The World of Extraordinary Ancestry

The biblical and Greek materials repeatedly describe unusual proximity between heavenly beings and human life. In Genesis 6 and the Watcher traditions, that proximity involves troubling unions and extraordinary offspring. Greek genealogy gives many named forms of divine-human ancestry.

We can group these scenes for the purpose of comparison. They concern a remembered world in which ancestry itself can carry a supernatural claim, rather than only a relation to distant worship or protection.

The grouping does not make the events identical. It identifies the kind of question the stories ask us to consider: what happens when powers beyond humanity enter the history of human descent?

The phrase primordial or heroic order will refer to that pattern here. It is a way of arranging the texts so that their similarities and differences become visible. The historical connection remains to be established.