Chapter 6

Time passed, and the race of men began to spread over the face of earth, they and the daughters that were born to them.

And now the sons of God saw how beautiful were these daughters of men, and took them as wives, choosing where they would.

But God said, This spirit of mine shall not endure in man for ever, he is but mortal clay; his life-time shall be a hundred and twenty years.

Giants lived on the earth in those days, when first the sons of God mated with the daughters of men, and by them had children; these were the heroes whose fame has come down to us from long ago.

And now God found that earth was full of men’s iniquities, and that the whole frame of their thought was set continually on evil;

and he repented of having made men on the earth at all.3 So, smitten with grief to the depths of his heart,

he said, I will blot out mankind, my creature, from the face of the earth, and with mankind all the beasts and the creeping things and all that flies through the air; I repent of having made them.

Only on Noe did God look with favour.

And these were the children of Noe, the man who was accepted as faultless in such a generation, the close friend of God;

Noe begot three sons, Sem, Cham, and Japheth.

There lay the world, corrupt in God’s sight, full of oppression;

and God, seeing the world so corrupt (no creature on earth but had lost its true direction),

said to Noe, The time has come for me to make an end of all mankind; their coming has filled the earth with oppression; I mean to destroy them, and earth with them.

Make thyself an ark from planks of wood;4 in that ark make cabins, and give it a coat of pitch within and without.

These are to be the measurements; three hundred cubits of length, fifty cubits of breadth, and thirty cubits of height.

The ark is to have a course of windows, which thou wilt make a cubit in height;5 and thou wilt make a door in its side; and it is to have a hold, and a lower and upper deck.

Thou must know that I mean to bring a flood of waters over the earth, and destroy every creature that lives and breathes under heaven; all that earth holds must perish.

But with thee this covenant of mine shall stand; thou shalt take refuge in the ark, thou and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee.

And take with thee into the ark, to preserve them, a pair of each kind of living creature, male and female,

all the different birds, all the different beasts, all the creeping things of earth; two of each shall go in with thee, so that all may survive.

And it is for thee to provide thyself with all that is eaten as food, and store it up, so that thou and they may have food to eat.

All this Noe did, at God’s bidding.