Amedeo

In the days before the Flood, sons of the Gods [Elohim] consorted with the beautiful daughters of men -- which made the Lord [Yahweh] mad enough to want to wipe out humanity. Now, the Elohim are stated in Genesis:1, are found also in the Ugarit pantheon, and are commonplaces in non-Biblical cultures. The consorting of gods with humans yielded the Greek Heroes (half divine and half human).

So, my question is, Are the sons of the Elohim the sons of the Canaanite Gods [such as Baal and others], or the sons of foreign gods (such as the Greek ones)?

Reference to text:

The Wikipedia article gives various interpretation as to who the nephilim were supposed to be. I take them to be as they are stated literally, and I know that they were never begotten or created either by the Deity in Genesis:1 or the deity in Genesis:2. So, I would conclude that they are FOREIGN Gods who were slipped in the Bible accounts in order to provide a pretext for the Lord to flood mankind.

Any more accurate knowledge?

Amedeo

As I expected, it would be impossible [except for irrational defamers] to object to sound logic. Going by the Biblical text (whose truth or falsity is irrelevant here), the Elohim of Genesis:1 created the world and its stars, plants, animals, and Man [in THEIR own image, a male and a female], and there is no report of generating divine sons or of creating other divine beings. Likewise, the divine Yahweh [elohim Yahweh] -- or perhap's the Elohim's son, Yahweh (according to the Ugaritic mythology) -- fashioned the world and a man (and eventually a woman), but He neither generated nor created other divine beings... who might be the consorters of human females.

Thus, the sons of the Gods who consorted with women must be foreign gods, gods of the Gentiles. But then the Bible narrators employed a foreign tale to give Yahweh the pretext to want to destroy mankind (because of their wickedness... which was really the wickedness of the wayword sons of the Gods.)

The obvious objection to the above inference, that the narrators employed a foreign tale, is that before the flood there were no foreigners. To put this more precisely, before the textual Flood, there were humans, descendants of Adam and Eve, whose genealogy is stated in the Bible itself. So, on the assumption that the Biblical accounts are historical accounts, between Adam and Noah (whose family was the only one to be saved from the all-killer Flood), there existed only the gods of Genesis:1 and Genesis:2. There were no other Gods and, therefore, there were no possible divine sons to consort with women.

Thus we come to the resolvable dilemma: Either the Bible is not a historical account (wherefore the tale of the consortations is taken from tales of people FOREIGN to the Biblical people), or it is a historical account and, therefore, the consorting divine sons were sons of the Genesis:1 Elohim. But [and I am using the Modus Tollens of logic], these Elhoim had no divine sons. Ergo, THE BIBLE IS NOT A HISTORICAL ACCOUNT.

So, once again I assert that the tale of the consortation and its aftermath [the fury of the Lord, the flood, and the saving of manking through one favorite of the Lord] is a Gentile tale, which the Bible composers/narrators employed for their own purposes. (Similar tales are know to exist in many ancient cultures.) Corollary: It is obvious that the Biblical accounts in question were written after the Flood, Noah, and the Nations whose sons founded. A new Biblical account starts with the incident of the Tower of Babel.

The tower of Babel account starts with the declaration that until that time there was only one language (and it was stirred in a confusion when Hamitic people moved eastwards in the plains of Babylonia and tried to build a real skyscraper). The people in question were not from the house of Shem and, therefore, were foreign to the mainstream that from Noah goes to Abraham. Nevertheless -- and this is God's truth (on the assumption that the Bible is a historical account) -- the whole world [the Biblical Mideastern world] has ONE language, which goes back to Adam and Eve and the Lord who spoke to them.

So, when, before the Tower of Babel incident took place, the Bible speaks of the Nations [based on the sons of Noah] as having their own languages, either these languages were just dialects of the aforementioned single language of mankind, or the narrator of the Nations and the narrator of the Tower of Babel were TWO and inconsistently so.

The narrator of the Tower of Babel episode must have spoken out of IGNORANCE rather than KNOWLEGE of the linguistic realities of people, because, the languages referred to by the other narrators are NOT dialects of one language, as WE know today. Many of the catalogued nationes are historically known to us and, for example, among the so-called Hamitic nations or peoples, the Hittites had an Indo-European language, whereas the Babylonians has a largely Arab-like language (plus the acquisitions from Sumeric). These are radically different languages. So, it is false that the Babylonian language which the tower-builders spoke was the single language of mankind that got corrupted by the Lord. The second narrator is historically wong, and the first narrator is historically wrong: he had heard of all of those nations, but he knew nothing about them (except for two or three of them... which gave the impression that there existed a single language).

The ignorance of (most of) the Nations in the first narrator is also evident from something he omits to say, namely that, those nations had different gods. As WE know that the Lord [Yah] was not their God, we can logically infer that THE NATIONS did not descend from one houseld (which spoke some particular language and had a particular god). The genealogy of the nations is fictitiously contrived; it is historically false.

Bible narrators actually employed foreign tales (tales from Gentile Peoples) whereby they assimilated the nephilim, and much more, into their own narratives. There is one point in the Bible which shows the extent to which the assimilation of foreign things is carried out:

When Adam and Eve were placed in the garden that the Lord had kindly prepared for them, though with a prohibition, suddenly a talking serpent appeared to Eve. Well, in the catalogues of creatures [the individuals and the KINDS of things] that the deities of Genesis 1 and 2 created, no talking serpent is created and no species of talking serpets is created. Talking serpents and such like "monsters" belong in the mythologies of the Gentiles, and yet the Bible narrator -- forgetful of the creation narratives -- says that this was the craftiest serpent that the Lord ever created. He makes the crafty (intelligent/shrewed) talking serpent into a creature of Yahweh!

Talking serpents, nephilim, flood and preserver of manking, Yahweh, Yaphet and the Yaphetites, the word "hebrew", the word "essene", the word "yahudah" and the hundred of Greek etyms that the Jewish scholar Yahudah discovered in Biblical Hebrew.... My Lord! All those tales do not come from foreign (gentile) people; they come from a Levantine people which, through the commingling with Proto-Arabs, became the Hebrew people and eventually the Isrealites and the Judaeans.

Thesis borne out by the above and still in the process of development: The Hebrews were a hybrid people of Caucasoids and Araboids, and inherited two languages and two sets of gods. What really happened in the Middle East, in that Biblical blank (except for a list of names) between Adam and Noah so to speak, is the pre-history of Canaan, of the Hebrews, and of the Phoenicians. Akkad and Babylonia were formed a bit later, within our historical [recorded] times. So we know of the history of Sumer and the later overlaying by conquerors wherefore Akkad emerged, and so forth. (Some of the Philistines survide unmixed even during the Israelitic occupation up to the Jordan River. Persia was never overrun by the Proto-Arabs.) Only recently have we been finding elements in the cultures of the Canaanites, the Hebrews, and others that harken back to their pre-history in the Levant. Only recently, for example, the tablets of Ebla have revealed the existence of Yahweh, of Jerusalem, and on many names which pre-date the Biblical narratives. Only recently I have done the etymogy of Yahweh and Yohveh, and of Yanus and Yaphet and Yonians (and much more that I do not care to keep on re-writing right now).

The research goes on.

Amedeo

In this passage,

I used the technical term, "modus tollens", which traditionally applies to the Conditional Syllogism, which was nowhere stated here. However, modern logical cannot fail to recognize the equivalence:

(-p V q) = (p --> q)

So, I can reword the above syllogism thus:

"If the Bible is a historical account (wherefore the consortations are not tales of foreign people), then it is a historical account (wherefore the tales are of the children of the Biblical Elohims). But the Biblical Elohims have no children: the consequent is false. Hence, the antecedent is false: the Bible is not a historical account. (The tales come from some non-Hebrew culture.)

Amedeo

The Catalogue of the Nations which descend from Noah [Genesis:10]

Part 1

Various ancient peoples, especially the Greeks, created -- in their myth-making times -- genealogies of nations. Various nations of even diverse races are traced back to a Greek hero and founder (of cities or nations or peoples). The stablishment of dynasties is typical of the Heroic Age of mankind, in which certain nobles or god-men are at the head of entire populations, just as the Noah family is at the head all of nations of the world after the Flood.

From what I can learn from the Bible itself, the WORLD which Yahweh created and which was repopulated by the Noah family is the "Middle East" which runs, at the most, from the Indus River, through the Caucasus mountains area, to the Mediterranean Sea (the western coast of Anatolia/Turkey), and from the Indus River to the Nile River.

The names of the Nations [Peoples; city-states or countries] which appear in the Biblical Catalogue or Table of the Nations were obviously known to the Bible narrator. He was acquainted with at least a few of the Peoples that he names. His geography was within the bounds of the aforementioned Middle East. Why so? The Bible does not state any geography, except on some occasions. For example the Eden which Yah prepared for Adam and Eve was the junction of four rivers, two of which are definitely known to us, namely the Tigris and the Euphrates. Thus Eden was in the Northern part of Mesopotamia... and the real time of the creation of Man was AFTER THOSE TWO RIVERS HAD BEEN NAMED BY REAL HUMANS. [This lateness COHERES with the fact that the farming Adam and Cain belonged, in real time, AFTER AGRICULTURE HAD BEEN CREATED AND ESTABLISHED IN MESOPOTAMIA; after the ideology that the male seed is responsible for the generation of humans has been established; and after the Aramaic language had risen.]

So, by considering the named nations which we recognize (from our knowledge of history) and the approximate locations that we know from historical knowledge, we know the approximate geography of those Peoples/Nations, and we can infer that the unknown Peoples/Nations were neighbors of the known ones. This factual and inferred geography may actually be a bit smaller than the aforementioned Middle East:

After the account of the established Nations, there will be the tale of the Tower of Babel, constructed by people who moved eastward in the plains of Babylon. This may be the eastern boundary of the populated world. However, it is possible that the Japhethite Madai are the historical Mada (Medes in Greek), who were an ancient Iranian population. (To be sure, their territory is not even close to Pakistan, where the Indus River is.) On the other hand, after the listing of the Sons of Javan [Japhethites], the remark is made -- at some time or other -- that the Sea People descended from them, spread into their territories, and spoke their own languages. Thus, the narrator had heard of Sea people and that they lived in territories beyond the geography of the Javanites.

Various peoples have been called the "sea people." Early Sea Peoples, on Egyptian records, refer to the Lukka (Lycians) and the Shardana (or people of Sardis, respectively on the southern and western coasts of Anatolia (the later Turkey). These were Proto-Greek populations which, together with the Ionians, persisted for millennia to come. In conclusion, it is reasonable to set the boundaries of the populated world, in Biblical view, as the trapezoid comprising the Indus, the Hellespont, and the Nile.

There is an endless array of people who have invented a geography for those Biblical Nations, by locating them in the Middle East, in Africa beyond Egypt, in Europe [totally unknown to the Bible Narrator], in the Far East [totally unknw to the Narrator], and even in the American continent. Medieval maps with Asia, Europe, and Africa have even mapped the races of the Peoples in Genesis:10, especially since the mappers had no idea about the ethnicity of the Hittites, the Medes, the Akkadian, the Babylonians, and the Shemites who inhabited the Middle East. I take all the named Nations as "nations" in the Middle Eastern trapezoid, even though there may have been peoples outside the trapezoid, as in Europe, that had names like the catalogued ones, or people migrating from the Middle East and carrying their names and their gods with them.

Part 2 [to follow]

Amedeo

Part 2

What is the real time of those nations, which were fully established by the time the Tower of Babel incident occurred? The account was written obviously AFTER those nations were established. So, for an approximate time of the writing, we must go to some time after the latest founded nation, which we can tell from our history of the nations in the catalogue that we recognize.

Since the Bible is a book of memories (and theologizations), there is no assumption to be made that the catalogued Nations existed at the time of the writing. Some the "nations" may be only names devoid of any content, names of peoples/nations that have been subsumed together with the the names of then-known peoples under the names of the sons of Noah, names of people in the pre-history of some the then-existing peoples. Genesis:10 is a page of mythical genealogy, not a page of history, and that's that.

The Japhethites

One of the three sons of Noah was Japheth, who begot Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meschech, and Tiras.

The sons of Gomer: Ashkenaz, Riphath, Togarmah.

The sons of Javan (ancestors of the Sea People): Elishah, Tarshish, the Kittim, the Rodanim.

Josephus identified Javan [Yavan] with the Ionians [on the west coast of Anatolia]. This is quite possible, since YAH, YOH, YEH are equivalent.

Javan = Yavan = Iavan.
Greek Ion/Iones [iota, omega, nu, etc.]; Ion, the ancestral head of the Ionions; Ion = an Ionian.
Ion = Yon; = Yan.
It seems that the Greek name is a contraction of an earlier name, such as Io`uan [iota, omicron, upsilon, etc.], which corresponds to the Latin You- or Yov- + -inus [Jovinus: of Jove; Jovite].

In that case, Javan = the legendary Greek king Ion (after whom the Ionians were named) = Jovinus (the Man of Yah, Jove, or Yahweh). This implies that the god of the Original Ionians was the one that became Jovis or Jupiter amongst the Latins, and Yah or Yahweh among a people that preceded the formation of the Canaanites (the Hebrews included), who acquired the Elohim and the "Arabesque" language.

The catalogued Javan or Ionians were those unmixed Ionians that were extant on Western Anatolia; some of the others were commingled in the Levant, and others had migrated to Italy before the commingling.

Other Proto-Greek ["Ionian"] populations, that eventually gave rise to the Sea people:

Elishah <* HLIS [Helis]/Hlidos: city or region of the Peloponnese/ // Heleios = an inhabitant of Helis.

Tarshish <* Tarsos, capital of Cilicia (next to Lycia, on the southern coast of Anatolia, close to Syria).

to continue...

Amedeo

[continuation]

Who were the Kittim [Kitt-im]? There is a mountain in Boiotia or Boeotia (in central Greece) as well as a mythical king, after whom the mountain was supposedly named, namely Kithairon [Cithaeron], who seems to harken back to Kitt-.

Who are the Rodanim [Rodan-im]? Here the linguistic affinity is with Rodos, the island of Rhodes, which is west of the Anatolian coast between the Greek mainland and Cyprus. (It was inhabited in the neolithic period. The Minoans went there in the 16th century B.C.. A Rhodian population was called Telchines.)

Those were the sons of Javan or Javinus, who was a son of Japheth. And who was Japheth that was adopted as a son of Noah? He was the Greek Titan Iapetos (way back before the Geppetto who constructed Pinocchio out of a pine log). He was a son of Ouranos and Gea [Sky and earth, the supreme gods in one Greek mythology] and father of Prometheus.

Of the sons of Japhet, we have noted that the Madai were probably the Medes (an ancient Iranian people). The alternative is a people who eventually founded a city on Boetia, namely Medeon (with the omega).

Tiras harkens back to Tiryns/Tirynthos ,a city in Mycenean Argolis (south of Corinth).

Of the sons of Gomer:

Ashkenaz [which sounds like the name of some Shemites] takes us to two ancient places: Askania, a city in Phrygia; and Askalon, a city of the Philistines [who where proto-Greeks, survived the Israelitic occupation, and continued to live in the Gaza strip; others had long been mixed with the proto-Arabs and yielded the Phoenician population].

Riphath

[to continue]

Amedeo

Togarmah corresponds to the Greek Togalma [tau, omega, etc.], the blending of to + agalma (= ornament; statue, painted image). Hence, agalma-poios = sculptor; statue-maker. ( I have found, in my etymological exursions of Greek residues in Southern Italy, that some small populations or citizens of a city, were named after thair preponderant occupation, such as this one or pottery-makers.)
The verb Agallo means not only I adorn, but also I honor [parents] or I show "piety" [toward parents or Gods... one of the cardinal virtues Plato discussed]. Without a stretch of the imagination, the "tagarmah" could be "the pietists" (alias Essenes before the commingling of the races).

In the Catalogues of the nations, the Hamites are the most easily recognizable nations... which are undoubtedy the ones that were contemporaneous with the Bible narrator.

Of the Shemites, Assur is one of the most easily recognizable one. The narrator has no conception of the pre-history of Assur and with infantile innocence proclaim Assur to be the nephew of Noah. Arphaxad is an "unknown" but looms large because it is out of his bloodline that Abraham will rise, after a very long period of time. Logically, the Hebrews/Israelites of this bloodline have nothing to do with the Hamitic Canaan. ALL of the catalogued nations arise as they are genealogically presented; they have no pre-history of their own.

The narrator of the Catalogue of the Nation may have lived around 1700 B.C., but not earlier, as the following historical pointers suggest:

The real Akkad was formed around 2371 B.C., before Babylonia.

Around 2000 B.C., Amorites from the west took control of most of Mesopotamia (which had Sumer and Akkad). Some Amorites formed the city-state of Babylon, wherefore the king of Babylon was called the king of Sumer and Akkad. (Babylon expanded and eventually some Babylonians moved eastward to build the famous tower.)

Ashur and Arbel, in Assyria (central Mesopotamia) were well established by 2500 B.C.. [Assur was founded by a Shemite -- obviously not simultaneously with the Babylonia of 2000 and less B.C.]

The Hittites (Hamite children of Heth in the Bible) formed in central Anatolia from the 18th century B.C. The height of their power was in the 14th century B.C. But it is then possible that around 1700 the Bible narrator had heard about the Hittites.

If the gap between the Tower and Abraham is only 1000 years, then he lived around 700 B.C. But then the the Israelites could not have lived in Egypt for some hundreds of years, occupied "Palestine", and be taken to the Babylonian captivity around 650 B.C. May God correct the longevity dates! Indeed, the Chaldeans from whom Abraham supposedly came flourished in 612-539 B.C. -- which would be AFTER the Babylonian captivity.

In conclusion (Genesis 11:10), 200 years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he initiated the bloodline of the Hebrews/Israelites. In the 100 years before that, he had begotten 4 other sons, wherefore Elam, Assur, Lud, and Aram were formed. However, he lived 500 years to keep on generating Hebrews.

Amedeo

In the Catalogue of the Nations, there appear no Arabs. They were unknown to the Narrator and, of course, he did not know that the Canaanites, the Hebrews, the Akkadians, and others were hybrids of Caucasoids and Araboids, who commingled their language, their gods, and their cultures. The Arabs will appear as the offsprings of the Abraham Israelites. By that time, the Bible Narrators had heard of more peoples besides the Mideastern ones.

Genealogies invent the origin of nations; they are not histories and archeologies of nations.

GakuseiDon

{sarcastic response removed}

einniv

Thanks for that! Lots good info.