Genesis 6:1-4's "sons of God" who took human wives and fathered the Nephilim were literal extraterrestrials, and the passage is an ancient record of alien-human hybridization.

Start with what the text does not say. "Sons of God" (bene ha'elohim) and "Nephilim" are Hebrew narrative terms with no vocabulary for spacecraft, other planets, or biological engineering. Popularizers like Erich von Däniken (Chariots of the Gods, 1968) and Zecharia Sitchin, who built an entire cosmology around the claim that Nephilim means "those who came down" from a hypothesized planet Nibiru, are importing twentieth-century science-fiction categories onto a text that predates them by roughly three thousand years. Bene ha'elohim is a stock Hebrew phrase used elsewhere in the Old Testament (Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7) for members of Yahweh's heavenly host: a real, if strange, claim about the composition of the spirit world, not a garbled memory of first contact.

The genuinely contested question is which class of "heavenly host" reading is correct, and the majority position among Hebrew Bible and Second Temple specialists is that bene ha'elohim refers to divine beings: angelic members of God's council who crossed a forbidden boundary. This is the view Michael Heiser argued at length in The Unseen Realm and Reversing Hermon: that the phrase carries this sense consistently everywhere else it appears, that the earliest interpreters read it this way, and that it connects directly to 1 Enoch's Book of the Watchers (roughly 200-100 BC), which expands Genesis 6 into a full narrative of rebellious angels named Watchers who descend, intermarry, and father monstrous offspring. The New Testament appears to assume the same reading: 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6-7 both refer to angels who sinned and were bound in darkness ahead of judgment, using language closely tied to the Enochic tradition rather than to any human sin. This was also the dominant reading among pre-Nicene church fathers (Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria all held some version of it) before falling out of favor in the Latin West.

The reading that displaced it, and still competes with it seriously today, is the Sethite view: the "sons of God" were the righteous line of Seth, the "daughters of men" the line of Cain, and the sin was intermarriage that eroded a godly lineage. Julius Africanus proposed this in the early third century, but it was Augustine's City of God (early fifth century) that gave it its classic and most influential formulation, largely on the ground that angels, being spirit, cannot marry or reproduce (an argument later echoed in readings of Matthew 22:30). The Sethite view became dominant across medieval and Reformation Christianity and remains the standard position in many evangelical circles today, including young-earth organizations such as Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International, which favor it partly because it avoids any reading that could be pressed into service by higher critics or, now, by ancient-astronaut writers.

A third, minority scholarly position reads "sons of God" as ancient Near Eastern kings claiming divine or semi-divine status: a "dynastic ruler" or divine-kingship view formally proposed by Meredith Kline in a 1962 article and developed since. On this reading, "daughters of men" describes royal harems, and the passage critiques the tyranny of pre-flood sacred kingship, paralleling how Egyptian pharaohs and Mesopotamian kings styled themselves sons of the gods. Its strength is taking real ANE royal ideology seriously; its weakness, noted by critics across the debate, is that it has to assign bene ha'elohim a sense the phrase carries nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, making the kings-claimed-divinity move an inference rather than something the text states.

None of this is settled by a vote, and This record does not pretend it is: it is a live, mostly intra-Christian exegetical debate, weighted toward the divine-council reading by lexical usage, ANE background, and the earliest reception history, but held by serious, orthodox interpreters in more than one direction. What all three readings share is a decisive break from the ancient-astronaut misreading, which does not engage the Hebrew grammar, the ANE background, or the text's own reception history at all. It simply relabels "divine beings" as "aliens" and moves on.