After these things [Moses] wrote of
the offspring produced from the union of the daughters of Cain and the sons of Seth
saying, There were mighty men in those days; and also afterward, because
judges went not the daughters of men, they bore the mighty men who were of old,
the mighty men of renown. The mighty men who were born were born to the
feeble tribe of Cain and not to the mighty tribe of Seth. The house of Cain,
because the earth had been cursed so as not to give them its strength, produced
small harvests, deprived of its strength, just as it is today that some seeds,
fruits, and grasses give strength and some do not. Because, at that time, they
were cursed and sons of the cursed and were dwelling in the land of curses,
they would gather and eat produce that lacked nutrition, and those who ate were
without strength just like the food that they ate. As for the Sethites, on the
other hand, because they were the descendants of the blessed [Seth] and were dwelling
in the land among the boundary of the fence of Paradise, their produce was
abundant and full of strength. So too were the bodies of those that ate that
produce strong and powerful. (Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis section
VI.5 in St. Ephrem the Syrian: Selected Prose Works [trans. Edward G.
Matthews, Jr. [The Fathers of the Church 91; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University
Press of America, 1994], 136)
