Lactantius, Divine Institutes 2.13

When God saw that the earth was filled with malice and crimes, He decided to destroy the human race by a flood; yet, to restore the multitude, He chose one man, because among all the corrupted a single example of justice remained (Genesis 6:9-9:29).

This man, when he was six hundred years old, built an ark just as God had commanded him, and in it he himself was preserved together with his wife, his three sons, and their three wives, when the waters covered all the highest mountains (Genesis 6:9-9:29).

After the earth dried, God cursed the injustice of the former age, so that the length of life would not again become a cause for devising evils; He gradually diminished the human lifespan through successive generations and set a limit at one hundred and twenty years, which it was not permitted to exceed (Genesis 6:9-9:29).

When he had come out of the ark, as the Holy Scriptures teach, he diligently cultivated the ground and planted a vineyard with his own hand; when it first bore fruit, he rejoiced, drank to drunkenness, and lay naked (Genesis 6:9-9:29).

One of his sons, named Ham, saw his father's nakedness but did not cover it; instead he went out and told his brothers, while they, taking a cloak, entered with faces turned away and covered their father (Genesis 6:9-9:29).

When the father learned what had been done, he disowned and expelled that son; the fugitive settled in the part of the earth now called Arabia, and the land was named Canaan from his name, and his descendants were called Canaanites (Genesis 6:9-9:29).

This was the first nation that ignored God, because its leader and founder did not receive the worship of God from his father but was cursed by him, and so he bequeathed ignorance of the divine to his descendants; from this nation the neighboring peoples flowed forth as their multitude increased (Genesis 6:9-9:29).

The descendants of the father himself, however, were called Hebrews, among whom the religion of God resided; but when their number later grew immensely and their own lands could no longer contain them, young men — whether sent by their parents or acting on their own, driven by scarcity — fled to seek new homes, dispersed hither and thither, filled all the islands and the whole world, and, torn from the holy root, established new customs and institutions according to their own will (Genesis 6:9-9:29).

The first of all who occupied Egypt began to suspect and worship celestial things; because they were not sheltered by houses due to the climate, nor was the sky ever veiled by clouds in that region, they noted the courses of the stars and their effects while venerating them and gazing at them more curiously and freely (Genesis 6:9-9:29).

Afterwards they invented portentous animals to worship, led by certain prodigies, whose authors we shall soon reveal; the other peoples dispersed throughout the land, admiring the elements of the world — heaven, sun, earth, sea — worshiped them without any images or temples and celebrated sacrifices to them in the open, until, as time passed, the most powerful kings built temples and statues and instituted their worship with victims and incense (Genesis 6:9-9:29).

Thus the nations began to stray from the knowledge of God; therefore they are wrong who contend that the worship of gods existed from the beginning of things and that paganism is prior to the religion of God, which they think was invented later, because they are ignorant of the source and origin of truth; now we return to the beginning of the world (Genesis 6:9-9:29).