GENESIS 6, or, "You want me to build what?"

A heroic race of half-angel half-humans are created (maybe), humanity falls into corruption, and God commissions Noah to build a really big boat.

Here's an origin story ripped out of the pages of a Marvel comic...

Born out of the forbidden love of fallen angels and beautiful yet corrupt human women, a mysterious and heroic race of giants known as the "Nephilim" patrol the lawless land of a new and increasingly evil world.

That's not too far from what the Bible says at the beginning of Genesis 6 - "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days-and also afterward-when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown."

This passage requires some context and translation. "Nephilim" can be loosely translated into "giants", though it is arguable as to whether this refers to someone who is literally gigantic in size, or more figuratively gigantic in intelligence or personality.

"Sons of God" can also be interpreted in at least two ways. First, the phrase could be taken to mean "angels", since the phrase "Sons of God" is used again in the book of Job to explicitly mean angels. www.rationalchristianity.com tells us that in both cases of Job and Genesis, early Jewish writers interpreted "Sons of God" to mean angels.

The second way the phrase can be interpreted is as "Sons of Seth". The logic here is that the sons of Seth were godly men who followed God's path. Contrastly, the cursed sons of Cain were not godly, so people who interprete Gen 6 in this way believe that the phrase "daughters of men" refer to the daughters decended from Cain.

So one could either read the "Nephilim" as being a giant super-race of heroic angel/human half-breeds, or simply virtuous men descended from Seth.

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For reasons that are not too clear, the world starts to increase in wickedness and violence. God sees this, becomes unhappy and decides to press the giant reset button in the sky by summoning a world-wide flood. I'd like to point out here that God becomes upset with man's violence, and then kills all but eight of them as punishment.

God decides that Noah and his family are the only people righteous enough to carry on the human race. He tells Noah to build a giant ark that will house two of every kind of animal, protecting them from the impending flood.

Have you ever wondered to yourself, if Noah's ark had to carry two of every kind of animal in the world, how big would the ark need to be? Well, the Bible answers this question very specifically: 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high, with lower, middle and upper decks. I'm too lazy to do the math myself, but www.christiananswers.com says that's 100,000 square feet, or more floor space than 20 standard size basketball courts.

Would that be enough to house two kinds of every animal? I suppose you could figure out the mathematics to support that (like this), but it seems unlikely to me, unless you account for some kind of space-saving divine intervention on board.

Pop Culture References to Gen 6: Evan Almighty, a SNES game that no one has ever played.