World English Bible · Before the nations
Genesis 6
Touch any underlined name to see who or where it is. Tap a verse number to see where it is taken up elsewhere.
1When men began to multiply on the surface of the ground, and daughters were born to them, saw that men's daughters were beautiful, and they took any that they wanted for themselves as wives. said, " will not strive with man , because he also is ; so his days will be one hundred twenty years." The were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when came in to men's daughters and had children with them. Those were the who were of old, men of renown. saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the of man's was continually only evil. was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him in . said, "I will destroy man whom I have created from the surface of the ground—man, along with animals, creeping things, and birds of —for I am sorry that I have made them." But in eyes. This is the history of the generations of : was a man, blameless among the people of his time. walked with . became of three sons: , , and . The earth was corrupt before , and the earth was filled with . saw the earth, and saw that it was corrupt, for had corrupted their way on the earth. said to , "I will bring an end to , for the earth is filled with through them. Behold, I will destroy them and the earth. Make a ship of gopher wood. You shall make rooms in the ship, and shall seal it inside and outside with pitch. This is how you shall make it. The length of the ship shall be three hundred , its width fifty , and its height thirty . You shall make a roof in the ship, and you shall finish it to a upward. You shall set the door of the ship in its side. You shall make it with lower, second, and third levels. I, even I, will bring the flood of waters on this earth, to destroy having the breath of life from under . Everything that is in the earth will . But I will establish my with you. You shall come into the ship, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you. Of every living thing of , you shall bring two of every sort into the ship, to keep them alive with you. They shall be male and female. Of the birds after their kind, of the livestock after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every sort will come to you, to keep them alive. Take with you some of all food that is eaten, and gather it to yourself; and it will be for food for you, and for them." Thus did. He did all that commanded him.
A public domain modern English translation, free to read and share. 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