Kyle Dresback
Friends,
Perhaps against my better judgment, I want to consider today’s enigmatic passage from Genesis 6:1-8. In it we’re told, “The sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves.”
Admittedly, there are literal giants in this passage vying for our attention, but if we look closer, we find a very human psychological drama in miniature that —I think intentionally—repeats itself throughout the Hebrew Bible.
You might recognize this pattern—“saw” that it was “beautiful” and “took.” These very words describe Eve’s decision to eat the fruit in the garden; the moment when humanity, full of potential, cracks and begins to break.
This literary formula recurs with devastating consistency: Abram tells his wife that the Egyptians will see her beauty and he concocts a plan for her to be taken so he is spared; Lot saw the beautiful Jordan Valley and parted with Abraham in taking it; Achan saw the beautiful but forbidden plunder in Jericho and forfeited his life when he took.
Each story turns on seeing something—specifically its beauty—and violating the created order by taking it.
The construction is masterfully woven into the biblical story such that when we arrive at King David’s downfall—“He saw a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful…”—we recognize these loaded verbs and know his next action without being told: He took her.
But the significance in this verb pattern is more than merely literary. It carries the weight of human experience, like looking at the ancient DNA of our own moral weaknesses. Robert Alter (from whom I’ve learned much about biblical literary patterns) describes this repetition as a visual “trap.” It ensnares the eye, then the heart, bringing destruction.
If this pattern is instructive at all, it is perhaps a warning to a culture that has collapsed the “see-take” gap to nearly zero. In contrast, it strikes me as particularly Christian to see grace in our limitations—learning to receive a meal, an unexpected gift, an act of forgiveness, even limits on what is mine for the taking.
May God give us eyes to see his grace and hearts that are content with his gifts.
In Christ,
—Kyle
