King James Version · Before the nations
Genesis 6
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1And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And said, shall not always strive with man, for that he also is : yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when came in unto the daughters of men, and they children to them, the same became which were of old, men of renown. And saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the of was only evil continually. And it that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at . And said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But found in the eyes of . These are the generations of : was a man and perfect in his generations, and walked with . And begat three sons, , , and . The earth also was corrupt before , and the earth was filled with . And looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for had corrupted his way upon the earth. And said unto , The end of is come before me; for the earth is filled with through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred , the breadth of it fifty , and the height of it thirty . A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy , wherein is the breath of life, from under ; and every thing that is in the earth shall . But with thee will I establish my ; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee. And of every living thing of , two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them. Thus did ; according to all that commanded him, so did he.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Before the nations, 2600 BC to 2100 BC ›
The opening chapters, from creation to Babel, told on a scale that covers the whole earth before the story narrows to one family.
- The neighbours' own stories
- Mesopotamia told its own versions of these events. Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh tell of a flood, a survivor, an ark, and birds sent out to find land. Enuma Elish tells of a world made from a defeated sea. The resemblances are close enough that scholars have argued about them for a century and a half, and the differences are where the argument gets interesting: Genesis has no quarrel among gods, no accidental humanity, and a flood sent for moral reasons rather than because people were noisy.
- Babel and the ziggurat
- A tower with its top in the heavens, built of brick and bitumen on a plain in Shinar, describes a Mesopotamian ziggurat exactly. Dozens were built, the best known at Ur and Babylon, of mud brick because southern Mesopotamia has no stone. The detail about brick instead of stone is the kind of thing someone writes who has actually seen one.
- The wider world
- If these chapters are placed anywhere in ordinary chronology, the surrounding centuries are the age of the Egyptian pyramids, the Sumerian city-states, the Indus Valley cities, and the first phase of Stonehenge. Writing was a few centuries old and existed in two places on earth.
All of Genesis