Parsing The Bible For Space Aliens
philly.com
Posted on Sun, Jan. 05, 2003
The Raelians, who claimed success in cloning, cited Scripture in describing extraterrestrial origins.
By Jim Remsen
INQUIRER FAITH LIFE EDITOR
Open your Bibles today to Genesis, Chapter 6. It's a strange passage, part of the accounting of sins that presaged the great flood. Here's how it reads in a prominent Jewish translation of the Torah:
When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the divine beings saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and they took wives from among those that pleased them. The Lord said, "My breath shall not abide in man forever, since he too is flesh; let the days allowed him be one hundred and twenty years." It was then, and later too, that the Nephilim appeared on earth - when the divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown."
Jewish sages acknowledge this account of human-divine coupling as a curious fragment of text - but they generally have given it an earthbound understanding.
Some Jewish accounts refer to the "divine beings" as "fallen angels." But most Jewish commentators consider them to be human "sons of God" - as in upper-caste "sons of the judges," according to Bible scholar Neshama Leibowitz. In her Studies in the Book of Genesis, Leibowitz says Genesis 6 is a lesson in how "the stronger enslave the weaker, the classic example of exploitation being the subjugation of the daughters" of common folk.
No way, say UFO enthusiasts.
A number of fringe religious groups have long seized on Genesis 6 as proof of extraterrestrials. Their writings, known as "the ancient astronaut school," hold that the "divine beings" (B'nai Elohim in Hebrew) were super-intelligent visitors from outer space - and that the Bible provides a garbled chronicling of that primeval event.
It's the sort of far-out stuff normally relegated to supermarket tabloids. But it pushed its way to the top of the news with the report that a UFO Elohim sect, the Raelians, claimed to have cloned the first human, a baby girl.
The Raelians have a dazzling master narrative. It goes like this:
The Elohim come from another planet and are responsible for creating life on this planet. Elohim, a plural noun traditionally thought to be a broad reference to God, should be translated as "those who came from the sky."
The sect's founder, onetime French journalist Claude Vorilhon, was the person chosen by the Elohim to bring the news of humankind's origins to the people of planet Earth. The Elohim dubbed him Rael and made him their prophet.
During close encounters with a few Elohim emissaries in UFOs, Vorilhon learned that eons ago Elohim mastered genetics and cell biology and set up laboratories in and around present-day Israel. From DNA, these Elohim created plants, then animals, then humans.
Vorilhon says the Elohim would like to come to Earth again to give us some of their advanced technology, but will not return until there is world peace and an embassy is built for them in Jerusalem.
According to Vorilhon, the offspring (Nephilim) of Elohim fathers and human mothers are of prime importance. He was told he is such a person, as are all the major prophets, including Moses, Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad.
There is no God of salvation in Raelian belief. Rather, like Daoists, the 40,000 or so Raelians avow an immaterial God that is "a concept without identity, and without consciousness of our own existence."
Here's the kicker: Raelians believe we have souls only while we are alive. Eternal life, therefore, comes not through the soul but via the re-creation of a person from his DNA.
"Cloning is the key to eternal life," says Vorilhon.
Most mainstream religious figures have denounced the Raelians and their human-engineering goals. For instance, William Devlin, head of the Philadelphia-based Urban Family Council, called the sect "perhaps the wackiest group around" and condemned their cloning work as "the rebirth of Frankenstein in biological medicine."
Beyond that, Bible scholars find the appropriation of sacred Scripture to be cockeyed.
Everett Fox, Bible professor at Clark University, acknowledges in his The Five Books of Moses commentary that Genesis 6 "seems difficult to reconcile with biblical ideas about God." Perhaps it was retained, he suggests, "to round out a picture familiar to ancient readers, and to recall the early closeness of the divine and human which, according to many cultures, later dissolved."
But Jeffrey H. Tigay, professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages at the University of Pennsylvania, and Robert Harris of the Jewish Theological Seminary, both reject the notion of Elohim being "visitors from the sky."
"Nowhere in the word Elohim is there anything that means sky," Harris told the Village Voice. "In Hebrew, the word sky is either Shamayim or Rakiah."
Tigay, in an e-mail to The Inquirer, said Elohim "most commonly means god, both as a common noun and as a name of the Biblical God." Elsewhere in the Torah, Elohim "is sometimes used for angels (note elohim in Judges 13:22)... and even spirits of the dead (1 Samuel 28:13)."
"If the word meant 'those who come from the sky,' it could not have been used for spirits of the dead, who were thought (even the righteous dead) to reside in the netherworld beneath the earth," Tigay said.
Vorilhon, the prophet Rael, scoffs at the critics.
"People are lost and misguided by primitive religions that are trying to slow down science," he said in an interview with the Miami Herald. "Nothing can stop science."
In his eyes, humans will one day be B'nai Elohim themselves, creating life and spreading it to other planets.
"The people we create will look at us as gods," he said. |
