MDDM: ch. 67 "Garden Pests"

[Doug Millison]

There may also be an allusion to the "giants" who inhabited the earth
before God created humans. Genesis mentions them:

Genesis 6
1   And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the
earth, and daughters were born unto them,
2   That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and
they took them wives of all which they chose.
3   And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that
he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
4   There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when
the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children
to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
http://www.biblegateway.com/cgi-bin/bible?passage=GEN+6&language=english&version
=KJV

Genesis describes what you might call a sort of "devolution" -- from these
"giants in the earth" to mere men, from Adam and Noah and Methusela who
live hundreds of years, down to Abraham and his descendents whose life
spans growing shorter and shorter, approaching ours.  Also, humans
gradually lose direct contact with God -- a theme taken up in a fine book
I've recommended here before, _God a Biography_, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
book by Jack Miles:

on the Amazon.com page for this book:
"From Booklist
Literary studies generally bomb in public libraries. Who wouldn't rather
read, say, War and Peace, than a book about it? But here is a literary
study novel enough to woo ordinary (i.e., noncollege-student) readers,
provocative enough in its approach to hold their attention throughout, and
well enough written (academic literary studies are usually literarily
execrable) to make reading it enjoyable. The text Miles examines is the Old
Testament, although for his critical purpose, he reads its books in the
order of their appearance in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible--that is, with the
prophets (Isaiah through Malachi) preceding the books of later history and
wisdom (I Chronicles through the Song of Solomon), which in turn are
reversed (wisdom before history). Miles follows this order because it is
more conducive to his explication of the Tanakh as the story of God's
development as a literary character. In this view, God starts out as a
creative being with neither a past nor any prospective future; nor does he
have any companion before he makes man in his image. He seems, Miles
argues, to discover his attributes as the Bible progresses, and for a very
long time--until Isaiah speaks of him, to be precise--the quality now most
popular with his people, love, is not among them. Moreover, in the account
of him given by the order of books in the Tanakh, he proceeds from
involvement with to retirement from human actions and from speech to
silence. Very starchy believers will doubtless castigate what they see as
the blasphemous presumption of treating God as a literary character, but
less flammable believers as well as nonbelievers will be afforded greater
understanding of how Western civilization formulated the peculiarly
personal religious consciousness that informs Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam alike. Ray Olson "

Miles analysis also echoes the Gnosticism that Pynchon develops in GR,
Vineland, and M&D, a God who retreats from a flawed creation. Interesting
in this context is _Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and
Resurrection_, a book by Harold Bloom that I've mentioned several times in
the past here, Dave Monroe, too.