The Days of Noah: When the World Broke Before It Was Washed Away
The week before last, I thought I was writing a tidy two-part series. Part One explored the Watchers and their descent at Mount Hermon, and Part Two followed the consequences as their offspring, the Nephilim, spread across the earth.
Turns out, the story itself had other ideas. The deeper you go into the ancient sources, the more the story expands, and what seemed like a single thread opens into a much wider tapestry. So here we are, in Part Three, turning to the flood itself, to Noah and his world, and to the unsettling question that lingers after the waters recede: what, if anything, was truly destroyed, and why that matters to us today.
The War Before the Waters
Many of us who grew up Protestant read the flood account as the Creator’s judgment of terrible human wickedness. But when you really look at Genesis 6, you’ll notice that humankind’s wickedness appears in the very next verse following a very strange one, the verse about the birth of the Nephilim. Until I read other ancient sources, it never occurred to me that the ideas in these two passages might be related: the Sons of God, their offspring, and the flood.
However, once I read Enoch and Jubilees, it became suddenly very clear. The wickedness of humans does not emerge in isolation. It unfolds in a world already altered at its core, where the boundaries between realms have been crossed, and the consequences are still spreading outward. Even without the Book of Enoch, there are clues in Genesis 6 itself. For example, if only humans were wicked, why destroy the world? Humans are fairly fragile. The Creator made us and could certainly have destroyed us with surgical precision by various means. But no, the text says He regretted making everything, birds, beasts, and creeping things. Later in Genesis 6, it also says the earth was corrupt, that all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth. This seems to point to a much larger corruption of the world itself.
By this point in the Genesis story, the Watchers themselves have descended, borne children, and been judged and bound by the archangels. Thus, the direct influence of the fallen angels has already been removed. Unfortunately for all of creation, what they set in motion remains active in the world. Their offspring still stalk the earth, and as I described in my last blog post, there are likely much darker things happening, the breeding of hybrid beings, human sacrifice and blood drinking tied to the appeasement of powerful forces, and cannibalism.
Humankind, the image-bearers of the Creator, is not quiet by this point. They cry out to the Creator, and the archangels hear them. The archangels petition the Creator on humanity’s behalf. According to the Enochic tradition, the Creator hears and moves against the Nephilim in judgment for their terrible acts, but not immediately. Instead, He allows a kind of internal collapse to begin. The archangel Gabriel is sent, not simply as an agent of destruction, but as a catalyst. How this happens, we are not told. But in some fashion, Gabriel moves among the Nephilim themselves, pitting them against each other.
What had once been a unified force of giants dominating the earth begins to fracture. Rivalries emerge, alliances dissolve, and the same appetite that had consumed the earth now turns inward. The giants go to war against one another.
To imagine what this would have meant for ordinary human life is almost impossible. A world already strained beyond its limits becomes a battlefield, shaped and reshaped by beings whose scale and strength no human could withstand. Entire regions do not simply fall into disuse; they are driven out of use, instinctively avoided. People remember which valleys echo at the wrong time, which hills no longer hold silence, and which paths end in something no one returns from. Landscapes shift violently, not over generations, but in moments, hillsides torn open, forests flattened, rivers choked with debris from conflicts no human eye fully witnesses.
The ground itself feels uncertain beneath their feet. The earth shudders without warning. A distant impact rolls across the land like thunder, but there is no storm. At night, the horizon flickers with movement too large to name. Sound travels strangely, low, heavy, and irregular, as if something massive is crossing distances that should not be crossed so quickly. The familiar markers of safety begin to fail. What once signaled shelter now offers no protection. What once felt known becomes unreliable.
Communities do not stand in the way of this violence; they are swept away by it or crushed beneath it. Crops are crushed in a single pass, and storehouses collapse without warning. Walls and dwellings, built with care and effort, splinter like matchsticks. Entire settlements vanish, not because they were targeted, but because they were in the path of something that does not see or register human life at all. Survivors do not rebuild in the same place. They scatter, moving quietly, learning to leave no trace, teaching their children not where to go, but how to disappear.
Over time, the meaning of survival changes. It is no longer about cultivation, growth, or even community. It becomes something smaller, more immediate. Stay hidden. Stay quiet. Stay out of the way. And even that offers no certainty, only the hope that, for one more day, whatever is moving across the land will pass by without noticing that anyone is still there.
The fate of the giants is not a matter of clean judgment. Instead, it is a collapse from within. The corruption does not simply get removed. It consumes itself until very few are left.
Echoes of the Giant Wars Outside the Bible
Interestingly, other ancient cultures also preserve fragments of a similar war between the giants or against the divine order itself. In Greek tradition, the Gigantomachy tells of earth-born giants warring against the divine order, a conflict so immense it reshapes the world. In Mesopotamian texts, particularly in the Enuma Elish and related traditions, we find accounts of chaotic, hybrid beings clashing in violent cosmic struggles, though these are often described as chaos monsters and divine conflict rather than as giant races. Norse mythology preserves the memory of the Jotnar, ancient giants locked in ongoing conflict with both the gods and one another, their wars woven into the very fabric of creation and its eventual destruction.
None of these accounts align perfectly with the Enochian account. They are each shaped by their own cultures and languages. But the pattern is difficult to ignore. Regardless of details, there is a shared memory of beings larger than human, a world destabilized, and conflict on a scale that breaks it.
Whether these are independent myths or distant echoes of a shared memory remains a matter of speculation. But they form a backdrop that makes the Enochic account feel less isolated and more like one voice among many describing a world that had lost its original shape.
Noah and a World Barely Holding Together
While the world fractures, another thread begins quietly, almost hidden beneath the violence. That is the story of Noah.
Now, we all know Noah from the Bible. In fact, it might be the most well-known Bible story. We know about the ark, the pairs of animals, and Noah finding grace in the eyes of the Creator. Despite the flood being, at the very least, the Creator’s fearsome judgment on humankind, we even decorate our nurseries with the ark and the animals. A strange decor choice, given the story itself.
Anyway, according to both Genesis and Enoch, Noah is warned before the flood arrives. In Genesis, the account is brief and restrained. But in the Enochic tradition and related texts, the story is more detailed. The archangel Uriel is sent to reveal what is coming and to instruct Noah in what must be done. The ark is not merely a vessel for survival. It is a means of preservation, a way to carry forward what little remains intact in a world that has largely come undone.
Even Noah’s birth is marked by this tension. In the Genesis Apocryphon, an ancient text preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Noah is described as “radiant” at birth. His appearance is so unusual that his father, Lamech, fears he may not be fully human. In a world where boundaries have been broken in ways that are hard to imagine, this fear is not irrational. Lamech turns to Methuselah, Noah’s grandfather, to seek counsel about whether the child is fully human. Lamech is apparently concerned that baby Noah is the product of the same corruption that has overtaken the earth. Methuselah sets Lamech’s mind at ease; he says that Noah is indeed human, but set apart by the Creator.
This story alone reveals something profound about life in that time. Traits that should have been obvious, human or not human, natural or unnatural, had become uncertain. Even a child’s face at birth raised questions that earlier generations would never have considered.
So, Noah grows up in a world that is already unraveling. He does not inherit a stable earth, but one that has been stretched, distorted, and worn thin by forces far beyond human control. By the time the ark is built, the earth is no longer capable of sustaining life as it was intended. What once held together with quiet consistency now strains under the weight of what has been introduced into it. The created order no longer behaves as intended.
The flood, then, is not simply an act of judgment in the way it is often framed. It is a reset. A reassertion of boundaries in a world where every boundary has been crossed. The ancient texts describe the waters not only as rain from above, but as something breaking open from below, the “fountains of the deep” erupting as the structure of the earth itself gives way. This is not a storm in any ordinary sense. It is a total collapse of the world as it had been known. The sky opens, the ground fractures, and water comes from every direction at once, as if the boundaries that once held back chaos have been withdrawn.
Inside the ark, Noah and his family would have felt this long before they understood it. The first impacts, the shifting of the ground beneath them, the sudden violence of rising water lifting what had always been fixed. The sound alone would have been overwhelming: the relentless force of rain, the groaning of wood under pressure, the crashing of debris carried by currents that did not move with any natural rhythm. Days would blur together. Light would fade behind a sky that no longer cleared. There would be no horizon, no sense of direction, only motion and the constant awareness of forces far beyond control.
Outside, the world would have been unrecognizable within a matter of hours. Valleys fill first, then plains, then the higher ground that had once seemed safe. Those who try to flee would find themselves overtaken by waters that do not recede. Structures collapse, animals scatter and vanish, and every attempt at escape narrows until there is nowhere left to go. The texts do not linger on individual stories, but they do not need to. The scale itself tells the story. Everything that breathes outside the ark is overtaken. The world that had become unlivable is now entirely undone.
And yet, even here, there are hints in the ancient traditions that the flood is not chaotic in the way human destruction is chaotic. It is ordered in its own way, contained within the will of the Creator. The same texts that describe the waters rising also describe them receding in time, held back, released, and then gathered again. This is not annihilation without purpose. It is an unmaking with intention. They unmake what has been distorted. They cover what cannot be healed in its present form. They press down over the remnants of a world that has lost its shape, dissolving what no longer belongs, erasing what cannot be restored. What emerges on the other side is not simply a cleansed version of what came before, but a beginning again, a world returned, as much as possible, to its original order.
And in the midst of that, one small vessel remains, carrying forward fragile humanity and a few creatures. Not because the world deserved preservation, but because the Creator had not abandoned it entirely.
What Remained Beneath the Surface
And yet, even after all of this, the story does not resolve cleanly. The waters recede, the land reappears, and life begins again. But in some strands of ancient Jewish thought, especially in the Book of Jubilees, the destruction of the Nephilim does not fully erase their presence. These beings, after all, were never entirely one thing or another. They did not fully belong to either the human or the angelic realm. And so, in these traditions, when their physical bodies are destroyed, something of them remains.
The Book of Enoch gives voice to this idea in stark terms. It describes the spirits of the Nephilim as continuing after death, no longer embodied, but not at rest. They remain close to the earth, restless, dislocated, still bound in some way to the material world they once moved through so forcefully. Their influence does not end with the flood; instead, it changes form. What was once physical domination becomes something less visible but no less real: deception, oppression, and intrusion into unseen dimensions of human experience.
The Book of Jubilees develops this even further, placing it directly into the post-flood world of Noah and his descendants. According to this account, the new beginning is not as quiet as it should be. Noah begins to experience affliction from these unseen forces, disturbances that do not come from the natural world but from something else. He cries out to the Creator for relief, asking that these influences be removed so that his descendants can live in peace.
The response is decisive, but not absolute. The Creator commands that the vast majority of these spirits be bound and restrained, removed from active influence. But then comes the detail that lingers. A portion, traditionally described as one-tenth, is permitted to remain and is placed under the authority of Mastema. Mastema is a chief adversarial figure, often understood as a Satan-like presence, who operates under the Creator’s authority rather than outside of it. He is the one who petitions for a portion of the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim to remain active after the flood, not for chaos alone, but as part of a constrained role involving testing, accusation, and the ongoing tension within the human story. So, these spirits are not released freely into the world. They are constrained, limited, and allowed to operate only within boundaries they did not choose and cannot cross.
By the time we arrive at the New Testament, this framework is no longer explained in detail, but if you are looking, it may echo there. The language has shifted, and the focus has narrowed, but the underlying reality remains recognizable. Think about when Jesus encounters demonic beings. They do not respond as chaotic or mindless forces. They recognize Him immediately. They speak with Him, trying to reason with Him. And they reveal awareness, not only of who He is, but of what is coming.
For example, when Jesus goes into the region of the Gerasenes, this scene unfolds. A man comes out from among the tombs, a place already associated with death and separation, and he is described as living among them, unable to be restrained even with chains. He cries out, night and day, and wounds himself, as though something within him is both tormented and uncontained. When he sees Jesus from a distance, he runs toward Him, but what follows is not simple recognition. He falls and cries out with a voice that is not entirely his own, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High Creator? I beg you, do not torment me.”
Jesus asks his name, and the reply comes: “My name is Legion, for we are many.” The moment is striking because it reveals that this is not a single presence but a multitude, speaking with a shared awareness. And then comes the line that echoes across the wider tradition: they beg Him not to send them out of the region, and in another account, not to send them into the abyss.
Beneath the surface of the encounter is an urgency, a fear of displacement, of being forced into a state they know is coming but has not yet arrived. In Matthew’s account, that fear becomes even more explicit: “Have you come here to torment us before the time?”
Without any additional context, I always wondered about the abyss and about the reference to time. But within the ancient framework shaped by texts like Enoch and Jubilees, that reaction begins to make sense, at least to me. If these spirits are understood as what remained of the Nephilim, disembodied, restless, and bound to the material world but no longer able to inhabit it fully, then their awareness is understandable. They are not encountering something unfamiliar. They are encountering the One tied to the restoration of the very order they once disrupted. And, the “time” they refer to suggests that future moment when their existence will end, when even the partial allowance granted to them in earlier traditions gives way to their final judgment. Eventually, they will join their fathers, the Watchers, in the abyss.
So while the Gospel account does not spell out the Enochic tradition, and that tradition is not official church doctrine, it nonetheless resonates with it. The recognition of Jesus by the evil spirits, the language about time, the fear of being sent away or bound, all of it carries the faint outline of a much older story, one in which certain beings were allowed to remain for a time, but not forever.
And so, even after the flood, even after the world has been washed and reset, something may remain. They are quieter now and less visible. But they are still present, still active, and still part of a story that did not end when the waters receded.
The Flood Echoes Across Cultures
Even if one does not revere Scripture, the flood story is also present in many, many other ancient cultures. In Mesopotamian tradition, the Epic of Gilgamesh preserves a flood story that parallels the account of Noah, complete with a chosen survivor, a vessel, and a resetting of the world. The apkallu, semi-divine figures associated with knowledge before the flood, are said to have brought wisdom to humanity, only for later traditions to describe a shift toward corruption and danger.
There are even unusual versions that surface in later historical accounts here in the United States. Early European explorers and traders in North America recorded traditions among the Mandan people of the upper Missouri River, sometimes referred to as the “White Mandan” in older writings. According to these accounts, which may or may not be fully accurate, the Mandan preserved a story of their ancestors surviving a great flood in a large vessel or canoe, guided by a figure described as different from the surrounding peoples, sometimes portrayed as light-skinned or set apart in appearance. These reports are debated and often filtered through the biases of those who recorded them, and they should be approached with caution. Even so, they remain another example of how flood memory and the image of preservation through water appear in places and forms that are difficult to fully explain.
While not necessarily flood stories, the Egyptian and Hermetic traditions preserve similar themes through the ages. In ancient Egyptian tradition, one of the central figures is Thoth, the Divine scribe, keeper of knowledge, and mediator between realms. He is associated with writing, mathematics, sacred speech, and the ordering of the cosmos itself. In later Greek interpretations, he is identified with Hermes Trismegistus, an archetypal sage credited with preserving profound knowledge of the structure of reality, the soul, and the hidden workings of the universe.
Within Hermetic literature, there is a recurring idea that knowledge is not simply discovered but preserved and transmitted across ages, especially through periods of destruction or renewal. Some later traditions speak of sacred writings hidden away or inscribed on durable materials, intended to survive cataclysmic events such as floods or fires. While these are not part of early canonical Egyptian religion, they emerge in later esoteric traditions that reflect on Egypt as a repository of ancient wisdom.
There are also accounts, especially in later writings attributed to Hermes, that describe cycles of civilization in which humanity rises, falls into corruption, and is periodically reset. In one well-known passage, Hermes laments a future decline of Egypt, describing a time when sacred knowledge is lost, the connection between the human and the Divine is obscured, and the world becomes disordered. While this is not a direct parallel to the flood narrative, it carries a similar sense of cosmic decline followed by renewal.
From a speculative perspective, some have drawn connections between these traditions and the Enochic worldview. If, as Enoch suggests, certain forms of knowledge were introduced into the world prematurely or in distorted ways, such as metallurgy, enchantments, and the manipulation of nature, then the strong emphasis in Egyptian and Hermetic traditions on guarded, sacred knowledge becomes interesting. It raises the question of whether what is being preserved is not only wisdom, but also a memory of how dangerous knowledge can be when separated from its proper order or source.
To be clear, Egyptian religion does not describe the Watchers, the Nephilim, or a war of giants as Enoch does. What we find instead is a shared idea across cultures that there was a time when the boundary between realms was thinner, when knowledge was different in kind, and when that knowledge held the power either to sustain the world or to destabilize it. So while we cannot say that Egyptian and Hermetic traditions preserve the same story, it is not unreasonable to see them as carrying a similar concern. That there are forces, insights, or forms of power that belong to the Divine order, and that when they are mishandled, whether by beings or by humans, the consequences ripple outward in ways that reshape the world itself.
All of these seemingly unrelated stories feel like intriguing parallels that raise the question of whether fragments of a much older worldview are being carried forward in different forms. These may be independent developments, shaped by human psychology and environment. But it is also possible that they are fragments, remnants of a much older disruption, preserved imperfectly across time and culture.
The Giants After the Flood
Before we close, there is one more biblical thread about giants that refuses to disappear. Genesis 6 itself starts it. It is easy to get distracted by the Nephilim and overlook the “and also afterward” from that same verse.
Somehow, despite the global cataclysm of the flood, the biblical narrative says that giants reappear on the earth. They come from various clans. The Anakim mentioned in Numbers by the Israelite spies are so large that the Israelites describe themselves as grasshoppers in comparison.
Then there are the Rephaim, who appear in the Hebrew Scriptures in texts like Deuteronomy and Joshua, where they are remembered as one of the giant clans inhabiting the land, closely linked to figures like Og of Bashan. They are an ancient people associated with both great size and a shadowy, in-between existence. Poetic passages, such as in Isaiah and Psalms, use the term “Rephaim” in a way that seems to blur into the realm of the dead, suggesting they were something more than simply a race of large humans. That dual meaning has led some ancient interpreters to see them not just as physical descendants of the earlier giant traditions, but as part of a lingering echo of that pre-flood corruption, where the boundary between the living and the dead, the human and the other, no longer held as cleanly as it once did.
Then there is Goliath and his brothers, encountered in the time of David. In the biblical account, Goliath is not an isolated figure but part of a larger remnant of the Rephaim giants associated with the Philistine city of Gath. Later passages in Samuel and Chronicles describe several of his relatives or clan, men of extraordinary size and strength, suggesting that what David encountered was not a singular anomaly but a surviving line of the ancient giant clans, rooted in the same broader tradition that includes the Anakim and Rephaim encountered earlier in the biblical narrative.
Interestingly, these accounts of giant clans are not scattered randomly across ancient geography. They cluster in specific regions, particularly around areas historically associated with Mount Hermon and the northern territories. How this happens is not explained in the text, but it seems unlikely to me to be a coincidence.
Some interpret these biblical “giants” as simply large humans. Others see them as echoes of the earlier corruption, either through a second incursion or through something that was not entirely erased. The text itself remains silent on the mechanism, which leaves the tension unresolved.
As in the Days of Noah
This brings me back to one final verse that has lingered in my mind for years. In my evangelical upbringing, it was often presented as a kind of summary of the world's condition just before the return of Christ, a warning wrapped in familiarity.
In the Gospels, Jesus says that the end will come “as in the days of Noah.” It was usually explained as a picture of ordinary life continuing without awareness, people eating, drinking, marrying, going about their days, unaware of what was coming, right up until the moment the rain began. In the churches I knew, there was often a subtle edge to that teaching. It was not only descriptive, but cautionary, even quietly critical. Those who were simply living their lives, enjoying themselves, not orienting everything toward the Creator as we understood Him, were held up as examples of a kind of blindness, a failure to take the nearness of judgment seriously.
But after studying the biblical text more carefully, and allowing the older traditions surrounding it to speak, that interpretation begins to feel naïve at best and incomplete at worst. It captures something true, but not nearly the whole of it. Because once the ancient context comes into view, the days of Noah begin to look far less like ordinary life carrying on and far more like a world beginning to break.
Those days were not defined solely by human distraction or even by the moral failure we tend to frame it as. And the flood itself does not read as a sudden overreaction to human behavior, as though the Creator simply reached a breaking point. Instead, what emerges is a picture of a world fundamentally altered in terrible ways. The boundaries between realms had not simply thinned; they had been crossed and left open, as though things had stepped through and never stepped back. Violence no longer looked like moments of conflict that rose and fell; it settled in, working its way into the grain of daily life until it felt inevitable, even ordinary. And the line that once made a human being recognizable, something steady and given, began to shift. Faces, bodies, and behaviors no longer carried the same certainty. What had once been unmistakably human could no longer always be named as such, and whatever was emerging in its place did not seem bound by the same limits.
If that fuller picture is even partially true, then the warning carried in those words begins to shift. It is no longer only about distraction or indifference, about people too busy with ordinary life to notice what is unfolding around them. It reaches further than that. It points to the possibility of a return, not simply of human brokenness, but of a deeper, older corruption pressing in from beyond the human sphere. And a return like that would not likely announce itself in ways that are obvious or unmistakable. It would begin quietly, almost beneath the level of conscious notice, as the edges of things soften and the lines that once held begin to lose their clarity. What was once distinct would start to overlap. What once felt stable would begin to feel unsettled, though no one could quite say why. Over time, what once seemed unthinkable would no longer shock in the same way. It would simply be there, folded into the background of life.
At that point, the question will no longer be whether people are paying attention in the ordinary sense. It will be something more difficult and more interior. It becomes a question of whether we are still able to recognize what we are seeing, whether we have kept any real awareness of the unseen dimensions that have always existed alongside our own, or whether we have learned to ignore them altogether. And, more importantly, whether we have the discernment to tell the difference between what belongs and what does not, between what is aligned with the Divine order and what quietly distorts it.
Because when the underlying order shifts beneath our feet, awareness alone may not be enough. It must be paired with discernment, the ability to perceive clearly, to name rightly, and to resist the slow normalization of what was never meant to take root in the first place.
Grace and light to you all.