Thoughts on Genesis 4-7

These four chapters all flow together in what I was thinking about with them this morning, but I want to specifically call out thoughts on chapters 4 and 7.

Thoughts on Genesis 4

In Genesis 4, what was standing out to me this morning was the varied and highly skilled nature of the work of Lamech's sons.

This is something I've noticed before and thought was a little odd, both for it's inclusion and for it's disparity, but then I never really gave it much consideration. When we are introduced to Lamech we are told:

And Lamech took two wives. The name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal-cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. The sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

As I said, on the one hand, this always struck me as odd because the point of the story seems to be Lamech's murder and pride, so why are we being introduced to his sons who we will never see come up in the story again? But then the question on the other side of that is, where do Lamech's sons learn these incredibly varied skills? We are only a few generations out from Adam and Eve, and yet we already have the development of musical instruments/music and metalworking. Plus, given that these sons all do different things, it's not as though Lamech was doing these things and passed them on, especially because the language implies that these things started with Lamech's sons.

So why are we introduced to his sons at all, and how did they develop such a varied skillset? I think the answer is in Genesis 6.

Genesis 6 sees the "sons of God" seeking out human women and having children with them. In Dr. Michael Heiser's The Unseen Realm he points out that the Biblical account is not the only place we see stories of heavenly beings coming to earth and bearing children with human women. This is the exact story of the Mesopotamian Apkallu as well. The Apkallu were gods who descended, bore children with human women (those children being great heroes and warriors like Gilgamesh), and then imparted secret, heavenly knowledge to humanity, teaching them things like metal working, advanced agriculture, cosmetics, war, music, etc. There are also Jewish stories, outside of the bible, that expand on Genesis 6 along the same lines, claiming that the angels who sired these children also imparted divine knowledge to humanity (the book of Enoch was a popular one in Jesus' day). The interesting distinction between the two accounts however is that the Mesopotamian literature praises the imparting of such knowledge to humanity, while the Bible (and other Jewish writing) condemns it as corrupting, hastening humanity's descent into sin and rebellion against God.

I think this is what is happening in Genesis 4. On the one hand, yes, we are seeing the corruption in Cain's city/descendants such that Lamech is boasting of murder and declaring that Yahweh will protect him for it, but on the other hand, we see, with his sons, how much further the corruption goes. While those stories might not be fresh in our minds, for Israel and her neighbors, people who have stories of these very areas of knowledge having been illicitly handed down by divine beings, to read about Lamech's sons would scream to them that Cain's line was involved with these being and were therefore a major part of the corruption of humanity. This would mean it was not just Cain's sin of murder that continued on down through the generations to Lamech, but also that his sin opened the door for his descendants embracing greater forms of rebellion against Yahweh.

I may be wrong about this, but it really does seem to make sense of both the inclusion of Lamech's sons and of their highly varied and highly specialized skillsets. 

Thoughts on Genesis 7

In terms of Genesis 7, I mostly just want to share an interesting video on a potential mechanism behind the flood.

For a little context, I came to faith in Christ through a church that generally takes a pretty low view of the idea of a global flood and instead focuses a lot more on how the language in Genesis allows for a local flood and/or makes a global flood nonsensical (e.g. how much water would be required to cover Mt. Everest). They also tend to take a pretty disparaging view of a young earth understanding of the bible as foolish and unscientific.

Well, a few years back I came across this video, and found it absolutely fascinating:

The lecture is long, but worth the watch if you're at all curious about this topic. They present the idea of what they refer to as Catastrophic Plate Tectonics. In short, the idea is that the continents were in the Pangea formation as a single landmass before the flood, and that a plate subduction event triggered the flood and caused the rapid movement of the continents to their current positions, moving with enough momentum to cause/create mountain ranges when land masses collided with one another. There is a lot more to it than that, and the explanation also includes the global layering of sediment with varied flora and fauna being captured/fossilized in the process, changes to global weather patterns, etc.

I obviously can't say for sure whether or not their model is the correct one, but it has a lot of explanatory power and definitely changed the way I think about the flood account and it's scale.