Genesis 6 says that shortly before the Flood, “the sons of God” married “the daughters of men,” who gave birth to unusually tall people whom the Bible refers to as the Nephilim (Aramaic, “giants”).
In a previous post, we mentioned the three main theories about this mysterious incident:
- The sons of God were the righteous line of Seth, and the daughters of men were the wicked line of Cain.
- The sons of God were human rulers, and the daughters of men were common women.
- The sons of God were fallen angels, and the daughters of men were human women.
As we saw, the first of these doesn’t work because the line of Cain went extinct with the Great Flood, and Genesis says the sons of God also mated with the daughters of men after the Flood, allowing the Israelites to later encounter “the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim)” (Num. 13:33) when they entered the Promised Land.
The second theory is also problematic because the phrase “sons of God” is never used for human rulers in the Bible.
On the other hand, “sons of God” is consistently used in the Old Testament to refer to high-ranking angels, which would support the third interpretation.
Modern people tend to dismiss the third option because angels don’t have physical bodies, but this is something doctrinal development has made clear. This fact was not clear to the ancient Israelites, who didn’t have a problem with embodied angels, and when trying to figure out what an ancient text means, we need to determine what it would have meant to the original author.
Further, Christian thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas have held that even if angels don’t normally have physical bodies, they can assume them. So before we set the third theory aside, let’s consider what evidence we have for it.
One of the books that some New Testament authors read was 1 Enoch. This book is directly quoted in Jude 14-15, which describes it as containing prophecy.
In 1 Enoch, a group of angels decide to leave heaven and marry human women. They also teach mankind destructive skills like how to make weapons for war, how to make cosmetics for seduction, and how to perform magic. They corrupt mankind by these skills, and after they get married, their sons are violent giants, and the resulting corruption brings on the Great Flood.
The fact is that the angelic interpretation of Genesis 6 is the most ancient one we have on record. In The Word Biblical Commentary on Jude 6, the British scholar Richard Bauckham writes:
According to Jewish tradition, [angels] descended from heaven to marry human wives and corrupt the human race in the period before the Flood. This was how the account of the “sons of God” in Gen 6:1-4 was universally understood (so far as our evidence goes) until the mid-second century a.d., though the tradition took several varying forms.
From the time of R. Simeon b. Yohai in the mid-second century a.d., the traditional exegesis was replaced in Judaism by an insistence that the “sons of God” were not angels but men. In Christianity, however, the traditional exegesis had a longer life, questioned only in the third century and disappearing in the fifth century.
This understanding was not limited to just one or two sources. In The Word Biblical Commentary on Genesis 6:1, another British scholar, Gordon Wenham, writes,
The “angel” interpretation is at once the oldest view and that of most modern commentators. It is assumed in the earliest Jewish exegesis (e.g., the books of 1 Enoch 6:2ff; Jubilees 5:1), [the Septuagint], Philo De Gigant. 2:358), Josephus (Ant. 1.31) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QapGen 2:1; CD 2:17–19). The [New Testament] (2 Pet 2:4, Jude 6, 7) and the earliest Christian writers (e.g., Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen) also take this line.
The angelic interpretation of the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 is thus the universal and earliest view in both Jewish and Christian circles, across a wide range of sources.
What all of the sources have in common, though, is that they were all written in the period around the birth of Christ—either a few centuries before or afterward. But Genesis itself is from an earlier period, and how a text was later interpreted does not automatically tell us how it was interpreted at the time it was written. What would help is if we had material from before Genesis was written that could shed light on the matter . . . and we do.
One of the things that scholars of Genesis have noted is that its author frequently engages in anti-pagan polemics by giving an orthodox alternative to the ideas of surrounding pagan cultures. This is why in Genesis 1:16, he says that “God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night,” but he does not name them as the sun and the moon.
The reason is that the words for “sun” and “moon” were also the names of the sun god and the moon god, and he doesn’t want the reader thinking that the high God made the sun god and the moon god. The message is, “They’re just lights! Don’t worship them!”
For those familiar with the ancient Near Eastern background that the author of Genesis is undermining, the background to Genesis 6 is clear. In Mesopotamian literature, there was a group of demigods known as the Apkallu. They were wise and taught mankind the skills that made Mesopotamian civilization great.
The Apkallu also mated with human women before the Great Flood and fathered divine-human hybrid children who were Mesopotamian king-heroes.
The Flood itself comes about differently in Mesopotamian mythology. There, the Flood happened because the human race multiplied so much that it was making too much noise at night and keeping the gods awake, so they sent the Flood to get rid of the problem.
It thus appears that the author of Genesis is rebutting these Mesopotamian ideas in his introduction to the Flood narrative.
Instead of the Apkallu being the good guys who made Mesopotamia great, the sons of God were fallen angels who abandoned heaven and improperly mated with human women. And the skills they taught corrupted mankind and brought on the Flood, which wasn’t a petulant act of the gods because mankind was making too much noise; it was sent because of man’s wickedness.
It thus looks as though we have evidence for the angelic interpretation of Genesis 6 both before Genesis was written (with the Mesopotamian Apkallu) and after it was written (in the Jewish literature from around the time of Christ).
This provides significant support for the angelic interpretation, but is there any way we can confirm it? That’s what we’ll discuss in my next post.