The Sons of God in Genesis 6: Angels or the Sons of Seth?

The following is a draft post that I wrote a while ago on the issue of whether the Sons of God in Genesis 6 are angels or just the male descendants of Seth. Some of the arguments are in inchoate form and can be expanded. But I believe that what is written here is sufficient to show that the Sons of God are in fact angels.

Did you know that the Bible teaches that angels were so enamored with the beauty of human women that they came down from their heavenly abodes and had sexual relations with them, producing a race of nephilim, or giants? Many people, including many Christians, don't actually know that the Bible teaches this. The natural reaction of the modern Christian layman is that nothing so repugnant to the intellect, and so reminiscent of Greek mythology, could ever be in God's word. But it is in the Bible, and there is no way of getting around this fact. In fact, not only is this taught in the Hebrew Bible, but that it is taught in the Bible is the majority opinion of scholars specializing in Genesis and the ancient Near East. In what follows, I will argue, or rather summarize, many of the reasons for holding to the majority opinion. After establishing this, I leave it to the reader to decide whether to bite the bullet and accept this biblical mythology as fact, or whether to judge that this is too far-fetched, and that the Bible is simply profoundly wrong here.  

The Biblical verse in question comes from the Book of Genesis, one of the world's most controversial texts. The full verse is as follows: 

Genesis 6:1-4 (ESV): When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, 2the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. 3Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in^a man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” 4The Nephilim^b 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 term "sons of God," or the bene elohim in Hebrew, does in fact refer to angelic entities. Let's look at the evidence. First, in the Masoretic Text (MSS), the term bene elohim and its minor variants is only found in about six or so different verses of the Old Testament, and in each of the verses, the term clearly and unambiguously refers to angels (or, at the very least, supernatural entities). I list the verses below: 

Job 1:6 (ESV): Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them.

Job 2.1 (ESV): Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the LORD.

Job 38:7 (ESV): when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Psalm 29:1 (ESV): Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength.


Psalm 89:7 (ESV): a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him?


Daniel 3:25-28 (ESV): He answered and said, “But I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, and they are not hurt; and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.” Then Nebuchadnezzar came near to the door of the burning fiery furnace; he declared, “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, servants of the Most High God, come out, and come here!” Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came out from the fire. And the satraps, the prefects, the governors, and the king’s counselors gathered together and saw that the fire had not had any power over the bodies of those men. The hair of their heads was not singed, their cloaks were not harmed, and no smell of fire had come upon them. Nebuchadnezzar answered and said, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants, who trusted in him, and set aside the king’s command, and yielded up their bodies rather than serve and worship any god except their own God. 

In each of these passages, it is clear that the bene elohim, or a mild variant thereof, refers to either minor gods or angels, members of God's heavenly council (for the purposes of this blog post, I will will set aside discussion of whether minor gods exist and are distinct from angels in God's heavenly council). In Job, they are members of God's heavenly council who present themselves, alongside the adversary, i.e., satan, to God. Likewise in the Psalms, these are unanimously taken by scholars to be references to members of God's heavenly council. In the passage on Daniel the fourth person in the fire, identified as "one like a son of God" in 3:25, is explicitly identified as an angel sent by God in 3:28. (Note that the above Daniel passage is one of the very few Biblical passages that is originally in Aramaic). Moving from the Masoretic text to the Septuagint (LXX), the evidence is even more overwhelming. The LXX translates Genesis 6:2 and 6:4 as "the sons of God," and "the angels of God, (άγγελοι του θεού)" respectively. In other words, the LXX uses the normal Greek word for angels in Genesis 6:4. Moreover, the LXX explicitly renders the Job passages and Daniel 3:25 using the Greek word άγγελοι (angels), the same one it uses in Genesis 6:4. It is important to underscore the strength of the above evidence, for it shows that both prior to and after Genesis was written, the sons of God were taken to be angels. This is because the book of Job, the oldest book in the Bible, predates Genesis, whereas Daniel and the aforementioned Pslams likely post-date it. Given all of this, the intratextual linguistic evidence must be regarded as being very strongly in favor of the angelic interpretation. 

In addition to the above Biblical evidence, the earliest extra-biblical reference to Genesis 6:1-4, the apocrphyal 1 Enoch, a second-temple text dated to the third or second century B.C.E., clearly identifies the bene elohim as angels, and expands on what is found in these few verses, building a robust midrashic narrative from it. Here is a link to the whole of 1 Enoch available online, for those who would like to read and verify for themselves. Again, it is important to emphasize that this text represents our earliest extra-biblical reference to the sons of God found in Genesis 6. 

In addition to 1 Enoch, there are a plethora of texts from the second-temple period which take the sons of God here to be angels (see, e.g., Philo, Gig. 2.6f; and Josephus Ant. 1.73, ). Moreover, it appears that Jude and 2 Peter are alluding to this story, and taking an angelic interpretation of it. Further, the tangential mode by which the authors of the epistles of Jude and 2 Peter allude to this episode is evidence that this interpretation was quite widespread among Jews of their time. It is undeniable that the angelic interpretation is very ancient. Indeed, we don't have evidence of a non-angelic interpretation until the second century C.E., where one Rabbi Simeon Bar Yohai curses anyone who advocates for the angelic interpretation in the targums. And by that time the angelic interpretation was already widespread and well-established. The fact that the angelic interpretation is the most ancient interpretation, the only one for which we have any evidence for in the second-temple period, and that it is quite widespread in this early period, is evidence that this is how the text was originally meant to be understood. 

In addition to the above points, the angelic interpretation makes the most contextual sense. It explains, for example, why the sexual union of the sons of God and the daughters of men produced the nephilim, or giants, something implied by the passage. Without an angelic interpretation of the sons of God, the production of giants from the union of the sons of god and the daughters of men would be left unexplained. After all, intermarriage among godly men and ungodly women would not normally produce giants! And it is clear that the Hebrew word nephilim here refers to giants. The word only appears twice in the Old Testament, in the aforementioned story and in Numbers 13:33, the latter of which is provided below:

30But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.” 31Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.” 32 So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. 33And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we  seemed to them” (Numbers 13:30-33 (ESV); emphasis added).

The context here is that God commanded Moses to send spies to scout out the land of Canaan, as he is giving it to the Israelites. The spies come back and report that they saw nephilim there, or at least their descendants. But notice that their gigantic height is emphasized. So it is plausible that nephilim denotes giants. Moreover, the LXX actually translates nephilim as γίγαντας (the Greek gigantas) in both Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33. As an aside, it is interesting that Josephus states that some Jews in his day have posession of the bones of the giants. This is only some of the evidence for the identification of the nephilim with giants, but it is sufficient. 

In addition to the above evidences for the angelic interpretation, the term "daughters of men" appears to naturally refer to women of the human race. Indeed, the Hebrew word for man in Genesis 6:1, (הָֽאָדָ֔ם), is exactly the same as that used in Genesis 6:2, viz., הָֽאָדָ֔ם . And since Genesis 6:1 clearly uses the word to denote all mankind, cf., "when man (הָֽאָדָ֔ם) began to multiply," it stands to reason that the word, as it appears in the term "daughters of men (הָֽאָדָ֔ם)" in 6:2, is used to denote the same meaning. Similar reasoning can be applied to the LXX, which uses ἄνθρωποι (mankind) and ἀνθρώπων in Gen 6:1 and Gen 6:4, respectively. It is very improbable that the meaning of one word would change so suddenly in the text. So it is clear that "daughters of men" simply refers to female humans. But this then probabilifies the view that the Sons of God, who are juxtaposed with female humans, are in fact nonhuman entities. 

So, the evidence that the bene elohim refers to angels here is very strong indeed. It is no wonder why it is the majority view among contemporary scholars of the Hebrew Bible.

Reasons why the Sethite Interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4 is Flawed 

First, nowhere in Genesis, nor indeed in the whole Bible, is the line of Seth, or the male descendants of Seth, referred to as the sons of God. Similarly, nowhere in the whole Bible are the daughters of Cain referred to as the daughters of men.

Second, nowhere is it implied in Genesis that the whole line of Seth, or even his male descendants, are righteous people, something required by the Sethite interpretation.  

Third, Genesis does not juxtapose two lines of people descending from Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve are presented as having had many children, and there are many lines of descent from Adam and Eve, of which the Sethite and Cainite line are but two. Thus, the emphasis on Sethites vice Cainites seems to be foreign to the text. 

Fourth, this interpretation utterly fails to explain why giants would be produced by the intermarriage of Sethite men and Cainite women. If the sons of god and daughters of men are both human beings, then why should giants be produced from their union, as the text naturally implies? By contrast, the angelic interpretation explains this quite nicely: the nephilim, or the superhuman giants, are simply a byproduct of the sexual relations of heavenly and human entities. 

Fifth, the term "daughters of men" is most naturally interpreted as referring to human women. But there is simply nothing in the text that would allow us to exegetically infer the more specific view that by "daughters of men" only women of a certain lineage, whether Cainite or otherwise, are denoted.  Indeed, to restate an argument above, the Hebrew word for man in Genesis 6:1, (הָֽאָדָ֔ם), is exactly the same as  that used in Genesis 6:2, viz., הָֽאָדָ֔ם . And since Genesis 6:1 clearly uses the word to denote all mankind, cf., "when man (הָֽאָדָ֔ם) began to multiply," it stands to reason that the word, as it appears in the term "daughters of men" in 6:2, is used to denote the same meaning. Similar reasoning can be applied to the LXX, which uses ἄνθρωποι (mankind) and ἀνθρώπων in Gen 6:1 and Gen 6:4, respectively. It is very improbable that the meaning of one word would change so suddenly in the text. So it is clear that "daughters of men" simply refers to female humans, and not to a subsection thereof. 

Sixth, since the flood is closely linked to this story, and in fact immediately precedes it, it does seem that the punishment of the flood is somehow linked with this antedeluvian backstory. But the Sethite interpretation fails to adequately link this story with the punishment of the flood, as the corruption of a mere two lines of people, the Sethite and Cainite lines, appears to be insufficient justification for God to flood the Earth. 

Seventh, this interpretation utterly fails to take into account the Biblical intratextual evidence: as we have seen, in all instances of the Masoretic Hebrew text that contain the term banu elohim or its variants, the term is taken to refer to angels. 

Eighth, it doesn't explain why the LXX, the earliest extra-biblical reference to the story (1 Enoch), and a plethora of early second-temple texts interpret the sons of God as angels in Genesis 6.

Ninth, and somewhat comically, the view that the “sons of God” refers to the godly line of Seth implausibly implies that the ungodly women were far more attractive than the godly women. Otherwise, why wouldn't the godly male descendants of Seth just marry the godly female descendants of Seth? No good explanation appears to be forthcoming on this interpretation. 

For at least the above reasons, the interpretation that sees Genesis 6 as contrasting godly Sethite men with ungodly Cainite women must be rejected as wildly implausible.