Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 6:2
The sons of God saw the daughters of men. The oldest reading takes sons of God as divine beings, not a human family line.
Genesis 6:2, in every translation this tool compares.
English son of can mean a literal child or a member of a category, son of the soil, sons of thunder. Hebrew bene elohim works the same way, and here the category in view, sons of the divine realm, is a real option English son of does not rule out but does not spell out either.
Because the identity of the sons of God who take human wives sets up the whole flood narrative, and which reading you take, divine beings or a righteous human bloodline, comes from the same two Hebrew words carrying two very different ranges elsewhere in the Old Testament.
Most modern versions read sons of God without further comment, leaving the identification to footnotes or study notes. The King James likewise reads sons of God, unglossed.
בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים bene ha'elohim · H1121 + H430
Bene elohim and the singular ben elohim identify members of the divine council elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, at Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7, and Psalm 89:6, all contexts where no one reads the phrase as human beings. The earliest interpreters, including the Septuagint tradition, 1 Enoch, and Jubilees, took Genesis 6:2 the same way, as heavenly beings intermarrying with humans. The alternative, that sons of God means the righteous line of Seth marrying Cain's corrupted daughters, is a later reading associated with Julius Africanus and Augustine, developed in reaction against the angelic view rather than growing from Hebrew usage of the phrase itself.
English sons of God carries no built-in link to a divine council, an idea unfamiliar to most modern readers, so the phrase reads as loosely poetic rather than as a technical term with a fixed range of reference elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.
Before deciding what a phrase means in one passage, survey every other place the same phrase occurs in the same corpus. Bene elohim is not ambiguous where it appears elsewhere; the ambiguity here is imported by later theological discomfort with what those other passages already say.
The divine-council reading is both the oldest attested interpretation and the one that matches every other biblical use of the phrase. The Sethite reading, sons of God as godly men, has no other biblical use of the phrase to support it and arose specifically to avoid the angelic implications, which makes it weaker as a reading of the Hebrew even though it became dominant in later Western Christianity.
- Bene elohim / bene ha'elohim as divine-council beings: Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7; Psalm 89:6
- 1 Enoch and Jubilees read Genesis 6:2 as fallen divine beings; so does the Septuagint tradition and Josephus
- The Sethite view associated with Julius Africanus and developed by Augustine, City of God 15.23
