Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The Sons of God

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The Sons of God

The phrase bene ha-elohim, sons of God, appears in a small number of passages and is contested in most of them. In Genesis 6 the sons of God see that the daughters of men are fair and take wives of them, and the passage ends with the Nephilim in the earth; the whole episode occupies four verses and explains almost nothing about who the sons of God are. In the opening of Job they present themselves before the Lord, with the Adversary among them, in what reads as a court in session. A verse in Deuteronomy 32 and one in Psalm 89 use the phrase, or a close variant of it, in a similar register.

What sort of being the phrase named is a genuinely open question. The reading that has dominated Western tradition treats them as angels, and it is old: the Book of the Watchers develops the Genesis 6 episode at length on exactly that assumption. Another line of interpretation, also old, takes them as human descendants of Seth. A third reads them against the divine councils of surrounding Near Eastern literature.

The ranked lists adopt the angelic reading and give the phrase a fixed position, which converts an interpretive choice into a settled fact of the system. That conversion becomes invisible once the table is printed, and it is the reason this entry describes the angelic reading as one settled position rather than as the only one available.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.