Questions raised during the session, with answers drawn from the teaching.
Q: Doesn’t Scripture say God visits sins on multiple generations? Doesn’t that apply here — couldn’t the curse on Canaan come from what his father Ham did?
The passage being referenced is Exodus 20:5–6, where God says he visits the iniquity of fathers on children to the third and fourth generation. That verse operates within the framework of the Mosaic covenant — it is about the consequences that flow through families and communities when a covenant people turns to idolatry. Those consequences take the form of material hardship: failed harvests, military defeat, foreign invasion. They are not a declaration of guilt transferred from parent to child, and they are not an eternal judgment. They describe the real-world effects of a corrupted spiritual environment that a family or community creates for itself.
More importantly, the curse on Canaan predates the Mosaic covenant by centuries. Noah is not invoking a legal code. He is speaking prophetically — announcing what God has already seen in Canaan’s future. God does not punish one person for what another person did. What he does is declare, through the prophetic voice of Noah, what Canaan’s own choices will produce and what consequences will therefore follow.
Q: But the text doesn’t say “thus says the Lord” — how do we know this is God speaking through Noah and not just an angry grandfather?
Two things establish it.
First, the pattern. Across Genesis, every time a patriarch pronounces blessings or curses over his descendants — Noah over his sons, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob over theirs — those pronouncements come to pass. They function prophetically across the board. This is not a coincidence of editing. The patriarchal blessings are a recognized literary and theological category in the text, and they consistently describe futures that unfold exactly as announced.
Second, the content. If this were Noah reacting in anger to what Ham did, he would have cursed Ham. He didn’t. He cursed Canaan — who wasn’t even present, who had committed no recorded offense, and who hadn’t even been born in the timeline of the immediate narrative. The only explanation that makes the target of the curse coherent is that this is prophetic: Noah is seeing what God already knows about Canaan’s future, and declaring it.
Q: Are the foreign gods Israel worshipped — Baal, Asherah, all the rest — actually real spiritual beings, or are they just idols?
They are real. Deuteronomy 32:17 calls them “demons” and “gods they had not known.” These are the angelic beings of the divine council, assigned to govern the nations after Babel, who corrupted their stewardship and began demanding worship rather than dispensing justice. Psalm 82 addresses them as real beings before whom God stands in judgment. Daniel 10 names specific ones — the “prince of Persia,” the “prince of Greece” — as angelic figures contending over the nations they govern.
They are not omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent — those belong to God alone. They are created beings with real but limited authority, accountable to a higher court, and headed for judgment. But real they are. When Israel worshipped at Baal’s altars, they were not bowing before a carved piece of wood. They were pledging allegiance to a spiritual being who actually received it.
Q: Why do some Bibles say “sons of Israel” in Deuteronomy 32:8? Is that a valid reading, or is it wrong?
It is a translation based on a later manuscript — the Masoretic text, compiled by Jewish scholars around AD 1000. Manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 and over a thousand years older than the Masoretic text, read “sons of God” (bene Elohim) at this verse. The Septuagint — the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars in the second and third centuries BC — reads “angels of God.” Two independent witnesses predating the Masoretic tradition agree.
The “sons of Israel” reading also fails on contextual grounds. Israel did not exist when the nations were divided at Babel; Abraham hadn’t been born yet. And the seventy nations in Genesis 10 do not correspond to any count of the sons of Israel. “Sons of God” is the linguistically consistent reading — it is the same phrase used in Genesis 6 and Job 1, both times referring to members of the heavenly court. The manuscript evidence, the contextual coherence, and the consistent usage of the phrase across the Hebrew Bible all point the same direction.
Q: Are the Nephilim still around today? Does “also afterward” mean they’re still here?
Genesis 6:4 establishes that Nephilim existed “in those days — and also afterward,” which confirms that they appeared again in the post-flood world. The biblical record tracks them specifically in the land of Canaan through the conquest period and a few associated accounts beyond it — including Goliath, the clans Joshua encountered, and the giants described in Numbers 13. After those accounts, the biblical record stops referencing them as an ongoing presence. Whether any such beings exist in the present is a question Scripture doesn’t directly answer beyond the conquest-era material.
Q: If the flood destroyed all life except what was on the ark, how did giants get back into the land of Canaan?
The flood destroyed the Nephilim themselves. It did not destroy the knowledge the Watchers had left behind. Jubilees 8 records that Cainan — whose name becomes “Canaan” — found inscriptions carved by the Watchers into the rock at Mount Hermon, the very location where they had descended. He copied those inscriptions in secret. They contained the teachings and practices the Watchers had given humanity before the flood — including, presumably, the means by which they had communicated with and involved themselves in the human world.
The subsequent concentration of giants exclusively in the land Canaan illegally occupied strongly implies that the knowledge he preserved was used to invite a repetition of what had happened before the flood — but localized now, not global. That localization is why God’s response was different: not a second flood (he had promised not to destroy the earth by water again), but a targeted holy war through Israel to remove what had been brought back into the world in that specific region.
These questions were raised during the session and are preserved here as a record of what came up in the room. They are a companion to, not a replacement for, the main chapter notes.