Floods and Fallen Angels

Last week I purchased a massive book: 'Myths and Legends from the Ancient Near East'. I've been reading a myth or two every night before bed. 'A myth a day keeps the imagination at play'...

Anyway, I completed the section on Mesopotamian myths, which concluded with the Epic of Gilgamesh. There are at least three Mesopotamian flood myths pre-dating the Biblical story. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers are thought to have flooded Mesopotamia sometime between 3200 and 2900 B.C.E.; the myths are the result of people trying to understand why it happened.

Sumerian 'Eridu Genesis' - c. 2300 B.C.E.

For an unspecified reason the gods became dissatisfied with humans and decided to destroy them. The gods gathered in their temple in the city of Shuruppak to discuss the plan. The god Enki secretly told Ziusudra, the priest-king of Ziusudra, about the plan and advised him to make a boat so that some life could survive. The flood happened, Ziusudra & Co. survived in the big boat, and the gods rewarded Ziusudra with immortality.

Akkadian 'Atrahasis' - c. 1600 B.C.E.

Humanity reproduced too much and made too much noise on earth. The gods were losing sleep over it. Ellil suggested a cull. The Divine Assembly agreed and first used disease, then drought, to reduce the human population. The starved humans resorted to cannibalism, and the god Ea felt sorry for them. He gave them some fish. Ellil got angry at this and suggested that all life be wiped out by a great flood. The gods agreed on it, but Ea still wanted humanity to survive. He secretly told Atrahasis to build a big boat so that some life could survive. The flood happened, and the gods looked upon their work - the floating corpses of men, women, children and animals - and despaired. They wept for seven days. The goddess Ninhursuga chastised the Divine Assembly for not properly discussing the decision. Atrahasis & Co. survived in the big boat. The gods decided to limit human population growth by making it so that babies would occasionally be stillborn, or die shortly after birth.

Epic of Gilgamesh 'Utnapishtim' - c. 1300-1000 B.C.E.

Humanity reproduced too much and made too much noise on earth. The gods were losing sleep over it. Enlil suggested a they wipe out humanity with a great flood. Ea visited Utnapishtim in a dream and gave in instructions to build a big boat to survive the coming flood. Utnapishtim & Co. build the boat. The flood happened. The gods looked upon their work and were terrified; they fled to the highest heaven. The goddess Ishtar chastised the Divine Assembly for not properly discussing the decision, and the gods wept. The boat settled on the mountain of Nisir. Utnapishtim let out a dove, but it returned to the boat, unable to find a resting place elsewhere. Then he let out a swallow, which also returned. Then he let out a raven, which found dry land and did not return. Utnapishtim prepared a huge sacrifice, and the gods gathered around it like flies. Enlil was barred from taking any of the sacrifice because he brought about the flood without properly thinking it through. The gods rewarded Utnapishtim with immortality.

Hebrew 'Noah' - 1000-600 B.C.E.

The sons of Elohim (God) mated with the daughters of man. The Nephilim were around in those days. Man was very wicked, and God regretted making them. He decided to wipe out all life. Yahweh-Elohim (God) told Noah to build a big boat to survive the flood. The flood happened and everything not on Noah's Ark was destroyed. Noah let out a raven, but it returned to the boat, unable to find a resting place elsewhere. Then he let out a dove, which returned with an olive branch. He let the dove out again, but this time it didn't return. The boat settled on the mountain of Ararat. The earth dried out, and Noah prepared a big sacrifice, burning a piece of every clean animal. God smelled the cooking meat and promised not to wipe out all life again using a flood, and put the rainbow in the sky as a reminder to himself not to commit genocide. Noah planted a vineyard and was a drunk for the rest of his life.

Discussion

There are some obvious similarities, but I find the differences more interesting. In the three polytheistic stories, there is the sense (in the latter two it's explicit) that gods realise that genocide is bad and there's probably a better solution to their problem (which in the latter two is lack of sleep caused by their being too many noisy humans on earth). The instigator of the flood is the villain. In the Biblical story, Yahweh-Elohim is both destroyer and saviour. Like the gods of Ziusudra and Utnapishtim, he does not try out any other methods first; he goes straight to a genocidal flood. We are told that man was wicked, but the nature of the wickedness is unspecified, and we are left wondering 'If it's man who's wicked, why do all the animals have to die as well?'. Unlike the other gods, Yahweh does not look upon the floating corpses and realise that Genocide Is Bad. Instead, he smells the pleasing aroma of the cooked meat in Noah's sacrifice and promises not to flood the world again, as though he had a craving for something but wasn't sure what: was it genocide or steak? Turns out it was steak. Sorry about the flood, guys. I won't do it again. Noah is not rewarded with immortality; instead, traumatised by the experience and terrified of God's mood-swings, Noah becomes a drunk. 

The lack of the, fairly obvious, moral message that Genocide Is Bad is emphasized by the content of subsequent Bible books. In Exodus, God commands Moses & Co. to exterminate all of the Promised Land's inhabitants when they arrive. In Numbers, God commands Moses & Co. to kill lots of people, and Moses berates his army officers for not executing all the women and children. A compromise is reached: the male children and non-virgin women are killed; the virgin females are kept as wives/sex slaves. In Deuteronomy, God commands the Israelites the exterminate the inhabitants of the Promised Land. In Joshua, the Israelites slaughter their way through the Promised Land, with God occasionally helping out by throwing rocks from the sky.

But ancient Jews were still bothered by God's seeming overreaction in the time of Noah. What made those times so much worse than now? Who were the 'sons of God'? Who were the Nephilim? A modern theory is that the 'sons of God' and the 'Nephilim' mentioned in the flood story are a remnant of Israel's earlier polytheistic mythology; the Nephilim are described as 'the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown'; the author was trying to quickly explain away the semi-divine humans that were still part of Israel's folk-culture during the transition from polytheism to monotheism.

Another explanation was that the 'sons of God' (sometimes translated as 'sons of the judges' or 'sons of the nobles') referred to the descendants of Seth, whereas the 'the daughters of men' were the descendants of Cain. Mixed marriages between God's chosen people (his metaphorical sons) and the scummy Cainites were the cause of the wickedness. This idea is reinforced by the frequency that God commands the Israelites not to marry anyone who isn't also an Israelite.

But there is one more theory about the 'sons of God': that they were fallen angels. This idea can be traced back to The Book of Enoch, which I imagine came about like this:

Sometime in the first century B.C.E., when Judea was ruled by Greeks and the Jews were having a bad time, a man looked at a shooting star and saw a falling angel, cast out of heaven for defying the will of God. This unknown man realised that fallen angels were responsible for evil. He rushed back home and read Genesis to try and find scriptural evidence of his revelation.

(This is an oversimplification: Enoch may be the works of multiple authors edited together)

He found the enigmatic Enoch verse:

Genesis 5:24 'Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.'

And the sons of God passages:

Genesis 6:1-2, 4 'When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose... The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterwards, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.'

And he realised that the sons of God were fallen angels who had mated with human females to produce a race of giants, the Nephilim. He then wrote the Book of Enoch, which tells of how a band of angels led by Shemhazai lusted over human females; then they descended to Earth and slept around, producing a race of giants, the Nephilim, who had huge appetites. The giants consumed all of the humans' food; then they started eating humans, then each other. Meanwhile, the fallen angels taught the humans all sorts of things that God disapproves of.

God saw the evil committed by the fallen angels, the humans and the giants, and God decided to wipe out life with a flood. But first God decided to invite Enoch, a righteous man, up to heaven and transformed him into the angel Metatron, God's second-in-command.

The message to the suffering Jews was clear: God is still in heaven; he is not responsible for evil; he will get round to sorting out our problems.  

The idea of fallen angels was a popular one. It absolved, to an extent, God of blame for the evil in the world. Unknown authors wrote books expanding on the story of Adam and Eve: Satan the fallen angel was the serpent in the Garden of Eden who tempted Eve; he had rebelled because he refused to bow to Adam; Satan now hated mankind; he proceeded to tempt (in the guise of an angel of light) and harass the first humans after their expulsion from Eden, and continues to plague humans to this day. 

The fallen angels, the soldiers of Satan, came to be in league with the demons. In Jewish tradition, demons were created at the end of the sixth day. God abandoned working on them as soon as the Sabbath began; he had made their spirits but not their bodies; he left them unfinished as a reminder to humanity to stop working as soon as the Sabbath began. The demons of Jewish tradition are not inherently evil; they occasionally possess humans because they are jealous of humanity's physical bodies, but they are just another of God's creatures. They are both good and evil, like the Hebrew God himself.

Paul the Apostle believed in fallen angels. He was a fan of The Book of Enoch, Genesis, and The Life of Adam and Eve. Paul's imagination combined the stories of these books, the beliefs the Jewish Christians he had been persecuting and his disapproval of the Mosaic Law to produce a novel theology. One day his mind snapped and he decided he had been prenatally chosen to preach the good news (gospel) that Jesus marked the end of God's covenant with Abraham and the necessity of following the Mosaic law. He was paranoid about fallen angels; he worried that they might lust after Christian women; he warned his followers not to trust angels. Reading his letters, I can't help but feel sorry for poor paranoid Paul.

As Christianity developed, so did the idea of fallen angels. In his City of God, Augustine described Satan and the fallen angels as beings that were created good but rebelled out of pride before the creation of man. God then decided to create humans to replace the fallen angels. Satan & Co, like all angels and humans, have free will. They rebelled out of free will and continue to do evil out of free will; they oppose the goodness of God. Their presence on earth is tolerated by God, who outsmarts the angels by using the evil they create to produce good. But he only does this after the evil has occurred. The Jewish demons didn't exist in gentile Christianity; demons and fallen angels were synonymous.

The Book Of Enoch, featuring Enoch as a prototype Jesus (a righteous man who cheats death and is taken to heaven to become God's second-in-command) had a mixed reputation within Christianity. Some churches suppressed it, others made it canonical.

In the first and second centuries C.E., the Jews attempted several times to rebel against Roman rule and declare Judea independent. This resulted in the Romans slaughtering, enslaving, and banishing tens of thousands of Jews. The majority of Jews ended up part of the diaspora, scattered across the Empire. The Rabbis compiled and edited the books of the Hebrew Bible (which Christians later took as the Old Testament) in the 2nd century so that the scattered Jews could still be linked by their culture and traditions, preserved in the written word. They thought fallen angels were a stupid idea. All books featuring fallen angels were rejected from the canon. To the rabbis, the belief in fallen angels could not be reconciled with the belief in the omnipotent Hebrew god who openly boasts about being responsible for evil as well as good, e.g.:

Isaiah 45:7 'I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things.'

The Book of Job, generally considered to be the masterpiece of the Hebrew Bible (it is certainly the Bible book I recommend most of all), deals with the problem of evil, sort of. It is also Satan's main appearance in the Hebrew Bible. Job, the protagonist, is a righteous man who follows all God's laws and has a great life. God and his angels, including Satan, meet up. God asks Satan if he has seen how loyal Job is. Satan suggests that Job is only loyal because he has a great life. So God and Satan work together to ruin Job's life so God can prove a point.

Satan hires mercenaries to kill Job's animals and servants. God rains down fire from above and uses a great wind to blow down Job's house, killing all of Job's children. Satan gives Job loads of diseases, covering his entire body with sores.

Job sits in the ashes of his house for seven days, then has a long conversation with some of his friends in which they all try to understand why the fuck Job's life has just been ruined for seemingly no reason. They discuss whether Job may have secretly been guilty of something, maybe he deserved it really, and decide that maybe God has actually ruined Job's life for no obvious reason. Towards the end of their discussion, another character, Elihu, joins in and rebukes them, saying that God is wise and wouldn't have ruined his life for nothing, Job must deserve it.

God then appears in a whirlwind. He tells Elihu to shut up because he's totally wrong. He tells Job to shut up and stop questioning. God is the all-powerful creator and ruler of everything, and can do what he wants. You humans are tiny and do not understand my ways.

Attempting to read this in a Christian context, God being the Loving God of Love and Satan being the Evil Prince of Evil, is difficult. Why are God and Satan teaming up to ruin someone's life? WHAT IS THE GOD OF LOVE DOING?

In the Jewish context it makes sense. Satan is a servant of God who carries out divinely ordained wicked acts. These acts may be to test people's loyalty, to strengthen their character, to bring out their true nature, or for mysterious reasons which humans aren't capable of understanding. The Rabbis saw fallen angels as superfluous; when you already have a god who is often openly wicked, there is no need for a separate evil entity in opposition to God. This was a threat to monotheism; if God tolerated divine beings in opposition to him, was it because he could not defeat them? What was he waiting for? This was getting dangerously close to dualism. (Throughout history, dualist religions, who see the cosmos as a battleground between a good god and a bad god, have arisen out of Christianity.)

The combination of Jewish and Christian scriptures in Christian Bibles presents us with a morally complex God and a morally complex Satan; this finds its ultimate expression in Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Satan is easily read as the brave hero rebelling against the cruel tyrant God. Even the loyalist angels comment on God's wickedness; the angel Gabriel refers to God as 'Heaven's awful monarch'.

A Rabbi has no problem when confronted with the famous Epicurean trilemma:

'If God is unable to prevent evil, then he is not all-powerful.

If God is not willing to prevent evil, then he is not all-good.

If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why does evil exist?'

To a Rabbi, simple: God is not all-good. If it's an oversimplification to call a human being all-good or all-bad, it must be even more so to say that the same of the supreme transcendent being who created everything. Man was created in God's image; man is both good and evil, so is God. Claiming that God is all-good was deity denigration. Fallen angels were for pussies who didn't want to take monotheism seriously.

The Rabbis worked hard to suppress Enoch and the other fallen angel books. The idea was still popular among Jews when the Talmud, the other Jewish sacred scripture, was written. This process began around 200 C.E. and took a long time; the Talmud is freakin' huge (over 6,200 print pages, according to Wikipedia). The Talmud records all the exegetical interpretations of Jewish scriptures: what Rabbis agreed on, what they disagreed on and why, what was allegorical, what was literal. It was written because persecution of the Jews was on the increase; they were more and more scattered across the world. The Hebrew Bible was not enough to keep Jewish culture preserved.

The Talmud contains extended editions of Biblical tales, which were not to be taken literally. They were there to argue for a certain understanding, or to prove a point. One of the extended creation stories demonstrates how silly the Rabbis thought fallen angels were: before creating man, God asks his angels what they think of the idea. Some of them protest against the notion. God destroys them with his little finger. The violent Hebrew God would not let rebellious angels survive. And if humans could figure out that rebelling against an omnipotent God was not going to go well, then angels, greater and more intelligent than humans, should have been able to.

I find the Jewish view far more satisfying. The books of the Hebrew Bible were written over a about a thousand years. They attempt to imagine and understand what the supreme creator must be like; the authors lived in a primitive world and so had to conclude that the creator was a capricious tyrant with a long list of things that shouldn't be done. From the starting point of monotheism, the authors didn't have the luxury of believing in quarrelling gods. Everything was caused by the One True God. When people became ill after eating shellfish in the desert, it was a sign that God disapproved of eating shellfish. Social cohesion and good health were blessings from God; activities that promoted them were incorporated into the Mosaic Law (which developed over many years). The priests were doing God's work by promoting his law; they needed food, so God demanded animal sacrifices. Since the Israelites successfully slaughtered their way through the Promised Land, it must have been God's will. Does that make it right or good? No: it's just God's will. A great flood had occurred, and there had been a small band of survivors. The flood and the ark must both have been God's will. Did this make the flood right? Could there have been a better way that God could've solved everything? Maybe, but we puny humans can't say. God does what he wants.

The God of the Hebrew Bible is a more unpleasant character than the God of Christian scripture, but he is a more in-depth attempt to understand the will of the One True God responsible for all things. We understand cause and effect better nowadays; it sounds silly to attribute success and failure, prosperity and calamity, as rewards and punishments meted out by a Divine Dictator. Nevertheless, the books of the Hebrew Bible are powerful works of literature by people trying to make sense of the world they lived in.

Sources

Books:

Zealot by Reza Aslan

Fallen Angels by Bernard J. Bamberger

Omens of Millennium by Harold Bloom

Introduction to the Talmud by Moses Maimonides

A Gathering of Angels by Morris B. Margolies

Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels

Myths and Legends of the Ancient Near East edited by Rachel Storm

Christian Beginnings by Geza Vermes

Relevant earlier posts:

Bible: Adam & Eve, Extended Edition (includes the story about God destroying protesting angels with his little finger)

Bible: The Ten Generations, Extended Edition (includes parts of Enoch: the lustful angels and the transformation of Enoch into Metatron)
Pauline Gentiles and Jewish Christians

Bible: New Testament Timeline

The [Nine Billion] Names of God (about the explanations for God's multiple names and his occasional use of plurals)

Elohim vs Yahweh (about the theory that the Biblical flood story was originally polytheistic)

Torah Documentary Hypothesis (about the theory that the Torah is composed of multiple documents edited together)

Review: Paradise Lost and Regained by John Milton