“All the Sons of God” in Job 38:7: The Known Views and Our Hypothesis

Job 38:4-7 Where were you when I founded the earth? Declare, if you know understanding. Who set its measures, for you know? Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk? Or who cast its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Here are the main views held regarding “all the sons of God” in Job 38:7.

When the foundations of the earth were laid, man had not yet been made, so those who shouted for joy, the “sons of God,” must have been angels. Many commentaries today hold this view. It rests on that order of creation, and also on the heavenly assembly of the Psalms (Psalm 29:1; Psalm 89:7, which is 89:6 in many English Bibles), on the tradition in which 1 Enoch calls the Watcher angels “the children of heaven” (1 Enoch 6:2), and on the Septuagint’s rendering of Job 38:7 as “all my angels” (Septuagint, Job 38:7).

• The difficulty: Hebrews 1:5 says that God never said to any angel, “You are my Son” (Hebrews 1:5). And the Hebrew text itself does not use the word for angel. “Angels” entered through translation and interpretation.

Hebrew poetry often names one subject twice in different words. On this view, “the morning stars” and “all the sons of God” (Job 38:7) are two names for a single heavenly company.

• The difficulty: Parallel lines do not always speak of the same subject. Hebrew poetry often sets two different groups side by side as well. And even on this view, the question of who that company is remains open.

Here we offer a hypothesis grounded in the texts of Scripture. Scripture does not state it in a single sentence, but when the texts below are set together, we judge it to be a highly persuasive interpretation.

First, Paradise lies beyond time and space. Yeshua said to the thief on the cross, “today you shall be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Paul, speaking of the man who “was caught up into Paradise” (2 Corinthians 12:4), said, “whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know, God knows” (2 Corinthians 12:2). And Scripture says that “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8), and “a thousand years in your eyes are as yesterday when it passes” (Psalm 90:4).

Second, Scripture tells of people who saw and met beyond the bounds of time.

• On the mountain of the transfiguration, Moses, who had died long before, and Elijah, who had been taken up, appeared and spoke with Yeshua about “His departure, which He was about to fulfill at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31), an event that had not yet happened.
• “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). Abraham saw a day that had not yet come.
• The apostle John is the clearest witness. “I came to be in the spirit on the Lord’s day” (Revelation 1:10), he writes, and he was told, “write what you saw, and what is, and what is about to happen after these things” (Revelation 1:19). When he heard the call, “Come up here, and I will show you what must happen after these things” (Revelation 4:1), “immediately I came to be in the spirit, and behold, a throne was standing in heaven” (Revelation 4:2), and he stood before the throne of heaven. He saw what had already happened, the birth of the Messiah, whose “child was caught up to God and to His throne” (Revelation 12:5). He was carried away “in the spirit” into a wilderness (Revelation 17:3) and onto “a great and high mountain” (Revelation 21:10). At last he saw and recorded the final completion: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Revelation 21:1). “And I, John, am the one hearing and seeing these things” (Revelation 22:8).

Third, God knows His own from before time. “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4). The Lamb was “slaughtered from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). God is the One “declaring the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10), who “calls the things that are not as though they are” (Romans 4:17).

Therefore, when these texts are brought together, a path opens. Whoever belongs among the sons of God, whenever he departed this world, long ago or in our own day, may, if God so wills, be present in a Paradise beyond time and space at the very scene in which the foundations of the earth were laid, and shout for joy there. This hypothesis reads “all the sons of God” (Job 38:7) as “the ekklesia of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven” (Hebrews 12:23). It agrees with the reading of Job 1:6 set out in section 1, where the sons of God in the heavenly council are likewise understood as redeemed human beings rather than angels, and with the words “to which of the angels did He ever say, ‘You are my Son’?” (Hebrews 1:5).

• The limit of this hypothesis: Job 38:7 does not state this directly. Because it is drawn from setting the texts above side by side, we offer it not as a settled conclusion but as a persuasive hypothesis.