Historical Genesis: Long Lives and Nephilim (S07, E07)

Greetings, and welcome to the Faith Chapel Podcast. My name is Jason,

and I am the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In the podcast, we are going through an eight-episode series looking at whether

Genesis should be taken as history or mainly as fiction.

In this seventh season of the podcast, we will look at different aspects of

what is known as primeval history, the first 11 chapters of Genesis,

and discover if the Bible's account of the origins of this world can be trusted.

Today we dive into the topic of the long lives of human beings as found in Genesis,

as well as a group known in the early chapters of Genesis called the Nephilim.

Thanks for joining us as we dive into this discussion.

What we have going on in Genesis 5 is a long list of 10 patriarchs that lead from Adam to Noah.

And the goal of this is clearly to get us from one generation to the generation

where the next big thing happens.

And so in the midst of this, what we find are really long lives for these patriarchs.

And just to go over a couple of them, I'm going to read through the first two

from Genesis 5 verses 1 through 8, and then we're going to,

Genesis 5:1–8

discuss what people understand based upon these numbers.

So in Genesis 5, starting in verse 1, we read, This is the written account of

the descendants of Adam.

When God created human beings, he made them to be like himself.

He created them male and female, and he blessed them and called them human.

When Adam was 130 years old, he became the father of a son who was just like him in his very image.

He named his son Seth.

After the birth of Seth, Adam lived another 800 years, and he had other sons and daughters.

Adam lived 930 years, and then he died. When Seth was 105 years old,

he became the father of Enosh.

After the birth of Enosh, Seth lived another 807 years, and he had other sons and daughters.

Seth lived 912 years, and then he died.

All right, so what we have here is the beginning of this genealogy.

Adam having a son when it says here he was 130 years old, and then he lived another 800 years.

So his life was 930 years long, according to Genesis.

And then when Seth was 105 years old, he bore Enosh, and then he lived to the

ripe old age of 912 years old.

So it's pretty cut and dry what the Bible is saying here.

This is a person, he lived, this is how long he lived, this is one of his sons.

Obviously, Adam had other sons, and Seth presumably had more sons than just

Enosh. But this is one of the patriarchs. This is his son. This is how old he was.

It's pretty cut and dry in that.

But what we find here is it being a remarkable feat to live 930 years,

at least according to our standards today.

And so there are people who look at this and they say it's just cut and dry.

This is Adam. He lived 930 years. That's all we need to know.

But then there are other people who look at this and say it doesn't quite fit

with the bones of humans we've found.

We haven't found any bones of humans that have tested to have lived that long.

What do they make of these stories? Maybe they just didn't find any of the ancient

people, or maybe they didn't live this old, and these numbers would then be symbolic.

And so we're going to take a look at both of these examples,

their literal years or their symbolic years.

And there are people who are very strong, especially when we come to young earth

creationists, they are very strong in believing that it is literal years.

And then there are people, I haven't seen any real strong opinions on the metaphor

side, on the symbolic numbers, but there are still people who believe in that.

And so we're going to look at how they both come to this conclusion and then move on from there.

It says in the ESV study Bible, one of the most striking aspects of the passage

in Genesis 5 is the great age of the first people in Genesis.

Given that the lifespan of people today, and at least since the flood,

is much shorter than the lifespan of those listed from Adam to Noah,

the question is often raised as to whether the remarkable longevity of these patriarchs,

as given in chapter 5 verses 1 through 32 should be taken at face value or whether

their longevity has some other explanation.

So first we're going to look at what the symbolic understanding of these numbers is.

First it says that the symbolic numbers, if they are symbolic numbers,

they are more than likely figures related to either A, astronomical periods.

So we can see when certain constellations are in the sky.

And so like it's been said in movies, and I don't know if it was really said

in the 1800s and earlier, but people have been quoted as saying it's been many moons.

And so that's kind of an astronomical feature that would be up there.

Or you can look at the constellations that are in the sky at a certain time

of the year and that. And so they could divide it up into that and that's how

they get to these numbers.

So it could be various astronomical periods.

Or they are a code of an honorary significance.

So in the ancient cultures, revering the ancestors was something that was done.

It was something that they revered their ancestors. And so to give them more

reverence, they attributed long lives to them.

This is something that is a possibility of these being symbolic numbers.

And lastly, the third possibility is that they are calculated from a numeric

method with almost all being divisible by five or divisible by five plus seven.

The idea here is they multiplied that number by five or they multiplied that

number by five and then added seven to it to get to the ages where we have them today.

One of the examples that people who use the symbolic nature here would say is Lamech's age at 777.

That's what his age is attributed to. And seven is the number of completion.

And in Jewish thought, when you duplicate something three times, it adds certainty to it.

So this is like triple perfection. This is the ultimate number in Judaism.

And maybe they're just saying Lamech, who is Noah's dad, is the one guy that

produced an offspring that God saw something in that he saved.

And so they gave him this triple number of protection. And so some people would

point to that and saying, that's too obvious to say that that's his actual age.

That seems to be a very symbolic number.

The author of How Old Was Father Abraham Craig Olson, he says this,

I think these numbers were assigned as exaggerated hyperbolic numbers to give these people honor.

In Genesis 5, everyone lives around 900 years, but they fit this pattern of

divisible by five or divisible by five with the addition of seven.

And so what that means is that in the examples that we have from Genesis chapter

Genesis 5 · chapter mention

5 up here, Adam being 930 years old, we all can look at that number and say,

yeah, that number is divisible by five.

If it ends in a 5 or a 0, it's going to be divisible by 5.

And then when we go down to Seth, Seth lived 912 years.

And so if we subtract 7 from that number, it gets to 905. And then again,

it's divisible by 5. And so that's what they're saying.

These numbers are divisible by 5 or they're divisible by 5 when you subtract 7 to them.

And so that's the concept here for what these ages are and what they represent.

They would represent honor to these people because of the longevity that's attributed to them.

And with the multiplication systems that they had, they would just multiply

it by five or multiply it by five times.

Plus seven. And again, the seven is symbolic for perfection.

The HarperCollins Study Bible states it this way, the long lives of the patriarchs

before the flood are a sign of the greatness of the ancestors and their distance from the present era.

A similar concept is found in Mesopotamian kings lists, where kings before the

flood lived for tens of thousands of years.

And so that is one of the examples, one of the ways that we would look at the

numbers of the patriarchs, the ages of the patriarchs. It is a symbolic number.

But the other way of looking at it is that they are literal numbers.

So the ESV study Bible says this.

No writer, however, has offered a convincing alternative explanation like the

ones I listed above, and none of the proposed alternatives can be substantiated with any certainty.

The traditional understanding is that the numbers should be taken at face value,

often assuming that something changed in the cosmology of the Earth or in the

physiology of humans or in both,

after the Flood, resulting in a rapid decline in longevity, finally stabilizing

at a normal lifespan in the range of 70 or 80 years.

In any case, one clear implication of these genealogies is.

Is that these people actually lived, regardless of how long, and they actually died.

And so the ESV study Bible here is saying that when you look at the explanation

of the ages, and according to

their opinion, it's not a convincing alternative of the literal numbers.

And so this is, again, is an example of people who would believe those were

actual numbers, and they give the reasons why they believe, because something

changed, whether in the environment when the flood came on the earth,

or maybe it's something in humans that changed.

And we have already talked about how the DNA of human beings has degraded over

time. And so something like that could have happened in this era as well.

Those are the two concepts of how to,

look at the age of the patriarchs. One of the sources I listed talked about

the Sumerian kings list.

And so I just want to give this as a historical basis.

And it has some interesting fact at the very end that I think is fascinating to me.

All right. So again, this is the Archaeological Study Bible.

It says this about that list. The Sumerian king list, an ancient record of the

kings of Sumer and Akkad were originally composed in the late 3rd millennium BC.

During the reign of Utu Hegel of Uruk, in order to legitimize the ruling dynasty.

It displays striking similarities to the genealogies of Genesis.

The preamble begins with intriguing terminology, when kingship was lowered from heaven.

It goes on to list the succession of kings, the lengths of their reigns,

and the respective cities from which they ruled.

The kings are recorded to have enjoyed extraordinarily long reigns.

For example, In-Min-Lu-Anna ruled 43,200 years.

In-Min-Gal-Anna ruled 28,800 years.

A great flood is then purported to have covered the land, after which kings

were recorded as having significantly shorter reigns, though still of incredible

duration, 140 to 1,200 years.

The genealogies in Genesis are also divided into pre- and post-flood periods,

with longer lifespans prior to the catastrophic deluge of Genesis 5 and significantly

lesser longevity after it, such as chapter 11.

Unlike the king list, however, the early Genesis genealogies do not serve to

legitimate their later kings.

All right, so what we have here is the concept of an outside source from the

Bible listing a really long lives for kings.

So we would consider this historical evidence that people could have lived longer back then.

Their reigns are incredibly long, way longer than what Genesis accounts a human living for on earth.

And so there seems to be some sort of symbolic nature to these numbers.

But the goal here is that this is an outside source that relates to and really

goes alongside what Genesis is saying.

The difference between the two, the main difference between the two,

is that this Sumerian king list is trying to legitimize the kings that are ruling after the flood.

And so they go before the flood and they say, look at our ancestors,

look at how long they ruled for, look at how much we revere them.

And so from this line, that's how we should get our kings.

But that's not what the Genesis account does. It's not trying to account for any kings at all.

It's really taking the godly line from Seth all the way down to Noah.

And it's just saying, these are the people in this list.

These are the ancestors that we have of those who follow after God.

So what is interesting, and I think just fascinating point to these ages and

their lengths of ruling time,

is that the Sumerians are the ones who used, and I am going to butcher this,

but secagesimal system, which is a base 60 numeral system.

And we have 60 seconds in a minute. We have 60 minutes in an hour.

Our time is based upon this kind of system, mathematical system, 360 degrees in a circle.

Again, it's based upon this base 60 numeral system.

If you take the Sumerians being the ones who really came up with this system

and you divide the numbers by 60, you get some fascinating numbers.

So the longest number there is 43,200. That's the longest reign.

And when you divide that by 60, it comes out evenly to 720.

And the concept from the NIV Cultural Background Study Bible says this.

If the notation is read with the decimal values, which I converted that to, rather than the,

sexagesimal values, the numbers are in the same range as the biblical numbers

and the totals of the lists are nearly identical.

So when you think about someone reigning for 720 years, you can fit that into

the timeframe of Adam who lived 930 years.

And so that's the concept that they have seen from that if you place it into

that base 60 numeral system.

And so it's fascinating to look at and what that could mean for the literal ages in Genesis.

But again, there is no uniform agreement on are they really that old or are

they symbolic number revering just the people who came before them.

So one last note on the genealogical record is that when you look at Genesis

5 and you look at Genesis, I think it's 10 right before the story of Babel, both of them have 10.

Patriarchs listed. And the concept of them having 10 prior to the flood and

10 after the flood really seems to indicate that there are gaps in those genealogical records.

They are more than likely not consistently one from another.

We do know that Adam was the actual father of Seth. That's described in the

Bible, and that's something we know for sure.

But in the other ones, there can be gaps in there.

They don't have to be linear. One begat another who begat another.

They can be ancestors and they can jump generations. And this is something that

we see elsewhere in the world at that time.

So the Archaeological Study Bible says the fact that there are exactly 10 names

in the list, as in the genealogy

of Genesis 11, 10 through 26, indicates that it almost certainly contains gaps,

the lengths of which are summarized in the large numbers.

Other ancient genealogies outside the Bible exhibit similarly unrealistic figures

and also contain exactly 10 names.

And then the NIV's Cultural Background Study Bible adds this,

comparing biblical genealogies to one another shows that often several generations are skipped.

Thus, a genealogy's purpose is apparently not to represent every generation

as our modern family trees attempt to do.

Genealogies represent continuity and relationship and are often used for purposes of power and prestige.

And so that's the last note here on the genealogies, that even though it says

Seth is the father of Enosh, he might be the grandfather.

He might be the great-grandfather of Enosh, and that is allowed for in the vocabulary of this text.

Now, when you get to ardent young earth theorists, they are going to take these way more literally

than someone just looking at it from the context of syntax and word order and

what words mean and what they would understand.

They are pretty dogmatic about it being Adam 930 years and then Seth,

912 years, and so on and so forth.

And they see very few gaps. I think one of the persons that I looked at said

there are two gaps in that first genealogical record that he can see elsewhere in.

Gaps in these generations. And so, again, it depends on where you're at

and how fervent you are in young earth compared to an older earth,

where you will see people lining up on these genealogies.

That's where we are at with the genealogies in Genesis 5.

When we go to Genesis 6, the first four verses are quite fascinating,

and we're going to just take a look at those real quick and try to figure out

what's really going on in this context.

So Genesis chapter 6 verses 1 through 4 reads this way.

Genesis 6:1–4

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.

Then the Lord said, my spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh.

His days shall be 120 years.

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward,

when the sons of God came into the daughters of man, and they bore children to them.

These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

Very ambiguous language here. We have the context of the sons of God.

We have the context of the daughters of man, and then we have their offspring known as the Nephilim.

There's not widespread agreement on how to really interpret this in what they

would call the most biblical way.

And so I'm going to give you the examples of what they think this could mean,

multiple people think this could mean,

and then we'll just flush out a little bit and I'll lean one way on this,

but it's not a dogmatic issue that you really have to agree or you're not a Christian.

There's plenty of opportunities here for differing opinions of this.

So the sons of God, option one, are fallen angels.

And the context that we get from this is when we see the term sons of God in

scripture outside of this verse, almost all the time, they are referring to.

Angels, people who are in God's angelic court.

So in Job 1.6, we read, now there was a day when the sons of God came to present

themselves before the Lord and the Satan also came among them.

And the idea here is simply that the sons of God are angelic beings in this context.

And when we look at a passage in Hosea and another one in Job,

it is also referring to the angels who are in God's court.

And so some people will take this to be the angels who in this case are fallen.

They are no longer in heaven with God, but they have rebelled against God.

They have joined Satan's side and are going in that direction.

So option one, sons of God are fallen angels and the daughters of man are human

females, just any human female that was out there.

So those are the differing perspectives on option one. Option two,

the sons of God are sons of Seth who are living a godly life.

And so this separates the line that comes from Cain and the line that comes from Seth.

From Seth's line are people who are in the genealogy of Genesis 5.

They are following after God and trying to pursue a relationship with him.

They are living godly lives.

And here, option two would be daughters of man are the daughters of Cain's descendants.

And these are people who are not living godly lives.

And we know that because this is the precursor to what happens before Noah and

the flood. This is like setting up the stage for God sending the flood on the

world. That's option two.

Options three and four are very similar. I have separated them here.

Some people combine them.

So option three are the sons of God. And in this case, God is lowercase.

And that's intentional because Elohim in the Old Testament can refer to Yahweh, the God of creation.

And sometimes it refers to human kings and rulers.

Even in the New Testament, Satan is called the God of this world.

In this context, God is lowercase, not referring to Yahweh, but to some other lesser being.

The sons of God, in this case, are sons of ancient kings.

This is attested to in especially like Roman culture, where they would call the emperor divine.

A title of one of them was divinity.

That's how they would refer to the

emperors. And so sons of God here are referring to these ancient kings.

And the daughters of men are just all human females.

Option four is that the sons of God are specifically Cain's descendants who

are wicked, but are still created in the image of God.

And therefore they have this classification as sons of God and they are marrying

Seth's godly line of descendants. And again, the reason for that is because

what flows out of this is the wickedness and corruption that leads to the flood.

And so those are the options. fallen angels and just human females, the,

sons of Seth and the daughters of Cain, the sons of the kings of the earth and

just daughters of men, and then the sons of Cain marrying the.

Seth's godly line of descendants.

When we look at the concept of the sons of God and the daughters of men,

it says the identity of both groups is uncertain and various solutions have

been advocated, although none has gained universal support.

Though it would be difficult to determine which of these three views may be correct, it is clear

that the kind of relationship described here involves some form of grievous

sexual perversion, wherein the sons of God saw and with impunity took any women,

daughters of men, that they wanted.

The sequence here in Genesis 6-2, they saw that they were attractive and they

took, parallels the sequence of the fall in Genesis 3-6, where Eve sees the

fruit, she sees that it's good,

and she takes it of herself.

In both cases, from Genesis 6 and Genesis three, something good in God's creation

is used in disobedience and sinful rebellion against God with tragic consequences.

Only Noah stands apart from this sin. And that's from the ESV study Bible.

So the context here is clearly that something negative is coming out of this.

And when you look at the actual passage back in Genesis six,

it says that they took as their wives, any they chose.

And for me, that does seem to point to what the ESV is saying here,

where they are just collecting women as property, and they're just doing what they want with them.

They are gathering harems, and they're just, again, it says sexual perversion

here, and that definitely seems to fit in with the context here. So,

When you look at that, there are these four options that you could believe.

And when I look at these, I'm drawn more to option three than any of the others, because,

I see the correlation between how the kings of the world were considered divine,

in human standards and how their children could be referred to as sons of God.

And they just took and collected females and perverted that.

And I think we've seen enough evidence, whether it's in studies or elsewhere,

that when you don't have a strong family unit, wickedness does continue to grow

and expand in this world.

And so that's my opinion of this.

Like I said, it is not a dogmatic issue where I would even put it on like a

scale of this is something that is a high priority for you to agree with me.

That's not what this one is. There's plenty of room for disagreement in this.

Then the HarperCollins Study Bible adds this, The strange account of the sons

of God who marry and have sons

with the daughters of humans is another instance of transgression of the boundaries

between human and divine, like the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel stories.

This time, however, the transgression is initiated by the divine beings.

This obviously correlates it with more of the sons of God being angels,

but I found this to be an interesting perspective with the context of it is

similar to what's happened between the divisions between God and humanity.

God clearly set forth in Genesis 1 that a man should leave his father and mother

and be joined to his wife, which is singular.

And the context here is that they are going against that commandment of God.

That's really the message that I get out of Genesis 5, 1 through 4,

that it is wickedness that is growing and expanding on this.

And so that leaves us to their offspring, the sons of God and daughters of men,

their offspring are referred to as Nephilim.

There's two ways to look at who the Nephilim are.

If the sons of God are fallen angels and they do procreate with the daughters of men, and

there's some issues I see here with do angels really have DNA and other things

like that which would allow them to procreate and have offspring.

Some people do believe that they are offspring of fallen angels.

And if that were the case, they would probably have some sort of extra prowess. Maybe it's height.

Maybe it's strength. Maybe they would just have quicker reflexes or something

because they would be from two different worlds. They would be from a spiritual

world and then from a physical world.

And when you look at Nephilim, this is something that you could clearly get

out of the name, that they have extra power.

So this is from the ESV study Bible.

They say in Hebrew, Nephilim means fallen one.

But what happened when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek

is that when they were rendering this word Nepolem into Greek,

they rendered it gigantes, which is Greek for giants.

And so they interpreted this as being a superior race.

And again, this comes a couple of hundred years before Jesus.

So after the Hebrew had been written for many, many years, they translated it

into Greek, and this is how they render it in Genesis six gigantes.

So the ESV says this idea may have been mistakenly deduced from Numbers 1333.

We'll get to that in a second. One must be cautious about reading it back into the present passage.

The Nephilim were mighty men or warriors, and as such, may well have contributed

to the violence that was on the earth.

So the Jewish scribes who took the Hebrew text and put it into Greek.

They clearly saw this as the sons of God, meaning the fallen angels of this world.

And so in ancient times, this isn't a new concept, but this is something that

they really believed it produced someone with greater prowess on this earth.

And so that's something to really be considered when we're looking at the historical

evidence of who the Nephilim are.

Option two, and it goes along with the last context here of what the ESV said,

is that they were really strong and aggressive humans who were really good at

wreaking havoc on Earth.

So they were just human, just like you and I were. We do know how there is height

differences between people based on genetics. And so somehow these were set

apart and they gravitated toward each other.

They were lifting rocks. They were running marathons, whatever.

They were doing, they had just this really strong prowess.

And that's why it says that they contributed to the violence that filled the earth.

And why, when we go back to Genesis chapter 6, verse 4, it says,

Genesis 6:4

these were mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

And when it says that, it doesn't necessarily mean that in a reverence sort

of way because of the destruction that they bring.

These were just a gang that really brought havoc on this planet.

So the NIV Zondervan Study Bible says this, the Nephilim were not an ethnic

group, but a social group of warriors, usually past heroes of legendary power.

Here in Genesis chapter six, they illustrate the extent of violence in the world.

And the fascinating thing about the Nephilim is that, as the earlier quote mentioned,

that it's only mentioned one other place in the Bible, and that's in Numbers

13, 33, which says, and there we saw the Nephilim.

So let me give some context here. This is when the spies have gone into the promised land.

They are bringing back this giant fruit, but they're scared.

The report that they give to them is, and there we saw the Nephilim,

the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim.

And we seem to ourselves like grasshoppers. So we seemed to them.

They saw these people. They just were bigger, stronger, faster than the Israelites were.

And so they attributed these characteristics to the Nephilim.

Lastly, I'll read this quote. If both passages, so,

back in Genesis and here in Numbers, refer to the same people,

then the Israelite spies are expressing their fears of the Canaanites by likening

them to the ancient men of renown. And again, that.

Is contributing to the concept that the Canaanites were so wicked that God was

going to kick them out of their land.

Again, we see this in Genesis and in Numbers that when we have the Nephilim,

they are there creating havoc and God's punishment is ready for them.

So someone asked last week about aliens mentioned in scripture.

This is one of the passages where people do glean information about these being aliens.

And the actual name of the Nephilim, which means fallen ones,

gives some sort of basis for them to jump off of.

So these are ones, if they're fallen ones, they came down from above in their

eyes. And so this is one thing that they would point to as these are aliens.

How big and strong they are and how corrupt they are, are also things that they lean towards.

So when you look at our aliens in the Bible, this is one of the passages that come up.

But a couple of more that I have seen, just throw this in your knowledge.

I find it kind of fascinating. But Ezekiel chapter 1,

Ezekiel 1 · chapter mention

where Ezekiel sees a wheel within a wheel. That's another passage that people point to as alien life.

So I'll read verses 15 to 21 for you.

Now, as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside

the living creatures, one for each of the four of them.

As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction, their appearance

was like the gleaming of Barrow.

And the four had the same likeness, their appearance and construction,

being as it were a wheel within a wheel.

When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning, as they went.

And their rims were tall and awesome, and the rims of all four were full of eyes all around.

And when the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them.

And when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose.

Wherever the spirit wanted to go, they went, and the wheels rose along with

them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

When those went, these went, and when those stood, these stood.

And when those rose from the earth, the wheels rose along with them,

for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

In that context, people pull out of there. They can move in all four directions

without turning, which would be humanly impossible.

There were creatures there that had full of eyes all around them.

And wherever they wanted to go, they could rise up in the air.

They could come down to the ground.

These people point to this passage and say these are pointing to aliens.

But when you look at the greater context of this one, this is the throne room

of God being manifested on this earth.

And so it's going to be weird because God is not of this earth and God,

this to me is just a description of the beasts that are around him.

When you look at Isaiah 6 and all the cherubim that are around him,

they are screaming, holy, holy, holy is he.

And when you look in Revelation, there are beasts that are there that have eyes all over themselves.

And so this is just a description of God's throne room coming on earth.

And actually, what Ezekiel is going to see is that it's taken from Jerusalem.

His throne is no longer in that temple.

But it is another place that people point to. I had someone ask me,

not recently, but a while ago, about Revelation 1, verses 12-16.

Revelation 1:12–16

And this description of Jesus, which in this they see him being treated like an alien.

And then I, John, turned to see the voice that was speaking to me,

and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands

one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest.

The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow.

His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished bronze,

refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters.

In his right hand, he held seven stars.

From his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.

In other versions, it's going to be worded differently. but the concept of being

clothed, they saw this being like space gear with his feet burnished like bronze.

They just saw like what you would see walking on the moon and that sort of thing.

And so when you look at scripture, like these are the only three places that

people that I've seen are taking to be alien-like.

And from my perspective, all of them can be easily debunked He's saying,

no, no, no, this revelation is clearly talking about Jesus, the son of man.

And yes, you could call him an alien because he is God and like, this isn't his home.

That is not an alien in terms of that. As I mentioned about this Ezekiel passage,

it was all about God's throne room, and it is going to be outside of what we

can really understand it.

And then from Genesis 6, verses 1 through 4, in my opinion, again,

Genesis 6:1–4

it's describing the king's sons who are just doing whatever they want perversely

with all the women that they can't.

And so that's how I would describe them.

From my perspective, the Bible does not eliminate the possibility of aliens,

but it certainly doesn't allude to aliens being real either.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of the age of the patriarchs

as described in Genesis, as well as looking at who the Nephilim are.

The debate of the long lives of human beings in primeval history is not solved in this discussion.

There are some topics in scripture where it is okay to disagree with one another,

and this is one of those topics.

It doesn't matter to me if you believe human beings lived more than 900 years,

or if you believe the number used in Genesis to describe how old Adam and subsequent

human beings were is simply a symbolic number.

In my opinion, it's also okay to disagree on who the Nephilim was and who the

sons of God and daughters of men meant.

These arguments were put forth to help you understand the positions and to grow

in the grace of God as we live together believing the Bible is inspired by God.

If you would like more information about Faith Chapel and its ministries,

please visit the website gofaithchapel.org.

Next week, we will conclude our series by looking at how we should read the

first 11 chapters of Genesis. Have a great week.