Who were the sons of God in Genesis 6:1-4? The view that says they were angels who lusted after human women, came down to earth in bodies of flesh, took wives for themselves, and produced corrupted offspring who may or may not have been gigantic, while popular and ancient, falls short of being plausible. The objections are, in my mind, significant and fatal.
First, there is no direct tie to the context of Genesis. Appeals must be made to other OT texts such as Job 1:6; 2:1; and 38:7 or NT ones like 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6. The former are said to prove that “sons of God” refers to angels, while the latter are supposed to confirm the immoral conduct of the angels in Noah’s day. However, we noted last time that the phrase “sons of God” in Job need not refer to angels, at least not in every instance, so it provides weak evidence at best for that meaning in Genesis 6. And when Peter mentions “angels who sinned” and Jude, “angels who did not keep their proper domain,” it must be assumed that they are talking about intermarriage with human women. There is nothing in either passage that speaks directly to the events of Genesis 6.
The second objection has to do with the punishment that is promised in v.3, where Yahweh says, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” This judgment is later described in more detail as the destruction of “man whom I have created from the face of the earth” (v.7), “the end of all flesh” (v.13), and “floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die” (v.17). This judgment was directed against man, not angels, which is akin to punishing the victims rather than the perpetrators of this heinous evil. In response, someone might say that Peter and Jude are describing precisely this judgment of the angels for their part in this sin, but this is not actual evidence in favor of the view, it merely demonstrates that the view is possible. While we can imagine many possible ways to explain Bible difficulties, we need to have real evidence. And imagination is not evidence.
A third difficulty arises from Jesus’ words in the Gospels that the angels in heaven “neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matt. 22:30; Mk. 12:25; Lk. 20:35-36).1 It’s not just that angels are spiritual rather than material beings, but Jesus said specifically that they do not marry, which is precisely what Genesis 6 says the sons of God did to the daughters of men. And furthermore, the supposition that angels mated with human women involves a huge number of assumptions which stretch credulity to the breaking point. When angels appear in physical form, do they have the capability of performing all the functions of a human body? When they eat food (cf. Gen. 18:8), do they digest it? Do they obtain nutrients from it and then rid themselves of the waste products by urination and defecation?
Do angels have DNA? Are they capable of producing sperm which can fertilize a normal human ovum? There is no reason to think any of this is true of angels other than a desire to justify this view of Genesis 6.
The angels-as-sons-of-God view seems to be fatally flawed; next we turn to the Cainite and Sethite view. This view holds that sons of God refers to the godly descendants of Seth, while the daughters of men were descendants of the godless Cain. This view has the benefit of appealing to the preceding context of 4:16-5:32, where Moses appears to draw an intentional contrast between the godless line of Cain and the godly line of Seth. It is supposed that intermarriage between the two lines threatened to pollute the entire race of mankind and put in jeopardy the Seed promise of 3:15, by turning the whole race into godless pagans. There is a certain kind of symmetry here with the warnings Moses gave to the children of Israel against marrying the pagan women of Canaan (cf. Deut. 7:3-4). And we must remember that Moses was writing Genesis, presumably during the years of wilderness wandering, for the benefit of the same Israelites, so Genesis 6 could serve as an argument against mixing God’s chosen people with pagans.
This essentially turns Genesis 6 into a kind of interpretive island, without ties to any other portion of Scripture.
This view also has the added benefit of not depending on obscure texts like 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6. Those passages probably refer to the initial fall of the angels, but even if not, they would have no bearing on the events which brought about the flood. There would also be no logical connection with the 3 uses of “sons of God” in Job, since by his time the lines of Cain and Seth would be irrelevant, all of the Cainites and most of the Sethites being wiped out in the flood. This essentially turns Genesis 6 into a kind of interpretive island, without ties to any other portion of Scripture. This doesn’t necessarily mean the view is false, but it does weaken the argument as I see it.
Another problem with this view is that it requires us to use two different definitions of the words “men” and “daughters” in the first two verses of chapter 6. In v.1 these words refer to mankind in general: “Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them.” But in v.2, according to this view, the daughters of men refers only to women of the godless line of Cain. Unfortunately, there is no indication of such a change in the text; it must be supposed in order to accommodate this view.
One final point about this view is that it does not offer any explanation for the identity of the giants or nephilim in v.4. Why should the offspring of believers and unbelievers be anything other than normal human children? Accordingly, proponents of this view point out that v.4 does not say that the nephilim are the offspring of the sons of God and daughters of men, just that they “were on the earth in those days, and also afterward.” This may be true, but it does seem as though Moses intends us to see some connection between them in this verse. However, I will admit that it is not really an objection against the view.
Still, when we consider the arguments for and against this second major view, it, too, seems to fall short. At the least, we are left looking for some explanation which may be even closer to the intention of the text of Genesis without requiring us to bend the rules of grammar. That will be next.
1 Ironically, in Luke 20 Jesus refers to those who share in the resurrection as “sons of God” and the angels he calls simply “angels.”
It seems to me that this article does not sufficiently wrestle with the New Testament data of 2 Peter 3 or Jude 6. First, the statement is made that “There is nothing in either passage that speaks directly to the events of Genesis 6” and yet Peter lists the angels that sin right before the flood, so Genesis 6 is definitely in the context of 2 Peter. Jude draws a comparison directly between “the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling,” and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and their sexual immorality in Jude 7. Verse 7, according to a very literal translation, reads: “as Sodom and Gomorra and the cities surrounding them the similar manner to these committed fornication and went after other flesh, are exposed as an example undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.” The “to these” and the “as” clearly tie Sodom and Gomorra back to the angels that sinned, and argue that Sodom and Gomorra committed the same sin of sexual immorality. The other question that must be answered is why these passages say that angels are currently kept in chains (literally, Tartaros in 2 Peter 3) when it is clear that demonic activity is alive in well in the time of Christ and after (cf Ephesians 6:10-12). In short, 2 Peter and Jude teach that there were angels who sinned sexually in such a severe way that God has locked them up but allowed other fallen angels to continue working in the world. 2 Peter and Jude are also tapping into an ancient Jewish interpretation of these events (see Enoch, quoted by Jude later in his letter), and if Peter and Jude disagree with this conclusion and are teaching something different, they would need to make that much clearer because and Jew familiar with Enoch would have understood these references as being to the angels that sinned in Genesis 6.
Ben,
Thanks for reading and commenting. The purpose of the article, as stated in the title, it to interpret Genesis 6, not 2 Peter or Jude. If we keep that in mind, it will help tremendously in evaluating the proposed solutions. What I said about Peter and Jude not speaking directly to the events of Genesis 6 stands. There is nothing in either passage which clearly and unambiguously ties them to Genesis 6:1-4. Of course, they can be made to fit the angels marrying human women view, but simply showing that texts can be made to cohere is insufficient to building a case for that view. In order to interpret Moses’ words in Genesis 6, I contend that we must deal with what he says, not simply run to later texts in an attempt to prove the plausibility of a view one has presupposed. This was a significant part of my argument from Part 1.
As far as your interpretations of 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 are concerned, which you consider to be clear and plain, many students of Scripture see otherwise. You may well have a point, but you do not prove it simply by asserting it. Peter does not describe the angels’ sins, let alone speak of marriages between angels and humans which result in hybrid offspring or anything else. He does not even mention marriage at all in the context, so there is nothing but the presupposition to connect it back to Genesis 6. Jude speaks of angels who left their own abode and did not keep their proper domain, two expressions which are not found anywhere in or around Genesis 6. What do these mean? He does not say, and it is merely your opinion that it is a reference to Gen. 6:1-4.
You speak of “to these” and “as” and say they “clearly tie Sodom and Gomorra[sic] back to the angels that sinned,” but this is surely overstating the case. First, it is just as plausible (and in my mind more so) that “to these” links the cities around them with Sodom and Gomorrah, saying nothing about any supposed similarity between the angels’ sin and that of the men of Sodom. Of course the term “as” links v.7 to v.6, but the subject is God’s ability to judge apostates, not the similitude of their particular sins. If that were Jude’s point, then we would have to assume that those people who came out of Egypt and were destroyed as unbelievers (v.5) were also guilty of giving themselves over the sexual immorality and going after strange flesh. All of this is much less clear than many seem to think, and as a result these two NT texts provide weak support for any particular interpretive view of Genesis 6.
As far as Jewish apocalyptic texts from the 2nd century BC or Paul’s teaching on spiritual warfare are concerned, I do not think it is appropriate to argue from them back into the text of Genesis 6. Of course, the Bible will be consistent with itself, since it is God’s word, but I do not see anything in Ephesians 6 that requires one take the sons of God to be angels in Genesis. To argue that Jude’s readers would have a worldview consistent with that taught in the book of Enoch is problematic, to say the least, and his so-called quotation of that book is disputed with good reason. But even if I were to grant these things to you, they have no bearing whatsoever on the actual interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4, which must be determined by the context of what is written not by how it was interpreted centuries later by unbelieving Jews.
Thank you for taking the time to think through my statements and give a thorough response. I don’t normally talk about this issue as much, but it does interest me and I wanted to hear what your thoughts were. I think at the heart of our disagreement is a question of whether the New Testament can determine the interpretation of an Old Testament passage. I may look at Genesis 6 and not think it is talking about angels, but if Peter and Jude do in fact understand it that way (and granted that is an “if”), then I am free to interpret it differently but in doing so I am disagreeing with an apostolic interpretation.
I agree many say otherwise concerning these passages, but from what I have seen that is because they don’t like what it seems to be saying. I myself once strongly held to the Sethite view because I couldn’t fathom the genetic questions and because of the statement of Christ. Then one day it dawned on me that for no Jew in the Old Testament would either of those factors have come into play, and so I tried to look at the question anew with an open mind. Based on Genesis 6 alone, I probably would not hold to the fallen angel view, but if that is the view that Peter and Jude take, then I feel compelled to agree with them. (As for Christ’s statement, he said the angels “in heaven” whereas Jude is clear these are angels who left their first estate).
Of course it is possible to understand Jude and Peter in another way, but I have not heard a better explanation of those texts. As I study them, the immediate sequence of fallen angels followed by the flood in 2 Peter, lines up, but even more so the statement that these angels were bound in Tartarus. What angels were bound if demons are still active today? And although the connection can be read between Sodom and the fallen angels as applying simply to the judgment, the more natural reading would be the sexual immorality followed by judgment, especially since Sodom and Gomorra would have been an instance of human/angelic relations. And if this is not a reference to Genesis 6, what tradition is being appealed to? Where in the Old Testament do we read of angels falling?
The Enoch connection troubles me as well, and again there are many who don’t like it, but like it or not Jude quotes Enoch, and the first section of Enoch is a long drawn-out tale of the supposed angels from Genesis 6. Do I think Enoch’s entire account is accurate? Well, I think the one quote used by Jude is, but the rest of it isn’t necessarily inerrant (and almost certainly is not). But for Jude to reference Enoch means his readers were familiar with it, which means for him to talk about angels sinning and then immediately to connect that to another story about people almost committing immoral acts with angels would have made his readers think of Genesis 6. Other interpretations have been put forward, but I would need to say one that is more compelling than simply reading Genesis 6 as angels, especially given the long history of tradition in Christian and Jewish circles.
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts. Again, thank you for taking the time to engage. Trust you and your ministry are doing well.
Thanks for the interaction. You bring up several points of discussion. Give me a bit of time to get to them, and hopefully I can reply in detail next week.
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I would agree that what Moses wrote can have only one meaning, it is precisely my belief that there isn’t hidden meanings under the text that has driven me to the view that Genesis 6 involves fallen angels. If Peter and Jude understand Genesis 6 as fallen angels, and if their letters are inerrant, then they must have been right and Moses must have had fallen angels in mind. I don’t think this meaning was hidden for 1500 years, as it was a common interpretation before Peter and Jude wrote, as can be seen by the book of Enoch.
I agree that knowing everything an OT Jew knew would be quite impossible, my only point was that I realized my two reasons personally for initially rejecting the angel views would not have been possible for an OT Jew – the statement of Jesus and modern genetics. That made me rethink my position, but it wasn’t “knowing what an OT Jew would have thought” that changed my mind, it was Peter and Jude.
To conclude, I think your first statement hit the nail on the head. Our fundamental disagreement is whether the NT can determine the meaning of an OT passage. I appreciate the exegetical work you have done on Genesis 6, but I still think a strong case can be made that “sons of God” is a technical term for angels, and that is enough to leave the interpretation of the passage open in my mind. My study of Jude and 2 Peter, however, has lead me to the conclusion that what they wrote would be quickly understood by their audience as the sons of God in Genesis 6.
I thank you, brother, for taking the time to engage with me on these issues. I apologize if my statement about people not liking what it is saying came off as uncharitable. I was speaking somewhat biographically there, and didn’t mean to offend. Looking forward to the day we can meet up on the other side and finally know for sure which of us is right, and not care a bit.
I agree that this disagreement, if indeed we disagree, is fundamental. Can the NT determine the interpretation of an OT passage? I would say no. A text means whatever its author intended it to mean. In the case of Genesis 6, we must ask what Moses intended to communicate to his readers, the Israelites coming out of Egypt and heading for the land of Canaan. This is why we must not jump to 2 Peter and Jude without doing due diligence in Genesis and wrestling with the issues that are there. Whatever Peter and Jude have to say, we can be confident would not contradict Moses’ intent, since they were also being carried along by the Holy Spirit.
We might be tempted to think that since Moses was merely human, albeit Spirit-led when he wrote, he may have been writing better than he knew. Another way to put this is to say that the Spirit intended a meaning that Moses could not perceive and which he would not have imagined when he wrote. But this is a problem, because it would turn Moses’ writings into a kind of riddle or mystery rather than a genuine revelation. Instead of interpreting what Moses wrote, we are left trying to discern the hidden meaning behind or underneath the words. It is difficult to understand how this could be considered a revealing of truth.
The only words we have are the ones Moses wrote. To imply that the Spirit infused another meaning below the surface of the words themselves, is to claim 2 different intentions for the words, that Moses meant one thing and the Spirit another. If Moses meant something other than what the Spirit himself intended by his words, then, in order to preserve the absolute integrity of the Spirit’s voice, we would have to say that Moses was wrong in what he meant to say. They cannot both be right, if they are in disagreement, and if they agree, then we have 1 meaning and the words of Moses must be interpreted as written.
The suggestion that we must look to the NT authors to explain what Moses wrote also denies that there are 2 meanings, a literal and a spiritual one, since it is presumed that Peter and Jude can explain to us what Moses did not. But this assumes that there is only one meaning to Moses’ words, and that it is only rightly interpreted by these later authors. But this, too, is problematic, for it means that Moses’ readers from the 15th century BC until the late 1st century AD would have been unable to discern the true interpretation, unless of course they followed the unscriptural teachings of the Book of Enoch. This is not a position I would defend.
You say that many people disagree with the angelic view “because they don’t like what it seems to be saying.” I think this is quite uncharitable. How can you know the motivation that leads people to take a different position? For myself, I had no allegiance to any view when I began studying, and I think I have come to my position out of a desire to rightly interpret the text itself. My prejudices, such as they are, drive me to try to let the text speak first and then conform my understanding to it. I do not have an anti-supernatural bias, nor do I disbelieve what the Bible reveals about the nature of spiritual warfare. I simply ask for evidence from the text of Scripture itself, interpreted in context and giving full weight to the author’s intent.
It is ironic to me that you say you once held to the Sethite view but changed your position based on your supposed understanding of what an OT Jew would have thought of this passage. I am curious how you came to this knowledge, especially considering that the category of “OT Jew” spans almost 1,000 years and a great deal of progressive revelation, so that the first readers of Genesis 6 may not have had any other Scriptures to which to appeal, while a Jew living in the Divided Kingdom may have considered the evidence of Job and the Psalms and such prophets as had been written by his time. Whatever else we can say about the OT Jewish interpreter, he did not have 2 Peter or Jude to which to appeal, so I can’t see how this idea led you to that particular view.
As far as my interpretation of 2 Peter and Jude are concerned, they are completely beyond the scope of my posts and of the interpretation of Genesis 6, as I have already demonstrated. It does not matter whether you think the other explanations of them are better than yours, the fact that there are other possible explanations means that they cannot be used to explain Genesis 6 beyond reasonable doubt. It’s nice when we can wrap up Scripture into a neat little package that fits together without any loose strings, but that speaks more to our ability to think imaginatively than to the truthfulness of our view. So it does not really concern me much how this affects one’s interpretation of 2 Peter and Jude, so long as your view of Genesis 6 does not contradict anything that is specifically stated in the NT.
Finally, regarding Jude’s quotation of Enoch I would note that it is not a question of “liking it,” but of what it can be demonstrated that Jude was doing. Jude 14 attributes this saying to Enoch: “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his saints.” This corresponds to 1 Enoch 1:9 which begins, “Behold, he comes with the myriads of his holy ones.” At first glance this appears to be a quotation of an extra-biblical source by Jude, but the fact that he changed the wording to insert “the Lord,” a clear reference to Jesus, may indicate that Jude was simply referencing a common tradition rather than citing a book he knew was not reliable as Scripture. But again we are discussing a source that comes more than 1,000 years after Moses, so it cannot have any bearing on what he intended his original hearers to understand.
At the end of the day, we continue to be driven back to the text of Genesis 6 itself to ground our view, and this is precisely what I have tried to do. At the end of the day, you will have to consider whether I have succeeded or not, but I think I have made my case.
You can’t interpret anything till you check with what the word means how it’s used, and saying in the rest of the Bible.
Martin, thanks for commenting on the blog. I appreciate you taking the time to read what I have written.
If we cannot offer an interpretation of any passage of Scripture until we have checked to see how the words are used in the rest of the Bible, then we are really stuck in an impossible situation. In order to know a word’s meaning in passage A, we would have to know its meaning in passage B, but how could we know that unless we first checked its meaning in passage C? And how would we know what it means in passage C without knowing what it means in passages A and B? This vicious circle would leave us at a loss to determine the proper meaning of any part of Scripture.
Instead we must give precedence to the immediate context, believing that God was competent to reveal the truth through the human author’s words in a way that they could be understood by the general reader. Other passages may be helpful from time to time, but only the immediate context can be definitive, and sometimes we do not have enough information to be dogmatic about a particular interpretation.
You’ve prepared a very good argument here. Well done. I don’t hold to the idea of the sons of God being fallen angels, for all your reasons and frankly, I don’t hold to the idea of the Seth line vs the Cain line either. After all, Cain was given a mark of grace. But considering that Adam was called the son of God, ref the genealogy in Luke 3, and considering the order that Paul outlines, God, Christ, Man, Woman, 2 Cor 11, it just seems that Gen. 6:2 can be understood very easily. Often the scriptures are not exactly chronological and so I read chapter 6 as kind of an overview of mankind up to this point. Men were choosing women and they became mighty, and we can link it with v 5, that the imagination of man’s heart was great in the earth. The sin nature manifests itself. It doesn’t need fallen angel DNA. And so the story of Noah, the preacher. And I just read this and got permission from my hubby!
Thanks for reading and commenting.