Moses must be to contemporary `men of renown' in tradition and history. Bryant in his

Analysis of Ancient Mythology traces all idolatry back to apostate perversions of the truth

of the Deluge. "My purpose is", he said "to divest mythology of every foreign and

unmeaning ornament, and to display the truth in its native simplicity; to show that all the

rites and mysteries of the Gentiles were only so many memorials of their principal

ancestors, and of the great occurrences to which they had been witness". "The history of

Noah has been recorded by the ancients through their whole theology, but has been

obscured by the many names and characters given him. He is Thoth, Hermes, Menes,

Osiris, Atlas and Prometheus."

Greek mythology gives an important place to certain beings described as of a mingled

heavenly and earthly origin, and called giants, titans, demigods, heroes. The reader will

call to mind many heroes of Greek mythology who were said to be the offspring of the

union of gods and men, for example, Achilles, was the only son of a goddess, and was

invulnerable except in the heel. Another well-known figure in Greek mythology is Leda,

the wife of a king of Sparta, with whom it is said Zeus fell in love, and visited her in the

form of a swan. The result was the birth of the twins Castor and Pollux, and the famous

or infamous "Helen of Troy".

In Greek mythology Uranos (the heavens) was the first king of the gods. The Titans, a

family of giants, were the progeny of the union between Uranos and Ge (the earth), a

very palpable reference back to the union of the sons of God with the daughters of men,

and a possible corruption of `the generations of the heavens and the earth' (Gen. 2: 4).

These Titans rose in rebellion and were consigned to Tartarus. This last word takes us

forward to II Pet. 2: 4, where we read "For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but

cast them down to hell" where the word translated `cast down to hell' is the word

tartaroo.

Tartarus is nowhere spoken in the Scriptures, except in this passage, but it evidently

referred to a place that was known to the reader. If we refuse to admit the testimony of

antiquity, we can assign no meaning to this term. According to the ancients, Tartarus was

one of the regions of Hell, surrounded by a brazen wall, a place of intense cold and

darkness. Æneas is said to have heard the dragging of the chains of those imprisoned

therein. Tartarus was said to be so cold, that Plutarch explained it was so called because

`to shiver' was in the Greek `to tartarize'. In the lowest pit of the dread abode were `the

subtartaris'd Titans', Titenes hupotarrarioi (Hesiod).

While we do not purpose pursuing this evident of acquaintance of the ancients with

the facts of Gen. 6:, the many parallels that can be discovered, together with the link

formed by Peter's use of the pagan Tartarus, prevent us from dismissing the whole

subject as irrelevant or meaningless. Dreadful things happened in the early days of this

earth, desperate attempts to corrupt the seed, to prevent its continuance and to divert the

early prophecy of Gen. 3: 15 away from the true Seed to the false, with all its

corrupting effects, and these events in the infancy of the race left indelible marks on the

minds of men.