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Back to Question of the Week Q: Can you explain Genesis 6:1-4 ? Who are the "sons of God?" Who are the Nephilim? I know that they were destroyed in the flood by reading on. Some say they are a godly line of humans but that doesn't make sense. Others say they were fallen angels but calling them sons of God doesn't seem right either. This has puzzled me and some of my friends for some time. - Richard |
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A: Dear Richard: Yes, indeed, this passage from Genesis is puzzling. Let's just first compare two different translations to illustrate some of the difficulties: First, from the ORT Bible, based on Aryeh Kaplan's translation: Man began to increase on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them. The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were good, and they took themselves wives from whomever they chose. God said, 'My spirit will not continue to judge man forever, since he is nothing but flesh. His days shall be 120 years.' The titans were on the earth in those days and also later. The sons of God had come to the daughters of man and had fathered them. [The titans] were the mightiest ones who ever existed, men of renown. (Genesis 6:1-4) A classic non-Jewish translation, the Revised Standard Version, renders this same passage a bit differently: When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose. Then the LORD said, "My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown. OK, so what the heck is going on here? Nahum Sarna, in the JPS Genesis Torah Commentary suggests that this may be a kind of leftover fragment of a typical ancient myth about human-divine intermarriage- but with a twist. While it's true that one obvious guess as to the meaning of "Nephilim" may be "fallen ones," from the meaning of this word's Hebrew root consonants, Sarna points out that the literary context of this passage is God's moral judgment of humankind, both in this story and in the Noah story immediately following. Thus, even if our ancestors told typically mythical stories about some sort of lusty angels who came down to Earth, the more important point is that they have no power or meaning independent of the One God. Again, according to Sarna, this is not like other ancient myths, where rogue divine beings caused all sorts of real trouble for the various gods and goddesses. Sarna also points out that Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 32, and Job 4 all contain references to God rebuking or "demoting" angels who do not obey the divine plan. There were various names for angelic beings in the Bible, and "children of Elohim" (a common name of God) is one of them- it does not necessarily mean "children" in a literal sense, but more like "nation of," or "associated with." Now, as to the Nephilim themselves, the reason our first translation calls them "titans" is probably due to the apparent meaning of another passage in the Torah where the word appears. After Moses sends spies up to the land of Israel, they come back, scared witless by their perception of the inhabitants: But the men who had gone up with him said, "We can't attack those people; they are stronger than we are." And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, "The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them." (Numbers 13:31-33) Based on this report of these giant beings, a translator of the Bible might conclude that the Nephilim of Genesis 6 were also giants. Sarna points out that the Nephilim seem to be the offspring of the angelic intermarriage, not the "fallen angels" themselves, and speculates that this passage in Numbers uses "Nephilim" in a rhetorical sense, to mean "humongous scary people," or something like that. So in conclusion, if you believe, as I do, that the Torah reflects the influence of history and human composition (which in no way diminishes its status as sacred text), then this passage is weird, but not such a big problem. It is probably evidence that our ancestors were influenced by pre-monotheistic myths, which they retold as part of their evolving religious understanding. This mini-story does seem connected to the themes of the passages before and after it: genealogies, God's moral judgment, and the gradual shift into more realistic (but still mythical) human life-spans after the extraordinary numbers posted in chapter 5. Hope this helps! |
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