Cave of Treasures: A Human Answer to the Sons of God?
A Syriac history of the world where the 'sons of God' are Seth's descendants living on a holy mountain beside Paradise.
The Cave of Treasures is a Syriac Christian history, usually dated to the 5th or 6th century CE. It says the sons of God in Genesis 6 were Seth's descendants, not angels.
The Cave of Treasures is a Syriac Christian retelling of history from creation to the time of Christ, traditionally but wrongly credited to Saint Ephrem. It is usually dated to the fifth or sixth century CE. E. A. Wallis Budge published an English translation in 1927. Its title refers to a cave where Adam stored gold, frankincense and myrrh from Paradise, and where his body was later kept.
It offers a different answer to Genesis 6. The children of Seth live on a mountain close to Paradise, in purity, and are called "sons of God." Below them the descendants of Cain live in the plain. Cain's line invents musical instruments, and the music and the beauty of the Cainite women draw the Sethites to break their oath and go down the mountain. The children born from these unions are the giants.
The book then follows Adam's body. Noah takes it into the ark, and after the Flood, Shem and Melchizedek bury it at Golgotha, the center of the earth, where the cross of Christ would later stand. Adam's skull lying beneath the cross is a detail many later Christian paintings of the crucifixion still show. This Sethite reading of the sons of God became standard in much of Christian thought, offering a human rather than angelic explanation for the giants.
In the Cave of Treasures, Noah carries Adam's embalmed body aboard the ark, and it is later buried at Golgotha, on the very spot where Christ would be crucified.
Scholars see the Sethite reading as a later theological move to avoid the idea of angels marrying women, not an older tradition than the Enoch books.
