Doctrine

The Sons of God and the Nephilim

Four verses before the flood story stand among the strangest in the Bible, and three readings of them have contended for two thousand years.

3 historic readings

The World Is Destroyed by Water. Gustave Doré, 1866. Public domain.

Summary

Genesis 6 says the sons of God took wives among the daughters of men, and that their children were the Nephilim, a Hebrew word for the giants of the years before the flood. This site's tradition reads those sons of God as angels who left their place, which is the oldest reading on record.

The phrase sons of God turns up again in Job, Deuteronomy and the Psalms, and each time it names beings in God's court.
Jude and Peter both tie a sin of angels to the days of Noah, and Jude sets it beside Sodom.
The word watcher is a Bible word. It comes from Daniel's Aramaic, not from the Book of Enoch.
Two other readings are old and serious: the line of Seth, and kings who styled themselves sons of gods. Both stand below.
The reading comes from 1 Enoch, and this site's tradition follows 1 Enoch's account of the history. 1 Enoch stands outside the sixty-six books and is not proposed for them.

In canon order, each link in the verse's own words

The chain across the canon

Torah
Genesis 6:1–4The first text
¹Now when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, ²the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took as wives whomever they chose. ³So the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days shall be 120 years.” ⁴The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and afterward as well—when the sons of God had relations with the daughters of men. And they bore them children who became the mighty men of old, men of renown.
Sons of God, daughters of men, and the Nephilim.
Every argument on this page is about these four verses.
Deuteronomy 32:8
⁸When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He divided the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.
The nations set by the number of the sons of God.
Wisdom
Job 1:6
⁶One day the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them.
The same phrase again, and these are plainly not men.
Job 38:7
⁷while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
They shout at the founding of the world, before any man exists.
Psalms 82:1
¹God presides in the divine assembly; He renders judgment among the gods:
A judgment given in an assembly of beings God calls gods.
Prophets
Daniel 4:17
¹⁷This decision is the decree of the watchers, the verdict declared by the holy ones, so that the living will know that the Most High rules over the kingdom of mankind and gives it to whom He wishes, setting over it the lowliest of men.’
The word watcher itself, in Aramaic. This is where the name comes from.
Letters
1 Peter 3:19–20Genesis 6 not named here
¹⁹in whom He also went and preached to the spirits in prison ²⁰who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In the ark a few people, only eight souls, were saved through water.
Spirits held in prison, and their disobedience dated to the days of Noah.
2 Peter 2:4–5Genesis 6 not named here
⁴For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them deep into hell, placing them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment; ⁵if He did not spare the ancient world when He brought the flood on its ungodly people, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, among the eight;
Angels chained, and the very next line is the old world drowned.
Jude 1:6–7The fullest textGenesis 6 not named here
⁶And the angels who did not stay within their own domain but abandoned their proper dwelling—these He has kept in eternal chains under darkness, bound for judgment on that great day. ⁷In like manner, Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, who indulged in sexual immorality and pursued strange flesh, are on display as an example of those who sustain the punishment of eternal fire.
Angels who left their home, and Sodom named in the same breath.
The New Testament sentence that says what the sin was and what it cost.

Where this site stands, and on what

The case

The claimthis site's tradition
The objectionanother reading, at full strength
The answerwhat that reading costs
Scripturequoted plain, never slanted toward any side

The claim · this site’s tradition

This site's tradition holds the Watchers reading: the sons of God of Genesis 6 are angelic beings, and the transgression described there is exactly as strange as it sounds.

1The phrase carries the argument

Almost everything turns on one Hebrew phrase, bene ha-Elohim, sons of God. Everywhere else it stands in the oldest Hebrew books it names beings of heaven and not men. The writer then sets it against a second phrase, the daughters of men. He is drawing a line between two kinds of being.

The detail behind this step

The Hebrew is a construct chain, sons of the Elohim, and the article on the second noun makes it definite. Jerome noticed the grammar in the fifth century and reported that Aquila, the Jewish translator, rendered the plural in a way that meant angels, citing the assembly of gods in the Psalms as his warrant. Whatever else that shows, the phrase was not read as ordinary human sonship by the people closest to the Hebrew.

2The apostles read it that way

Neither Peter nor Jude names Genesis 6, and this site's tradition reads them as pointing back to it. Peter puts the fall of angels and the drowning of the old world in one breath. Jude names angels who abandoned their own home, then says Sodom sinned in like manner, going after strange flesh. That pairing is hard to account for on any other reading.

The detail behind this step

Jude goes further and quotes the Book of Enoch by name, calling him the seventh from Adam. It is the clearest use any New Testament writer makes of a book outside the 66. It does not put Enoch among the sixty-six. It does show that Jude expected his readers to know the story, and the story Enoch tells about these verses is the angelic one.

3Where the reading comes from

This reading of Genesis 6 comes from 1 Enoch, and this site's tradition follows 1 Enoch's account of the history: the angels who married were angels who left heaven, and the Watchers of the book are those angels. 1 Enoch is not one of the sixty-six books and this site does not propose it for them. The word scripture means the writings, what a text says and what it teaches, and in that plain sense the New Testament treats 1 Enoch as a writing worth quoting. The rest of the account, the names of the Watchers, the oath on Mount Hermon, the giants and the judgment, is told in 1 Enoch itself.

Read more at 1 Enoch, the Book of the Watchers, the whole account this reading rests on, chapter by chapter.

4The name comes out of Daniel

In Nebuchadnezzar's dream a being comes down from heaven and is called a watcher, in Aramaic 'ir, a wakeful one who does not sleep. Daniel uses the word three times in that one chapter. The Book of Enoch took a word Scripture already had and made it a title.

5What the first readers heard

Jewish writers before Christ told this story at length, and Josephus reports the angelic reading as simply what was understood. That settles nothing by itself. It does tell you what the passage sounded like to the people who first read Jude.

The one verse everybody raises

The objection, answered

The objection, at full strength

Matthew 22:30

³⁰In the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage. Instead, they will be like the angels in heaven.

Angels in heaven do not marry, and the verse is offered as though that closed the question.

The answer · this site’s tradition

The sentence answers a trick question about a widow in the world to come. Jesus says that angels in heaven do not marry.

Jude's angels are precisely the ones who did not stay in heaven. A rule that holds inside a house tells you little about a man who has walked out of it.

The words shown above say the sons of God took as wives whomever they chose. That is a seizing, and the flood follows it.

Angels in bodily form, where Scripture shows them

Scripture is not shy about angels who appear and act as men. Three visitors sit down under Abraham’s tree and eat what Sarah baked. Two of them walk into Sodom, are pressed into Lot’s house and eat supper there, and the men of the city want them. Hebrews tells ordinary Christians that some have entertained angels without knowing it, which only works if angels can pass for men. None of this makes the Sethite reading foolish; Augustine and Calvin held it, and it stands at full strength below. It does mean this verse settles less than it is usually asked to settle.

Each in its holders’ own words

The historic readings

On this reading	The Watchers, or angelic, view	The Sethite view	The divine-kings view
Sons of God are	Beings of God's court who left their place	The godly line of Seth	Kings who claimed divine sonship
The Nephilim are	The children of that union	Violent men of the mixed generation	Their dynasties of renown
The marriage objection	A rule about heaven, not about deserters	Proof that angels do not marry at all	Beside the point, since no angel is in view

Held by this site’s tradition

The Watchers, or angelic, view

The Book of Enoch, Jubilees, Philo, Josephus, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian hold it, and some Greek codices read angels of God at the verse. In our own time Chuck Missler and Michael S. Heiser teach it.

Reads bene ha-Elohim as the beings of God's court that Job describes, here overstepping their place.

Its case, in full4

Every other use of bene ha-Elohim in the oldest Hebrew books denotes heavenly beings.
Jude parallels the angels' sin with Sodom's, going after strange flesh, and Peter places that sin in Noah's context.
It is the oldest reading on record, dominant in Second Temple Judaism and among the earliest church fathers.
It explains why the offspring are called Nephilim and gibborim, men of renown, rather than ordinary children.

Irenaeus states the reading plainly in the second century and ties the giants to it.

“And for a very long while wickedness extended and spread, and reached and laid hold upon the whole race of mankind, until a very small seed of righteousness remained among them: and illicit unions took place upon the earth, since angels were united with the daughters of the race of mankind; and they bore to them sons who for their exceeding greatness were called giants.”

Irenaeus· The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, Sections 18-19, 202Patristic

Heiser argues from the setting of the passage in its own world that no human reading of the phrase survives it.

“This article deals a death blow to any non-supernatural (or non-mythic as some prefer) interpretation in the sense that, if you care about interpreting the Bible in context, no human interpretation of the sons of God can work.”

Michael S. Heiser· “The Ancient Near Eastern Context for Genesis 6:1-4” (drmsh.com), 2015Evangelical

Held by others, at full strength

The Sethite view

Augustine, Chrysostom and Ephrem the Syrian held it, and so did most of the Reformers, Calvin among them. It was the majority Western reading from the fifth century on.

Reads the two phrases as two human lines, and the passage as the collapse of the godly line by intermarriage.

Its case, in full4

Genesis 4 and 5 lay two genealogies side by side, so the narrative already has two lines in view.
Sons of God is used covenantally of human beings elsewhere, in Deuteronomy and in Hosea.
In the resurrection they neither marry, so angels are presented as beings who do not marry.
It needs no supernatural biology, and it keeps the flood's cause squarely on human wickedness.

Augustine reads the two phrases as two peoples, and this is the sentence the Western tradition rests on.

“By these two names (sons of God and daughters of men) the two cities are sufficiently distinguished. For though the former were by nature children of men, they had come into possession of another name by grace.”

Augustine of Hippo· The City of God 15.22, 426Patristic

Calvin puts the weight on what the godly line threw away, which is this reading's pastoral force.

“It was, therefore, base ingratitude in the posterity of Seth to mingle themselves with the children of Cain... they voluntarily deprived themselves of the inestimable grace of God.”

John Calvin· Commentary on Genesis 6:2, 1554Reformed

Held by others, at full strength

The divine-kings view

Targum Onkelos, the synagogue's own Aramaic rendering, which reads sons of nobles, and in the modern era Meredith Kline.

Reads bene ha-Elohim as tyrant kings who claimed divine sonship, as pharaohs did, and who seized wives at will.

Its case, in full4

Kings of the ancient Near East routinely styled themselves sons of the gods, and the title fits the second-millennium world.
Targum Onkelos, the synagogue's Aramaic rendering, translates the phrase as sons of nobles or great ones.
Taking wives of all which they chose reads naturally as royal harem-taking, and men of renown as dynastic fame.
It keeps a fully human referent while explaining the language of divinity.

This site’s quote store holds no words of a holder of this reading on this passage yet, and a quotation is added here only when one is verified.

Labeled study resources, never Scripture

Ancient witnesses

01Witness
1 Enoch 6-16, the Book of the Watchers
What it says
Non-canonical: Second Temple study resource
Two hundred Watchers descend on Mount Hermon under Semjaza and Azazel, bind themselves by oath, take wives and teach forbidden arts. Their offspring are the giants, and their imprisonment is fixed for seventy generations. Jude reproduces the prophecy of its opening chapter closely, though not word for word against any surviving Greek copy.
1 Enoch, tr. R. H. Charles (1917, public domain)
02Witness
Jubilees 4-5
What it says
Non-canonical: Second Temple study resource
Retells the same chapters with the Watchers descending in the days of Jared, and the flood as the cleansing of the corruption they introduced.
The Book of Jubilees, tr. R. H. Charles (1917, public domain)
03Witness
The Genesis Apocryphon and the Book of Giants
What it says
Dead Sea Scrolls: described, not reproduced
In the Genesis Apocryphon, Lamech fears that his son Noah was fathered by a Watcher, which is evidence that the angelic reading was live at Qumran. The Book of Giants fragments name the giants and their dreams of judgment.
Qumran caves 1 and 4 (descriptions from public scholarship)
04Witness
Philo of Alexandria, On the Giants
What it says
Second Temple philosophy
Philo reads the sons of God as angels or souls in the air. He allegorizes the passage while keeping the angelic identification.
Philo, De Gigantibus, tr. C. D. Yonge (1855, public domain)

What the copies actually read

The manuscripts

01Manuscript
Sons of God or sons of Israel in the Song of Moses?
The reading
The Masoretic Text, the standard Hebrew copy behind most English Bibles, reads according to the number of the children of Israel. A Dead Sea Scrolls fragment and the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament translated before Christ, both read sons of God. The Berean Standard Bible follows the older reading, which is why the verse in the chain above says what it says. This is given as manuscript data, not as an argument.
02Manuscript
Genesis 6:2 in the Greek tradition
The reading
Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth-century Greek Bible, reads angeloi tou theou, angels of God, where Codex Vaticanus and most witnesses read huioi tou theou, sons of God. Modern critical editions of the Greek Old Testament list Alexandrinus among the witnesses to the angels reading. It is evidence of how some of the earliest Greek-speaking readers heard the phrase, not evidence of what Moses wrote.

People clinging to a rock as the floodwaters rise over the world, engraving by Gustave Doré. — Notable art
The World Is Destroyed by Water
Genesis 6-7 · the judgment that follows the corruption of those days.
Gustave Doré, 1866. Public domain.

The question is whether these verses describe a rebellion that crossed a line God had drawn, or a marriage problem inside one family. This site reads the first, and the reason is the phrase itself. The giants standing in the land generations later are the same trouble carried forward.

Where it leads

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The books beyond the 66

Every text on this page, and where it came from

Sources

Scripture: Berean Standard Bible, public domain.
Patristic quotations: Ante-Nicene Fathers and City of God translations, public domain.
Josephus: Whiston translation, public domain. Philo: Yonge translation, public domain.
1 Enoch and Jubilees: R. H. Charles, 1917, public domain, labeled non-canonical.
Missler, Heiser and Kline are cited by name and work only; their books are under copyright.

Every cited work, in the sources registry →