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Malalas, Chronicle 1.2-3:
In the middle of their (= Seth’s children) time Enoch the just, the son of Jareth, was taken away and did not die. He was taken away after 1287 years. Enoch was the seventh from Adam, according to the interpretation Aquila the Jew gave of the Hebrew scriptures written by Moses. For the priests of the Jews interpreted Moses’ Hebrew accounts as follows: “The sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and took them wives of all which they chose and came in unto them, as Moses says, and they bare sons to them. There were giants in the earth in those days, the men which were of old, the men of renown” (Genesis 6:2-4). From Adam until the angels, the sons of Seth, desired women, or rather the daughters of men, of the tribe of Cain, there were 2122 years. In that time God sent a ball of fire from the heavens against the giants in the Celtic land and burnt it and them. The ball plunged into the river Jordan and was extinguished. They tell stories of this fire and say that Phthaethon, the son of the sun, fell from this chariot to earth, a tale which Ovid has written poetically. But Plutarch of Chaironeia speaks of this more truthfully when he says that the ball of fire fell on the Celtic land.
Although the remaining giants saw so many of their number struck by lightning, they remained stubborn. God said to them in anger: “My spirit will not abide in these men, for they are flesh” (Genesis 6:3), as is recorded in Moses’ writings. The most learned Pindar, who was a Hellenic poet after the time of Moses, described these giants poetically as men born from earth, with serpents’ feet, who made certain daring attacks against the highest divine powers. He called them serpent-footed and said that they were destroyed by the gods through various punishments. The most learned Timotheus interpreted this poetic story as follows, saying that the reason why the poet called these men serpent-footed was because their minds were brutalized and they considered human values of no account, but had feet which moved toward the evil, and unjust things of the earth. … the usual motion both of the sun and of the moon, ordered that some should be destroyed by a thunderbolt, others should have their bodies turned to stone, others were to be shot with the swiftest of deadly arrows, others were to be torn apart by wounds as from a spear, and the remainder were to be drowned in the ocean depths. Thus the giants, or serpent-footed creatures perished miserabl and ended their lives. Servius said that they lived in a low-lying plain and had fought a war with people of the mountain tops, and crawling on their bellies were slaughtered by the mountain dwellers.
Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Genesis 6:2-4
Malalas, Chronicle 1.2-3
Bibliography
| Jeffreys, Jeffreys and Scott 1986, 2-3 | Jeffreys, E., M. Jeffreys and R. Scott. The Chronicle of John Malalas. A Translation. Byzantina Australiensia 4. Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies 1986. |
Amar Annus
URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0000814.php
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