Nephilim

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

— Genesis 6:4

The Nephilim are a group named twice in the Old Testament: once before the flood, born when “the sons of God” took human wives from “the daughters of man” (Gen. 6:1-4), and once after it, among the Canaanites the Israelite spies reported seeing (Num. 13:33). Genesis 6:4 calls them “the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.” Whether the “sons of God” who fathered them were angels or human beings is a question Reformed dogmatics answers by ruling out the angelic reading, rather than by settling on one positive alternative.¹

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter addressing the Nephilim narrative or the identity of the “sons of God” directly. Its chapter on the fall of man states that Adam’s sin left all his posterity “dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body,”² the same condition Genesis 6:5’s own verdict on antediluvian humanity describes and total depravity is built on, not a statement about the Nephilim or the sons of God as such.

Biblical Basis

Genesis places the Nephilim at the head of the flood narrative:

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose… The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. (Gen. 6:1-2, 4)

The next verse turns from that report to a verdict on the whole generation: “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” (Gen. 6:5), the judgment that leads directly to the flood itself.

The Nephilim are named a second time centuries later, when the twelve spies return from surveying Canaan: “And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them” (Num. 13:33). Scripture elsewhere associates the Anakim with unusual physical stature (Deut. 9:2), consistent with Numbers 13:33’s report, but does not itself explain how a group destroyed in the flood came to have descendants in Canaan centuries later.

Doctrinal Significance

Genesis places the Nephilim notice immediately before, not inside, its verdict on antediluvian humanity, and Reformed exegesis has read that verdict as more than a comment on one wicked generation. John Calvin’s own commentary on Genesis 6:5 takes the verse’s “only” as God denying “that there was a drop of good mixed with” the human heart, and Calvin “goes on to correctly comment that the interpreter is not wrong to extend the doctrine of man’s total and universal depravity in Genesis 6 to ‘the whole human race.’”³ On this reading, the passage’s significance for total depravity does not depend on settling who the “sons of God” were: the flood came because “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5), a description of the corruption of the human heart as such, not only of the Nephilim or their parentage.

Historical Development

The patristic angelic reading

“Most of the fathers, in the three first centuries of the church” read the “sons of God” of Genesis 6:2 as angels rather than men, among them Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius, Irenaeus, and Cyprian.⁴ Thomas Ridgley traces the reading to two sources: a Septuagint manuscript that rendered the Hebrew “sons of God” as “the angels,” used by fathers who did not “well understand” the Hebrew text directly, and the pseudepigraphal Book of Enoch, which gave “an account of a conspiracy among the angels” naming the participants, the year, and the place, “as very much… exceeds the apocryphal history of Tobit” in its embellishment.⁴

Its rejection by Origen, Jerome, and Augustine

The angelic reading did not go unchallenged even in the patristic period itself. Origen, answering the pagan critic Celsus’s charge that the Book of Enoch was a Christian embarrassment, replied that the book “was not in great reputation in the church,” despite Origen’s own occasional deference to it elsewhere.⁴ Jerome’s Catalogus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum (4th century) lists Enoch among the apocryphal writings rather than Scripture, and Augustine’s City of God, book 15, chapter 23 (5th century), goes further, calling the book “not only apocryphal, but, as it deserves, fabulous.”⁴

Opposing Views

The angelic reading. First attested among the earliest church fathers, this reading holds that the “sons of God” were fallen angelic beings who took on some capacity to father children with human women, and that the Nephilim were the offspring of that union.

The human reading. Reformed dogmatics rejects the angelic reading on textual grounds. Herman Bavinck states plainly that “the view that the ‘sons of God’… in Genesis 6:2 are angels and not men is untenable.”¹ His argument runs on three points: the flood’s judgment in the following verses falls only on guilty humans, with angels never mentioned (Gen. 6:3, 5-7); Scripture nowhere ascribes a corporeal nature to angels, so nothing in the text supports angels taking on the capacity to marry and father children; and Christ himself states that angels “neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matt. 22:30), a description Bavinck reads as ruling out the very capacity the angelic reading requires.¹ On this reading “the sons of God” and “the daughters of man” are both human beings, though Scripture does not itself specify what distinguished the two groups from each other.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t Scripture elsewhere use “sons of God” for angelic beings, supporting the angelic reading here too (Job 1:6; 38:7)? Bavinck’s argument does not depend on the phrase “sons of God” being unable to name angels elsewhere; it depends on what the immediate context of Genesis 6 itself will support. The chapter’s judgment falls only on humans (Gen. 6:3, 5-7), Scripture nowhere else describes angels as capable of marriage or physical procreation, and Christ’s own statement that angels do not marry (Matt. 22:30) applies without qualification, not only to some future state.¹ A word’s use elsewhere does not settle what it means in a passage whose own details point the other way.

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 6, “Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment thereof,” para. 2. ↩
John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, trans. John King (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 1:248, quoted in Matthew Michael Barrett, “The Scriptural Affirmation of Effectual Calling,” in “Reclaiming Monergism: The Case for Sovereign Grace in Effectual Calling and Regeneration” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2011), 94-95. ↩
Thomas Ridgley, A Body of Divinity, vol. 2, ed. James P. Wilson (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1814), n. 41. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴