Tuesday, February 7, 2023

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Former sons of God.


Genesis 6:2

the sons of God 

(the Hebrew word here means angels everywhere else it it used in the bible) 

saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.


Genesis 6:4


The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—

and also afterward—

when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.


Former gods

The Titans, as a group, represent a pre-Olympian order.[27] Hesiod uses the expression "the former gods" (theoi proteroi) in reference to the Titans.[28] They were the banished gods, who were no longer part of the upper world.[29] Rather they were the gods who dwelt underground in Tartarus,[30] and as such, they may have been thought of as "gods of the underworld", who were the antithesis of, and in opposition to, the Olympians, the gods of the heavens.[31] Hesiod called the Titans "earth-born" (chthonic),[32] and in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Hera prays to the Titans "who dwell beneath the earth", calling on them to aid her against Zeus, just as if they were chthonic spirits.[33] In a similar fashion, in the Iliad, Hera, upon swearing an oath by the underworld river Styx, "invoked by name all the gods below Tartarus, that are called Titans" as witnesses.[34]


They were the older gods, but not, apparently, as was once thought, the old gods of an indigenous group in Greece, historically displaced by the new gods of Greek invaders. Rather, they were a group of gods, whose mythology at least, seems to have been borrowed from the Near East (see "Near East origins," below).[35] These imported gods gave context and provided a backstory for the Olympian gods, explaining where these Greek Olympian gods had come from, and how they had come to occupy their position of supremacy in the cosmos. The Titans were the previous generation, and family of gods, whom the Olympians had to overthrow, and banish from the upper world, in order to become the ruling pantheon of Greek gods.


For Hesiod, possibly in order to match the twelve Olympian gods, there were twelve Titans: six males and six females, with some of Hesiod's names perhaps being mere poetic inventions, so as to arrive at the right number.[36] In Hesiod's Theogony, apart from Cronus, the Titans play no part at all in the overthrow of Uranus, and we only hear of their collective action in the Titanomachy, their war with the Olympians.[37] As a group, they have no further role in conventional Greek myth, nor do they play any part in Greek cult.[38]


As individuals, few of the Titans have any separate identity.[39] Aside from Cronus, the only other figure Homer mentions by name as being a Titan is Iapetus.[40] Some Titans seem only to serve a genealogical function, providing parents for more important offspring: Coeus and Phoebe as the parents of Leto, the mother, by Zeus, of the Olympians Apollo and Artemis; Hyperion and Theia as the parents of Helios, Selene and Eos; Iapetus as the father of Atlas and Prometheus; and Crius as the father of three sons Astraeus, Pallas, and Perses, who themselves seem only to exist to provide fathers for more important figures such as the Anemoi (Winds), Nike (Victory), and Hecate.



Sons of God


Hebrew Bible

Genesis 6

1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, 2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. 3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. 4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.


— Genesis 6:1–4, KJV

The first mention of "sons of God" in the Hebrew Bible occurs at Genesis 6:1–4. In terms of literary-historical origin, this phrase is typically associated with the Jahwist tradition.[3]


That the "sons of God" were separate enough from the "daughters of men" that they warranted such a distinction, has spawned millennia's worth of debate regarding the meaning of the term. Historically, in Jewish thought, this passage has had many interpretations. 


Here are three:


Offspring of Seth: 

The first references to the offspring of Seth rebelling from God and mingling with the daughters of Cain are found in Christian and rabbinic literature from the second century CE onwards e.g. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Origen, Augustine of Hippo, Julius Africanus, and the Letters attributed to St. Clement. It is also the view expressed in the modern canonical Amharic Ethiopian Orthodox Bible. In Judaism "Sons of God" usually refers to the righteous, i.e. the children of Seth.


Angels: 

All of the earliest sources interpret the "sons of God" as angels. From the third century BCE onwards, references are found in the Enochic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Genesis Apocryphon, the Damascus Document, 4Q180), Jubilees, the Testament of Reuben, 2 Baruch, Josephus, and the book of Jude (compare with 2 Peter 2). This is also the meaning of the only two identical occurrences of bene ha elohim in the Hebrew Bible (Job 1:6 and 2:1), and of the most closely related expressions (refer to the list above). In the Septuagint, the interpretive reading "angels" is found in Codex Alexandrinus, one of four main witnesses to the Greek text.


Deified kings/Tyrant judges: 

There is also a large consensus within the scholarly community, that the "sons of God" were simply the deified kings of the various Canaanite city states. These would be the same Canaanite city states that the later proto-Israelites would eventually flee, and who would eventually resettle in the Judean highlands.


"All of the earliest sources interpret the "sons of God" as angels."


"'This is also the meaning of the only two identical occurrences of bene ha elohim in the Hebrew Bible (Job 1:6 and 2:1)"


So 

bene ha elohim 

means angels in Job 1:6 and 2:1?

And it just happens to explain where/why we are at right now?


But just not in genesis 6:1-4?

There it didn't mean angels.



We do a disservice to the almighty 
when we try and water down his word.

I've heard it suggested that it was just to controversial a topic at the time and that no one would believe it and convert to Christianity so the "Offspring of Seth" view was substituted for the original meaning.


Nowdays?
It explains tons and it needs to be reexamined.


Etc.

etc. 

 etc...

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