Recently, I’ve been looking at a mysterious passage in Genesis 6, at the beginning of the Flood narrative. In this passage, the “sons of God” marry “the daughters of men,” and the passage mentions a group of people known as the Nephilim.
I’ve been considering the following questions:
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 linking 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 my first post, we answered Question 4 and saw that the Nephilim were a group of “giants” or unusually tall people (at least by ancient standards, when people were a lot shorter than they are today).
In a second post, we answered Questions 3, 5, and 6: it looks as though the 120 years was a grace period before God sent the Flood, the Nephilim were the children of the sons of God and the daughters of men, and they were on the earth both before and after the Flood because these groups mated twice.
This gave us a partial answer to Questions 1 and 2, because it eliminated a popular interpretation that holds that the sons of God were the righteous line descended from Adam and Eve’s son Seth, whereas the daughters of men were the wicked line descended from Cain. But the line of Cain did not survive the Flood, so the Sethite/Cainite interpretation isn’t correct.
If that’s true, then who else might the sons of God and the daughters of men be?
Another interpretation is that the sons of God are rulers, and the daughters of men are common women. In support of this, it can be pointed out that the king of Israel was sometimes described as God’s son. Thus in Psalm 2:7, God tells him, “You are my son; today I have begotten you.”
The problem is that the phrase “sons of God” is never applied to rulers like kings. This is an unknown usage in Hebrew. Worse yet, there is an established meaning for the phrase “sons of God” in biblical Hebrew, and it does not point to rulers.
The standard Old Testament usage of the phrase “sons of God” refers to high-ranking members of God’s heavenly court, or what we would call angels. Thus at the beginning of the book of Job, we read, “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them” (Job 1:6; cf. 2:1, 38:7).
Deuteronomy 32:8 also says that when God “divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God,” which reflects the Israelite belief that God had assigned the nations to different angelic beings but kept Israel for himself (v. 9).
But these angels went bad, began resisting God’s will, and were worshiped by men (cf. Deut. 32:17). Thus the Greek Septuagint of Psalm 96[95]:5 says, “All the gods of the nations are demons,” and St. Paul similarly says, “What pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God” (1 Cor. 10:20).
We see this reflected in Daniel 10, where the angel Gabriel tells how he was delayed for three weeks in answering Daniel’s prayer by the demonic “prince of Persia,” how he needed help from Michael in battling him, and how he and Michael would defeat the prince of Persia and the “prince of Greece” would come to prominence.
The third interpretation of who the sons of God were in Genesis 6 is thus that they were angelic beings, and this would allow the phrase “daughters of men” to have its normal, expected meaning: human women.
But in recent centuries, the idea that angels mated with human women has struck many as incredible.
Some have pointed to Jesus’ statement that in the resurrection, humans “neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven” (Matt. 22:30). But this doesn’t settle the matter, because Jesus is describing “angels in heaven,” and he does not say that no angels ever abandoned their place in heaven and did things they weren’t supposed to do.
In fact, we know that some did. The New Testament mentions “the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling” (Jude 6).
Other people have appealed to the fact that angels don’t have physical bodies. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes angels as “spiritual, non-corporeal beings” (328) and as “purely spiritual creatures [who] have intelligence and will” (330).
However, this does not mean that angels can’t assume physical forms. For example, in Genesis 19, two angels arrive in Sodom to investigate the outcry against the city, and the men of the town attempt to rape them. Abraham’s nephew Lot goes out of his house to try to talk the townspeople out of it, but things go badly, and the angels “reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door” (Gen. 19:10).
In the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274) held that angels could fashion temporary, material bodies for themselves out of the air (ST I:51:2). He also explained a way in which an angel—or rather a demon—might be able to father a child.
But that’s a subject that we’ll take up another time.