Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

The sons of God are mentioned again at the beginning of the Book of Job, where it says: Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them .

But who on earth were they?

If one looks at it logically, “the sons of God” can mean only one of two things: either it’s a reference to some beings never mentioned either before or after — for if God had really had several sons, one would imagine that they’d have been much more integrated in the events that scripture describes, especially if one considers how things end, with God’s only begotten son’s birth and death — or it’s another term for beings that already figure in scripture. It definitely isn’t man, which leaves only one possibility: by “sons of God” the Bible is referring to angels. In this case the question is sons in what way. Are the angels really God’s sons, or is it just a figure of speech — in rather the same way as human beings are sometimes called God’s children?

So there are three alternatives regarding the meaning of “sons of God.” It could be the name of some unique, extremely rarely mentioned sons of God, or it’s a name for the angels, whose implied relationship to God must then be taken either literally or metaphorically. As far as the Church is concerned, only the last is possible. Apart from Christ, any sons of God are quite unthinkable as far as it is concerned, and “sons of God” can therefore be only another word for angels.

So what does the Bible mean by the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose? It can’t mean anything other than that angels had children with human beings, it’s the only possible interpretation, and for this reason none of the great theologians has paused here and given this passage the attention it deserves, but they have always averted their eyes from it on their way from the creation to the great flood: that the angels should have selected wives from the human race is a thoroughly shocking idea as far as the Church is concerned, not least because it is so completely incompatible with the notion of the angels as purely spiritual, noncorporeal beings.

But it’s in the Bible. And there’s more: There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came unto the daughters of men, and they bear children to them, the same became mighty men of old, men of renown .

What kind of creatures are we talking about? This is the only reference to them in the entire Bible, and it makes their existence extremely enigmatic, even by biblical standards. The only thing one can say with certainty is that the angels’ progeny with the daughters of men were giants, and that they roamed the earth for a time. What they looked like, what they did and thought, and just how they disappeared, we are not told. But the fact they’re mentioned so close to the story of the great flood, which destroyed everything on the face of the earth, and that they’re never mentioned again, makes it likely that this was what led to their demise.

But we can’t be certain. Its highly concentrated form makes the passage cryptic, and it is one of the Bible’s most impenetrable texts. One suspects that the few lines dealing with the sons of God and their offspring, the giants, come from a much larger story that is suppressed here. By itself, as it stands, the passage is incomprehensible. But read in conjunction with the Book of Enoch, it opens up and fills with meaning. It seems that after the fall, God ordered two hundred angels, the so-called “guardians,” led by Azazel and Shemhazai, to keep watch over man and report his doings. They were in such close proximity to human beings that not only did they become aware of earthly women’s beauty, but they also began to lust after them. Their faces, bodies, laughter, scents, the way they moved. . Everything about them attracted the angels, and the longer they were in their presence, the greater their lust grew; after a while they could think of nothing else, it was unendurable, and finally, during a gathering on Mount Hermon, they decided to surrender, with the catastrophic results that this entailed. Angels and mortals were never meant for each other, and when the angels took women and had sex with them, a mixed race was born — what scripture describes as “giants in the earth” and “mighty men of old, men of renown,” which in the Book of Enoch are called Nephilim. Four of the archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael, felt for mankind, and asked God to step in, upon which the fallen angels were forced to attend the Lord’s destruction of their sons, before themselves being thrown into a pit of darkness, everlastingly damned, and all trace of their misdeeds were wiped out by the great flood.

But the narrative is more complicated than that. Apart from their carnal lust, these angels also brought their knowledge to mankind, knowledge about everything from medicine, mining, and weaponry to astronomy, astrology, and alchemy, according to the Book of Enoch. Furthermore it is quite obvious that the angels’ activities were the direct cause of the great flood. Which of their sins weighed most heavily when the Lord made his decision to expunge all living things from the face of the earth isn’t easy to say. In scripture itself the motive is a general one, When the Lord saw that man had done much evil on earth , is all it says. But in the same scripture the angels’ carnal intercourse with mankind is transcribed as a euphemism, the identity of the angels placed in doubt (they’re not called angels but sons of God), the presence of the Nephilim embellished (“men of renown”) — as well as the entire period in which they existed and walked the earth, sixteen hundred years, not being mentioned at all.

When the same scripture lays the blame for the great flood at the door of man’s wickedness, isn’t this another facet of the same cover-up? Are there any grounds to believe that the great flood was linked to man’s evil?

No, there aren’t. The great flood was unleashed on the world to wipe out all traces of a divinity that had gone out of control. The angels were never intended for mankind, not in that way, they weren’t supposed to lust after them and get them pregnant, the imbalance between them was too great, which their offspring, the deformed and degenerate giants, so clearly showed. It ruined the angels and it ruined mankind. The same was true of the knowledge man gleaned from the angels, that ruined him as well.

But for Antinous Bellori the most pertinent thing in the Book of Enoch was the image it portrayed of the angels. That human life in all its earthly imperfection actually represented something desirable. Not only did the angels lust after women so intensely that they set aside the word of God and slept with them, but they must also have felt compassion for human beings and their life in ignorance and poverty, because they passed on their occult skills to them.

Bellori found another nonbiblical depiction of the angels in The Book of the Apocalypse of Baruch , where the relationship with mankind is represented in much more ambivalent terms.

And God said to Michael: “Blow the trumpet to call the angels so that they can worship the work of my hands.” And Michael the angel blew, and all the angels gathered and worshipped Adam one after the other. But Satanael did not worship, but said: “I do not honor clay and dirt.” And he said: “I shall set my throne in heaven and be like the Almighty.” And so God drove him from his presence and spoke to his angels as a prophet: “All those who hate God shall be driven from his sight, and from his glory.” And the Lord commanded the angels to guard paradise. And they entered it to worship God. Then Satanael went and found the serpent. He turned himself into a worm and said to the serpent: “Open your mouth and swallow me into your belly.” And he got over the wall and into paradise to mislead Eve. “It was because of them I was driven from God’s glory.” And the serpent swallowed him and he got into paradise and found Eve. He said to her: “What did God order you to eat in the bliss of paradise?” And Eve answered: “We eat from all the trees in paradise, but God commanded us not to eat from this tree.” When Satanael heard this, he said to her: “God envies you your life, and your immortality. But take and eat and you will see, and give some to Adam, too.” And both of them ate, and the eyes of both were opened, and they saw that they were naked.