Reading and summarizing/reviewing The Unseen Battle: Spiritual Warfare, the Three Rebellions, and Christ’s Victory Over Dark Powers by Joel Muddamalle
Chapter 3 – The Rebellions of Genesis 3 and 6
Through the writngs during the Second Temple Judaism (2TJ) period, the common view of how evil entered the world was because of three rebellions, not just one. We’re most familiar with Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, but there was also the rebellion of the sons of God and the generation of the nephilim in Genesis 6, and then the Babel rebellion of Genesis 11 and the dispersal of the people into different nations. Muddamalle addresses Babel in the next chapter.
The serpent of Genesis 3 was a nachash, a word having multiple meanings in Hebrew: a serpent, a divine throne room guardian, or a being with a fiery, reflective, bronze-like appearance. Likely, all three senses of the word are in play when talking about Eden’s nachash. Muddamalle points out that the nachash’s deception marks the introduction of spiritual warfare: the nachash used truth alloyed with tiny but significant lies to tempt Eve, and then Adam, to rebel against a rather explicit command from God, and diverting them from their appointed mission as Edenic caretakers. Adam and Eve chose to take sides against their Creator.
There’s an quiet irony in the curse God places on the nachash to crawl and eat dust, as it’s the very same material God used to form Adam in Genesis 2:7. Muddamalle draws references between Adam’s name and the Hebrew word adamah, meaning “ground” or “soil.” Checking Strong’s, the word used in the Genesis 3:14 condemnation of the nachash is aphar (dust), the same word used in the Genesis 2:7 in the creation narrative, and the same word used (twice) in His condemnation of Adam in Genesis 3:19. Muddamalle didn’t point that out and I wish he did, because it creates a noticeable link between Adam, the nachash, and their curses. It’s no accident the writer(s) of Genesis used the same word in all three verses.
God curses and prophesizes against all three parties: the nachash, Eve, then Adam. To the nachash He dooms his future by stating the zera—the seed or the offspring—of Adam and Eve will directly contend with him. This establishes the prophetic pattern of the what role future generations will play in God’s plan to restore His human children back into their intended place in His family.
The nachash’s and Adam and Eve’s rebellion is the first and “popular” one that we’re all familiar with, but let’s go to the second rebellion, narrated in Genesis 6, that has the sons of God begetting the nephilim by human women. Here, the rebellion can easily be interpreted merely as supernatural beings up to no good, but there’s a backstory that the Genesis writer and his audience would have already had in mind with this story. Muddamalle cites the pseudopigraphical/Dead Sea Scroll (DSS) sources of Enoch and Jubilees, that the ancient Hebrew and those of 2TJ would have considered as preserved history and lore. He also cites the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and early Christian writings from Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and more, as sources who were privy to all of this additional literature and history. 2TJ and early Christian thought retained the supernatural view of the sons of God, that they weren’t humans but very much divine beings in active rebellion against Yahweh. Producing the nephilim was a way the sons of God enacted this rebellion.
Justin Martyr specifically notes that these “angels” were responsible for introducing magic to humanity, a discipline forbidden by God. Enoch calls these sons of God “Watchers,” beings acknowledged in a single verse in Daniel. Enoch further depicts the Watchers as teaching humanity various methods of degeneracy: using plants as drugs and how to conduct warfare. While the “taking” of the human women by the sons of God probably wasn’t rape, there’s some evidence that the fathers of these women offered them to the sons of God in exchange for this unholy knowledge. In light of this, the subsequent verses about human depravity and the resulting flood make sense: the degeneracy of God’s human family got worse after the rebellious sons of God actively got involved.
Mesopotamanian and Meditterranean mythologies are rife with stories of supernatural beings and giants consorting with humanity, as seen in the Hurrian texts, Greek and Phoenician stories, the apkallu, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. If it were real history, it makes sense that scripture’s writers would also mention these beings and the consequences of their schemes, not just as a matter of “setting the record straight” but to also show further how God works in response to scheming to oppose Him. To punish the sons of God, Peter mentions that God commits the sons of God to “chains of darkness” in 2 Peter 2, also echoed in Jude verse 6, while later in Jude 14 and 15 has him lifting nearly verbatim from 1 Enoch:
Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone, and to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts they have committed in their ungodliness, and of all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
We’re already acquainted with how God punished His human family in being a party to the sons of God’s rebellion by sending the flood. The nephilim (for now) are wiped out, and the zera of Adam and Eve is preserved with Noah’s line surving after the flood. We know God is upholding His promise of the nachash’s future doom with this remnant of humanity.