Seder 4: Genesis 5 and Hebrews 11---A Question about Enoch

 There are 10 generations listed in the genealogy of Genesis 5, going from Adam to Noah inclusive.  The list features long lifespans, indicating blessing from God. The effects of sin are also evident, since the description of each step ends with the words "and he died."

Except in the case of Enoch, who "walked with God".  Here the text mentions that all his days were 365 years, and that after time "he was not, for God took him'' (v 24).

Enoch is counted as one of the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11.  Verse 5 says, "By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him" (ESV).

One usual interpretation is the one given in the NLT, which in verse 5 says, "It was by faith that Enoch was taken up to heaven without dying." 

However, there is some apparent tension here with verse 13, which says, "All these people died still believing what God had promised them" (NLT).

In discussing this issue, adventist Christians also bring in John 3:13: "No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man."

One way to resolve this tension is to remember that "all" in the Bible is often not a "mathematical all",  meaning "every single one." In general the heroes of faith died, and in general people do not ascend to heaven, but perhaps Enoch was a rare exception.  It's also possible that verse 13 only refers to the patriarchs and matriarchs in verses 8-12 and not to Abel, Enoch, and Noah in verses 5-7.  

Some Adventist Christians have a different way of explaining the question. Perhaps Enoch was "taken" or "translated" (KJV) in the figurative sense described in  Colossians 1:13, where Paul says that God "hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son."  In this reading, Hebrews 11:5a is saying that Enoch was translated into God's kingdom so that he wouldn't see the second death.  

In that case, though, why did Enoch experience the "first death" at the comparatively early age of 365?  One possibility is that he was a martyr.  Perhaps he was the "young man" that Lamech boasted about killing in Genesis 4:23.  

We still have to explain Heb 11:5b, which says that Enoch "was not found, because God had taken him."  The Greek word for "taken," metatithemi, is used 6 times in the New Testament.  One of those is in Acts 7:16, which speaks of Jacob's body being moved to a grave near Shechem.  So Hebrews 11:5b may be referring to God moving Enoch's body to an undisclosed location, as he later did with the body of Moses (Dt 34:6).    

Whatever happened to Enoch after 365 years, he was a man of faith, a bright spot in the early history of humanity.          

Seder 104: Num 3---The Special Role of the Levites

 The first chapter of Numbers describes the military census conducted when the Israelites were at Mt. Sinai early in the second year of the Exodus, preparing to break camp and head toward the Promised Land.  This census included every Israelite tribe except the priestly tribe of Levi.  

Details about the tribe of Levi are given in Numbers 3-4.  Numbers 3 begins, "These are the generations of Aaron and Moses....."  This wording is reminiscent of the book of Genesis (see Gen 2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1, 32; 11:10, 27; 25:12,19; 36:1,9; 37:2) and implies continuity with the narrative begun in Genesis.  

The following verses concentrate on Aaron's male descendants, his successors in the priesthood.  We are reminded that two of those sons, Nadab and Abihu, had recently died when they "offered unauthorized fire before the Lord" (v. 4).  The theme of the importance of protecting holy things and holy space continues in Num 3-4.  

Aaron's remaining two sons, Eleazar and Ithamar, "served as priests in the lifetime of Aaron their father." The phrase for "in the lifetime of" can also be translated as "in the presence of" or "under the supervision of", as in Deut 25:2; 1 Sam 2:11.  

The rest of the tribe of Levi was set aside to serve at the tabernacle, as a gift to the priests.  Their work was not primarily military, but it did have one military aspect.  The Levites were to guard the tabernacle and its furnishings (vv 5-10), a kind of security detail.  

The Levites represented all of the tribes of Israel in their service to the priests.  At the Exodus God had saved the nation's firstborn sons, setting them aside for himself.  The Levites would replace the firstborn of Israel in that role (vv 11-13).

A count of Levite males at least one month old gave 7500 descendants of Gershon, 8600 descendants of Kohath, and 6200 descendants of Merari, for a total of 22,300.  There is an apparent error in the MT in verse 39, which gives the total as 22,000.  One possible answer to this discrepancy can be found in the Lucianic recension of the Septuagint, which gives the total from Kohath as 8300 rather than 8600, leading to a total of 22,000 as in the MT.  

The total of firstborn males from the other tribes is given as 22,273 (v 43).  To redeem the extra 273 firstborn males, 5 shekels for each was paid to the priests.   One fun question:  How was it decided which 273 families were to pay the 5 shekel redemption price?  A tradition preserved in the Talmud (b Sanhedrin 17a)  proposes that Moses put 22,273 slips of paper in an urn.  On 22,000 were written "son of Levi," and on 273 were written "5 shekels."  Each family drew a slip of paper out of the urn to determine whether it would be paying 5 shekels.  

As I have mentioned previously, the numbers in our English translations of Num 1-3 raise questions for readers.  For one thing, we would not expect the total number of firstborn males from 11 tribes to be close to the total number of males from one of the twelve tribes, unless only about 1/11 of the males were firstborn males.  Moreover, the total of 22,273 firstborn males is out of sync with the total of 603,550 adult males given in Num 1.  We wouldn't expect only 1/27 of the males to be firstborn males.  Again, we should keep in mind the main spiritual message of the numbers, which is that God has greatly blessed the Israelites in accordance with his promise to Abraham.

The redemption of the firstborn has a connection with Christian theology.  Like the firstborn Israelites on the Exodus, Christians have been rescued from death and are "bought with a price" (1 Peter 1:18-20; 1 Cor 6:19-20).  

Seder 4: Gen 5:1-6:8

Genesis 5:1 begins by reaffirming that humans are created in the image of God and are blessed by God.  The commission that God gave to man, to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth" still stands, even after the Fall.  Without the tree of life this commission is harder to carry out, but at this point God seems to be granting Adam and his descendants some pretty long lifespans.

Genesis 5 gives a genealogical listing of 10 generations from Adam to Noah.  A midrash on Ps 139:16 says that God knew about all of these in advance, with the details recorded in his book.

In the Masoretic Text these 10 generations cover a total of 1656 years, a fairly large chunk of human history.  Some of the numbers in the LXX are different, and the total number of years is about 600 years more than in the MT.  For more on the numbers, see here.

The entries in the Gen 5 list the generations in a set format with this structure:

"And X lived a years, and begot Y.  And X lived after he begot Y for b years, and begot sons and daughters.  And all the days of X’s life were (a + b) years, and he died."

The seventh entry is a little different.  With Enoch there is emphasis that he was one who "walked with God," and instead of saying "and he died" in 5:21, the text says that "God took him".  This tantalizingly brief discussion has led to lots of speculation about what happened to Enoch, including legends about his being taken to heaven, being shown wonderful things, and prophesying.  At any rate, we count him as a hero of faith (Heb 11:5).  

In Gen 6:1-8 we read about the sins of mankind increasing, leading to God deciding to send a flood as a judgment upon the earth.  These verses have also been the subject of much speculation.  Here is how Gen 6 begins:  

"When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive.  And they took as their wives any they chose." 

The earliest understanding of this passage (and as far as we know, the only understanding prior to 100 AD), is to identify the "sons of God" as angelic beings who rebelled against God, manifested themselves as humans, and married human women, violating a boundary that God had put in place.  

This identification of the "sons of God" is consistent with the use of that term elsewhere in the Tanakh (e.g., Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7).  

Chapter 6 goes on to say in verse 4, "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.  These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown." 

In the LXX, "Nephilim" is translated "giants".  So the implication is that the offspring of the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men" were giants.  The Nephilim are mentioned again in Num 13:33, and apparently one of the reasons that God commanded the Israelites to wipe out the inhabitants of Canaan was to deal with those giants (Joshua 11:21-22).  

If we had asked Jews during the time of Jesus about the meaning of Gen 6:1-4, they would have filled in some more details based on 1 Enoch 6-16.  (They didn't consider 1 Enoch to be scripture, but they believed that it contained accurate history on this point.)  According to 1 Enoch, the angels who married the human women also brought forbidden knowledge to mankind, including sorcery and how to make weapons of war.  These angels were then put in a condition of restraint to await final judgment in the future.  

We see these beliefs in a few places in the New Testament, especially Jude 6-7:

"And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day---just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire."

Jude 14, by the way, quotes a prophecy of Enoch from 1 Enoch 1.

Another place in which the I Enoch account is assumed is in 2 Peter 2:4-5:

"For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to
chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but
preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly;" 

I also want to say something about Gen 6:3:  Then the LORD said, "My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh:  his days shall be 120 years."  

This verse has been interpreted in two different ways.  One is that human lifespans were going to be shortened, down to around 120 years.  Another is that God was giving mankind 120 years to repent before sending the flood.  

Seder 4 Sermon: Generations

Genesis 5 begins, "This is the book of the generations of Adam."  The book of Genesis is punctuated by a number of statements of this form.  (The next one appears in Gen 6:9.)  According to one theory, much of the book of Genesis may have originally consisted of a series of clay tablets, with these statements appearing as either the headers or footers for the tablets.  Sometimes these statements seem to be summarizing what has just been said; sometimes they seem to summarize what comes next; and sometimes both. 

In his sermon on Seder 4, Rob Wilson makes the important observation that the New Testament begins with a statement of the same form:  "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham" (Matt 1:1).  In fact, the Greek words for "the book of the genealogy", biblos geneseos, are the same words used in the Septuagint translation of "book of the generations" in Gen 5:1.

As with the statements in the book of Genesis, we might view Matt 1:1 as both a summary of what has come before (the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures) and a summary of the New Testament.  Both are, fundamentally, the story of Jesus the Messiah.

Rob also emphasizes that we are all part of this story (see Ps 139:16).

Matthew 1 gives one of two genealogies of Jesus recorded in the New Testament.  The other appears in Luke 3.  The two genealogies lead to Jesus' legal father Joseph by two different routes, and there are multiple ideas about how to explain the differences between them.

Rob pointed out that the two genealogies send two different messages.  The Matthew 1 genealogy focuses on Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, while the Luke 3 genealogy emphasizes Jesus as son of God and savior of all mankind.    Both are important messages.