Few passages stir up more curiosity than the four short verses at the opening of Genesis 6. They speak of “sons of God”, “daughters of man”, and a shadowy people called the Nephilim. Type that name into a search engine and you’ll meet fallen angels, ancient astronauts and rumours of hidden skeletons. Turn to the text itself and you meet something far more restrained—and, in the end, far more unsettling.
Here’s what Moses actually wrote: Genesis 6:1–4.
That’s all. No names, no explanation, no follow-up story. Moses drops these figures into his account and walks straight past them. Our task isn’t to fill that silence with imagination but to ask what these verses are doing where they stand.
A passage placed with purpose
Genesis 6:1–4 sits at a hinge in the story, and the material on either side controls its meaning.
- Before it stand two family trees. Genesis 4 traces Cain’s line, ending with Lamech—a man who takes two wives and boasts of murder. Genesis 5 traces Seth’s line, ending with Noah, and its refrain is worship and hope.
- After it comes the verdict: The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (Genesis 6:5). Then the Flood.
So these four verses are the last rung on a ladder of corruption—not a detour into monsters, but the final proof the world has become unliveable. And they’re followed at once by the first appearance of grace in the Bible: But Noah found favour in the eyes of the LORD (Genesis 6:8).
Notice, too, how the language echoes the garden. In Genesis 3:6 Eve saw the tree was good, and she took. In Genesis 6:2 the sons of God saw, and they took. Same verbs, larger scale: what began with a piece of fruit has grown into the seizing of persons. Sin does not stay still.
One more clue. Verse 4 calls these figures men of renown—in Hebrew, literally “men of the name”. Five chapters later the builders of Babel say: let us make a name for ourselves (Genesis 11:4). Human beings grasping at greatness rather than receiving a name from God: that’s the thread running through this section of Genesis.
What does the word “Nephilim” mean?
Honest answer: nobody’s certain. Three explanations compete.
| PROPOSED ORIGIN | MEANING | COMMENT |
|---|---|---|
| From naphal, “to fall” | “The fallen ones” | The most common suggestion, and the source of the popular link with fallen angels. |
| From naphal, “to fall upon” | “Raiders” or “attackers” | Fits the violence of the context well. |
| A loanword from Aramaic | “Giants” | Reflected in the Septuagint, the ancient Greek Old Testament, which renders it gigantes. |
The Greek translation shaped everything that followed. Once gigantes entered the imagination of the Western church, every later reader arrived at Genesis 6 already expecting towering figures. The Hebrew is far less committal.
What the passage does say clearly is the children born of these unions were gibborim—mighty men, warriors, champions. The same word describes Nimrod in Genesis 10:8, the first empire-builder in Scripture. It’s a word about power, not about height.
View 1: the sons of God were angels
The oldest recorded reading takes “sons of God” to mean heavenly beings who’d rebelled, left their place, and took human wives.
The strength of this view is the phrase itself. In Job, “the sons of God” clearly means angelic beings who present themselves before the Lord (Job 1:6; 2:1) and who shouted for joy at creation (Job 38:7). If the words mean that elsewhere, why not here?
Two New Testament passages are also brought forward. Jude speaks of the angels who didn’t stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling (Jude 6). Jude adds Sodom acted likewise in pursuing what he calls unnatural desire—literally, “other flesh” (Jude 7). Peter places rebel angels alongside the generation of the Flood (2 Peter 2:4–5).
Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons and Tertullian held this reading, and it has strong modern defenders. Michael Heiser argued our discomfort here is really discomfort with the supernatural worldview of the biblical authors themselves. Gordon Wenham and Kenneth Mathews judge it the most natural sense of the Hebrew.
The difficulties. Jesus says in the resurrection people are like angels in heaven (Matthew 22:30). Defenders reply, fairly, that this describes angels in heaven, not rebels who left it. The harder problem is Genesis itself: if angels were the offenders, why does the judgement in verses 3, 5 and 7 fall entirely on man?
View 2: the sons of God were Sethites
A second reading takes the “sons of God” as the godly line of Seth and the “daughters of man” as the ungodly line of Cain. The sin is spiritual intermarriage: the worshipping line dissolving into the world around it.
It became the majority view of the Western church through Augustine of Hippo, and was held by John Calvin, Matthew Henry, commentators Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, and in the 20th century John Murray.
Its strength is context. Genesis has just spent two chapters building two family lines—a strange thing to do if the next paragraph had nothing to do with them. And covenant sonship language is thoroughly biblical: God calls Israel my firstborn son (Exodus 4:22).
The difficulties. The exact phrase “sons of God” is never elsewhere used of pious men in the Old Testament. “Daughters of man” in verse 1 plainly means women in general, not Cainite women. And it’s hard to see how mixed marriages, however sinful, would produce a generation of legendary warriors.
View 3: the sons of God were divine kings
A third reading deserves far more attention than it gets. The Hebrew word elohim, normally translated “God”, is also used of human judges and rulers who act as God’s representatives (Exodus 21:6; 22:8–9). Psalm 82 addresses corrupt judges as gods and sons of the Most High—a text Jesus quotes in John 10:34–35. And the ancient Jewish translation Targum Onkelos renders our phrase “sons of the nobles”.
This fits the world in which Genesis was first read. Kings across the ancient Near East routinely claimed divine parentage: Pharaoh was called the son of Ra, and Mesopotamian rulers listed gods among their ancestors. In that setting, “sons of God” taking any women they chose is not a puzzle—it is a portrait of tyranny.
Meredith Kline set out this case in a 1962 study of divine kingship in Genesis 6, and it has been developed since by Willem VanGemeren, Bruce Waltke and Derek Kidner. Read this way, the sin is despotic harem-building. The phrase took as their wives any they chose carries a chill: this is seizure, not courtship—the same pattern as Pharaoh taking Sarai (Genesis 12:15) and David taking Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11:4).
WHY THE WORDING MATTERS.
Genesis 6:2 does not describe romance. It describes selection—men who could take whatever they wanted and answer to no one. That is precisely what makes the Flood the answer to them.
Weighing the three: where the evidence points
In summary:
| VIEW | SONS OF GOD ARE | NATURE OF THE SIN | MAIN SUPPORT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Angelic | Rebel heavenly beings | Crossing the heaven–earth boundary | Job 1:6; Jude 6–7; 2 Peter 2:4 |
| Sethite | The godly line of Seth | Spiritual compromise through marriage | Genesis 4–5 context; covenant sonship language |
| Divine kings | Tyrants claiming divine status | Violence, polygamy, seizure of women | Exodus 21:6; Psalm 82; ancient kingship |
These three are usually presented as rivals. But they needn’t be exclusive, and the passage reads best when the third supplies the human actors and the first supplies the spiritual power standing behind them.
It explains a great deal:
- It keeps the offenders human, which is why the judgement falls on man and no one else. Genesis records no sentence passed on angels here.
- It explains the title. Ancient kings really did call themselves sons of the gods. Genesis is not inventing a category but reporting one, and quietly exposing it as blasphemy.
- It explains the offspring. Warrior dynasties, not biological hybrids, are what tyranny produces. The children of powerful men become powerful men.
- It honours Jude and Peter without forcing them onto Genesis. Both teach that angels rebelled and are held for judgement. Neither says those angels fathered children. Demonic power behind human tyranny is a thoroughly biblical pattern—Daniel 10 sets spiritual forces behind earthly kingdoms, and Revelation 13 has a dragon give a beast its throne.
- It fits the flow of Genesis. Verse 4 calls them “men of the name”; chapter 10 gives us Nimrod, a mighty man who founds Babel; chapter 11 gives a city built to make a name. Genesis is tracing the rise of godless empire, and 6:1–4 is where it begins.
We hold this with conviction but without contempt for those who differ. Calvin, defending the Sethite reading, warned against speculation that outruns the text—a warning that binds every reader of this passage, including us.
Were the Nephilim hybrids? A problem that will not go away
Read verse 4 slowly and something surprising appears. It does not say the Nephilim were the children.
The Nephilim are already on the earth. The unions then happen, children are born, and those children are called gibborim, mighty men. The identification of the Nephilim with the offspring rests entirely on the words “these were”, which in Hebrew are ambiguous. The verse reads just as easily as: Nephilim were around at that time, and this is also when the sons of God took wives, and their children became the famous warriors of old.
That matters, because the hybrid idea creates a theological problem its defenders rarely face.
THE PROBLEM IN SHORT.
God made from one man every nation of mankind (Acts 17:26), and sin and death came to all through Adam (Romans 5:12). Salvation works the same way: Christ took our nature, and surely it is not angels that he helps but he helps the offspring of Abraham (Hebrews 2:16). A race partly human but not descended from Adam would stand outside both the fall and the remedy. Genesis gives us no such race—and the gospel has no place to put one.
“And also afterward”: the giants of Canaan
The Nephilim appear only once more in the Bible, and that appearance is regularly misread.
Ten of the twelve spies return from Canaan and report: And there we saw the Nephilim… and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them (Numbers 13:33).
Before treating this as data, notice what the text calls it. Verse 32 says the spies brought to the people of Israel a bad report—the Hebrew word means slander. God does not correct a detail; he condemns the report, and the men who spread it die by plague (Numbers 14:36–37). This is unbelief speaking. Fear had reduced them to grasshoppers in their own eyes—and then, they claim, in their enemies’ eyes too, which no spy could possibly know.
For sober information we turn to Deuteronomy 2–3, where God tells Israel about the peoples of the land: the Anakim, the Rephaim, the Emim and the Zamzummim. They are tall and strong—and entirely ordinary: nations with territories, cities and kings. Og of Bashan was a real king with a famously large bed (Deuteronomy 3:11), not a demigod.
Even Goliath’s height is uncertain in the manuscripts. The traditional Hebrew text gives six cubits and a span, around nine feet nine inches. The Septuagint, the earliest Samuel manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the historian Josephus give four cubits and a span—about six feet nine inches. Either way, a formidable man. Neither way, a monster.
Where did the Nephilim go?
The Bible answers in three movements.
- The Flood. Whatever the Nephilim were, the waters ended them along with everyone else outside the ark (Genesis 7:21). The mighty men of renown drowned with the rest.
- The conquest. Tall, warlike peoples reappear in Canaan, and Joshua removes them: There was none of the Anakim left in the land… Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain (Joshua 11:22). Notice which city survives—Gath, where Goliath will one day live.
- The kingdom. The last of them fall in David’s day. Second Samuel 21 records four giants of Gath killed by his men. A shepherd who trusted the Lord defeated the champion no soldier dared face, and then his men finished the work.
The pattern is not accidental. Giants enter the story as the terror that stops God’s people believing his promise, and leave it defeated by the Lord’s anointed king—a shape the New Testament completes at the cross, where Christ disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them (Colossians 2:15).
What Genesis 6 is really about
Every reading of “sons of God” arrives at the same destination, because Moses names it in the very next verse.
The problem is not exotic biology but the human heart: every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. That is one of the bleakest sentences in Scripture, and it is not aimed at hybrids or angels. It is aimed at us.
And there is a second thread. Ever since God promised that the woman’s offspring would crush the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15), the line of promise has been under attack: corruption here, Pharaoh drowning Hebrew boys later, Herod at Bethlehem later still, and in Revelation 12 a dragon waiting before a woman in labour. The assault never stops. Neither does the preservation. The ark is mercy in the shape of a boat.
Facing your giants
Why does God tell us so little about the Nephilim? Because the secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children (Deuteronomy 29:29). Some silences in Scripture invite us to search. Others are boundaries. This one is a boundary, and much confusion has grown from stepping over it.
What is revealed is enough. An age came when the strong took what they wanted and called it greatness, and God judged it. A land had giants standing between his people and his promise, and he removed them. A cross saw the powers behind every tyranny beaten in public.
The giants in your own life are unlikely to be nine feet tall. They are more often a diagnosis, a debt, a hostile family, a habit you cannot break. Genesis 6 and Numbers 13 together teach that the size of the obstacle is never the real question. Ten spies measured themselves against the giants and felt like insects. Two measured the giants against God. Only two entered the land.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
Should the Book of Enoch be in the Bible, since Jude quotes from it?
No. Jude cites a line from 1 Enoch, a Jewish book written between the Testaments, but quoting a source does not make it Scripture. Paul quotes the Greek poets Aratus and Epimenides in Acts 17:28 and Titus 1:12 without turning them into holy writ. The Holy Spirit can preserve a true statement found in a fallible book, and that is all Jude claims. 1 Enoch was never received as Scripture by the Jewish people who guarded the Old Testament, and Jesus never treats it as such. It remains useful for understanding how some ancient readers interpreted Genesis 6—which is quite different from telling us what Genesis 6 means.
Are demons the disembodied spirits of dead Nephilim?
This idea comes from 1 Enoch, not from the Bible, and it should be set aside. Scripture identifies demons as fallen angels—spirits who sinned and are now under judgement (Matthew 25:41; 2 Peter 2:4; Revelation 12:9). It never hints that they were once embodied, and it never links them to the Nephilim. The theory has spread widely through popular deliverance ministry teaching, but building a doctrine of demons on an uninspired book is exactly the method that produced the confusion around Genesis 6 in the first place. What we need to know about demons is that they are real, they are defeated, and they flee before Christ.
Doesn’t Matthew 22:30 settle the question by ruling out angelic marriage?
Not by itself. Jesus is answering a question about the resurrection, and his statement describes angels in heaven—those who kept their place. It would be an overreach to make a passing comparison about the age to come into a comprehensive statement about what rebel spirits could or could not do before the Flood. The verse does show that marriage is not native to angelic existence, which weighs against the angelic view. But the strongest arguments against that view are drawn from Genesis itself, where the judgement falls squarely on man.
Do reports of giant human skeletons prove the Nephilim were real?
Those reports have not survived scrutiny. The famous photographs circulating online have been traced to digital image competitions, and the nineteenth-century newspaper accounts of enormous skeletons belong to an era of frequent hoaxes, the Cardiff Giant being the best known. Christians should be the last people to lean on evidence that cannot bear weight. Our confidence rests on the testimony of God in Scripture, which never needs propping up by a photograph. If a genuine find were ever made, it would be interesting; it would not make the Bible any more true than it already is.
Since Jesus said the last days would be “as in the days of Noah”, will the Nephilim return?
Look closely at what Jesus actually says in Matthew 24:37–39. He points to eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage—ordinary life carried on in total unawareness until the flood came. The comparison is about spiritual complacency, not about giants. Nothing in the New Testament predicts a return of the Nephilim, and the passages that describe the end speak of deception, apostasy and persecution rather than hybrid beings. Watching for signs that Scripture never gave us is a way of being unprepared for the ones it did.
Could the Nephilim have been saved? Did they have souls?
If they were human—and everything in Genesis indicates they were—then yes, they possessed souls and stood under the same offer of mercy as everyone else in that generation. Peter tells us God waited patiently while the ark was being built (1 Peter 3:20), and Noah is called a herald of righteousness (2 Peter 2:5). Mercy was preached in that world for a very long time before judgement came. The tragedy of the Flood generation is not that grace was withheld from them but that it was despised. The question is worth asking mainly because it turns back on the reader: judgement delayed is not judgement cancelled.
Who are the “spirits in prison” that Christ preached to in 1 Peter 3:19?
This is one of the harder verses in the New Testament, and faithful interpreters differ. Augustine and Calvin understood it to mean that Christ, by his Spirit, preached through Noah to that generation—people who are now spirits in prison. Others, including Edmund Clowney and Karen Jobes, take the spirits to be rebel angels and the preaching to be a proclamation of victory made after the resurrection, not an offer of salvation. On either reading, one thing is certain: this verse offers no second chance after death, which Hebrews 9:27 rules out plainly. It is a passage about the triumph of Christ, and it should be read as such.
