While some Kabalists, and even archæologists say that “Adam, Enoch, and Noah might, in outward appearance, be different men, but they were really the self-same divine person.”[268] Others explain that between Adam and Noah there intervened several cycles. That is to say, that every one of the antediluvian patriarchs stood as the representative of a race which had its place in a succession of cycles; and each of which races was less spiritual than its predecessor. Thus Noah, though a good man, could not have borne comparison with his ancestor, Enoch, who “walked with God and did not die.” Hence the allegorical interpretation which makes Noah have this coat of skin by inheritance from the second Adam and Enoch, but not wear it himself, for if otherwise, Ham could not have stolen it. But Noah and his children bridged the flood; and while the former belonged to the old and still spiritual antediluvian generation, insomuch as he was selected from all mankind for his purity, his children were _post_-diluvian. The coat of skin worn by Cush “in secret,“_i. e._, when his spiritual nature began to be tainted by the material—is placed on Nimrod, the most powerful and strongest of physical men on this side of the flood—the last remnant of the antediluvian giants.[269] In the Scandinavian legend, Ymir, the giant, is slain by the sons of Bur, and the streams of blood flowing from his wounds were so copious that the flood drowned the whole race of ice and frost giants, and Bergelmir alone of that race was saved, with his wife, by taking refuge in a bark; which fact permitted him to transmit a new branch of giants from the old stock. But all the sons of Bur remained untouched by the flood.[270]