Gen 6:1-5 has always been hard to interpret:
1 When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. 3 Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” 4 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. 5 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.
Are the “sons of God” Sethites (descendants of righteous Seth, the traditional Christian interpretation)? Or are they titan-fathering fallen angels? Who are the Nephilim?
And most importantly, why was God so upset?
I won’t go through all the arguments for each interpretive choice, fascinating though they are. Instead, I will just say that one point frequently passed over is the importance to the story of Genesis 2. That is where the opening narrative shows how God intends the image to be multiplied (Gen 1:28). The Creator arranges and then specifies (Gen 2:24) the institution of marriage. Adam and Eve come together in the sacred monogamous intergendered life-long union. That is how the genealogies of Genesis 4 and 5 start. The fruitfulness the Lord commanded must come about through the marriage of a man to one woman.
But Gen 6:1-2 contrasts that with what happened. When people started on this task of “multiplying” (v1), the sons of God (whoever they were) looked upon the attractiveness of the women and took as “wives any they chose.” That could very well be a reference to polygamy. If it is a lament of the generalizing of having more than one wife, that explains why, in the next thought, the Lord says that He is fed up with man and limits the damage by limiting his earthly life (v3). We saw this practice start even before with the Cainite, Lamech. The text emphasizes how he took two wives (Gen 4:19), repeating the fact in recounting Lamech’s twisted logic of revenge (Gen 4:23-24).
This is where fallen men stopped respecting God and His ordained marriage covenant and thereby stopped respecting women. Genesis 6 contrasts this with Noah, who only had 3 sons because he was monogamous:
But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.
–Gen. 6:18, following Gen 6:9-10
A key theme of the ark story (Gen 6-9) is the multiplying of people and animals “two by two.”
This helps explain the deep yet destructive propensity of men to seek women beyond the good confines of marriage, the necessity of the seventh commandment, and the horrendous relationship carnage in a post-Christian society.
I, myself, started down this path in high school when I openly took on two girlfriends at once. (Yes, and they knew about each other). Of course, such a situation is inevitably unstable and both relationships fell apart. Looking back, this is the action I most regret about my life. In fact, the experience was one of the main things that led me to convert to Christianity. I could not change my heart myself. Even today, I often thank God on my knees that He interrupted my life then and changed me, and so staved off the damage of a Genesis 6 life.
The New Testament begins with the counter-narrative of a man, Joseph, who not only commits to one woman, Mary, but also to taking her without having her for several months. Their story begins the new era of the Messiah, who makes reversing this violence possible. Over the thousands of years of ensuing human history, the mystery is not how fallen men are so easily tempted to unfaithfulness. The mystery is how marriage has prevailed. Holy Spirit has helped human societies avoid the violence of Lamech on a large scale. By common grace, stable cultures have at least upheld the goodness of marriage as the Bible defines it ….so far.
This season, I pray that the Western world come closer to the goodness of marriage, Closer to the trail of Joseph than to that of Lamech.
Am I to understand that, in something for which Nathan does not condemn David, you, Sam Andreades would? Did Nathan overlook something? Maybe he felt pity towards David and so would only call out the Bathsheba incident. I suspect Nathan is a greater prophet than you, so how should I reconcile this? Was Nathan a prophet who overlooks sin, even serious sin (which seems to be your characterization with the lamech reference)?
Hi Chris, I want to certainly agree–not only was Nathan a greater prophet than me, he was a prophet (period)! I am not. We should remember, though, that Nathan was not sent in 2Samuel 12 to speak of all of David’s sins, just the ones that he was hiding, the ones that cost the kingdom so dearly and were the most abhorrent to God.
But God gave his judgment that David’s polygamy was serious sin by other means. We need only read the deadly consequences of it in David’s family through the rest of 2Samuel to understand God’s condemnation of it. Kind of like giving people quail to eat, because they insist, and letting the resulting plaque ensue (Numbers 11).
In fact, throughout the Old Testament, when God’s men take steps down Lamech’s path, grave trouble follows.
Your thoughts and reply are appreciated.
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