evinced for virtue, they now showed by their actions a double degree of wickedness; whereby they made God to be their enemy. For many angels † of God ‡ accompanied with women, and begat sons that proved unjust, and despisers of all that was good, on account of the confidence they had in their own strength; for the tradition is, that these men did what resembled the acts of those whom the Grecians call giants. But Noah was very uneasy at what they did; and, being displeased at their conduct, persuaded them to change their dispositions and their actions, for the better. But seeing they did not yield to him, but were slaves to their wicked pleasures, he was afraid they would kill him, together with his wife and children, and those they had married; so he departed out of that land. children behind him who imitated his virtues. | for what degree of zeal they had formerly All these proved to be of good dispositions; they also inhabited the same country without dissensions, and in happy condition, without any misfortunes falling upon them, till they died. They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order. And, that their inventions might not be lost before they were sufficiently known, upon Adam's prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water, they made two pillars:* the one of brick, the other of stone. They inscribed their discoveries on them both, that, in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain, and exhibit those discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them. Now this remains in the land of Siriad to this day. CHAP. III. OF THE DELUGE: NOAH'S PRESERVATION IN AN ARK, AND Te Of Josephus's mistake here, when he took Seth, the son of Adam, for Seth or Sesostris king of Egypt, the erector of these pillars, in the land of Siriad, see Essay on the Old Testament Appendix, page 159-160. Although the main of this relation might be true, and Adam might foretell a conflagration and a deluge, which all antiquity witnesses to be an ancient tradition; and Seth's posterity might engrave their inventions in astronomy on two such pillars; yet it is no way credible that they could survive the deluge, which buried all such pillars and edifices far under ground, in the sediment of its waters; especially since the like pillars of the Egyptian Seth or Sesostris were extant, after the flood, in the land of Siriad, and perhaps in the days of Josephus also. + This notion, that the fallen angels were in some sense the fathers of the old giants, was the constant opinion of antiquity. Gen. vi. 4. Now God loved this man for his righteousness; yet he not only condemned those other men for their wickedness, but determined to destroy the whole race of mankind, and to make another race that should be pure from wickedness; and cutting short their lives, and making their years not so many as they formerly enjoyed, but one hundred and twenty§ were only, he turned the dry land into sea. And thus were all these men destroyed. But Noah alone was saved, for God suggested to him the following contrivance and way of escape: That he should make an ark of four stories high, three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits broad, and thirty cubits high. Accordingly he entered into that ark, with his wife, and (for of them only do I understand him) was now reduced A cubit is about twenty-one English inches. § Josephus here supposes that the life of these giants Gopher-wood: but what tree this Gopher was is not a |