Before the flood arrives, something stranger appears.

Genesis 6 opens with divine beings, called sons of God, taking human women as wives and producing offspring the text calls Nephilim, mighty ones, men of renown. The description is brief, strange, and deeply unsettling. It sounds like mythology borrowed from a culture Israel was supposed to leave behind.

Then God looks at the earth, grieves what He sees, and decides to unmake it with water.

And then there is a question many readers carry before the flood even begins. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh contains a flood story almost identical to Genesis, written a thousand years earlier: a righteous man warned by a god, a great boat, animals saved, a bird sent to find dry land, a sacrifice after the waters recede. For readers who assumed Genesis was entirely unique, that parallel feels threatening.