Exactly Who Are "the Sons of God" of Genesis 6?

People that have attempted to understand Genesis 6 have neglected one important tool—discourse analysis. Their failure to apply discourse analysis to chapters 5 and 6 has been most unfortunate. Genesis 5 and Genesis 6:1-8 comprise a section of Genesis entitled “This is the book of the generations of Adam.”¹ Let us make some observations concerning this portion of the Genesis narrative.

A “genealogy” not only gives a list of patriarchs, but it relates an historical narrative of that time. Since the intention of the author of each genealogical division of Genesis was not only to give a list of descendants, but also to tell a story, we must see Genesis 5 through 6:8 as a story written for the purpose of giving us an account of some important events. It sets the stage for the next genealogical section of the narrative. With this in mind, we must interpret this section in the light of what the author wanted us to understand. So what does the author of Genesis 5 through 6:8 desire us to understand?

Of course we are to understand that this genealogy was meant to give us a running history of the “generations of Adam,” or better translated, "the descendants” of Adam.

This is the only section in genesis that the author called a “book.” Should not this make us ask what is unique about this section among all the sections of Genesis? Leupold makes the helpful comment which answers this
question: “‘Book’ (sepher) refers to any document, long or short, as long as it is complete in itself.”²
A perusal of this section of Genesis reveals to us that at the end of this section we are told that God decides to destroy all the descendants of Adam and Eve except Noah. Therefore, when we read this section we should expect to discover something about Adam’s line of descendants and what caused their demise. The whole rest of Genesis 5 emphasizes that each of these patriarchs bore sons and daughters. Nine times it states, “And he fathered sons and daughters” (Green), and it says, “Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth” (Green). The reader is surely supposed to see from this repetition of the patriarchs’ begets that this mention of proliferation was only the tip of the iceberg. Besides all this, people are not dieing off from the earth until they are very old, but are remaining alive to further populate it. The author apparently wants to emphasize this point, because he adds up the years that these patriarchs lived before and after the birth of the next patriarch to show the total length of their lives. He does not do this in his genealogy recorded in chapter 11. This proliferation went on for a thousand years before Noah was even born.

God was blessing, but something happened that changed everything.

Even though making a living was tough (Gen. 5:29), things were proceeding well, but something happened: “Now it came about, when men [lit., “the man”] began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose” (Gen. 6:1-2, NASB). Even though chapter 6 begins a new chapter, we must be careful not to disconnect what we read at the beginning of chapter 6 from what was being asserted in chapter 5, as would be the tendency of us all. Rather, we should understand that these patriarchs were proliferating one after the other when at some point another group of people (literally “the man” in the Hebrew Scriptures) began to “multiply” upon the land. The word for multiply simply means to rapidly increase; it is not necessarily a proliferation through descent. Of course, this influx or proliferating of “the man” brought the two groups together and they intermarried.

The presence of a new group of people into the land which was already occupied by the descendants of Adam precipitated the intermarriages.

Remember a thousand years at least had passed since Adam and Eve were created and now a different group comes on the scene and these intermarriages take place.

“The land” referred to in Genesis 6:1 had already been mentioned earlier in Genesis.

Before we move on to see what logical implications must be drawn from this scenario, let us take a look at what was meant by “the face of the land.” (Please see quotation of verses 1 and 2 above.) These intermarriages took place “on the face of the land.” This land already was spoken of in Genesis 2:5-6, which introduces the narrative of the creation of Adam and Eve: “Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth [land], and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth [land]; and there was no man to cultivate the ground. But a mist [“flow” or “flood”] used to rise from the earth [land] and water the whole surface of the ground.” My article on this website, called “Where was the Garden of Eden?” relates that David M. Rohl in his book Legend: The Genesis of Civilization explains that the Garden of Eden was located between the Caspian Sea and Lake Urmia. It was watered by hot springs, as the Bible says. The area that we are speaking of now is this land that was watered with hot springs. I explained in my book New evidence for Two Human Origins: Discoveries That Reconcile the Bible and Sciencethat the Hebrew should be translated “flow” or “flood”; this can be shown through a study of Job, where this Hebrew word is also used. This flow from the ground refers to the hot springs some of which are found even today in Northern Iran. Hot springs are not found all over the world; this is a local phemomenon. Therefore,’erets translated “earth” or “land” refers to a limited part of the earth. It is noteworthy also that, if we believe the land had lain dry of years before the creation of Adam and Eve, we would not be able to conclude that the sixth day of creation, when Adam and Eve were created, occurred three 24-hour days after the water was separated from the land. Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden, but not out of “the land.” Furthermore, our text says, “Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them…” The land” refers to the part of the earth that was local to where the descendants of Adam and Eve were living.” This would also be the natural interpretation of this verse, since that if you were giving a history of a people and you spoke of “the land,” you would mean the land upon which the people you are discussing lived. Through our discourse analysis, we realize that we are dealing in Genesis 5:1-Genesis 6:8 with the history of the descendants of Adam and Eve; therefore, the people who first lived upon the land were the descendants of Adam and Eve.

We should also note that  by reading on in Genesis, we find that Genesis 6:5 reveals that Noah’s flood was limited to “the face of the land.” Verses 5, 6, and 7 all limit the judgment of God to “the land” or to “the face of the land.”

Certain conclusions may be drawn from the narrative.

Now let us see what conclusions we may draw from the narrative:

1. Adam and Eve’s descendants were living upon a piece of land for years. They were multiplying in numbers. At least a thousand years after Adam and Eve were created, another group of people began to grow in numbers upon the same land.

2. The men who were of the descendents of Adam and Eve took wives from the incoming group.

3. The group which was already on the land was the group who were the descendants of Adam and Eve.

4. The group that came into the land was called “the man.”

5. Only two groups are involved in this narrative; therefore, if the incoming group is called “the man” or “men,” the descendants of Adam and Eve must be “the sons of God.”

6. Since "the sons of God" are the descendants of Adam and Eve, and the other group is called “the man,” there is no reason to say the angels were one of the groups, as some interpreters do. They have no part in this matter. Maybe they had something to do with the appearance of giants, but that’s another issue. They are not “the man” because the term “man” does not fit a group of fallen angels, and they are not the sons of God because the sons of God, according to point 5 are the descendants of Adam and Eve.

7. Since “the sons of God” have already been identified as the descendants of Adam and Eve, the interpretation that we should translate the Hebrew to read, “the sons of the gods” is untenable.

8. That “the sons of God” means the descendants of Seth and “the man” the descendants of Cain is also untenable for a number of reasons: (1) If we read further we find that there were two results that followed these intermarriages: the life spans of men changed drastically and the offspring of the marriages became great men of political power. If these marriages were only the result of the combination of Seth’s descendants and Cain’s descendants, there would have been no change in life spans resulting from them. (2) The distinguishing factor between these two groups was that one group was described as “the sons of God,” the other, “the daughters of men.” This distinguishing factor is based upon their physical origins rather than on their spiritual origins. The words “and daughters were born to them” (Gen. 1:1) places the interpretation of these “daughters of men” and “sons of God” in the realm of the physical. If the daughters of men have a physical relationship to men, why would we not, in context, interpret the phrase “the sons of God” to indicate that this represents a physical relationship to God? God physically created Adam and Eve directly from the ground with the result that, taken as a whole, their descendants can be called “the sons of God.” Also, if the daughters of men were also sons of God, where our text would not be making a distinction between them because the author distinguishes between the two group by noting a difference in their origins?

9. Only two groups of people were mentioned in Genesis chapters 1 through chapter 6: The first group is laterally called in Hebrew “the man,” whose creation was narrated in Genesis 1. The text reads, “And God created man [lit., “the man”] in His own image, in the image of God He created them” (Gen.1:27). The first time 'adam is used in Genesis 1:26 the article is not attached because it is the first time the word is used (v. 26). The second time adam is used (Gen. 1:27) the article is included because of the grammatical rule of previous mention. Also the article is used because it makes reference to a group of people. (2) The second group is “the sons of God” whom we discovered were the descendants of Adam and Eve. The first time we find the word 'adam used is in Genesis 5:1; it refers to the man Adam. “The man” of Genesis 6:1-2 cannot refer to the descendants of Adam and Eve because this group has been found to be “the sons of God.” (See No. 5 above.) Also, if they belonged to the group called “the sons of God, no change in life spans would have resulted. “The man” basically refers to the human race even in Genesis 6:1-2, but in this context, the descendants of Adam and Eve are excluded. I quote here from the NASB: “And I will send hornets ["the hornet" in Hebrew] ahead of you, that they may drive out the Hivites…” (Ex. 23:28). “The hornet” here means members of the hornet species. Therefore, “the man” of Genesis 6:1-2 refers to members of the human race. These people could be Sumerians or other members of the human race. The only occurrence of “the man” previous to Genesis 6:1 was in Genesis 1:27, where the author writes of the creation of mankind. When the author writes, “Now it came about, when men [Hebrew, “the man”] began to multiply on the face of the land…” he was stressing that these people were part of the group of people created in Genesis 1, where they were also referred to as “the man.” Before the mixing of the races, the descendants of Adam were not really a part of “the man” because “the man” was historically defined as well as anatomically defined. The phrase “the man” connects the reader’s mind back to Genesis 1 because this was the first time that the term was used to refer to mankind. “The man” in Genesis 6:1-2 means those people who were the ones whose creation was related in Genesis 1, who also were described as the descendants [usually translated “generations”] of the heavens and the earth (Gen. 2:4).

Someone may ask…

Someone may ask, “Why didn’t the author call the descendants of Adam and Eve 'the sons of Adam' in Genesis 6:2 rather than ‘the sons of God.’” This would have worked quite well in English, but not so well in Hebrew. Since in Hebrew adam means man, calling the descendants of Adam and Eve “the sons of Adam” in Genesis 6:2 might have seemed awkward. It would have come out like this: “Now it came about, when…[the man] began to multiply on the face of the land…that the sons of…man saw that the daughters of…the man were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose.” Maybe this would have been a little confusing even to the Hebrew reader so that the author used “the sons of God” instead.

The increase in life spans of “the man” to 120 years indicates that “the sons of God” were the descendants of Adam and Eve.

To add a further note, Genesis 6:4 speaks of the great abilities of the men who were the offspring of the mixed marriages; this was a positive result. Therefore, the other result of the mixed marriages must also be positive. It relates how that the life spans became 120 years. If this is to be positive in nature, there must have been an increase in the average life spans of “the man” from their previous average life span of about 60 years. Some people hold that “the sons of the gods” were the non-Adamites and the “men” were the Adamites. But, “men” must have been those who were not a part of the descendants of Adam because they are the ones whose life spans were increased. These observations fit the interpretation of the passage that I have presented above.

The rapid decrease in the life spans of the descendants of Adam and Eve must be explained.

People assert that “the sons of God” are the descendants of Seth or that they are the worshippers of heathen gods and then move on without ever accounting for the rapid decrease in life spans. One must explain how the intermarrying of these two groups of people brought about this rapid decrease in life spans. Also why did these life spans decrease just the amount that you would predict if they were the marriages of the descendants of Adam and Eve with pre-Adamites. For example, why did the life spans level off while the people dwelt at the tower of Babel, and why did they decrease just the amount you would have expected them to do when these people were scattered and began to marry into the pre-Adamic race. Also, what caused the life span of Terah to be longer than his father’s?

Here is a quote from my book: “Kurt P. Wise, associate professor of science at Bryan College, has written a book, Faith, Form, and Time, in which he defends the young-earth view. Wise expressed that the most likely mechanism for the drastic decline in human life spans was the result of genetics. Dr. Wise concluded that even though Moses’ ancestors experienced changes in environmental conditions,”³ ‘none of these changes that we think might have occurred seem capable of changing human longevity.’"⁴ He went on to say, “A third consideration is that the change in life span after the flood seems to be smoothest when the life spans are graphed against generation time rather than against actual time of birth or mid-life. It seems that the life span of humans was changed by a set percentage each generation. Such a change sounds like a genetic change over the generations.”⁵It has been my thesis that God created Adam and Eve (Gen. 2) quite subsequent to His creation of the human race through descent (Gen. 1), and that the descendants of Adam and Eve married into this existing race.

We need to also look at a very import reason for concluding that the “sons of God” do not refer to fallen angels. Since “the sons of God” is a phrase that can mean either physical sons of God, spiritual sons of God, spiritual sons of the gods, it becomes impossible to determine its meaning in Geneis 6 simply by definition. The context must decide. To determine whether or the sons of God are the fallen angels or the descendants of Adam and Eve, we must look to the context. However, the immediate context depends upon one's view of the meaning of the sons of God. As a result, we must look to a broader context that to just this one section of the Book of Genesis to find the answer. The book of Genesis can be shown to have been written with an attempt to show that God had been continually blessing the human race ever since the beginning of creation. Genesis is divided up into sections separated by the phrase “These are the generations of...” or some similar phrase, except for Genesis 2:5-4:26. This section was treated as a special case no doubt because Adam was created directly by God; the author, therefore, could not speak of the descendants of Adam as the descendants or generations of God. Ignoring the section of Genesis that contains the phrase “the sons of God,” let us observe how the author emphasizes God's blessing mankind:

1. Genesis 1:1-2:4 This section keeps repeating, “And God saw that it was good.” The emphasis is that God blessed mankind with a good creation.
2. Genesis 2:5-4:26 God blessed Adam with a wonderful garden and animals and a wife suitable for him.
3. Genesis 5:1-6:8 (We will skip this section.)
4. Genesis 6:9-9:29 God preserves Noah and his family through the flood.
5. Genesis 10:1-11:9 God blesses Noah's sons and man by giving them many ethnic groups through their descendants.
6. Genesis 11:10-26 God blesses Shem's descendants with proliferation.
7. Genesis 11:27-25:11 God blesses Abraham with spiritual and material blessings and tells him that He will bless mankind through Abraham.

“And I will bless those who bless you,
“And the one who curses you I will curse.
“And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:31)

Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Savior, came through the line of Abraham.
8. Genesis 25:12-18 God blesses Ishmael with many descendants.
9. Genesis 25:19-35:29 God continues His blessing on Abraham by blessing his descendants: Isaac, Jacob, and Esau.
10. Genesis 36:1-8 God blesses Esau's with descendants and many livestock.
11. Genesis 36:9-43 Esau's descendants become the nation of Edom.
12. Genesis 37:1-50:26 God blesses the world of Abraham by choosing his descendant Joseph to save the world from a great famine. God works providentially to sanctify Joseph's brothers so they would serve Jehovah. The twelve gates of the New Jerusalem will bare the names of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Now that we have done our homework we are ready to go back to our problem of deciding what is meant by “the sons of God.” If those who say that they are fallen angels are correct, God blesses the descendants of Adam and Eve with many children and then permits the fallen angels to bare children to their daughters. Then God pronounces a curse upon the human race when He tells them that they will only exist for 120 years. God does not mention any judgment upon the angels. Next he chooses Noah and his family to escape this judgment. God sees that they have intermarried with His earlier creation of mankind. He gives them a warning that he is not happy with their sin but pronounces a blessing upon mankind in which he tells them that their life spans will be doubled to 120 years. (God foreknew that Adam would sin and that the two races would intermarry.) When mankind spurned God's grace in blessing them with the longer life span by their continual sinning, He pronounces judgment upon them, and chooses Noah and his family to escape. Which scenario best resembles the tenor of the other sections of the Book of Genesis? I believe the second scenario is the correct answer. The first scenario is in conflict with the other sections of Genesis; it has little grace in it, but the other sections do. If the sons of God were fallen angels, God would be permitting them further tempt the human race, which had already been tempted in the Garden of Eden. Such a scenario is simply out of tune with the rest of the Book of Genesis.

Doesn't The Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees andThe Antiquities of the Jews inform us that the Fallen Angels Begat Children with the Daughters of Man?

These ancient books interpret the Genesis story of the mixing of the sons of God with the daughters of men to be an account of angels coinhabiting with mankind. However, these books cannot be relied upon for true biblical exegesis nor can they be relied upon as the source of true revelation from God. They are not cannonical. They were written approximately a thousand to thirteen hundred years after the cannonical Book of Genesis.

The most ancient of these books was probably The Book of Enoch, which was written around the third century B.C. This book tells us that the offspring from the union of angels and men produced angels 450 feet tall. But Book of Revelation, which is in the Bible, makes this statement: "Ane he measured its wall, seventy-two yards, according to human measurements, which are also angelic measurements" (Rev. 21:17). The Greek places the measuring unit it cubits which were based upon a man's arm and hand lengths. Therefore, the basic size of an angel must be similar to a mans size. One would not expect the offspring of man's union with the angels to be 450 feet tall.

It should be observed from reading Genesis 6:1-4 that the giants or nephilim were on the land at the time the intermarriages took place, but according to the text, the giants were not pruduced by these intermarriages. We know this because verse 4 reads: "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. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown." In otherwords, the author of Genesis makes note that both before and after the nephilim appeared the strongest men politically were the children born to the mixed marriages rather than the nephilim, whom one would have thought would have been the most powerful.

The Book of Enoch contradicts the Holy Scriptures in a number of places. Here is a quote from The Book of Enoch (from 1 Enoch 40): "Then I heard the voices of the four figures [angels] praising the splended Lord. The first voice blessed the chosen one, and the chosen ones who rely on the Lord of Spirits. I heard the third voice interceding and praying for those who live on earth, and requesting in the name of the Lord of spirits."⁶' The angels seem to be blessing God, possibly Christ, and also others all in the same breath. We are not to praise God's creation as we do God. Also the angels are supposed to be interceding for mankind. The Lord Jesus is the only mediator between God and men,(1 Timothy 2:5)even though the Law was ordained through angels (Gal. 3:19). Enoch 48:1-3 asserts that the Son of Man was named in Heaven. Jesus was forever eternal. The Bible never says that He was named in Heaven. In 1 Enoch 69:8-11, the author of The Book of Enoch accusses the angel Penemue of curupting the human race by teaching them how to write with ink and paper. This way of thinking is foreign to the Bible. The Book of Enoch also says that the angels looed down and saw the sinfulness of man before Noah's flood (Enoch 1:9. But the Bible says that God saw the sinfulness of man (Gen. 6:5). Man's sinfulness is ascribed to the fallen angel Azazel (1 Enoch 10:8). But the Bible attributes our sinfulness to our fleshly nature (Gen. 6:3). Enoch prays for fallen angels (1 Enoch 10:8). Such instruction to man is never found in the Scriptures. Jude tells us that even the angels will not accuse Satan, but according to Enoch, God told him to reprimand the fallen angels.

The Book of Jubilees is also non-cannonical and it is quite obvious why. A very serious doctrinal error is its teaching that God changed mankind's nature after the flood so that he would not need to sin. The Bible teaches that the new nature is given to those who believe in Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior.

Joseph finished his work The Antiquities of the Jews probably around 90 A. D. It is possible that the idea that the angels were the sons of God and that they had relations with human women found also in The Book of Jubilees and The Antiquities of the Jews was taken from The Book of Enoch.

To conclude, those of us who believe in the western cannon of Holy Scriptures will do best to let the Scriptures speak for themselves. I have shown in by book that the life spans drop as the descendants of Adam and Eve began to marry into the pre-Adamic race as one would expect. They drop the amount you would expect, and they drop at the specific times in history when you would expect them to drop. Any other scenario that does not interpret the intermarriages of Genesis 6 to be between the descendants of Adam and Eve and a race of pre-Adamites does not fit the way the life spans of Adam's descendants diminished to their present level. Certainly Moses understood what actually happened, but somewhere after the death of Moses and about 300 B.C. the true creation scenario was lost.


[You probably have some helpful comments on the identity of "the sons of God." If you do, please post your comments below.]>


Copyright © 2010 by Gary T. Mayer
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¹Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture has been taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977 by the Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Other Scripture taken from:

The Interlinear Bible: Hebrew-Greek-English, © 1976, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1984, 2nd ed. 1986 by Jay P. Green, Sr. (Lafayett, IN: Sovereign Grace Publishers).

The Literal Translation of the Holy Bible, copyright © 1976, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1985 by P. Green, Sr. This work was contained in the side column of Green’s work referenced above.
²H.C. Leupold, Exposition of Genesis, 2 vols. (Columbus: Wartburg Press, 1942), 1:230.
³Gary T. Mayer, New Evidence for Two Human Origins: Discoveries That Harmonize the Bible and Science (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouseTM, 2009), 17.
⁴Kurt P. Wise, Faith, Form, and Time: What the Bible Teaches and Science Confirms About Creation and the Age of the Universe (Nashville: Broadman and Holman Publishers, 2002), 175, cited in Mayer, New Evidence, 17.
⁵Ibid, 176 cited in Mayer, New evidence, p. 17.
⁶A. Nyland, Complete Books of Enoch: 1 Enoch (First book of Enoch), 2 Enoch (Secrets of Enoch, 3 Enoch (Hebrew Book of Enoch (Mermaid Beach, Qld, 4218, Australia: Smith and Stirling Publishers, 2010), 56.