In my Generations of Heaven and Earth (pp.36-39) I deal with the odd story of the sons of God marrying the daughters of men, related (but not necessarily genealogically) with the mysterious nephilim, often translated “giants” and much beloved of YouTube fantasists.
I mention the commentator Nahum Sarna’s probably correct opinion that the story was, originally, well known, and therefore only sketched in Genesis, but that its brevity precludes authoritative interpretation now the cultural memory is lost.
There are two major understandings of the “sons of God, daughters of men” part. The first, attested from the second century AD and the commonest Jewish interpretation today, is that the “sons of God” are Seth’s line, and the “daughters of men” are outsiders. This understanding was very convenient for the thesis of my book, which is that God formed Adam amongst an existing human race, as evidenced by archaeology and anthropology.
The second explanation is that introduced in 1 Enoch, in perhaps the second century BC, that “sons of God” means angelic beings, and “daughters of men” Adamic women. In 1 Enoch, this event is linked to the origin of demons. I rejected this view in my book on what seem to me the strong grounds that spiritual beings (other than God’s Holy Spirit) can scarcely have the capacity to impregnate physical women, let alone to marry them and have children. Why in heaven would God have created them thus?
I didn’t mention Jesus’s teaching that, in the age to come, people will not marry but be “like the angels in heaven,” which is most naturally taken as a statement about their nature, rather than their self-restraint.
One fly in my interpretive ointment is that (as I mention in the book) two New Testament passages (2 Peter 2:4-5, and Jude v6) seem to reference 1 Enoch in their mention of angels leaving their appointed place, and conversely it is hard to think of a source for their thinking if they are not hinting at Enoch.
It has recently occurred to me, though, that the gist of the Enoch story may genuinely represent the meaning of Genesis 6, if instead of considering the angelic sons of God as free-living spiritual beings, we see them as spirits parasitising earthly men. It would then be through these men that they illicitly relate sexually to women.
This, at least, would make sense of 1 Enoch’s claim that this was the origin of demons, for such evil spirits could not, reasonably, be the children born to the “daughters of men.” “Spirit possession” is rare in the Old Testament, though all too common in the New. But King Saul was oppressed by just such an evil spirit from heaven, and a lying spirit influences the false prophets in 1 Kings 22.
But perhaps there is also a more proximate clue in the account of the serpent in Eden. This, too, has two alternative interpretations, though it is eminently possible that both are intended. The first is that the serpent is an “unclean” animal with no rightful place in the garden, and that in heeding its (not very natural) speech, Adam is reversing the established order of authority in creation, God > Adam > Eve > creature, so that the creature comes to rule Eve, Eve Adam, and Adam – in effect – God. The second interpretation, as argued by the late Mike Heiser, is that “serpent,” nachash, may etymologically refer to one of the divine council, with a rightful presence in the garden, the ability to speak, and the motive to corrupt humanity.
In fact, Scripture overall affirms elements of both, for biological serpents retain their accursed nature, as in the subdued serpents in Isaiah’s eschatology, the viper that bites Paul, and John’s metaphorical reference to the Jewish leaders as a “brood of vipers.” Yet “that ancient serpent” is also identified as Satan, clearly treated as a senior angelic being. And so it is at least possible to think of the Edenic serpent as a spiritual entity “indwelling” an ordinary creature, and so likewise to draw a parallel with angelic “sons of God,” just a few chapters later, “indwelling” human males to indulge their unnatural desires for Eve’s offspring and incurring more widespread angelic judgement, as in Psalm 82.
That might not convince materialists or Sadducees who reject both angels and demons, but would circumvent the implausibility of disembodied spirits producing sperm and signing marriage certificates. It would make 1 Enoch’s “origin of demons” theme something more credible than demons as the children of women.
Do I accept that interpretation? Actually I’m with Nahum Sarna in regarding the passage as too under-determined for confident interpretation. The purely human version’s recorded history post-dates the NT by a couple of centuries, but 1 Enoch only precedes it by a couple, which still leaves many centuries of separation from the writing of Genesis, let alone whatever event it records.
So if I’m thinking about the history of demon possession, I’m inclined to go with my recent reappraisal. But if I’m trying to support Genealogical Adam and sell books, then it’s humans all the way down!
Interesting idea that I have not heard before.
You are suggesting that (fallen) angelic spirits may have parasitized human males who then had sexual relations with (normal) women who bore (unusual) children as a result. The angelic spirits are what we now refer to as demons.
It is not clear whether the progeny of these liaisons were physically unusual in any way; why should they be, if an indwelling evil spirit does not / cannot directly affect the biology of its host? If the progeny, ‘the heroes of old, men of renown’, were the Nephilim, unlike in 1Enoch they are not describe as ‘giants’ (the Biblical giants, like Goliath, were the Anaks). Perhaps they became remarkable only in their temperaments, and that through nurture rather than nature.
It occurs to me: How could these spirits have parasitized whomsoever they wished? Rightly or wrongly Christians tend to believe that demon possession has to be invited in some way (although the Bible provides scant grounds for this belief). One would think that these sons of God would have had to have been particularly vulnerable, possibly as a consequence of wickedness. But perhaps not. Perhaps parasitic indwelling by evil spirits did not require vulnerability or conscious consent. If so, how are things different today?
Hi Peter
For brevity I missed out what I wrote in GHE on the offspring of the marriages: there I raised doubts about whether the passage actually says that the nephilim were the children of those unions at all. In fact Genesis seems to say the nephilim pre-dated those unions, but happened to be contemporaneous. But I agree “giants” is a dubious translation. So the children would be normal.
In fact, I’ve since come across the possibility that “nephilim” means “raiders,” ie human marauders, in which case their mention both here, and after the Flood, would simply describe social instability.
For clarity, then, I disagree with 1 Enoch if it teaches that demons are human-angelic hybrids. My only point in the OP was to suggest one way in which the angelic interpretation could be more plausible than giving them biological reproductive rights!
As for the vulnerability issue you raise, (a) since the context in Genesis is of universal human corruption, that would seem to include susceptibility to evil influence (if indeed wickedness is a precondition for demonisation); and (b) the sons of God would be, as per Heiser, the spirits – the men would be sons of men, ie of Adam.
Peter
I might add that under my tentative interpretation the story would act as an “aetiology of demons” story not by (as in 1 Enoch) setting up a biological-spiritual conundrum, but simply by describing how and why evil spirits first started using people as hosts.
I’m certainly not proposing it as a certainty, but merely entertaining it as an hypothesis for future Mike Heisers to play with.
Yes 1 Peter is cited by Heiser to argue that ‘spiritual beings’ can, naturally, take flesh and have sexual relations, though they hitherto hadn’t. However, Heiser also cannot conceive of how this may occur other than by some ‘parisitic’ spiritual means.
As I wrote to you, now some time ago, I have an elegant and parsimonious theory that avoids the ‘ghost in machine’ or ‘parasite’ talk altogether which I think is important, because this argument has the weakness of being a ‘just-so’ account of demonic activity, and does not justify God wishing to exterminiate the Rephaim and Anakim, rather than, say, convert or subdue them. Instead, my hypothesis quite persuasively demonstrates, using the same biblical sources but relying on Girard’s anthropology (with a twist that Girard himself missed) for a thoroughly Aristotelean (ie., hylomorphic) union of soul and body of the Nephilim (and indeed, of haNachash), a theory which is most illuminating of an orthodox etiology of evil as well as being a sort of God’s KO to Darwinism, by suggesting interaction between Adamic humanity and non-Adamic humanity *in the flesh*. This fits also with the Bible’s major theme of spiritual recapitulation too, since, typologically, a war in the flesh also will signify later strictly-spiritual demonic kinship to which Jesus frequently refers (“you are sons… of the devil” etc), a spiritualised struggle that is easily explained by the disappearance of non-Adamics who had nevertheless ‘infected’ humanity (original sin; ongoing corruption; etc.), leaving only their ‘demonic’ spirits to lure Adamic humanity.
You’ll have to wait for my book.
Well, Brother, if it’s going to be in a book it must be true! 🙂
But I have some problems with the idea. Textually, though I’ve seen it in Heiser, to me relating Gen. 6 to the need to eliminate a demonic race of Rephaim and Anakim seems underdetermined by the texts.
More naturally, in my view, the “seed of woman/ seed of serpent” decree in the garden finds its first fulfilment in the murder of Abel by Cain, and the subsequent bifurcation of the genealogies of the line of Cain and the line of Seth. Gen. 6 “Human interpreters'” suggestion is that the intermingling of these lines escalates the human evil to be remedied by the flood makes sense. Cain is of the serpent because he listens to him crouching by the door instead of mastering him through God’s word.
Anthropologically the hylomorphic animation of human corpses by angelic beings appears (since we’re channeling Aquinas here) to leave the eternal souls created by God for those bodies languishing disembodied on a warehouse shelf in heaven!
In any case, the hylomorphic model does not envisage a Cartesian consciousness occupying a human body, but rather the soul is the principle that makes the body a living human form in the first place. For devils to have the power to “form” a living human seems as problematic as their being able to impregnate women.
Theologically the idea seems to me Gnostic: humanity is divided into two superficially similar groups, one the (good) seed of Adam, and the other the (evil) literal offspring of demons.
But the whole thrust of the NT is that there is but one, sinful, humanity, in equal need of salvation, and Paul puts this very plainly. Although he maintains a doctrine of election, this is entirely founded in Christ, according to the will of the Father, and not through the corruption of devils:
And this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. (Rom. 2:22-24)
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. (Eph. 2:1-3)
That’s why the gospel is to be preached to all without distinction. Those who are reprobate and refuse the gospel are so because of their human sin, not their demonic origin. They are “seed of Satan” because their response is stubborn and evil, like Cain’s. That seems also to be the sense of Jesus’s equivalent teaching, such as his references to “my sheep,” who are the elect (Matt 24:24), rather than the true children of light hidden amongst demonic usurpers, ontologically distinct.
I don’t need to point out the dangers of elitism or even racism in this ontological division. We identify (how?) some group as the modern Anakim or Rephaim, and logically might seek to destroy them as Joshua did. This is not far-fetched – the “Manifest Sons of God” and “Joel’s Army” Pentecostal heresies have espoused such distinctions, sometimes in organisational unity with the Ku Klux Klan.
Well said, and I agree with your fair-minded and balanced analysis. My quibble, however, is elsewhere, and I obviously failed to make that clear.
I do not say that angelic beings animate human corpses. Rather, I say that ‘human beings’ were not always all ‘Adamic.’ The biological (or zoological) homo genus and sapiens species in particular, tells us nothing (or next to nothing) about theological qualities (cf. Kenneth Kemp), such as whether or not they are Image Bearers. On the other hand, the Bible (and a papal encyclical) affirm that the Bible is about Adam the Image-bearer and his progeny (it is not about ‘homo sapiens’) and that Adamites are “the only ‘true’ men” (paraphrasing the encyclical), for the purposes of God as revealed in Scripture (ie., Image-bearing; rule; eternal life; judging angels; salvation. NB This papal statement was to oppose polygenism). Thus, another homo- species and indeed another homo sapiens species may have existed before and perdured after the advent of Adam, and indeed may have provided God with the ‘adamah’, the matter of Adam’s flesh, into which God breathed his life.
No doubt this raises many questions vis-a-vis what constitutes licit and illicit interactions between Adamic and non-Adamic ‘humanity’ (for good and bad, for it solves Genesis’ problem of necessary incest, but raises the question of bestiality, which I think worse, but a misguided and modern imposition), but it is a perfectly hylomorphic hypothesis, if the transcendental form of a creature manifests its first temporal existence out of the body of another creature in time (of which the Bible provides ample typology) by some providential agency of God, with or without a process of change through apparent natural selection or otherwise (I have a longer explanation for how this may be). The same would be true of the advent of the sacrificial non-Adamic, as for merciful Adam.
Nevertheless, I concur with you that, since Jesus comes to save all mankind, it be fitting at least that no non-Adamics remained at that time. And even if interbreeding were supposed to have occurred, leaving genetic traces of the non-Adamic in man, that the superior theological Adamic principle of Image-bearing supervene on the non-Adamic (this is a mystery and claim based on intuition), such that the relevant etiology or parentage of sin and evil sufficed, in Jesus’ words, to be simply spiritual (“you are of your father, the devil…”).
The purpose of this line of inquiry is just this: to give an etiology of evil that does not resort to deus ex machina claims, ‘spooks’ or possessed zombies, which threaten the credibility of the faith. On my interpretation, borrowing from and expanding upon, inter alia, Girard and Jaynes, we may reasonably posit a sophisticated non-Adamic non-Image-bearing community founded on sacralised violence, who were quasi-rational but unfree, venerating kings and gods (lucifer as their chief), performing bloody rituals etc (Gobekli Tepe, anyone?) and this was *good,* because purely natural. The influence of this biologically kin people on Adam, then – who was called to a different telos – leads to his fall, and their continued corrupting influence leads God to require their destruction. Nevertheless, sin, through Adam, has indeed already entered the Adamic world, and the removal of this non-Adamic race can in no way undo Adamic man’s spiritual problem, which only Christ can undo and has undone (O Felix Culpa!).
Levi
The concept of non-adamic man is, of course, central to my Generations of Heaven and Earth. And if one accepts an old-earth interpretation of the evidence, or even a young-earth one with significantly different forms such as Neanderthals, I guess, then some such concept is the only “historic Adam” alternative to an Adam and Eve doing gardening as H. erectus a million years or so ago.
My present-day concerns are allayed if you say there are no non-Adamites now, as the NT implies as strongly as any doctrinal statement. In fact, the Genealogical Adam concept would not only make non-Adamites now implausible, but would also ensure that any remaining “demonic genealogy,” genetic or otherwise, would now be universally distributed. Hence we would all, by nature, be “children of the devil,” though I still think Jesus means something different by that phrase.
Whatever, Genesis 6 suggests that whatever occurred between whoever it was occurred when Adam’s race was well-established in the land.
I do have some problems with an innately malevolent and violent pre-adamic race being “good,” (and it’s a problem with the GA model itself, not your formulation). I would happily concede that “good” in Gen 1 means “natural,” in the sense of “as created by the good God and following his creational ends” (to ape Aquinas again), though it’s easier to apply that to the lion or the parasitic fly than to the rational apex of creation.
If lucifer (or any created being) was responsible for bringing that violence about in pre-adamic lines, then it appears to me neither “natural,” nor “good,” but the Fall. Have I misuderstood something?