Question:  Dear Greg,

            In Genesis 6:4 when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them, they produced giants.  God destroyed the earth with a flood and later we read giants were again on the earth.  Where did these giants come from?  This is being discussed in our Sunday school class this weekend.  Please help.

            Donna

Answer:  Dear Donna,

            Genesis 6:1-4 is not an easy passage to understand, but here’s some general background.  The Hebrew word for giants is nephilim.  Many people make the mistake of assuming that the nephilim or giants were the children spoken of in verses 1 and 2.  That would make the nephilim or giants the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men.

            Then, having accepted this assumption, people reason that these children who became giants were the product of either fallen angels (demons) or angels who somehow cohabited with earthly human women.  The assumption usually has the demons or angels being male, with the humans being women.

            Wrong!  Let’s start by going back to review the context and purpose of the book of Genesis.  One of the primary purposes of this book is to help us understand that there is only one God.  The original audience to whom Genesis was written was influenced by a culture that worshipped many gods—studies of ancient Babylonian, Sumerian and Egyptian cultures reveal this.

            Keeping that purpose in mind, we should then remember that the Bible has something to say about this assumption regarding who the giants were.  Jesus tells us in Matthew 22:30 that angels do not marry nor are they given in marriage.  It is impossible, according to Jesus, for angels or fallen angels to reproduce—either with their own kind or with a human.  In fact, the only serious consideration of gods reproducing with humans comes to us from the world of paganism.  Remember—one of the major purposes of Genesis is to insist that there is only one true God.  So, would Genesis be trying to defeat its own purpose here?

            So what does this passage mean?  One possible answer is that the sons of God spoken of here are children from the godly line of Seth, and that “sons of God” refers to those who follow God.  This would be similar to our referring to Christians today as children of God—rather than sons of God meaning a divine person or angelic being.  The “daughters of men” was a poetic way of referring to humans from the line of Cain, who were not as godly as those from the line of Seth.  So, the children of this union were products of a human inter-marriage, some of whom became in some way, heroes.  Heroes—people who stood “head and shoulders” above others is probably a good sense of what this text means, rather than some super-human, bionic type of superhero, or some grotesque distorted human who has super-human strength that we think of when we read words like “giants” or “hero”.

            Hope this helps with your Sunday school!

            In Christ,

            Greg Albrecht