Part 2-of-3
In all these, "sons" corresponds to Strong's G5207, and "God" to Strong's G2316. God Himself applies "sons of God" to redeemed humans. To insist the phrase can never describe men in the Old Testament sits very uneasily with this consistent biblical usage.
The usage of the phrase "sons of God" in the New Testament was intentionally shocking to Jewish readers of the first century, see John 10:34ff. That we are becoming sons of God in the Gospel, by the power of Jesus, is a claim at least as outrageous as Jesus's own claim to be the Son of God. If "sons of God" in John 1:12/etc. is to be taken merely to mean that we are spiritually upright, then we could take Jesus's own claim to be the Son of God in the same metaphorical way -- he was just a good teacher, nothing more. We are just spiritually upright people, nothing more. No, the New Testament is giving an absolutely outrageous teaching -- through salvation by faith in Jesus Christ,
we become the sons of God, the very same sons of God as those that fell in Genesis 6, beings of supernatural power! See 1 Cor. 4:20, Acts 1:8, 1 Cor. 6:3, etc.
C. What about Job 1:6 and Job 38:7?
Those who hold the hybrid view often point to Job 1:6 and Job 38:7 as if that settles everything:
Of course not. But the phrase "bene ha'Elohim" just means "angels" -- the sons of God who dwell in heaven with God. These are beings of such unimaginable power that men regularly mistake them for God himself (Rev. 19:10, 22:9, etc.) They are not mere men.
Yes, in Job—written in highly poetic ... language
The genre is irrelevant; the point is that the phrase
just means angels, heavenly creatures.
Yes, in Job—written in highly poetic heavenly-courtroom language—the "sons of God" are heavenly beings. The underlying words there use the same basic combination as in Genesis 6 (Strong's
H1121 together with Strong's
H430). Context tells you they are in heaven; context tells you they are not men.
But that is the point:
context determines the referent. The same words can describe:
- Heavenly beings in Job's heavenly court scenes.
- Covenant people in Deuteronomy 14:1; Hosea 1:10.
- Redeemed believers in the New Testament (Romans 8; 1 John 3).
This is a pretty argument but it fails to achieve its goal. The language used in Deut. 14:1, Hos. 1:10, John 1:12, etc. is
elevating language -- it is not metaphorizing men as sons of God, it is literalizing them as sons of God, thus elevating them to a status that is above mere men! You are right that context determines that Deut. 14:1 is not "You are angels" but "You are sons of the Lord God" is intentionally parallel to that appellation of angels used in Genesis, Job, Psalms and elsewhere -- "sons of God". The very point being made in the text is, "You are sons of God,
so act like it". Moses is pointing upward to something beyond mere men and saying, "you are that higher thing, and you are to be like that higher thing, so don't follow the ways of the people of the land of Canaan".
To take one usage (Job) out of its poetic, heavenly setting and then force that meaning into Genesis 6—against the entire flow of Genesis 4–6—is not a careful handling of Scripture.
But that's not what it is at all -- Genesis, Job, Psalms and other passages,
all use the phrase "sons of God" to simply mean angels, which is why the Septuagint (which, again, is extensively quoted by the New Testament, verbatim) translates this phrase to "angels", in Greek.
D. Genesis 6 in its own context
In Genesis 6 the phrase "sons of God" sits immediately after the Spirit has carefully distinguished two
human lines:
- Cain’s line – murderous, worldly, "daughters of men" (Genesis 4).
- Seth’s line – calling "on the name of the LORD" (Genesis 4:26; chapter 5), the worshiping family.
As I noted above, this is an imposed systematic. You are simply reading this structure onto Genesis 4 and Genesis 5. The phrase "bet Adam" is nowhere used in Genesis prior to Genesis 6, so merely saying "Genesis 4 exists" proves nothing. Both Seth and Abel are in Genesis 4, so the idea that Genesis 4 is "the bad genealogy" and Genesis 5 is "the good genealogy" and Genesis 6:1ff is some kind of intermingling of these two, which arbitrarily angered God for some reason, is just invented.
Within that context, "sons of God" naturally refers to the men of the God-fearing line (Seth), and "daughters of men" to the women of the godless line (Cain).
This is purely interpolation, and baseless interpolation at that. To be clear, I will grant that there is a spiritual parallelism to the corruption of Cain, because he is a type of the Antichrist, and Nephilim are intimately connected (in their origins, career and fate) to the Antichrist, but this is a spiritual typology, it is simply not what the text itself is talking about, this is not the
subject of Genesis 6:1-7. The
subject of Genesis 6:1-7 is answering the following question:
What motivated God to destroy the world in the Flood? What was happening in the world that was so bad, that destroying all life on earth was
better than allowing it to go on? Because God is righteous and merciful, we know logically that the Flood must have been the most righteous and most merciful action God could take. So what horrors must have been occurring on earth that the most righteous and merciful God could do nothing but to flood the entire world, and start over with Noah and his sons?
THAT is the topic being addressed in Genesis 6:1-7. No need to appeal to the Hebrew or point all over the text to other usages of words and phrases, it's just right there on the page itself for anyone to read.
The Bible itself has already done the categorizing. You have to shut your eyes to Genesis 4–5, run past God's repeated references to "man" and "flesh" in Genesis 6:3–7, and then import outside myths in order to find angels bedding women.
Nonsense. While I will grant you that the meaning of that phrase is not obvious when you first read the text, with some study, it becomes overwhelmingly clear what is being stated. The fact that it is
overwhelmingly clear is one of the reasons I've changed my mind about how important this issue. There are many passages in Scripture, such as the visions of Daniel or Ezekiel -- which are great mysteries, and there are many reasonable interpretations. No one of them is definitely right or definitely wrong, as long as they abide by the general rules of rightly handling the word of God. I had previously thought of Genesis 6:1ff in a similar vein -- there is the Sethite view, there is the angel-view, and there are hybrids of these views, but whatever the case, it's ultimately a mystery, so nobody can say for sure what it actually means. But in fact, the case for the angel view is so overwhelming that the Sethite view seems more and more to me like a spiritual cover-up, for reasons I will not speculate on here. I don't think the Sethite view rises to the level of heresy because it is still spiritually aligned with the teaching of this passage, but it does attempt to blind the minds of those who are reading Scripture, which is a demonic thing. Any of us can slip into a demonic deception for a time, so I don't hold everyone that holds the Sethite view to be a witting heretic, but this question is actually very important, has enormous spiritual and prophetic consequences, and false teaching on this point is actually extremely destructive.
E. Scripture vs. extra‑biblical fables
Notice what the hybrid advocates in the forum had to do: when pressed for biblical proof, they ran to:
- Vague appeals to "history" and pictures of Nimrod.
- The book of Enoch (which is not Scripture).
- Their own imagination about "half human abominations."
I can't answer for other people who may or may not handle God's word responsibly, only for myself. The case for the angel view -- which I will present below -- is so overwhelming
from the text, that all other questions disappear in importance. Yes, Enoch really does tell us a lot about the history of what was happening in Genesis 6. And the Ethiopian Orthodox church has held since early church times that the book of Enoch is
indeed canonical Scripture. I will not go so far as to side with them, but I will note it down for the record.
This goes beyond what is written and leans on speculation more than Scripture. The King James Bible never once says "half man, half angel." It never says "hybrid," "demigod," or "half human abomination." Those are ideas brought in from outside, not terms used by the text.
Jesus himself is a hybrid... son of God and son of Man. In fact, Jesus is
God's answer to the demonic hybrids of the angels of Satan, that is, the fallen sons of God. As I said, this issue isn't just a 50/50 coin-toss, Genesis 6 is at the very core of the Gospel itself, and its prophetic implications are staggering.
In Genesis 6 the "sons of God" are the covenant men who should have remained separate but did not.
This is purely interpolation. Who was to be separate from whom?! Are we saying that all the line of Cain was cursed?
When they "saw the daughters of men that they were fair"
Chuck Missler humorously points out in his lecture on this topic, "Were the daughters of Seth really so ugly?" LOL
and "took them wives of all which they chose" (Genesis 6:2), they did not cross species;
"Cross species" is a materialization of what is being said here. The angels obviously appeared in human form to mate with human women, otherwise, offspring could not have been conceived, let alone birthed. But the reality of what was occurring was an abuse like the sexual exploitation of young children by an adult. The former are weak and vulnerable, unable to act on their own cognizance, and this is what makes child exploitation a particularly revolting evil. In the case of adult rape, an adult woman might have a fighting chance, some women do escape a rape attempt. But in the case of child exploitation, there is no chance of escape, they don't even have a fighting chance. Spiritually, this is the essence of the crime being committed by these fallen sons of God whose offspring corrupted the whole earth to such an extreme that God's only remaining response was to destroy the whole world. This is why it is said, "of all which THEY chose", meaning, they simply decided who they would breed with, and that was that. It was rape, plain and simple.
they crossed the line between holiness and worldliness. They did exactly what God later forbade Israel to do: "Neither shalt thou make marriages with them… For they will turn away thy son from following me" (Deuteronomy 7:3–4).
Again, I will grant this spiritual parallelism every time -- you are correct that this is the same imagery, but to stop there is to give an incomplete reading of Genesis 6. The corruption of the Antichrist line began with Cain himself, Cain being the first type of Antichrist (after Adam himself who, in his disobedience, is also a type). It is obvious from the text that the devil's goal was to completely fill the earth with wickedness so that there would be NO line from which the Messiah could come. And it is only when Satan had almost completely succeeded -- with just one line left, that of Noah -- that God intervened and cut off the entire world of that time, in the flood waters. This is why "and also after" is so important... the Nephilim were not completely cut off in the Flood. God left an opening for Satan to turn away from wickedness... he could have stopped his rebellion at the Flood. Whether God would have forgiven him, I don't know, but he could have stopped, and he chose not to. Rather, the Nephilim wickedness persisted
through the Flood ("and also after"), which fact explains why the children of Israel would have their inheritance given to them from the land of Canaan, the son of Ham, in whom the blood of the Nephilim had survived (Num. 13:33).
To set this aside and to insist on angel–human breeding is to overlook the clear grammar, the Strong's data, the covenant pattern of Scripture, and the moral warning of the passage. It shifts the focus from the Word of God to imaginative stories that the Bible itself does not teach.
The Bible is filled with more imaginative stories than all the pagan mythology added together. In fact, it subsumes all of them. The only actual uncertainty I see in Genesis 6:4 is "the heroes of old", which I think a strong argument can be made is where the demigods of pagan mythology existed. Like the megalithic structures which are clearly pre-Flood, built by technology we do not have access to even in the modern world, these beings were destroyed in the Flood, but their memory lived on through the fallen spirits worshiped by the Gentile nations.
3. Jesus Refutes the Angel Theory
The idea that angels have DNA, reproductive organs, and biological compatibility with human women goes far beyond anything Scripture actually says.
Angels are regularly mistaken for humans in Scripture. "Angels unawares" -- you can't be unaware if they are obviously non-human. That angels
should not inter-breed with humans is obvious; it does not follow from the fact that it is immoral, that it is therefore impossible. Scripture nowhere says it is impossible for heavenly beings to interbreed with earthly beings. In fact, we know of one instance where this has certainly occurred: the Virgin Birth. And notice the contrast -- where God did the "impossible" without a blasphemous corporal act, the rebellious angels committed actual blasphemy and debauchery. This is why the Virgin Birth is such a hated teaching of Scripture -- the demonic spirits recognize that it is God's mirror reflecting back to them their own depravity by showing how God does through pure holiness, what they had tried to do in rebellion, by blasphemy, forbidden mixture and debauchery.
Jesus Christ explicitly defined the nature of angels:
Jesus states that resurrected saints are "as the angels of God in heaven" precisely in that they "neither marry, nor are given in marriage." Angels do not form marriage covenants, do not have family structures, and do not engage in procreative union.
The angels who came to earth to breed with women were cast out of heaven, in fact, they are chained in Tartarus, 2 Pet. 2:4.
Angels are "ministering spirits" (Hebrews 1:14), not flesh.
Angels eat meals, Gen. 18:8. They can incarnate, just as God can and does. We are explicitly told that the fallen angels who inter-bred with human women "abandoned their own dwelling", meaning, they departed from their spiritual condition. They were cast out of heaven and, when the Flood came, they were chained in Tartarus, as Peter tells us. So yeah, they're not supposed to do that. But they did it anyway.
The hybrid theory requires angels to possess DNA, reproductive organs, and biological compatibility with human ova—the full machinery of creaturely reproduction. That is not a small adjustment; it is a direct assault on the Creator‑creature distinction. If angels could generate offspring, they would share in God’s creative prerogative, something God never grants to any creature.
Well, you're bumping up against the core issue here --- Satan in Isaiah 14 seeks to vaunt his throne "above the stars of God", meaning, to become greater than the celestial creatures, which requires that he must unseat God himself as Creator. That Satan really intends to murder God is proven in Scripture itself, compare John 8:44, Luke 22:2,3 with Luke 22:6. So, the angels of Satan (Matt. 25:41), some of whom we see in Genesis 6,
actually do intend to obliterate the Creator-creature distinction, at least insofar as they intend to make themselves God. This connects the arc of Genesis 6 all the way to 2 Thess. 2 where we find that the Antichrist, "as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God." Truly, the son of Satan.
Those who connect this theory to 2 Peter 2:4 or Jude 6 are making an assumption the text itself never states. Peter speaks of "angels that sinned" being "cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment" (2 Peter 2:4), and Jude says they "kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation" (Jude 6). In both cases the focus is on rebellion against God’s authority and abandoning the place He appointed them, not on entering marriage or fathering children.
Jude is quoting Enoch word-for-word, so we know for a fact that he is referring to Genesis 6. That's the case regardless of your view of the canonicity of Enoch -- no matter what, Jude is indeed referring to Genesis 6. And, of course, so is Peter. The Apostles aren't just making random ruminations about the heavens, they are giving specific teachings about Scripture and what Scripture shows us about the spiritual wickedness in the heavenly realms (Eph. 6:12). There is yet a Great Apostasy coming, 2 Thess. 2:3.
And if these particular angels are now bound in chains awaiting judgment, they are not roaming the earth taking wives.
Those angels are not. Apparently, Satan is very busy recruiting other angels for this purpose, otherwise, Matt. 24:37 could not be fulfilled.
In plain terms, the "angel‑hybrid" theory gives to created spirits a role in generating life that Scripture reserves for God alone,
Precisely! See again Isaiah 14.
and it turns the Flood narrative into something very different from the Bible’s own presentation.
No, it greatly clarifies the biblical narrative. Let's suppose that the world of Noah was like the Mayan and Incan cultures, with unchecked depravity, open-air ritual human sacrifice, etc. etc. While those cultures were certainly reprehensible to God, God has not flooded the world a second time, nor destroyed it in fire (yet), so what was happening in Genesis 6 that was so evil, as to be literally a hell-on-earth, leaving God with no other alternative than to wipe the whole thing out? God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked Ezek. 33:11, so the evil that drove him to destroy all life on earth must have been an evil to which mankind has never since managed to descend, even with all of our modern technologies. And that's your hint: they were doing evil with the aid of powers beyond any human technology. Indeed, Genesis 6 is describing nothing less than literal hell-on-earth.
Jesus’ own testimony about the nature of angels makes this view very hard to reconcile with the teaching of Scripture.
Jesus's teaching is about the resurrection, and his remark about "as the angels" who do not marry, is clearly in respect to the holy angels, not the fallen angels who, by virtue of being in rebellion against God, may do whatever sort of evil they are capable of doing. And we know that angels can incarnate in human form
and eat -- if they can perform bodily functions, then they can perform bodily functions. Nowhere does Scripture say they do not have genitals when they incarnate, nor that they are incapable by nature of reproduction.
4. God Judged Man, Not Angels
If the "Angel Theory" were true, the Flood would be a miscarriage of justice. If angels committed the crime, why did God punish humans?
The same can be said of Adam and Eve -- after all, it was Satan himself who intervened. For all we know, if the Serpent had not tempted Eve, they would still be in the Garden to this day. So why is mankind punished for the instigating sin of the Serpent? But the answer is there in the text, Gen. 1:26-28 and compare to 1 Cor. 6:3.
Look at the verdict in Genesis 6:3:
If Genesis 6 were about angels committing the primary crime, this verdict would make no sense. The text does not say, "My spirit shall not always strive with these angels," nor, "I will cut short the days of these hybrids." God deliberately names the guilty party: man. He underscores their nature: flesh. And He announces a very specific human penalty: "yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years," a probationary limit on human life and opportunity before the Flood.
Agreed in all points but your confusion on these points is a result of a malformed cosmology. You view the angels as strictly above man, but Scripture says of man alone that he is "made in the image of God". Man may not have the powers of angels, but he bears the royal visage. This is why Paul scolds the Corinthian church, "Do you not know that we will judge angels?" Do you not know that? Are you not familiar with Scripture? Do you not understand God's created order? Do you not realize that we outrank angels, even though we are created "a little lower" than them? (Psalm 8:5)
Angels, by contrast, are "ministering spirits" (Hebrews 1:14), not flesh and blood creatures subject to shortened earthly lifespan. The punishment God pronounces fits one thing: human apostasy—not angelic biology.
Note the warning in Genesis 3, "And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." (Gen. 3:22) Immortality in sin is a horrifying thought, but it is also a reality that the damned angels already inhabit (John 16:11, 2 Pet. 2:4, Rev. 17:8, etc.)
- Genesis 6:5: "God saw that the wickedness of man was great."
- Genesis 6:6: "It repented the LORD that he had made man."
- Genesis 6:7: "I will destroy man whom I have created."
The punishment fits the crime only if the crime was human rebellion.
The story of the Fall is exactly the same issue. And the biblical explanation of this is that it is a
co-rebellion between both men and angels. Men are punished first because we bear the royal visage, we are made in God's own image. But the spirits must also be punished, and that final accounting will come on Judgment Day, and not before. Some of the fallen angels are bound (2 Pet. 2:4), or cast out, but the final accounting will occur on Judgment Day itself, Job 4:18.
5. The Nephilim: Human Tyrants, Not Hybrids
Proponents claim the "Giants" (Nephilim) were the offspring of these unions. However, the text says otherwise:
A. The sequence: giants already present
The text states, "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in…" The order is crucial. It tells you that the Nephilim ("giants") were already in the earth "in those days" and "also after that"—that is, they span the period both before and during the intermarriage of the sons of God and the daughters of men. The verse does not say that the giants only began to exist as a direct result of those unions.
Naw, this is just parsing words. People try to play word games with "in those days", which is absolutely baffling to me. You just asserted that Genesis 6 is a continuation of the context of Genesis 5 (which ends with Noah and his sons), then when the phrase "in those days" comes along, you want it to refer to some time well before Noah, so that you can re-order the whole sequence to move the Nephilim away from the Flood and disconnect them from the causal trigger of the Flood. But Jesus clarifies the meaning of "in those days" in Matthew 24:37 --- "As it was
in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man..." What were "those days"? They were "the days of Noah". This is obvious from the context, but for those who want to work as hard as possible to try to misunderstand the plain reading of the text, Jesus clarifies that "the days of Noah" are what is being referenced in Genesis 6:4, which is obvious from the last verse of Genesis 5. Thus, the "also afterward" must mean
after the days of Noah, which were after the Flood. And that's a key to understanding a lot of what Moses is going to tell the Israelites later on, (Exo. 33:2, Deut. 7:20, etc.)
B. The meaning of "Nephilim"
The word translated "giants" is often rendered "Nephilim" and is tagged in Strong's Concordance as H5303. Many lexicons connect it with Strong's H5307, "to fall." It carries the idea of "fallen ones," or those who fall upon others—bullies, tyrants, violent warriors. It describes their character and often their might, not a supernatural origin. Nothing in the lexical data demands "half angel, half human." That is read into the text, not drawn from it.
We can agree that the exact meaning of the term is uncertain. I like the idea that it just means "fallen ones", but that's just a personal prejudice.
C. They were men—explicitly
Genesis 6:4 itself defines these Nephilim as "mighty men which were of old, men of renown."
I'm glad you brought this up, because this is what unlocks the whole subject. In most discussions of the Nephilim, we're told there are just two places where the word is used -- Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33. From this, we're then told that the project of decoding the true meaning of this word is essentially hopeless since it is only used in these two places and any particular definition can be refuted from a sufficiently academic stance. However, Genesis 6:4 says, "
the same were the mighty men of old", meaning, the Nephilim are mighty men or, in Hebrew, ha'gibborim. Once this identity is understood, suddenly, there aren't just two references to the Nephilim, there are dozens or potentially hundreds of references.
Here are all the passages that use the exact phrase in Hebrew "ha'gibborim": Gen 6:4, 2Sa 10:7, 2Sa 16:6, 2Sa 20:7, 2Sa 23:8, 2Sa 23:9, 2Sa 23:16, 2Sa 23:17, 2Sa 23:22, 1Ki 1:10, 1Ch 11:10, 1Ch 11:11, 1Ch 11:12, 1Ch 11:19, 1Ch 11:24, 1Ch 19:8, Ezr 7:28, Neh 3:16, Son 4:4, Jer 46:9, Joe 3:9.
There are other passages that use other spellings. Here is the full list of all relevant passages (various spellings or phrasings, including references to the giants and Raphaites):
1Chr 1:10,11:10,11,12,15,19,24,26,12:1,22,26,29,31,4,9,14:9,19:8,20:4,6,8,26:31,6,27:6,28:1,29:24,5:24,7:11,2,40,5,7,9,8:40,9:13,26; 1Ki 1:10,8,11:28; 1Sa 14:52,16:18,17:51,2:4,9:1; 2Chr 13:3,14:8,17:13,14,16,17,25:6,26:12,28:7,32:21,3; 2Ki 15:20,24:14,24:16,5:1; 2Sa 10:7,1:19,21,22,25,27,16:6,17:10,8,20:7,21:16,18,20,22,22:26,23:13,16,17,22,8,9,5:18,22; Amos 2:14,16; Dan 11:3; Deut 10:17,2:11,20,3:11,13; Ecc 9:11; Eze 32:12,21,27,39:18,20; Ezr 7:28,10:8,9,14:5,15:20,6:4; Hos 10:13; Isa 10:21,13:3,17:5,21:17,3:2,42:13,49:24,25,5:22,9:6; Jer 14:9,20:11,26:21,32:18,46:12,5,6,9,48:14,41,49:22,50:36,9,51:30,56,57,5:16,9:23; Job 16:14; Joel 2:7, 3:10,11,9; Josh 10:2,7,1:14,12:4,13:12,15:8,17:15,18:16,6:2,8:3; Jdg 11:1,5:13,23,6:12; Nah 2:3; Neh 11:14,3:16,9:32; Oba 1:9; Pro 16:32,21:22,30:30; Psa 103:20,112:2,120:4,127:4,19:5,24:8,33:16,45:3,52:1,78:65,89:19; Rut 2:1; Song 3:7, 4:4; Zech 10:5,7, 9:13; Zep 1:14, 3:17.
As you can see, we're dealing with a topic that features
massively in the text. This is one of the biggest topics in all of Scripture! And here we were led to believe that this all comes down to some extremely mysterious, obscure and uncertain word "Nephilim" that only occurs in two place in Scripture and nobody can ever know for sure exactly what it means.
"THE SAME were ha'gibborim". Note that the "men" in "mighty men" is inferred, it is not in the Hebrew itself. It is also translated "the mighty", "warriors", "the strong", and so on. While many of these references are clearly to humans, not all of them are, and particularly in the conquest of Canaan, it is not always clear whether these are merely men, or beings possessing superhuman strength of some kind, whether gigantism or something else.[/i]
CONT'D
