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Who were the sons of God in the book of Genesis? And what did they do? The elusive text of Genesis 6, 1 through 4 with its references to Sons of God, Daughters of Men and Giants has perplexed interpreters for ages. In his book, The Sons of God in Genesis 6, 1 through 4, Yap Dudins offers a comprehensive history and analysis of the various proposals for understanding the Sons of God episode.
He also evaluates expression, Sons of God, within its ancient Near Eastern context, and sets forth his own understanding of the message and function of Genesis 6, 1 through 4. In Genesis, we talk with Yap Dudins about this fascinating, albeit difficult, text, Genesis 6 and the Sons of God. You're listening to New Books and Biblical Studies, a channel of the New Books Network, and I'm your host, Michael Morales. Yap Dudins is college associate professor at Papa Reformed Theological Seminary in Hungary.
He's published articles on the Old Testament, the Intertestamental Period, and the New Testament, in English, Dutch, and Hungarian. Yap, welcome to New Books and Biblical Studies. Thank you very much. As we begin, let me read for us the text of Genesis 6, 1 through 4 for the sake of our discussion.
I'm reading from the New King James Version. Now, it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them. At the Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful, and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. The Lord said, My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for He is indeed flesh.
It is day shall be 120 years. There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward. When the Sons of God came into the daughters of men and they bore children to them, those were the mighty men who were of old men of renown. Yap, what first interested you in this enigmatic passage?
I'll probably just admit the fact that it's a very enigmatic passage. I did my master thesis on the first chapter of Genesis, so I was looking for studying that further. But then I was thinking that, well, I should do some variation as well. And then I didn't stumble on that passage because I knew it.
But I was thinking, well, it's probably one of the most difficult passages of the Old Testament, maybe not in explaining the grammatical side of it, but as to content, it's one of the most difficult, small, very small passages, and very complex story as well, very compact narrative as well. So it was more a kind of challenge, I think, to say that well, and let's take the most difficult thing. Tell us a little bit more about yourself. Yeah, I'm Dutch.
I'm born in the Netherlands, but now at the moment, presently, I'm an associate professor at the papa reform, Theological Seminary in papa Hungary. Would you offer us a brief summary on the main approaches to understanding the Sons of God in Genesis 6? Well, the S2D explanation or the interpretation of text, I think the expression, the sons of God, was the most basic problem that if you solve that, then most of the pieces of the puzzle find their place. And when we have a look at the history of Exodus, then the main lines of Exodus are that there are two main solutions that the sons of God are super-humans, so beings, or they are humans, human beings.
And that can be split up in two or so in the end four lines of Exodus. If you take the super-human side, then it is about angels or about more generally divine beings or heavenly beings. And if you say they are, they are in some way or another, they are human beings, or the text is telling us something about a narrative about human beings, then they are viewed during the history of Exodus as either judges or mighty persons, rulers, or as the sons of Seth, the son of Adam and Eve, and that means that they are seen as the peers people who are the followers of God. So that are the main lines of Exodus when we have a look at the text.
Let's turn first to the sons of God's angels' interpretation or the heavenly category as you put it. What's the history of this understanding? Well, the angels, or what I call the angels' interpretation, is the oldest interpretation that we find in the history of Exodus. And of course, it was, it came into existence by comparison with other texts in your Testament where, for example, most clearly in the beginning of the prologue of the book of Job, where they easily can be seen, the same term is used as sons of God, who appeared before God, and then they were talking about them among them, also Satan.
And then this became the model, or they easily could be explained as being angels, and then they said that, okay, the text in Genesis 6, 1 through 4 is also about angels. So this is the oldest Exodus we find in both in Jewish and in Christian Exodus. Tell us about some of the strengths and weaknesses of this heavenly category. Well, the strength of the heavenly category is, of course, the fact that when we compare the expressions of God in Hebrew to the other texts in which is similar, or the same expression of course, and there are some texts, so we are not only looking to Genesis 6, then we see that it appears to be all of them are about heavenly beings or let's say angels.
So that is the strength of this Exodus that puts the sons of God into the heavenly realm. So that would be the main argument, the main strength of the hypothesis. Perhaps the weaker point is that when we use the term angels in Hebrew, they are really the attendants of God, or the messengers of God, who are sent out and they have a special task, and they seem to act really out of order within this chapter by going to earth, so having a sexual relationship with women and children, giant children are born, and well, it's a very strange story. How we wouldn't expect that from angels.
So that is one of the weaknesses, and probably also the reason why in the course of the history of Exodus, both in Jewish and in Christian circles, the Exodus just left this explanation behind. Well, perhaps also as a kind of the middle organization of the whole story. Another popular interpretation is that the sons of God refers to the line of Seth, or what you refer to as the religious category. What's the pedigree for this understanding?
This is also very ancient interpretation. When we see the sons of Seth, the sons of God as the sons of Seth, this whole interpretation hinges on the interpretation of Genesis 4, 26, especially in the Septuagint version. In Greek it can be read as, and it's about the sum of Seth, and in Greek you can read the verb what is used there. So the text is he hoped to invoke or to be called with the name of the Lord God, meaning that if you read what is in most translations I think from the Hebrew that they began to invoke the name of the Lord, that is clear.
But if you say that he hoped to be called by the name or with the name or he hoped to be called God or Lord, then they said that, yeah, okay, so if Eenosh the son of Seth was called God or could be called God, then his sons or his children or his descendants also can be called sons of Eenosh being sons of God. So and this is then in this way and it was explained in a very much in a way that these people were the previous people who in the world full of sin were still living very close to paradise and they were seduced by the daughters of Cain who seduced them and they went down, they came out of their closeness to paradise and they lost their destination, let's say that. So that's the core of the sentence, say that it's a Jesus. Yeah, what do you consider to be this these strengths and weaknesses?
I do not see so much strength in that even if it has been very popular I think in, at least I knew this interpretation from my youth I think in reformed churches it was one of the, I don't know, accepted but it was one of the explanations that you could hear. And then of course there was everybody could refer to the texts that call the Israelites, children of God or sons of God, but then there is a problem that all the Israelites were called children of God. So meaning that there were males and females among those children of course. And here in this case it's only about males because the other side is the daughters of man.
And also when the Old Testament talks about God's children or Israel as God's people then it's not because of their deity or their, it's about a relationship that God chose them. And it's about that. And in a lot of cases they are not so peers at all as we know from the Old Testament. You assess all the major views in the history of interpretation and performed your own exegetical analysis.
Tell us now about your own conclusions. Who are these sons of God? Well, when we have a look at the ancient Near Eastern material and literature then it turns out that similar terms are used to refer to or divine beings or deities. When we have a look at all the Old Testament material in which the Eastern is used, the sons of God, then in all cases reference to divine beings or deities or heavenly beings fits the context.
And it's maybe the most clear, okay, this is Aramaic and not Hebrew, but when we have a look at Daniel 3, 25, then you have the story of the friends of Daniel who are thrown into the fire and they are alive then and the king sees another person walking in the fire. And he says in his look is like a son of the gods. And then later on this same word is explained as God sent his angel. But that means that the expression son of God or sons of God is a more, is a broader term.
So it's not so specific for specifically for used for angels as God's messengers or, well, even the term angels or at least in Hebrew and Greek is used for human messengers as well. Anyhow, the term sons of God or son of God in Daniel 3 is a broader term. So meaning that it is more unspecified. A heavenly figure is vaulting there, a heavenly being is there or a divine being, someone who is belonging to another dimension or to the realm of heaven and not to the realm of earth.
So it's a little bit broader than angels. So that is what I think we how we should read this text in Genesis 6 as well. Of course, you get a lot of, especially theological problems, I think, when reading it this way. And you can ask questions about what does it mean when we say that the Old Testament is still, or the Old Testament of course, always referring to God in a very monodistic way.
So how can this be possible? But anyhow, that's our problem that we may have to solve or maybe we cannot solve, but anyhow, I think we should accept the text as it is and try to find at least on the base, on the text the best explanation for it. So yeah, how would your view regarding the divine beings relate to the rest of the story, the daughters of men and the giants or the nephilean that were born to them? Well, I use the metaphor in my book of ancient cartographers, meaning that if you have a look at ancient maps of the world, that the closer you are to their own, so the cartographer makes draw a map.
And the closer it is to his own environment, the more precise the map is and the further away from his own place, of course it's different now because we have Google Earth and whatever we have satellites and can make very precise maps. But for them, it was quite a job. And the further they were away from home, the more in precise or insecure the map did become. And this is also something that I think when we read the first chapters of Genesis, that this is a story that I think by Israelites, they probably wouldn't have seen it as a kind of what we would call myth, so as a fancy story about strange things.
But I think they will have taken it seriously, but still they wouldn't have seen it or considered it to have the same literary value as, let's say, a passage from the Book of Kings, which is far more kind of chronicle. So we go far back in history and there is probably also some archetypical side to these texts that we might or we should take into account. And well, if we look it from in that way, then I think we could say that if you read the beginning of Genesis, the story about paradise and what is classically called the fall of humanity, then it's resulted in two problems, namely first the problem that people became alienated from God and from each other. So humanity became fractured.
And in the 11th chapter of Genesis, when we have the story of the Tower of Babel, it seems that humanity is looking for a solution for the problem of fracturing. And they want to stay together and build for themselves a real name and power. And so that is the one side of the problem that is caused by what happened in this written in Genesis 3. Genesis 6 probably does this in a similar way, but then referring to the other side, the alienation from God.
And here a human solution is found for people connecting to the heavenly realm. Probably also they have a few that maybe immortality can be reached for them or anyhow they find some heavenly power. You have these giants that are born. So both Genesis 11 and 6 may be stories narratives about human solutions for the problem that existed since what happens as it was written in Genesis 3.
And then we read on and we get the story of Abraham and then God says, okay, I will give a solution for this problem. And I will make, I will bless him and so the connection to God is restored and he will be a blessing for all the peoples of the world. And so the problem of humanity and the fracturing of humanity is restored or will be restored by the people of the world and how that's the perspective that Genesis 12, when it's about the vocation of Abraham, that this perspective is given. And interestingly in all of these stories, so in Genesis 12 and it's about Abraham, but also in Genesis 6 and in 11, one of the key words is the word name in Hebrew.
So we will make a name for ourselves by building this tower and city. We will, the giants, the giants, they were the men of Rino, but the word name is used, they were famous in Genesis 6 and then in Genesis 12, when it's about Abraham, that God says that I will give you a name in the world. So I try to see or to connect these narratives to each other. Of course, this is mainly a literary approach, so or a narrative approach, but I think, well, there is some base for it.
Before saying goodbye, Yap, can you tell us about any new projects you're working on? Any other work on Genesis 6? Not especially in Genesis 6, I think it was enough for now. Although, new literature, you can always find new things or have new ideas.
So maybe if suddenly I wake up and I say that well, it's a great idea, I will maybe write an article about it. No, I'm now especially busy with projects with chaos and order in the Old Testament and in the ancient New Near East. So that's one of my bigger projects now. Yap, it's been great speaking with you about your recent book, The Sons of God and Genesis 6, 1 through 4, thank you for being with us.
You're welcome, all the best for you. Alright friends, you've been listening to new books and biblical studies at Channel of the New Books Network. Until next time, goodbye.