Part Five: As It Was in the Days of Noah

The Watcher tradition, the boundary violation, and what it means for now

The Template Jesus Chose

When Jesus describes the end times in Matthew 24, he chooses a single historical event as his primary structural template. Not the exodus. Not Babylon's destruction of Jerusalem. He chooses Noah.

Matthew 24:37-39

"As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away."

[TIER 1 — SCRIPTURE] Jesus affirms Noah's time as a historical reality with prophetic structural significance. The structural template Jesus is pointing to must be understood in light of what Genesis 6 describes as the defining features of that period.

The interpreter who reads Matthew 24:37 must take Genesis 6 seriously. Because the defining feature of Noah's time — the feature that makes it unique in all of human history before the cross — is what was happening in those verses: the bene Elohim crossing the line between categories of being that God had established, taking human wives, and producing offspring of a nature that had no natural parallel in God's creation order.

Genesis 6: Reading It Carefully

Genesis 6:1-4

"When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose... The Nephilim were on the earth in those days."

[TIER 1 — SCRIPTURE] Genesis 6:1-4 is Scripture. Bene Elohim took human wives and produced Nephilim. The identity of the bene Elohim is the exegetical question — the text uses the same phrase found in Job 1:6, 2:1, and 38:7, where it unambiguously refers to spiritual beings.

In every other occurrence of bene Elohim in the Old Testament it refers to members of the divine council, spiritual beings who stand before God. There is no occurrence where it means human beings. The sons of Seth interpretation — which reads bene Elohim as the godly human lineage of Seth — requires the phrase to mean something it never means anywhere else in the text. It is a sincere reading held by serious scholars across church history — including Augustine and Calvin — motivated by theological concern about the implications of the angelic interpretation for the nature of spiritual beings and divine governance. The concern is legitimate even if the exegesis does not finally support the reading.

But it does not survive careful Hebrew exegesis, and the New Testament confirms the angelic reading:

Jude 6-7

"You also know that the angels who did not keep within their proper domain but abandoned their own place of residence, he has kept in eternal chains in utter darkness, locked up for the judgment of the great Day." (Jude 6, NET)

[TIER 1 — SCRIPTURE] Jude 6-7 is Scripture. It confirms spiritual beings abandoned their proper domain and are being held for judgment. This is the New Testament's own interpretation of the Genesis 6 event.