For a while, I’ve been doing a series of posts looking at a mysterious passage at the beginning of Genesis 6:
The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” 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. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (vv. 2-5).
In the first post, I identified seven questions that need to be answered about this text:
- Who are the “sons of God” in this passage?
- Who are the “daughters of men”?
- Why does God say that man’s “days shall be 120 years”?
- Who were the Nephilim?
- What is the relationship between the sons of God, the daughters of men, and the Nephilim?
- Why does the text say the Nephilim were on the earth “in those days, and also afterward”?
- Do these events have anything to do with the Great Flood, which this passage introduces?
Over subsequent posts, we saw the most probable answers to these questions. The “sons of God” refer to fallen angels; the “daughters of men” are ordinary human women; God says there will be a 120-year grace period for mankind before the Flood; the Nephilim were unusually tall people or “giants”; they were the offspring of the fallen angels and human women; they were on the earth both before the Flood and afterward, when a similar event happened; and these events contributed to the wickedness of mankind that brought on the Flood.
To see the evidence supporting these answers, see the links to the other posts in this series, below.
Particularly startling for Christians will be the fact that, as we saw in the last post, the New Testament seems to confirm the angelic interpretation of who the “sons of God” were (Jude 6-7).
But how can we make sense of that if angels don’t have physical bodies? There are a number of possibilities, because even if angels don’t naturally have bodies, they can assume them.
One way this happens is through demonic possession. Although I haven’t seen this option explored in the literature, it would be hypothetically possible for a fallen angel to take possession of a man and then father offspring, perhaps using its angelic abilities to cause the children to grow to unusual height.
In the Middle Ages, the common opinion among Christian thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas was that angels can assume temporary physical bodies that they condense out of the air (ST I:51:2). This explained passages in Scripture where angels did physical things like when two of them “reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door” (Gen. 19:10).
Today we have the atomic theory of matter, rather than relying on the four classical elements of air, earth, fire, and water, but you can still propose that angels can assume temporary material bodies, even if the theory of the underlying matter has changed.
If they can do that, then could they use these bodies to generate the sperm cells needed to impregnate a woman? Personally, I don’t see why they couldn’t. We already know that angels are able to psychokinetically interact with matter on the cellular level, as when David improperly takes a census, and God sends an angel with a plague in punishment (2 Sam. 24:15-17). If an angel can manipulate microorganisms to cause a plague, I don’t see why it couldn’t similarly manipulate matter to produce sperm cells.
However, Thomas Aquinas held a different view. Based on the philosophy of Aristotle, he held that angels with “aerial bodies” could do some things that living people could do (like speaking, by fashioning sounds in the air) but not others (like eating or reproducing).
Still, he held that there was a way demons could father children. He quotes St. Augustine as saying that “many persons affirm that they have had the experience, or have heard from such as have experienced it, that the Satyrs and Fauns, whom the common folk call incubi, have often presented themselves before women, and have sought and procured intercourse with them. Hence it is folly to deny it” (City of God 15:23).
Aquinas then concludes, “If some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterwards of a man; just as they take the seed of other things for other generating purposes, as Augustine says (cf. The Trinity 3:9:17), so that the person born is not the child of a demon, but of a man.”
In other words, a demon might first appear as a succubus, have sex with a man in order to gather his sperm, and then change to the form of an incubus and have sex with a woman, impregnating her using this seed. The child would be fully human on this theory, as the sperm and egg it was born from both came from human parents.
Still, this illustrates that there are ways demons could be said to father children. I’ve just named three: (1) through possession, (2) through temporarily assumed bodies, and (3) through Aquinas’s succubus/incubus view.
There are also other possibilities, and here it is important to remember that we are dealing with material that is found early in Genesis.
As Bl. Pius XII pointed out,
the first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which however must be further studied and determined by exegetes; the same chapters . . . in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people (Humani Generis 38).
Consequently, we should not be too definite about exactly what happened that corresponds to the passage at the beginning of Genesis 6. Though these chapters “pertain to history in a true sense,” this sense “must be further studied and determined by exegetes.”
It’s one thing to figure out what the author said in “simple and metaphorical language.” It’s another thing to figure out what you would see if you could go back in time and witness the events for yourself.