The History of Interpretation: What the Record Shows

This question has been debated for a very long time. Here we set down what scholarship has established.

The angel reading: earlier in the surviving record

• The Aramaic Enoch manuscripts from Qumran: Copies of the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1-36) were found in Cave 4 at Qumran. The oldest copies that contain the story of the Watcher angels (1 Enoch 6-11) date from the first half of the second century BC (4Q201) and the middle of that century (4Q202), as published by J. T. Milik in 1976. In this story, two hundred Watchers, called “the children of heaven” (1 Enoch 6:2), come down on Mount Hermon, join themselves to the daughters of men, and father giants.
• Other Qumran writings: The Book of Giants (4Q203, 4Q530-533, and others), the Genesis Apocryphon (1Q20, column 2, where Lamech suspects that his wife’s pregnancy came from the Watchers and she denies it), the Damascus Document (CD 2:17-19, “the Watchers of heaven fell”), and Jubilees 5:1-2 all stand in the same tradition.
• The Septuagint at Genesis 6:2: The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, begun with the Torah in the third century BC. The Gottingen critical edition (John William Wevers, 1974) prints “the sons of God” (hoi huioi tou theou) at Genesis 6:2 as the original Greek text, on the strength of the manuscript evidence, while several witnesses, including Codex Alexandrinus, read “the angels of God” (hoi angeloi tou theou). Even within the oldest Greek translation, then, the manuscripts divide at Genesis 6:2. The Septuagint renders Job 1:6 and Job 2:1 as “the angels of God” (hoi angeloi tou theou) and Job 38:7 as “all my angels” (pantes angeloi mou). There the translators turned the Hebrew “sons of God” into “angels.”
• Jewish writers of the first century: Philo (On the Giants 6) and Josephus (Jewish Antiquities 1.73) read the sons of God as angels.
• Early church fathers: In the second and third centuries, several fathers, among them Justin, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, accepted this tradition.

Readings other than angels: in the record from the second century on

• A second-century Greek version: Symmachus translated the phrase as “the sons of the powerful.”
• The Aramaic Targums: Onqelos has “the sons of the great ones”, and Neofiti has “the sons of the judges.” Pseudo-Jonathan, however, a later Targum that bears Jonathan’s name, adds at Genesis 6:4 “Shemhazai and Uzziel, who fell from heaven,” so both currents run within the Targum tradition.
• Rabbinic literature: Genesis Rabbah 26:5, a rabbinic commentary on Genesis, records that Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in the second century called them “the sons of the judges” and pronounced a curse on anyone who called them “the sons of God.”
• The Sethite view: The first writer on record to state it clearly is Julius Africanus in the early third century, in his Chronographiae, preserved by George Syncellus. He wrote that the descendants of Seth were called sons of God because of the righteous men and patriarchs who came from him. Ephrem, John Chrysostom, and Augustine (City of God, Book 15, chapters 22-23) carried it forward, and it became the main reading of the church.

What must be said plainly: In the surviving record, the angel reading comes first. The Watcher story from Qumran reaches back to the second century BC, while the Sethite view appears in writing only in the third century AD. So the conclusion of this study does not rest on which interpretation is older. It rests on the witness of the text of Genesis and of the sixty-six books themselves: the object of judgment (section 2), the way Scripture uses its names (section 3), and the setting of the genealogies (section 6).