Could the Men Be Human?

The heavenly reading has an immediate difficulty: how could spiritual beings marry human women? Human interpretations offer an answer by identifying the sons of God within the human world. Two have been especially important: the descendants of Seth and powerful rulers.

Augustine understood the episode through the meeting of two ways of life. The people devoted to God become captivated by women associated with the earthly city. The marriages help explain how corruption spreads. Read this way, the story continues the family histories in Genesis and keeps the whole episode within human life.

The royal reading puts power at the center. Ancient rulers could claim a special relationship to the divine. If the sons of God are such men, their freedom to take whichever women they choose becomes a sign of tyranny. The episode describes an elite whose desires have become law.

Both readings explain something important. The Sethite interpretation connects the passage to the preceding genealogies and to religious compromise. The royal interpretation makes sense of the freedom exercised by those who choose and take. Neither deserves dismissal merely because it offers a human explanation.

Yet both need an identification Genesis leaves unstated. The narrator does not call the men sons of Seth or kings. The heavenly reading has the advantage of the scenes in Job, where the sons of God clearly belong to God's heavenly assembly. It asks us to carry a recognizable biblical expression into another biblical passage.

That is why this book favors the heavenly reading. The language supports it more directly. But the human readings have a serious objection in reserve: identifying the actors is only part of interpreting the story. We must also reckon with what the story says they do.