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162. "In a religious point of view the Cainites are not represented as cultivating the worship of the Redeemer—Jehovah. They probably still retained the nature-worship [which Cain adopted from the first] of Elohim. . . . Of the Sethites, on the other hand, we have mainly the record of their invoking Jehovah while walking with Elohim, of their retaining a hope of redemption from the fall, though it seems certain that towards the end of the antediluvian period they also degenerated, in a religious point of view, probably in consequence of the intermixture with Cainites, mentioned before. This intermixture, however, is stated to have originated in the aggressions of the Nephilim among the Cainites, who captured wives from the feebler Sethites,—feebler because not furnished with instruments of brass and iron. This, I think, is implied in the expression, 'took to them wives of all they chose,' that is, at their own will and pleasure, and without regard to the primitive law of marriage, which provides that a man should leave father and mother and cleave to his wife."
==Footnotes==
[1] We shall again encounter this superstition that angels sinned with human females. Therefore we think it well to add these words from the learned Prof. Peter Lange of Bonn University: "In Its relation to the philosophy of religion the angel hypothesis would have the effect of confounding all the ground conceptions of revelation, and obliterating its distinctions. It authenticated a fact which perfectly destroys all distinction between revelation and mythology, between a Divine miracle and magic, between the Biblical conception of nature, an conformity to law, and the wild apocryphal stories. . . With what sort of superstition this angel-interpretation had already connected itself in early times, we may learn from the twenty-second chapter of Tertullian’s Apologetic.”
==See Also==