NOTES for Gen 6:1-22

The parable of Noah, which many Bible readers perceive as the story of the flood, is mysterious in many ways, although its most interesting riddles are not obvious. Still, there is one riddle that has drawn the attention of commentators for more than one century: who are the "sons of God" mentioned in the parable, who "came in" to the "daughters of men"? Different interpreters sometimes build very ingenious theological schemes here, but the answer may turn out to be much simpler than it appears.

It has to do with historical realities connected with the cult of the Great Goddess, whose roots really do reach far back into prehistory. An essential part of this most ancient cult was ritual prostitution, and the priestesses of the goddess usually practiced it in a state of erotic and orgiastic ecstasy. In that state they really thought that they were uniting not with people but with spirits who took on human form.

For the readers of the age when the Prologue of Genesis was written, this was perfectly clear: the cult of the Great Goddess remained in the Near East right up to the final Christianization of the region. That is precisely why the prophets called paganism fornication: their definition was both literal and symbolic, since in the case of the cult of the Great Goddess, spiritual fornication was accompanied by physical fornication. It is no surprise that this cult became the symbol of the worst elements in pagan religiosity, and the sacred writer uses it to describe the spiritual situation in which humanity found itself before the flood.

Against this background, Noah is portrayed as the only righteous man in his generation, one who, as it says of him, "walked before God." What his "walking" means and what it was like can only be guessed; the parable gives no details. What matters, however, is that this very "walking" of Noah before God allowed the world not to perish completely.

The story of the flood itself is presented by the author of the Prologue somewhat schematically, and even symbolically. The details mattered so little to him that, as biblical scholars have long noted, he used two different accounts of the flood and joined them into one, in such a way that in some places the "seams" separating one version of the story from the other are still visible. These "seams" do not trouble the sacred writer: he is writing the parable of Noah, not a report about the flood.

The parable makes it clear that human beings have had a choice in every age. Today historians of religion have already moved away from the primitive linear schemes of humanity's religious development that were once popular. It is now clear that monotheism, once considered a historically very late phenomenon, actually has roots that reach as far back into history as many pagan cults. This means that even in prehistoric times a person could choose whether to worship the One or prefer someone else.

In that case Noah becomes a collective image. He becomes a symbol of all righteous people who have walked before God from the most ancient times down to our own day, righteous people who did not know, and perhaps still do not know, the tradition that goes back to Abraham. God never abandons anyone who seeks Him, regardless of where and when that person happened to live.