From Adam to Abraham

35

The most notable departure from Josephus is Malalas’ identification of Seth’s de-
scendants with the elusive “sons of God” mentioned, however fleetingly, in Genesis
6. For the most part, Byzantine chroniclers disowned the commonly held older su-
pernaturalist understanding of them as a class of fallen angels who had intercourse
with the daughters of men and fathered from them a monstrous race of giants. A
rationalizing explanation first set forth in the chronicle of Julius Africanus found a
much more welcoming reception: these were the descendants of Seth, who earned the
honorific title “sons of God” in recognition of the wisdom, piety, and stature of their
line.43 When, therefore, Moses referred to the offspring of the “sons of God” as giants,
it was in recognition of their imposing stature, not their monstrous nature. That inter-
pretation aligned perfectly with Malalas’own euhemeristic treatment of Greek myths.
Fables spun by Pindar about serpent-footed giants who rose up in rebellion against
the gods were, he writes, only a poetic distortion of Moses’ own older and more sober
report about the issue of the “sons of God” and “daughters of men.”44 The historicizing
interpretation of Genesis 6 also enabled Malalas to meld Josephus’account of the stele
of the Sethites with its more problematic counterpart in Jubilees. In this way, Malalas
managed to infuse the Jubilees story with a completely different, even diametrically op-
posed, sense, and one at home with his own more affirmative views about the origins
and transmission of knowledge. Instead of the demonic and proscribed revelations of
fallen angels and the cause of Cainan’s sin, the teachings that he discovered on the
stone slab now contain the precious astronomical findings of Seth and his “god-fear-
ing” offspring. Arphaxad’s son Cainan thus did the world a service by seeing to the
preservation of their learning for posterity. India was one of the beneficiaries of the
discovery; the people of that nation first learned about the science of astronomy when
another descendant of Arphaxad, an Indian astronomer named Gandoubarios, com-
posed for them a book on the subject.45
Reshaping/zz^z’/cA portrait of social decay at the time of Abraham’s great-grandfa-
ther Serug to meet the standards of euhemeristic historiography demanded of Malalas
even more thoroughgoing revision. Most striking is his terminology. Serug, he writes,
was the figure responsible for introducing the “doctrine of Hellenism”, a religious ide-
ology that was soon spread throughout the world. Malalas’ definition of “Hellenism”,
familiar to many Byzantine chroniclers, was not an original formulation on his part.
In his Panarion, the late 4th-century heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis had already
used the term in much the same way. In his taxonomy of the pre-Christian heresies,
Epiphanius numbered Hellenism third in a chronological succession of four: “barba-
43 lulius Africanus, Chronographiae fr. 23,1-14 Wallraff/Roberto.
44 Malalas, Chronographia I 3 (p. 5,47-55 Thurn).
45 Malalas, Chronographia I 7 (p. 9, 39-41 Thurn). Several Byzantine chronicles attribute the discovery to
Shelah, not Cainan; see Symeon Logothetes, Chronicon 26, 3 (p. 29, 4-9 Wahlgren).The variant tradi-
tion arises from a conflict in the genealogies of the post-diluvian patriarchs. Although attested in most
witnesses to the Septuagint version of Genesis, the name Cainan is lacking in the Hebrew version. He
was also missing in the genealogies of the universal chronicles of Julius Africanus and Eusebius, on
which see Georgius Syncellus, Ecloga chronographka 65 (pp. 36,32-37,1 Mosshammer).