They Had Been Images of God: IV – Cataclysm

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So far, our survey has taken us from the first man to the first marriage, and from the first marriage to the first family. Intertwined is the survey of evil, of agency and autonomy, of bonds, and of justice. The Fall exists like a shadow cast over all created creatures, manifesting at every turn in the penances of Adam and Eve, the alteration of their natures, and the transgressions of Cain.

Now we reach the period of human history in which civilization enters the scene. The populating of the Earth, the longevity of the first peoples, the sharp contrast between the lines of Cain and Seth: each is important to consider during the millennium and a half that transpired between the exile from Eden and the cataclysm of the Flood. It is only after the hard resent provided by the cataclysm that we begin the recorded history of mankind so familiar to us already.

To begin, we’ll start with the issue of the children produced by the generations of Adam and his sons Cain and Seth.

The Sons of God & the Daughters of Men

It is often mentioned, when dealing with the antediluvian time, that there existed a race of giants who were known as the Nephilim, and it was because of their evilness that God sent the Flood. This is true, as it is attested to in Scripture, but frequently, extra-Biblical interpretation presents these creatures in ways that don’t show the whole picture.

Some Midrashic traditions, drawing from earlier sources, claim that the Nephilim were the offspring of some impossible sexual union between angels and human women. This notion either originates in or is at least echoed by the ancient apocryphal text, the Book of Enoch. Hebrew angelology, however, was woefully incomplete, and was a field of study that would not reach its maturation until Christianity brought forth a fuller understanding of the Holy Trinity and the nature of Heaven. This explains why some Hebrews could have stuck to this belief even though, as we know now, angels can’t even produce offspring with each other, much less with human beings.

On the other hand, the line in Scripture about the “sons of God seeing the daughters of men” and taking “themselves wives of all which they chose”¹ must be accounted for. The Church Fathers were nearly unanimous in the assessment that this referred to the differences in the lineages of Seth and Cain; the Sethites having secluded themselves from the influence and intermingling of the Cainites who, for the most part, had spread across much of the Earth.

St. Augustine certainly agrees:

It may be, therefore, that giants were born even before the sons of God, who are also called angels of God, had intercourse with the daughters of men; that is, with the daughters of those who live according to man: in other words, the sons of Seth with the daughters of Cain.²

Here, St. Augustine makes the point that giants were already there, and that it’s even possible that the race of men themselves were simply larger in stature than our current imagination allows for. He expands on this point:

According to canonical Scriptures, then, both Hebrew and Christian, there is no doubt that there were many giants before the Flood, and that these were citizens of the earth-born society of men, whereas the sons of God, who were of the lineage of Seth according to the flesh, fell down into this society when they forsook righteousness. […] And we are reminded … by another prophet when he says, ‘There were giants famous from the beginning, that were of so great a stature, and so expert in war…’³

Bl. Emmerich as well notes that the “people of those early times were larger, though not out of proportion,” being “for more beautiful in the form than people of a later period”, and she compares their features to those of marble statues.⁴ Descriptions of ancient heroes in Western and Near-Eastern legends, such as those of the Greeks, Egyptians, and Mesopotamians also describe peoples of the distant past as being larger. Bl. Emmerich does note, however, that the Nephilim were larger still than these:

I saw Cain’s descendants becoming more and more godless and sensual. They settled further and further up that mountain ridge where were the fallen spirits. Those spirits took possession of many of the women, ruled them completely, and taught them all sorts of seductive arts. Their children were very large.

They possessed a quickness, an aptitude for everything, and they gave themselves up entirely to the wicked spirits as their instruments. And so arose on this mountain and spread far around, a wicked race which by violence and seduction sought to entangle Seth’s posterity likewise in their own corrupt ways. Then God declared to Noe His intention to send the Deluge. During the building of the ark, Noe had to suffer terribly from those people.⁵

Notice here a synthesis of the two distinct interpretations of who the sons of God were. Bl. Emmerich very clearly ascribes an even larger physical stature to those children of women who were especially alluring to the Sethite men, but these women were infused with “fallen spirits”. She’s saying that they were possessed by various demons, and that through this influence, they were made more appealing to the purer lineage, so that by seduction they could corrupt it.

A midrashic text points to a similar belief in Hebrew tradition, however with certain understandable inconsistencies:

Rabbi Meir said: || The generations of Cain went about stark naked, men and women, just like the beasts, and they defiled themselves with all kinds of immorality, a man with his mother or his daughter, or the wife of his brother, or the wife of his neighbour, in public and in the streets, with evil inclination which is in the thought of their heart, as it is said, “And the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth” (Gen. 6:5).

Rabbi said: The angels who fell from their holy place in heaven saw the daughters of the generations of Cain walking about naked, with their eyes painted like harlots, and they went astray after them, and took wives from amongst them, as it is said, “And the sons of Elohim saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose” (Gen. 6:2).⁶

As we will see, it’s unlikely the generations of Cain “went about stark naked like beasts”, given that it was from the line of Cain that sophisticated civilization—by our modern standards, at least—likely arose. A certain disdain for modesty no doubt existed among them, however, to a degree that almost certainly resembled or surpassed modernity’s open hatred for it. It would not be a stretch of the imagination to envision an ancient Hebrew, transposed in time and place to Miami, Florida circa 2018, and see him aghast with the exact same sentiment. “These women don’t wear any clothes!”

The apocryphal Book of Treasures attests to similar debauchery, specifically of sexual vice, among the Cainites:

Meanwhile fornication reigned among the daughters of Cain, and without shame [several] women would run after one man. And one man would attack another, and they committed fornication in the presence of each other shamelessly. For all the devils were gathered together in that camp of Cain, and unclean spirits entered into the women, and took possession of them. The old women were more lascivious than the maidens, fathers and sons defiled themselves with their mothers and sisters, sons respected not even their own fathers, and fathers made no distinction between their sons [and other men]. And Satan had been made ruler (or prince) of that camp.

The apocrypha makes special note of the influence of the demonic upon music and dance, something clearly paralleled in pagan rituals and chronicled in works like Bacchae. The Dionysian relationship between lower, base aspects of music and fornication cannot be ignored, and obviously wasn’t by the early-Christian world:

And when the men and women were stirred up to lascivious frenzy by the devilish playing of the reeds which emitted musical sounds, and by the harps which the men played through the operation of the power of the devils, and by the sounds of the tambourines and of the sistra which were beaten and rattled through the agency of evil spirits, the sounds of their laughter were heard in the air above them, and ascended to that holy mountain.

This account then details several hundred Sethite men descending from their living spaces on the holy mountain to put down the unrest of the Cainites, only to be overwhelmed by their own lusts for the women.

See the common thread that ties these sections together: an intermingling of the lineages of Cain and Seth, and some sort of demonic (fallen angel) influence that precipitates it. As we saw previously with the narrative of Cain and Abel, apocrypha and commentary maintained aspects of what truly happened, and Bl. Emmerich’s visions help bring it all together and resolve certain contradictions. In this case, the Enochian notion of fallen angels copulating with human women—a known impossibility according to Catholic angelology and theology—we have a more reasonable understanding of who the sons of God indicate. And yet, the extent of the Cainites’ wickedness was such that they embraced the demonic wholeheartedly, and this manifested in the adoption of obscene harlotry by their women.

So rather than there being an either/or interpretation of what happened, we see that it’s some combination of both. The fallen angels took possession of women. Enoch’s narrative was half-right about this, as the demonic spirits were involved, and progeny did result, but not in the manner of Rosemary’s Baby. St. Augustine and the Church Fathers were also half-right—although, to their credit, the half they got right was far more relevant and important to world history. There was an intermingling of the Cainites with the Sethites. But only by understanding how these two competing narratives are actually describing the same events do we get a complete picture of that antediluvian time.

There is a lot more that can be written on this alone, as many relevant books have been written on the subject. Apart from some hypotheses regarding the Watchers, or Grigori, as being a separate order of created being entirely, different from both angels and men, most interpretations fall into either a Sethite interpretation of the “sons of God” or a purely angelic-demonic one. This last hypothesis, regarding the Watchers, draws heavily on Enoch and is supported largely by the demonic interpretation, but it introduces more questions than it seems to answer. We will not dwell on those here.

Antediluvian Civilization

Scripture informs us that the progeny of Cain developed complex enough forms of civilization to have advanced knowledge in music and metallurgy, though the exact degree of their advancement is left unwritten:

And Ada brought forth Jabel: who was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of herdsmen. And his brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of them that play upon the harp and the organs. Sella also brought forth Tubalcain, who was a hammerer and artificer in every work of brass and iron.⁷

The days before the Flood numbered up to about fifteen hundred years. Coupled with the long lives of the early men, it can be safely presumed that the world had reached a population comparable to what we’re looking at today, if not greater. It’s worth remembering, also, that the world would have looked very different then than it does now—the oceans, for instance, probably didn’t exist, or if they did, they would have been many times smaller than they are now. The Flood included a deepening of valleys and a raising of mountains⁸, which so thoroughly changed the Earth’s geography as to render it utterly unrecognizable. This means that there would have been much more space for a men to populate, even though it seems like there’s plenty of space presently for several billions of us already.

This is all to say that the antediluvian peoples had access to natural resources, had manpower to extract them, and—their long lives taken into account—developed and preserved knowledge of what to do with them. In addition to the fact that their language had not yet been splintered, the likelihood of their civilization becoming fairly advanced in about a millennium-and-a-half’s time is high.

Bl. Emmerich’s brief account of antediluvian culture makes their civilization seem as alien to us as ours would be to primitive tribesmen, though not in terms of its sophistication so much as its organization.

These people could form all kinds of images out of stone and metal; but of the knowledge of God they had no longer a trace. They sought their gods in the creatures around them. I have seen them scratch up a stone, form it into an extravagant image, and then adore it. They worshipped also a frightful animal and all kinds of ignoble things. They knew all things, they could see all things, they were skilled in the preparing of poisons, they practiced sorcery and every species of wickedness. The women invented music. I saw them going around among the better tribes trying to seduce them to their own abominations. They had no dwelling houses, no cities, but they raised massive round towers of shining stone. Under those towers were little structures leading into great caverns wherein they carried on their horrible wickedness. From the roofs of these structures, the surrounding country could be seen, and by mounting up into the towers and looking through tubes, one could see far into the distance. But it was not like looking through tubes made to bring distant objects into view. The power of the tubes to which I here allude, was effected by satanic agency. They that looked through them could see where the other tribes were settled. Then they marched against them, overcame them, and lawlessly carried all before them. That same spirit of lawlessness they exercised everywhere. I saw them sacrificing children by burying them alive in the earth. God overthrew that mountain at the time of the Deluge.⁹

There’s a lot going on here, and parallels to our own contemporary society are impossible to ignore. And as with all of Bl. Emmerich’s visions, a lot of content is only touched on in the briefest of overviews. It isn’t difficult to imagine, however, a race of men whose technological prowess was aided not by knowledge of materials (as our is presently) but by the openly demonic, and how this would have looked to a visionary living in early-nineteenth century Germany.

She speaks of tubes that grant visions from other regions, and we can think of televisions, surveillance systems, the panopticon. She speaks of infants being buried alive in the earth and our country alone murders children at a rate of more than half-a-million a year. She speaks of their having no dwelling houses, but erecting enormous towers over extensive underground complexes, and the modern skyscraper comes to mind. She speaks of skilled makers of sophisticated poisons and sorcery, and we can remember the blight of Big Pharma on our society, of the Sackler family, of vaccine idolatry, and less obviously, of the xenoestrogens introduced into our foods, of the hormones from the Pill being so potent that they’ve altered the ecosystem.

Neither Scripture nor apocrypha offer us deeper glimpses into antediluvian civilization than what has been outlined above. What we can know for sure is that they were a people given over to their evil inclinations, prone to impulsiveness, violence, and sexual deviancy. They lived inordinately long lives, by today’s standards, which allowed for the preservation and maturation of knowledge at rates far better than subsequent centuries, yet they turned their attention toward evil and became so corrupted that they warranted utter desolation by water.

Noah and The Flood

At last, we arrive at the Deluge.

The Flood cycle takes up a good portion of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, and it is considered by some scholars to be something of a thematic repetition of what had come before. In a certain sense, it is a second fall, as the world this time lapses from its created state—a generally homogeneous ball with mild mountains and plains and dotted with large lakes—into the familiar pitted, marred, and drowned globe riven with deep valleys and high peaks. It is, likewise, a second creation story, for the same reason. It carries in it another account of a sin immediately after this fresh start, just as it also describes the events of a secondary parentage.

For this reason, we will not be dwelling very long nor prying very deeply into the Flood account. Theories about what happened probably fill hundreds of books related to creation and creationism, to say nothing of the multitude of comparative religion studies that cross-reference the Biblical account with other near-Eastern and various other accounts of an ancient flood-related worldwide cataclysm. For those interested in pursuing lines of investigation regarding proposed geological models of what happened, I recommend using Walt Brown’s Hydroplate Theory as a jumping off point.

What we’re interested in here, however, are the people involved: Noah and his sons. Before we get to that, however, the general nature of the Flood has to be addressed—specifically, whether or not it was, actually, a worldwide cataclysm. This is important to address because the Flood narrative is intimately related not just to the Biblical creation account, but also to the overall anti-Darwinist, anti-Evolutionist, anti-Modernist thread of cosmology that stands in reaction to what dominates our institutions today.

It is also, as evolutionists recognize, the most difficult to counter (detailed critiques of evolutionary theory notwithstanding), as even the uneducated laymen can see for themselves the preponderance of flood imagery across nearly every major world religion and myth. Many scholars have tried to rationalize this as some sort of archetypal pattern of mythological narratives, indicating a psychological process that Jung referred to as individuation. But this, like nearly all theoretical depth psychology, is a complete shot in the dark, and it comes across as an unwillingness to believe the original narrative.

The Flood is mentioned and attested to in various parts of the Bible, and while it is not for our purposes here to address or even list them all, a few examples are appropriate. From the Old Testament, Psalms¹⁰ and Isaiah¹¹ both have passages that refer to it directly, and from the New, Matthew¹² and Luke¹³ record Christ Himself speaking of the days of Noah and the coming of the Deluge. Peter’s epistles¹⁴ refer to the event as well. In each case, this event is not treated by its interlocutors as a mythological event, but a real one directly related to their history. As this understanding is squared with the rest of the Biblical context, it’s worth approaching what that means about the Flood itself.

Two modern trends in Biblical interpretation must be dealt with: the first is the purely mythological explanation, already mentioned, and the second is the theory of a localized, regional flood in antiquity. In a certain sense, this is even less believable than the mythological angle and harder to square with Scripture.

We know from later in Genesis that God commanded Abraham to travel virtually unheard-of distances throughout the Middle East and Levant. Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, around the wilderness, and to the border of Canaan. The Babylonian Captivity resulted in Israelites being extracted from their homes and taken all the way to Babylon. Examples of long journeys characterized as migrations define key parts of the Old Testament, and—at least in the former two cases—they were actively willed by God. God told Abraham to leave his home just as He told Moses to bring His people out of Egypt. And these examples are just from the Old Testament; the travels of the Apostles before their various martyrdoms took them as far west as Iberia (St. James) and as far east as India (St. Thomas).

But God didn’t tell Noah to go anywhere. If a regional flood was the simplest explanation, then we’re to believe that God instructed Noah to spend the better part of a century building an unimaginably large boat in order to ride out an otherwise insignificant flood event. Weirder still, that God would command him to load it full of animals, despite those animals surviving in other, neighboring, un-flooded regions. And all of this instead of just commanding Noah to move. While it’s certainly true that we are not to know the full mind of God, we can also know that God does not act irrationally. This interpretation puts God’s perfect reason at odds with Scriptural inerrancy, and that’s presuming that the sacred author was so confused when he transcribed the Flood accounts that his intention as a writer was at odds with an historical reality.

It’s only natural, then, to take Scripture in its plainest sense—aided, likewise, by the exactness with which it describes both the building of the Ark and the events of the Flood. The notation of dimensions occurs only three times in the Old Testament: first with the defining of the Ark, second with the Ark of the Covenant, and lastly with the building of the Temple. Each of these are figurements or types of each other, which are, of course, also prefigurements of Christ. St. Augustine, following exactly in line with the consensus of the Church Fathers, comments on this:

Now the dimensions of the Ark, its length, height and breadth, symbolise the human body, in the reality of which Christ was prophesied to come, and did come, to men. For the length of the human body from the top of the head to the sole of the foot is six times its breadth from side to side, and ten times its depth, measured on the side from back to belly. […] Thus, the Ark was made 300 cubits in length, and fifty in breadth, and thirty in height. And the door which was set in the side of it clearly represents the wound made in the side of the Crucified when t was pierced with a spear, which is indeed the way of entrance for those who come to Him, because from that wound there flowed the sacraments in which believers are initiated.¹⁵

Much more can be, and indeed has been, written tying the Ark to Christ, but it suffices our purposes here to merely touch on it.

As a result of the Fall, creation revolted against its Creator. Man lost grace and paradise, the animals lost their directions, and the chain of life that had Adam at its top fell into predatory disorder. The bare rock and soil of the world, however, did not undergo any change. It was not until the Flood that this occurred.

We speak of the Flood, but it’s perhaps more fitting to speak of it as a cataclysm. The floodwaters were, of course, the most threatening and obvious part of the event, but it’s important to remember that the floodwaters didn’t just disappear. The water never went away; you can see it when you visit the beach. This should drive home how different the world looked and was prior to this cataclysm; valleys were indeed shallower, mountains shorter. The shape of the planet itself had to change in order to accommodate having dry land after the cataclysm. Most Flood theorists attribute the contortion of the planet during the Flood as being a direct and natural result of it, and while there’s no space here to explore their various theories, this writer sees no reason not to believe that to be the case.

The Flood resulted in the wiping out of the entirety of mankind, and the reason for this that Scripture gives is severalfold: first, due to the intermingling of the children of God and men, as discussed above, and secondly, due to the great iniquities and wickedness of the race that resulted. The intermingling of the Sethites and Cainites meant that the blood of Cain would have survived into Noah’s progeny—likely through one of the wives of his sons, perhaps Ham’s. This explains how certain tribes of Nephilim were said to have been found in Canaan at the time of Moses: “certain monsters of the sons of Enac, of the giant kind: in comparison of whom, we seemed like locusts.”¹⁶

After the mountains had been up-heaved and the valleys sunk, the floodwaters receded and Noah, eventually, was able to emerge from the Ark. The rise of various different flood myths occurred after the sundering of language and dispersal of peoples at the Tower of Babel, which occurred within the first two centuries after the Flood¹⁷. As the people drifted apart and fell out of the True Faith, their understandings of their shared origin deteriorated and mythologized. We can attribute this in part to flesh’s innate frailty, by which we mean our darkened intellects, but we can also attribute this with near certainty to various demonic influences leading people astray by design. It is most often by preying on the frailty of the flesh and weakness of our will towards it that such influences are even able to work. The practice of open idolatry and the libidinous cults of pagan antiquity provided ample room for the demonic to maneuver, after all.

The Biblical Flood account, however, as a narrative, is the most accurate of these many accounts. As Rev. Warkulwiz explains,

[It] is the only complete true and authoritative account of the Great Flood. It is a sober, detailed and consistent report that was written by eye-witnesses. The postdiluvian patriarchs preserved it faithfully and passed it on to their posterity intact. Eventually it reached Moses, through whom the divine seal was put on it, certifying its accuracy.

Other peoples, not in the line of the patriarchs, drifted away from the true religion. They recalled the story of the Deluge, but because of their lack of devotion to the one true God, they corrupted it, transforming it into fantastic tales. Such tales are found in the traditions of nearly all peoples throughout the world—in those of the most advanced civilizations and the most barbarous tribes.¹⁸

Warkulwiz mentions that the account “eventually reached Moses,” and this is worth a brief aside. Moses’ great-grandfather was Levi, the patriarch of his tribe. And Levi’s grandfather, Isaac, was alive for a significant part of Levi’s life. Isaac’s life, we can trace from the chronologies in Genesis, significantly overlapped the end of Shem’s. Although the time between Moses’ life and that of the Flood was in the neighborhood of a millennium, it’s very believable that the oral account of the Flood history was only filtered through three or four people between Shem and Moses himself.

As mentioned previously, the changes inflicted upon the Earth by the Flood are too numerous and speculative to dig into here. The change in the earth could be seen as something of a delayed use of making the world reflect the contorted nature of its inhabitants after the Fall; in this sense, the two are inextricable from one another. While we cannot know the exact character or depths of depravity that antediluvian man had sunk to, God’s will to utterly annihilate them informs us that they were, on the whole, accustomed to barbarity and evil with a prevalence that outstrips even what we see today. While it may seem hard to believe, living as we are after the brutality and atrociousness that characterized the twentieth century, the wickedness of the antediluvian period reminds us that there are depths of depravity we have yet to reach. The Fall can send us still further from God.

In this way, we can understand that period immediately before the Flood was the very nadir of human goodness in the world. It was the culmination of the worst effects of the Fall taken to their maximum extremes, as God disallowed the proliferation of that evil by force. We cannot say that the world is all that much better now, however, purely on the basis that God has not sent another Flood to reset the system. He promised us He wouldn’t do such a thing, after all; and in fact, the next time we reach comparable levels of utmost depravity, He’ll be turning out the lights and rolling up the carpets: “Wherever you’re going, you can’t stay here!”

We can also surmise that God will stave off the death of all men for as long as there remains even the smallest glimmer of possibility that they may return to Him. Prior to the Sacrifice at Calvary, we know that no one entered Heaven (Enoch & Elijah aside), but still their souls could be prepared for glory. Until that time came, they waited for the messiah in Abraham’s Bosom. The willingness of God not to release the Deluge, of God to take favor of those willing to look to Him—first Noah, and then later Lot—are both types and examples of the sort of mercy and justice that God delivers unto every human soul. Death comes when the providential will of God has decided that further life will only reduce whatever glory you have: when you shine the brightest and thus will occupy the best throne for you in Heaven, or when there is no more hope of your salvation and further life would mean only greater suffering in Hell. These are judgments reserved to God alone.

Adam’s Final Resting Place

Origen attributed to Hebrew tradition that Adam’s skull was buried outside of where Jerusalem would be founded, at Golgotha: the place of the skull.¹⁹ This is consistent with the Christian apocrypha, particularly of the Adam/Treasures narrative. Just prior to Adam’s death, the Treasures account mentions:

But command thy sons, and order them to embalm thy body after thy death with myrrh, cassia, and stakte. And they shall place thee in this cave, wherein I am making you to dwell this day, until the time when your expulsion shall take place from the regions of Paradise to that earth which is outside it. And whosoever shall be left in those days shall take thy body with him, and shall deposit it on the spot which I shall show him, in the centre of the earth; for in that place shall redemption be effected for thee and for all thy children.” And God revealed unto Adam everything which the Son would suffer on behalf of him.²⁰

This is vividly consistent with something Bl. Emmerich mentions:

I once had a vision of Mount Calvary. I saw on it a prophet, the companion of Elias. The mount was at that time full of caves and sepulchers. The prophet entered one of the caves and from a stone coffin filled with bones he took up the skull of Adam. Instantly an angel appeared before him, saying: “That is Adam’s skull,” and he forbade its removal. Scattered over the skull was some thin yellow hair. From the prophet’s account of what had occurred, the spot was named “The Place of Skulls” (Calvary). Christ’s Cross stood in a straight line above that skull at the time of His Crucifixion. I was interiorly instructed that the spot upon which the skull rests is the middle point of the earth. I was told the distance east, south, and west in numbers, but I have forgotten them.²¹

Notice that both the apocryphal account and Bl. Emmerich’s mention not only that Adam’s skull was beneath the Cross, but also that this was somehow the exact “center” or “middle point” of the planet—clearly not in a geological sense, but in some sort of geographic sense. What this means isn’t clear from either account, but it’s striking that they both include this—despite it being extraordinarily unlikely that Bl. Emmerich had any knowledge of these apocryphal writings. It’s more explicit in her Dolores Passion:

I learned also that the prophet having related what had happened to him, the spot received the name of Calvary. Finally, I saw that the Cross of Jesus was placed vertically over the skull of Adam. I was informed that this spot was the exact centre of the earth; and at the same time I was shown the numbers and measures proper to every country, but I have forgotten them, individually as well as in general. Yet I have seen this centre from above, and as it were from a bird’s-eye view. In that way a person sees far more clearly than on a map all the different countries, mountains, deserts, seas, rivers, towns, and even the smallest places, whether distant or near at hand.²²

Notice again how much attention is given to the “center of the Earth” remark. We may not know exactly what the significance of this is, but it was deemed important enough to be remembered. Writers Emmanouela Grypeou and Helen Spurling attribute this notion to “exegetical speculations on Ps 74:12 (LXX 73:12): ‘For God is my king of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth’.”²³

Bl. Emmerich and apocrypha both speak of Noah and his sons removing some of Adam’s bones from their original resting place and loading them onto the ark before the Flood. Afterward, these bones were transported by Noah, Shem, and Melchizedek to their resting place at Golgotha.

Adam’s final grave site is worth a deeper look. We have to recall that the region of the Levant, where Christ Himself incarnated and spent his life on Earth, is the center world in a certain geographic sense. It sits at the junction of Europe, Asia and Africa, and for thousands of years was central to the interaction of trade, commerce, culture, and human movement. The Cross was erected a top of a geographical and social compass rose, from which in every direction—North, South, East and West—the Good News of Christ’s redemption and victory over death would be spread by His apostles.

It is appropriate then to believe that Adam’s skull was buried beneath the Cross and at the juncture of this other cross. It was in the Holiest Sacrifice that God remembered Adam, that God delivered to the whole race of Adam the path to salvation and thereby opened, for the first time since that first day of his wakefulness in the Garden, the gates of Paradise. Providence unfolds with a certain poetry; Adam, who Fell from Grace, came to rest beneath the very instrument and event of the Fall’s undoing. From the tree of knowledge did his transgression begin, while the remade tree of life was planted in the soil of his grave and stretched toward Heaven.

Melchizedek and the Beginning of Recorded History

The ancient Sumerians had legends of teacher-figures coming out of the water to bring advanced knowledge to early civilization. Similar myths are found in the ancient histories of the Mesoamerican civilizations. To punctuate this point, these figures—some historians refer to them by their Sumerian name, Annunaki, or Those of Royal Blood—are depicted wearing the scales of fish as clothing.

There’s a lot of hokey pseudo-history surrounding the Annunaki, popularized by New Age-adjacent attempts to uncover esoteric history. This can result in the conflation of the Annunaki with conspiracies as wide-ranging as reptilian alien hybrids to at least more-reasonable hypotheses concerning advanced Atlantean or Lemurian civilizations; talk of advanced cultures that predate what modern geologists refer to as the Younger Dryas period is thrown in for good measure.

We can dispense with the outlandish speculation to focus on what the Annunaki were referring to specifically: tall men with great knowledge who lived—if they were real—at the earliest onset of recorded history. When put that way, we know exactly who they’d have been: Noah’s grandchildren, if not his sons themselves. The generation born immediately after the Flood would still have possessed stature comparable to those born prior to it, as the effects of the Flood on diet and genetics²⁴ would probably not have led to serious alterations within the first generation. Additionally, Noah’s sons themselves had living memory of antediluvian culture and civilization; knowledge their sons would doubtless have had access to.

Using Scripture as a guide, we know that the diversification and complete dispersal of humanity did not occur until after the sundering of speech at Babel’s tower. This allows for several generations to have been born in the wake of the Flood, having lived and died still within the lifetime of Noah himself. Noah was still alive when Abraham was born, although he wasn’t long for the world at that point. Shem’s life continued long enough for it to have been very easy to believe that Abraham may have encountered him on his travels. There’s even some suggestion, from certain Hebrew traditions, that Shem and Melchizedek were the same person. While this is probably not the case, all three men—Abraham, Shem, and Melchizedek—lived contemporaneously. This link alone should be enough to make pause those who ascribe a purely mythological character to the first eleven chapters of Genesis; the continuity between Shem and the Flood cycle with Abraham and “real history” is too hard to ignore, and that link is Melchizedek himself.

That such a mysterious figure should hold a remarkable place might come as some surprise. He is the priest-king of Salem (Jerusalem) and the first man mentioned in Scripture to offer up a sacrifice to God specifically of bread and wine. He is presented without genealogy or context, and for this reason compared typologically to the Messiah, both in Rabbinic literature and in the Christian tradition, prefiguring Christ in a way that even Adam does not. Melchizedek’s righteousness and priestly authority prefigures Christ’s ministry and, to a certain extent, institution—or re-institution—of the true priesthood. St. Augustine elaborates:

Here, indeed, is the first appearance of that sacrifice which is now offered to God by Christians all over the world, in which is fulfilled what was long afterwards said in prophecy to Christ, Who was yet to come in the flesh: “Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek’—not, that is, ‘after the order of Aaron’; for his order was to be abolished when the things prefigured by these shadows came into the light of day.²⁵

Over the course of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, not only is the lineage of all mankind detailed, the lineage of his spiritual tradition is as well: the Mass. Melchizedek’s offering was the cumulative prefigurement of the True Sacrifice that would be offered atop Golgotha and repeated until the completion of time. It cannot be considered a coincidence that the Last Supper material was consistently identical to that of Melchizedek’s offering. We will look at this with greater care in the conclusion of this work. Suffice it to say that Melchizedek stands at a point in history where recognizable civilization began to erect walls around its cities and conduct trade, practice religion, and split into tribes.

Melchizedek himself is extremely mysterious, as Scripture offers next to nothing in the way of explaining who he is, where he came from, or why or how he inherited the Patriarchal blessing from Shem. On the last point, the general data is there simply by implication: Melchizedek would have been within the direct lineage of Shem in order to receive the blessing, as that same blessing is what passed from father to son down through Abraham to Jacob. Certain Hebrew traditions, in addition to some of the Church Fathers (though not many) correlated Shem with Melchizedek as the same person. Because of the priestly authority and inheritance possessed by Melchizedek, there’s good reason for such assumption, but the Scripture’s ambiguity on this point makes it impossible to tell either way.

Bl. Emmerich’s visions include a fair amount of things about Melchizedek, though some of it jars with the more traditional interpretations of him by Church Fathers. Her visions depict him as “a being of another nature, as an angel, as one sent by God”, who she never witnessed “eating, drinking, or sleeping”.²⁶ She continues in explaining how active he was in the political and social dimensions of several different kingdoms in the region, “[exercising] an irresistible influence by his mere presence”, so great that “even the idolaters cheerfully accepted his decisions and acted upon his advice”.²⁷ In such manner, he tasked himself “with the uniting, the separating, or the guiding of nations and families”.²⁸

Melchizedek, Bl. Emmerich claims, was pivotal in the establishment and erection of the ancient postdiluvian world. He traveled the Near East, partitioned off land for nations, and was known by all around as a great sage and prophet. Whether her claim of his otherwordly or angelic nature is true or not, we can certainly know that he was, at the very least, a great prophet whose priesthood prefigured that of the true Church.

This brings into our field of vision the scope of recorded history. Bl. Emmerich also had specific visions regarding the chronology of the ancient world, and Egypt in particular. According to her, the Egyptian calendar, far from being one of the more accurate ones of the region, was riddled with irreconcilable errors as a result of dynastic changes and superstitious scholarship:

But I saw that, even at the coming of Semiramis to Memphis, these people, in their pride had designedly confused their calendar. Their ambition was to take precedence of all other nations in point of time. With this end in view, they drew up a number of complicated calendars and royal genealogical tables. By this and frequent changes in their computations, order and true chronology were lost. That this confusion might be firmly established, they perpetuated every error by inscriptions and the erection of great buildings. For a long time they reckoned the ages of father and son, as if the date of the former’s demise were that of the latter’s birth. The kings, who waged constant war with the priests on the subject of chronology, inserted among their forefathers the names of persons that never existed. Thus the four kings of the same name who reigned simultaneously in Thebes, Heliopolis, Memphis, and Sais, were in accordance with this design, reckoned one after the other. I saw too that once they reckoned nine hundred and seventy days to a year, and again, years were computed as months. I saw a pagan priest drawing up a chronological table in which for every five hundred years, eleven hundred were set down.²⁹

This could explain why certain other sources, such as Plato’s Timaeus, cite Egyptian records as extending back some nine thousand years or more. The other ancient and contemporaneous civilizations may also have had faulty record keeping—and even for similar reasons—but the extent of Egypt’s error made it appear far older than it actually was.

Man has always had an appreciation for the old or the ancient, as the existence of things older than himself helps orient him within the flow of history. The surviving tangibles of the past remind him that things existed before he did, and they will likely exist after he dies, each thing coming into being and then disintegrating just as his flesh does. But this doesn’t imply an infinite causal chain; just as he was made, born, lived and died, so too can he assume everything around him plots a similar arc. The existence of history, in a practical sense, implies the existence of a beginning. It’s no surprise that civilizations might inflate the length of their records in order to appeal to a sense of legitimacy.

In The City of God, St. Augustine mentions varying chronology across early civilizations as well, partly verifying Bl. Emmerich’s claims:

In order to make it seem less incredible that years were calculated differently in days gone by, those who think that they were adduce a great deal of evidence derived from historical writings which shows that the Egyptians had a year of four months, the Acarnanians of six months, and the Lavinians of thirteen months. The elder Pliny mentions [reports of various long-lived men in antiquity]. He, however, considers that all these cases arise out of ignorance of chronology. ‘For some people’, he says, ‘used to reckon summer as one complete year and winter as another, while others treated each of the four seasons as a complete year, like the Arcadians, who had years of three months’. He adds that the Egyptians, whose short year of four months I have already mentioned, sometimes ended the year with the final phase of each moon; ‘and so, he says, ‘we have reports among them of individuals who lived to be a thousand years old.’³⁰

Here, St. Augustine is referring to grasping the ages of the Patriarchs and whether the cycles of generations given in Genesis can be trusted; although he very much says that they can, he’s using the imperfect chronologies of other Near-Eastern peoples as a counterargument that could suggest otherwise. For our purposes, the differences in chronology is the point—and when he’s citing “a great deal of evidence from historical writings”, he’s referring to the works of Censorinus, Macrobius, and Solinus, specifically.

Contemporary scholarship claims that the Egyptian year was comprised of 365 days not unlike the ancient Roman one. Exactly what this is based on is beyond the purview of this piece, as is whether the claim is even an accurate one. It should be remembered that despite Egyptology’s modern sophistication, it has frequently been marred by misleading or inaccurate scholarship plagued by modern presuppositions about ancient times.

It is not unbelievable for “years” to have taken on various meanings across the greater Near-Eastern neighborhood of antiquity. Nor, as any historical study of long dynastic civilizations can show, is revisionism or obfuscation of records a particularly obscure practice among ancient cultures. The full extent that this applies to chronology is hard to tell, and perhaps at this point impossible without further data on hand, but it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.

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Table of Contents

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1Gen 6:2.

2Augustine, City of God, 682.

3Ibid 684-685.

4Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 31.

5Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 31-32.

6Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, 22:3-4; pulled from Sefaria.com.

7Gen 4:20-22.

8Psalms 104:5-10.

9Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 32-33.

10Psalm 104

11Isaiah 54:9

12Matthew 24

13Luke 17

141 Peter 2 & 3; also 2 Peter 3

15Augustine, City of God, 687.

16Numbers 13:34.

17We can determine this because it occurred within the lifetime of Peleg.

18Warkulwiz, Doctrines of Genesis, 374-375.

19I have found attribution of this to Origen’s Commentary on Matthew 27:32 in a fragmentary Catena, but have been unable to source it directly. See:

Grypeou, Emmanouela and Helen Spurling, The Book of Genesis in Late Antiquity: Encounters Between Jewish and Christian Exegesis (Boston: Brill 2013), 72.

20Treasures, chap. Adam’s Stay in Paradise.

21Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 29.

22Emmerich, Anne Catherine, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (London: Burns & Lambert, 1862), 308.

23Grypeou & Spurling, The Book of Genesis in Late Antiquity, 74.

24See Warkulwiz, as well as hydroplate creationist theory.

25Augustine, City of God, 729.

26Emmerich, Life of Jesus Christ, 64.

27Ibid, 65.

28Ibid, 70.

29Ibid, 63-64.

30Augustine, City of God, 655-656.