Bibliology- Chapter 6 has several interpretive challenges. The first comes in the form of discerning the phrase “sons of God” and “daughters of man” in verse 2. There are three main understandings of this phrase: Sethites, fallen angels, and royal tyrannical successors of Lamech. The Sethite view is the view held by the early church and it holds that the sons of God were from the righteous line of Seth. This would mean that over the course of time, Seth’s line started to mingle with Cain’s line, and it would be for this reason that people became unrighteous as time went on. The sin that brought on the damnation of the world, in this sense, would be the procreation between those of righteous faith, and those of the world. The second view holds that “sons of God” refers to fallen angels who left Heaven to mingle with the daughters of man. This is the oldest interpretation and comes from rabbinical tradition. Its main support comes from Job 1:6, “Now there was a day when the sons ...
Bibliology- When looking at the genealogy of the Bible, it’s important to understand that the genealogy may not be complete. We can certainly conclude that Adam fathered Seth directly, as it explicitly says in 4:25, but after this, there are 10 sons mentioned by Adam to Noah. The Bible will often leave gaps in the genealogy, see Matthew’s genealogy as an example of this. There is another precedence for this in the Hebrew word יָלַד (yâlad), which can be translated as “became the ancestor of” as opposed to fathered or begot. However, none of this discredits the concept that the men of Genesis Chapter 5 have incredibly long lives. This view would also mean that the lines died off after a certain amount of time, leaving a different line in it’s place, but still of the same line. This would be nonsensical. So, while generation- skipping may be described in this chapter, it doesn’t change that the men continue on for a long period of time. If this were not the case, there w...