Genesis 6:2 names the sons of God without explaining them. Three readings compete: rebellious angels, the godly line of Seth, or ancient kings claiming divine descent. The angelic reading is the oldest on record and matches how the Hebrew phrase bene ha-elohim is used everywhere else it is unambiguous; the Sethite reading became the Western default from roughly the fifth century on; the kings reading is the youngest and the least attested. Nothing inside the four verses settles it.
Compare translations: Genesis 6:1 · Genesis 6:2 · Genesis 6:3 · Genesis 6:4
The Hebrew behind “sons of God” in Genesis 6:2 and 6:4 is bene ha-elohim. Read woodenly it is “sons of the God,” or “sons of the gods” — the definite article does some work here that English cannot easily carry. What matters more is that Hebrew uses “sons of X” to name a class rather than a lineage. The “sons of the prophets” who appear around Elijah and Elisha are members of a prophetic guild, not the children of prophets. On that idiom, bene ha-elohim means roughly “the divine ones,” members of the category to which God belongs.
That is exactly what makes the phrase contested, because the Bible uses it that way in some places and uses similar sonship language for human beings in others.
Most translations decline to decide. The King James, the NIV, the ESV, and the NASB all print “sons of God” and leave the ambiguity where they found it. A few go further in the notes than in the text: the NET keeps “sons of God” and attaches a long translator’s note laying out the options. Some Septuagint manuscripts, including Codex Alexandrinus, resolve it outright and read angeloi tou theou — angels of God.
The other half of the sentence matters just as much and gets discussed half as often. The women are benot ha-adam, daughters of humankind: the ordinary word for the human race, the same root as Adam. Whatever the sons of God turn out to be, the verse sets them opposite humanity in general rather than opposite one family within it.
The passage is four verses long and explains nothing. It reports that the sons of God saw, took, and fathered. It records a limit of a hundred and twenty years. It notes that the Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, and that the offspring were gibborim, mighty men of renown. Then it moves straight to the verdict of 6:5 and the flood.
The narrator plainly assumes his readers already know who the sons of God are. He is writing for people who need no gloss. Every reading of the passage therefore has to be built partly from outside it — from how the phrase behaves elsewhere, from what the surrounding chapters set up, from what the earliest readers took it to mean. That is not a defect in the interpreters. It is the situation the text puts them in.
The same four verses raise a second question that is usually asked alongside this one and answered on different evidence: who the Nephilim were, and whether they were the offspring of these unions at all.
The oldest interpretations we have are unanimous, and they are angelic. The Book of the Watchers — the opening section of 1 Enoch, probably third century BC — expands Genesis 6 into a full narrative in which two hundred angels descend, take wives, teach forbidden crafts, and father giants. Jubilees tells a version of the same story. Josephus states it as a matter of course. Philo reads it that way. So do Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian.
The Sethite reading arrives later. Julius Africanus, writing in the third century AD, is the earliest author known to mention it, and he mentions it as one option of two. It became the majority Western view over the next two centuries, carried by Augustine — who argues it at length in City of God 15.23 — and by Chrysostom in the East. From roughly the fifth century until the modern period, “the godly line of Seth” was simply what the passage was taken to mean, and the angelic reading survived mainly as an embarrassment to be explained away.
Modern scholarship largely reversed that again. The recovery of the Ugaritic texts in the twentieth century put bn ilm, “sons of El,” in front of scholars as a standing phrase for a divine assembly in a closely related Semitic language. The Dead Sea Scrolls supplied a Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 32:8 that divides the nations by the number of the sons of God rather than the sons of Israel. Most critical commentaries now treat the angelic reading as the sense of the words, while remaining considerably more cautious about what the passage as a whole is doing.
What none of that history establishes is a verdict. It establishes that the question is old, that serious readers have landed in different places, and that where they landed usually had as much to do with what they thought was theologically tolerable as with what they thought the Hebrew meant.
The sons of God are members of God's heavenly court who crossed a boundary they were never meant to cross, and the flood is the judgment that follows the crossing.
The sons of God present themselves before the LORD with the Accuser among them. Nobody reads this as Seth's descendants; it is a scene in a heavenly court, and it is the closest parallel to Genesis 6's wording anywhere in the Bible.
God describes the sons of God shouting for joy at creation, before there were any human family lines to distinguish. Whatever the phrase means here, it cannot mean a branch of humanity.
The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint read that God fixed the nations' borders by the number of the sons of God; the traditional Hebrew text reads sons of Israel. Several modern translations follow the older reading, which assumes a divine assembly.
Jude describes angels who did not keep their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling, and are held until judgment. A few verses later he quotes the prophecy of Enoch — the same tradition that retells Genesis 6 at length.
Peter lists angels who sinned, then the flood, then Sodom, in that sequence. The order tracks Genesis, and the flood follows the angels' sin directly, which is hard to account for if the two are unrelated.
This reading has the plainest lexical case. Every unambiguous occurrence of bene ha-elohim in the Hebrew Bible names heavenly beings rather than people, and Genesis 6:2 sets the phrase directly opposite benot ha-adam, daughters of humankind — two categories, not two branches of one family. It is also the oldest interpretation anyone recorded: the Book of the Watchers, Jubilees, Josephus, and Philo all take it that way, and some Septuagint manuscripts render the phrase as angels of God outright. Jude and 2 Peter both describe angels who abandoned their assigned place, and 2 Peter puts that sin immediately before the flood, in Genesis's own order.
Jesus says that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven, which many readers take as ruling angelic marriage out entirely. Defenders answer that the sentence describes angels who stayed in heaven rather than ones who left it, and that is a fair reading of the qualifier — but it is a reading, not a demonstration. The harder problem is the verdict: Genesis 6:3 and 6:5-7 announce judgment on humanity, with no word of sentence against the sons of God, which is strange if the offence was chiefly theirs.
Held by: Attested in the Book of the Watchers and Jubilees, assumed by Josephus and Philo, taken for granted by Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, and the majority reading in modern critical commentary.
The sons of God are Seth's descendants and the daughters of humankind are Cain's, so Genesis 6 records a covenant line dissolving into the culture around it rather than anything supernatural.
Seth's line is introduced with a note that people began to call on the name of the LORD. It is the closest Genesis comes to marking one family as God's, and the Sethite reading is built on it.
Seth is born in Adam's likeness and image, the same words used of humanity's creation, which gives his line a standing the narrative never grants Cain's.
God calls Israel "my firstborn son." Sonship language for a human covenant people is ordinary biblical idiom, which is what makes the Sethite reading possible at all.
Israelites are addressed directly as children of the LORD their God — more evidence that the Bible can call people God's sons with no heavenly beings in view.
Jesus says the resurrected neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven. This is the strongest objection to the angelic reading, and the qualifier "in heaven" is where the argument gets fought.
The narrative setting fits. Genesis 4 and 5 are two genealogies set side by side — Cain's line ending in Lamech's boast about killing a man, Seth's line ending in Noah — and Genesis 6 opens the moment the second one finishes. Sonship language for a human covenant community is ordinary biblical usage: God calls Israel his firstborn son, and Israelites are addressed as children of the LORD. This reading also keeps the offenders and the judged in the same category, which the flood narrative appears to require, and it needs no machinery the rest of Genesis never mentions.
Genesis never calls Seth's line sons of God or Cain's daughters of humankind. The phrase is benot ha-adam, daughters of the human race in general, which would include Seth's own daughters; Cain is not mentioned in the chapter at all. The reading also has to explain why ordinary intermarriage produces Nephilim and men of renown, and it has no obvious answer — mixed marriage is a recurring problem in the Hebrew Bible and never once produces a category of extraordinary offspring.
Held by: First recorded by Julius Africanus in the third century, argued at length by Augustine in City of God 15.23, preached by Chrysostom, and standard in the West from roughly the fifth century until the modern period.
The sons of God are human rulers — the kind of ancient Near Eastern king who claimed a god for a father — and the sin on display is tyranny: taking whatever women they chose because nobody could stop them.
God promises of David's heir, "I will be his father, and he shall be my son." Royal sonship is a real biblical category, and this reading extends it back to the rulers of Genesis 6.
The enthroned king recites a decree naming him God's son, begotten today. Kings across the region said the same of themselves, which is the background this reading appeals to.
"You are gods, sons of the Most High" — addressed to figures who judge unjustly and will die like men. Whether they are corrupt human rulers or members of a divine council is itself disputed, and the two readings of this psalm line up behind the two readings of Genesis 6.
Eve saw that the tree was good and took its fruit. The same verb pair drives Genesis 6:2, and the echo is the kings reading's best purely textual observation.
Kings across the ancient Near East styled themselves sons of a god as a matter of royal protocol, and the Hebrew Bible speaks that way about its own king. This reading takes the verbs at full weight: the sons of God saw, and took, any they chose. That pair — saw, took — is the same sequence that drives Eve at the tree and Achan at Jericho, and in Hebrew narrative it usually flags seizure rather than courtship. What results is a portrait of despots assembling harems, which is exactly the corruption Genesis 6:5 then summarises, and gibborim, mighty men of renown, reads naturally as a warrior aristocracy.
The Hebrew Bible never uses the plural bene ha-elohim for a group of human kings. The royal sonship texts are singular and address one king at a time, which is a different construction doing different work. The reading is also modern: no ancient interpreter is known to have understood Genesis 6 this way, and for a passage whose earliest readers left their opinion on record in writing, having none of them on your side is a real cost.
Held by: A modern proposal. Meredith Kline set out an influential version of it in 1962, and it appears in some recent evangelical commentaries, often combined with elements of the other two readings.
Weigh only the words on the page and the angelic reading has the most going for it: it is what the phrase means everywhere else it is unambiguous, it is what the earliest readers on record understood, and it explains why the flood narrative opens here rather than three chapters earlier. Weigh the shape of the story and the Sethite reading has a genuine claim: Genesis 4 and 5 build two lines, Genesis 6 collapses them, and the sentence that follows falls on humanity rather than on angels. The kings reading is the youngest and the thinnest on attestation, but it takes "took whomever they chose" more seriously than either rival. Most careful readers hold one of these with the other two in view, and that is not a failure of nerve — it is what four verses of evidence will support.
Genesis 6:1-4 does not actually say the Nephilim were the children of the sons of God. It says the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humankind — and that those unions produced the gibborim, the mighty men of renown. That the two groups are the same is an inference. It is a very common inference, and it may well be right, but the grammar leaves it open, and the phrase "and also afterward" puts Nephilim on the earth after the flood as well. Numbers 13:33 has the spies reporting them in Canaan centuries later.
The passage does not identify the sons of God with demons, name any of them, describe what the Nephilim looked like, or say a word about anyone's height. The giants of popular retelling come from the Septuagint's choice to translate nephilim as gigantes and from later elaboration in the Enoch literature, not from Genesis. Nor does this phrase have any direct relationship to the New Testament's use of "sons of God" for believers — a different idiom, in a different language, answering a different question.
No reading of this passage is a required article of Christian faith. Interpreters who agree on nearly everything else disagree here, and have disagreed for two thousand years. A page that tells you the question is settled is telling you something about its author rather than about Genesis.
The Hebrew is bene ha-elohim, literally "sons of the God" or "sons of the gods." In Hebrew, "sons of X" routinely names a class rather than a family line — "sons of the prophets" means members of a prophetic guild, not prophets' children — so the phrase means something closer to "members of the divine category." Genesis never defines it. Everywhere else the phrase appears unambiguously it names heavenly beings, which is why many readers take Genesis 6 the same way; others argue it marks the covenant line of Seth, or human kings claiming divine descent.
That is the oldest recorded interpretation and the most common one in modern scholarship. Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 are usually read as supporting it: both describe angels who abandoned their assigned place, and 2 Peter places that sin immediately before the flood. The main objection is Matthew 22:30, where Jesus says angels in heaven do not marry; defenders answer that the sentence describes angels who stayed rather than ones who left. Genesis itself does not settle the question either way.
Genesis says only that the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, and that the unions of the sons of God with human women produced mighty men of renown. Whether the Nephilim are that offspring or a separate group already present is genuinely ambiguous in the Hebrew. The name may derive from the root naphal, "to fall," though that is disputed. The Septuagint rendered it gigantes, which is how "giants" entered English Bibles. Numbers 13:33 mentions them again in Canaan.
No. The New Testament calls believers children or sons of God in John 1:12, Romans 8:14, and Galatians 3:26, but that is a Greek expression about adoption into God's family through Christ. Genesis 6 uses a Hebrew phrase that elsewhere denotes members of the heavenly court. The English wording is identical only because translators rendered two unrelated idioms the same way; the underlying claims have nothing to do with each other.
Two readings compete. One takes it as a new cap on the human lifespan, which fits the shrinking ages in the genealogies that follow — though Noah, Shem, and Abraham all live longer than that. The other takes it as a countdown: a hundred and twenty years of reprieve before the flood, which fits the immediate context of judgment. The clause it belongs to is itself uncertain, since the Hebrew verb rendered "abide" or "strive" appears nowhere else in the Bible.
Because the evidence pulls in different directions and no single reading disposes of all of it. The phrase bene ha-elohim points one way, Jesus's remark about angels points another, the genealogies of Genesis 4 and 5 point a third, and Genesis declines to explain itself. Study notes that lay out the options instead of picking one are being accurate about the state of the question rather than evasive.
BibleHearth