Pages 7-9: autumn 1991 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Steve Gunter Farrell Till alleges Genesis 6:

Pages 7-9: autumn 1991

           MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

                          Steve Gunter 

   Farrell Till alleges Genesis 6:1-4 proves the book of Genesis contains a 
mixture of mythology.  In fact, Till has simply misread the passage.  What is 
the meaning of Genesis 6:1-4?

   Science confirms the unitary origin of the human species in reports of 
experiments that validate Genesis 3:20, wherein Eve is named the mother of 
all living.  All women now living on the earth derive from but one common 
mother.

   In the May 13, 1985, issue of The New Yorker, Alex Shoumatoff demon-
strated the "diamond shape" of human genealogy. This is true since ancient 
cultures did not have the distance-conquering automobiles and conveyances 
that modern man possesses.

   Adam Clarke in his admired commentary concludes that the phrase "sons 
of God" certainly cannot mean (as skeptics desire) "sons of gods."  The 
polytheistic presupposition Mr. Till brings to his reading makes him stumble 
over the passage and so misunderstand its true meaning.

   What is meant by "sons of God"? These are the descendants of righteous 
Abel. Who are the daughters of men?  These are the offspring of evil Cain. 
Such a reading makes much more sense than the skeptical skullduggery Till's 
essay engages in.

   Genesis 6:4 causes much trouble for Mr. Till, especially when it comes to 
"nephilim in the earth."  The root word here is naphal and means to fall. The 
King James translators followed the Septuagint and thus "giants."  We do not 
have inspired translations, but we do have inspired texts.

   Mr. Till cites Numbers 13:32-33 where the word Nephilim is associated 
with people of great stature, but the correct meaning of the word is, among 
other things, to fall upon.  Hence, the "sons of Anak" were men of violence 
and perhaps inclined to banditry and such like.

   Genesis 6:11 says the earth was filled with violence. Thus is explained 
the Nephilim that Mr. Till transforms into giants to suit his polytheistic 
presuppositions.

   Furthermore, the rebellion of the angels (Jude 6) must be separated from 
the sexual crimes of Sodom in Jude 7.  The reason Mr. Till is a skeptic and 
not a saint today appears to be primarily due to a massive misreading of the 
text and too much study of noninspired works such as the spurious book of 
Enoch.

   I pray the day will come when Farrell Till returns to the faith and again 
preaches the truth from the book of books, the Holy Bible.

   (Steve Gunter's address is 1202 Royal Drive, Bentonville, AR 72712.)           

EDITOR'S NOTE: I was tempted to forego my usual editorial rejoinder and 
just let the glaring inadequacy of Mr. Gunter's   "rebuttal" speak for itself. 
Of ten fundamentalist preachers and writers who were sent advanced copies of 
"If It Walks Like a Duck..." Mr. Gunter was the only one who accepted our 
invitation to write a rebuttal. Since the offer was made and he at least made 
the effort, we decided to publish his response.

   Mr. Gunter sorely needs to explain his allusion to scientific confirmation 


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of "the unitary origin of the human species" that he claims "validates Genesis 
3:20 wherein Eve is named the mother of all living." If he meant the findings 
of biochemists Vincent Sarich and Allan Wilson, whose studies in mitochondrial 
DNA have traced the ancestry of all humans back to one woman, he needs to 
take another look at the data. Their studies were based on the assumption of 
a 2 to 4 percent steady rate of mutation in mitochondrial DNA every million 
years. Since mitochondrial enzymes are carried in the ovum but not the 
sperm, Sarich's and Wilson's DNA "clock" was able to trace human ancestry 
back to a single woman who had lived 200,000 years ago.  I wonder if 
Gunter is willing to accept that date.  The same DNA clock indicates that the 
hominid line that eventually produced "Eve" had diverged 5 million years ago 
from the primates that chimpanzees and gorillas evolved from.  Is Gunter 
willing to accept that finding? If not, he has no business citing scientific 
"discoveries" whose major conclusions he rejects. At any rate, the last thing 
Mr. Gunter should be doing is appealing to science to prove the accuracy of 
the Genesis record.  He will find himself in a peck of trouble if he keeps 
doing that.

   I wonder why he even referred to "the unitary origin of the human spe-
cies."  What relevance does it have to the issue we are supposed to be dis-
cussing?  All humans have descended from one woman; therefore, the Genesis 
writer could not have believed that angels once intermarried with human 
women.  Is that what he was trying to say?  If so, he will have to explain 
his logic to me, because I can't see any possible reasoning principle to base 
that conclusion on. Surely, he doesn't think that I believe angels and human 
women actually did marry.  I believe only that the Genesis writer thought 
that such marriages did occur.  But even if angels and women had in fact 
married as the Genesis writer obviously believed, the mitochondrial DNA 
studies would still be irrelevant to the issue.  Mitochondrial DNA can be 
transmitted only by females, and in the mixed marriages of Genesis 6, the 
angels had assumed the male role in reproduction. So why did Gunter wag 
this into the debate?  

   He spoke of Adam Clarke's "admired commentary," but he didn't tell us 
anything about who admires it and what that admiration is supposed to mean. 
He didn't even tell us Clarke's grounds for concluding that beni ha-elohim in 
Genesis 6:2 could not mean "sons of the gods"; he just told us that Clarke 
had concluded this and apparently expected us to accept it with no support-
ing explanation. I suspect that Mr. Gunter is too accustomed to speaking to 
gullible pulpit audiences who buy everything he says without demanding 
proof.

   Clarke's commentary is widely used by fundamentalist preachers, so that 
alone speaks volumes about what one can expect to find in it when the issue 
of inerrancy is at stake.  One has to wonder, then, just how naive Mr. 
Gunter is to think that the mere citing of what a "commentary" says is suffi-
cient to settle an issue as complex as this one.  I can cite Bible commentaries 
that agree with my position, so what does that prove?  The Revised English 
Bible was translated by a committee of reputable Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic 
scholars, and they translated beni ha-elohim in Genesis 6 as "sons of the 
gods." That surely carries more scholastic weight than what a single una-
bashedly fundamentalist commentator 
has said on the matter.

   Gunter accused me of "transform(ing)" the Nephilim into giants to suit my 
"polytheistic presuppositions."  In so doing, he  completely ignored my analy-
sis of the word nephilim, which showed that its usage in the OT was clearly 
associated with giantism.  If I have "transformed" the Nephilim into giants, I 
am in good company, because the translators of several versions (KJV, GNB, 
Septuagint, Amplified, Confraternity, Revised Berkeley, Lamsa's, and Living 
Bible) rendered the word giants.  In past articles, I have reminded readers 
that the Holy Spirit (according to the inerrancy doctrine) must have held the 
Septuagint in high regard, because he frequently directed New Testament 


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writers to quote it. How then can Gunter discredit it as he did by faulting 
the KJV translators for "follow(ing) the Septuagint"?   If the Septuagint was 
good enough for the Holy Spirit, why shouldn't it have been good enough for 
the KJV translators?

   As for my "polytheistic presuppositions," are we to assume that Mr. 
Gunter's hermeneutic approach to this passage was completely free of presup-
positions?  I suspect that if he examined his motives closely enough he would 
find at least a smidgen of predisposition to the inerrancy doctrine in his 
denial of angels and giants in this Genesis passage.

   Gunter told us that the sons of God in this passage were merely "the 
descendants of righteous Abel" and that the daughters of men were "the 
offspring of evil Cain."  But what evidence did he offer to prove this theory? 
None whatsoever!  It was simply an arbitrary pronouncement. Anyone with 
experience in trying to reason with bibliolaters knows that they are good at 
making arbitrary pronouncements to resolve discrepancies in the Bible.  The 
only problem is that arbitrary pronouncements prove nothing.

   One has to wonder, however, about certain implications in this pro-
nouncement. If the "sons of God" were "descendants of righteous Abel" and 
"the daughters of men" were "the offspring of evil Cain," does this mean that 
righteousness and wickedness are hereditary traits?  If one had descended 
from Abel, he was righteous; if one had descended from Cain, he was evil. 
Is this what Gunter is saying? Unless the Church of Christ has changed 
radically since I was in it, I don't think he will be willing to accept the idea 
of hereditary good and evil.  Furthermore, there is nothing in the Bible text 
to indicate that Cain lived an evil life after his exile for killing his brother. 
Certainly, there is nothing to suggest that his offspring were any more evil 
than the offspring of Adam's and Eve's other children. So just what is Gunt-
er's basis for saying that "such a reading (sons of God = descendants of 
righteous Abel, and daughters of men = offspring of evil Cain) makes much 
more sense than the skeptical skullduggery Till's essay engages in"?  If 
completely groundless assumption makes more sense than documented critical 
analysis, I suppose he is right.

    Gunter accused me of "stumbl(ing) over the passage," but if anyone has 
stumbled over it, he has. Genesis 6:1 does not say, "And it came to pass 
that when the offspring of Cain began to multiply on the face of the ground 
and daughters were born to them, etc."  It says that "when men (people, 
NRSV) began to multiply on the face of the ground and daughters were born 
to them...."  Gunter is doing a lot of stumbling to get only the offspring of 
Cain from the word men in this verse.  The truth is that the passage says 
nothing at all about either Cain or Abel. Gunter's "explanation," as I said, is 
purely arbitrary.

   Gunter asserted that "the rebellion of the angels (Jude 6) must be sepa-
rated from the sexual crimes of Sodom in Jude 7," but why must they be 
separated? Jude certainly didn't separate them.  After describing the fate of 
the rebellious angels in verse 6, Jude said, "Likewise, Sodom and Gomorrah 
and the surrounding cities, which, in the same manner as THEY, indulged in 
sexual immorality and pursued unnatural lust, etc." (v:7).  Does Gunter 
know what "in the same manner" means?  Can't he see that the antecedent of 
the  pronoun they has to be the angels in verse 6?  Jude was obviously 
saying that the people of Sodom in indulging in sexual immorality and pur-
suing unnatural lust had done in the same manner as THEY, the rebellious 
angels just referred to. If not, why not?

   That indulgence in sexual immorality was the sin of these fallen angels 
was made very clear in 1 Enoch and the other apocryphal works cited in my 
article.  Gunter tried to dismiss the apocryphal references  by a simple 
assertion that the book of 



                           3
Enoch was "spurious,"  so he apparently holds the book in considerably less 
esteem than did Jude who both alluded to its judgment of fallen angels and 
quoted it directly: "And to these also Enoch, the seventh from Adam, 
PROPHESIED..." (V:14). This introduced a direct quotation from 1 Enoch 
1:9, and the way that Jude quoted it (1) ascribed the authorship of the book 
to Enoch, the seventh-generation descendant of Adam, who was translated 
directly to heaven, and (2) attributed prophetic abilities to the author of the 
book. Mr. Gunter cannot dismiss the impact of this by just crying, "Spuri-
ous!"  In the first place, if by "spurious" he means "lacking authenticity," 
then 1 Enoch is no more spurious than Genesis, because no reputable Bible 
scholar believes that Genesis was actually written by Moses.  

   Whether 1 Enoch is "spurious" or not is beside the point.  I quoted the 
book and other apocryphal works simply to show that a legend about the 
intermarriage of angels and human women was widely believed when the book 
of Genesis was written. That fact and the striking parallel in the wording of 
Genesis 6:1 and 1 Enoch 6:1 must be dealt with.  Gunter dealt with neither, 
and he didn't because he can't. Genesis 6:1-4 was deeply rooted in mythology 
as were the creation, the flood, the tower of Babel and most of the other sto-
ries in the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  To deny this is to deny the 
obvious. 

                   ***************************


          INERRANCY PUBLICATIONS 

   We still have copies of the Laws-Till Debate.  After challenging Farrell 
Till to a written debate on the inerrancy question, James H. Laws, Jr., a 
Church-of-Christ preacher in the Spiritual Sword faction, quit after only 
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   The Jackson-Till Debate on Bible inerrancy is also available. Sixty-six 
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   Prophecies: Imaginary and Unfulfilled shows that popular "prophecies" 
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   All four 1990 issues of TSR are available at $1 per copy.


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