One of my favorite questions to ask, whenever I study God’s word is, why? Not why did something happen, but why was this passage included in Scripture? The simple fact that something happened is not an explanation; a truly vast number of events have occurred in the history of the cosmos, and only the tiniest fraction of them are mentioned in the Bible. The events, and the details, that are found in the pages of Scripture are there because the Holy Spirit thought that they mattered for the point he was making, first for the original readers, and then continuing on generation after generation. So I want to understand why those particular events and details are so important. This article will explore that very question for a particular passage in Genesis 6 that has, in recent years, become a fairly common topic of discussion, especially online.
The passage I’m looking at is this one:
When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days – and also afterward – when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown (Genesis 6:1-4).
A quick online search will show that a great deal has been written about this passage. Sadly, the overwhelming majority of it seems to be based on nothing but pure speculation. Some of those speculations might work acceptably well if I were writing biblical fiction, but for this article I want to stick to the facts.
The Sons of God
As any decent commentary will tell you, there are three main scholarly theories about what the phrase “sons of God” means in this passage. The oldest of these theories is that it refers to angels or supernatural beings of some sort. This theory is known to have been well established by at least the 2nd century BC (all of the surviving commentaries on Scripture are much younger than the biblical text itself). Around the 2nd century AD, some four centuries later, Jewish interpretation began to favor a theory that the sons of God were kings, while Christian interpreters swung toward seeing the sons of God as the lineage of Seth, and the daughters of men as the lineage of Cain.
I don’t have space in this article to delve too deeply into the history of interpretation here. Suffice to say that modern day scholars recognize that all three of these theories have problems, but the angel explanation seems to be the one with the fewest, provided one is willing to either accept that such a thing is possible, or alternatively, that Genesis at least partly reflects pagan myths. As J. H. Walton (2003:795) puts it:
After an almost total departure from identifying the sons of God as supernatural in favor of various human identifications, there has been a widespread return among critical scholars to a supernatural identification. There is a difference, however, between these beginning and ending points. Initially interpreters did not balk at a mythological interpretation of the Bible because it coincided with their own worldview. Today interpreters do not balk at a mythological interpretation of biblical passages because they believe Israel’s worldview was little different from its neighbors.
Those of us who accept the Bible as divinely inspired will, or course, recognize that angels and other supernatural beings do exist, and Jesus’ statement about marriage at the resurrection:
At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven (Matthew 24:30; compare also Mark 12:25 and Luke 20:35-36).
tells us only that angels in heaven don’t marry, not that rebellious angels can’t do so.
However, I will take a slightly different approach than some, and ask how Moses’ original readers would have understood this passage. I think we sometimes forget that the Israelites who first read this passage (or, for the majority, had it read to them), were not newly created, either as individuals or as a culture. The Israelites were an indigenous people in the ancient Near East. Their ancestors had come from Mesopotamia, and they themselves had lived for generations in the Nile delta, where Egyptian and Canaanite cultures were both influential. They knew the pagan myths the way our generation knows popular movies. It would have been extraordinary had Moses not written anything in response to those myths. Israelites at the time of Moses would almost certainly have understood the sons of God in this passage to be supernatural beings. Does that mean we should understand the passage the same way? Given that the Holy Spirit intended to be understood, and that there is no later passage of Scripture that gives this passage a different meaning, I think the answer has to be yes.
Now, during the second temple period (after the return of the Jews from the exile in Babylon), many Jewish writings indicate that the sons of God taught humanity various arts that led them into evil. Moses, however, does not say any such thing. He only says that they married, and had children with, whichever human women they chose.
Mighty Men Which Were of Old
So let’s get back to the text. What does Moses actually tell us? For one thing, he tells us that the children of these sons of God and daughters of men were something called Nephilim. Exactly what that word means is a little unclear, although the fact that Moses uses the term without explanation is sufficient to show that his original readers knew very well what it meant. The Blue Letter Bible indicates that the word Nephilim probably comes from a root word, nāp̄al, that means “fallen.” So “fallen ones” is a possible meaning, although not definitely correct. This passage does say that the Nephilim were “men of renown,” or more literally, men with a name. They were also “heroes,” Hebrew gibôr, a term that means mighty warriors. These were heroes in the ancient Greek sense, not the modern sense of men who rescue others. In other words the Nephilim were the kind of warriors that legends are told about. There’s nothing here in Genesis that explicitly says that they were evil, although that is a common understanding.
The only other place in Scripture where this word appears is in Numbers. It’s part of the account of the spies that Moses sent into Canaan. Two of those spies, Joshua and Caleb, came back and urged the Israelites to immediately go in and conquer the land God was giving them. The other ten spies, however, gave a bad report. They said:
The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them” (Numbers 13:32-33).
The descendants of Anak are mentioned a number of times in the Old Testament, and according to this statement, they are among the Nephilim. We have to remember, however, that this passage in Numbers is the report of the ten unfaithful spies; it is not something we are expected to take at face value. Both the number of Nephilim that were in the land, and their size, might well have been exaggerated by the fear of the men who gave this report.
Now, the Septuagint – the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was used by the early church – translates Nephilim with the word gigantes, a word taken from Greek mythology. Gigantes referred to a monstrous race that fought, and lost, a war against the Greek gods. The use of this word is the reason the King James version translates Genesis 6:4 as:
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
The gigantes of Greek mythology, however, while they were known for being strong and aggressive, were not always described as gigantic in size. That is, the word in Greek does not mean exactly the same thing the word “giant” does in modern English. The Septuagint dates from many centuries after Moses, of course, but the fact that it was the primary translation used by the early church gives it some weight here. Obviously, we should not take from it that Greek mythology is all true, but rather that this particular word, gigantes, is a suitable one to translate Nephilim; they were aggressive and powerful.
By now, I’m sure that some of you are wondering why I haven’t mentioned Enoch. The book of Enoch, sometimes called 1 Enoch by scholars, goes into great detail about the sons of God and the Nephilim. Like the Septuagint, Enoch dates from many centuries after Moses. Unlike the Septuagint, it is only accepted as Scripture by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Consequently, I don’t consider it a useful guide to the way people living in the time of Moses, more than a thousand years before Enoch was written, would have understood this passage in Genesis. Rather, we should look for the key to ancient Israelite understand of this passage in much older Near Eastern myths.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that Genesis is mythology; I’m saying that the Holy Spirit intended this passage, like a number of other passages in Scripture, as a response to pagan mythology. As I mentioned earlier, the Israelites would have been very familiar with the myths of the surrounding cultures. And in a number of those myths, one or another of the gods had a child with a human woman. The technical term for these beings is demigod; the child of a (pagan) god and a human. Both Canaanites and Phoenicians, peoples that the Israelites were going to have to fight to claim their inheritance, had some kings that were claimed to have descended from demigods, or even to be demigods themselves. Coming, as they did, out of generations of slavery, the Israelites would not have had a warrior tradition. The idea of fighting against an army led by a demigod must have been terrifying as, in fact, the report of the ten faithless spies clearly shows.
In light of this, it’s very interesting that Moses does not deny that demigods exist. Instead, what he does here is correct the bad theology of the myths. The Nephilim are not the children of beings that are in any way rivals to the God of Israel. They are the “sons of God” (bēn ‘ĕlōhîm). That is, they are lesser beings, not equal to that God that Moses was proclaiming. They could not withstand the people that God himself had chosen to inherit the land. Further, when they were killed, the Israelites did not need to fear the vengeance of any supernatural parent, since they themselves were under the protection of one who was even more powerful. The Holy Spirit was not teaching the people that Nephilim existed; they already knew that. The Holy Spirit was telling them that Nephilim could be killed. They were not a threat to the people of God. That’s the message of these verses in Genesis 6.
As it was in the Days of Noah
I would probably have ended this article right here if I were not seeing speculation, all over YouTube, about fallen angels interbreeding with human women in our era. So let’s take a second to look at that. This claim is based on something Jesus said:
As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man (Matthew 24:37; compare Luke 17:26).
So what did Jesus mean by that? If you just read this much, it might be natural to wonder if Jesus is referring to Genesis 6:4. But if you look at the full quote, rather than just reading one sentence, Jesus is saying something very different:
As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man (Matthew 24:37-39; compare with Luke 17:26-27).
The parallel Jesus draws with the “days of Noah” is that the flood came when people were not expecting it. They were going about their business, with no thought that they were about to die. And they had no excuse for their ignorance, since Noah was a “preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5). Not only that, but he had been building a 300 cubit long ark that could hardly have been hidden. They had been warned that judgment was coming, but chose to ignore that warning. In the same way, Jesus is saying, his return will be unexpected. The warning has been sounded, and is still being sounded every time the gospel is preached, but far too many people continue to ignore it.
Jesus was not predicting the return of the Nephilim. Does that definitely prove they aren’t coming back? No, I guess it could be argued that Jesus never promised they wouldn’t return. He also never said that I won’t win the Powerball, so maybe that will happen too. (Probably not, though, because I don’t play it). But so what? It doesn’t matter if it does happen (the Nephilim, I mean, not the Powerball). If they could be killed in Moses’ day, they can be killed today, too. In any era, the Nephilim are not a threat to God’s people.
The lesson of the Nephilim, then, is the lesson of Goliath, and of the fiery furnace, and of the storm on the sea, while Jesus slept in the boat. It’s the lesson of the Red Sea, and of the empty tomb.
The Apostle Paul wrote:
What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31).
To which question the only answer is, who cares?
References Cited
John, J. H.
2003 Sons of God, Daughters of Man. In Dictionary of the Old Testament Pentateuch, edited by T. Desmond Alexander and David W. Baker, pp. 793-798. InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove.