and were renowned as heroes. And what was the extent of their sin?
The Lord saw how great manâs wickedness on the Earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time .
Now the Earth was corrupt (Hebrew shachath: destroyed) in Godâs sight and full of violence.
God saw how corrupt the Earth had become, for all the people on Earth had corrupted their ways.
Genesis 6: 5,11,12
Things must have been extremely bad when we are told that âevery inclination of the thoughts of manâs heart was only evil all the time,â and that the whole Earth was full of violence. We go now to the New Testament, which sheds a little more light on the background to this situation. Speaking of the fallen angels, Jude 6 tells us:
And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, He has reserved in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great day.
In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves over to sexual immorality and perversion . . .
Jude 6,7
In the above verse we are told that these evil angels left their own habitation. In the Greek, this word is oiketerion, and it is used only here and in II Corinthians 5:2, where it refers to the âspiritual body.â So these angels left their spirit body and came into physical form in order to produce the Nephilim , who were superhuman in size and in wickedness and evil. So heinous were their crimes that not only did Yaweh destroy all living creatures on the face of the Earth, but also the millions of people who had become totally evil and morally bankrupt as a result of the activities of the Nephilim . Their sin is likened to the perversion and sexual immorality of Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns.
The sin which these fallen spirit beings committed in debauching virtually the whole of the then known world was so vile that it precipitated the Flood. This worldwide deluge is well documented in the historical annals of most of the known ancient world. It destroyed all breathing things except for the eight souls preserved through the Flood and the animals Noah was instructed to bring along. But water cannot kill spirit beings. When we are told that these angels left their own spirit sphere, the inference is that they could not return there. So Yaweh, because of their sin, cast them into a place called Tartarus , there to await future judgment.
But was their crime merely excessive sexual immorality and worldwide violence or was there something more? I believe that there was something more. This theory is not spelt out in black and white in any of the Scriptures. But by examining the ancient written records pertaining to the period before the Flood, and even afterwards, I believe we can construct a good argument.
As was mentioned in an earlier chapter, it would appear that these spirit beings were involved in some form of genetic engineering. We observed how two of the Israeli spies carried one cluster of grapes between them on a pole from the land inhabited by the Nephilim in the days of Moses. Later, we encountered Goliath the Gittite, who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. In this chapter we considered how all the Earth was changed after the fall of man. Noxious plants and poisonous insects and other creatures appeared which were never part of the original Eden. Evil influences must have interfered with the DNA of all these plants, animals, insects etc to cause them to change and become as they are today. Consequently, when the fallen angels married the daughters of men, perhaps it was genetic engineering which was utilised to impregnate the women and produce the monstrous evil aberrations called the Nephilim. These in turn produced offspring who were genetically-engineered supernatural and superhuman evil monsters. Over the course of several hundred years, while the Ark was being prepared, these people
Gary Smalley, Greg Smalley, Michael Smalley, Robert S. Paul