They were awesome. (But they really screwed things up.)

Goya, El Coloso (detail)

When the human race began to increase, with more and more daughters being born, the sons of God noticed that the daughters of men were beautiful. They looked them over and picked out wives for themselves.

Then GOD said, "I'm not going to breathe life into men and women endlessly. Eventually they're going to die; from now on they can expect a life span of 120 years."

This was back in the days (and also later) when there were giants in the land. The giants came from the union of the sons of God and the daughters of men. These were the mighty men of ancient lore, the famous ones.

- Genesis 6:1-4
(translation from The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language by Eugene H. Peterson)

This "back in the day" fragment that leads into the Noah account in Genesis is, at first, puzzling. It feels like something out of Greek myth, and it's not immediately obvious what it has to do with the Ark.

But someone made a choice to stick this fragment here; I think they must have thought it sheds light on the story that follows. (It certainly ties in to the mentions throughout the Noah story about Noah living hundreds of years.)

It reminds me of our sense of wonder at the people who came before us -- the ones we know specific details about, and also ones we can only imagine. Who were these people who brought the human society we know out of nothing?

As I think about the "Back From the Brink" resolution, I see two possible tie-ins to the Noah story. The first is that Noah was, himself, one of those great people. He did great things. So I see this prelude as, in part, an invitation to us to take a step back and think of the momentousness of human endeavor -- at least of some of it.

The second possible tie-in is to the verse that immediately follows: the beginning of the Noah story proper, the part about how people had screwed things up.

What's the image in your mind of the human behavior that induced God to want to bring the flood? What I remember from Sunday school was that people were misbehaving, and I suppose I always used to carry an idea in my mind of general licentiousness: drunkenness and vice, crime, "sex, drugs, and rock and roll."

Today I'm thinking about the story in bigger terms.

The 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test was about ONE THOUSAND
times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Today I'm thinking about arsenals of nuclear weapons that have the ability to destroy life on the planet. They are the result of brilliant human achievement and also of nearly inconceivable levels of human recklessness and sin. The men (and they were mostly men) who conceived and built nuclear weapons were awesome. But they really screwed things up.

And so now I am finding the account of those "giants" in Genesis to be a really appropriate prelude to a story about a life-ending calamity. And I feel an invitation, as I read about that calamity, to reflect more deeply upon what might possibly be meant when the Bible says, "God saw x" or "God decided y," or "God did z."


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Met Lab scientists had a rude awakening: "We're interested in your technology, not your political advice." As one of the Met Lab scientists said, "I might as well have thrown those recommendations [about abstaining from using the bomb] into Lake Michigan."

(See Unfinished Business in Chicago (Nuclear disarmament, that is))