Sons of God

What it is

Sons of God translates a Hebrew phrase, bene elohim, that names beings who stand near God in scripture. The Book of Genesis says they admired mortal women, chose wives from among them, and fathered the Nephilim, giants of ancient times; the flood follows to clear the earth of them. Elsewhere they gather as a court around God: Satan appears among them in the Book of Job. The phrase recurs at Job 38:7, and Dead Sea Scroll copies of Deuteronomy 32:8 read 'sons of God' where later Hebrew texts say 'sons of Israel'. Identifying them has long been contested: angels, Watchers, deified Canaanite rulers and Seth's righteous children have all been argued. It also serves in apocryphal Christian books, and Kabbalah places bene elohim within its angelic hierarchies, its ordered ranks of heaven.

Where it comes from

Scholars connect the phrase to older West Semitic religion. Ugaritic tablets contain bn il and bn ilm, matching words for an assembly of lesser gods, and Claus Westermann argued Genesis 6 rests on an Ugaritic original. In those texts the sons of the god El, seventy of them beside Asherah, were said to father earthly rulers through mortal women, and 2 Samuel 7 may echo the idea in Israel. Some read the phrase as a survival of early Israelite polytheism, kept inside a text edited toward one God. Second Temple readers re-imagined the sons as angels or Watchers, while others see late editing: Scharbert ties the passage to the Priestly source, and Milik and Black connected it to the Watchers legend in the Book of Enoch.

Peoples and places

Early Jewish texts read the sons as angels: the Enochic books, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jubilees and Josephus all take that line. Christian writers of antiquity, among them Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen and Commodianus, called them fallen angels whose unions with women begat the Nephilim. A different view makes them deified kings of Canaanite city-states, rulers whose lands the early Israelites left before settling the Judean highlands. From the second century another reading took hold, the sons as Seth's righteous line mixing with Cain's descendants, voiced by rabbis such as Shimon bar Yochai and by Augustine and Julius Africanus. It remains the standard explanation in contemporary Judaism, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible of 1954 renders the verse 'children of Seth', matching its Andemta commentary.

What people believe

In the earliest strata the bene elohim and the mal'akh, the Hebrew word for messenger, both describe facets of God at work. The sons dwell in heaven and form a court, echoing the divine council of the Pentateuch and the pantheon of the age. They express God's transcendent side and, unlike messengers, carry no word between God and humanity. In Job the two roles meet in Satan, counted among the sons yet acting as God's agent toward people. Simon Parker reads 'sons of X' as a Semitic idiom for belonging to a class, so the phrase names a set of divine beings; later monotheism, he argues, demoted them into subordinate angels.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Modern academics mostly treat Genesis 6 as inherited myth. Chris Seeman sees a story of real unions between divine beings and women, a motif that may have travelled from Mesopotamian or Greek tale into the Yahwist account of origins. Ronald Hendel calls it a lost myth: the sons were gods, their children demigods, and this mixing of realms upset cosmic order, so Yahweh caps human lifespan and the flood follows; he compares Hesiod's tale of Zeus ending demigods with a flood, and the Mesopotamian Apkallu. David Clines reads the passage as the climax of heaven-and-earth boundary breaking across Genesis 1-11, the final disorder that brings the deluge. On 1 Enoch, Hendel holds it expands Genesis 6, while Seeman says both draw on one older tradition.

Compare and confuse

Close phrases run through scripture: 'sons of elim' in Psalms 29 and 89, 'sons of Elyon' in Psalm 82, and the Aramaic bar elahin, a son of the gods, spoken in Daniel 3. Enochic books call the same figures Watchers. Translation histories diverge: several Septuagint manuscripts, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus among them, write 'angels', the Vulgate keeps filii Dei, the Peshitta says sons of God, and Jewish renderings often give 'sons of rulers', a choice linked to a curse bar Yochai is said to have laid on such translators.

Today

The phrase lives on in several currents. Contemporary Judaism usually reads Genesis 6:2 as speaking of the righteous children of Seth. Most modern Christian Bibles keep 'sons of God', following the Vulgate's filii Dei. In Kabbalah, bene elohim hold places in Jewish angelic rankings. Chrissy Hansen argues the lost Greek original behind the Septuagint likely read 'sons of God', the wording several medieval Latin theologians used. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church's Amharic Bible, adopted in 1954 under Haile Selassie, translates the verse as 'children of Seth' to match its commentary.

Questions people ask about Sons of God

Good reading and sources

• Sons of God on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data