The sixth chapter of Genesis begins with a puzzling episode in which “sons of gods” (to render the phrase literally) mate with human women to produce a race of giants. At this point, God announces that the human lifespan will henceforth be capped at 120 years. Benjamin Sommer notes that legends of deities begetting quasi-divine offspring with mortal consorts were common in ancient Near Eastern and Greek myth, but seem out of place in the monotheistic Torah. Yet the tale of the giants may not be so anomalous after all:

In Greek and Mesopotamian literature, gods become mortals, and humans divine—all of which points to a fundamental similarity between humanity and divinity in these ancient texts. The very core of polytheism is not simply that there are many gods but that gods and humans are made of the same stuff. Conversely, the Bible does not claim that God is the only heavenly being; after all, there are angels.

The core of biblical monotheism, as the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen and the great Israeli biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann showed, is something else: that God is unique. Even as Scripture demands that human beings attempt to imitate God, it also stresses they need to realize they will never fully succeed in doing so. It is for this reason that the book of Genesis includes this brief and surprising tale. . . .

It was hard for ancient people to admit it, and it’s even harder for moderns, but the Torah teaches that humanity has limits, and it’s not our role to play God.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.