Who Were the ‘Sons of God’ in Genesis 6? Fallen Angels or Seth’s Descendants?
From the time of Adam to the days of Noah, there were ten significant individuals in ten generations through whom God was working His plan.
These pre-Flood patriarchs are found in Genesis 5 in the genealogy of Adam. Here is an overview of the key people in this prophetic family line.
Adam was 130 years old when he became the father of Seth (v. 3).
Seth was 105 years old when he became the father of Enos (v. 6).
Enos was 90 years old when he became the father of Cainan (v. 9).
Cainan was 70 years old when he became the father of Mahaleleel (v. 12).
Mahalaleel was 65 years old when he became the father of Jared (v. 15).
Jared was 162 years old when he became the father of Enoch (v. 18).
Enoch was 65 years old when he became the father of Methuselah (v. 21).
Methuselah was 187 when he became the father of Lamech (v. 25).
Lamech was 182 years old when he became the father of Noah (v. 28).
Noah was 500 years old when he became the father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth (v. 32).
All the men in this list produced many more — other — sons and daughters, as we have seen. But the record only states that Noah had three sons, and there is no record of him having more sons or daughters before or after the Flood. This limitation may have been due to Noah’s enormous God-given assignment and the lack of time to care for a larger family. God ultimately found only one family of eight (Noah and his wife, their three sons, and their sons’ wives) to be free of the corruption that had affected the entire rest of the human race. But for some unknown reason, there were no more than three named children of Noah and his wife before or after the Flood.
So except for Noah, Genesis 5 says that everyone in Adam’s family line had many sons and daughters throughout their lives. Their centuries-long lifespans provided for the exponential growth of the earth’s population, and in the days just before the Flood, there was a population explosion. We read about this in Genesis 6:1, where it tells us “men began to multiply on the face of the earth.”
I noted previously that during Adam’s 930 years of life, if he saw only half his children grow up, and if only half of them got married, and if only half of those had children — and so on until Adam’s death — even estimating conservatively, Adam would have seen tens of thousands of his own descendants! When you factor in the voluminous numbers of descendants born to everyone throughout these generations, it is likely there would have been several million people living on the earth by the time of the Flood.
During the days of Jared, dark spiritual activities were rampantly occurring between mutinous angels and the daughters of men. These angelic beings who came down to cohabit with mortal women were known by ancient rabbinical writers as the Watchers, God-assigned watchers over mankind who became derelict in their assignment, and we will go into more detail about that in the following paragraphs.
The theological discussion of angels is very broad, and there are many different types of angelic creatures we could talk about — but that is beyond the scope of this blog post. For now, we are going to focus on what these beings are called in Genesis 6: the sons of God.
Who Were The ‘Sons of God’?
As the population began to boom, something nefarious was also taking place.
We see this revealed in the following verses.
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose…. 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 (Genesis 6:1,2,4).
The words “sons of God” in this passage are very important. It is interesting to note that when this phrase is used in Scripture, it denotes a direct creation of God. For instance, Adam was directly made by God, so he is referred to as a “son of God” in the genealogy of Christ (see Luke 3:38). Angels are also a direct creation of God. Hence, they, too, are at times referred to as “sons of God.” The words “sons of God,” which appear in Genesis 6:2 and 4, were understood to be angels by all the Jews and rabbis from earliest times to the Third or Fourth Century. Likewise, Christians in the Early Church also held to the knowledge that these “sons of God” were angelic beings. In fact, there are no known records of any Jew or Christian believing other- wise prior to about the Third Century. It was at that time that something changed, and a new view began to take hold, and it is now called the Sethite view.
Were These ‘Sons of God’ the Sons of Seth?
The Sethite view about the phrases “sons of God” and “daughters of men” that are mentioned in Genesis 6 is that descendants of the completely “godly” sons from the line of Seth married the daughters of men, whom some allege were the completely “wicked” daughters from the lineage of Cain. There are a myriad of problems with this view that did not emerge until the time of Sextus Julius Africanus, Augustine, and others in the Second Century and in subsequent centuries. The Genesis account states that the “sons of God” (who were celestial in origin) entered into unhallowed unions with the “daughters of men” (who were human in origin).
One writer has rightly stated, “The [theory of] ‘sons of Seth’ and ‘daughters of Cain’ fights against the intended grammatical antithesis between the sons of God and the daughters of Adam. Attempting to impute any other view to the text flies in the face of the earlier centuries of understanding of the Hebrew text among both rabbinical and Early Church scholarship. The lexicographical antithesis clearly intends to establish a contrast between the “angels” and the “women of the earth.” Furthermore, the words “daughters of men” in Genesis 6:2,4 does not refer only to the daughters of Cain, but to women of the entire human race, and this means all Adam’s female descendants are implied in this description.
Although many argue for the Sethite view, well-known Bible scholars of recent times expressed the belief that the “angel” view is correct — including G. H. Pember, M. R. DeHaan, C. H. Mackintosh, F. Delitzsch, A. C. Gaebelein, A. W. Pink, Donald Grey Barnhouse, Henry Morris, Merrill F. Unger, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum.
The Sethite View
However, for the sake of clarity, we will briefly look at the Sethite view to see what it is and why it is in the eyes of many so seriously flawed.
First, it must be restated that the Sethite view was a new idea that emerged in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries when Church leaders were combating Gnostic influences that caused people to become obsessed with angels. There was a need to bring correction to this obsession, but the devised correction included throwing out all long-established teachings about the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 as fallen angels who sexually mingled with mortal women. Although ancient rabbis and earlier Church fathers wrote in unison that the “sons of God” referred to fallen angels who had sexual relations with mortal women, that teaching began to be phased out or mitigated in the Fourth Century, and a new idea about this text in Genesis 6 began to be devised. In addition to trying to bring correction to the current obsession with angels, many at that time struggled, as many do today, with the idea that fallen angels could have physical relations with women.
The newfangled Sethite view began to assert that the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 were not fallen angels as it had been long believed — rather, they were said to be the righteous descendants of Seth who married into the wicked lineage of Cain. Proponents of this new view put forward the idea that this “merger” led to greater wickedness than the earth had seen heretofore.
There are many notable voices from antiquity wrote very clearly about the “sons of God” as fallen angels and about the newer Sethite view as a diversion from the established doctrine of the Church. The most ancient view of rabbis and early Church fathers was that the “sons of God” were fallen angels who sexually mingled with women. In the Old Testament, the words “sons of God” were used primarily to denote angelic hosts. When you combine this fact with what is written in Peter’s and Jude’s epistles, it becomes clear that the New Testament record holds to the most ancient belief as well — that the “sons of God” were rebellious angels who abandoned their posts to do the unthinkable with mortal women.
Furthermore, if the words “sons of God” and “daughters of Adam” were referring to the descendants of Seth and Cain, respectively, the question must be asked: Why did these natural unions produce monstrous giants, or Nephilim? If these were natural unions, as claimed by those who adhere to the Sethite view, the offspring of these unions should have also been normal, and they were not. These unions between human and heavenly creatures resulted in never-before-existing hybrid creatures that brought great bloodshed and violence into the earth in the days before the Flood.
We are told in Second Corinthians 13:1, “…In the mouth of two or three wit- nesses shall every word be established.” In addition to the Old Testament usages and the unified writings of ancient rabbis and Early Church fathers, we have the additional inspired New Testament commentary of Peter and Jude, who each affirm that the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 were indeed fallen angels who rebelled against God, abandoned their assigned posts, and committed such atrocities that God bound them in prison for their activities. This alone is enough to obliterate the Sethite argument and to return us to the original view that the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 were fallen angels.
Reasons the Sethite View is Unsupported by Scripture
Nearly every time this term “sons of God” is used in the Old Testament, it is used to describe angelic beings or “direct creation,” not humankind in general.
The words “daughters of men” in the original language mean the daughters of Adam, or the daughters of man (or of mankind) and refer to ALL daughters born in Adam’s line.
Nowhere in Scripture does it say that all Seth’s descendants were godly and that all Cain’s descendants were ungodly. Although Cain was exiled and “cursed from the earth” (Genesis 4:11-14), God nevertheless protected him from potential deadly retribution (see v. 15), and in protecting him, the Lord was by default protecting his future offspring. One could equally conclude, therefore, that this idea of a perpetually cursed seed is assumed, not biblically proven.
Adam and Eve had other sons and daughters after Seth, so to assume there were no other families on the earth besides the lineage of Cain would be an incorrect assumption.
The ideas of the godliness of all the Sethite men, the ungodliness of all the daughters of Cain, and that the two lines were not to marry are assumed or read into the biblical text.
If all the men in Seth’s line were so godly, why did all of them (except Noah) die in the Flood?
Lastly, as already stated, how did the human union of Seth’s sons and Cain’s daughters (“godliness” and “ungodliness” in itself) produce the extreme anomaly of giants, or Nephilim?
Again, the Sethite view simply does not line up with Scripture. Nearly every use of this phrase “sons of God” in the Old Testament refers to angels, which was the long-held rabbinical understanding as well as the belief embraced by Early Church fathers, such as Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Athenagoras of Athens, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Jerome. I examine the writings of these writers and other venerated individuals more in my full book.
