The Daughters of Humanity

Genesis introduces the women in an ordinary way. Humanity is multiplying on the earth, and daughters are being born. The sons of God then see these daughters and take wives from among them. The natural connection is to the women the narrator has just mentioned.

The Hebrew expression ha-adam means humanity in this setting. Readers may recognize Adam as a personal name, but here the story is speaking collectively. It begins with people increasing in number, then turns to the daughters born among them.

A familiar Christian interpretation narrows those two groups. It identifies the sons of God as descendants of Seth, associated with worship of the Lord, and the women as descendants of Cain. Their marriages then become a story of a faithful line drawn into a corrupt one.

That interpretation has a reason for looking backward. The preceding chapters give us the family histories of Cain and Seth. Genesis has already set different patterns of human life beside one another. A reader can reasonably ask whether those patterns carry into the next episode.

The difficulty is that Genesis 6 never names Seth or Cain. It does not introduce the women as a separate clan. It calls them daughters of the humanity that has been multiplying across the earth. To identify them as Cain's descendants, we have to add a connection that the sentence leaves unstated.

The broader reading is therefore the stronger starting point: the women are human women. That creates a striking contrast with the sons of God. The two groups receive different names, and the story turns on their meeting. What kind of meeting it is becomes clearer when we listen to the verbs.