Genesis 6 contains a mysterious passage about the “sons of God” marrying “the daughters of men” and giving rise to a group of giants known as the Nephilim.
In my previous post, we saw that evidence both before and after Genesis points to the sons of God being fallen angels, which was the original interpretation of the passage in all of the existing Jewish and Christian literature.
This raises questions about what we should make of this passage, but before we turn to that, is there any way we could get confirmation of this interpretation?
One thing that Christians should take seriously would be a passage in the New Testament that confirms this interpretation, and we have such a passage.
The book of Jude warns its readers against false teachers in Christian communities, and Jude warns about how God has sent judgment on wrongdoers before. In verses 6 and 7, he writes:
And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day—just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.
This passage refers to a group of angels who “did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling” in heaven.
That could be any group of fallen angels except for the next part of the verse, which says that Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities “likewise indulged in sexual immorality.”
If these earthly cities “likewise” did something, that means somebody else did it first. In context, the individuals being referred to are “the angels who . . . left their proper dwelling.”
Only the Greek text is even clearer than this translation would suggest, because the word rendered “likewise” is a four-word phrase in Greek that would be literally translated “in the same manner as these.”
The plural “these” points back to the previous plural noun “angels.” This is obvious when you read it in Greek, because it cannot refer to “Sodom” (a singular neuter noun), “Gomorrah” (a singular feminine noun), or “cities” (a plural feminine noun). The word for “these” is a plural masculine noun, so it points to a plural masculine antecedent, and the only noun that will serve is the plural masculine noun “angels.”
This makes it clear that Jude is saying that both the angels who left their dwelling in heaven and Sodom and the surrounding cities “indulged in sexual immorality.” The angels did so first, and then “in the same manner as these [angels],” Sodom and the cities of the plain did so as well.
Jude’s statement about the angels is thus an unmistakable reference to the event in Genesis 6, which is the only biblical passage he could be referring to.
There’s also a further aspect, which also is not obvious in this translation. In addition to saying that these two groups indulged in sexual immorality, it also says they pursued “unnatural desire,” but that’s not what it literally says in Greek.
The phrase used in Greek for what they pursued is sarkos heteras, which would mean “other flesh” or “different flesh.”
This points to something interesting. The men of Sodom are famous for attempting the homosexual rape of the two angels, who appeared to be men, and there are multiple passages in the Bible that condemn homosexuality. But this doesn’t seem to be the aspect of the act that Jude is thinking of.
If he were highlighting the homosexual aspect of what the Sodomites did, he would have expressed himself differently, because the apparently male flesh of the two angels would not be different (Greek, heteras) from that of the male Sodomites. Instead, it would be the same (Greek, homos).
What was different was not the sex of the flesh, but the species to which it belonged. Commenting on Jude 7, Richard Bauckham states,
Sarkos heteras, “strange flesh,” cannot, as many commentators and most translations assume, refer to homosexual practice, in which the flesh is not “different” (heteras); it must mean the flesh of angels. The sin of the Sodomites (not, strictly, of the other towns) reached its zenith in this most extravagant of sexual aberrations, which would have transgressed the order of creation as shockingly as the fallen angels did.
The fallen angels and the Sodomites, knowingly or unknowingly, thus were engaged in attempts to break the natural order by having sex with another species of God’s creatures.
Even if one disagrees on this point, the fact remains that Jude has an unmistakable reference to the events of Genesis 6 as involving “angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling” and “indulged in sexual immorality.”
We thus have New Testament confirmation of the angelic interpretation of the sons of God in Genesis. But how could this be? How can we make sense of this passage?
That’s what we’ll turn to in our final post in this series.