The Pooka Weighs In (Gen 6:4)

Adam’s Aftermath

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⁴ the daughters of the humans would bear them children. וְיָלְד֖וּ לָהֶ֑ם

I’m picking up the end of the thread we were discussing last time specifically to discuss the question of what happens when human women bear children fathered by gods. In that post, I pointed out that standard English translations of the Hebrew make it sound as if this is a recap of v. 2 — but it is not. This is still part of the footnote insisting that the Nephilim were on earth not just “in those days” but “afterwards too.”

Though the Nephilim are mentioned only in one other verse in the Bible, they are apparently the same as, or at least part of, the Rephaim, and that’s a group we know somewhat more about. One thing we know about them is that they are giants. It’s natural, if you think about it, or do I mean supernatural? Richard Elliott Friedman comments:

As in an extremely common mythological theme, such mixed divine-human breeding produces beings who are bigger and stronger than regular humans.

This mixing, at least by implication, has already been part of our biblical story. Working backwards from where we are now …

• Enoch spent 5:22 hanging with the heavenlies or to put it a bit more literally, “walking around with the gods,” as I pointed out in a later post. We assume they were not having sex, but nonetheless it seems to have been something God wanted to put a stop to. At least, “God took him,” perhaps into custody.

• Cain is ostensibly the result of the man’s being intimate with his wife (a different idiom for sex than we saw last time). Yet as 4:1 continues, Ḥavvah asserts that she and YHWH had created that child, leaving Cain himself at least ⅓ divine.

• Let’s not forget the original act of mixing, when God blew the breath of life into the original earthling’s nostrils in 2:7.

We’ll get back to the mythological era before the end of this post with some help from Hesiod, but first some 20^th-century mixing. Two supernatural beings of Irish extraction, a Good Fairy and a Pooka (“a member of the devil class”) briefly discuss this problem in Flann O’Brien’s remarkable novel At Swim-Two-Birds: