Neither Mortal nor Immortal

But someone will say to us: “Was the human being made mortal by nature?” Not at all. “Immortal, then?” We do not say that either. But someone will say: “Then he was made nothing at all?” That is not what we say. He was made neither mortal by nature nor immortal. For if God had made him immortal from the beginning, he would have made him a god; and again, if he had made him mortal, God would look like the cause of his death. So he made him neither immortal nor mortal, but, as I said earlier, able to receive either — so that if he leaned toward the things of immortality by keeping God’s command, he would receive immortality from him as his reward and become a god, and if instead he turned to the things of death by disobeying God, he would be the cause of his own death himself. For God made the human being free, and his own master. [a]

So what he got for himself by carelessness and disobedience, this God now gives him as a gift out of his own love for people and his mercy — when the person obeys him. Just as the man drew death onto himself by disobeying, so by obeying the will of God anyone who wants to can get everlasting life for himself. For God has given us a law and holy commands, and everyone who keeps them can be saved, and can reach the resurrection and inherit incorruption.

After Adam was thrown out of Paradise, that is when he knew Eve his wife, whom God had made into a wife for him out of his rib. And he did this not because he was unable to form the woman on her own, but because God knew in advance that people would name a multitude of gods. Since he knows beforehand, and knew that error was going to use the serpent to name a multitude of gods that do not exist — for though there is one God, error was already at work then to sow a multitude of gods and to say, “You will be like gods” — to keep anyone from supposing that one god made the man and a different god made the woman, for that reason he did not make the two of them as two separate works. And more than that: so that the mystery of God’s sole rule might be shown by it, God made the man’s wife at the same time as the man, and so that the goodwill between them might be greater. [d]

So Adam said to Eve, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” and he went on to prophesy as well: “For this reason a man will leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” And this very thing is shown being brought to completion among us. For which man who marries lawfully does not think little of mother and father and his whole family and everyone in his household, joining himself to his own wife and becoming one with her, and caring for her more? So much so that some men often make themselves liable even to death for the sake of their wives.

As for this Eve: because she was deceived at the start by the serpent and became the one who began sin, the demon who does harm — the one also called Satan, who spoke to her then through the serpent, and who is still at work today in the people he takes possession of — calls out her name, “Eva!” He is called demon and dragon because he ran away from God; for at first he was an angel. There is a great deal to say about him, so I am setting the account of him aside for now, since I have written about him elsewhere.

So when Adam knew Eve his wife, she conceived and bore a son whose name was Cain, and she said, “I have gotten a man through God.” And she went on to bear a second, whose name was Abel. He became a shepherd of sheep, while Cain worked the ground. There is more story about them than this, and an ordered explanation of it as well, so the book itself, the one titled The Genesis of the World, can teach anyone who loves learning their story more exactly. [i]

Now when Satan saw Adam and his wife not only still alive but even having children — and he was carried away with envy at not being strong enough to put them to death — and when he saw that Abel was pleasing to God, he worked on Abel’s brother, the one called Cain, and made him kill his brother Abel. That is how death got its start, traveling into this world and reaching every race of people down to this day.

But God, who is merciful and wanted to give Cain an opening for repentance and confession, just as he had given Adam, said, “Where is your brother Abel?” Cain answered God defiantly: “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” At that God was angry with him and said, “Why did you do this? The sound of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which opened its mouth to take your brother’s blood from your hand. Groaning and trembling you will be on the earth.” So from that time the ground has been afraid and no longer takes in human blood — nor the blood of any animal either. Which makes it plain that the ground is not the cause; the man who broke the command is.

Cain himself also had a son, whose name was Enoch, and he built a city and named it after his son Enoch. From then on the building of cities began — and this was before the flood, not as Homer lies when he says: [m]

To Enoch was born a son named Irad; he fathered the one called Mehujael, and Mehujael fathered Methushael, and Methushael fathered Lamech. Lamech took two wives for himself, whose names were Adah and Zillah. From then on began the practice of having more than one partner — and music as well. For Lamech had three sons: Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal. Jabal became a man who lived in tents and raised livestock; Jubal is the one who introduced the harp and the lyre; and Tubal became a hammerer, a smith working bronze and iron.

That is as far as the register of Cain’s offspring runs. The rest of the seed of his line has fallen into forgetting, because he murdered his own brother. In Abel’s place God granted Eve to conceive and bear a son who was called Seth, and from him the rest of the human race travels down to the present day. For anyone who wants to know, and loves learning, it is easy to set out all the generations from the holy Scriptures; and as I said above, I have already given part of this account, the order of the genealogy, in another work, in the first book of On Histories. All of it is taught to us by the Holy Spirit, who speaks through Moses and the rest of the prophets — so that our writings, the writings of those of us who worship God, turn out to be the older ones, and are shown to be truer than all writers and poets as well.

And about music, too, some have talked nonsense, saying Apollo was its inventor; others say Orpheus discovered the art of music from the sweet voices of the birds. Their account is shown to be empty and pointless, since both of these men came along many years after the flood. And what concerns Noah — who is called Deucalion by some — I have set out in the book I mentioned; and if you like, you can read it for yourself.

After the flood there was again a beginning of cities and kings, and it went like this. The first city was Babylon, and Erech and Accad and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. Their king was named Nimrod. Out of these came a man named Asshur, and that is where the Assyrians get their name. Nimrod built the cities Nineveh and Rehoboth and Calah and Resen, between Nineveh and Calah; and Nineveh became a great city, one of the first. [r]

Another son of Shem the son of Noah, named Mizraim, fathered the Ludim, and those called Anamim, and the Lehabim, and the Naphtuhim, and the Pathrusim, and the Casluhim — and out of them came the Philistines. As for Noah’s three sons, and their end and their genealogy, I made a summary register of them in the book I mentioned. Now I will go over what was left out about cities and kings, and about what happened when there was one lip and one language.

Before the languages were divided, the cities listed above already existed. But when people were about to be scattered, they took counsel by their own judgment and not through God: to build a city, and a tower whose peak would reach all the way to the sky, so that they could make themselves a name of glory. And since they had dared to attempt a heavy work against God’s purpose, God threw down their city and laid their tower flat. From that time he changed the languages of men, giving each a different speech. The Sibyl gave the same account, announcing that anger was coming on the world. She said:

And so on. These things, then, happened in the land of the Chaldeans. And in the land of Canaan there was a city named Haran. In those times the first king of Egypt was Pharaoh, who was also named Nechaoth by the Egyptians, and so the kings came in succession after him.

In the land of Shinar, among those called Chaldeans, the first king was Arioch; after him another, Ellasar; after him Chedorlaomer king of Elam; and after him Tidal, king of the nations called Assyrians. There were five other cities in the portion of Ham the son of Noah: the first called Sodom, then Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Bela, which was also given the name Zoar. And these are the names of their kings: Bera king of Sodom, Birsha king of Gomorrah, Shinab king of Admah, Shemeber king of Zeboiim, and Bela king of Zoar, the city that also bears the name Bela.

These served Chedorlaomer king of the Assyrians for twelve years, and in the thirteenth year they revolted from Chedorlaomer. And so it happened then that the four Assyrian kings joined battle against the five kings. This was the first beginning of wars coming about on the earth. They cut down the giants at Karnaim, and strong nations along with them, and the Ommaeans in that same city, and the Horites in the mountains named Seir, as far as the terebinth of Paran, which is in the wilderness.

At that same time there was a righteous king named Melchizedek, in the city of Salem, the city now called Hierosolyma. He became the first of all the priests of God Most High. From him the city was named Jerusalem — the Hierosolyma just mentioned — and from him priests came to be found over all the earth. After him Abimelech reigned in Gerar, and after him another Abimelech; then Ephron reigned, the one surnamed the Hittite. Those are the names the record holds for the kings of earlier times.

As for the Assyrians, the remaining kings across many years in between were passed over in silence and never written down. The Assyrian kings remembered as belonging to the very latest times, our own, are Tiglath-Pileser, and after him Shalmaneser, then Sennacherib. Sennacherib’s triarch was Adrammelech the Ethiopian, who also reigned over Egypt. And even these events, set beside our own writings, are quite recent.

From here, then, anyone who loves learning and loves what is ancient can take in the histories and see whether anything we say through the holy prophets is recent. At first the people of that time were few, in the land of Arabia and Chaldea; but after their languages were divided they began bit by bit to become many and to multiply over the whole earth. Some of them leaned toward settling in the east, others toward the parts of the great mainland and toward the north, so that they reached as far as the Britons in the northern latitudes. Others went to the land of Canaan, called Judea, and to Phoenicia, and to the parts of Ethiopia and Egypt and Libya, and the region called the scorched land, and the latitudes stretching out toward the west. The rest went to the places along the coast, and Pamphylia, and Asia, and Greece, and Macedonia, and after that Italy and the lands called the Gauls and the Spains and the Germanies — so that now the whole of it is filled with people living on it. [y]

Since, then, human settlement on the earth came about in three parts at the start — in the east, the south, and the west — the remaining parts of the earth were settled afterward, once people had spread out everywhere. The writers do not know any of this, and yet they want to say the world is shaped like a sphere and to compare it to a cube. How can they claim they are saying what is true about such things when they do not know how the world was made or how it was settled? As people gradually increased and multiplied on the earth, as I said before, that is how the islands of the sea and the remaining latitudes came to be settled too.

Who, then, among the so-called wise men and poets and historians, was strong enough to tell the truth about these things? They came along far later, and they brought in a multitude of gods — men born so many years after the cities, and last of all, after the kings and the nations and the wars. They should have made mention of everything, including what happened before the flood. The prophets among the Egyptians, or the Chaldeans, and the other writers should have been able to say exactly how the world was founded and the human being made, and everything that followed — if in fact they spoke by a divine and pure spirit and announced the truth in what was said through them. And they should have announced beforehand not only what had already happened or what was present, but also what was coming on the world. So it is shown that all the rest went astray, and that Christians alone have taken hold of the truth: we who are taught by the Holy Spirit, who spoke in the holy prophets and announced everything beforehand.

For the rest, let it be your work to search out the things of God in a friendly spirit — I mean the things spoken through the prophets — so that by setting what we say side by side with what the others say, you will be able to find the truth. As for the names of the so-called gods, I showed from the very histories they compiled themselves that among them these are found to be the names of men, as I made clear above. And their likenesses go on being molded day after day right up to now: idols, the works of men’s hands. These are what the crowd of empty-headed people serve, while they set aside the maker and craftsman of all things, who feeds every breathing creature; they are won over by empty teachings, through the error of a senseless opinion handed down from their fathers. [aa]

But God, the Father and creator of all things, did not abandon humanity. He gave a law and sent holy prophets to announce and to teach the human race, so that each one of us might sober up and recognize that there is one God. They also taught us to keep away from forbidden idol-worship, and adultery, and murder, sexual immorality, theft, love of money, false swearing, anger, and every kind of shameless excess and uncleanness; and that whatever a person would not want done to himself, he should not do to anyone else. So the one who acts rightly will escape the eternal punishments and be counted worthy of eternal life from God.

The divine law, then, does not only forbid bowing down to idols. It forbids bowing to the elements as well — the sun, the moon, or the rest of the stars — and forbids paying religious service to the sky, or the earth, or the sea, or springs, or rivers. We must serve only the one who really is God, the maker of all things, with holiness of heart and a sincere mind. That is why the holy law says: “You shall not commit adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony. You shall not set your desire on your neighbor’s wife.” And the prophets say the same. Solomon teaches us not to sin even by a signal of the eye, when he says: “Let your eyes look straight ahead, and let your eyelids signal what is right.” And Moses, himself a prophet too, says this about God’s sole rule: “This is your God, who makes the sky firm and founds the earth, whose hands showed forth all the host of heaven — and he did not set them out for you so that you should go after them.” And Isaiah himself says: “This is what the Lord God says, who made the sky firm and laid the foundation of the earth and everything in it, and who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk on it: This is the Lord your God.” And again God says through him: “I made the earth, and man upon it. I made the sky firm with my own hand.” And in another chapter: “This is your God, who fitted out the ends of the earth. He will not be hungry or grow tired, and there is no searching out his understanding.” Jeremiah says the same: “He made the earth by his strength, and set the inhabited world upright by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the sky, and the mass of water in the sky; and he brought clouds up from the end of the earth, made lightnings into rain, and brought winds out of his storehouses.” [ab]

You can see how agreeably and harmoniously all the prophets spoke, uttering by one and the same spirit what concerns God’s sole rule, and how the world came to be, and how the human being was made. More than that: they were in labor pains, grieving over the godless human race, and they shamed those who seemed to be wise, because of the error in them and the hardness of their heart. Jeremiah said: “Every man has been made a fool, with no knowledge of him. Every goldsmith is shamed by his carved images. The silversmith works his silver for nothing; there is no breath in them; on the day of their visitation they will perish.” David says the same: “They are corrupt, and they have made themselves detestable in the things they practice. There is no one who does what is good — not even one. They have all turned aside; together they have become useless.” So too Habakkuk: “What use is a carved image to the man who carved it — a lying illusion? Woe to the one who says to the stone, ‘Wake up,’ and to the wood, ‘Rise.’” The rest of the prophets of the truth spoke in the same way. And why should I count off the crowd of prophets? There are many of them, and they have said ten thousand things in friendship and agreement. Anyone who wants to can read what was said through them and know the truth exactly, and stop being carried off by opinion and pointless labor. These, then, whom I have named, were prophets among the Hebrews — men without letters, shepherds, ordinary people.