The Descent of the Gods

Discovery

Author's Note - 

This story is based on a passage in the Bible found in Genesis 6:1-4. The Biblical narrative indicates that the time period before Noah's flood lasted for 1,600 years, and it is not entirely void of details of what occurred during the Antediluvian age. Although it is nestled between two of the Bible's most famous stories (Cain & Abel and Noah's Flood), very few people know this story. Although short, these four verses record a bizarre event that most of Christendom simply ignores. 

For a long time, I had also disregarded the passage as odd, out of place and therefore not worthy of being explored further. That was until I discovered that this story had not been passed over by the ancients - not in the slightest. The story that the Bible only mentioned in four verses was elaborated on by a host of cultures, historians and religious writers over many centuries and even millennia.  

The oldest manuscripts that record the story in its entirety predate the birth of Christ (the Dead Sea Scrolls). It was not some obscure legend to Christ and the apostles - it was a well known part of Jewish lore. Some writers claimed that much of Greek and Roman mythologies originated with this event.

A consistent story arose from these sources. It's a shocking tale and asks hard questions it doesn't immediately give satisfactory answers to. This is why it is ignored by so many today. 

But why was it originally forgotten? To discover that reason, I had to continue searching through old histories and books. I found that as certain religious organizations grew in power in the centuries after Christ, some of their founding leaders broke tradition with their predecessors. They denied the version of the story that had existed until then. Due to the influence of these men in a religion that governed nations, minds and hearts alike, the interpretation of the Antediluvian story was changed and relegated to the status of an unimportant historical footnote. 

For more than one thousand years, the story remained just that. However, even a millennium was insufficient to remove the story's impact on our culture, or to completely erase it from memory.

As I uncovered the story as remembered by the ancient world, I started to have a desire to retell it for my own generation. I have struggled to do justice to the significance of the event itself, while remaining consistent to the worldview and context of the Bible - my principle rule was to craft a story that was true to the facts presented by the Bible in the passage and the rest of the Book. Other authors have taken serious liberties with the Biblical narrative to bring this story to life. I've done my best to tell a story that was theologically plausible.

Many legends and more myths exist about this story, and although I studied them and much of the story is inspired by them, there are some differences. I used some elements while disregarding others or reinterpreting them to fit the story I envisioned. So i have included excerpts from these sources at the end of relevant chapters, without including references that would spoil future plot points.

My sincere wish is that The Descent of the Gods delivers a cohesive Biblical adventure story that will surprise you and delight you as it did for me. And that by remaining as true as possible to the source material and the theology that underpins it all, you can be intrigued by the thought that it all very well could have happened this way.