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In the Beginning, Pt. 5; Death, Beautiful Women and the Heroic Temptation
Genesis 5 – 6:8; November 2, 2014
Long ago on an early June Sunday
afternoon in Donovan, Illinois, Debbie
and I attended a graduation party for
Denise Fertig, one of her softball
players. We had been dating for two
months at the time. That afternoon
we rode our bicycles five or six miles
out to the Fertig farm where they
were having a hog roast, seating
everyone around long tables set up in
the yard.
After we ate, Denise’s grandfather,
dressed in clean denim coveralls, the
patriarch of the family, a quiet
taciturn man, got up from the table
and walked out to the edge of his
cornfield. The slanting rays of the
late afternoon sun made the kneehigh corn glow in an iridescent green.
The old man knelt down and picked
up a handful of rich black dirt. He
stood up, rubbed the dirt between
his hands, sniffed it, and touched a
bit of it to his tongue. Then he
clapped his hand clean and gazed out
across the field. As I watched him,
his stooped but still strong figure was
silhouetted against the sun. It struck
me that here was one of the most
perfectly content human beings I had
ever seen. He was totally at peace
with his family and his little corner of
the earth.
A little later, as an early evening
thunderstorm started sweeping in
from the west, Debbie and I
hightailed it back to town. We then
sat on an old porch swing on the
front of the parsonage, sipping
lemonade, and watching the
approaching storm. I don’t know if it
was the day itself, the graduation
party, watching the old farmer, or the
approaching storm, but there seemed
to be magic in the breeze. A magic
that caused me to say to Debbie
without a trace of nervousness, “I’ve
known from the very first time I laid
eyes on you that I wanted you to be
my wife.”
She quietly replied, “And I’ve known
from the very first time I laid eyes on
you that with all my heart I wanted
you to be my husband.”
From that moment on we decided we
were officially engaged. That was
one of those days I would love to live
all over again. So ordinary, so simple,
and yet so filled with grace, beauty
and the wonder of life.
The gently genealogy of Genesis 5
speaks of people living very much like
I have just described. They are the
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descendents of the line of Seth, the
third-born son of Adam and Eve.
They are introduced in verses 1 and 2
of Genesis 5 with a reminder of the
first commandment to be fruitful and
multiply and fill the earth. This they
set about doing with great
enthusiasm. Unlike the corrupt line
of Cain who busy themselves building
cities and inventing technology and
engaging in the arts, Seth’s people
seem to be content to live peacefully
within their large extended families.
Is this saying there is something
wrong with civilization and our
notions of progress? Yes and no.
Progress has many advantages, but
the Bible warns of how easy it is to
take the desire for progress to an
extreme: Overwork, neglect of God
and family, stress, burnout,
exploitation, greed, envy, destructive
competition, and even murder are
the dark fruits of corrupted
civilization.
A year or so ago I noticed a new $12
monthly “maintenance fee” was
being deducted from my Wells Fargo
checking account. When I went to
my bank I was asked if I wanted to
see a “personal banker.” I replied,
“You’re darn tootin!” I observed that
the CEO of Wells Fargo, John
Strumpf, was being paid $19.3
million cash salary plus another $8.6
million in stock options that year and
then I added, “And you people need
to charge me a maintenance fee?” I
then announced I was going to
transfer to another bank. My
personal banker stammered, “Oh,
that won’t be necessary, I think we
can remove that fee.”
I think we are all nervously aware
that something major in our
civilization has gone off the tracks.
While for over thirty years wages
have hardly gone up at all for the
average American worker as related
to the cost of living, executive
compensation has been going
through the roof. In Germany CEO
pay compared to average worker pay
is 12 to 1. But in the U.S. it is 475 to
1. Civilization is not all what it is
cracked up to be. It always seems to
divide people into the “have’s” and
the “have nots.” There will always be
the ones who exploit and the ones
who get exploited, even if it is only
with a $12 maintenance fee.
The thing that stands out about
Seth’s people is their extraordinarily
long life spans. Most of them live for
almost a thousand years. The one
who lives the longest is Methuselah,
who makes it to the ripe old age of
969 years old. In modern terms this
is like being born in medieval
England, witnessing the Norman
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Conquest in 1066 AD and still going
strong today. How does the idea of
long life spans serve our story? For
one thing, the story wants to state
that the consequences of being
expelled from paradise happen
gradually and the shadow of Eden
lingers long over the land.
One very interesting thing you find if
you play around with the math is that
there is a fifty year period of time
when all the people mentioned in
Seth’s line would have been alive at
the same time. Between the year
874, in which Lamech (not to be
confused with Lamech of Cain’s line
who murders the young man), the
last mentioned, is born, and the year
930, in which Adam dies, all the
people mentioned in Seth’s
genealogy are alive along with their
numerous children. It is almost as if
the consequences from being denied
access to the tree of life have been
somehow avoided. Then suddenly, in
the year 930, Adam dies. Next, in
987, Enoch “was not, for God took
him.” And in 1042 Seth also dies.
We, who know the Garden of Eden
story of how God warned that to eat
from the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil was to court death,
need to no longer remain in
suspense. The prophecy of human
mortality is at long last fatally
fulfilled.
Keep in mind Cain’s act of murder has
shown that death might occur by
violence, but did not seemingly occur
naturally. And even this knowledge
of the possibility of death by violence
was confined solely to the line of
Cain, with whom the line of Seth does
not yet seem to be in contact with.
So the death of Adam and Seth must
have shattered Seth’s people’s
expectations and sent them reeling.
Their world was turned upside down.
How people took this realization is
indicated by Noah’s birth. Noah is
the first man who is born after Adam
dies and so has no first-hand access
to any living memory of the Garden
of Eden and its prospect of immortal
life. He is the first man who has to
grow up knowing that someday we
must all die. So this makes Noah, not
Adam, the first prototype of a person
who has to deal with their own
mortality. Therefore it is fitting that
his father Lamech gives Noah a name
that means both “comfort” and
“lament.” And this at least partially
explains why Noah finds favor in the
eyes of the Lord.
But how does everybody else react to
the sudden realization that we must
all die? They go boldly and heroically
wild (6:4). Who can blame them? It
is no stretch to imagine that having
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lived within a deathless mindset for
so long, these oldest of men,
explicitly god-like in their origin and
nature, not only are shocked by the
belated discovery of their own
unavoidable mortality; they are
offended and angry.
is fighting for his family and his
homeland while Achilles is fighting
for a vain king he has absolutely no
respect for. But Achilles feels he
must go forth in single combat
against Hector because that is the
code of the warrior.
These people closely resemble the
heroes of the Greeks and Romans,
descendants of gods, obsessed with
affront to their god-like dignity that
mortality bestows upon them.
Rather than wait for death to find
them hiding away in a corner, they go
forth, beautifully clad, to meet death
face-to-face, in the person of another
death-defying warrior, who also
defends himself against death by his
own power and ability. The desire for
immortality is sublimated into the
desire for fortune and glory, to set
out on a quest that will pit the hero
against death defying odds.
There is a consistent theme in all the
heroic stories of an everyman called
out to pursue a quest. He is at first
reluctant, but with the coaxing of a
representative of the gods, he sets
out. He usually picks up companions
on the way, has to rescue a fair
maiden, encounters tragedy and
betrayal, and eventually
accomplishes the quest even though
he sometimes has to die to do so.
Think of examples like King Arthur,
Robin Hood, Frodo in the Lord of the
Rings, Luke Skywalker in Star Wars,
Katniss in Hunger Games. They all
tell the same story. And these
stories, if they are well told, always
have a receptive audience because
we instinctively recognize universal
truths and yearnings of life outside of
Eden that they portray. These are
stories of us.
Every culture, every people have
these heroes. The Bible calls them
the “Nephilim” – warriors of great
size and super-human strength.
Consider Homer’s Iliad, a similar
story, where the Greek hero Achilles
and the Trojan champion Hector fight
it out on the plains of Troy. In the
person of Achilles, we are introduced
to the tragic warrior. Achilles is selfaware enough to know that the
Trojan Hector is the better man, who
This is the fifth great truth of Genesis,
for here we find an introduction to
what heroic literature repeats time
and again: that death is the mother
of the love of glory, of a beautiful
name for splendid deeds. Death is
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also the mother of beauty, of a desire
to bring some kind of beauty to an
ugly world fated to decay. In the face
of death, artful men and women
create beautiful objects and beautiful
stories: statues and paintings, poems
and songs, vases and temples, movies
and books – objects that they hope
will last, immune to decay as their
makers are not.
And what of women? For women
figure prominently in the stories of
the heroes. There is Helen of Troy
whose face launched a thousand
ships. There is resourceful Penelope
who faithfully waits twenty years for
Odysseus to make his way home by
promising her many suitors she will
marry one of them when she finishes
a tapestry she works on daily but
each night undoes. There is the
daring Maid Marion who joins Robin
Hood in his death-defying heroics.
There is Princess Leia who at one
point has three heroic men vying for
her favors as they forge the New
Republic upon the ruins of the old
Empire. And in Hunger Games the
young woman Katniss is the heroine
surrounded by less than heroic young
men. The one thing all these women
have in common is that they are
beautiful.
In our story from Genesis, the “sons
of God” refer to the righteous line of
Seth becoming enamored with the
“daughters of men” which are Cain’s
people. They are attracted to the
dangerous and the exotic. No longer
content with their peaceful pastoral
lives, they go looking for the alluring
and the foreign. By pursuing women
based on their beauty alone, these
lusty fellows are oblivious to matters
of character and moral goodness
which is much more important to the
long-term success of marriage and
stable homes for children. This is the
first but by no means the last story in
the Bible of the desire of men for
exotic women outside the will of God,
and the end is always unfortunate.
These stories caution us as individuals
and as societies of letting our
passions rule our hearts. To me the
arts are endlessly fascinating. But as
the Bible advises, they are only to be
approached with caution. Debbie
and I loved to go out with another
couple every year when Woody Allen
brought out his latest film. Allen’s
personal life is a moral mess but his
art deals with the classic themes we
see here in Genesis and would
unfailingly provoke a long
conversation over supper after
viewing one his movies.
This past week I saw the opera The
Flying Dutchman, Richard Wagner’s
take on the same classic story of
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obsession, love, death and beautiful
women. This is such a frequent
theme in the Bible and elsewhere
that we should not be afraid to
explore how contemporary culture
expresses it. Early on Debbie and I
exposed our kids to these themes in
art and cinema, even taking them
occasionally to R rated movies if we
had the appropriate conversations
before and after. Far from corrupting
their morals, I believe exposure to
these things helped them to grow up
into thoughtful, Christ-centered
adults who seem to recognize both
the truths and the lies being
expressed in today’s art. Since we all
live east of Eden and we are all
deeply impacted by our culture, we
need to have the ability to see the
visual arts with deeply Christian eyes.
The age of heroes produced results
not to God’s liking, and for good
reason: the desire of our collective
heart is only evil continuously. The
first thing God does is greatly
diminish our life spans, down to a
maximum of 120 years. And then
because God is not distant and
disengaged from his creation like we
are often tempted to think he is, God
expresses grief arising from the deep
pain of disappointment. Even
though it is a negative response to a
negative situation, this a strong
statement that God genuinely cares
about what is going on in the world.
Personally I find this to be of great
comfort when I look out over all the
desperate situations that are all
around us. But this is the story for
next time.
For now, it might be best to keep in
mind the wisdom Seth’s people once
had but have no longer. The best
things in life are not the heroic
adventures – the “Wheel of Fortune”
is an obscene deception as are all our
desires for fortune and glory. The
best things are found in the midst of
the simple ordinary things of
everyday living: being a loving
spouse and a good parent, being at
peace with oneself and not striving or
straining for the golden ring… being
like that Illinois corn farmer I saw in a
field on a late afternoon some 24
years ago. After all, how can you tell
a farmer is good at his job? He is
always outstanding in his field.
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