This is the Bamao podcast with Marty Solman. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today we take a look at the backstory of Noah and talk about the mid-rosh surrounding the Nephilim from Genesis 6.

So we have a lot going on with these few little paragraphs leading up to the flood narrative, Marty, what can you tell us about this?

We do have a lot going on. We even have some stuff we're not even going to get to. I'm really just going to talk about little bits and pieces here.

When you talk about the Nephilim, there's a whole section of Jewish apocrypha, like the book of Enoch, and a whole bunch of stuff that's even written even a little bit later, like 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th century.

About the watchers, if you get it on Google and start getting into the midrosh around us, the watchers, you'll be in a whole nether realm of apocryphal midrosh.

It's cool, but it's also wild and crazy and really easy to abuse. So we're not even going to be in the middle of that. We're just going to talk about little bits and pieces here today.

We're not taking a whole red pill. We're just like cutting in half and taking part of the red pill.

That's right. To play off of that, it's good to, talking about the abuse of midrosh.

We need to come back and cycle back and say, we are not the experts on midrosh.

We're probably getting all kinds of things wrong here. We're getting all kinds of things wrong. We're probably applying it incorrectly. We probably misunderstand all kinds of things.

We need to, when we talk about the midrosh, Bret and I on the podcast, when you learn this stuff and listen to this stuff, we need to realize that when we are not ordained rabbis, when we are not capital R rabbis, who are not trained in this stuff, we need to not hold this with like firm fisted of the word.

We need to hold this very loosely with like humility. We are simply trying to let the midrosh open our eyes to, I mean, we're going all the way back to session like episode zero here.

We have been taught in the Western world that we can learn the static truth, that we can fill in the blanks, we can achieve all the answers, and then we teach this with a sense of like resolute, comprehensive authority.

And what the Eastern world view teaches us, the gift it wants to give us, is to hold all of this with much more open hands, learning how to ask better questions, stop pursuing the answers, stop trying to figure out what to think and start learning how to think that's why I want to toy with the midrosh.

Because I find it helps me deconstruct my Western mind. Now to even make this point, Brent, this is not the first time we've attempted to record this episode, correct?

Right.

An unprecedented situation in the BAME OF HOTCAST.

And over 200 episodes, we have never pulled the plug on a recording. Like we have, you know, we've had stuff we've edited out here and there you've heard the bloopers at the end of the episodes, if you've listened all the way to the end of the episodes, like there's all kinds of things that you get, but never have we like pulled the plug, walked away from the episode,

had to do so much more research. Marty was losing his mind. Brent didn't even intend to corner me with a question, and he did, and I realized I didn't know anything about what I was talking about.

It was fantastic. What was that experience like for you, Brent?

It was bizarre. I went on like a two hour walk after that, just like in this days, and I came home, and I told Maggie I was like, Maggie something really weird happened to you. I think I broke Marty.

I don't know. And like, right as I'm telling her that you text me, like, okay, I've looked into some things and feeling a lot better about this.

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