Heroes of Old
For many years—since the early 1990s, at least—I have maintained a regular program of Bible reading. In odd numbered years, I read some portion of the New Testament, one or two chapters per day (Luke-Acts in 2023); as a result, I read the selected book(s) twelve times in the year. In even numbered years, I read the whole Bible, four or five chapters a day, starting with Genesis right through to Revelation. Thus, I’ve read through the Bible at least fifteen times.
I was taught as a child, and I believe as an adult, that God speaks through scripture. For thirty years I taught full-time at George Fox University, an orthodox/evangelical Christian university that is committed to the authority of the Bible. I read the Bible, I study the Bible, and I seek to be changed by the Bible. To speak more precisely, I hope to be changed not just by this collection of ancient books we call the Bible but by the God revealed in the Bible.
And now it is 2024, time to begin with Genesis again. It’s January 2, so I read Genesis chapters 6-10. The text says in verse 2: “. . . the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.” Verse 4: “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.”
Such a text creates a problem for Bible readers. How should we understand it?
At George Fox, I have said many times to students, we are committed to the authority of scripture. That is, we believe what the Bible teaches. But what the Bible teaches is not necessarily what the Bible says. It’s relatively easy to quote some passage of the Bible that is false, if we take the words away from their context. For instance, Psalm 93:1 reads, “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.” (The great reformer, Martin Luther, thought this verse proved that the theory that the earth orbited the sun had to be wrong.) Careful Bible readers know that every passage must be understood in context and according to genre. Few of us are tempted to take the psalmist’s poetry as an astronomy lesson. After all, the earlier lines of the same verse say, “The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed in majesty and is armed with strength.” The psalm teaches about God’s omnipotence and eternal authority, but to do so it says something false about the motion of the earth.
Back to Genesis 6, the “sons of God” and the “heroes of old.” I think it is a mistake to read this literally. The genre here is not poetry, but myth.
(The very word, “myth,” creates doubt and consternation for many people. In academia, a myth is any meta-story that organizes the thinking of a significant group of people. Thus, we speak of the “myth of inevitable secularization,” “the myth of American exceptionalism,” “the myth of dialectical materialism,” and so on, including myths of various pagan gods. “Myth” often implies falsity, but it always means that it is a meta-story that shapes worldviews.)
Ancient Israelites were familiar with stories of the great men of the distant past. Egyptians, Babylonians, Sumerians, Greeks—all the powerful cultures of the ancient world had myths of the men of old. In the deep past, these stories said, men were bigger (some were giants), they lived longer (thousands of years, in Babylonian myths), and they struck bargains with the gods. Some men and women were offspring of the gods. These are the greats of pre-history, the “heroes of old.”
How should an Israelite think about such stories? What does our myth say? The text nods briefly to such stories, as if acknowledging them. But the acknowledgment is vague. Who are these “sons of God” who father children by the “daughters of men”? The text doesn’t say, and there is no good answer. If the “sons of God” are lesser gods, this text contradicts the emphatic Old Testament teaching that there is only one God. If the “sons of God” are angels, this text contradicts the teaching of Jesus that the angels don’t marry—and it would make this text singular among all Bible references to angels. If the “sons of God” are ordinary men, the myth is deflated; it doesn’t explain the “heroes of old” at all.
The key to this myth, I think, is in the verse I haven’t quoted, in between verse 2 and verse 4. “Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is corrupt; his days will be a hundred and twenty years.’”
The God of Israel is in control. The ancient Israelite could nod to his neighbor: “Yes, you have stories of great men of the past, the demi-gods and heroes. But my God—the only real God—put a limit to all that. Find me someone who lives more than 120 years. We are mortal beings, corrupted beings, who live before the face of God.”
It seems to me that our text treats the myths of the nations as an opportunity to assert the power and divine authority of Yahweh. Speculation about the “heroes of old” can produce lots of fun; the Percy Jackson stories are bringing pagan legends to a whole new generation. But the Bible speaks to people in this world, a world of sin and death, a world that needs redemption/salvation. Redemption came, not through the heroes of old, but through the Word made flesh.
