the argument holds.
The other honest note: Greek and Roman myth is full of gods fathering children on women, and people will say Genesis borrowed it. The order runs the other way. Genesis predates Hesiod and Homer by centuries on any dating, and the resemblance is what you would expect if something happened and the memory scattered and got dressed up.11 A shared memory and a borrowed myth look identical on the page. What decides between them is which account reads like an explanation invented afterward, and which reads like a report that costs the teller something.
God says his Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt, and their days will be 120 years.12
Two readings. Either a new cap on human lifespan, or a countdown to the flood. The countdown reading fits the chapter better, because the chapter is about a coming judgment and because Noah's sons are born after this and men keep living past 120 for generations after the flood. Either way, the point stands: God announces the end and then waits. Peter calls that patience, and says God waited in the days of Noah while the ark was being built.13
The years between the sentence and the water were not empty. They were a very large, very slow, very public warning being hammered together in a field.
Three hundred cubits by fifty by thirty.14 How long that is depends on the cubit, and the cubit is not one fixed thing. On the common cubit of about 17.5 inches the ark is 438 feet. On a round 18 inches it is 450. On the long cubit, which Ezekiel defines as a cubit and a handbreadth, it is 510, and that is the one the Ark Encounter built.15
Do not spend the class arguing about which. The number that matters is not touched by any of it. Three hundred to fifty is six to one whatever a cubit turns out to be, and that ratio is the thing worth knowing.
In 1994 a team of naval architects at the Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering tested twelve alternative hulls at the same displacement, varying only the proportions, and scored each one on structural strength, resistance to capsizing, and how it rode.16 Say what they found accurately, because the popular version oversells it. Their own concluding word is that the ark had a reasonable length-beam-depth ratio. On one of their two indices it came second, and the hull that beat it is the one they record as having the worst capsize resistance of the thirteen.17 That is better than a first place. The only shape that rode and held better than the ark was the one that would have rolled over. Their work was funded by a creation research association, and we say that ourselves rather than let somebody find it in the acknowledgment later.18
One more thing from that study, and it is the part usually skipped. The most important number in the whole calculation was not a dimension at all. It was where the weight sat. The hull was around 4,000 tonnes carrying some 17,000 tonnes of cargo, so four fifths of what floated was freight, and the balance point of the whole vessel was a fact about how the cargo was stacked rather than about the ship.19 Put the heavy things low and stability rises about a quarter. And what does the chapter specify, right there in verse sixteen? Three decks. It is not a boat shape. It is a box built to float, not to sail, which is exactly what you want if the goal is to stay upright rather than get somewhere.
The animals are the part people stumble on, and the answer is a word. Genesis says kinds, not species.20 A kind is the group that could interbreed, which is a far larger unit than a species. Every dog on earth is one kind. Two of those, not two of every breed. The count that makes the ark impossible is a count of species, and species is not what the text asks for.
This course runs once every two years, and we take a field trip to the Ark Encounter when it does.
Here is the whole of what Genesis specifies about the vessel. Gopher wood. Rooms inside. Pitch within and without. Three hundred by fifty by thirty. A window, finished to a cubit above. A door in the side. Three decks.21
That is the list, and what it describes is a box. No bow, no stern, no keel, no rudder, no mast and no sail. The text does not even give the ark ends, and it never says which way it faced.
Every picture of it adds something, because anyone who builds one has to. The Ark Encounter has a fin at one end and a skeg at the other, worked out by a mechanical engineer from real naval architecture,22 and Answers in Genesis describes them as structures the ark may have included.23
Stoney's discussion question this week asks how the ark of the flood compares to other arks in the Bible, and the Hebrew answers it directly.
The word for Noah's vessel is tebah. It is used for exactly one other object in all of Scripture: the basket of bulrushes that Moses' mother puts him in.24 The KJV translators saw it and kept it, which is why an English reader meets an ark of gopher wood in Genesis and an ark of bulrushes in Exodus.
Both are daubed with pitch. Both carry the one God has chosen through water that is killing everyone else. Both come out the far side with a deliverer inside.
That is not a coincidence anyone invented. It is one word used twice, and the second time it is telling you how to read the first.
The Bible is our final authority. We just took the majority Reformed reading seriously, weighed it against Jude and Peter and Job, and let Scripture settle it rather than tradition. That cuts both ways, which is the point: it also means saying Nephilim appears twice when our own side sometimes talks as though it appears everywhere.
Christ's work is finished. There was one door in the side of the ark, God shut it, and everyone inside lived.25 Not the strongest, not the most deserving. Everyone who was inside. Christ is the door, and when the work was done he said it is finished, and the debt was settled for everyone the door was shut on.
God chooses. Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD, and the sentence order matters: the favour comes before the verse that calls him righteous.26 He is not chosen because he is righteous. He is described as righteous after he is favoured.
Salvation is God's work from start to finish. God gives the dimensions, God brings the animals, God shuts the door. Noah swings a hammer for a hundred years and does not save one living thing by doing it. Obedience is real and it is not the mechanism.
A God who grieves. That is the strangest thing in the chapter and it is easy to read past. The judgment does not come from indifference. It comes from a God who looked at what people had become and was cut by it.
And a door that was open for a hundred and twenty years and then was not. Christ lived the righteous life Noah's generation would not live, went into the water of judgment himself, and came out. The door is open now. Peter says the flood prefigures the baptism that saves you, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.27
Next week: The ark is built and the animals are aboard. Genesis 7 is the week the waiting ends, and it begins with a door.
Genesis 6:8. Noah, however, found favor with the LORD.
One word turns the chapter. Everything before it is the earth filled with violence and a God who is grieved. Then however. That is the hinge the whole Bible swings on, and it is not describing what Noah achieved.
with, and what in Jude 6-7 is hardest for the other view?
God you carry into a chapter like this?
not hold.
the same time?
second one telling you about the first?