Transcript:
There is this very strange text. That is verses 1-4 of Genesis 6. So let’s go look at that for a second. We’ll read the text to refresh our memory and to be precise about what is said and what is not said. Genesis 6:1-4, one of the strangest passages in the Old Testament — and the Old Testament is full of strange passages. It says this:
When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.
Immediately after this we see (verses 5-6):
The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
And so he decides to wipe man out in the flood. We’ll get to that in a second. For now, the question is this (point 2 on the handout), who are the sons of God and the daughters of men? This has been an object of speculation and debate for many, many, many centuries.
There are basically three options. Let’s begin with the most common one, the angelic interpretation. In this view (which is a very ancient interpretation), the sons of God are angelic beings. They’re angels, to put it simply. And they take to wife human women and have sexual relations with the women, who are called the daughters of men. And as a result of this unnatural union (talk about contrary to natural law, this is one that is), they give birth to the Nephilim. Actually it says that they give birth to “the mighty men”. In Hebrew, the Gibburim, and in Greek (anybody know what the Greek is?) Gigantes. Yeah, the giants, not the football team, but “the big people”. Which is, by the way, what gibbor means. Gibbor just means “mighty” or “strong”. Whenever you see “i-m” on a Hebrew term, that’s the plural suffix. it means “many”, like Elohim. And then the Greek, gigantes, is obvious, it’s where we get the word “giant” from. So in this view, angels come down, they have sexual relations with women and then the children of those are giants, because you know, those angelic genes, they’re strong. And so the sin in question (in this interpretation) is the unnatural union of the angels with women, and that’s what leads to the flood. God wipes out humanity because of his sin.
Now what would be the argument for this position? Well it’s very simple, it’s a linguistic argument. The angels in the Old Testament are sometimes called sons of God. For example: Job 1 and 2, Psalm 29:1 and psalm 89:6. Those are examples of angels being called Benei HaʼElōhīm (sons of God). And so, if that’s what the term means here, then it would be saying that the angels have relations with women. That’s the argument for it. What’s the argument against this — I like to do this argument for and against thing. What’s the argument against this position? Angels don’t have, you said bodies, I was going to say “the necessary equipment”. But we’ll go with bodies. Ok, that’s right. By definition, we know both from scripture, tradition and the analogy of faith (the Church’s teaching on angels) that angels are pure spirits. Even within the angelic realm, angels don’t generate. You look at Thomistic angelology or any angelology of the fathers, each angel is its own species. They don’t procreate, they don’t generate. So the idea that they even have the power to generate is actually metaphysically impossible, theologically erroneous. It’s simply impossible for them to copulate with a human person and create any kind of offspring.
So in other words, this interpretation, although ancient, it’s in the Book of Enoch (for example), which is an ancient Jewish writing from about the 2nd Century B.C. (is when most scholars date it). It’s widely read and known in the early church. Enoch interprets this as “this was the fall of the angels”. Want to know why the angels fell? Well it’s not narrated in Genesis 1-5, but it is narrated in Genesis 6, from this view. They fell because ladies, you are just too beautiful. They saw the ladies and they said “Wow! They’re so beautiful.” They just couldn’t resist. Actually, that was Tertullian’s interpretation too. If you remember the section in 1 Corinthians 11, when Paul is talking about women wearing veils in the liturgy (you don’t remember this?) He says that women should worship with their heads covered because of the angels. And Tertullian, in 200 AD, argued that what Paul meant there was that women are just too beautiful and that they need to cover themselves so that the angels can pay attention in the mass (basically). So cover up, you ladies are just too beautiful. Probably not right, although it was a good try. So that’s one interpretation.
Another interpretation, let’s go back to option number 2. Option number 2 is the ancient ruler’s interpretation. In this view the sons of God are ancient kings, ancient dynastic rulers, and the daughters of men were these royal harems that they would take from among their subjects. And in this case the sin in question is sexual lust and polygamy. In other words, these kings, who, remember in the ancient world, kings were regarded as divine or at least semi-divine, these kings would take to wife the women of their subjects and create these harems. And so out of lust and polygamy they sin and so God sends the flood to destroy them. Not impossible, hard to demonstrate, a bit of a modern interpretation. It’s kind of a novelty. I take it with a grain of salt. I actually think it can be confused with option 1. Although it does make me realize something else. Another major weakness to the angelic interpretation is that it would necessitate the angels inserting themselves into the narrative in chapter 6:1 and then pulling out in chapter 6:4. In other words, coming from nowhere and going nowhere, because who is punished in Genesis 6:5? It’s not the angels. God doesn’t throw them out of Heaven or anything like that. They aren’t consigned to eternal darkness. It’s humanity that’s punished. So if the sin were the sin of the angels, you would expect to see the punishment to be the punishment of the angels. But you don’t have any description of the punishment of the angels. People who are punished is humanity, the human beings, right? So that exegetical argument also favors the idea that the sin that’s being described is a human sin. It doesn’t have anything to do with the angels.
Ok, option 1, which I think is the right interpretation, is what is known as the Sethite interpretation. In this view, the sons of God are descendants of Seth. They’re descendants of the righteous seed of Adam and of the culture that Adam gave rise to, whereas the daughters of men are the descendants of Cain, the culture that’s also described in Genesis 5. And the sin in question here is the intermarriage between the godly Sethites and the ungodly Cainites. The sons of God in this case are attracted by the women of the Cainite civilization and they intermarry with them and thereby fall into the sin and the idolatry of the Cainite culture. Now, I realize that I don’t have the time to defend this in the depth that we would need. I would encourage you to read (if you can) Hamilton’s section in the Handbook on the Pentateuch or Augustine’s City of God, book 15. He deals with this in depth, the whole question of the sons of God and the daughters of men in book 15 of Augustine work, The City of God. He argues for this interpretation. Aquinas takes it also as well in the Summa Theologica in the section on whether angels have bodies and whether they can do things with those bodies that humans do. Aquinas deals with this in the Summa, part 1, question 51, article 3. He says this:
But God's holy angels could not fall in such fashion before the deluge. Hence by the sons of God are to be understood the sons of Seth, who were good; while by the daughters of men the Scripture designates those who sprang from the race of Cain. Nor is it to be wondered at that giants should be born of them; for they were not all giants, albeit there were many more before than after the deluge."
Note this, in Hebrew this just means “mighty men”, like these are powerful, warlike men. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are (you know) 25, 30, 40, 50 feet tall. And you can check out Aquinas on that, or Augustine has a more lengthy interpretation. For now the basic point would be this, one of the key strengths of the Cainite-Sethite interpretation is that Genesis 6:1-4 is preceded by Genesis 5 and 4. And what is Genesis 4 and 5 all about? The descendants of Cain and the descendants of Seth. If we had the time (which we don’t), because we have to get Noah, we’re not even there yet, just go back and read chapter 4 sometime and look at v. 17-23, which describe the descendants of Cain, his genealogy, who are warlike, murderers, violent and polygamous. And then contrast that with the descendants of Seth who are described in v. 26. And the descendants of Seth are described in this way. It says they begin to call on the name of the Lord. So the Sethites are described as a liturgical civilization, whereas the Cainites are described as a polygamous, violent, technological civilization. And it’s basically these two cities: the city of man, city of God. And that’s where Augustine actually gets his whole title for his book, The City of God, from, is the idea of these two cultures at war with one another: the City of Man and the City of God. And that’s going to happen throughout the rest of Genesis. The constant temptation of the citizens of the city of God is going to be the live like the citizens of the city of Man, to marry the citizens of the city of Man, and therefore to fall into the idolatry of the city of man. So this view says that basically what happened is the Sethite culture, the descendants of Seth, were corrupted by the descendants of Cain such that all humanity became wicked except for one family, Noah’s family, or actually it says just one man, Noah, and so God wipes out humanity and then establishes a new covenant with them.
Brant Pitre
Author