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Genesis 6

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1 And it was, that man began to multiply himself upon the faces of the ground, and daughters were born to them.

2 And the sons of God saw the daughters of man that they were good; and they took to themselves wives of all that they chose.

3 And Jehovah said, My spirit shall not contend with man to eternity, because he is flesh; and his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.

4 The Nephilim were in the land in those days; and even more after the sons of God came·​·in to the daughters of man, and they gave·​·birth for them; they are the mighty men, who from an age were men of renown*.

5 And Jehovah saw that the evil of man was multiplied on the earth, and that all that is formed by the thoughts of his heart is only evil all the day.

6 And Jehovah repented that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to His heart.

7 And Jehovah said, I will wipe·​·away man, whom I have created, from upon the faces of the ground, from man to beast, to creeping thing, and to the fowl of the heavens; for I repent that I have made them.

8 But Noaḥ found grace in the eyes of Jehovah.

9 These are the births of Noaḥ; Noaḥ was a man just and perfect in his generations; Noaḥ walked with God.

10 And Noaḥ begot three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

11 And the earth was corrupt before God; and the earth was·​·filled with violence.

12 And God saw the earth, and behold it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its way on the earth.

13 And God said to Noaḥ, The end of all flesh has come before Me, for the earth is filled with violence from their faces, and behold I am destroying them with the earth.

14 Make for thee an ark of gopher wood; with rooms* thou shalt make the ark, and shalt tar* it inside and outside with tar.

15 And this is how thou shalt make it: three hundred cubits the length of the ark, fifty cubits its breadth, and thirty cubits its height.

16 A window* thou shalt make to the ark, and to a cubit thou shalt complete it from above; and the entrance of the ark thou shalt set in its side; with lowest, second, and third stories thou shalt make it.

17 And I, behold I am bringing the flood of waters on the earth, to destroy all flesh wherein is the spirit of lives from under the heavens; everything that is in the earth shall expire.

18 And I will raise·​·up My covenant with thee; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou and thy sons, and thy wife, and the wives of thy sons, with thee.

19 And from all that lives from all flesh, twos from all, thou shalt bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; male and female they shall be.

20 Of the fowl after its kind, and of the beast after its kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of all shall come to thee, to cause them to live.

21 And take thou to thee of all food that is eaten, and gather it to thee, and it shall be for food for thee and for them.

22 And Noaḥ did according·​·to all that God commanded him; so did he.

   


Thanks to the Kempton Project for the permission to use this New Church translation of the Word.

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Arcana Coelestia # 1673

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1673. 'And they smote the Rephaim in Ashteroth Karnaim, and the Zuzim in Ham, and the Emim in Shaveh Kiriathaim' means false persuasions or the hells of such persuasions which the Lord overcame. This is clear from the meaning of the Rephaim, the Zuzim, and the Emim, as those of a similar kind to the Nephilim mentioned in Genesis 6:4 - the Nephilim, as was shown more than adequately at that verse, meaning false persuasions or those people who because they were persuaded of their own superiority and pre-eminence regarded all things that were holy and true as worthless, and who plunged falsities into evil desires, see 581 - and from the following places quoted in that paragraph, Numbers 13:33; Deuteronomy 2:10; Isaiah 14:9; 26:14, 19; Psalms 88:10. Here it is the different kinds of false persuasions that are meant by these three, and also by 'the Horites in Mount Seir', for there are many kinds of false persuasions, each kind varying not only according to the falsities but also according to the evil desires to which those falsities are allied or into which they are plunged, or from which they stem and are produced. The nature of such false persuasions cannot possibly become clear to anyone who knows scarcely anything more about false persuasion or evil desire than that such things exist; but in the next life they are arranged quite distinctly and separately into their own genera and their own species.

[2] Among those who lived before the Flood, especially among those called the Nephilim, most dreadful false persuasions existed. The Nephilim were such that in the next life by their persuasions they deprive other spirits they encounter of their whole ability to think. As a result it seems to those spirits as though they are scarcely alive, let alone capable of thinking anything true. For in the next life, as has been shown, there is a communication of the thoughts of all; and therefore when persuasiveness such as this flows in, it inevitably kills so to speak all power to think that the others have. Such were the unspeakably horrible nations against whom the Lord fought in earliest childhood and whom He overcame. And unless the Lord by His Coming into the world had overcome them, nobody at all would be alive today on this planet, for everyone is governed by the Lord through spirits. Today those same people, on account of their delusions, are hemmed in all round by what looks like a misty rock, out of which they are constantly endeavouring to rise up, though to no avail - see 1265-1272, and in many places before that. They and their like are also the people meant by Isaiah,

The dead will not live, the Rephaim will not rise. To the end that You have visited and destroyed them, and wiped out all remembrance of them. Isaiah 26:14.

[3] And in David,

Will you work a wonder for the dead? Will the Rephaim rise up and confess You? Psalms 88:10.

'The dead' here is not used to mean the dead but the condemned. At the present day too, especially from the Christian world, there are people who in a similar way have persuasions, but not of so dreadful a nature as those possessed by people before the Flood. False persuasions which occupy both the will and the understanding parts of man's mind - as did the persuasions of those before the Flood, and of those meant by the Rephaim, Zuzim, and Emim - are of one kind. But false persuasions that occupy only the understanding part, having their origin in false assumptions confirmed within oneself, are of another kind. The latter kind are not so powerful as the former, nor so deadly, but they nevertheless cause much annoyance to the other spirits in the next life, partially taking away from them their capacity to think. Spirits such as these arouse in man outright confirmations of falsity, so that a person inevitably sees falsity as truth, and evil as good. It is their sphere which is of such a nature. As soon as any truth is called forth by angels those spirits smother and extinguish it.

[4] A person can discover whether such spirits govern him by merely considering whether he thinks the truths of the Word to be falsities and confirms himself in this so that he is not able to see otherwise. He can in that case be quite sure that such spirits reside with him and have dominion. It is similar with those who persuade themselves that all private gain is the common good, and who imagine that nothing contributes to the common good if it is not to their own private gain. Evil spirits residing with such a person supply so many confirmations that he does not see otherwise. Such people as regard all private gain as the common good, or who disguise it with the appearance of its being the common good, in the next life act in much the same way with regard to the common good there. That this is the nature of the influx of the spirits residing with man I have been given to know to the life from uninterrupted experience.

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.