If someone asked you to name the origin of a story about gods who take human wives and then give birth to a race of semidivine heroes, you might answer: It’s a Greek myth, or perhaps a Norse legend, or maybe a folktale from Africa or India. Surely this story couldn’t come from the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. Or could it?
In fact, it is one of the seldom-told stories in the Hebrew Bible. The passage from Genesis 6:1–4 is short enough to quote in full:
“When mankind began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, the Sons of Goda saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took wives of them, from any whom they chose. And Yahweh said, ‘My spirit will not be strong1 in man forever, for indeed he is but flesh. His lifetime will be 120 years.’ The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterwards, when the Sons of God mated with the daughters of men and they bore children for them: these were the heroes of old, the men of renown.”
For thousands of years this story has scandalized readers of the Bible, and for good reason. The story appears to go against the grain of our traditional understanding of biblical religion.
But the story is there, and since it is, perhaps our traditional understanding is what’s wrong. Perhaps, to paraphrase Hamlet, there are more things in the Bible than are dreamt of in our philosophy: Let us look more closely.2
In the past, many scholars have simply dismissed the story as a kind of biblical aberration. The reaction of the great 19th-century scholar Julius Wellhausen is typical; he characterized the story as “a cracked erratic boulder.”3 Like a cracked boulder, it might best be just hauled away.
Early Jewish and Christian commentators were also perplexed by the story. Since it was already anchored in the holy text, the only way to avoid the unpleasant implications of gods and humans marrying and having offspring was to provide an interpretation that would render it more palatable. The early rabbis therefore understood the phrase beûneÆ haµ ÕeûloµhiÆm to refer not to “the Sons of God,” but to righteous men. The Church fathers, on the other hand, interpreted the phrase as a reference to the descendants of Seth, who was born of Adam and Eve after Cain killed Abel (“Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him ‘Seth’ meaning ‘God has provided me with another offspring in place of Abel’ ” Genesis 4:25). In this way both the early Jewish and the early Christian interpreters avoided the problem of the polytheistic implications suggested by the “Sons of God.” Neither of these early interpretations is supported by the evidence. They simply illustrate how early interpreters tried to tame this troublesome text.
How are we to understand the story? Amorous gods, beautiful women, sex, curses and fame. It has all the elements of a successful soap opera, with mythic motifs thrown in for good measure. 009Is there enough here to understand—or is the story too cryptic, too broken?
I believe the text can be understood, but only by following a trail of clues that will lead us to other texts in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient mythologies.
The first stop in our investigative trail is to ascertain the identity of “the Sons of God.” This is relatively easy. The Sons of God (Hebrew, beûneÆ haµ ÕeûloµhiÆm) are known from several texts in the Hebrew Bible. In Job 1:6 and 2:1, the Sons of God present themselves to Yahweh in the heavenly divine assembly. Later, in Job 38:7, we learn that the Sons of God have been with Yahweh at the creation of the world; when they see what God has wrought “the Sons of God shout[ed] for joy.” The Sons of God (Hebrew, beûneÆ ÕeµliÆmb), again appear at Yahweh’s divine assembly in Psalm 89:7, where Yahweh’s incomparability among the gods is proclaimed. A similar scene is found in Psalm 29:1, where the Sons of God (Hebrew, beûneÆ ÕeµliÆm) sing praises to Yahweh.4
Perhaps the most intriguing reference to the Sons of God is in the famous Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, just before Moses ascends Mt. Nebo to die without entering the Promised land. Deuteronomy 32:8 contains what is apparently an old mythological reference to the early history of humanity. The traditional Hebrew text reads:
“When the Most High apportioned the nations, when he divided the sons of man, he established the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel.”
The sense of this passage is fairly clear until one comes to the last phrase. How can the borders of the peoples (including non-Israelite nations) be established according to the number of the sons of Israel? Has Israel already been established? Not yet, according to the sense of the text. There is something wrong in this passage: the end contradicts the beginning.
The contradiction does not appear in all Bibles, however. Look at the Revised Standard Version (RSV), for example. There we read in Deuteronomy 32:8 that the borders of the peoples (or nations) are fixed, not according to the number of the sons of Israel, but “according to the number of the Sons of God.” This reading is based on the Greek Septuagint, a Bible translation made in the third century B.C. for Jews living in Alexandria who could not read Hebrew. The modern RSV translators decided that in this case the Septuagint, rather than the received Hebrew text (known as the Masoretic text), has preserved the original reading.5 Bible translations that adhere to the received Hebrew text, however, read “sons of Israel” instead of “Sons of God.”
“Sons of God” in Aramaic Deuteronomy fragment suggests that “Sons of Israel” in received Hebrew text was later substitution to “clean up” the story.
Recently a fragmentary text from among the Dead Sea Scrolls was found to contain Deuteronomy 32:8. Written in late Herodian script (late first century B.C. to early first century A.D.), this fragment is now our earliest Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 32:8; the last phrase in the verse in this fragment clearly reads “the Sons of God,” not 010“the sons of Israel.” This reading, preserved in Greek in the Septuagint but not in the received Hebrew text, seems rather clearly to be the authentic original reading.
Apparently, somewhere along the line in the transmission of the standard rabbinic Bible someone felt the need to clean up the text by literally rewriting it and substituting “sons of Israel” for the original “Sons of God” in Deuteronomy 32:8.
Now that we have established the correct text of Deuteronomy 32:8, we can use it to complete our portrait of the Sons of God. According to this passage in Deuteronomy, the Sons of God were not only present at the beginning of the world, but also figured importantly in the division of the nations. According to the following verse, Yahweh chose Israel as his own portion, implying that each of the other deities, the Sons of God, also received a nation to rule over. This would make sense of the division of the nations according to the number of the Sons of God. We can see in this passage an indication that the Sons of God at one time played a far more important role in the early history of humanity than is generally remembered in the biblical traditions.
Pre-Israelite Canaanite traditions contain seed of Sons of God concept.
For even earlier history of the Sons of God, we have to look outside the Hebrew Bible. As with many other elements of Israel’s religious traditions, the ancestry of the concept of the Sons of God can be traced to pre-Israelite Canaanite traditions. Especially valuable in this regard are 14th-century B.C. Canaanite texts written in cuneiform on clay tablets. Discovered in 1928 at the ancient city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast,c these texts provide a wealth of information about the society, religion and narrative traditions of Canaan in the period before the emergence of Israel.
In the myths, epics and ritual texts from Ugarit, the phrase “the Sons of God” (banuµ Õili or banuµ Õili–mi) occurs frequently. In the Canaanite pantheon, the chief god is El, whose name literally means “God.” He and his wife Asherah are the father and mother of the gods. The phrase “the Sons of God” can be translated literally as “the Sons of El.”
The beûneÆ ÕeµliÆm are found not only in Ugaritic texts, but also in Phoenician inscriptions of the eighth to seventh centuries B.C.6 and in an Ammonite inscription of the ninth century recently found in Amman, Jordan.7 So the concept of the Sons of God pervades Canaanite lore over an extended period of time.
The Canaanite roots of the Sons of God allow us a glimpse into the antiquity of these figures and make it clear that these are indeed divine beings. The Israelite use of the term derives from the body of traditional lore inherited from the Canaanites. The concept of the Sons of God as 011well as the stories about them doubtless goes back to Canaanite time.
In Israelite tradition the Sons of God are the lesser deities who accompany Yahweh in his heavenly assembly.8 Their sphere of activity is restricted in comparison to that of their Canaanite forebears; this, of course, is due to the fact that in Israelite worship Yahweh had subsumed the essential functions of the other gods. Only in a few passages are the activities of the Sons of God prominent. These passages, especially Genesis 6:1–4 and Deuteronomy 32:8, reflect traditions that are quite early. Indeed, these two passages would be quite at home among the Ugaritic mythological texts, except that the chief god is Yahweh rather than El!
Who were the Nephilim? Was their destruction the original motive for the Genesis Flood?
Let us turn now from the Sons of God to the offspring produced when they united with the daughters of men, as described in Genesis 6:1–4. Although the language of the text is a bit choppy, it nevertheless seems clear that the offspring are referred to as the Nephilim. These Nephilim are described as the “heroes of old, the men of renown.” Who are the Nephilim?
Nephilim literally means “the fallen ones.” In Hebrew the word is a common euphemism for “the dead.” (For example, Jeremiah 6:15 tells us, “They will fall among the fallen [Hebrew, noµpeûliÆm].”)
In Ezekiel 32:27, we read of the Nephilim as warriors who have fallen:9
“They lie with the warriors,
The Nephilim of old,
who descended to Sheol
with their weapons of war.”
Elsewhere in biblical tradition the Nephilim are described as the giants who were native inhabitants of Canaan. In the report Moses’ advance scouts give of their foray into Canaan (Numbers 13:33), they advise Moses:
“All the people whom we saw in its midst were people of great size; there we saw the Nephilim—the Anaqim are part of the Nephilim—and we seemed in our own eyes like grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed in their eyes.”
In Deuteronomy 2:11 the giant Anaqim—part of the Nephilim—are also called Rephaim, a more general term for the giant native inhabitants of Canaan. Two of the most famous of the Rephaim are King Og of Bashan, whose huge iron bed could still be seen on display in Rabbah of Ammon (Deuteronomy 3:11), and the giant warrior Goliath, who is described as descended from the Raphah in Gath (2 Samuel 21:19ff.).10
The Nephilim thus appear to be a race of heroes who lived both before the Flood and in Canaan before the Israelites conquered the Promised Land. In these eras, the Nephilim end up, as their name suggests, as “the dead ones.” The Rephaim and Anaqim are said to have been wiped out by Joshua, Moses and Caleb,11 though some stragglers remained to be slain by David and his men.12 In Joshua 11:22, we are told that “No Anaqim remained in the land of Israel, but some remained in Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod.”
The function of the Nephilim-Rephaim-Anaqim, the giant demigods—half god, half human—is constant in all these traditions. They exist in order to be wiped out: by the Flood, by Moses, by David and others.13 The function of the Nephilim in Israelite tradition is to die.14 As we have already noted, Nephilim actually means “the fallen ones.” The connection between death and the Nephilim appears to be basic to the several forms of the tradition.
I believe that in the original version of the mating story in Genesis 6:1–4, the Nephilim were destroyed by the Flood; indeed they were the cause of the Flood. To understand this argument, however, we must explore the Mesopotamian flood story, which is obviously related in some way to the flood story preserved in the Bible.
In the Mesopotamian flood story, the gods’ motive for the flood, as we now know from the Old Babylonian myth of Atrahasis, is a cosmic imbalance between the human world and the divine world; the human world is overpopulated with humans, and the gods cannot sleep because of the noise:15
“… the people multiplied,
the land was bellowing like a bull.
At their uproar the god became angry;
Enlil heard their noise.
He addressed the great gods,
‘The noise of mankind has become oppressive to me.
Because of their uproar I am deprived of sleep.’ ”
In this primeval era, according to Babylonian understanding, humans live forever; this is what has created the overpopulation. People can still die from violence or starvation, but natural death has not yet been instituted. After other efforts at population control fail, Enlil decrees the flood, 012which will kill all humans and take care of the noise problem—Enlil’s final solution.
However, Enlil’s wily adversary, the god Enki, attempts to thwart Enlil’s plan. Enki advises an “exceedingly wise” man named Atrahasis to build an ark for himself and his family, together with a menagerie of animals, in order to survive the flood. When the flood recedes, and Atrahasis and his family have survived, the gods Enlil and Enki have a showdown. Finally, they agree on an acceptable compromise, suggested by Enki, to control the size of human population: people will henceforth die natural deaths.d
Natural death becomes the fate of humanity. This is the solution to the cosmic imbalance that brought on the flood in the Babylonian account of the flood.
The Genesis flood occurs to punish human evil, to redress a cosmic imbalance.
In the story in Genesis 6:1–4, the divine response to the cosmic imbalance represented by the Sons of God mating with the daughters of men is likewise to limit human lifespan: “My spirit will not be strong in man forever [says Yahweh in Genesis 2:3], for indeed, he is but flesh. His lifetime will be 120 years.”
The punishment a decree of a limited lifespan, is directed at humans, however, not at the Nephilim.
I believe that originally in early Israelite tradition, the motive for the Flood was the destruction of the Nephilim. The sexual mingling of the Sons of God and the daughters of men created a cosmic imbalance and a confusion in the cosmic order. The birth of the demigods threatened the fabric of the cosmos. The natural response in myth, as exemplified by the Babylonian flood tradition, was to suppress the imbalance by destroying its cause. In the Atrahasis myth, humanity is destroyed so that its noise would be eliminated. The natural conclusion of Genesis 6:1–4, according to the logic of the myth, is the deluge—the destruction of humanity, and 013the concomitant annihilation of the disorder. The cosmic imbalance is resolved by a great destruction out of which a new order arises.
In Genesis 6:1–4 as it has come down to us, however, the conclusion of the old myth has been transformed. The Flood is no longer the result of the Sons of God mating with the daughters of men. The conclusion of the myth has been detached from the Flood narrative (though it still immediately follows it, beginning in Genesis 6:5), and a new motive has been supplied in the biblical account. The motive in Genesis 6:5–8 is the increase of mankind’s evil on the earth, not the increase of population (as in the Babylonian myth), nor the mixing of gods and mortals (as was originally the case in the myth partially preserved in Genesis 6:1–4).
Note the parallel use of the word “multiply” at the beginning of the mating myth (Genesis 6:1–4) and at the beginning of the Flood story that follows, beginning in Genesis 6:5: The story of the mating of the Sons of God with the daughters of men begins: “When mankind began to multiply on the face of the earth” (Genesis 6:1). The Flood story begins: “Yahweh saw that the evil of mankind multiplied on the earth.”16 In Genesis 6:1–4, the problem is the mating between gods and humans. In the Flood story it is human evil. The parallel use of “multiply on earth” suggests a parallel construction introducing cosmic imbalance. In Genesis 6:1–4, it is the mating of gods and humans; in the Genesis Flood story, it is human evil. In the Babylonian flood story, it is overpopulation.
The ethical nature of the biblical Flood story is highlighted by this change in motive—in the Bible, the flood is brought on not by the cosmic imbalance caused by human overpopulation, but by the evil engaged in by humankind. The new motive for the Flood is found in Genesis 6:5–7:
“Yahweh saw that the evil of mankind had multiplied on the earth, and that all the thoughts of his heart were only evil continually. And Yahweh repented that he had created mankind, and he was grieved in his heart. Yahweh said, ‘I will wipe out mankind, whom I created, from the face of the earth. …’ ”
By truncating the original ending of the story in Genesis 6:1–4 from its logical sequel—the flood which would eliminate the cosmic imbalance of gods mating with humans—the story of the Sons of God taking wives of the daughters of men becomes simply one example of man’s evil inclination. Similar stories in the Primeval Cycle precede the Flood story in Genesis. Thus, a new motive for the great destruction of the Flood is presented; the story of the Sons of God and the daughters of men has been rearranged and no longer serves as the primary motive for the great destruction.
While the Nephilim appear to die in the Flood, they are still around later; they die in another great destruction, the Israelite conquest of the Promised land. These great destructions bring to an end a “primeval” era: before the Flood and before Israel. In both of these primeval eras, the Nephilim are doomed to die.e
The story of the Sons of God mating with the daughters of men is thus understandable on its own, transposed as it is, and is also understandable as a part of a carefully crafted larger whole—the cycle of stories leading up to the Flood. This cycle itself feeds into the stories of the patriarchs and the narration of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel.
The Primeval Cycle in Genesis is characterized by a series of mythological transgressions of boundaries that result in a range of divine responses. Slowly these responses build up to a new ordering of the cosmos. The mixing of gods and morals in Genesis 6:1–4 is mirrored by the mixing of the divine and the human in the Garden of Eden story, in which humans desire to “be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, 22), another cosmic imbalance. As a result Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden. Similarly, in the Tower of Babel story, where humans want to build “a tower with its top in heaven” (Genesis 11:4), they are divinely punished by a confusion of tongues. In Genesis 6:1–4 the bounds between divine and human are also breached, and the result is the decree of the limit of man’s lifespan to one hundred and twenty years. The basic pattern persists.
The stories proceed in a dialectical fashion, generating oppositions and resolving them, all the while sketching a transition from a mythical “nature” to human “culture,” from an era when humans are naked and immortal to an era of clothing, mortality, hard labor and nations—the era of the present world. Genesis 6:1–4 fits snugly into this context—the repetition of mythological transgressions of boundaries and the slow building up of the limitations of the human world.
If someone asked you to name the origin of a story about gods who take human wives and then give birth to a race of semidivine heroes, you might answer: It’s a Greek myth, or perhaps a Norse legend, or maybe a folktale from Africa or India. Surely this story couldn’t come from the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. Or could it?
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The Hebrew word for “God” is ÕEloµhiÆm. In other Semitic languages, and occasionally in Hebrew, this word means “gods” in the plural, The general usage in Hebrew is in the singular, referring to Yahweh, the god of Israel. The singular usage is clear in these contexts, since ÕEloµhiÆm takes a singular verb, as in this passage. Why the plural form was originally used to signify the single god, Yahweh, is unclear. Probably the shift in religious belief from the worship of a pantheon of gods to the worship of a single god is involved. In a sense we might say that, for the Israelites, Yahweh takes over the functions of the whole pantheon. Here we have the transition from “gods” to “god.” The “Sons of God” still exist in Israelite mythology but they are no longer the object of worship and of the cult.
2.
The Hebrew form ÕeµliÆm is a variant form of ÕeûloµhiÆm, “God.” The –oµh– in ÕeûloµhiÆm is a particle that originally added an emphatic or particularizing quality to the plural form çeµliÆm.
[For the restorations in this text, see W. G. Lambert, “The Theology of Death” in Death in Mesopotamia, ed. B. Alster (Copenhagen: Akademisk, 1980), pp. 54–58. The restorations are based on the Gilgamesh Epic, tablet 10, column 6, lines 28–32, where the gods’ decree of human mortality after the flood is recalled.]
5.
This double dimension of the Nephilim need not disturb us once we understand the essential fluidity of mythological traditions. Just as Goliath can be killed by Elhanan or by David in different stories, so the Nephilim can be destroyed by the Flood or by the conquest. In either case, the semidivine Nephilim are no longer here in the present world. They are “the fallen ones.”
Endnotes
1.
Most modern English versions translate this troublesome verb as “abide” or “remain.” This is simply a guess from the context. I read the verb (Hebrew yaµdoÆn) as a perfectly normal formation from the root dnn, “to be strong.” It has not, I believe, been noticed that this same root appears In the name of an Israelite village in the Judean hill country, Dannah (Joshua 15:49). The name of this village means “stronghold.” The root dnn is therefore attested in Biblical Hebrew, both in the place-name and in Genesis 6:3.
2.
For a more detailed discussion of what follows, with complete references, see Ronald S. Hendel, “Of Demigods and the Deluge: Toward an Interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4, ” forthcoming in the Journal of Biblical Literature, 106 (1987), pp. 13–26.
3.
Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, transl. J. S. Black and A. Menzies (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1885), p. 317.
4.
See also (beûneÆ ‘elyoÆn) and Daniel 3:25 (bar ÕeûlaµhiÆn).
5.
The Septuagint reads literally “the angels of God” (aggeloµn theou); this, however, is the usual and normal Septuagint translation of the Hebrew “Sons of God.”
6.
Arslan Tash (KAI 27.11) and Karatepe (KAI 26.A.III.19). Translations of the Karatepe inscription and one of the inscriptions from Arslan Tash may be found in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Related to the Old Testament, ed. James B. Pritchard (3rd ed; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 654 (Karatepe), and p. 658 (Arslan Tash).
7.
Siegfried H. Horn, “The Amman Citadel Inscription,” BASOR 193 (1969) pp. 2–13.
8.
For other descriptions of Yahweh’s divine assembly, see 1 Kings 22:19, Isaiah 6, Psalm 82 and, from a later era, Daniel 7:9–10. References or allusions to the divine assembly are found in many texts, including Jeremiah 23:18 and the plural addresses (“let us…” or “like one of us…”) in Genesis 1:26, 3:22 and 11:7. For more discussion, see E. Theodore Mullen, Jr., The Assembly of the Gods, Harvard Semitic Monographs 24 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1980).
9.
Some of my readings in this passage diverge from the traditional translations for textual and linguistic reasons. For a discussion of this passage, see Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), pp. 168, 176.
10.
In 2 Samuel 21 it is a warrior named Elhanan who defeats Goliath. This story is more familiar to us in 1 Samuel 17, where David is Goliath’s opponent. This is an example of a story that “floats” in oral tradition from a lesser hero to a greater hero.
Note that the giant aboriginal inhabitants of Seir, Ammon and Gaza are also utterly annihilated, generally by Yahweh (Deuteronomy 2:12, 20–23). See also Deuteronomy 9:1–3; Amos 2:9.
14.
Compare Mario Liverani’s remarks on the function of the Amorites in Israelite tradition, “The Amorites,” in Peoples of Old Testament Times, ed. D. J. Wiseman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973).
15.
W. G. Lambert and Alan R. Millard, Atrahasis: the Babylonian Story of the Flood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 66–67, 72–73.
16.
Several scholars have suggested that the increase of population referred to in Genesis 6:1 is a vestige of the theme in Atrahasis of human overpopulation. See Alexander Heidel, The Gilagamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1949), pp. 225–226; Alan R. Millard, “A New Babylonian ‘Genesis’ Story,” Tyndale Bulletin 18 (1967), pp. 11–12; Claus Westermann, Genesis I/l, BKAT (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1974), pp. 500–501; see also H. Schwarzbaum, “The Overcrowded Earth,” Numen 4 (1957) pp. 59–74. The connection seems rather forced, however, since an increase of population is to be expected in myths of primeval humanity. The distinctive features of the Atrahasis myth—excess of population and its accompanying noise—are both absent in the Israelite tradition. For a nuanced view of the contrast between the Israelite and Mesopotamian traditions, see William L. Moran, “Atrahasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood,” Biblica 52 (1971), p. 61.
