It turns out that the Nephilim are at it again. Last night, the CW series Supernatural identified angel-human hybrids as Nephilim, and the back half of the season will involve a hunt for the Nephilim fetus of Lucifer and the U.S. president’s girlfriend. But that is small potatoes compared to the pernicious influence of the Nephilim from the “Days of Noah” on U.S. public discourse. According to media reports, Ohio’s new highly restrictive anti-abortion legislation was spearheaded by none other than Janet Folger Porter (a.k.a. Janet L. Porter and Janet Folger), a Christian extremist who has promoted a number of faith-based conspiracy theories, ranging from allegations that Barack Obama planned to open concentration camps for conservatives to claims that gay people cause natural disasters by having sex. But Folger isn’t just a standard-issue Evangelical extremist. She also believes that the Nephilim were gay and caused the Flood of Noah, so therefore the world will end soon because gay marriage is now legal. This seems funny, I’m sure, but the fact that Folger Porter achieved a legislative victory speaks to the power and influence of these ideas. Worse, because media reports indicate that Donald Trump has suggested that he will roll back federal regulations protecting gay people, and because his nominees for cabinet jobs listen to Evangelical extremists, it’s important to understand what they believe and why. The media do a terrible job of this, and mostly just point and laugh without taking the time to understand how scraps of data are assembled into vast mountains of hate. A few years ago, Folger (as she was then known) explained that legalizing gay marriage would cause God to destroy the world. She learned of this, she said, when she had a different nut job on her radio show: As I wrote about in my book, “The Criminalization of Christianity,” Jeffrey Satinover, who holds an M.D. from Princeton and doctorates from Yale, MIT and Harvard, was on my radio program one day and I asked him about where we are in history. He explained that according to the “Babylonian Talmud” – the book of rabbis’ interpretation of the scriptures 1,000 years before Christ, there was only one time in history that reflects where we are right now. There was only one time in history, according to these writings, where men were given in marriage to men, and women given in marriage to women. Satinover is a psychiatrist who believes that homosexuality is a compulsion that can be “treated” and “cured” like alcoholism or pedophilia. He also believes—and I am not making this up—that he discovered a secret code in the Torah. Yes, he’s the same guy that wrote Cracking the Bible Code a couple of decades ago. Anyway, despite his manifestly ridiculous belief in magical Bible codes that predict the future, he makes a disturbing argument based on his conclusion that homosexuality is a pathology: “the debate over homosexual behavior and its implications for public policy can only be decided conclusively on moral grounds, and moral grounds will ultimately mean religious grounds.” Notice the careful illogic used to privilege religion as the arbiter of gay rights. Religious grounds are not moral grounds (for example, religion compels Jews to avoid mixed fabrics, but cotton-poly blends are not inherently immoral), and moral grounds are only one possible basis for public policy, which traditionally favors either universalist or utilitarian reason, not the fuzzier ethics of virtue. Folger quoted Satinover’s argument for why gays caused the Flood, and it’s a doozy: But, he said, the Talmud’s writings reveal that “before the Flood people started to write marriage contracts between men, in other words, homosexual ‘marriage,’ which is more than homosexual activity – it’s giving an official state stamp of approval, a sanctification … of homosexual partnership.” […] In fact, he said, “the writings indicated that it wasn’t even so much the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back,’ but that the sin in and of itself is so contrary to why God created the world, so contrary to the order of God’s nature, that God said then and there ‘I have to start all over … to annihilate the world and start from the beginning.[’] … The argument, Folger said, is because Jesus said that the Days of Noah would be like the period leading up to the Second Coming (Matthew 24:37), therefore gay marriage will bring about the Apocalypse. Now, since the Second Coming, unlike the Flood, is in theory a consummation devoutly to be wished, you’d think she’d be pretty gung-ho about it, but that’s not the case. And never mind that Jesus did not mean that the Nephilim would return to gay-marry their way to sin, but rather that humanity would be blind to the Second Coming the way the antediluvians failed to foresee the coming of the Flood. I wondered, though, what exactly the Talmud said since very few of the Christian polemicists on the subject of gay Nephilim apocalypses actually tell us where to find the passage. Using a partial quotations Satinover provides, I found the passage in Chullin 92a and b of the Babylonian Talmud. The passage starts out as an analysis of which parts of the hip-bone of an animal are kosher. This spirals into bizarre tangents until, after a discussion comparing righteous men to various objects like grain and silver, the conversation turns to the laws that God gave all humans after the Flood: Said Rab Judah: These are the thirty righteous men among the nations of the world by whose virtue the nations of the world continue to exist. Ulla said: These are the thirty commandments which the sons of Noah took upon themselves but they observe three of them, namely, (i) they do not draw up a kethubah document for males, (ii) they do not weigh flesh of the dead in the market, and (iii) they respect the Torah. (Soncino translation) That’s it. That’s the whole of Satinover’s evidence for the Talmud speaking of pre-Flood gay weddings.
The most important part is that it refers to the “sons of Noah” (literally: Bnei Noach), which is a Hebrew term used for all non-Jewish humans, since after the Flood all humans were assumed to be descended from Noah’s three sons. It was sometimes used to describe righteous Gentiles. According to the text—which, I will remind you, was written thousands of years after the imaginary Flood—all these sons of Noah refrained from drawing up kethuba documents for males, which refers to a marriage deed. The text, you will note, is silent on pre-Flood practices. Instead, it refers to what all humans do not do. There is an implication that the practice of same-sex marriage must have been desired in order for it to be condemned as sinful, but the text offers no suggestion that the Nephilim were gay-marrying their way to disaster. It speaks only of post-Flood events, and indeed it praises the pagans and other Gentiles for not practicing same-sex marriage. The second commandment, incidentally, also praises the sons of Noah for keeping their cannibalism at home rather than openly buying and selling human flesh in the marketplace. High standards! Instead, it seems that Satinover’s evidence comes from a different Jewish source, the Genesis Rabbah, composed around 500 CE, at a time when Christians had already spent two or three centuries cracking down on decadent Greco-Roman sexuality. (Cf. the prohibitions on homosexuality in the slightly later Justinian Code.) The Genesis Rabbah 26.5.4 gives the following: “The generation of the Flood was not blotted out from the world until they composed nuptial songs in honour of pederasty and bestiality” (trans. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon). The reasoning for this is torturous, but comes down to an extreme form of Biblical literalness in which early medieval Jews read Genesis 6:2 in a peculiar way. You see, in that passage it says that the Sons of God “took them wives of all which they chose.” The Jews of the era believed that no word of the Torah was extraneous, and so, because “which they chose” seems extraneous, they interpreted it to mean something different than the wives. As the Genesis Rabbah bluntly puts it: “whomsoever they chose: that means males and beasts.” There is no logical reason to believe this except by imposing that weird form of literalism on the text. Indeed, the only way even that turns into a pre-Flood gay marriage orgy is if the Sons of God are not the Fallen Angels (who wouldn’t be human at all), but rather the righteous sons of Seth, from the interpretation of Genesis which was popular in that era, the interpretation that excises Fallen Angels from Genesis. The authors of the Genesis Rabbah agreed that the Sons of God were not angels. This line of reasoning seems to be influenced by the passages we find in the much older Book of Jubilees (5:1-3) describing how the Nephilim—here meaning the giant offspring of the Fallen Angels—committed sins against men and beasts, who were all cannibals, or in 1 Enoch 7:4-5, where the Nephilim specifically cause God to destroy the world by eating people and sinning against animals. (In these books, the Nephilim, not humanity, cause God to bring about the Flood.) It’s also parallel to the reasoning given in the Christian Epistle of Jude (6-7), which equated the Fallen Angels with the sexual immorality of Sodom. Indeed, in the Genesis Rabbah, the rabbis specifically equate the Sons of God taking male wives with the people of Sodom trying to rape God’s male angels. Remember, though: The idea of pre-Flood gay marriage causing God to destroy the world isn’t found in Genesis, or even the Books of Enoch or Jubilees. According to the textual evidence, it’s an invention of Late Antiquity. As such, it fits right in with extremist Evangelicals’ medieval vision for society. I’d like to ask this, though: Why is it that I know the history of his bad idea better than the “Christian” polemicists? There’s no need to answer that. We already know that they don’t care about the history of ideas, or even whether their bizarre view of pre-Flood Nephilim gay weddings has any sort of support in the texts they claim to live by and ask us to take literally. Their only concern is that that U.S. government enshrine their prejudices into law, so that their interpretation of scripture achieves the blessing of the state and can be imposed by force on those of other faiths, or no faith. You know, freedom.
30 Comments
Time Machine
12/9/2016 11:13:53 am
>>>The idea of pre-Flood gay marriage causing God to destroy the world isn’t found in Genesis
Reply
Kathleen
12/9/2016 11:40:33 am
I had thought of that as well
Reply
Firewall Cracker
12/10/2016 09:28:53 am
How many can be banned
Reply
Time Machine
12/9/2016 11:17:08 am
>>>the righteous sons of Seth
Reply
A C
12/9/2016 11:17:25 am
The concept of ideas having a history is so outside their belief system that they can't assimilate it into their thinking. Otherwise they'd have to ask difficult questions like whether or not ideas from first millennium Levant are best interpreted by the values of people in 21st century America.
Reply
V
12/9/2016 12:45:06 pm
Yeah, no, it's not "may have been" the breaking of hospitality laws, it's pretty screamingly obviously the breaking of hospitality laws. 1. No sex was actually had with the angels, 2. they were in disguise so the people of Sodom WOULDN'T know they were angels, and 3. the angels were sent BECAUSE of the sins of Sodom, to find "ten righteous men." The concept that the sin of Sodom was angel/human sex just doesn't hold up at all. The concept that the violation of hospitality laws was the sin of Sodom, however, very much does, supported at other points in the text and also by the description of the crowd's specific behaviors, which were big no-nos. Are STILL big no-nos, and rightly so; random mobs of assholes showing up at my door don't get to rape my guests, either.
Reply
Yes. That's the way I've always understood it also. They were in violation of hospitality lsws.
1/3/2017 02:51:59 pm
At Risk
12/9/2016 11:22:37 am
Jason, I think when most Christians are talking about the days of Noah, and sin today, they're including gay behavior and gay marriage into the whole mix of sin increasing, as some might perceive the situation today....
Reply
Time Machine
12/9/2016 11:42:24 am
Believe it or not, it's impossible to shoehorn endorsement of gay behaviour into the Bible.
Reply
V
12/9/2016 12:46:11 pm
And most of Leviticus was supposedly invalidated by the "New Covenant" with Jesus. Your point?
Time Machine
12/9/2016 02:29:05 pm
Jesus never said anything - the believers in Jesus said everything while he was in their body.
At Risk
12/10/2016 01:18:33 pm
Time Machine, you may have crossed the line, if you're making a crude joke comparing the indwelling of the Holy Spirit with sexual perversion involving Jesus.
V
12/10/2016 10:31:25 pm
I get the point that you are an idiot and a troll, GIGO. I said "supposedly," and I never said one thing about "what Jesus said" in this response. Furthermore, when we are talking about WHAT SOURCE MATERIAL SAYS, we do not preface every fucking remark with "Oh, well, the material says this BUT WE ALL KNOW IT'S MADE UP." Do you sit here when talking about fiction and insist on saying, "Well, in the book Harry Potter says, BUT REALLY JK ROWLING, YOU KNOW" too? You suck at conversation, then. Go back to elementary school, man.
A Buddhist
12/9/2016 12:30:48 pm
Were Christians to truly hold the Bible as their guide to sin,
Reply
V
12/9/2016 12:50:43 pm
Yes, but there's a disproportionate weight put onto "gay behavior" (which really isn't very different from "not-gay behavior" other than who they have sex with) as compared to, say, not leaving gleanings in the fields for the poor (which doesn't happen AT ALL anymore) or working on the Sabbath, both of which Jesus had very harsh words against in the New Testament. So it's still showing a rather blatant ignorance of their own history and holy documents.
Reply
Kal
12/9/2016 01:43:05 pm
TM is mostly harmless.
Reply
Tom
12/9/2016 02:18:14 pm
Is this a sneaky evangelist way of acknowledging climate change and the possible flooding due to melting of the ice caps without admitting that the science has been right all along.
Reply
Brady Yoon
12/9/2016 02:19:31 pm
Gay marriage will not destroy the world. It will save it.
Reply
Only Me
12/9/2016 04:15:27 pm
Great post, Jason, but I say so with sadness. This type of behavior is unacceptable and unjustified. Neither personal feelings nor personal beliefs should ever have the power to deny anyone of basic human rights just because you disagree with their sexuality, ethnicity, etc.
Reply
Kathleen
12/9/2016 04:19:27 pm
Is there an effort to translate resources with current scholarship from original documents, or are there just too many and so we are stuck with archaic, subjective or erroneous translations?
Reply
V
12/10/2016 10:37:11 pm
Some of both. A lot of resources have been re-translated multiple times. Other resources haven't. There is no one single body which translates all works, after all, so it tends to depend on who needs the resources.
Reply
12/9/2016 06:42:24 pm
After I finished work today, I checked in and saw what had become of the comments here. I have cleaned them up. Let's keep them clean.
Reply
V
12/10/2016 10:38:43 pm
Get rid of Time Machine and they'll be clean. I'm not going to stop calling him on his asshattery, Jason. Someone has to if you won't, and I have never felt such contempt for any other purported human being as I have for him. Trump would be more welcome in my personal space than Time Machine.
Reply
Not the Comte de Saint Germain
12/10/2016 11:14:39 pm
Whoa, even I wouldn't go THAT far. 12/11/2016 09:42:01 am
I installed an IP address blocker and banned him for violations of the terms of service. He started using software to get around the IP block and the blocker doesn't seem to work with his new IP address. I can't sit here and manually remove his posts ever half hour. I clean them up as best I can, but there is only so much I can do.
An Over-Educated Grunt
12/12/2016 09:33:43 am
Actually I'm kind of disappointed. I left for the weekend and I came back and there wasn't near as much ranting about men getting it on with men. For a man who engages in that level of intellectual onanism, he sure is concerned with non-reproductive sex. You deprived me of all sorts of opportunities to poke the bear with a fantabulous, leather-wrapped, rainbow-bedazzled, extra-phallic cattle prod. I was looking forward to it too.
Sticker
12/10/2016 08:47:06 am
The Jewish prohibition on mixed fibers applies to wool and linen. Jews can definitely wear poly-cotton blends!
Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
12/12/2016 09:35:22 am
To be fair, it doesn't specify which fibers you're not allowed to mix, so, since God isn't big on issuing clarifications, you have to assume it's a blanket prohibition.
Reply
Sticker
12/17/2016 10:31:12 am
I'm not sure what you are reading, but this isn't just rabbinical interpretation (which seems to be universal anyway, if you read about shatnez law) --- the scripture is pretty clear: Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
Enter your email below to subscribe to my newsletter for updates on my latest projects, blog posts, and activities, and subscribe to Culture & Curiosities, my Substack newsletter.
Categories
All
Terms & ConditionsPlease read all applicable terms and conditions before posting a comment on this blog. Posting a comment constitutes your agreement to abide by the terms and conditions linked herein.
Archives
November 2024
|