For the past few weeks, we've been exploring an account of “the generations of Adam” (Genesis 5:1), which up to now has mainly been a genealogy with stories sprinkled in (Genesis 5:3-32). Unlike the Cain genealogy (Genesis 4:16-24), here we've caught glimmers of hope we're looking at a new humanity, a righteous people of God. But as we try to wrap up these generations of Adam, our foot gets stuck in the mud of 'sons of God,' 'daughters of Adam,' 'fallen ones,' 'mighty men'... oh boy, quite the quagmire. These four verses that launch chapter 6 are nobody's idea of a cakewalk! They've been called “the strangest of all the Genesis narratives,”1 “ambiguous by nature,”2 “mysterious,”3 “cryptic and obscure,”4 “one of the most difficult texts to interpret in the Hebrew Bible,”5 “among the most debated texts in the entire Bible.”6 Well... don't you just feel encouraged?
It all starts by pointing us back to the time already covered by the chapter 4 and 5 genealogies; we're retreading ground previously gained.7 Those genealogies are all about how “the human began to multiply on the face of the ground” (Genesis 6:1). In pagan stories set in this time, humans multiplying doesn't go over as a good thing: “the peoples had increased, the land bellowed like a bull, the god was disturbed with their uproar.”8 But in the Bible, God doesn't mind that; actually, humanity multiplying is a sign of his original blessing (Genesis 1:28). So the human being, the Adam, is multiplying, “and daughters were born to them” (Genesis 6:1), just like last chapter told us (Genesis 5:4, 7).
Onto the stage step characters we don't yet recognize: “the sons of God.” A whole lot depends on who or what they are, but that's a big question we'll have to circle back to. For now, let's read what they did. “The sons of God saw the daughters of humanity, that they were good” (Genesis 6:2). The 'daughters of humanity' – we just heard about them a verse ago. But the sons of God see these human women and appraise them as good9 – which probably means, in this context, somehow attractive, beautiful, and desirable.10 That's often taken to mean that the sons of God feel a passionate desire, a lust for the women's physical beauty.11
If so, they act on it: “they took for themselves wives” (Genesis 6:2). And some readers figure there's nothing going wrong here: “no commandment is broken.”12 But notice the three key words: they see, they say it's good, therefore they take. Who's that remind you of? Eve in the garden, that's who (Genesis 3:6).13 That's not a promising sign. Acting out of their own vision, they take wives for themselves, like Lamech when he “took for himself two wives” (Genesis 4:19), making us wonder if the 'sons of God' here stick to one wife a piece or not.14 Notice, after all, that they take wives “from all whomsoever they chose” (Genesis 6:2). But it's in the pagan world, not in Israel, where people are said to 'choose' a wife.15 And the phrase 'from all' contrasts with God's warnings Israelites not marry Canaanite women (Genesis 24:37; Nehemiah 13:27) and mandates that their priests marry none but ladies of Israel (Leviticus 21:14; Ezekiel 44:22). Legally, “nobody [in Israel] could choose freely among all women.”16 But the 'sons of God' abide by no such laws. In at least one way (if not more), a boundary is being broken by “a mixing of things that should be separate.”17
Into this situation, the LORD himself suddenly speaks (Genesis 6:3), but what he says is hard to read – there are a lot of words that show up only here in the Bible, and I've seen totally different translations of this verse. God says his spirit – (the Holy Spirit? the breath of life?) – won't strive (or remain, or be strong?) with humans forever, since also he's flesh (or by their transgressing he is flesh?).18 All we can tell for sure is, God answers a problem. Somehow, the sons of God marrying human women could be thought to lead to humans exceeding all limits, like when the serpent promised to make humans like gods (Genesis 3:5) but then God refused to let humans 'take' what would let them live forever (Genesis 3:22).19 The LORD says he's not having any of that this time either: humans are still just flesh and have a limited number of days to live, either individually or collectively.20 Because of this weird new situation, God has to be extra clear about this.21 And the way the story's written, God acts immediately, “before the story can begin to unfold any further.”22
After that, we get a further comment: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days (and also after), when the sons of God came in to the daughters of humanity and they bore children to them. These were the Gibborim who were of old, men of the name” (Genesis 6:4). You'll note two weird words there. 'Gibborim' is easier: that means 'mighty ones,' like warriors or heroes. Then there are 'Nephilim,' who most scholars think are the same as the Gibborim here, children of the sons of God and daughters of man,23 though some think they're unrelated.24 'Nephilim' means, literally, 'the fallen ones.'25 Fallen from heaven to earth?26 Fallen morally from prior holiness, like Adam and Eve?27 Fallen, as in born abnormally?28 Fallen in battle as a slain warrior, like when David laments “how the mighty ones have fallen in the midst of battle” (2 Samuel 1:25) or when Ezekiel sees “the mighty ones, the fallen... who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war” (Ezekiel 32:27)?29
The big question of it all is, who or what are the 'sons of God'? Setting aside more crackpot ideas like aliens30 or Neanderthals,31 one major theory is that they're angels, who – maybe assigned on mission to earth already, maybe looking down from heaven – decide they have an interest in human women, and so they show up, adopt human form, marry, and have kids who are just... all wrong. That theory sounds weird – it is weird – but that's “the earliest known explanation” of what's going on here,32 accepted with utter sincerity by Jews up to the time of Jesus,33 plus Christians for the next couple centuries.34 Gradually, though, people got uneasy with that theory. Didn't Jesus himself contrast “the angels in heaven” with humans who “marry and are given in marriage” (Mark 12:25)? So “how could it not amount to folly to say that spirits... desire fleshly things?”35 No way can “spiritual natures have carnal relations!”36 Only “mad fools” could buy that... right?37
So some turned to a new theory, the idea that that the 'sons of God' were the upper class – maybe kings who claimed to represent God, maybe judges who acted like gods on earth, maybe the rich in general, maybe especially strong or skilled people.38 This would then be a “self-deification of the powerful,” when “the ruling class became captives of their own appetites.”39 In the second and third century, this approach became popular among the rabbis.40 One problem (among others) is that nowhere else are judges or kings, as a group, called 'sons of God.'41
Around the same time, Christians, starting in Syria,42 began pioneering the soon-to-be-popular idea that the 'sons of God' were actually the male descendants of Seth in Genesis 5, while the 'daughters of humanity' were only the female descendants of Cain from Genesis 4, and the problem was then being “unequally yoked with unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 6:14).43 This theory held sway for over fifteen centuries in the church, but the problem is that it's based on iffy translations of an earlier verse,44 plus that it's Seth's family that's identified with Adam and is known for daughters, so the 'daughters of humanity' can't just be the people of Cain.45
Most pastors I talked to about this sermon said they'd just leave things here: lay out a few major options, shrug, and call it quits. They said they'd leave it up to you to go read your Bible and try to make up your own mind, to decide whatever it means to you. That doesn't quite sit right with me. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16), and so God breathed out these verses, he gave them a meaning, and so it must be profitable to teach from them somehow. After combing through as much of the up-to-date research as I could find, taking hundreds of pages of notes, and turning it over in my mind for several years now... let me tell you what I think makes most sense.
The cultures around Israel used the phrase 'sons of God' or 'sons of the gods' to refer to divine beings, deities.46 They were often the chief god's courtiers and companions, those who make up the heavenly assembly or divine council, “the celestial entourage of God.”47 'Sons of gods' could also be a class term, meaning 'gods.'48 The Bible has no problem with this: it says that when the LORD made the world, “the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7), and that on occasion “the sons of God come to present themselves before the LORD” in his royal court. In the Bible's view, they're never the LORD's peers: “Who among the sons of God is like the LORD, a God... awesome above all who are around him?” (Psalm 89:6-7). Later Israelites came to understand the sons of God as angels serving the LORD. But they could also be identified as “the gods of the nations” (Jeremiah 14:22), since “the Most High... fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God” (Deuteronomy 32:8).49 In Genesis 6, we're probably looking at pagan ideas about their gods.
The idea of gods sleeping with mere humans, especially a long time ago, was a common idea in the mythologies of pagan cultures around Israel; and so was the idea of them producing children who'd go on to be important heroes and kings.50 This is, in fact, “a defining aspect of the time of the heroes.”51 Many pagans looked back at a heroic age when these sorts of things happened, a time of ancient human women “mingling with gods” and so bearing them “splendid children,” starting with “the race of illustrious kings.”52 There was then “a race of heroes, godlike men... called demigods.”53 In Greece, for example, the hero Heracles was born when the god Zeus rushed down from Olympus, “desiring the love of a fine-girdled woman.”54 The famous Argonaut heroes of Greek mythology included not only Heracles the son of Zeus,55 but Ancaeus, Erginus, and Euphemus the sons of the sea god Poseidon;56 Erytus, Echion, and Aethalides the sons of the herald god Hermes;57 Ascalaphus and Ialmenus the sons of war god Ares;58 Augeas a son of the sun god Helios;59 and, oh, you get the picture. Even some Romans thought the founder of Rome was the son of a mortal maiden who “united in marriage” with the god Mars.60 The Hurrians had a king named Kirta whom Canaanites called a son of the god El,61 and a myth about a boy named Silver who was fathered by the sky god Kumarbi and a mortal woman.62 The Babylonians looked back to legendary kings like Gilgamesh, “a giant in height, 18 feet tall...,” since he was “two-thirds god and only one-third human,” having been born to the god-king Lugalbanda and the goddess Ninsun.63 Pagans often figured some of the ancient heroes of that age had ultimately been fully “changed into gods” themselves.64
Although that was a lost age ended by the gods, who for unknown reasons had chosen to “destroy the lives of the semi-gods” in a great catastrophe,65 pagans often celebrated that heroic generation as having been a golden age marked by justice, much better than our world and its people afterwards.66 Those were days, they said, of “righteousness and piety,” when humans were often “guests of the gods, eating at the same board,”67 and so the heroic race were “more righteous, better far,” than other generations.68
Such heroes and kings might be gone now, the pagans said, but pagan elites claimed special privileges and pride due to being descended from these part-divine heroes.69 The Sumerian king “Shulgi, mighty man, king of Ur,” started spelling his name with the symbol for a god,70 and he claimed to be a brother of the god-king Gilgamesh.71 Plenty other kings claimed to be descended from gods and striving to earn godhood through their rule.72 Two noble families in Athens boasted their descent from Neleus son of Poseidon and Aeacus son of Zeus, respectively. The kings of ancient Sparta claimed to be descended from Heracles,73 as did the ruling house of Macedonia, including Alexander the Great.74 Julius Caesar thought his family was “descended... from the immortal gods,” tracing his heritage back to Aeneas the son of Venus.75 It was a common pagan brag.
So in that light, what's going on in Genesis 6? God is giving Israel a way to take the wind out of everybody's sails. Genesis is saying, let's suppose for a moment that your myths are all real. Fine, say the pagan gods came and had kids with human women. Well, if they did, they that was an aggressive transgression of both natural and nuptial boundaries: like Eve, they blurred heaven and earth; like faithless Israelites, they married outside the law (Genesis 6:2). Those gods are, at best, idiots. It's like Psalm 82, where God “takes his stand in the divine assembly and judges among the gods” (Psalm 82:1), convicts them of being too ignorant and incompetent to deserve their godhood (Psalm 82:2-5), and declares: “I said, 'You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you.' Nevertheless, like humans you will die, and like one of the princes you will fall!” (Psalm 82:6-7).76 And so these 'sons of gods' shouldn't really be called gods after all.77 And their sort of religion is therefore wrong,78 exposed in all its falsity by “the radical and subversive gaze of God.”79
Where pagans thought some of those ancient heroes had been awarded immortal godhood,80 Genesis says those pagan heroes are as “flesh and blood” as the rest of us (Genesis 6:3).81 The LORD marks here “a clear division between divine and mortal.”82 All heroes, no exceptions, were “mortal human beings;”83 each did “die like a mortal.”84 The heroes were 'fallen ones,' doomed from the get-go (Genesis 6:4). Not merely noble “heroes falling in battle strife,”85 they were monsters of sin, fallen to damnation, for “the proud shall stumble and fall, with none to raise him up” (Jeremiah 50:32). Calling them 'Nephilim' might as well be naming them 'the losers,' 'the goners'! And for all their credit as “men of the name,” men with a heroic reputation sung about in legend, Genesis denies them any individuality (Genesis 6:4). “Their story is jarringly brief” here,86 and their names and supposed stories are “lost in the dustbin of history.”87 In Genesis, any pagan heroic age came and went and wasn't worth remembering. Such heroes of old were just “weeds sown among the wheat” (Matthew 13:25),88 and those who claim descent from the ancient heroes are, at best, frauds.
And last of all, Genesis makes clear that the heroic age was no golden age of justice after all; it was a dark age of spreading evil, violence, and corruption (Genesis 6:5). All this time the 'sons of God' were impulsively looking at the goodness of the daughters of humanity (Genesis 6:2), the true God and Father was looking, taking centuries of evidence into account, and seeing something very different: that “the evil of humans was great on the earth” (Genesis 6:5).89 These 'sons of God,' presuming to see and judge like God, were blind to what he can plainly see.90 As humans multiplied (Genesis 6:1), so humans multiplied evil on the earth (Genesis 6:5).91
And this wasn't accidental or casual; it was deliberate, outward actions of wrong and harm which testify to an inward heart-rot.92 Where God had once “formed” man from the dust (Genesis 2:7) and day by day “forms the hearts of them all” (Psalm 33:15), the human heart turns out to all day be “forming” designs that are pure disaster (Genesis 6:5).93 This picture of “constant, unceasing, and active devising, planning, and carrying out of evil” is a shocking dash of hyperbole showing what happens when we cut the brake lines amid our downward spiral.94 “In the state of fallen nature,” we all have such an inborn “impulse to evil” that we “need the help of grace in order not to fall.”95 Or, as Scripture puts it, “the hearts of the children of humanity are evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live” (Ecclesiastes 9:3).
Here, instead of multiplying to “fill the earth” with God's image and goodness (Genesis 1:28), humans have opted to “fill the earth with violence” (Genesis 6:11). If “the one who sows to the flesh will from the flesh reap corruption” (Galatians 6:8), then humanity's become a gambler on the carnal slots, which always pay out their poison. God sees that “sin had reached its climax, ruling from the depths of the human soul and filling the breadth of the earth.”96 As a result, the earth itself is polluted, corrupted, ruined (Genesis 6:13). Our savagery spreads to other creatures, who react to our beastliness by becoming beastlier; our behavior hurts the health of the land, as we pollute it and treat it like garbage.97 The earth becomes unfit for God's purposes for it.98
The other Sunday, facing the curse already on the ground, we read Lamech's dear wish for “comfort from our making and the agony of our hands” (Genesis 5:29). Now, those same three Hebrew words crop up again, in a “poetic interweaving of linguistic irony.”99 Lamech's root for 'comfort' can also form a word for 'being sorry.' And God is sorry, remorseful, regarding his 'making' humans who produce agony or grief, not for our hands, but for his very heart (Genesis 6:6).100 Now, God is all-knowing. “God sees what will happen many generations in the future as if it had already happened.”101 In fact, before God made one molecule of the universe, he knew each and every deed, word, or thought – good or bad – that would take place in his creation. So nothing catches God by surprise. God is sovereign and has no second thoughts. “God is incomprehensible and immeasurable, for whatever it is that we're able to know or sense about God..., he is by many degrees far better.”102 Nothing harms or shocks him or disturbs him, because “God always abides in his own glory.”103 But for us to apprehend this God beyond comprehension, “the Bible uses words of God as if he possessed human passions.”104 It may not be speaking literally, but it's definitely speaking seriously.
At the mind-boggling interface of the timeless God and our time and space, the only way we can begin to understand is to imagine God heartbroken, to imagine God disturbed, to imagine God disgusted. Only by such impassioned pictures can we reach out to the impassible God. As heavy as the curse weighs on the ground of this globe, so heavy does the evil of earthlings weigh on the mind of their Maker. As bitter and piercing as all the thorns and thistles, such are the arrows of our sins shot into the tenderness of God's purity. More noxious and rotting than the foulest decay to us is the stench which the corruption of creation causes its Creator. The relentlessly imaginative devisings of the human heart are what frustrate the holy heart of Heaven (Genesis 6:5-6).105 These are agonies of a Father whose children torch the neighborhood and throw away their lives.106
No wonder God's portrayed this way, to help us understand “the bitterness of our sins.”107 So God is said to regret his creation, and resolves: “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the earth – man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heaven – for I am sorry that I made them” (Genesis 6:7). The cost of our dominion over creation is that they share the consequences for our corruption. Since all flesh had “ruined the earth in God's sight” (Genesis 6:11), God will therefore “ruin both them and the earth” (Genesis 6:13).108 It's “both devastating and undeniably just.”109 Because human evil had so thoroughly infected earth, the only remedy yet available was a system reboot, wiping things clean.110 ...Yet available.
But in the fullness of time, God would show a fuller solution to human evil, and that was to send forth his Son. God the Son took on human flesh, human blood, a human heart, a human will. And that will never once swayed toward evil. Here was a Son of God who never called evil good or good evil. Here was a Son of God who did not take as he chose, but always receives what his Father gives. Here was a Son of God who came to redeem the sons and daughters of humanity, offering liberty from first to last. Here was a Son of God whose giant goodness worked mighty works on the earth.
Embracing human feelings, he made visible and palpable the grief of God over sin. As he taught us stubborn crowds, “he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5). But in the end, over the very city whose unbelief cried for judgment, he wept hot tears of sorrow (Luke 19:41-44). Facing the darkest depths of human evil, his “soul was very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34). The Son of God offered his life to raise those who had fallen. Only through an agony shared somehow between God and man could the perfect likeness of God in creation take shape, and so “surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). Now that, in God's sight, is a hero! He embraced our ruin and devastation, opening his heart to be pierced so sharply. He stretched all human evil from first to last on the length and the width of his cross, excruciatingly bearing it all, to blot out, not human life, but human sin (Psalm 51:9).
“Repent, therefore..., that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19)! And let us not, by further sin, “grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom we were sealed for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). “Take care, brothers and sisters, lest there be in any of you an evil and faithless heart” like the hearts of the failed heroes (Hebrews 3:12), and “do not devise evil in your hearts against one another” (Zechariah 8:17). “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart” this day (Ezekiel 18:11), that you may “love the Lord your God with all your heart..., and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). This is not easy. “The righteous one falls seven times – and rises again” (Proverbs 24:16). In so rising again, “the one who overcomes will be clothed thus in white garments” for an eternal golden age ahead; “and I will never,” says this true Son of God, “never blot his name out of the book of life” (Revelation 3:5). Hallelujah! Amen.