5. The One Hundred And Twenty Days of Adam (§§27-54)

The Nephilim Gen. 6. 1-8

Hebrew Text: Ben Chayyim 1524-25
	Genesis 6. “1 Events so unfolded, that when man began to multiply on the surface of the ground and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God [males of the divine order] saw that the daughters of man [females of the human order] were beautiful and they took women for themselves from whomever they chose. 3 And the LORD said, ‘My Spirit would not continue till the end of an eon striving for supremacy in Adam [Man], even he being flesh, so his days will become one hundred and twenty years.’ 4 The Nephilim [lit. fallen ones] were on earth in those days and also at a later period when the sons of God commingled with the daughters of man, and the latter bore these offspring to them. They were the mighty ones from a remote time in the eon’s past, men of more than ordinary reputation. 5 And the LORD saw that the wickedness of Adam [Man] had multiplied on the earth, and that every formulation of his mind was only and always wicked. 6 And the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth and He was grieved at His heart. 7 And the LORD said, ‘I shall wipe man whom I created off the surface of the ground, and along with man, beast and moving creature, and winged creature of the sky, because I regret that I made them.’ 8 But Noah found favor with the LORD.”

27. It can be seen here how the subject changes from man, the collective, to Man, Adam, the particular: “… when man began to multiply … and daughters were born to them [plural, i.e. man, collective] ….” and “My Spirit would not continue till the end of an eon striving for supremacy in Adam [Man], even he [singular, i.e. Man particular, Adam himself] being flesh …. 5 And the LORD saw that the wickedness of Adam [the individual first Man] had multiplied on the earth, and that every formulation of his [singular, i.e. Adam’s] mind was only and always wicked [which proves original sin, that mankind has inherited Adam’s sin]. 6 And the LORD regretted that He had made man [Adam here = man collective, see the end of verse 7 following] on the earth and He was grieved at His heart. 7 And the LORD said, ‘I shall wipe man [collective] whom I created off the surface of the ground, and along with man [collective], beast and moving creature, and winged creature of the sky, because I regret that I made them [here the “them” refers to man collective: God only regretted making earthly man, as it says in verse 6, not the animals, though they suffered “along with” man in the destruction].’” This is an important difference, because the foreshortening to a total of one hundred and twenty of the days of Adam is what is in view in verse 3, not the days of the whole of mankind. God says here Adam will not live till the end of an eon, but his “days” will be, or rather become, one hundred and twenty years only. This phrase, “the days of [personal name] were/shall be/become [so many] years,” is only used three times in the Hebrew Scriptures, and in all cases to denote a span of life, either with a temporal delimiter — a span of life following a certain point in a person’s life — in Genesis 5. 4, or, as here, absolutely, without any temporal delimiter, of the total lifetime of a person, the other instance being Genesis 11. 32. (“And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died in Harran.” A different phrase is used more frequently, “all the days of [personal name] were [so many] years,” and in those cases, too, the reference is to the total lifespan of a person). The phrase in this case specifies, therefore, the total lifespan of Adam.

28. As regards the precise interpretation of the verse, the first possibility — that Adam’s individual lifespan was reduced to 120 years — can be discounted, as according to Genesis 5. 5 the duration of Adam’s life was 930 years, not 120 years. It must have been in some other sense that his lifespan became 120 years. The preceding phrase that God was displeased with the spiritual conflict within Adam and promised “even he” would not live for an eon, implies a temporal change of some kind. A reduction of Adam’s lifespan — if not of his individual lifespan to 120 years — was evidently the result of God’s displeasure. Then Adam’s lifespan could only have become the shorter 120-year lifespan of someone else or of some other people. “Even he” was flesh and suffered a reduction of lifespan to less than an eon, and the implication is: why should some other individual or individuals not suffer a similar reduction?

29. One theory is that the total lifespan of each individual man descended from Adam was reduced to 120 years. However, the phrase in question denotes, as has been demonstrated, an exact total number of years to which Adam’s lifespan was reduced, and the following Biblical genealogies prove many men lived longer than 120 years, many less, and only a few precisely 120 years. Therefore, that theory, too, is untenable.

30. If the reduced 120-year lifespan was not that of Adam himself, nor of Adamic individuals descended from him, it could only have been that of the collective Adamic race. Indeed, the context is precisely that of the multiplication of Adam’s sin in the fall of the sons of God, to which the natural corollary would be the extension of Adam’s punishment (viz. the reduction of his lifespan from an eonic scale) to his fallen progeny. As the Fall of Adam was duplicated in the fall of his multiplied descendants, the sons of God (cf. verse 5: “the LORD saw that the wickedness of Adam had multiplied on the earth”) so evidently was Adam’s reduced lifespan, in fulfillment of this divine pronouncement, duplicated in 120 years granted to his fallen offspring. That is, as the context indicates, the lifespan of antediluvian Man was curtailed by its elimination in the Noachide Flood following a final interval of 120 years.

31. What was the precise nature of this extension whereby the temporal punishment visited on Adam was visited on his fallen progeny? A) It was, as has been demonstrated, a reduction, from an eon to 120 years. B) It paralleled Adam’s punishment: in the same way that the fall of the sons of God duplicated the Fall of Adam, so did the reduction of the lifespan of Adam’s race duplicate the reduction of Adam’s individual lifespan by God. C) Specifically days became years. In the only other instance where the phrase in question is used absolutely, in the case of Terah, the meaning is that the total number of Terah’s days was equal to 205 years. Here, similarly, the total number of Adam’s days were to equal 120 years, but with a reduction of scale. The equality, therefore, could not have been one of constituent total, as in Terah’s case, of smaller units of time totting up to a larger sum on an identical timescale. It could only have been an equality of number, of a certain number of units of time on a large timescale becoming the same number of units of time on a smaller timescale. In some way 120 large days became 120 smaller years. If Adam’s days were of the same magnitude as Terah’s there would be no reduction, but an increase: 120 regular days would be increased, not reduced, to 120 years. Hence we can conclude Adam’s days, 120 in number, were originally of a magnitude greater than years, and became 120 years appointed to his fallen race by reduction. The significant difference, in this instance, is it is God speaking, and we know God’s days correspond to 1000 human years each. The 120 days of Adam referred to by the Divinity in direct speech must, therefore, have been divine days of 1000 years each. We conclude Adam’s lifespan was curtailed from the eonic scale he would have continued to enjoy, if he had never fallen, to a shorter span of 120,000 years, and a parallel and further reduced 120 years were granted to his fallen progeny. Adam’s 120 divine days became Mankind’s 120 regular years. The apparent conflict between the two figures for Adam’s lifespan, which was irreconcilable on the theory that Adam’s individual lifespan was reduced to 120 years, will be resolved in the following paragraph.

32. The figures 120,000 years and 930 years are two different ways of measuring Adam’s lifespan. The key to understanding how they relate to each other is the eonic scale of the day of Adam’s creation. Adam and Eve were unique in every sense. The first day in Adam’s life was the day of his formation from the dust of the ground by God Himself in the latter part of the Sixth Day of Creation. Eve was created by divine genetic engineering from the side of Adam, likewise in the latter part of the Sixth Day of Creation. That was on the eonic scale of 360,000,000 years in geological time. Adam lived many tens of thousands of years on that eonic scale, as the first man created by the hand of God. Here, however, in Genesis 6, God now ordains an end to the life of Adam at 120,000 years precisely. From the point in time when God foreshortened its span, Adam’s life was reckoned in normal human years: the preceding thousands of years within the Sixth Day made up merely the first day of his life, since Hebrew time reckoning was based on the principle of pars pro toto, i.e. a part of a day (here, part of the Sixth Day of Creation) counts as a whole day for the purpose of computing periods of time. So the human genealogy of Adam now begins (Gen. 5), with a special mention at the beginning of the divine or eonic Day on which he was created, and Adam begets Seth, and Seth begets Enosh and so on, down to Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

33. The eon to which Adam never attained was the divine Day of 360,000,000 years (geological time). God told him that the Day he ate of the forbidden Tree, that Day he would die (Gen. 2. 17). Adam died before he had lived 360,000,000 years. He fell into a lower sphere and ceased to experience time as God Himself did. God experienced each day in each thousand-year period as one thousand years. Adam now experienced those thousand-year periods as man does presently, viz. each day of each year in each of the 120 thousand-year periods granted to him by God he experienced simply as one day. Also God pronounced that these 120,000 years would “become” (i.e. after they were completed, and therefore after the death of Adam) 120 years. Adam failed to attain one eonic Day on the divine timescale and his lifespan was reduced to 120,000 years. Likewise antediluvian Man failed to outlive Adam one divine Day of 1000 human years, and was eradicated following a curtailment of that downscaled eon to an even shorter period of 120 years.

34. Reckoning back from the arrival of Jacob in Egypt in his 130th year in 1853 BC during the reign of the Hyksos king Aphophis, we can count the years by the precise genealogical data given in Genesis to the Flood in 2435 BC and the first (human, non-eonic) year of Adam at 4091 BC. (For the date of Jacob’s arrival in Egypt, see §412, below, >>.) Adam died at 930 (human, non-eonic) years old in 3161 BC. Including the years he lived on the eonic time-scale during his first day, the earliest point in the life of Adam can be dated, therefore, to 3161 BC minus 120,000 = 123,161 BC.

35. Genetic material extracted from the wombs of modern women across the world has shown that all modern humans are descended from a single woman, known by the Biblical name of Eve (“Mitochondrial Eve”), who lived around 120,000 years before the present, according to one of the more favored estimates. This evidence supports the precise Biblical dating proposed here.

36. The date 123,161 BC followed a glacial period, around 150,000 to 130,000 years ago in geological time, when glaciers covered large areas of the earth’s surface. The Bible states that Adam was formed from the dust of the earth following a time when the earth was watered by what the Hebrew text calls an “ed” which “went up” and “watered the whole surface of the ground” (Gen. 2. 6). “Ed” is a rare word and its meaning is disputed. In the Book of Job (36. 27) it denotes frozen water of some kind, ice or frost, and the root from which it is formed means “to turn over, wrap, go round,” especially of seasons, clothing, accounts and events, and then also a turn for the worse. The noun in Job is the product of such a destructive climate change, matching precisely the phenomenon which characterized the age preceding Adam’s formation: a mantle of ice, an “ice cap” or “ice sheet,” which stood thick above (“went up” from) the surface of the ground and which supplied water at its melting edges.

37. Another characteristic of glacial periods like this one was that the world was not only cooler then it was also more arid. In this case, it is recorded in the Bible (Gen. 2. 6) that God, for some unspecified length of time before the formation of Adam, had not caused it to rain on the earth; neither was it possible for water to be channeled onto the dry earth, as commonly in the Biblical Near East, by human irrigation, there being no man to till the earth, so the only source of water was the “ed” or ice sheet. Gen. 2. 5-6 reads: “When the LORD God did not cause it to rain on the earth, and there being no man to work the ground, then an ice-sheet would form above [lit. go up from] the earth and water all the surface of the ground.” Glacial conditions alternated with warmer periods up to around 2500 BC (uncalibrated radiocarbon date), when the progressive melting of ice-sheets from around 19000 BC, and the consequent flooding of coastal regions, ceased, and present-day climatic conditions prevailed. Going back now to the period around 130,000 to 115,000 years ago in geological time, there occurred a much milder phase, called the Eemian interglacial, when conditions were generally warmer and moister than at present. This was the Paradisiacal period when God planted the garden in the east of Eden. Adam was “translated” by his Creator and “set down” in the garden to tend and care for it (Gen. 2. 15). The imbalance that existed previously between wet, hot, tropical periods and glacial, dry, arid, periods was now addressed by the authorization of Man to be keeper of the garden.

38. Adam’s life, to sum up, was divided into two phases: the first lasted 119,070 years within the Sixth Day of Creation, and this period counted as Adam’s “first day;” the second lasted 930 years till his death at 3161 BC. The first was the period in which occurred the Fall, the begetting of Cain and Abel, the murder of Abel by Cain and the earliest of the Cainite generations; the second was the period at the end of Adam’s life when he produced Abel’s replacement, Seth, and other unnamed sons and daughters.

39. It was the firm opinion of the Talmudic Rabbis that no less than 974 generations intervened in human history prior to the first year of Adam referred to in Genesis 5. 3 (Chagigah, Page 13, Side B). They based this on the fact that Moses (Deuteronomy 7. 9), followed by other inspired writers in the Hebrew Scriptures (1 Chronicles 16. 15, Psalm 105. 8), declared God had kept His Covenant, or issued forth His Word, to “one thousand generations.” Included amongst the beneficiaries of His faithfulness during this time were Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Psalm 105. 9f., 1 Chronicles 16. 16f.). Rashi emphasized this could not mean the Covenant was of limited duration, as if God had ordained a term of a mere 1000 generations for its validity. Rather, it referred to the long period preceding Moses, during which God had faithfully kept His Covenant with His people, until finally, in the 1000th generation, the Torah was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Of course, the Biblical genealogies demonstrated that 26 generations, not 1000, intervened between Adam and Moses. Far from abandoning the interpretatio difficilior, however, or explaining the figure away as what could only otherwise be a very imprecise and misleading cypher for a “long time,” the Rabbis remained adamant it indicated there were 974 generations somewhere unaccounted for, preceding the era of the Adamic genealogy in Genesis 5, making 1000 generations in total from the first generation to the time of Moses. In the light of the understanding that Adam’s first day was on the eonic timescale, and that his lifespan was of a total duration of 120,000 years, in our terms, it is clear there was ample room within that first day for the 974 missing generations. The average length of a generation in the Adamic or pre-diluvian era was 117.3 years, measured from birth to the begetting of the first son. (This reckoning includes the relevant biographical data of all the patriarchs in the genealogy in Genesis 5 who were strictly pre-diluvian, from Adam to Lamech, Noah’s father, but excludes that of Noah himself, who spanned the pre-diluvian and post-diluvian eras, and whose age at the begetting of his three sons, 500 years, was, in any case, anomalously great.) This figure multiplied by 974 gives 114,282.7 years as the approximate total number of years preceding the Adamic genealogy in Genesis 5. Counting back before the first year of Adam in 4091 BC, the first generation of the 974, therefore, was around 118,000 BC, i.e. 120,000 years BP, to the nearest complete millennium. This figure is what would be expected, given the historical reconstruction outlined here.

40. Genesis 2. 4-15:

4 These are the generations [i.e. what came out] of the heavens and of the earth when they were created,

in the day [singular]

that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,
5 And every plant of the grassland [or, field] before it was in the earth, and every herb of the grassland [or, field] before it grew:

when the LORD God did not cause it to rain upon the earth, and, there being no man to till the ground,

6 An ice-sheet [Heb. ‘ed] would form over the earth, and water the whole face of the ground:

7 Then the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed through His nostrils [cf. Psalm 18. 16 Heb.] the spirit [Heb. neshamah] of life; and man became a living soul [Heb. nephesh]:
8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.

9 Now out of the ground made the LORD God to spring every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the Tree of Life also in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of the Experience of Moral Extremes [lit. knowledge of good and evil],
10 And a river flowing out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and formed four heads.
11 The name of the same [or first or single, viz. river “flowing out of Eden”] is Pishon: that is it which compasses the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;
12 And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
13 And the name of the second river [viz. flowing out of Eden] is Gihon: the same is it that compasses the whole land of Ethiopia.
14 And the name of the third river [flowing out of Eden] is Hiddekel: that is it which goes toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river [flowing out of Eden] is Euphrates.
15 And the LORD God translated [lit. took] the man, and set him down in the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

41. Commentary:

Genesis 2. 4 tells us that the new life forms which appeared on earth, as described in the subsequent verses, were produced out of the existing heavens and earth. They were born from germs of life within, present in the heavens and earth when they were first created in Genesis 1. 1. The verse goes on to refer to that same point in time as the single “day” when God “made” (not “created”) earth and heavens. Note the order here, in the second part of the verse: earth first, heavens second, directly opposite to the order in the first part of the verse. This is the order, with earth first, in which the earth and heavens actually appeared in Genesis 1, verses 2 and 8, after the original creation of heavens (first) and earth (second) in Genesis 1. 1. What Genesis 2 verse 4 is telling us is that the objects of the creative work described in Genesis 1. 2 and 1. 8 — relating to the earth in its chaotic state and the atmospheric heavens — were outgrowths of the original creation of the universal heavens (space) and earth in Genesis 1. 1. The word for the creative work done in Genesis 1. 2 and 1. 8 is “make” (Hebrew ‘asah), which means to fashion and form already existing material, rather than “create” out of nothing (Hebrew bara), which is the word used in Genesis 1. 1. The chaotic earth and the atmospheric heavens appeared later, formed out of already existing matter, but the seeds or germs of their substance were contained within the universe created on the single day referred to in Genesis 1. 1. Likewise, according to Genesis 2. 5, the vegetable life which appeared as the result of God’s fiat on the third day of Creation (Genesis 1. 11-12), was already created in seed form on the day God made the universe in Genesis 1. 1. God is said here to have made every plant and every herb on that primal day “before” it was “in the earth” and “before it grew.” The germs of all plant life existed somewhere in space, not “in the earth,” but outside the earth, when they were created in Genesis 1. 1. Entombed at a later stage in the earth, the seeds sprung to life on the third day of Creation, according to Genesis 1. 9-10, as soon as the water was removed from the ground above them. The scene is set before the emergence of the complete range of Grassland (Heb. sadeh, “grassland, savannah, field”) vegetation in Genesis 2. 4-6, when arid conditions on dry ground were only relieved by water at the edge of an ice-sheet. Man was needed, in the plan of God, to work the ground, and the fashioning of God (Hebrew yaṣar, “molding, fashioning” as of clay) then produced the required result. The glacial maximums and minimums continued till man appeared to work the ground. God planted the garden in the east of Eden in the Grassland period, at a time when the climate was more moderate. As the temperatures warmed following the last glacial maximum, and sea-levels began to rise to their current levels, God placed in that same location the Man whose soul He had brought into being from the neshamah spirit He blew through His nostrils, and whose body He had fashioned from the dust of the ground. pre-diluvian history now began.

42. Where was Adam physically located and what historically happened to Adam during the 120,000 years? If no less than 974 generations passed away within his lifetime, there might be expected to be in the Scriptural record a corresponding abundance of prophetic or historical detail to match the huge timescale of this phase in the patriarch’s life, at least in respect of Adam himself, if not of the more insignificant generations who succeeded him. In fact, nothing whatsoever is recorded for that interval, except the bare summary in Genesis 6, which relates to the emergence of a degenerate strain in the Adamic line, and is backgrounded in the following paragraphs. The Bible itself, however, describes Adam’s presence in the garden as the result of a translation or rapture; and that shows Adam bypassed the interval, and did not live through it. He was first placed geographically by his Creator in a location where the garden had been planted some undetermined period earlier (Gen. 2. 8); then, subsequent to that initial, geographical, placement, he was “taken (= raptured) by God” and “set down” in the garden, to tend it and devote labor upon it (Gen. 2. 15). The words “taken by God” are the same as those used in the case of Enoch: he too was “taken by God,” with the result that he “disappeared,” and did not die a natural death (Gen. 5. 24). The two statements in Adam’s case — that he was first placed in the location where the garden had been originally planted, then was “taken by God” and set down in it — imply that the second was a transportation of Adam in time, not space. When we find Adam’s lifespan, on a later occasion, reduced as a result of the Fall, from the eonic scale he had enjoyed in the garden, to the lesser, pre-diluvian, scale outside it, which latter began in 4091 BC, we understand the sequence of events to have been as follows: the physical formation of Adam from the dust was complete by 4091 BC; at that time he was placed geographically where the garden had once been located, but had long since disappeared; thirdly, he was translated back in time to 123,161 BC and “set down” in the garden, as it was originally formed, in all its beauty and luxuriance, in the Eemian interglacial period. This translation of Adam to Paradise, — the first in a series, preceding that of Enoch, — is emphasized in Syriac Christian tradition, for example, in the following passage from The Cave of Treasures: “[Brit. Mus. MS. Add. 25875 Fol. 5b col. 2: first Adam’s creation is described and his crowning on earth:] And when Sâtânâ [Satan] was cast out from heaven, Adam was raised up so that he might ascend to Paradise in a chariot of fire. And the angels went before him, singing praises, and the Seraphim ascribed holiness unto him, and the Cherubim ascribed blessing; and amid cries of joy and praises Adam went into [Fol. 6a, col. 1] Paradise. And as soon as Adam entered Paradise he was commanded not to eat of a [certain] tree ….” The Fall followed at some point subsequent to this, and the result was a temporal, as well as a spiritual, moral, and physical, diminution of the human species. Adam lost his spiritual communion with God, and the eonic scale of life he had enjoyed in the garden. The lower nature to which he had succumbed was inferior in a purely temporal, as well as in a moral, sense to that with which he had been endowed by his Creator. Dismissed from the garden, and as a direct consequence of the Fall, he begot children in the cursed world outside its bounds. At this point in time, when the human species “began to multiply,” — and, therefore, after he had successfully reared his dependent family, — Adam’s lifespan was downscaled as described in Genesis 6. The rapture was reversed, and Adam returned to the world he himself had corrupted, and to the ground from which he had been translated, in the year 4091 BC.

43. At the Fall the human race was debased by the admixture of animal genes through the commingling of the Serpent, the most advanced pre-human hominid, with Eve. The Serpent, as the Bible tells us, was not originally a reptile, but was the most sophisticated animal God had created up to that time (Gen. 3. 1), being bettered only by Adam. The word Serpent in Hebrew means “Whisperer of Spells.” This hominid was a sorcerer. He could reason, talk (Gen. 3. 1-5), and was almost indistinguishable, physically speaking, from the true Adamic homo sapiens sapiens. He was capable of interbreeding with the Adamic species. The Serpent seduced Eve (2 Cor. 11. 2-3) to eat of the Tree of the Experience of Moral Extremes (Gen. 3. 6), which gave her experience for the first time of sexual shame (Gen. 3. 7), and she became pregnant by the Serpent with Cain (1 John 3. 12, John 8. 44). Then Eve induced Adam to eat of the same Tree (Gen. 3. 7) and she became pregnant by him with Abel. After this flagrant breach of the divine command, the Serpent was cursed by God and his body changed from its original hominid form to that of the lowest reptile (Gen. 3. 14-15).

44. Eve gave birth to two children on the same day, the first, Cain, of mixed animal and human stock, the second, Abel, of pure human, Adamic, stock. These sexually-begotten children of Adam and Eve lived a lifespan of unspecified length, though even in the second phase of Adam’s life, after the reduction of his lifespan from its eonic scale, the lifespans of the pure Adamics, at least, as demonstrated by the genealogy in Genesis 5, were of a higher order of magnitude than the norm today by a factor of around 10. The Sumerian King List from Babylonia claims that the pre-diluvian kings, their names paralleling those of the Cainites, ruled for so many “shars” each. (See §481, below, >>, for the pre-diluvian section of the Sumerian King List.) The word “shar,” in Greek “saros,” means a “complete cycle” or a “large number.” In later periods the word was used to represent the number 3,600, and this is how the Babylonian priest Berossus interpreted it, but according to the Byzantine scholar Suidas, it denoted a period of 222 lunar months or 18 solar years and 6 months: “Saroi [the plural of saros] are, with the Chaldaeans, a measure and a number. One hundred and twenty Saroi [i.e. the sum of the reigns of the pre-diluvian kings], according to the calculations of the Chaldaeans, makes 2222 years, for the Saros contains 222 lunar months, which is equivalent to eighteen years and six months.” In the pre-diluvian era 360 days comprised one year and 30 days one lunar month. If 120 “shars” were the same as 2222 × 360-day years, then 1 “shar” comprised 18.52 such years, i.e. 18 years and 6 months to the nearest month. That, in turn, comprised 222 lunar months (reckoned at 30 days per month) to the nearest lunar month, with 6 days remaining. Under this system the end of the saros fell in the 223rd lunar month. The astronomer Halley around the turn of the eighteenth century realized that eclipses follow a cycle of 223 lunar months. On the basis of the entry in Suidas, he chose to name the newly discovered eclipse cycle a “saros.” Some believe the coincidence is more than fortuitous and that the eclipse cycle was, in fact, known to the Chaldaeans, and perhaps even to the Sumerians before them. Hence the Sumerian name for it, “shar,” or “cycle.” The saros was further subdivided into 6 “neroi” and 60 “sossoi.” If the saros of the Sumerian King List was of the shorter duration, then the reigns of the pre-diluvian kings were of an order of magnitude higher than the average modern reign by a factor of around 10 — the same as in the case of the lifespans of the pre-diluvian Adamics. The Bible states that the pre-diluvian heroes whose names appeared in the chronicles and legends current in the Near East at that time lived in a remote period in the eon’s past but says nothing specific about their lifespans. It is equally unspecific about the length of time which intervened between each Cainite generation. The word “beget” (Hebrew yalad) used in the Cainite genealogy can mean “beget a son” or it can mean “produce” as of a more remote ancestor.

45. When they were grown, Cain murdered Abel. Cain thereafter was driven out of God’s presence, married what the Hebrew text (Gen. 4. 17) terms his ishshah, which is the word used of a woman derived from an Adamic male (Gen. 2. 23), i.e. his own half-sister, and became the founder of a sub-human race. (For the ancient names of the descendants of Cain, see §§413ff, below, >>.) The existence of this wife of Cain proves that Abel was not the only Adamic in the pre-Sethite era. However, Eve’s progeny in the line of Cain, the female members of which are referred to here as the daughters of man, because they inherited human genes through Eve and Cain’s wife, were yet not pure human stock. They were called the Nephilim, or fallen ones. Another word used to describe the hybrids in the period after the Flood was Rephaim (cp. Num. 13. 33 and Deut. 2. 11, translated “Titans” in the Greek Septuagint at 2 Sam. 5. 18 and 22). We have descriptions of the Rephaim or Nephilim in Canaan from the time of Joshua. They were brute men, taller, stouter and more violent than the true human species. Goliath of Gath is said to have been of the stock of the Rephaim (2 Sam. 21. 19, 22, 1 Chron. 20. 5, 8). The stature of these specimens gave rise to the translation of the word Nephilim as “giants” (Greek gigantes).

46. This passage in Genesis 6 informs us that the Nephilim were on earth in “those days” (the 120 “days” or 120,000 years of Adam) and also “after that” when the sons of God intermingled with the daughters of man. The genealogy of the Cainites in the Bible (Gen. 4. 16-24) precedes the birth of Seth and his genealogy (Gen. 4. 25-26, 5. 1-32), and unlike the Sethites, the Cainite generations are not dated and no ages are given for them. The Cainite history transpired, as it says here, in a “remote time in the eon’s past,” during the 120,000 years of Adam, or, as it also describes that era, when man “began to multiply on the surface of the ground.” The beginning of the multiplication of man referred to was immediately after the Fall, since it was then that the first sexually-begotten humans, Cain and Abel, were born.

47. Cain’s first abode, after he was expelled by God, was in the land of Nod, somewhere along the eastern border of Eden (Gen. 4. 16). In the eastern part of Eden itself, which was a large expanse of territory including at least parts of North East Africa and the Near East, was the garden of Eden, and this garden was watered by a single river called Pishon “rising in [lit. going forth from] Eden,” which after it left the territory of the garden, split into four arms (Gen. 2. 10-14). Havilah, the land “around” which this first river wound its way, was somewhere near Egypt, towards the east, in the direction of Assyria (Gen. 25. 18, 1 Sam. 15. 7). The mention of its splitting into four arms and its geographical location suggest the Pishon was, as some ancient commentators held, the prehistoric Nile with its famous Delta, perhaps more precisely the Nile seen as a continuation of its eastern branch, the Blue Nile, which rises in the mountains west of Zeila in Somaliland in the Horn of Africa. This town was anciently equated with the Biblical Havilah. The garden, therefore, seems to have been located in present day North East Africa, somewhere along the course of the Blue Nile or, at any rate, the Nile south of the Delta. The second river “rising in Eden” was the Gihon, which is said to have “wound its way round” the whole of Ethiopia. Ethiopia in the Bible is a comprehensive name for the African hinterland south of Egypt. The Gihon, too, was anciently equated with the Nile, and the reference in this case is, presumably, to the prehistoric White Nile, or the Nile south of its junction with the Blue Nile. The more easterly rivers “rising in Eden” were the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq. If the garden was in North East Africa, yet was in the eastern section of Eden, and Eden stretched towards the east as far as Iraq, we can conclude the territory of Eden spread a vast distance to the west over most of what is today North Africa, and perhaps over other lands as well.

48. Nod, on the other hand, running along the eastern border of Eden, was somewhere not too far distant from, if not on the banks of, the most easterly rivers which “rose in Eden,” the Tigris and Euphrates. Native Mesopotamian sources, recovered by archaeologists from the dust of Iraq, state that the first kingdom before the Flood was located in Ku’ara. This was the name of a small community in the vicinity of Eridu, at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, east (and south) of the ancient mainland courses of the two rivers themselves, in the marshes where they enter the Persian Gulf. The Sumerian word Ku’ara is otherwise translated Nadu (nadû) and Nadu is the Mesopotamian equivalent of the Hebrew “Nod” (nwd). It means “Wandering.” (Chicago Ass. Dict. s.v. adj. nadû, lexical section, Ku’ara = A.HA = nadû.) Likewise the Sumerian name for Eridu (NUN.KI) is otherwise translated Nadu. (Ibid., s.v. vb. nadû, lexical section). The land of Nod, therefore, included the little community called Ku’ara and the area around Eridu. Cain was cursed to be a wanderer and hence the name of the land where he attempted at first to fix his abode. According to this evidence, Cain dwelt at the mouth of the Persian Gulf in the earliest phase of his life, after his expulsion.

49. Adam, too, it can be concluded, had been dismissed from the garden, to till the “ground [Heb. adamah] from which he was translated [lit. “taken”]” (Gen. 3. 23), in an easterly direction, since God is said to have placed cherubim at the east of the garden and “the blazing heat of the sword which whirls in all directions” to prevent his access that way to the Tree of Life (Gen. 3. 22-24). In Arabic chronicles drawing on earlier Mandaean sources (Mandaism being a mixture of heterodox Judaic and pagan Babylonian belief-systems, which preserved ancient Babylonian traditions well into the medieval period) Adam is represented as having dwelt after the Fall in the island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) on the mountain called Adam’s Peak, from where, on occasion, he visited his erring offspring in the plains of the west.

50. During “those days,” i.e. from around 120,000 years BP (Before Present) onwards, we find remains of modern man radiating outwards from an original center of dispersion, and this was precisely in the area of northern and eastern Africa and somewhat later the Near East, where the earliest anatomically modern human specimens have been found. One of the major routes of migration, as the remoter of the 974 generations multiplied and sought new lands, was eastwards across the continent of Asia and from there by land bridge over into America and the Atlantic zone. Given that the Bible only names two lands or territories in the pre-diluvian era, viz. Eden and Nod, and Eden itself was of vast extent, stretching from Iraq in the east all across North Africa to the west, it is possible, indeed likely, that the name “Nod” applied to the whole territory east of Eden, even as far as the Atlantic zone, where it will have met Eden again on the latter’s western border.

51. According to the Bible, Cain eventually built a center of civilization, a city and a state, called Enoch after his son. The name Enoch in Hebrew means “Trained” (from the verb ḥ-n-k = “train,

The world 18,000 years before present, with the location of Nod (Ku’ara) at the head
of the present-day Persian Gulf, of the pre-diluvian city Enoch (Atlantis) in a now-submerged area off
the coast of Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and of its extended territories in the now-submerged areas
of the greater Atlantic Ocean. The red line indicates the size of the Atlantis zone as compared to the yellow line marking the extent of Europe and Asia together. The former is larger than the latter. For the location of the continent of India in the “Atlantic Ocean” in Megasthenes, writing in the time of Alexander of Macedon, see §494, below, >>, and more generally on the Atlantis tradition, §482ff., below, >>.)

discipline, initiate, inaugurate,” lit. “rub, polish, finish.”) The same name translated into Greek is “Atlas,” which likewise means “Submitted, subjected to hardship or discipline.” (Liddell-Scott-Jones, Greek Lexicon, s.n., euphonic initial a-, followed by tlas, from tlao, meaning to “submit, undergo, etc.”) The Greeks were told by the Egyptian priests that in a remote period in the past, more than 9,500 years before Christ, there existed a settlement and a more extended territory called Atlantis, named after Atlas, located in the now sunken coastal shelf bordering the Atlantic Ocean, around an area of land-mass greater than Libya (North Africa) and Asia put together. Members of Atlas’ line controlled also territories on the present African and European mainland. Atlantis clearly is the settlement named after Enoch (Atlas) which is referred to in Genesis. The Atlantic Ocean at that time surrounded a single vast continent, the easternmost regions of which could be met across the Ocean directly west of the Straits of Gibraltar. (That is around the seaboard of the present Americas. For full details about Atlantis see §482ff., below, >>.) Since there was only one continent in those days, — America being joined to Asia at the Bering Straits, — the Atlantic bordering it extended far beyond its present bounds to the west, and encompassed the whole of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The city itself is said to have been located somewhere in that primeval, extended, Atlantic Ocean, in a plain running down to the sea, to the southward of a moderate-sized mountain where the parents of Atlas’ mother dwelt. The parents of Enoch’s mother were Adam and Eve. The names of the parents of Atlas’ mother, translated into Greek as Evenor and Leucippe, are the equivalents of the Hebrew Adam and Eve. (See further §492.1, below, >>.) As Adam and Eve are located traditionally in Sri Lanka, on a mountain (Adam’s Peak) in an identical situation to that described in the case of Atlantis, the city must be looked for in that location. There is, indeed, a widespread tradition in Sri Lanka that an ancient city lies submerged off the shores of the island.

51.1. As regards the more extended area ruled from the city, there is known to have been a center of prehistoric culture on the Atlantic seaboard of Europe within the regions that fell under the control of Atlantis at that period in prehistory. The caves of Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain are monuments to the barbaric, superstitious and violent culture modern man (“Cro-Magnon” man) had developed in the period around 40,000 to 20,000 BP on that seaboard. In the Lascaux cave there is depicted, significantly, a representation of the great celestial bull, Taurus, with the seven stars of the Pleiades hanging over its back, which is the sign of the fratricide Cain, as well as a picture of a lewd, “stag-horned,” magus-like figure, whose horns identify him with the same cursed fratricide. (See further on the sign of Cain and his identification with the stag or bull of Taurus, §422, below, >>.)

51.2. The coastal outline was different in those remote ages, because of the ice-sheets which had advanced once again after the disobedience of Adam and covered vast expanses of the continent of Europe. The blazing heat of “the sword which whirls in all directions” placed by God at the east of the garden of Eden had caused a change in the climate back to arid, glacial, conditions worldwide. Areas beneath the Ocean now were then dry land. Plato (in Timaeus and Critias) relates, accordingly, that Atlantis was located in an area later covered by the sea. He also notes, incidentally, that what he calls “elephants” were abundant in the environs of Atlantis, as Ice Age mammoths actually were in the world inhabited by Cro-Magnon Man. Earthquakes and great floods terminated the settlement’s existence some 9,500 years BC. Historically this was the time the last major Ice Age began to give way to a warmer phase, which involved an increase in precipitation. Coastal flooding was a natural concomitant of this climatic change.

52. The age of Enoch-Atlantis, during the 119,070 years of the first, eonic, phase of Adam’s lifespan, was the era of the Nephilim. The Greeks translated Nephilim as gigantes, giants. They believed that in ancient ages the god Heaven (Ouranos) warred with his spouse Earth (Gaia), and that Earth produced at that time monstrous offspring called “giants.” These battled against Heaven and the gods his allies in Liguria in the South of France. They raised up huge rocks and tree-trunks to assault Heaven. This myth is a reminiscence of the presence in that area of the ancient Nephilim and of the separation between the two genetic lines of the “sons of God” (the heavenly race) and the “daughters of man” (the earthly race). The stones and tree-trunks are a reference to the megalithic monuments scattered around those regions, which, indeed, date back to the era of the Nephilim.

53. Just before the climate changed and the settlement of Enoch-Atlantis was no more, the people of that prehistoric culture, according to Plato, advanced eastwards in an aggressive fashion, aiming to overwhelm the areas of Europe and Asia still outside their control east of Italy, as well as Egypt east of Libya. An element in the tradition preserved by Cosmas Indicopleustes claims that the invasion originated in the continent on the other side of the Ocean from Atlantis, viz. the prehistoric American continent. Parts of this, as Plato confirms, came under the control of Atlantis. At that period, the American zone seems to have been the power base of the Atlantian civilization. The leaders picked up mercenaries from Atlantis and then proceeded on their incursion into Europe. They were prevented, however, by what are described as the more enlightened and civilized inhabitants of the Greek mainland. The center of Greek civilization then was the prehistoric city of Athens, which had, according to Plato, a different physical, geographical, layout to that which it had in the historical period. It was founded towards the end of the period when Atlantis reigned supreme, around 9,500 BC, and the city of Sais in Egypt 1000 years later. It is a fact that after 10,000 BC or thereabouts the center of barbaric development shifted east. No longer was the Atlantic seaboard the focus of prehistoric civilization. Primitive, but still quite complex, urban centers began to appear in Turkey (Çatal Hüyük and other sites), in the Levant (Jericho) and in Mesopotamia.

54. In the latter area, in Mesopotamia, the Nephilim built cities here and there, and lived out their degraded lives in the bestial fashion they had learnt from their ancestors. It was at this point that they were visited by the divinely-created father of the true human species, Adam. The natural route from Ceylon, where Adam is said to have settled after the Fall, to Mesopotamia is now, and was then, by sea across the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. The Babylonian chronicler Berossus recorded that in the most remote ages, when Mesopotamia was inhabited by groups of various genetic origin who lived “like the beasts,” a divine being, half god, half man, as he described him, emerged from the Persian Gulf and taught them the rudiments of true religion and culture. He was called Oannes (U-ana). This was the ancient Babylonian name of Adam. The initial “u” sound in the name U-ana means “he of the design, or, image” (as Adam was originally created in the “image” [Hebrew demuth] of God, Gen. 1. 26f., and thus received his spiritual name Adam), and also “he of the earth” (as Adam was formed secondarily out of the “earth” [Hebrew adamah], Gen. 2. 7, and thus received his earthly name Adam), then finally the “spouse, husband, male,” which is what Adam generally means in Hebrew. (For further details on the Sumerian name U-ana see §448, below, >>.) The second element, ana, literally “high one,” is a title commonly found in these early names. Oannes did not eat with the native inhabitants, though he always dealt compassionately with them, and withdrew each night into the waters of the Gulf, returning with the light of day. So he taught them the worship of the True God and the story of creation.