I remember well the eerie, uncanny feeling I had as a child reading Genesis 6.1-4.This wasn’t a story we heard in Sunday School, and it wasn’t in any children’s Bible or Arch Books.It was mysterious and strange, and not understanding what sex was made it even weirder.The sons of God, or perhaps angels, came down from Heaven to mate with human women.Although not stated directly, their offspring seem to have been giants.Abruptly the story ends.Archie T. Wright was clearly fascinated by this story as well.His book, The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6:1-4 in Early Jewish Literature, isn’t so much about demons as it is about the influence of this very brief, extremely odd story.
As a young person I knew about the book 1 Enoch.Living in a rural town with no bookstore and no library (there was one in the town three miles away, but I didn’t drive and out-of-towners had to pay for a card), I had no way to read it.Wright writes quite a bit about it here.(In case you’re wondering, yes, in subsequent years I did read it.)His history of transmission is a little suspect, but he explores the impact of these four brief verses on what can perhaps best be described as a diegesis.This universe includes Watchers (the first part of 1 Enoch is called The Book of the Watchers), archangels, angels, evil spirits, giants, and demons.Later Judaism moved away from this world, while early Christianity grew fascinated with it.The mythology that emerged from it is sprawling and quite bizarre.All encapsulated in a few verses before the flood.
Wright’s book is academic; it’s a revised dissertation.Still, it’s a source more credible than a lot of what you find on the internet.This particular biblical episode is an example of what happens when you don’t explain enough.Granted, the writer likely had no idea that this brief account—shorter than a blog post—would eventually make it into a book that some people would consider from the anthropomorphic mouth of God himself, but because of this brevity questions, like angels, hung in the air.As Wright shows, these verses were incorporated into ways of explaining the existence of evil in the world.It was known by many names, and even took on personification in the form of Satan and his ilk.This is a world of the unexpected, and it readily took me back to a childhood of wonder concerning the inexplicable passages in the Good Book.
