I’ve got the impression that in some places, the leaders organized ways to take care of the poor. The help was not at the level of modern standards but there were almshouses, orphanages, auctions where people could offer how much they would demand payment for taking care of an orphan or disabled person (lowest offer won). There were also places that gave food to the poor.
Some of these actions were funded by individuals but these individuals followed the general models that were part of the Christian teaching in the society.
You make an interesting attempt at harmonizing Genesis with evolutionary language, but the biblical pattern runs deeper. Adam was not the first to sin. Lucifer was. God’s love, imbued with choice, was extended first in heaven before earth. All creation was given choice, which is why a third of the heavenly host also fell.
You are right to connect sapiens with history, but not in the way you frame it. Creation moved naturally up to the point of intelligent but godless man. These early humans were clever yet savage, inward and overpowering. God knew such a humanity would never yield true stewards of His creation. That is why Adam was unique, set apart from natural man as covenant-bearer. Through him the divine line carried forward, preserved in Noah and his descendants. This is why genealogy matters in Scripture, it is the thread of God’s covenant woven through a broken humanity.
The flood itself is the judgment that separates covenant from chaos. The tales of giants and strange creatures before the flood give us a glimpse of what life looked like when humanity was left to its own devices. Without divine guidance, mankind was violent, restless, and futile. Has that truly changed today, or do we simply wear new clothes while wielding the same destructive tools?
And here is the deeper pattern: when Satan was cast down, creation shifted. Reality was allowed to bear the weight of evil. Since then, creation itself cannot be trusted without God, because good and evil cannot coexist in harmony. Every chapter of history shows the same arc; pride, rebellion, collapse. God gives creation freedom, and creation in turn chooses self.
This is the narrative Scripture reflects: heaven and earth alike corrupted by pride, salvation only secured through God’s covenant, and Christ standing as the true steward where Adam and natural man failed. The flood was the very first baptism of creation in its entirety. Now move forward after the early examples of our failure when God walked with us this time.
Do we see such justice anywhere? At all? Equity? Social, real, meaningful justice?
I know many and of many more who yearn for it. I don’t see that the yearning brings it about. I don’t see the yearning as evidence that there is something for which to yearn.
If it were worldly, I would expect to see it present in the world large scale.
Except humanity wasn’t “left to its own devices”; the "sons of elohim came down and deliberately led people astray – that’s what the brief Genesis 6 reference is about, along with references in Jude and Peter.
So humanity thought it had divine guidance, it was just that those who were supposed to do that guiding went off in their own direction(s).
What an incredibly weird false dichotomy. Neither scientific nor relevant to Christianity.
If Jesus were the real deal, He blows all this nonsense, this ancient cultural garbage, to bits. Wipes it off the board.
[Jesus’ fully divine nature has to be separated from his fully human, ancient Hebrew-Canaanite feet of clay. The trouble is, nothing survives that amputation.]
Exactly the opposite: the Incarnation affirms the ancient cultural context. He didn’t bring some new heavenly worldview that miraculously gets imprinted on believers’ brains, He came within a worldview and worked within it just as He had been doing all along. Yahweh has always functioned in and through men; in Christ He was and is that man, and that affirms all the prior work in and through men–
No Beauty We Could Desire
Yes, you are always everywhere. But I,
Hunting in such immeasurable forests,
Could never bring the noble hart to bay.
The scent was too perplexing for my hounds;
Nowhere sometimes, then again everywhere.
Other scents, too, seemed to them almost the same
Therefore I turn my back on the unapproachable
Stars and horizons and all musical sounds,
Poetry itself, and the winding stair of thought.
Leaving the forests where you are pursued in vain
–Often a mere white gleam–I turn instead
To the appointed place where you pursue.
Not in Nature, not even in Man, but in one
Particular Man, with a date, so tall, weighing
So much, talking Aramaic, having learned a trade;
Not in all food, not in all bread and wine
(Not, I mean, as my littleness requires)
But this wine, this bread…no beauty we could desire.
~C.S. Lewis, Poems, (1964)
Again, that’s backwards: God embraced being human, and Jesus remains human, and there can be no separation – He isn’t a patch job, glued together, He’s a single Person, fully Man, fully God.
How does Jesus being fully human, and therefore biased, ignorant and enculturated, validate utterly any bizarre ANE non-knowledge beliefs?
I give Jesus all good will as a natural phenomenon AND I continue that good will in to the proposition that he was God incarnate. That doesn’t change the nonsense of ANE beliefs. Jesus stands alone, nothing else matters. If the incarnation happened, it happened in fully, and only, human, history. Tales of the supernatural in that are manifest dross. It’s hard enough to make God Love in Christ, trying to make him Love in the OT and OT ‘history’ - utter and normal ANE weirdness - in the NT; the harrowing of Hell, the continuation of Daniel’s apocalyptic in Revelation, is absurd. A rabbit warren of distraction from the main and only event.
It validates the message that comes with those parameters.
According to multiple translation teams the critical word in the OT is chesed (hkhe-sehd), which is translated as “lovingkindness” or “steadfast love” or “covenant love” or even “loving faithfulness” (shows how tough the concept is to get into English). It is critical because it is central to the OT concept of and message about God.
I’m sorry that you can’t see that thread running through the Tanakh.
I’m sorry that you can’t see that you’re gaslighting me. That the ghastly horrors visited upon humanity by the God of the OT can’t be ameliorated by sentiment. Hitler loved his dog.