Forbidden Knowledge, Part 1

Forbidden Knowledge, Part 1
By: Pete Garcia

Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:4-5

The tragic irony in our fall from grace at the garden of Eden was that in the promise of attaining ‘godhead’ status through the acquiring of forbidden knowledge, that knowledge had the opposite effect. It removed Adam and Eve’s immortality and perfection, and traded it for mortality, death, and corruption. They were before the fall, as close to being a ‘god’ as they ever would be. Not that God created them to be gods, but compared to what we are today, they would have been viewed as godlike. They could live forever so long as they remained under God’s protective umbrella; they were perfect, uncorrupted, and probably smarter than we ever could hope to be. And since that time mans number one goal has been to regain the immortality he lost, through various schemes and efforts apart from his Creator.

So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. Gen 3:24 The cherubim that was placed there to guard the tree of life, was not for the tree’s protection, but for our own. Had man eaten from it in a sinful state, he would have become immortalized in the sinful state, unable to die, but still living in a constant state of dying. Movies today often romanticize the notion that life is possible for centuries, even millennia apart from the biblical concept of eternal life. The truth is man would more resemble zombie, than teenage heartthrob vampire.

We would have rotted from the inside out, unable to die, but continuing to exist nonetheless. For the wages of sin is death…Romans 6:23 begins, and wages must be paid for all who sin. And since by one man, sin entered into the human race (Rom 5:12), ALL would be in a continual state of death, unable to shed these bodies once time has worn them down. That is why God forbade the way to the Tree of Life, and put a limit to man’s longevity for a reason.

And the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” Genesis 6:3

And thus we see man’s life dramatically reduced after the Flood to what it is today. After the fall but before the flood, man realized that he was mortal, and would die, sought ways to undo this. The fallen angels, who had already sided with Satan prior to creation, also sought to capitalize on this in an attempt to corrupt man’s lineage, so that a Redeemer could not come, thus nullifying God’s prophetic promise (Gen. 3:15) of such a One who would come. So they did, and Scripture records their deeds in Genesis 6, and also confirms them in the New Testament.

For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment 2 Peter 2:4

And the angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day; Jude 1:6

The three passages of Scripture confirm that these angelic creatures broke a divinely sanctioned barrier that God put in place to prevent this from ever happening. Their judgment was severe and a warning to any other angelic creature who might be tempted to commit a similar type of offense.

The Curse of Canaan

There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. Genesis 6:4

We are able to fill in some of the gaps using two extra-biblical apocryphal sources that were well known in the days of Christ, and have just been recovered this past century with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to the book of Jubilees and the book of Enoch, 200 “Watchers” descended down upon Mt. Hermon and came together in an agreement to take for themselves wives. Both of these books were quoted by the early church fathers such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Origen, and Epiphanius.

Disclaimer: I understand that the book of Enoch is NOT Scriptural canon, but if Jesus’ half brother Jude can quote from it, I think I can as well. Personally I only use Enoch and Jubilees in so much as it agrees with what Scripture already states, but if it parts directions with Scripture, than we side with Scripture over any non-Biblical source.

“And they took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in to them, and mixed with them, and taught them charms and conjurations, and made them acquainted with the cutting of roots and of woods. And they became pregnant and brought forth great giants whose stature was three thousand ells. These devoured all the acquisitions of mankind till men were unable to sustain themselves. And the giants turned themselves against mankind in order to devour them” (Enoch 7:1-4).

Many experts believe that it was first through the hybrid interbreeding between the ‘Watchers’ and human women, that man’s line first became genetically corrupted which lasted up until the flood. If those ‘Watchers’ who sinned were immediately judged by God, how then were they able to produce more of these ‘giants’, or nephilim as the Hebrew calls them, after the Flood?

Going back to Jude and Peter’s scripture, these angels were judged, and sentenced to the abyss and will remain until Judgment Day. But notice what these angels also did besides mixing with humans…they taught forbidden knowledge. These angels were there at Creation. Satan had already fallen because he was there in the garden posing as the serpent to tempt Eve. They had a vastly superior understanding of how things work than did man; astronomy, chemistry, biology, botany, zoology, etc. They figured out, because they understood to an advanced degree, how DNA worked; and that by breeding different things together (trial and error), you can get varying types of hybrid creatures.

Canaan was a son of Ham, an uncle to Nimrod, a grandson of Noah, and was the one who received the curse from Noah for his father’s sin of mocking him. I often wondered why Canaan received the curse rather than his father Ham, who actually committed the offense. I believe Noah prophetically cursed him, possibly knowing that Canaan would be the one to whom a greater offense would come through. From Genesis 9:24-25

So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him. Then he said:

“Cursed be Canaan;
A servant of servants
He shall be to his brethren.”

From the book of Jubilees, chapter 10:29-34:

29And Canaan saw the land of Lebanon to the river of Egypt, that it was very good, and he went not into the land of his inheritance to the west (that is to) the sea, and he dwelt in the land of Lebanon, eastward and westward from the border of Jordan and from the border of the sea. [Compare with Gen. 10:15-19]

30And Ham, his father, and Cush and Mizraim his brothers said unto him: ‘Thou hast settled in a land which is not thine, and which did not fall to us by lot: do not do so; for if thou dost do so, thou and thy sons will fall in the land and (be) accursed through sedition; for by sedition ye have settled, and by sedition will thy children fall, and thou shalt be rooted out for ever.

31Dwell not in the dwelling of Shem; for to Shem and to his sons did it come by their lot.

32Cursed art thou, and cursed shalt thou be beyond all the sons of Noah, by the curse by which we bound ourselves by an oath in the presence of the holy judge, and in the presence of Noah our father.’

33But he did not harken unto them, and dwelt in the land of Lebanon from Hamath to the entering of Egypt, he and his sons until this day.

34And for this reason that land is named Canaan.

It is believed, that when Canaan settled into Shem’s land, that he did so in or around Mt. Hermon. Mt. Hermon is located at the northern end of the Golan Heights, which separates modern day Israel from Lebanon. For a fascinating and more in-depth read on Mt. Hermon, see here.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Hermon means “Forbidden Place.” Jerome (4th-century translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible) interpreted Hermon as “anathema.” Mount Hermon was the port of entry for a group of wicked angels, who corrupted the human race in the days of Noah.

So if the book of Jubilees can be trusted as a source historically, then Canaan would have settled in the Promised Land roughly 700 years before Joshua entered in. By the end of the Exodus, Joshua and Caleb, along with the ten other spies secretly searched out the land of Canaan, only to make a ghastly discovery…giants.

Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses, and said, “Let us go up at once and take possession, for we are well able to overcome it.” But the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we.” And they gave the children of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, “The land through which we have gone as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great stature. There we saw the giants (the descendants of Anak came from the giants); and we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.” Numbers 13:30-34

So how could there be giants again? Did more even more fallen angels come down and mate with Canaan’s descendants to create a hybrid race? Considering the severity of the punishment God used against those previous 200 ‘Watchers’, it seems unlikely. And it couldn’t be the same Watchers, as those angels who now were confined to the abyss as punishment.

There is an alternative explanation though. From Jubilees, chapter 8:1-4

1. In the twenty-ninth jubilee, in the first week, [1373 A.M.] in the beginning thereof Arpachshad took to himself a wife and her name was Rasu’eja, the daughter of Susan, the daughter of Elam, and she bare him a son in the third year in this week, [1375 A.M.] and he called his name Kainam.

2. And the son grew, and his father taught him writing, and he went to seek for himself a place where he might seize for himself a city.

3. And he found a writing which former (generations) had carved on the rock, and he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it and sinned owing to it; for it contained the teaching of the Watchers in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun and moon and stars in all the signs of heaven.

4. And he wrote it down and said nothing regarding it; for he was afraid to speak to Noah about it lest he should be angry with him on account of it.

Arpachshad, or as is spelled in Genesis 10:22, Arphaxad, was one of the sons of Shem. It is possible that when the “Watchers” were teaching all sorts of forbidden knowledge to the antediluvian peoples that along the way, they placed these teachings into stone, which would have survived the Great Flood.

To be continued…