Who Are the Sons of God in Genesis 6?

This article is a summary of the following episode: Giants from Angels? Genesis 6 Explained

Genesis 6 tells us that the sons of God saw the daughters of man, that they took wives for themselves, and that the Nephilim were on the earth in those days. Most of us learned to read past it quickly. The passage feels like mythology dropped into the middle of Scripture, and we are not sure what to do with giants.

Yet two apostles thought this story was worth telling to suffering Christians. That alone should slow us down.

Why This Question Keeps Returning

The debate has grown louder in recent years, and thoughtful Reformed teachers have argued publicly for the angelic reading, some from the text and some from the early church. For the first four centuries, the angelic view was not merely common. It was the settled assumption of the writers we still read. The Sethite view, which treats the sons of God as the godly line of Seth, became the majority position later, largely through Augustine.

We raise this not to settle a controversy by counting votes. We raise it because many of us were handed one reading without ever being told there was another, and without being shown what the apostles do with the passage.

Reading the Text Itself

Moses tells us that man began to multiply and that daughters were born to them. Those daughters are plainly human. Then the sons of God see that the daughters of man are attractive, and they take wives for themselves.

Two groups are being set beside each other. One is named in ordinary human terms. The other is not. The question the text puts in front of us is simple: who are these sons of God?

The verbs deserve our attention. They saw, and they took. That is the movement of Genesis 3, where Eve saw that the fruit was good and took it. Something forbidden is seen, desired, and seized. A boundary God established is crossed.

It is also worth noticing what surrounds the passage. Nothing in Genesis 4 through 7 introduces the line of Seth as a category called the sons of God. The reading has to be imported from outside the narrative.

The Sons of God in the Old Testament

This is the first appearance of the phrase, so we look for where else Scripture uses it. We find it in Job.

In Job 1 and Job 2, the sons of God present themselves before the Lord. That gathering is in heaven rather than on earth, and the accuser comes among them. These are not men.

Job 38:7 settles the matter. God describes the morning stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy while the foundations of the earth were laid. Seth did not exist. Neither did any human being. Whoever the sons of God are, they were present before humanity was made, which rules out both a godly human line and a dynasty of human kings.

In the New Testament we are called sons of God, but Scripture tells us plainly how we receive that title. It comes by adoption in Christ. The Old Testament use is doing something different.

Do Angels Have Bodies?

The first objection we usually hear is that angels are spirits and cannot act physically.

Scripture is more physical about the spiritual realm than we tend to be. In Genesis 18, Abraham washes his visitors’ feet and feeds them. Their feet had gathered dust, and they ate what he prepared. In Genesis 19, the men of the city see them as men and demand that Lot hand them over.

We are not told how any of this works. Scripture does not give us a mechanics of the unseen world. Paul tells us we wrestle against rulers and authorities, that the conflict is real, and that we stand in the strength of the Lord. He does not satisfy our curiosity beyond that. But the claim that the spiritual realm has no physical point of contact is not what the text shows us.

What Jesus Actually Said

The second objection is that Jesus settled the question when he said that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.

Context matters here. He is answering a trap about a woman who had seven husbands, designed to make the resurrection look absurd. His subject is marriage in the age to come, not the capacities of angels.

And notice what he says. Angels in heaven do not marry. That describes what they do in their proper place, where things are as they should be. It does not tell us what they are able to do. There is a difference between cannot and does not, and the whole objection rests on reading one as the other.

That phrase, in heaven, turns out to matter. Peter and Jude both describe angels who did not stay where they belonged.

The Giants Are Not a Footnote

Genesis 6 tells us the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward. Nephilim is simply the Hebrew word carried over into our translations; some render it giants.

If this passage were only about godly men marrying ungodly women, we would expect a troubled household and children who wander from the faith. We would not expect a category of being that terrifies an army. Believers marry unbelievers constantly, and no giants result.

Scripture keeps giving us more. In Numbers 13, the spies describe the sons of Anak who came from the Nephilim, and say they felt like grasshoppers. Deuteronomy links the Emim, the Anakim, and the Rephaim as peoples great and tall. Moses records that Og of Bashan had an iron bed nine cubits long, somewhere near thirteen or fourteen feet.

Then we meet Goliath. We usually remember his height and forget his equipment. His bronze coat weighs five thousand shekels, roughly a hundred and twenty-five pounds, and the shaft of his spear is compared to a weaver’s beam. Assemble the whole kit and you are carrying several hundred pounds onto a battlefield. Hand that load to the strongest man alive and he cannot lift his arms to fight. An army refuses to face him, and they are not being cowardly.

Joshua tells us these peoples were violent, and the record of the conquest treats certain clans as something to be removed rather than merely defeated. The text is describing strength that is not ordinary human strength.

A Corrupted Earth and an Uncorrupted Line

Genesis 6 then tells us the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and that all flesh had corrupted its way. Human sin is certainly part of that. The text says all flesh, and by this point in the narrative more than humanity is in view.

Just before the flood account, Moses calls Noah a righteous man, blameless in his generations, and then gives us his family line. Noah is not righteous because of his performance. Scripture is consistent that righteousness comes by faith. But that second word is doing particular work.

Blameless translates a Hebrew word that Leviticus uses for a sacrificial animal without blemish. Set beside a genealogy, the phrase speaks of a line that remained uncorrupted. That is why the genealogy sits where it does.

A Rebellion That Failed

Three chapters earlier, God made a promise. The seed of the woman would crush the serpent’s head.

That phrasing would not have been lost on its first hearers. Descent was reckoned through the man, so a seed belonging to the woman points ahead to a birth unlike any other. The deliverer would come as a human being.

Read Genesis 6 against that promise and the strategy comes into view. Corrupt the human line, and the promised seed cannot arrive. Judgment can be postponed forever.

It failed. God cleansed the earth, preserved one uncorrupted family, and the promise held. Scripture goes on weaving the same thread. A shepherd from the line that leads to Christ takes down a giant and cuts off his head, and we are meant to hear Genesis 3 in it.

How Peter Uses the Story

Here the passage stops being a curiosity.

Peter writes to believers scattered across Asia Minor. They have been pushed to the margins and persecuted for their faith. They gave their lives to God, and it feels like the losing side. The powers of Rome look like they are winning.

In 1 Peter 3, Christ is put to death in the flesh and made alive in the spirit, and he goes and proclaims to the spirits in prison who formerly did not obey in the days of Noah. The timing is explicit. This is Genesis 6.

What did he proclaim? Victory. This is not a second chance offered to the dead. It is an announcement to the powers that tried to prevent his coming that they have lost. Peter then finishes the thought: Christ has gone into heaven and is at the Father’s right hand, with angels, authorities, and powers subjected to him. To a church that feels forgotten, that last line is the entire point.

In 2 Peter 2, the same story becomes a warning. False teachers are exploiting the church and appear to face no consequences. Peter answers that their condemnation is not idle. God did not spare angels when they sinned but committed them to chains of gloomy darkness until judgment. He moves straight from there to Noah and the flood, then to Sodom and Gomorrah, and the thread running through all of it is sensuality.

Twice, in two letters, Peter reaches for this passage. Once to comfort and once to warn. Whatever we conclude about the details, we cannot say this is an obscure corner of Scripture that pastors should avoid.

How Jude Uses It

Jude removes any remaining ambiguity. The angels who did not stay within their own position of authority left their proper dwelling, and he keeps them in chains until the judgment of the great day.

Then Jude adds a comparison. They did this just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire. He places the sin of these angels alongside a sin of that kind, in a story where angels appear again.

Jude also quotes Enoch on the coming judgment. That does not make Enoch Scripture, any more than Paul quoting pagan poets makes them Scripture. It tells us his readers knew the material and that he did not need to explain it. The passage he draws from sits in the middle of a retelling of this same rebellion.

Learning to See the Whole Field

The New Testament writers assumed a world with more in it than we usually allow. Paul says our struggle is not against flesh and blood. He warns that people can appear as servants of righteousness while serving another master. John tells us to test the spirits. James tells us to resist the devil. None of them treat this as exotic.

We have often read the Old Testament battles as merely physical and the New Testament as merely moral. Peter and Jude read them as one conflict. The nation was established to bring the Messiah. The Messiah has come. The powers lost that war, and they now turn their attention to his church.

This is not an invitation to speculate or to go looking for demons. It is an invitation to stop being surprised.

How We Actually Fight

Paul tells us the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds, and he tells us what those strongholds are. They are arguments and lies raised against the knowledge of God. The battlefield is what we believe.

So we fight where God has told us to stand. Preaching, prayer, singing, the Lord’s table, baptism, and the ordinary company of God’s people. These look unremarkable, which is exactly why we underrate them. Peter tells the same suffering church to be sober-minded and watchful, because what is prowling after them is after their minds.

Notice as well how Peter handles Christians who are not growing. He does not question whether they belong to Christ. He says they have forgotten that they were cleansed. That is a different pastoral instinct than most of us were trained to have, and it is the one that actually bears fruit.

Our Hope

Faithful Christians have read the sons of God differently, and we can hold that question generously. What Peter and Jude do with the story does not depend on settling it.

Whichever way we read Genesis 6, the apostles want the same thing for us. They want our eyes open to a realm we cannot see, and our confidence resting somewhere other than what we can presently observe. Evil is not new, it is not winning, and it has been publicly defeated.

The rebellion failed. The powers are subjected to Christ. The wicked will be judged and the righteous will be saved, and we receive that by faith rather than by resolving every question about giants. We are not called to hunt anything. We are called to look to the one who cleansed us, and to hold onto the fact that he holds us still.