Who are the “sons of God” in Genesis 6?
Question 8016
Genesis 6:1-4 is one of the most disputed passages in the Old Testament. The “sons of God” who take human wives and produce the Nephilim have generated interpretive controversy for centuries, but the most exegetically consistent reading points in a clear direction when the relevant evidence is laid out carefully.
The Three Main Interpretations
Three interpretations have circulated across Christian history. The “sons of God” are understood either as the godly line of Seth inter-marrying with the daughters of Cain, or as powerful human rulers and nobles who took multiple wives by force, or as fallen angelic beings who cohabited with human women and whose offspring were the Nephilim. Each of these readings has been defended by serious scholars, and the question deserves careful treatment rather than dismissal.
The Case for the Angelic Reading
The Hebrew phrase bene elohim, “sons of God,” is the most important piece of linguistic evidence in the discussion. In Job 1:6, 2:1, and 38:7, bene elohim unambiguously refers to angelic beings who present themselves before God. The parallel term in Psalm 29:1 and 89:6, bene elim, refers in context to the divine council, again angelic figures. There is no clear, unambiguous Old Testament usage of bene elohim to mean “godly human men.” The phrase consistently designates supernatural beings when it appears elsewhere in the canon.
The Seth-line interpretation, however sincerely motivated by a desire to avoid the difficulty of angelic cohabitation with humans, reads into the text a theological distinction between the line of Seth and the line of Cain that the text itself does not make. Genesis 6 does not say “the line of Seth,” nor does it characterise the two groups in those terms. The interpretation imports a framework from outside the passage and reads it back in. The ruling class interpretation faces the same problem: nothing in the language of the passage identifies social power as the distinguishing characteristic. The natural reading of “sons of God” taking “daughters of man” treats these as two ontologically different categories of being.
New Testament and Early Witness
The New Testament provides two passages that appear to confirm the angelic interpretation. Jude 6-7 speaks of “the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling,” and links this immediately with the sexual immorality of Sodom and Gomorrah in a comparison that is most naturally read as thematic. The angels’ abandonment of their proper station is placed in direct parallel with sexual disorder. 2 Peter 2:4-5 similarly connects the angels “who sinned” with the immediate context of the judgement of the flood, locating their transgression in that period of history.
The earliest Jewish interpreters of Genesis 6 consistently read the passage as referring to angelic beings, a reading reflected in the Septuagint’s translation and in the broad consensus of Second Temple Jewish literature. The weight of early interpretation aligns with the linguistic evidence.
The Nephilim and Ancient Mythology
If the offspring of these unions were the Nephilim, described as “the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown” (Genesis 6:4), this may account for a significant portion of what survived in Greek, Mesopotamian, and other ancient mythological traditions as stories of heroes born from gods and mortal women. The Greek demigod tradition, with figures like Hercules born from divine and human parentage, may preserve a corrupted memory of a historical event that Genesis records with accuracy. This does not lend any authority to Greek mythology; it suggests rather that mythology preserves, in severely distorted form, an echo of real events whose true character is given in Scripture.
The Imprisoned Angels
The fallen angels of 2 Peter 2:4, kept in chains of gloomy darkness until judgement, and those of Jude 6, held in eternal chains, are most plausibly the angelic beings of Genesis 6, whose offence was of a particularly egregious character. Their current imprisonment is a category distinct from the demons who remain operationally active in the world today, which suggests that whatever took place in Genesis 6 was judged so severely that the participating fallen angels were permanently removed from activity, while the broader population of fallen angels continues until the final judgement.
So, now what?
The darkness of Genesis 6 provides the context for the flood. The corruption of humanity reached such a depth, and the intrusion of the supernatural into human life became so pervasive, that God’s judgement was necessary to preserve the line through which the Messiah would come. Noah was not simply a moral man; he was “blameless in his generations” (Genesis 6:9). God’s preservation of Noah was the preservation of the redemptive line, the line that ran from the garden promise in Genesis 3:15 all the way to Bethlehem. The enemy’s attempt to corrupt that line did not succeed.
“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.” Genesis 6:4