They Had Been Images of God: III – Generation

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The expulsion from Eden marked the end of the very first period of human history, brief as it was. While some Midrashic commentary of the Jewish tradition held a belief that Adam and Eve could have spent years in Paradise, the Church Fathers are in general agreement that the Fall happened fairly quickly after Eve’s creation. Most presume it to have been a mere matter of hours, taking place almost certainly on the same day.

After leaving Eden, the second period of history carries the lineage of Adam up through his death. Little is written in Scripture about this period except for the fratricide of Abel and the life of Cain. That crime, as well as Cain’s life, play a big role in several apocryphal texts that we’ll approach in this chapter, but the reasons for the crime itself are best discerned by a careful reading of Scripture and of the Church Fathers. The religious sacrifice, prefiguring the Mass that would be demonstrated at the Last Supper, begins to be formed with Abel’s offerings.

Cain & Abel

The narrative of Cain and Abel is well-known enough that it hardly needs repeating: Abel was tasked with shepherding while Cain with farming the land, and when the two went to offer sacrifice to God, God accepted Abel’s offerings (“the firstlings of his flock”) while rejecting Cain’s. Cain in turn chose to murder his brother, and being caught in his guilt, was given a mark so that men would know not to kill him.¹ There’s a lot going on in this passage, as well as a lot that was expounded upon by the visions of Bl. Emmerich, apocryphal works, and of course, the Church Fathers. We’ll consult each of these briefly in ascending order importance: first the internally-disagreeing apocryphal accounts, then Bl. Emmerich’s visions, and finally, most relevantly, the Church Fathers.

Scripture only mentions three sons born to Adam and Eve by name, after which, “he begot sons and daughters.”² Apocrypha includes Cain and Abel having both been born with twin sisters; Cain’s twin sister, according to the Books of Adam and Treasures, was named Luluwa (Lebhudha in the English translations of Treasures and Bee), who was allegedly “more beautiful than her mother.”³ Abel’s twin was named Akila, although Treasures and Bee both refer to her as Kelimath.⁴ Bee’s account, however, switches the position of these two sisters; Lebhudha as Abel’s twin and Kelimath as Cain’s. Bee’s brief account only gets trickier to reconcile with the others, as it includes implications regarding animal sacrifices and diet, the authorship of books, and the pollution of the world by intermarriage with the Cainites that all in some form clash with more reliable narratives.

Jubilees gives a totally different account; according to its narrative, Cain and Abel were both born in sequence, as Scripture states, before the first daughter was born, who was named Awan.⁵ No other daughters were born until after Abel’s death. This already makes Jubilees suspect, as its own timeline of events indicates that only three children were born to the first parents over a span of twenty years, and then, no children were born again to them for another forty-six years. Even in a time of unimaginably long lives, such a gap in childbearing is striking, even taking into account that it was this period during which the important events of Scripture take place.

In each of these apocryphal accounts, however, it is clear that Cain and Abel were relatively young—quite young, in fact, in the Adam/Treasures narrative. Jubilees indicates that Cain murdered Abel when he was roughly in his early forties, making Abel in his late mid-to-late thirties⁶; the account of the murder itself and the lead-up to it resemble closely the account given in Scripture. While well into adulthood, these are still the years of relative youth by antediluvian standards.

The Adam/Treasures narrative, however, is a bit different—both in content and in presentation. According to these apocrypha, Adam had deigned it necessary to wed Cain to Abel’s twin sister and Abel to Cain’s, something Cain was not particularly thrilled about. In this version, the reason for Abel’s murder was still jealousy over God refusing Cain’s sacrifice while accepting Abel’s, but there was an added dimension of a primordial libido dominandi at play. This comes across as distinctly unnecessary to the narrative, and although not unbelievable, it remains dubious enough to warrant relatively safe dismissal.

Bl. Emmerich’s account, on the other hand, is far more consistent with both Scripture and with what many of the Church Fathers have written on the subject. She does not give a direct account of what led to Abel’s murder, however; this again indicates that the jealousy found in the Adam/Treasures narrative is fictitious. Bl. Emmerich picks up the narrative after the murder, explaining that Cain had “conceived on Mount Olivet the design to murder Abel”, and that afterwards, “he disputed long with God.”⁷ The sacrifice, and thus the cause that prompted Cain’s sin, is left out.

She does, however, mention an already-existing community of people by the time of Abel’s murder; “Eve bore children at stated intervals,” she claims, after which “a number of years was devoted to penance.”⁸ The apocrypha here considered—Adam, Treasures, Bee, and even Jubilees—are consistent on this note, with the Adam/Treasures narrative giving an exact seven years of penance after each birth. Note that this still is not enough to explain the gap in Jubilees’ account, however.

Returning to Bl. Emmerich, however, we see that this led soon enough to the establishment of a community:

Once I saw about twelve people: Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, two sisters, and some young children. All were clothed in skins thrown over their shoulders like a scapular and girded at the waist. The female dress was large and full around the breast where it served as a pocket. It fell down around the limbs, and was fastened at the sides and once under the arm. The men wore shorter dresses, which had a pocket fastened to them. The skins from which their dresses were made were, from the neck to the elbow, exceedingly fine and white. They all looked very noble and beautiful in their clothing. They had huts in those days, partly sunk in the earth and covered with plants. Their household was quite well-arranged. I saw orchards of low, but tolerably vigorous fruit trees. There was grain also, such as wheat, which God had given to Adam for seed.⁹

It’s impossible from either Scripture or Bl. Emmerich’s visions to tell if the two sisters of Cain and Abel were their twins Luluwa and Akila/Kelimath as described by apocrypha. On the one hand, the apocrypha may be revealing aspects of the truth that were lost to time; on the other, more likely hand, the twins narrative was made in order to better condense the apocryphal narrative into its shorter chronology.

This makes sense in context with Scripture, when Cain pleads with God that “every one, therefore, that findeth me, shall kill me”¹⁰ for having slain his brother. The footnotes of the Douay-Rheims Bible point out that 130 years would have passed by that point, presuming that the murder of Abel and the conception of Seth happened relatively close together, which would explain Cain’s fear of his siblings and nephews. Scripture, however, places the conception of Seth after the short description of the generations of Cain, which include even his presumptive death—more will be discussed later on this point. It’s hard to tell exactly when these events took place with relation to each other given the compendious nature of these early chapters.

That said, Bl. Emmerich’s visions certainly agree with this presumption:

Cain responded that everywhere his fellow men would seek to kill him. There were already many people upon the earth. Cain was very old and had children. Abel also left children, and there were other brothers and sisters, the children of Adam.¹¹

This is consistent with words St. Augustine wrote on the subject:

But those who are disturbed [that a city should have been built by one man at a time when, it seems, there were only four men on earth] have paid too little heed to the fact that the writer of the sacred history had no need to name all the men who may then have existed, but only those required by the plan of the work which he had undertaken. For the intention of the writer, through whom the Holy Spirit was acting, was to arrive at Abraham by way of a clearly defined succession of generations descended from one man. […] But the writer did not remain silent with respect to that other society of men which we call the earthly city; for it too was mentioned to an extent sufficient to enable the City of God to shine forth by comparison with its opposite.¹²

There were already others around whom Cain could fear because some significant time had passed between his birth and his murder of his brother. Who did he fear? Certainly not random unrelated tribes of people; such tribes could not have existed. He feared his nephews and sons—validly so, perhaps, as will be explained later regarding Lamech.

Note here also: St. Augustine frames the typological element of Cain’s sin—that it is a type for the worldliness of the city of man, a first example and also prefigurement of that tendency which binds so many of us to earthly engagements and passions—within the historical account of the Genesis narrative itself. Not only can both be true, but in fact the typological significance relies on a real historical truth in order to make any sense.

We can afford ourselves a tangent here in order to contrast it with what modern scholarship has to say about the story of Cain and Abel:

This story perhaps originally explained the origin of the Kenites. It may also have been an exaltation of the seminomadic life (Abel) in contrast to the sedentary (Cain before the crime) and the strictly nomadic (Cain after the crime). Conflicts with the sedentary Canaanites and with the wild desert tribes, such as the Midianites, could have conditioned the attitude. The story receives a more universal meaning from J; it concerns all mankind, not the eponymous ancestors of specific tribes.

Without its proper historical roots, the story contains anachronisms. Civilization is well developed; sacrifice has been instituted; the existence of other peoples is supposed.¹³

Far from being a more enlightened view, the stunning lack of imagination and insight in modern commentary is enough to leave anyone speechless. On display, again, are the problems with trying to reverse-engineer Scripture into the product of some regional cult; what the text actually says—or doesn’t say—becomes less relevant than the modern scholar’s presuppositions about the period in which it might or might not have first been transcribed.

In case it is not clear by now, attempts to chock the line of Cain to any specific tribe by way of genealogy is nonsense, as the Genesis narrative internally makes it explicit that they were all wiped out by the Flood. In a typological sense, there is certainly truth to the moral significance of Cain, Abel and Seth—something St. Augustine expands on in great detail in The City of God—but there is no basis for presuming a living remnant of Cainites who survived the Flood. While their blood may have lived on due to the intermingling of theirs and the Sethite lines, all previous tribal identities were erased by the deluge. Postdiluvean man is descended only through Shem, Ham, or Japheth. More on this as we approach the generations of Cain.

Cain’s Sacrifice

What was it about Cain’s sacrifice specifically that led God to reject it? Scripture tells us this much about the sacrifice:

And it came to pass after many days, that Cain offered, of the fruits of the earth, gifts to the Lord. Abel also offered of the firstlings of his flock, and of their fat: and the Lord had respect to Abel, and to his offerings. But to Cain and his offerings he had no respect: and Cain was exceedingly angry, and his countenance fell.¹⁴

There is a lot that can be gathered from this passage, though as St. Augustine notes, nothing too concrete. Based on the explicit mention of Abel offering the best of his labors, and the use of contrast between the two brothers, it can be assumed that Cain’s sacrifice was rejected not because it was in itself displeasing to God, but because of what Cain chose to sacrifice—and what he chose not to sacrifice. Ambrosiaster comments as such:

He was not able to discern what was worthy of God, and reserved the best fruits for his use. It is not therefore the offering he has made that God reproaches Cain, but the unworthy presents he offers him. And he is not even condemned for this fact, but because in spite of this warning he would not correct his conduct. “This offering comes to you, and you are the master of it,” (Ibid., 7), that is, those gifts that I reject become your property again. He wants to teach him what to do in the future.¹⁵

So it could be taken that Cain offered the wrong things to God, which is what warranted such an explicit rejection. God even goes to Cain and asks him why he is upset over this turn of events; it should only have been expected for God to reject his sacrifice if he did not offer something worthy of it, and yet rather than foster self-reflection, the rejection fostered a deep envy of his brother. Cain offered the wrong things up for sacrifice, we can thus presume, not necessarily out of explicit disdain for God, but out of an overinflated self-interest.

In Cain, as we saw in the Fall with Adam, we see again the problem of the self versus God. Cain desired himself, whether implicitly or explicitly, more than he desired God. We don’t know whether this was a conscious issue or not, as Scripture offers us no insight as to Cain’s interior life. What we do know is that, in the end, it makes little difference; it still results in offering to God things that do not constitute what He wants from us—a wrong sacrifice. St. Augustine explains on this further:

When he speaks of those brothers, the apostle John says, ‘Be not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.’ By this, we are given to understand that God did not esteem Cain’s gift because it was wrongly ‘divided’ in the sense that, though he gave something of his own to God, he nonetheless gave himself to himself: as do all who follow their own will and not the will of God; that is, who live with a perverse and not a righteous heart, yet who still offer gifts to God. They suppose that they are by this means purchasing God’s help, not in healing their base desires, but in fulfilling them. […] Thus, when Cain discovered that God esteemed his brother’s sacrifice but not his own, he ought surely to have changed his ways and imitated his good brother, instead of succumbing to pride and envy.¹⁶

The fact that Abel (and presumably Adam) were capable of making proper sacrifices that pleased God proved that, although catastrophic, the Fall had not completely reduced Man to hopelessness. This was explicitly clear in the immediate wake of the Fall, but nonetheless, losing Eden, eternal life, the indwelling of Spirit, and introducing the ever-present entropy of death into creation would understandably make for a very bleak outlook on the world. That Adam and his progeny were capable of having even a shred of hope after the first sin is nothing less than a testament to the love all men have for God, even in their Fallen state.

As stated before, it’s generally agreed that Cain and Abel were both fully-matured adults and probably over a century in age at the time of Abel’s murder. It seems unlikely that Cain would have offered well-pleasing sacrifice to God before the last incident described in Genesis, as this ritual was in all probability a regular or at least semi-regular occurrence.

Death of Cain

After murdering his brother and fleeing from God, Cain’s life was marked by restless wandering. Some commentators¹⁷ have questioned how Cain could have founded a city while also living as a constant transient. The Jerome Biblical Commentary reiterates the modern claim that the genealogy of Cain

has been taken by J from a separate tradition. Originally, the Cain of v. 17, who founds a city, could not be Cain the wanderer […]. The author has fused the two sources. The common element in both, which justifies the fusion, is the increase of evil in the world. In the genealogy, this evil is represented in the development of material civilization, which J and other inspired authors see as harmful to religious life.¹⁸

There is, of course, an element of truth to this, running along the typological grounds of Henoch being the original and first city of man, as St. Augustine points out. However, in a more rudimentary sense, the impossibility of Cain’s founding a city due to his transient status is absurd. The simplest explanation is that he founded Henoch, named after his son, and left the details of administration and expansion to his tribe while he departed to continue his wanderings.

Although Bl. Emmerich doesn’t remark specifically on the founding of Henoch, she does offer a brief aside as to the nature of Cain’s life:

Cain led his children and grandchildren to the region pointed out to him, and there they separated. Of Cain himself, I have never seen anything more that was sinful. His punishment appeared to consist in hard, but fruitless labor. Nothing in which he was personally engaged succeeded. I saw that he was mocked and reviled by his children and grandchildren, treated badly in every way. And yet they followed him as their leader, though as one accursed. I saw that Cain was severely punished, but not damned.¹⁹

The last remark here probably ranks among the most controversial statements of her visions, and it puts her in mild disagreement with most of the Church Fathers—although, admittedly, not quite all of them. Scripture leaves Cain’s salvation open-ended, ultimately, when we consider the mercy God showed to him and the willingness with which he took up his sentence. For moral purposes, the Church Fathers had a tendency to presume his damnation, though certainly not without sufficient reason.

St. Augustine, in meditating on on Cain’s sin and his interaction with God, elucidates the matter at the heart of whether Cain was saved or not.

Thus, when God says, ‘when it shall return unto thee’, this is to be understood as meaning ‘let it return unto thee, and then thou shalt have the mastery of it’, rather than ‘it will return, and then thou shalt have the mastery of it’: that is, as a command rather than a prediction. For a man will have the mastery of his sin if he does not place it over himself by defending it, but makes it subject to himself by repenting of it. Otherwise, he will indeed be its slave, and it will have the mastery of him, if he lends it his protection when it arises.²⁰

The ‘it’ he’s referring to is sin—consciousness of it, rather than the acting out of it, as we can presume Cain did not murder again for the rest of his life. Repentance requires of us to own our sin, which we do inside the confessional booth by coming specifically to God with our transgressions. We must own it because we’re presenting it to God so that he may relieve us of it, and He will only take what we can first acknowledge is ours. This is true of both venial sin, which we should have a habit of confessing regularly anyway, and those most grievous mortal sins (that should be confessed as soon as possible, but should really just be avoided in the first place).

This seems to be exactly what Cain does: “My iniquity is greater than that I may deserve pardon.”²¹ Cain owns his offense and confesses it to God directly. Contrast it with Judas, the man who would have been better off never having been born²², who sinned greatly in his betrayal of Christ and then ran from his iniquity into the ditch of a potter’s field. Was Cain among those elect who waited for the Redeemer in Abraham’s Bosom, as we know from tradition that Adam and Eve were? It seems at least possible.

The footnotes of the Douay-Rheims holds that Cain was killed by one of his progeny, by accident, during a hunting expedition. Jubilees indicates otherwise, holding that he was killed when his own house fell on him²³—unlikely, again, given his status as a transient. The accounts of the Adam/Treasures narrative maintains the tradition that built up around the lines of Genesis 4:23-24: “And Lamech said to his wives Ada and Sella: Hear my voice, ye wives of Lamech, hearken to my speech: for I have slain a man to the wounding of myself, and a stripling to my own bruising. Sevenfold vengeance shall be taken for Cain: but for Lamech seventy times sevenfold.” The Douay-Rheims offers commentary on this:

It is the tradition of the Hebrews, that Lamech in hunting slew Cain, mistaking him for a wild beast; and that having discovered what he had done, he beat so unmercifully the youth, by whom he was led into that mistake, that he died of the blows.²⁴”

This is consistent with the accounts provided in both of the Adam/Treasures narratives. The Book of Treasures recounts:

And in the days of Ânôsh, in his eight hundred and twentieth year, Lamech, the blind man, killed Cain, the murderer, in the Forest of Nôdh. Now this killing took place in the following manner. As Lamech was leaning on the youth, his son [Tubal-Cain], and the youth was setting straight his father’s arm in the direction in which he saw the quarry, he heard the sound of Cain moving about, backwards and forwards, in the forest. Now Cain was unable to stand still in one place and to hold his peace. And Lamech, thinking that it was a wild beast that was making a movement in the forest, raised his arm, and, having made ready, drew his bow and shot an arrow towards that spot, and the arrow smote Cain between his eyes, and he fell down and died. And Lamech, thinking that he had shot game, spake to the youth, saying, “Make haste, and let us see what game we have shot.” And when they went to the spot, and the boy on whom Lamech leaned had looked, he said unto him, “O my lord, thou hast killed Cain.” And Lamech moved his hands to smite them together, and as he did so he smote the youth and killed him also.²⁵

The Second Book of Adam’s account is much the same in substance, but it differs on a few key details. Its narrative includes Cain coming to Lamech’s wives and asking for his whereabouts before being directed to the field. He was still killed by accident, confused for a robber, but in this version, Lamech’s son Atun is with him rather than Tubalcain, and it is Atun’s mistake that leads to Lamech murdering him with a stone.²⁶ The greater detail supplied by the Second Book of Adam’s account fills out some of the story but does little to service any greater purpose.

Authors Emmanouela Grypeou and Helen Spurling documented a rabbinical Hebrew tradition that refers to a similar encounter as that described in the Adam/Treasures narratives. Referring to an ancient rabbinical text called the Tan Bereshit, they quote:

How was Cain killed? He became the angel of death for one hundred and thirty years, and he was wandering and roaming under a curse. Lamech was the son of his son in the seventh generation, and he went out blind to hunt, and his son was leading him by his hand. When the child saw a beast, he told him. He said to him: ‘I see something like a beast’. He stretched the bow towards it and he killed Cain. The child saw from a distance that it was killed and a horn was on its forehead. He said to Lamech: ‘My father, behold the likeness of a man is killed and a horn is on its forehead’. Lamech said to him: ‘Woe is me, it is my ancestor’. He clapped his two hands in regret and struck the child on the head and killed him by accident, as it is said, For I have killed a man for wounding me (Gen 4:23).²⁷

Some Hebrew traditions held that the mark of Cain consisted of a horn that sprouted from his forehead, which may explain the remark of Cain’s beastly appearance. The mark of Cain was more likely a discoloration of his skin, if it were to be anything visible at all. Bl. Emmerich notes that “his posterity gradually became colored” and attributes this mark to causing the browner hue of Ham’s children.²⁸

In any case, the similarities to Treasures can’t be ignored. Notice how in Treasures, Cain is confused for a beast, while in the Hebrew commentary, he is remarked as being physically beastly. The detail that Lamech clasped his hands and struck his son is also the same, as is the exact manner and method of Cain’s death. It’s difficult to say whether the Tan Bereshit was written prior to the surging of Christian apocrypha that arose in the first three centuries after the Crucifixion, as much of the rabbinical Talmud, of which the Aggadic Midrash texts are a part, was written during and after the same period. While some of the Hebrew commentaries on Genesis predated the Incarnation, most did not.

What seems clear is that the tradition of Lamech slaying Cain by accident is a tradition attested to by more than merely a single apocryphal source; rather, it seemed to be a general consensus held at least by the Christians of antiquity. No doubt it was a carryover of some ancient Hebrew tradition; whether the Tan Bereshit encapsulated or merely built off of this Hebrew tradition, it’s impossible to tell, but it still had to exist.

The Generations of Adam and His Last Days

Very little is written of Adam’s life after the birth of Seth. Genesis, upon Seth’s birth, immediately transitions into Adam’s generations and into the Flood cycle. Apocrypha, by and large, is much the same. As mysterious as the first hundred and thirty years of Adam’s life are to us today, the last eight hundred or so are completely obscured.

What we can deduce from Adam’s life, however, is that he spent his life teaching. This may not be saying much, given that every father is called to pass along his practical knowledge to his children, but Adam was the first father who had the first children. Adam also lived for more than nine hundred years, having been able to see eight generations of his progeny multiply and expand across the face of the Earth. Following tribal custom, he’d have been the most respected physical elder of society for some eight hundred years; even as (or if) he grew feeble in his old age, his wisdom would have been incalculable.

Although Adam lost paradise and with it, an intellect un-darkened by the rampant passions of flesh, Adam’s first memories upon leaving Eden would have been of the Lord providing clothing for him. Additionally, Adam’s prelapsarian nature included being something of a gardener, or at least tender of Eden. That the sons of his mentioned in Scripture were a farmer and a husbandman are thus of no surprise.

Along similar lines, we can also see Adam’s prelapsarian nature included being the first High Priest, wherein prayer, sacrifice, and worship done in thanksgiving—and later penance, also—would have been an important part of his duties. Adam surely would have been at least intellectually aware of this, even if he did not stay long enough in Paradise to exercise it. And, after he Fell, God would surely have instructed him in these duties anyway, as they took on a new character after the first sin was committed.

What all of this means is that Adam was imbued with and imparted to certain practical knowledge necessary for human survival, both before and after the Fall. Although Adam lost certain aspects of his role as king, priest, and father, there nonetheless remained the kernels of these roles after his rebellion. He was still king over creation, even if he lost certain rights and means to best govern it; he was still priest, even if his priestly duties took on penitential dressings atop those originally ordered toward thanksgiving; and he was still—especially—father. The latter perhaps became so important, given the sway that death now held over the world, that it partially eclipsed the former two aspects. Part of being a father is the instruction to future generations of his kin on survival—varying in methods and roles according to the generation.

Adam dies after nearly a millennium of life. When his wife Eve died is unknown, but aprocrphyal accounts believe that she died very soon afterward, having overseen his burial.

The Adam/Treasures narrative is strangely discordant with Scripture on account of when Adam died, which calls into question a lot of its reliability on the whole. According to Scripture—both to Masoretic and the Septuagint—Adam lived long enough to have seen Lamech born and grow into adulthood. This is the same Lamech who was Noah’s father, and he was the eighth patriarch in succession from Adam himself, following Seth, Enosh, Kenen, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, and his own father Methuselah.

Where Adam/Treasures departs from this is critical, as its narrative claims Adam died sometime after the birth of Mahalalel²⁹; according to Biblical chronology, Adam’s lifespan here would be half of the commonly accepted 930 to something no greater than about 450. This is noteworthy for a couple of reasons: first, according to Scripture, no antediluvian patriarch lived less than nine hundred years except for Mahalalel (895) and Lamech (777, presumably killed in or immediately before the Flood). Noah lived to be 950, and Shem 600. The age of the patriarchs did not lessen to under a half-millennium until Shem’s progeny; the first generation born after the Flood, which was nearly seven hundred years after the death of Adam. The reason for this likely had to do with how the Earth was changed by the Flood—changes in food nutrition or levels of background radiation, for instance.

It’s more confusing than that, however, as the accounts given in Adam/Treasures still claim that “the days of Adam [were] nine hundred and thirty years.”³⁰ The chronology doesn’t make any sense if trying to rectify it with Scripture, which means only that they have to be wrong at least in this aspect. Coupled with discrepancies between themselves, the other discrepancies with Scripture, and simple errors, it’s not difficult to see why these books were considered apocrypha by the early Church. To their credit, they do seem, in a general sense, to be somewhat more believable than what constitutes much of what’s available in English of the Hebrew Midrash, when it comes to assumptions or interpretations of historical narrative. But, stacking them up against the suppositions of the Church Fathers, they end up looking nonsensical at worst, and childish at best.

This is why it is interesting to note how the visions of Bl. Emmerich constitute an unexpected, otherworldly take on various pieces found in ancient tradition and apocrypha, but seem to interpret them in ways consistent with most of the Church Fathers. This can be seen in parallels between how apocryphal works discuss Eve’s penances after births and Bl. Emmerich’s visions detailing more or less the same practice, the brief but vivid explanations of the first True religious ceremonies, and especially in her explanations of the Nephilim that we will get to in the next chapter.

It’s not so much that Bl. Emmerich is trying to reconcile the differences between these strains of Genesis interpretation—in fact, it’s unlikely she was even aware of these specific apocryphal works to begin with. Rather, assuming her visions were real, in both a supernatural sense (having come from God) and an historical sense (truly depicting, with some editorializing, the periods in which she claimed, rather than something else that God wanted her to see), what we see in the apocryphal texts is the purveyance of a true historical record being distorted over the millennia. This is especially true with the hard reset of the Flood. And it makes complete sense when we consider, as both Bl. Emmerich and Scripture indicates, the rapid degeneration of the lines of Noah’s children. As lifespans shortened, sins multiplied, and the peopling of the Earth began again, the true history—if it was to be preserved—would be preserved in a very limited fashion by the time anything would be written down. This is what will be explored in chapter four.

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Table of Contents

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1Gen 4:2-15.

2Gen 5:2.

31 Adam 74:6-8; Treasures chapter Adam’s Expulsion from Paradise

41 Adam 75:11, Ibid Treasures

5Jubilees 4:1

6Ibid, 4:7.

7Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 29.

8Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 27-28.

9Ibid.

10Gen 4:14.

11Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 29-30.

12Augustine, City of God, 647.

13Jerome Biblical Commentary, 13.

14Gen 4:3-5.

15Ambrosiaster, Questions on the Old and New Testaments, Question 5, trans. John Litteral.

16Augustine, City of God, 644.

17Mostly among the Midrash traditions, although contemporary scholarship (perhaps understandably) continues these lines of reasoning.

18Jerome Biblical Commentary, 14.

19Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 31.

20Augustine, City of God, 645.

21Gen 4:13.

22Mark 14:21.

23Jubilees 4:31.

24Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible, 9; footnote Ver. 23.

25Treasures, The Rule of Anosh.

262 Adam 13: 5-13.

27I have been unable to source this anywhere except in their book; see:

Grypeou, Emmanouela and Helen Spurling, The Book of Genesis in Late Antiquity: Encounters Between Jewish and Christian Exegesis (Boston: Brill 2013), 115.

28Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 30.

292 Adam 7:9, Treasures – The Death of Adam.

302 Adam 7:10, Ibid Treasures.