Genesis 6 opens with four verses that have unsettled readers for two thousand years.
"The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose... There were giants in the earth in those days."
Then the text moves on to the flood and never returns to it. No definition of who the sons of God were. No account of what followed. The Bible raises the subject and drops it.
Interpreters have filled that silence three ways. All three are held by serious people. Understanding the argument is more useful than being handed a verdict.
1. The Angelic View
The oldest reading, and the dominant one in ancient Judaism and the early church, takes "sons of God" as heavenly beings. It draws support from elsewhere in scripture, where the phrase clearly carries that sense, as in Job 1:6, Job 2:1 and Job 38:7.
It also fits how the New Testament writers speak. Jude refers to "the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation" (Jude 1:6), and Peter to "the angels that sinned" now held "in chains of darkness" (2 Peter 2:4). Neither stops to explain the story, which suggests the audience already knew it.
2. The Sethite View
On this reading, "sons of God" means the godly line of Seth and "daughters of men" the line of Cain, so the passage describes the corruption of a faithful line by intermarriage. It entered Christian tradition largely through Julius Africanus and was carried by Augustine, and it became the standard Western reading for centuries.
Its strength is that it keeps the passage entirely human. Its difficulty is that the text does not say Seth or Cain anywhere.
3. The Dynastic Rulers View
A third reading takes "sons of God" as a royal title. Kings across the ancient Near East claimed divine paternity, and on this view the passage describes powerful men seizing women because they could, with the flood following as judgment on human tyranny.
Its strength is that it fits the surrounding ancient world. Its difficulty is the same as the Sethite view: the text does not spell it out.
Why the Oldest View Is the Hardest to Read
Here is the practical problem. If you want to examine the interpretation that the earliest readers held, you need the literature they were reading, and most of it is not in a 66-book Bible.
The Book of Enoch tells that version at length: the Watchers, the oath, the descent, the judgment. It is the source Jude quotes by name in Jude 1:14. Fragments of it in Aramaic were recovered from the caves at Qumran, so we know it was being read in the centuries around the New Testament. How those fragments were found is a story in itself.
Reading Enoch does not settle Genesis 6, and nobody should pretend it does. It is not a ruling. What it does is let you read the oldest interpretation in its own words instead of in a summary of a summary. Then you can weigh it against the other two yourself.
Jesus pointed back to this era himself, which is the subject of a separate article.
The Faith Made Complete Ethiopian Bible carries Enoch and Jubilees complete in English, inside an 88-book edition, so Genesis 6 and the literature around it sit in the same volume.
Where this comes from. A plain-language summary of published historical scholarship. Ancient dates and counts are reconstructions, and where scholars disagree this article says so. Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.
