STORIES FROM THE BIBLE---3-1

                                             NOAH AND THE ARK --1

  

   After Abel was slain, and his brother Cain had gone into another land, again God gave a child to Adam and Eve. This child they named Seth; and other sons and daughters were given to them; for Adam and Eve lived many years. But at last they died, as God had said they must die, because they had eaten the fruits of the tree that God had forbidden them to eat.

 

   By the time that Adam died, there were many people on the earth; for the children of Adam and Eve had many other children; and when these grew up they had other children ; and these had children also. And in those early times people lived much longer than they do now. Very few people now live to be hundred years old; but in those days, when the earth was new, men often lived to be eight hundred, or even nine hundred years old. So after a time that part of the earth where  Adam's sons lived began to be full of people.

 

   It is said to tell that as time went on more and more  of these people became wicked, and fewer and fewer of them grew up to became good men and women. All the people lived near together, and few went away to other lands; so it came to pass that even the children of good men and women learned to be bad, like the people around hem, and no longer did what was right and good. And as God looked down on the world that he had made, he saw how wicked the men in it had become, and that every thought and every act of man was evil and only evil continually.

 

   But while most of the people in the world were very wicked, there were some good people also, though they were very few. The best of all the men  who lived at that time was a man whose name was Enoch. He was not the son of Cain, but another Enoch, who came from the family of Seth, the son of Adam, who was born after the death of Abel. While so many around Enoch were doing evil, this man did only what was right. He walked with God and God walked with him,and talked with him. And at last, when Enoch was three hundred and sixty-five yeas old, God took him away from the earth to heaven. He did not die, as all the people have since Adam disobeyed God, but "he was not, for God took him." This means that Enoch was taken up from earth without dying.