The Sons of God and the Nephilim

"The 'angel' interpretation is at once the oldest view and that of most modern commentators."  --  Gordon Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary (1987)¹¹

"That ancient figment, concerning the intercourse of angels with women, is abundantly refuted by its own absurdity;  and it is surprising that learned men should formerly have been fascinated by ravings so gross and prodigious."  --  John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, on 6:2 (1554)²²

"Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai used to curse anyone who would call them ... 'children of god.'"  --  Genesis Rabbah 26:5³³

Summary

This is a child of The Flood Narrative.  That article reads Genesis 6-9 as text and asks what it claims.  This one takes the four verses that introduce the Flood, Genesis 6:1-4, and asks who "the sons of God" were, what the Nephilim were, and what the 120 years of 6:3 mean.  The method is the same:  trace every reading to its earliest witness, check every quotation against the source, and report the verdict even when it is uncomfortable.

1. The Hebrew phrase is fixed in meaning everywhere else.  Bene (ha)'elohim (בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים, "sons of God") occurs eight times in the Hebrew Bible with this or the variant bene 'elim, counted from the Westminster Leningrad Codex with a script published beside this article.⁴⁴  Outside Genesis 6 the referents are the heavenly court before God (Job 1:6, 2:1), the beings who shouted at creation before humans existed (Job 38:7), and the beings told to ascribe glory to Yahweh in Psalms 29:1 and 89:7.  Hosea 2:1 (English 1:10) has "sons of the living God" of Israel, a different phrase.  No text calls Seth's line or any dynasty "sons of God."  Umberto Cassuto, Claus Westermann, Wenham, and Michael Heiser all rest their case on this and none of them found an exception.⁵⁵

2. For four centuries it was the only reading anyone recorded.  1 Enoch 6-7 names two hundred angels who swore an oath on Mount Hermon "in the days of Jared" and fathered giants.⁶⁶  Jubilees 5:1 says "the angels of God saw them."⁷⁷  The Damascus Document from Qumran says "the Heavenly Watchers fell" and "their sons also fell who were tall as cedar trees."⁸⁸  Codex Alexandrinus of the Septuagint reads hoi angeloi tou theou at 6:2.⁹⁹  Philo quotes the verse as "the angels of God."¹⁰¹⁰  Josephus writes that "many angels of God" (polloi angeloi theou) had sons who resembled the Greek giants.¹¹¹¹  Justin, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Lactantius all say the same.¹²¹²  The run ends in the middle of the second century AD, and it ends among Jews, not Christians.  Trypho called Justin's exposition "blasphemies" in about AD 160, and Symmachus, Targum Onkelos and Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai supplied human readings in the same generation (point 6).¹²  No Christian read the passage of men before Africanus, about AD 221.

3. The New Testament sides with the old reading, though not by name.  2 Peter 2:4 says God "did not spare angels when they sinned" but "cast them into hell" (tartarōsas), and the next verse turns to Noah.  Jude 6-7 says angels "left their proper dwelling" and that Sodom sinned "in like manner to these" by going after "strange flesh" (sarkos heteras), and then Jude 14 quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 by name.¹³¹³  Neither letter says "Genesis 6."  Augustine denied the link, and the chain angels-Noah-Sodom that both letters follow is the order of 1 Enoch and Jubilees.  Heiser's statement that "the writers of the New Testament knew nothing of the Sethite view" is stronger than the evidence, but the evidence points his way.¹⁴¹⁴

4. The Sethite reading is a third-century rescue, and its earliest author still had "angels" in his Bible.  Julius Africanus, writing about AD 221, is the first Christian on record to read "the descendants of Seth."  His own copy of Genesis read "the angels of heaven," and he adds "in some copies I found 'the sons of God.'"  He then allows that if angels are meant they were magicians who taught women astrology.¹⁵¹⁵  Augustine made the Sethite reading standard in City of God 15.23 (about AD 420), and Luther and Calvin followed him.  Its motive was stated openly by its defenders:  angels are spirits, and spirits do not beget.  Wenham's judgment is that it was preferred "because it avoided the suggestion of carnal intercourse with angels" and "has few advocates today."¹

5. The Sethite reading fails on the text in four places.  "Daughters of men" in 6:2 must mean what "men" (ha'adam) means in 6:1, and there it is the whole human race, so the sons of God stand outside humanity;  Skinner and Cassuto both call this decisive.¹⁶¹⁶  Nothing in Genesis 4-5 calls Seth's line "sons of God" or Cain's daughters "daughters of men."  The reading needs every godly man to be a Sethite and every ungodly woman a Cainite, which Genesis 5 contradicts by giving the Sethites daughters.  And it cannot explain why the children of mixed marriages should be Nephilim.  Meredith Kline, no friend of the angel view, wrote that unless that last difficulty is overcome "the religiously mixed marriage interpretation of the passage ought to be definitely abandoned."¹⁷¹⁷

6. The royal reading is older than Kline and explains one thing the others do not.  Symmachus (second century) translated "sons of the mighty," Targum Onkelos "sons of the great ones," and Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai cursed anyone who translated "sons of God" literally.³  Kline's 1962 article in Westminster Theological Journal made this respectable among evangelicals:  the "sons of the gods" are the antediluvian kings of Cain's dynasty, their sin is Lamech's sin of polygamy in the royal harem, and the Nephilim are the princes born to them.¹⁷  Its strength is that verse 3 punishes man, which is awkward if the offenders were angels.  Its weakness is that no text calls any king bene ha'elohim, and Kline had to concede the phrase was borrowed from pagan royal titles.

7. The Mesopotamian background supports the supernatural reading, not the human one.  Amar Annus showed in 2010 that the Watchers and Nephilim of the Enoch literature are inverted versions of the apkallu, the seven divine sages of Mesopotamian tradition who lived before the flood, taught humanity, and whose later members were "two-thirds apkallu" by human mothers.¹⁸¹⁸  Genesis 6:1-4 sits in the same cultural frame:  divine beings, human women, mighty offspring, and a flood.  Whoever wrote Genesis 6 was contradicting that lore, not borrowing kings from it.

8. The 120 years of 6:3 are a countdown, and the numbers prove it.  If 120 years were a new lifespan cap, the text breaks at once.  Noah lived 350 more years after the Flood, Shem 600, Arpachshad 438, Eber 464, Terah 205, Abraham 175, Isaac 180, Jacob 147, Aaron 123, and Jehoiada 130.¹⁹  Nobody reaches a cap of 120 until Moses, sixteen generations and well over a thousand years later, and the decline is a curve, not a step.  Cassuto's defence that the cap was "gradually" reached concedes the point.  Read as a period of grace before the Flood, as Rashi, Luther, Calvin, Whiston, Keil, and Kidner read it, the number fits:  Noah was 600 at the Flood (7:6), so the decree falls in his 480th year.  The one difficulty is that 5:32 puts his sons' birth at 500, twenty years later, which Rashi met by saying the Torah is not in chronological order.²⁰²⁰

9. The Nephilim are "fallen ones," and they are giants in every ancient witness.  The word comes from naphal, "to fall."  Ezekiel 32:27 uses the same two words, "the mighty (gibborim) who have fallen (nophelim)," of dead warriors in Sheol, and Cassuto argued the Nephilim were named for having fallen by the sword.⁵  The Septuagint rendered the word gigantes in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33, and Numbers says the spies "seemed like grasshoppers" beside the Anakim "who come from the Nephilim."  Heiser's proposal that the plene spelling of Numbers 13:33 reflects an Aramaic noun naphila, "giant," is the only etymology that explains both spellings.¹⁴

10. Nephilim after the Flood are a problem for every reading, and the young-earth answers are guesses.  Genesis 6:4 says "and also afterward."  Numbers 13:33 puts Nephilim in Canaan, and Deuteronomy 3:11 gives Og's bed as nine cubits by four.  If all flesh outside the ark died (7:21-23), the post-Flood Nephilim cannot be descendants of the pre-Flood ones by ordinary birth.  Henry Morris proposed a second demonic incursion after Babel;  Bodie Hodge proposed that "Nephilim" means fallen men of any age;  Heiser reads "afterward" as a second incident.  None of these is in the text.  Every reading has to say something here, and the honest statement is that the text does not say what.²¹²¹

11. The creationist organisations do not agree and say so.  Henry Morris of ICR held the angelic view and argued it at length in The Genesis Record (1976), with a demon-possession mechanism of his own.²¹  Ken Ham wrote in 2023 that "the ministry of Answers in Genesis doesn't take an official position," and that he personally leans Sethite;  AiG's Bodie Hodge concluded in 2008 for "the fallen men view (a modified Sethite view)."²²²²  CMI's Gary Bates and Jonathan Sarfati argue the angelic view.²³²³  The giant-skeleton photographs that circulate as proof of Nephilim were traced by National Geographic in 2007 to a 2002 Photoshop contest entry built on a mastodon excavation.²⁴²⁴

12. The angelic reading has a real cost, and this article states it.  Jesus said the angels in heaven "neither marry nor are given in marriage" (Matt 22:30).  Spirits have no bodies to beget with, which is why Augustine, Luther, and Calvin refused the reading, and why Cassuto could accept it only by positing a lower order of "sons of God" who do procreate.  The reading also imports a demonology, in which the spirits of the drowned giants become the demons of the New Testament, that the Bible nowhere states and 1 Enoch 15 does.  These are costs.  They are not textual arguments, and the earliest readers paid them without complaint.

Verdict.  The angelic reading is the oldest and has the best lexical case:  the exact phrase names heavenly beings in every other use, the earliest Jewish and Christian readers took it that way without exception, and the New Testament's chain of angels, Flood, and Sodom follows the same tradition.  The Sethite reading was born in the third century to remove a scandal and cannot survive verse 1.  The royal reading explains the judgment on man and nothing else.  The 120 years are a countdown to the Flood, not a lifespan, because the lifespans say so.  The cost of the angelic reading is theological, not textual, and no argument on this site for a young earth, a global Flood, or a historical Adam depends on settling it.  The site does not need to.

Every source consulted is catalogued in the literature review and every quotation with its route of verification in the quotes file.

The text, in its own words

Genesis 6:1-4 is four verses and about seventy Hebrew words.  Here is the passage in the ESV, with the disputed terms marked.

When man (ha'adam) began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God (bene ha'elohim) saw that the daughters of man (benot ha'adam) were attractive.  And they took as their wives any they chose.  Then the LORD said, "My Spirit shall not abide in (yadon) man forever, for he is flesh:  his days shall be 120 years."  The Nephilim (hannephilim) were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.  These were the mighty men (haggibborim) who were of old, the men of renown.³³

Three things are worth seeing before any interpretation is applied.  First, the passage is a unit.  Verse 1 sets a scene, verse 2 reports an act, verse 3 gives God's response, verse 4 tells the reader what came of it.  Second, the passage never explains its terms.  It assumes the reader knows who the sons of God are and what Nephilim are.  Third, verse 4 is the only place the word nephilim appears in Genesis, and the only other place in the Bible is Numbers 13:33.

The Greek translators did not leave the phrase alone.  Codex Alexandrinus, the oldest nearly complete Greek manuscript of Genesis, reads hoi angeloi tou theou, "the angels of God," at 6:2, and hoi huioi tou theou, "the sons of God," at 6:4.⁹  Augustine, who read Greek badly but had several copies, reported that "the Septuagint indeed calls them both angels of God and sons of God, though all the copies do not show this, some having only the name sons of God," and that Aquila, the second-century Jewish translator, rendered it "sons of gods."²⁵²⁵  Symmachus, another second-century Jewish translator, rendered "sons of the mighty," and Targum Onkelos has bene ravrevaya, "the sons of the great ones."³  So by the second century AD the three readings that still divide commentators were already in the translations:  angels, gods, and great men.

The Greek also fixed the meaning of nephilim.  Both in Genesis 6:4 and in Numbers 13:33 the Septuagint has gigantes, "giants," and it is from the Greek that the English "giants" of the King James Version descends.⁹

The phrase names heavenly beings everywhere else it occurs

The strongest argument in this debate is a word count, and it can be checked.  The Hebrew phrase "sons of God" occurs in two forms, bene (ha)'elohim and bene 'elim.  A script published beside this article searched every word of the Westminster Leningrad Codex, using the Open Scriptures morphological tagging, for the construct plural of ben ("son") followed directly by 'elohim or 'el.  It found eight.⁴

Two more cases belong in the discussion though the Masoretic Text does not carry them.  Deuteronomy 32:8 says the Most High fixed the borders of the peoples "according to the number of the sons of Israel" in the Hebrew, but "according to the number of the angels of God" in the Septuagint, and a Qumran fragment, 4QDeut^{heiser-2001][} 'elohim.  Heiser argued in 2001, in the paper on this site's disk, that the Qumran reading is original and the Masoretic one a scribal correction, since "it is inconceivable to suppose that a scribe would have done the reverse, altering an innocuous 'sons of Israel' to a potentially explosive 'sons of God.'"²⁶²⁶  And Daniel 3:25, in Aramaic, has Nebuchadnezzar say the fourth figure in the furnace is "like a son of the gods" (bar-'elahin*).

So the exact phrase, wherever its referent can be identified, names members of the heavenly court.  In Job 1 and 2 one of them is Satan.  This is what Cassuto meant when he wrote that "wherever the terms bene (ha)'elohim or bene 'elim occur, the reference is definitely to angels," and why he called the angelic interpretation "the oldest in the history of exegesis."⁵  Westermann, whose three-volume commentary is the standard critical work on Genesis 1-11, went further:  "today, when the true meaning of the Hebrew word can no longer be contested (as e.g., the Catholic exegete O. Loretz has shown), the passage is to be discussed in a completely new context."²⁷²⁷  Skinner in 1910 wrote that the sons of God "are everywhere in OT members (but probably inferior members) of the divine order, or (using the word with some freedom) angels."¹⁶  Wenham, an evangelical, agreed that "in the light of Canaanite usage and of passages such as Job 1:6, it seems most likely that the 'angelic' interpretation is to be preferred."¹

The Ugaritic tablets, found at Ras Shamra from 1929, are the Canaanite usage Wenham means.  In them the members of El's council are the bn il, "sons of El," and Heiser's 2001 paper documents El's seventy sons as the background of the Deuteronomy 32:8 count.²⁶  The phrase was a stock term for divine beings in the language next door to Hebrew, three or four centuries before the earliest date anyone gives Genesis.

The count is not an argument from authority.  It is an argument from usage, and the reader can rerun it.  A Sethite or royal reading has to explain why a phrase that means one thing in seven checkable places means something else in the two disputed ones, and why the writer of Genesis chose a term for the heavenly court to describe a family line or a dynasty when he had ordinary words for both.

The angelic reading held the field alone until the mid-second century AD

The history of interpretation can be laid out as a table, because the witnesses are dated and the readings are plain.  Every item below was checked against the source named in the footnote.

The list has no gaps for four centuries.  From the earliest surviving commentary on the passage, the Book of the Watchers, to the middle of the second century AD, no Jewish or Christian writer whose words survive read the sons of God as men.  The human readings begin with Symmachus, Onkelos and Shimon ben Yoḥai, treated below;  Lactantius is later than they are and is listed here because the angelic reading continued after the split, not because it was still unopposed.  Charles, the editor of Enoch and Jubilees, summed it up in 1902:  "The true interpretation of Gen. vi. 1-4 is undoubtedly that given in our text, the Enoch literature, Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs, Philo, Jude, Peter, Josephus, Justin Martyr, and most of the early Christian writers."³²  Wenham's list adds Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and Skinner's runs "Fathers down to Cyprian and Lactantius."¹⁶

Three of these witnesses need a word each.

1 Enoch is the source of the elaborated form of the story:  the names Semjaza and Azazel, the oath on Hermon, the giants "three thousand ells" tall who "devoured mankind," the teaching of metallurgy and cosmetics, the binding of the angels "for seventy generations," and the doctrine that "the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth."⁶  None of that is in Genesis.  The question is not whether Enoch is right about the details.  It is that Enoch's author, writing perhaps three centuries before Christ, read bene ha'elohim as angels without argument, as though no one had ever read it otherwise.  Westermann, who thinks the angel reading a mistake, still traces the whole "angel" tradition to Enoch's gloss and says that without it "exegesis could never have taken this turn."²⁷

Philo is a qualified witness.  He quotes the verse with "angels" and insists "let no one suppose, that what is here stated is a fable."  But he then allegorises the whole passage into a doctrine of souls, and on the giants he says the lawgiver "utters no fable whatever respecting the giants."¹⁰  He accepts the wording and evacuates the event.  Origen did the same two centuries later, telling Celsus that "even before us there was one who referred this narrative to the doctrine regarding souls."³³³³  The point stands:  both men had "angels" in front of them and neither thought the Hebrew meant men.

Josephus is the witness the young-earth organisations cite most, and his Greek is unambiguous:  polloi gar angeloi theou gynaixi syniontes hybristas egennēsan paidas, "for many angels of God, consorting with women, begat insolent sons."¹¹  He adds that these sons did what "the Grecians call Giants" are said to have done, and that Noah, unable to change them, left the country.  William Whiston, his eighteenth-century translator, noted that the angelic reading "was the constant opinion of antiquity."³⁴³⁴

The New Testament

2 Peter 2:4-5 reads, in the Greek of the SBL edition, ei gar ho theos angelōn hamartēsantōn ouk epheisato, alla seirais zophou tartarōsas paredōken eis krisin tēroumenous, "for if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but casting them into Tartarus in chains of darkness handed them over to be kept for judgment," and the sentence continues "and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah."¹³  Jude 6-7 reads that "angels who did not keep their own position but left their proper dwelling" are kept "in eternal chains under gloomy darkness," and that Sodom and Gomorrah, ton homoion tropon toutois, "in the same way as these," went after "strange flesh."¹³  Jude 14 then quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 by name as a prophecy of "Enoch, the seventh from Adam."

Neither letter cites Genesis 6.  The link is inferential, and three things make the inference strong.  The sequence angels-Flood-Sodom in both letters is the sequence of 1 Enoch and Jubilees and of the Damascus Document, not of any other tradition.  Jude's "in the same way as these" ties Sodom's sexual sin to the angels' sin.  And Jude has just quoted Enoch as prophecy, which shows he read the book.  Tertullian, who thought Enoch canonical, used exactly this argument in AD 200:  "Enoch possesses a testimony in the Apostle Jude."³⁰

Augustine saw the force of it and denied the premise.  He wrote that he could "by no means believe that God's holy angels could at that time have so fallen," and that Peter "rather speaks of these who first apostatized from God, along with their chief the devil."²⁵  That is a possible reading.  But there is no other Old Testament story in which angels sin, are imprisoned, and are followed at once by the Flood, and Augustine did not offer one.

Heiser's verdict that the New Testament writers "knew nothing of the Sethite view, nor of any view that makes the sons of God in Genesis 6:1-4 humans" claims more than silence can prove.¹⁴  What can be said is that the New Testament, where it touches the story, follows the tradition that read the sons of God as angels, and that the Sethite reading had not yet been invented when the letters were written.

The Sethite reading was invented to remove a scandal

The first recorded objection to the angel reading is Jewish, and it is an objection to the doctrine rather than to the grammar.  In Justin's Dialogue, written about AD 160, Trypho breaks in:  "The utterances of God are holy, but your expositions are mere contrivances ... nay, even blasphemies, for you assert that angels sinned and revolted from God."  Justin answers from Isaiah 30:4 in the Septuagint, which he reads as saying "the princes in Tanis are evil angels."¹²  Trypho does not offer a Sethite reading.  He offers a reason for wanting one.

The rabbis supplied the alternative.  Genesis Rabbah 26:5 records that Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai, a pupil of Akiba in the second century, "called them 'the children of judges'" and "used to curse anyone who would call them 'children of god.'"³  Targum Onkelos, from the same period, has "the sons of the great ones."³  Rashi, a thousand years later, gives both:  "the sons of princes and rulers," and "another explanation ... these were princely angels who came as messengers from God:  they, too, intermingled with them."²⁰  Cassuto, a Jewish scholar with no stake in Christian angelology, wrote that the human reading was adopted "in order to express their opposition" to the fallen-angel legend.⁵  And the rabbis did not manage to erase the older reading from their own targum:  Pseudo-Jonathan on 6:4 opens "Schamchazai and Uzziel, who fell from heaven, were on the earth in those days," and only then continues with "the sons of the Great."³

The Christian Sethite reading has a birth certificate.  It is Fragment 2 of the Chronography of Julius Africanus, written about AD 221 and preserved by George Syncellus.  It deserves to be read whole, because it is not what it is usually made to be:

When men multiplied on the earth, the angels of heaven came together with the daughters of men.  In some copies I found "the sons of God."  What is meant by the Spirit, in my opinion, is that the descendants of Seth are called the sons of God on account of the righteous men and patriarchs who have sprung from him, even down to the Saviour Himself;  but that the descendants of Cain are named the seed of men, as having nothing divine in them, on account of the wickedness of their race and the inequality of their nature, being a mixed people, and having stirred the indignation of God.  But if it is thought that these refer to angels, we must take them to be those who deal with magic and jugglery, who taught the women the motions of the stars and the knowledge of things celestial, by whose power they conceived the giants as their children, by whom wickedness came to its height on the earth, until God decreed that the whole race of the living should perish in their impiety by the deluge.¹⁵

Three things follow.  Africanus's own Bible read "the angels of heaven";  "sons of God" was a variant he found "in some copies."  His Sethite reading is offered as "my opinion" about what the Spirit meant, not as what the text says.  And he keeps the angel reading as a live option in the same paragraph, with the Enochic detail that the angels taught astrology.  That is how a new reading looks when it is new.

Augustine fixed it.  City of God 15.23, written about AD 420, argues for a page that "the sons of God, who were according to the flesh the sons of Seth, sunk into this community when they forsook righteousness."²⁵  His reasons are worth listing, because they are the reasons every later Sethite has used.  Scripture calls godly men "angels," as it does John the Baptist and Malachi.  Verse 3 says "these men," so the offenders were men.  Giants are born of ordinary parents even now:  a woman of "gigantic size" was seen at Rome a few years before the sack.  And the books of Enoch that tell the other story "are properly judged by prudent men to be not genuine."²⁵  He also concedes, with visible reluctance, that "sylvans and fauns, who are commonly called incubi, had often made wicked assaults upon women," and that this "is so generally affirmed, that it were impudent to deny it."  What he could not believe was that "God's holy angels could at that time have so fallen."²⁵  Charles's summary of the fourth and fifth centuries is that Hilary, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine "pour discredit and contempt on the old myth," and that Chrysostom's homily on Genesis 6 set out "to subvert the fables of thoughtless praters."³²

The Reformers inherited the settled view and stated the motive without embarrassment.  Luther:  "In reference to this point the Jews fancy foolish things.  They interpret the sons of God to signify demon-lechers ... But that anything may be begotten by a devil and a human being is simply false."  His own reading:  "Moses calls those men the sons of God, who had the promise of the blessed seed."³⁵³⁵  Calvin:  "That ancient figment, concerning the intercourse of angels with women, is abundantly refuted by its own absurdity."  His own reading:  "the sons of the pious, whom God had separated to himself from others, as a peculiar and hidden treasure, became degenerate."²  Neither man argued from the usage of the phrase.  Both argued from what angels are.

Wenham's assessment is fair to everyone:  the Sethite reading was "for a long time the preferred Christian exegesis, again because it avoided the suggestion of carnal intercourse with angels," and it "has few advocates today."¹

Four textual problems

The Sethite reading is not merely late.  It runs into the text, and the difficulties were pointed out by the scholars who most wanted a human reading.

First, verse 1 fixes the meaning of "men."  "When man began to multiply" uses ha'adam of the whole race.  Verse 2 then contrasts "the sons of God" with "the daughters of ha'adam."  If the daughters are simply human daughters, the sons of God are not human.  Skinner:  "Against both these last explanations it is decisive that ha'adam cannot have a narrower reference in v. 2 than in v. 1;  and that consequently bene ha'elohim cannot denote a section of mankind."¹⁶  Cassuto makes the same point as his first argument.⁵  Heiser adds that "the text never calls the women in the episode 'daughters of Cain.'  Rather, they are 'daughters of humankind.'  There is no actual link in the text to Cain."¹⁴

Second, nothing in Genesis calls Seth's line "sons of God."  The label has to be imported.  Its supporters point to Genesis 4:26, "then people began to call upon the name of the LORD," and to Israel called God's son in Exodus 4:22.  But Genesis 4:26 has no subject "Sethites," and Exodus is eleven chapters and several centuries away.  Morris, arguing the other side from inside the young-earth movement, put it plainly:  "Neither the descendants of Seth nor true believers of any sort have been previously referred to in Genesis as sons of God in any kind of spiritual sense."²¹

Third, the reading needs a moral geography the text does not supply.  For "sons of God" to mean godly men and "daughters of men" ungodly women, every Sethite man must be godly and every Cainite woman a temptress, and there must be no godly women or ungodly men worth mentioning.  Genesis 5 repeats "and had other sons and daughters" of every Sethite patriarch, and Morris asked the obvious question:  "What about the 'daughters of God'?  Were they being married to 'sons of men'?"²¹  Kline noted the same:  a Sethite who married a Sethite woman "only chanced to select a covenant woman."¹⁷

Fourth, it cannot explain the Nephilim.  Verse 4 says the sons of God "came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.  These were the mighty men."  If two human lines married, why were the children giants?  Kline, arguing for a royal reading, agreed with Dillmann that "the Nephilim were the fruits of those marriages is certainly the meaning," and concluded that unless the Sethite view could explain it, "the religiously mixed marriage interpretation of the passage ought to be definitely abandoned."¹⁷  Augustine's answer, that giants are sometimes born to ordinary parents, is true and beside the point:  the text ties the Nephilim to these marriages, not to chance.

There is also a fifth difficulty, smaller but telling.  Verse 2 says the sons of God took wives "of all whom they chose."  On the Sethite reading this is a sin of mixed marriage.  But Cassuto observed that "and they took them wives is simply the usual expression for legal marriage.  The passage contains not a single word, either here or in the Lord's speech in v. 3, alluding to rape or adultery or to any act against the Lord's will."⁵  Whatever the sin was, the text does not describe it as marrying outside the faith.  There was no law against that yet, and Abraham later married his half-sister with no comment.¹⁴

The royal reading, from the rabbis to Kline

The third reading has the same rabbinic pedigree as the second and a better modern defender.  Symmachus's "sons of the mighty," Onkelos's "sons of the great ones," and Shimon ben Yoḥai's "children of judges" all make the sons of God a human aristocracy.  Wenham dates the reading to "about the middle of the second century A.D., partly, it seems, out of conviction that angels could not indulge in sexual intercourse and partly to suppress speculation about them," citing Philip Alexander's 1972 study of the targums.¹

Meredith Kline gave it its evangelical form in "Divine Kingship and Genesis 6:1-4," Westminster Theological Journal 24 (1962).  His argument runs in four steps.  Across the ancient Near East kings called themselves sons of the gods;  at Ugarit King Keret is krt bn il.  Genesis 6 borrows the title:  "From the titulary of this pagan ideology of divine kingship the term bene ha'elohim was appropriated in Gen. 6:1-4 as a designation for the antediluvian kings.  It is accordingly to be translated, 'the sons of the gods.'"¹⁷  The kings in question are Cain's dynasty, whose "outstanding representative" is the polygamist Lamech of Genesis 4:19-24.  And the sin is his sin:  "The sin was that of Cainite Lamech, the sin of polygamy, particularly as it came to expression in the harem, characteristic institution of the ancient oriental despot's court."  The Nephilim are "the princes born into these royal houses ... the mighty tyrants who Lamech-like esteemed their might to be their right."¹⁷

Kline's reading has one advantage no other has.  Verse 3 says "My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh."  God judges man.  If the offenders were angels, the judgment falls on the wrong party, and Kline pressed this hard:  supporters of the angel view "have themselves been most disturbed by the exclusive attention paid to 'man' and to him as a creature of 'flesh' in the verdict of God pronounced against the sin of 'the sons of God.'"¹⁷  On the royal reading the kings are men, the verdict fits, and the whole passage becomes the last stage of the corruption that Genesis 4 began.

Its weakness is the one Kline admitted in the sentence quoted above.  No Hebrew text calls any king bene ha'elohim.  The phrase has to be a borrowed pagan title used ironically, which means the writer chose the standard Hebrew term for the heavenly court and trusted the reader to hear it as sarcasm.  Psalm 82, which the royal reading leans on, calls its judges 'elohim and "sons of the Most High," but Heiser and others read Psalm 82 as a divine council scene too, so the proof text is itself disputed.¹⁴  And the royal reading has the same trouble with the Nephilim as the Sethite one:  princes are not giants, and Numbers 13:33 says the Nephilim were.

Wenham records David Clines's compromise, that the sons of God may be "both divine beings and antediluvian rulers," and Skinner reports that Franz Delitzsch, "forced to accept the explanation because of linguistic usage, but with great reluctance," solved the problem of verse 3 by making the angels act "through the instrumentality of demoniacs."¹  Morris, as the next section shows, took the same route.  Every hybrid is an admission that the phrase means angels and that verse 3 is addressed to men.

The Mesopotamian background points the same way

The young-earth reader will want to know whether the angel reading is a pagan import.  The answer from the Assyriologists is the reverse:  the Genesis passage is a rebuttal of pagan lore, and one cannot rebut a story about divine beings by telling a story about noblemen.

Amar Annus, an Estonian Assyriologist, argued in the Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha in 2010 that "the origin of Watchers derives from the Mesopotamian mythology of the antediluvian sages (apkallus)," and that "the mythology of Watchers and their sons the giants derived from inverted versions of various Mesopotamian myths and beliefs about apkallus."¹⁸  The apkallu were seven divine sages sent before the flood to teach humanity the arts of civilisation.  After the flood the tradition continues with sages of mixed descent;  the last of them, Lu-Nanna, was "two-thirds apkallu."¹⁴  The Erra Epic has Marduk send the sages down to the Apsu, the subterranean waters, never to return.  Annus summarised the Genesis side of the comparison this way:  "the antediluvian sages, the Mesopotamian apkallus were demonized as the 'sons of God', and their sons Nephilim (Gen. 6.3-4), who in later Enochic literature appear as Watchers and giants, illegitimate teachers of humankind before the flood."¹⁸

Annus is writing about the Enoch literature more than about Genesis, and he dates the borrowing late, in the Babylonian exile or after.  This site's article on Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Parallels owns the question of direction and date.  What matters here is narrower.  The Mesopotamian material has divine beings, human mothers, mighty half-divine offspring, forbidden knowledge, and a flood.  Genesis 6:1-4 has divine beings, human mothers, mighty offspring, and a flood, in four verses, with the knowledge left out.  Cassuto, writing in 1944 before the apkallu connection was drawn, already saw the shape:  the Torah "merely explains, in harmony with its outlook, the origin of the titans ... These colossi are in no way related, Heaven forfend!, to the Deity, but only to 'the sons of God', that is, to the members of the Divine household, to God's ministers, more particularly to the lowest orders among them."⁵  On his reading the passage is deliberately short because its author found the whole subject "wholly uncongenial," and its point is verse 3:  the offspring of such unions were not immortal, "for in the end every man must die."

Heiser's Unseen Realm (2015) builds the same case for a lay audience and adds that the Nephilim-apkallu polemic is carried forward in Genesis 10, where Nimrod is a gibbor, the same word as 6:4.¹⁴  That is speculation and he marks it as such.  The core claim is not.  The neighbours of Israel told this story about gods.  Genesis tells it about bene ha'elohim.  On any reading the writer was answering them.

The 120 years are a countdown, not a lifespan

"His days shall be 120 years" (6:3) has two readings.  Either God is shortening human life to a maximum of 120 years, or God is announcing that the Flood will come in 120 years.  Cassuto lists both, attributes the second to Rashi, and chooses the first.⁵  Rashi, Luther, Calvin, Whiston, Delitzsch, Keil, and Kidner chose the second.²⁷  Wenham lists the objection to each and leaves it open.¹

The lifespan reading can be tested against the ages the same book records, and this site has already tabulated them in The Long Lifespans of Genesis.  Here are the ages at death after the decree, in the Masoretic text, in the order the narrative gives them.

If 6:3 imposed a 120-year limit, the text violates it in the next chapter and for the next thousand years.  Nineteen named people outlive it after the decree, and the first person to die at exactly 120 is Moses, sixteen generations after Noah.  Jehoiada, in the ninth century BC, still reaches 130.  Wenham notes that "only Aaron (123, Num 33:39) exceeds 120" after Jacob, which is true of the Pentateuch but misses Jehoiada.¹  Whiston, translating Josephus in 1737, had already seen the problem:  "as to the rest of mankind, Josephus himself confesses their lives were much longer than 120 years, for many generations after the flood."³⁴

Cassuto's defence is that the limit was reached "gradually," that "the span of life was diminishing from generation to generation, and in the end would be stabilized" at 120.⁵  Wenham entertains the same idea, comparing "the slow-acting curses of Eden."  But a limit that takes a thousand years to arrive and is then exceeded by a priest under King Joash is not a limit.  The decline in the lifespans is real and this site's longevity article models it as a curve;  it is not a cap, and 6:3 announces a number, not a trend.

The countdown reading fits the arithmetic that the lifespan reading fails.  Noah was 600 when the Flood came (7:6).  A decree 120 years before it falls in his 480th year.  Calvin's editor did the sum:  "Noah was about four hundred and eighty years of age at the time referred to:  if one hundred and twenty years be added, it will make him six hundred years old at the time of his entering the ark."²  The reading also fits 1 Peter 3:20, "the patience of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared," and it fits the Hebrew verb.  Yadon is a hapax legomenon;  the Septuagint's katameinē and the Vulgate's permanebit both took it as "remain," and Wenham reports that they "seem to have been confirmed by modern etymological research."¹  "My Spirit shall not remain in man for ever" is a sentence of death with a date attached.

The countdown reading has one difficulty and it should be stated.  Genesis 5:32 says "after Noah was 500 years old, Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth," and 6:1-4 comes after that verse.  Read in narrative order, the decree comes when Noah is over 500 and the Flood is less than 100 years off.  Rashi saw it:  "If, now, you object, saying that from the birth of Japheth until the Flood there were only 100 years, remember that there is no 'earlier' or 'later' in the Torah ... the decree was issued twenty years before Noah had any children, so we find in Seder Olam."²⁰  Calvin met it by reading "500 years old" as "in his fifth century."  Neither answer is elegant.  Both are more elegant than Jehoiada.

Josephus, for what it is worth, combined the readings:  God "cut short their lives, and made their years not so many as they formerly lived, but one hundred and twenty only," and then sent the Flood.³⁴  Whiston's footnote argued that Josephus meant the giants only, and that the number "need we suppose" different from "the 120 years of God's patience [perhaps while the Ark was preparing] till the Deluge."³⁴

The Nephilim: fallen ones, giants, and "also afterward"

The word nephilim (נְפִלִים) is built on the root naphal, "to fall."  Calvin said so, and added that "grammarians do not agree concerning its etymology."²  They still do not.  There are three serious proposals.

"Those who have fallen," the dead warriors.  Ezekiel 32:27 describes "the mighty (gibborim) who have fallen (nophelim) ... who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war."  Gibborim is the word Genesis 6:4 uses of the Nephilim's offspring, and the verb is naphal.  Cassuto argued the Nephilim were so named "because, according to the story related of them, they all fell by the sword and descended to Sheol," and that Ezekiel is alluding to them.⁵  Wenham accepts the Ezekiel link and adds that "the gigantes of Greek mythology were defeated and imprisoned in the earth," which is why the Greek translators reached for that word.¹  Annus notes that "in the Hebrew Bible, the term 'Nephilim' also refers to heroes' 'fallen' status as dead."¹⁸

"Those who fell," the angels.  Morris took the word as "a reference to the nature of their pseudoparents, the fallen angels."²¹  Targum Pseudo-Jonathan already read it that way:  "Schamchazai and Uzziel, who fell from heaven."  The trouble is that in Genesis 6:4 the Nephilim are the offspring, not the fathers, and the grammar (a passive or stative noun, "fallen ones") describes the Nephilim's own state.

"Giant," from Aramaic.  Heiser observed that Numbers 13:33 spells the word nephiylim with a second yod, which is not the expected form of a Hebrew participle, and proposed that "the Jewish scribes adopted an Aramaic noun:  naphiyla, which means 'giant.'  When you import that word and pluralize it for Hebrew, you get nephiylim, just what we see in Numbers 13:33."¹⁴  He calls this "the only explanation to the meaning of the word that accounts for all the contexts and all the details."  It has the merit of matching the translators.

Whatever the etymology, every ancient reader took the Nephilim to be giants.  The Septuagint's gigantes in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33 is the earliest witness.⁹  1 Enoch 7:2 gives their height as "three thousand ells," which no one defends.  The Damascus Document says their "bodies were like mountains."  Numbers 13:33 has the spies report that beside "the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim) ... we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them."³  Deuteronomy 3:11 gives Og of Bashan, "the remnant of the Rephaim," a bedstead nine cubits long and four wide, about four metres by two, and Heiser cautions that "the size of Og's bed cannot be taken as a precise indication of Og's own dimensions."¹⁴  Augustine's point holds too:  people of great size are born in every age, and the woman at Rome who "over-topped all others" had parents of ordinary height.²⁵  The text says the Nephilim were mighty and famous.  It gives no measurement.

"And also afterward"

The hardest words in the passage are in verse 4:  "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man."  If "afterward" means after the Flood, and Numbers 13:33 says there were Nephilim in Canaan, then either the Flood did not kill everyone outside the ark, or the sons of God did it again.

Every reading has to answer this and none answers it from the text.  The rabbis, Wenham reports, "preferred to suppose that 'and also afterwards' refers to the period of grace before the flood," which he calls "strained," because the next clause "implies continued visits by 'angels to mortal wives.'"¹  Cassuto took "afterward" as after the Flood and allowed "in exceptional instances, a few individuals of this race."⁵  Morris proposed that "soon after the Flood, another unusually intense demonic invasion of earth took place, probably in connection with the rebellion at Babel," and that certain Canaanite tribes "became so demon controlled that a race of monsters was again produced."²¹  He added, to his credit, "it is well not to be dogmatic on this subject."  Heiser reads verse 4 as looking forward to Numbers 13:33 and the Anakim, and takes the phrase as a second episode.¹⁴  Hodge, at Answers in Genesis, avoided the problem by making "Nephilim" a moral term, fallen men, that any age can produce.³⁶³⁶  Bates, at CMI, noted that a post-Flood reading "would be a major blow to the view that God used the Flood to destroy the Nephilim" and argued that "afterward" is a phrase inside the pre-Flood narrative.²³

The Hebrew is asher yavo'u, an imperfect, which Skinner, Wenham, and Cassuto all read as frequentative:  "whenever the sons of God went in to the daughters of man."¹  That makes the unions repeated, not a single event, and leaves "afterward" pointing at whatever the reader already knows about Nephilim later.  For the first readers of Numbers, that was Canaan.  The honest verdict is that Genesis 6:4 anticipates Numbers 13:33, that the Flood narrative leaves no survivors outside the ark (7:21-23), and that the text does not say how the Anakim came to be called Nephilim.  Every proposal on the table, including the young-earth ones, is a conjecture, and the article that follows the Flood into Canaan will have to say so.

What the creationist organisations say, and the giant-skeleton hoaxes

Young-earth creationism has no position on this passage, and its three main organisations disagree.

ICR.  Henry Morris, the founder of the Institute for Creation Research, gave the angelic reading twelve pages in The Genesis Record (1976).  His argument is the lexical one:  "The only obvious and natural meaning without such clarification is that these beings were sons of God, rather than of men, because they had been created, not born.  Such a description, of course, would apply only to Adam (Luke 3:38) and to the angels."²¹  He met Matthew 22:30 by observing that Jesus spoke of "the angels of God in heaven," which "does not necessarily mean that those who have been cast out of heaven were incapable of doing so."²¹  His mechanism was his own:  the fallen angels "accomplished their purposes by something equivalent to demon possession, indwelling the bodies of human men, and then also taking (or 'possessing') the bodies of the women as well," with "some such genetic manipulation" producing "a race of monsters."²¹  This is Delitzsch's demoniac hybrid with a 1970s vocabulary, and it has no more textual support than Delitzsch's.

Answers in Genesis.  Bodie Hodge published "Who Were the Nephilim?" on the AiG site in July 2008.  He surveyed four views and concluded:  "After researching this in more detail than anticipated, I was challenged on many occasions and affirm that this last view, the fallen men view (a modified Sethite view), may be the best at this point in my studies."³⁶  The original page has since been replaced.  Ken Ham wrote in June 2023 that "as this section doesn't impinge on any major doctrines, the ministry of Answers in Genesis doesn't take an official position on the identity of the Nephilim," and that he personally leans to "the simplest explanation," the Sethite one.²²

CMI.  Gary Bates's article, first published as an appendix to Alien Intrusion and posted on creation.com in 2020, argues the fallen-angel view from the five uses of bene (ha)'elohim and from Jude 6-7, and reads Matthew 22:30 as limited to "the angels in heaven, or those angels who obey God."²³  Jonathan Sarfati's Genesis Account (2015) takes the same side;  the book could not be obtained for this article, and its position is reported from Wes Bredenhof's review, which complains that "Sarfati vigorously argues the old view that 'the sons of God' were angels."³⁷³⁷

So ICR and CMI hold the angelic reading, AiG's founder leans Sethite, and AiG says officially that it does not matter.  The last position is the right one for this site too, and the final section explains why.

The giant skeletons.  A photograph of a human skeleton some ten metres long, lying in a trench beside a man with a shovel, has circulated since 2004 as proof of the Nephilim.  National Geographic News traced it in December 2007.  The picture was created by a digital artist using the alias IronKite for a 2002 contest on the website Worth1000 titled "Archaeological Anomalies 2," where it placed third;  the artist started from an aerial photograph of a mastodon excavation at Hyde Park, New York, in 2000, and superimposed a human skeleton.  A March 2007 article in India's Hindu Voice claimed a National Geographic team had helped dig it up in India, and the magazine had to state that "the National Geographic Society has not discovered ancient giant humans."²⁴  Bates's CMI article warns its own readers off such pictures, and adds that "the square-cube law places a limit on human size."²³  No creationist organisation endorses the photographs.  They are mentioned here because a reader who has seen them will otherwise assume this article is hiding them.

The cost of the angelic reading, stated plainly

A reader who has followed the argument this far might expect the article to close the case.  It will not, because the angelic reading has costs, and a site that asks skeptics to weigh evidence has to weigh them too.

Angels do not marry.  Jesus said that in the resurrection people "neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven" (Matt 22:30;  Mark 12:25).  The plain sense is that angels are not a marrying kind of being.  Morris's and Bates's reply, that Jesus spoke only of the angels in heaven, is a real distinction in the Greek (hoi angeloi en tō ouranō) but a thin one:  the saying is about what angels are, not where they are.

Spirits have no bodies.  This is Augustine's, Luther's, and Calvin's objection, and it is not answered by lexicography.  Augustine's own concession about incubi shows how far a fourth-century bishop was prepared to go, and he still could not accept that holy angels had fallen this way.  Cassuto's solution was to posit a lower order:  "The sons of God mentioned here do not belong to the group of ministering angels, who do not propagate their species, but resemble in this respect human beings."⁵  Westermann's comment on that is fair:  "Perhaps he is not conscious of how deeply he has plunged into mythological thinking."²⁷  Delitzsch, "forced to accept the explanation because of linguistic usage, but with great reluctance," asked "Did angels mingle in the flesh with women of the human race?" and answered, "We must therefore, at least as exegetes, accept this paradoxical and scandalous idea."²⁷  That is the honest form of the angelic reading:  the words say it, and the words are all the exegete has.

Verse 3 judges man.  Kline's point stands.  If angels sinned, the verdict "My Spirit shall not abide in man" falls on the victims.  The angelic reading has to say that the women and their fathers consented (Wenham), or that the whole race had become corrupt by the same time (6:5), or that the judgment on the angels is recorded elsewhere (2 Pet 2:4).  Each is possible.  None is in the four verses.

A demonology comes with it.  1 Enoch 15 teaches that "the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth," and that "the spirits of the giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth."⁶  Justin and Lactantius took this over:  the demons of the Gospels are the ghosts of drowned Nephilim.  Nothing in the Old or New Testament says so.  A reader who accepts the angelic reading of Genesis 6 does not have to accept Enoch's demonology, but the two arrived together and the church fathers did not separate them.

The Nephilim after the Flood.  Discussed above.  The angelic reading needs a second incursion or a loose use of the word.  The other readings need the same, so this is not a cost peculiar to it, but it is not a point in its favour either.

None of these costs is a textual argument.  They are arguments about what angels can do, and the earliest readers, who knew the Hebrew far better than any modern, paid them without complaint.  But a reader who declines to pay them is not being dishonest with the text.  He is preferring a doctrine of angels to a lexicon, and the article has told him what that preference costs in turn.

Nothing on this site depends on the outcome.  The universal Flood of The Flood Narrative is established from 6:5 onward.  The historical Adam of Adam, the Fall, and Death does not touch these verses.  The age of the earth is a question for Dating the Earth and its children.  Genesis 6:1-4 is four verses that explain where the mighty men of old came from, and a Christian may read them with Justin or with Augustine and lose nothing else.

Common objections

Objection 1: "Angels are spirits. Jesus said they do not marry. The angelic reading is physically absurd."

This is Calvin's objection and it is the strongest one.  Two replies.  First, it is an argument about angels, not about the text, and the people who knew the Hebrew best, from the author of Enoch to Cassuto, read the text as saying it anyway.  Delitzsch's formula is the honest one:  "at least as exegetes" the reader must accept what the words say.  Second, the Bible's angels eat (Gen 18:8), are seized by a mob that wants them sexually (Gen 19:5), and wrestle (Gen 32:24), so "spirit" in Scripture does not mean "incapable of bodily action."  Matthew 22:30 describes the angels in heaven, and the argument of Jude 6 is precisely that some angels "left their proper dwelling."  Whether that is convincing is a judgment about angels.  The article has stated the cost and does not pretend it is zero.

Objection 2: "The Sethite view is the historic Christian view. You are siding with the Book of Enoch against the church."

The Sethite view is the historic view from Augustine to the nineteenth century.  It is not the historic view before AD 220, when there is no trace of it, and Africanus, who first proposed it, still had "the angels of heaven" in his Bible.  Justin, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement, and Lactantius are as much "the church" as Augustine, and they are closer to the text's first readers.  As for Enoch, the article uses it as a witness to how the phrase was understood in the third century BC, not as Scripture.  Jude quoted it;  this article only reports that he did.

Objection 3: "2 Peter and Jude never mention Genesis 6. The angels who sinned could be the original fall of Satan."

Augustine said this and it is possible.  But the sequence in both letters, angels imprisoned, then Noah's Flood, then Sodom, is the sequence of 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Damascus Document, and Jude quotes Enoch in the same paragraph.  There is no other Old Testament passage where angels sin, are chained, and the Flood follows.  Jude's "in the same way as these" makes the angels' sin a sexual one like Sodom's.  Satan's original fall is nowhere described as sexual, is not followed by the Flood, and did not end in chains, since Satan is loose in Job 1 and 1 Peter 5:8.  The reader may still prefer Augustine's reading, but it has to be preferred against these three points, not in ignorance of them.

Objection 4: "Nephilim after the Flood prove the Flood was not global."

The text says the Nephilim existed "in those days, and also afterward," and Numbers 13:33 puts Nephilim in Canaan.  It also says "all flesh died that moved on the earth ... everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died" (7:21-22).  A local flood does not resolve the tension, because the Anakim of Numbers are in the Judean hills, not in a Mesopotamian floodplain that a local flood spared.  The tension is real and every reading has it.  The article's answer is that the text does not say how the Anakim came to be called Nephilim, that "afterward" most naturally anticipates Numbers, and that the young-earth proposals (a second incursion, or a loose use of the word) are conjectures.  What Genesis 6-9 claims about the extent of the Flood is argued in The Flood Narrative from the language of chapters 7-9, and four ambiguous words in 6:4 do not overturn sixty-nine uses of "all."

Objection 5: "This is just a Mesopotamian myth about gods and women that Israel borrowed."

The comparison is real.  Annus has shown that the Enoch literature inverts the apkallu tradition, and Genesis 6:1-4 sits in the same frame.  But "borrowed" is the wrong word for a text that contradicts what it resembles at every point that matters.  The Mesopotamian sages are benefactors;  the sons of God bring a flood.  The sages' offspring are honoured;  the Nephilim drown.  The sages are immortal;  verse 3 says "he is flesh."  Cassuto's reading of the passage as a deliberate rebuttal, "from the affirmations one may deduce the negations," fits the evidence better than dependence.  Which text is older as a written object, and whether either depends on the other, is the subject of Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Parallels.  For this article the point is narrower:  a polemic against divine-human unions is not evidence that Genesis meant human noblemen.

Objection 6: "Verse 3 judges man. So the sinners were men, and the angelic reading has the wrong culprit."

This is Kline's argument and it is the best case for a human reading.  The reply is that verse 3 is not the only judgment in the chapter.  Verse 5 indicts "man" for the wickedness of his heart, verses 11-13 indict "all flesh" for corrupting its way, and 2 Peter 2:4 records the judgment on the angels separately.  Wenham's reading is that the women and their fathers were consenting parties, since the text uses the ordinary language of marriage and none of force.  And Kline's own reading has the same problem in reverse:  if the sons of God were Cainite kings, verse 3 judges all mankind for the polygamy of a dynasty.  The verse limits human life or human time;  it does not say who started the trouble.

Objection 7: "The giant skeletons prove it."

They prove that a digital artist won third place in 2002.  National Geographic traced the best-known photograph to a Worth1000 contest entry built on a mastodon dig, and the article that reported it is cited above.  No creationist organisation endorses the pictures;  CMI warns against them.  The Bible's own giants are described by comparison ("like grasshoppers") and by furniture (a bed nine cubits long), not by skeletons, and Augustine already noted that very tall people are born in every age.  A reader who wants physical evidence for the Nephilim does not have any, and should say so.

Sources