Who are the “sons of God” in Genesis 6?

Question 8016.

The sons of God in Genesis 6:1 to 4 have been argued over for well over two thousand years, and the argument shows no sign of settling. Four verses, a strange union, an unusual offspring, and then the flood. It is one of the most compressed and most disputed passages in the Old Testament.

I hold the angelic view, that the sons of God are fallen angels. I hold it with conviction but without contempt for those who differ, because this is a genuinely difficult text and good people have read it otherwise for a very long time.

The passage in front of us

Genesis 6 opens with people multiplying on the face of the land and daughters being born to them. Then verse 2: the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive, and they took as their wives any they chose.

Verse 3 has the LORD saying His Spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, and setting a limit of one hundred and twenty years. Verse 4 introduces the Nephilim, present in those days and also afterward, born when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man, and describes them as the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

Then verse 5, and the tone darkens completely. The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. Whatever is being described in verses 1 to 4, it stands immediately before the verdict that brought the flood.

The three readings

Three interpretations have circulated across Christian history. The angelic view holds that the sons of God are fallen angels who took human wives. The Sethite view holds that they are the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the ungodly line of Cain. The dynastic view holds that they are royal figures, ancient kings who took wives by force and built harems.

Each has serious advocates. The angelic view is the oldest, held by Jewish interpreters before the New Testament era and by most early church writers. The Sethite view rose to dominance from Augustine onwards and is still the majority evangelical position today. The dynastic view has been argued mainly by scholars working from ancient Near Eastern parallels.

So the question is not whether serious Christians can differ. They plainly do. The question is which reading best accounts for the words on the page.

How the phrase is used elsewhere

This is the argument I find most difficult to get around. The Hebrew phrase is bene ha elohim, and where it appears elsewhere in the Old Testament it refers to angelic beings without exception.

Job 1:6 has the sons of God presenting themselves before the LORD, with Satan among them. Job 2:1 repeats it. Job 38:7 has the sons of God shouting for joy at creation, which rules out human beings entirely, since no humans existed. The related expression in Daniel 3:25 describes a figure like a son of the gods in the furnace.

If a phrase means angelic beings everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, the burden of proof lies with anyone claiming it means something different in Genesis 6. That is ordinary interpretive method, and I do not think we should abandon it here because the result is uncomfortable. See Job 1 for the clearest parallel.

The contrast the verse draws

There is a second point of Hebrew usage that weighs heavily. Verse 2 contrasts the sons of God with the daughters of man, or daughters of adam. If both groups were human, the contrast would be pointless.

Under the Sethite reading, the verse would be saying that human males from one family married human females from another family. That is not a contrast between sons of God and daughters of humanity; it is a contrast between two branches of humanity, and Hebrew has perfectly good ways of saying so.

The natural force of the wording is a distinction of kind rather than of family. One group is described by relation to God, the other by relation to adam. That reads as two categories of being.

What Jude and Peter add

The New Testament supplies evidence that I think is decisive, or close to it. Jude 6 describes angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling, and says God has kept them in eternal chains under gloomy darkness.

Then Jude 7 continues: just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example. The word likewise ties the angelic sin to the sexual sin of Sodom. Jude is comparing them.

2 Peter 2:4 to 5 does something similar with the chronology. God did not spare angels when they sinned, and He did not spare the ancient world but preserved Noah. Peter moves from the angelic sin directly to the flood, in that order. The sons of God of Genesis 6 fit that sequence exactly.

The strongest objection

The best argument against the angelic view comes from Jesus Himself, and it must be answered honestly. In Matthew 22:30 He says that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven.

If angels do not marry, how could the sons of God take wives? The answer turns on a detail in the wording. Jesus says angels in heaven. He is describing the holy angels in their proper state, and He is making a point about marriage rather than about capability.

Jude describes precisely the opposite situation: angels who left their proper dwelling. The whole force of Jude 6 is that these beings abandoned their appointed place and did something outside their nature. Jesus tells us what angels in heaven do. Jude tells us what certain angels did when they refused to stay there.

Assessing the Sethite view

I want to be fair to the majority position. Its strengths are real. Genesis 4 and 5 trace two lines, one from Cain and one from Seth, and Genesis 4:26 notes that people began to call upon the name of the LORD. A story about those lines merging is not implausible.

It also fits the flow of judgement, since the flood falls on humanity, and it avoids the biological difficulties that trouble many readers about the angelic view.

What it cannot explain is the offspring. If the sons of God are Sethite men and the daughters of man are Cainite women, why does the union produce Nephilim, described as mighty men and men of renown? Ordinary marriages between ordinary people do not produce a category that requires a new word. That gap has never been closed to my satisfaction.

Assessing the dynastic view

The dynastic reading argues that ancient kings were commonly called sons of a god, that Genesis is describing tyrannical rulers assembling harems, and that the passage is a critique of despotic power.

It has the merit of fitting ancient Near Eastern royal language, and the phrase they took as their wives any they chose does carry a note of unrestrained power.

But it faces the same problem as the Sethite view regarding the offspring, and it faces an additional one. The Old Testament never uses bene ha elohim of human kings. The parallels come from outside Scripture, and I would rather let Hebrew usage govern Hebrew text.

The questions that remain open

Holding the angelic view does not mean pretending it is free of difficulties, and I want to name them rather than hide them.

We are not told how spirit beings could father children, and Scripture never explains it. We are not told whether the offspring were physically different in kind or simply extraordinary in size and strength. We are not told why the phrase and also afterward appears, given the flood.

I am content to hold a position while acknowledging unanswered questions. The alternative, which is to choose the reading with the fewest puzzles rather than the reading with the best evidence, is not actually a virtue.

Why the passage is there at all

Step back from the debate and ask what these four verses are doing. They sit immediately before the announcement of the flood, and they function as the final item in a catalogue of escalating corruption that began with Genesis 3.

The trajectory runs from disobedience, to murder, to Lamech’s boast of vengeance, to this. Whatever exactly happened when the sons of God took wives, the narrator presents it as a boundary being crossed. Creation had been ordered by kinds, and something was mixing what God had separated.

That reading fits Genesis 1 remarkably well. The creation account is preoccupied with separation and with each thing according to its kind. Genesis 6 shows the last separation collapsing, and the flood follows.

How the sons of God were read before Christ

It is worth knowing how this passage was understood by Jewish readers in the centuries before the New Testament, because their reading was remarkably uniform. The Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls all take the sons of God as angelic beings.

Josephus writes plainly that many angels of God had relations with women and produced sons who were arrogant and despised every virtue. Whatever we make of these sources, and I would not grant any of them authority, they establish what the phrase was understood to mean in the world the New Testament writers inhabited.

That matters when we come to Jude and Peter. Both write for readers who already understood the sons of God of Genesis 6 in angelic terms, and neither writer corrects the assumption. Jude in particular alludes to that literature without hesitation.

How the Sethite reading became dominant

If the angelic view is older, why is the Sethite view now the majority position among evangelicals? The shift has a traceable history and it is instructive.

Julius Africanus in the third century seems to be the first to propose the Sethite reading. Augustine adopted it, and Augustine’s influence in the Latin West was enormous. There were also pastoral motivations. The angelic interpretation had become entangled with the Enoch literature and with a growing appetite for speculative angelology that the church rightly wanted to restrain.

So the change was driven partly by exegesis and partly by a legitimate concern about where the older reading was leading people. I have some sympathy with that concern, as anyone who has looked at the current market in Nephilim books will understand. But a reading should be judged on the text rather than on the company it attracts.

Why the sons of God question is worth the effort

Someone will fairly ask whether four obscure verses deserve this much attention. I think they do, for reasons that go beyond the passage.

The first is methodological. This is an excellent test case for whether we let Hebrew usage govern our reading or let our expectations govern it. The phrase bene ha elohim means angelic beings everywhere else, and the honest reader has to reckon with that even when the conclusion is uncomfortable.

The second is that it shapes how we read the flood. If the corruption of Genesis 6 included an intrusion from outside humanity, then the flood is not simply God losing patience with bad behaviour. It is a rescue operation preserving the line through which the promise would come. See Jude for the New Testament comment.

Holding the sons of God question without heat

I want to close the argument with a word about temperature. This is a secondary matter. It touches no article of the creed, no element of the gospel, and no test of fellowship.

I have heard the angelic view presented with an air of superiority, as though anyone holding the Sethite position had simply not read carefully. That is unkind and untrue. Augustine read carefully. So do a great many of my own friends.

What I would ask of anyone on either side is that they be able to state the opposing case fairly before rejecting it. If you cannot explain why a thoughtful person reads the sons of God as Sethites, you are not yet ready to dismiss it. That principle applies well beyond Genesis 6, and it would improve most of our disagreements. On the offspring themselves see were there really giants.

A closing observation on the sons of God

There is one more thing to notice, and it is the kind of detail that makes me love the Bible. The phrase sons of God is not left behind in Genesis. John picks it up in a completely transformed way.

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God, and so we are. Paul writes to the Romans that all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God, and that creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

Whatever the beings of Genesis 6 were, the title now belongs to redeemed people. The phrase that opens the darkest chapter in Genesis becomes, by the end of the story, a description of ordinary believers. See what does born again mean.

Paul makes the same move in Galatians, telling the churches that in Christ Jesus they are all sons of God, through faith. The title that once described beings who abandoned their place now describes people who have been given one. You can read the passage at Galatians 3.

It is a long way from Genesis 6 to Romans 8, and the same three words carry the whole distance. That is the kind of thing that repays reading the Bible as one book rather than sixty six pamphlets, and it is why I would rather teach a difficult passage than skip it.

So, now what?

Hold your position with confidence and hold your neighbour with charity. This is not a test of orthodoxy, and I have warm fellowship with people who read the sons of God as Sethites. What I would ask is that the decision be made on the evidence rather than on which conclusion feels tidier.

And notice where the passage lands. After all that corruption, one verse turns everything: but Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD. Grace shows up in the middle of the worst chapter in the book, unearned and specific. Where might it be showing up in yours?

But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

Genesis 6:8 (ESV)

For Further Study

For those wanting to weigh the arguments further, Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology sets out the angelic view briefly and clearly, while Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology gives the fullest even handed survey of the three positions. Lewis Sperry Chafer treats the passage at length within his older dispensational framework, and J. Dwight Pentecost is useful for the way this material connects with the wider biblical storyline. Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s work on Genesis and on Jewish interpretive tradition is particularly valuable on the Hebrew phrase itself, and John Walvoord is worth reading for a careful example of how to hold a considered view without overstating the certainty available.