In a previous article, I looked at the mysterious text that introduces the Flood narrative in Genesis 6. It involves the “sons of God” marrying the “daughters of men,” and it mentions a group known as the Nephilim. It also involves several other matters, and I identified seven mysteries to solve:
1) Who are the “sons of God” in this passage?
2) Who are the “daughters of men”?
3) Why does God say that man’s “days shall be 120 years”?
4) Who were the Nephilim?
5) What is the relationship joining the sons of God, the daughters of men, and the Nephilim?
6) Why does the text say the Nephilim were on the earth “in those days, and also afterward”?
7) Do these events have anything to do with the Great Flood, which this passage introduces?
In the previous post, we were able to solve one of these mysteries (number 4): based on the way the Nephilim and their descendants are described in the biblical text, they appear to have been people who were unusually tall, or “giants.”
But now let’s see if we can answer more of these questions. The one I’d like to focus on first is Question 3, or why God said that man’s “days shall be 120 years.”
Some have taken this to be a declaration that man’s lifespan would decrease from the centuries-long lifespans of the pre-Flood patriarchs (Gen. 5). This is possible, but there are problems with the proposal.
First, people continue living for centuries long after this announcement. Noah himself lives to be 950 (Gen. 9:29); other biblical figures live for centuries (cf. Gen. 11); and the Israelite patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob live to be 175, 180, and 147 (Gen. 25:7, 35:28, 47:28). In fact, nobody in Genesis is said to live to 120 years old, and Psalm 90:10 is frank that “the years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty.”
I thus tend to favor the theory advocated in the Jewish Publications Society’s commentary on Genesis, which notes, “Early exegesis of this verse [Gen. 6:3] prefers to see here a reference to the interval of time remaining before the Flood.”
In other words, the 120 years was a grace period before the Great Flood. After all, Genesis 6:3 is at the beginning of the Flood narrative, and it makes sense for it to be a reference to “when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared” (1 Pet. 3:20).
This is my proposed answer for Question 3. Next I’d like to look at Questions 5 and 6.
After the statement that the sons of God took wives from among the daughters of men and the statement about man’s days being 120 years, Genesis says, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them” (6:4).
From the first part of this sentence, you might conclude that the unusually tall Nephilim were a new and unrelated group that the text just happens to mention being on the earth before the Flood. However, the second part of the sentence rules that out.
It says that they were also on the earth after the Flood, and it tells us when this happened—i.e., “when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.” The Nephilim are thus the children of the sons of God and the daughters of men, answering Question 5.
We can then answer Question 6: The Nephilim were on the earth both before and after the Flood because the sons of God and the daughters of men mated twice.
Genesis 6 records one mating, but it alerts the reader that it happened a second time, which reflects Numbers 13:33, where the spies Moses sends into the Promised Land report that there, “we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim).”
The ancient reader would have known that the Israelites had encountered Nephilim in the Promised Land, and so the author of Genesis includes his remark to explain how they could be around both before and after the Flood.
This provides us with a clue that can help us answer Questions 1 and 2, because if the sons of God and the daughters of men mated both before and after the Flood, then they must have been around both before and after the Flood.
That eliminates one of the possibilities for who they were. According to some authors, the “sons of God” represent the righteous line that came from Adam and Eve’s son Seth, whereas the “daughters of men” were the wicked line that came from their son Cain.
This “Sethite/Cainite” interpretation is problematic because the language of the text does not suggest it. It is unsupported speculation to propose that the sons of God were descendants of Seth. Even worse, the phrase “the daughters of men” does not suggest the descendants of Cain.
But Genesis 6:4’s statement that “the sons of God came in to the daughters of man” both before and after the Flood eliminates this possibility, because the line of Cain did not survive the Flood.
Only “a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water” (1 Pet. 3:20) in Noah’s Ark. Noah’s family is a population bottleneck. At least the way Genesis presents it, Noah’s family was of the line of Seth, and the line of Cain went extinct.
(It’s not impossible that Noah had some Cainite ancestry, but this is not indicated in the text, and the way Israelite genealogies reckoned ancestry by the male line, the line of Cain itself did not survive.)
We’ve thus been able to eliminate one of the more popular theories regarding Questions 1 and 2. But there’s more work to be done on them, so we’ll take that up in a future article.