Who Were the ‘Sons of God’ in Genesis 6?

Gary Bates, creation.com

Probably the most often-used and controversial passage of Scripture by pro-ETH (extra-terrestrial hypothesis) UFOlogists is the account of “the sons of God” and their resultant offspring, the Nephilim. The description in Genesis 6:1–7 reads:

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the LORD said, “My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” 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.

The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORDsaid, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”

For proponents of the ancient astronaut and astrogenesis theories, the “sons of God” or even the Nephilim refer to extraterrestrial visitors to Earth. Erich von Däniken and Zechariah Sitchin, among others, believe these interfering aliens had sexual union with humans and/or genetically engineered humans or prehuman creatures in an effort to oversee mankind’s evolution. This is a grand assumption based on an interpretation of the text that is clearly incorrect. These writers advocate, for example, that the “sons of God” is merely a description by ‘primitive’ biblical authors who did not understand the technology, describing alien visitors from the sky. However, the unity of Scripture, the Scripture test (where passages are cross-referenced with each other to ensure they are not used out of context), and the way that expressions were used similarly throughout all of the books of the Bible do not warrant one particular expression to be rendered differently to other cases where it appears.

The text itself readily refutes the ‘primitive authors’ idea. In the first chapter of Genesis, we read that God created mankind fully formed and intelligent. Adam was even given the job of naming all of the land animals (Genesis 2:19–20). In the subsequent chapters, we see Adam’s offspring described as musicians and craftsmen (Genesis 4:21–22), demonstrating they were not primitive. The Scriptures are full of detail to show that, prior to the account in Genesis 6, man was already fully human, vastly intelligent, and engaging in spiritual worship—facts so readily ignored by those looking for the slightest opportunity to squeeze a UFO or two into the Bible. Unlike their rejection of earlier passages in Genesis as being real history, they readily accept that the Nephilim incident in Genesis is based on true events. But their ‘primitive authors and UFO’ interpretation is impossible if we accept that the earlier descriptions in Genesis are also true.

However, even among Christians, the meaning of this passage is sometimes hotly debated. There are probably four major views regarding the expression “the sons of God” in Genesis 6, with some surprising connections to UFOlogy:

1. It refers specifically to fallen angels.
2. It represents the ‘godly’ descendants of Seth, one of Adam’s children.
3. They were kings or rulers who were described as ‘gods’.
4. They were human beings possessed by demonic fallen angels.

1. The fallen-angel view

The early verses in Genesis 6 serve as a prelude to the great Flood of Noah’s day. They give the wickedness of man on the earth as the reason that God invoked this global catastrophe. Noah and his family, who were aboard the Ark, were the only humans to survive this enormous world-destroying and land-reshaping cataclysm. (Many of the world’s present geological formations and fossils were laid down by the catastrophic effects of the Floodwater.) Although the ‘space brothers’ have told many UFO contactees that the Flood was a real event, in true counterfeit fashion they have also said that it was triggered by their intervention to cleanse the earth from its impurities.

In addition, some Christian commentators believe that another reason for the Flood was not only to destroy sinful mankind but also to wipe out the offspring that resulted from the sexual union of the sons of God and the daughters of men—the Nephilim (see later).

This view is common among those who believe that the sons of God are fallen angels. They argue that these angels cohabited with, or had sexual relationships with, human women. The strongest argument for this view comes from the simplest understanding of the text itself.

The term, “sons of God,” in Hebrew, is bene (ha)elohim. It is used five times in the Old Testament (twice in Genesis 6, and once each in Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7, Authorized Version). In the passages outside of Genesis, it is always clearly used of angels. Some claim that a similar term is used in Hosea 1:10, but it is not exactly the same description because it refers specifically to the children of Israel being “sons of the living God.” One should not resort to exceptions unless there is a good reason, but in this case there is no Scriptural reason to do so. The angels are described as sons (bene) of God because He directly created them. Contrast this to the description of the “daughters of men.” The Hebrew used here is benot (ha)adam. If the sons of God were mortal human beings being born of humans, then the expression used should have been bene (ha)adam. The text itself draws a clear distinction between the offspring of humans and those directly created by God. In the New Testament, Adam, the first man, is called “the son of god” (Luke 3:38) because God also supernaturally created him. The New Testament also describes only Christian believers on numerous occasions as “sons of God” (Romans 8:14; Galatians 3:26), but this makes sense because they have been “born again” and are a “new creation” in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17).³ There are similar expressions in the Old Testament. In Daniel 3:25, the term “son of the gods” or “like the Son of God” (Aramaic bar elahîn) is used, which describes either an angel or a theophany that appeared with the three men in the “fiery furnace.” (A theophany is where God appears as an angel or in human form.) The expression “sons of the mighty” (bene elim) is also used to describe angels in Psalms 29:1 and 89:6.

The fallen-angel view is a common view held by the translators of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament around 250 BC), ancient Jewish interpreters, the historian Josephus, the earliest Christian writers, and by many modern notable Christian apologists today.

The biggest objection to this view is the belief that it is impossible for angels to have sexual relations with humans because they are spirit beings. But as we have already seen in the UFO/abduction phenomenon, as well as in other parts of Scripture, they can also exist and manifest at a physical level. 

This objection is often based on a passage in Mark 12:24–25 (repeated in Matthew 22:29–30). Here, Jesus was being questioned about a hypothetical woman who, according to Jewish law, should marry the brother of her dead husband. If there were seven brothers and they all eventually died, she would eventually have married all of them. Who would be her husband at the resurrection of the dead? Jesus replied:

Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

Some use this passage to claim that angels are incapable of having sex or procreating, but this is not what the Scripture says. It does say specifically that the angels in heaven, or those angels who obey God, do not engage in this practice. In a parallel passage in Luke 20:34–36 the context is made clear:

And Jesus said to them, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.”

He answered the question primarily to affirm the reality of the resurrection and the eternal life it will bring believers (like that of the angels), contradicting the beliefs of the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead and who were trying to trick Jesus.

In every biblical account where angels are sent by God and manifest in physical form, the Bible records them as appearing as males, therefore with gender (e.g., Gabriel, Michael). If masquerading angels are appearing as aliens, then the experiences of abductees suggest that fallen angels, at least, can manifest as female, too. An unwarranted extrapolation of the above text is used to suggest that because believers will not be married in the resurrection life, they will also be genderless (supposedly like the angels). Once again, the passage tells us only that people will not be married in heaven, although they do marry now. God’s ordained purpose for marriage was for procreation to populate the earth. Each of the angels was supernaturally created, so there was no need for procreation, and in this way we will be like them. Christians will not marry each other in the new heavens and Earth. They (the church) will be “married” to Christ, as His bride, throughout eternity. This expression is applied figuratively; Christ has redeemed His followers by His death and resurrection. Human beings have an individual identity, which they will never lose, and even angels are identified as individuals. It would seem strange that we would not retain our identities, of which being male or female is an integral part, in the resurrection life. 

The fallen-angel view of the sons of God is a provocative concept, and thus it remains an unacceptable explanation to many. Some argue vehemently against it and have tried to explain the passage in other ways. Around the fifth century AD the fallen-angel view came increasingly under attack. Some theologians claimed that it was impossible for angels to father children by human women.¹ Proponents of the fallen-angel view have often pointed out, however, that angels appeared in physical bodies, such as the three visitors to Abraham who sat, ate, and spoke with him (Genesis 18:1–15). We would presume then that they must have had the necessary digestive systems to be able to do this. In another example, angels appeared to the inhabitants of Sodom in such a form that the depraved Sodomites wanted them for homosexual relations (this is where the word sodomy comes from).

2. The Sethite view

The adherents to the Sethite view believe that the “sons of God” were a hereditary line descended from Seth, and that this was a God-fearing lineage. This view became popular in Reformed circles due to the opinion of John Calvin. The Scriptural support for this idea comes from Genesis 4:25–26, which describes the birth of Seth to his father Adam. It says:

Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, “God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.” Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh. At that time men began to call on the name of the LORD.

It was assumed to be a godly line because the passage says that men began to call out to God. However, some Christian apologists, citing ancient biblical historians, claim that “call” has been mistranslated and should actually read “profane.”² In any case, it doesn’t really matter. There were many generations after Enosh, and family heritage is not an automatic producer of piety.

This view also holds that the daughters of men were descended from the evil Cain (who murdered his brother Abel). If this were the case, however, one wonders why the Scripture did not say “sons of Seth” and “daughters of Cain.”³ There does not appear to be any textual basis for applying exclusivity to Seth’s or Cain’s lineage. If there is any distinctive human line at all, benoth Adam means the daughters of Adam, which ultimately means all women anyway. There is nothing to suggest that Seth’s line was any more pious than anyone else on the face of the earth, and conversely, there is no implication that any daughters of Cain would have been more sinful than anyone else. According to 1 John 3:12, Cain belonged to “the wicked one” because he murdered his brother Abel, but this passage does not refer to his offspring. If the remaining descendants of Seth were so “godly,” why were they not spared the judgment on sin that everyone received, except Noah and his family? Some have also claimed that when it says the sons of God “took” (Hebrew laqach) wives for themselves, the Hebrew implies a more violent “taking” than one usually associates with the normal process of betrothal. But to “take a wife” is a common term in Hebrew as well as in English. Strong’s Concordance says that the Hebrew verb can mean “to take, get, fetch, lay hold of, seize, receive, acquire, buy, bring, marry, take a wife, snatch or to take away” — such a range of meanings does not provide a strong argument to support the claim that this was a violent “taking.”

3. Kings and rulers

While it is true that many ancient rulers (and some modern ones, for that matter) have declared themselves to be gods, once again, it is hard to see any Scriptural support for this claim. The text does not imply this; it is an outside or eisegetical idea. The term “mighty men” is often used to suggest that they may have been kings or leaders, but as we shall see, this is not what the term means. 

Also, the Nephilim (the offspring of this union) are always referred to in the masculine gender. Surely the offspring of human parents would occasionally produce female children as well.

4. Demons

The view that fallen angels, or demons (are they the same? — see later), possessed, or inhabited, the bodies of men, and perhaps women, is entirely possible, and we see this phenomenon throughout Scripture. The practices of channeling, automatic writing, and perhaps even the abduction experience itself are forms of demonic possession. This then begs the question of who are the Nephilim and why are they expressly mentioned as the offspring of this union? Nowhere else in Scripture are the offspring of demon-possessed people, or anybody else, for that matter, singled out and then automatically classified as “fallen.”

The offspring—“as in the days of Noah”

The word Nephilim was actually left untranslated by the English translators. In some earlier versions the word was rendered as “giants.” It is entirely possible that these beings were indeed very large, so in one sense this translation could be correct. But its literal meaning is “fallen ones,” from the Hebrew root word naphal, meaning “to fall or to be cast down.” Why were these offspring, if they were the progeny of human parents (whether kings, ungodly, or demonically possessed) automatically condemned by God and regarded as fallen? Being born into an ungodly family by unbelieving parents does not mean that one is excluded from the promises of God that arise from faith in Him.

Some have suggested that the Nephilim were condemned because they were not fully human. This comes from the view that the sons of God were angels that cohabited with women to produce half-angelic/half-human beings — a hybrid offspring. Another often-quoted Scripture to support the angel view is Jude 6–7:

And the angels who did not stay within their own positions of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day—just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire [emphasis added].

The passage clearly links the perverted sexual practices of Sodom and Gomorrah with fallen angels who have not “kept their place.” But what are the “everlasting chains for judgment?” The next passage describes angels who have been “locked up” awaiting their eternal and final punishment. Moreover, the word “hell” in this next passage is the Greek word tartarus, which occurs nowhere else in Scripture. The most common occurrence of the word hell is a translation from sheol in the Old Testament and hades in the New Testament, which describes a place of departed spirits. This distinctive treatment of fallen angels is also completely different to any other account in the Bible, because we know that even Satan himself and his minions are still allowed to roam about the earth. The aforementioned passages, read in isolation, are hard to understand, but they make sense when read with the view that the sons of God in Genesis 6 were possibly fallen angels.

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell [tartarus] and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a Flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly… (2 Peter 2:4–5).

But why was this group of miscreant angels kept in chains? In the aforementioned passage, once again, specific angels are juxtaposed to the time of Noah and the sinful practices of Sodom and Gomorrah. This is the second specific reference to angels being imprisoned at the time of Noah. One can only presume that these particular angels did not play by the rules and that they stepped outside the boundaries of normal warfare engagement. In a sense, they had committed war crimes or acts of atrocity upon human beings. If these demonic angels had possessed human beings, why were they singled out for harsher treatment, since demonic possession occurred after that time and is apparently still occurring today? Some commentators also refer to 1 Peter 3:18–20, which says:

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water [emphasis added].

This could possibly be a third mention of the fallen angels of Noah’s time. Although the word spirit(s) is used of angels, it can refer to man’s spirit also. However, the text does specify a “prison,” which fits with the idea of “chains” previously mentioned in relation to tartarus.

The whole concept of a certain group of angels participating in perverse acts is very thought-provoking because Jesus was asked about the signs that would precede His second coming. He said in Luke 17:26:

Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will the Son of Man be in his day.

Of course, Jesus was warning His listeners that the people of Noah’s day did not expect the catastrophe that befell them. But Genesis 6:11–13 also tells us that the world at that time was violent and corrupt.

Some suggest the intriguing possibility that Jesus’ warning may have also referred to angelic sexual interference with humans. They also believe that this prophecy is being fulfilled today with “alien” abductions and their alleged associated sexual practices. In addition, some also believe that the modern hybrid alien/humans are real living offspring, similar to the Nephilim of Genesis 6. However, the difficulty with this view is that the original group of angels who procreated (as opposed to some who might just have engaged in sexual activity — if that is possible) were apparently locked up in tartarus to await judgment at the end of time. If the angels in Noah’s day were imprisoned for this sort of behavior, why wouldn’t all angels who partake in these practices today automatically be locked up by God as well? Unless, perhaps, it is a prelude to the “end times” (“just as in the days of Noah”) when literally “all hell breaks loose” before God finally deals with these matters on Judgment Day. At least this line of thought has some interesting parallels to our study.

A few apologists suggest that fallen angels are distinctly different from demons, based on the view that wherever demons are mentioned in Scripture, they seem to require embodiment in a biological creature, whereas angels do not. These apologists believe that demons are the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim destroyed in the Flood. Interestingly, the apocryphal (non-canonical) book of Enoch also describes the spirits of the Nephilim as evil spirits roaming about the earth. An account that would seem to support this idea is found in Mark 5. After Jesus crossed the lake in a boat, the chapter says:

And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. … When he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him. And crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me!” For he was saying to him, “Come out of this man, you unclean spirit!”

And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” 

He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.

Now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him, saying, “Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.” So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs (Mark 5:2, 6–13).

Note how the demons requested permission to possess the pigs. The view that the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim are demons is a radical view, but it does have some Scriptural support.

Although angels are described as spirits, so are human beings. Jesus was described as quickening spirit, there is the Holy Spirit, and God is spirit. It would appear the spirit is part of our being and not necessarily the sum of it. Additionally, in the New Testament, the expressions “demon” and “evil spirit” (as opposed to just “spirit” or even “ministering spirits”) seem to be interchangeable. Also note the following passage:

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons (emphasis mine 1 Timothy 4:1).

This seems to distinguish between spirits and demons. And elsewhere in the New Testament, we never see a single example where the angels and demons are interchangeable. However, the express terms “deceitful” and/or “deceitful spirits” and “demons” are interchangeable and seem to describe the one and the same entity.

The Nephilim

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