Genesis 6:1–4

Genesis 6:1 — "When men began to multiply on the surface of the ground" The verse opens with a narrative marker that deliberately echoes the creation mandate of Genesis 1:28 ("be fruitful and multiply"). What was commanded as blessing has now become the precondition for catastrophe. The multiplication of humanity is not itself sinful, but it has amplified the spread of moral disorder introduced at the Fall (Gen 3) and consummated in Cain's line (Gen 4). The phrase "daughters were born to them" foreshadows the conflict to come: female beauty becomes the occasion — though not the cause — of the transgression. The author is setting the stage with studied economy.

Genesis 6:2 — "God's sons saw that men's daughters were beautiful, and they took" This verse is the crux of one of Scripture's most debated passages. The Hebrew b'nei Elohim ("sons of God") has generated three major interpretive traditions:

1. The angelic interpretation — held by the Book of Enoch, early Church Fathers such as Justin Martyr (Second Apology 5), Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, and Lactantius: the "sons of God" are fallen angels or watchers who transgress the boundary between the divine and human orders. This reading is strongly supported by the parallel usage of b'nei Elohim in Job 1:6 and 2:1 (where the term unambiguously refers to angelic beings), and by the New Testament echoes in Jude 6–7 and 2 Peter 2:4, which appear to allude directly to this event as angelic sin.

2. The Sethite interpretation — championed by Julius Africanus, Augustine (City of God, XV.23), and later Chrysostom: the "sons of God" are the righteous line of Seth (cf. Gen 4:26, "then men began to call on the name of the LORD"), who intermarry with the corrupt daughters of Cain. Augustine favors this view partly to avoid the theologically troubling implication that angels possess corporeal reproductive capacity.

3. The dynastic/ruler interpretation — proposed by some modern scholars: the b'nei Elohim are ancient Near Eastern kings or tyrants who claimed divine status and seized women for their harems, a form of the abusive polygamy already seen in Lamech (Gen 4:19).

The verb wayyiqḥû — "they took" — is pointed and disturbing. It is the same verb used for taking a wife in marriage, but here it carries the force of seizure, of unbounded desire enacting itself without constraint. This is the concupiscence of Genesis 3:16 ("your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you") now operating at a cosmic and social scale. The sin is precisely the collapse of boundaries — between divine and human, between desire and restraint, between the sacred and the profane.

Genesis 6:3 — "My Spirit will not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh" God's declaration is both a judgment and a lament. The Hebrew yādôn (rendered "strive" or "abide") is hapax legomenon — unique to this verse — and may connote both contention and indwelling. The divine Rûaḥ (Spirit), the breath that animated Adam (Gen 2:7), is being withdrawn in stages. The reason given — "he also is flesh" — is not a condemnation of materiality per se (for God declared physical creation "very good" in Gen 1:31), but a diagnosis of the human condition: flesh has come to dominate spirit rather than be ordered by it.

The limitation of 120 years has been understood two ways: (a) a reduced individual human lifespan (though the post-Flood patriarchs exceed this, complicating the reading), or more likely (b) a remaining period of 120 years before divine judgment falls — a final window of grace before the Flood. The latter reading is reflected in 1 Peter 3:20 ("God's patience waited in the days of Noah") and gives the declaration a merciful as well as punitive character.

Genesis 6:4 — "The Nephilim… mighty men of old, men of renown" The Nephilim (from nāfal, possibly "the fallen ones" or "those who cause others to fall") are the offspring of the unions described above, or possibly a separate category of ancient giants. Numbers 13:33 identifies the Anakim encountered in Canaan as descendants of the Nephilim, using them to terrify Israel with their own smallness ("we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers"). The term gibbōrîm ("mighty men") and anšê haššēm ("men of renown/name") evoke the heroic traditions of the ancient Near East — the demigods of Mesopotamian and Greek mythology, beings whose greatness is measured purely in earthly, fleshly power.

The passage ends without resolution. No punishment is narrated here; the Nephilim simply exist. This narrative incompleteness is deliberate: the reader is left suspended in a world of unchecked transgression, waiting for the Flood that must come.

Catholic tradition brings a uniquely integrated reading to this passage, holding together its literal strangeness and its theological depth without flattening either.

On the angelic interpretation: The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that angels are personal, spiritual creatures endowed with intellect and will (CCC §328–330), and that "Satan and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing" (CCC §391). The tradition of Jude 6 ("the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling") and 2 Peter 2:4 ("God did not spare angels when they sinned") strongly implies a pre-Flood angelic transgression, lending weight to the patristic angelic reading of Genesis 6:2. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) affirmed that the devil sinned of his own free will; the angelic transgression in Genesis 6 may represent a secondary wave of such rebellion, this time directed against human nature rather than God alone.

On the withdrawal of the Spirit: St. Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses V.29.1) reads the withdrawal of the Spirit in verse 3 as a theological anticipation of the Incarnation's necessity: where the Spirit can no longer dwell because of sin's dominion over flesh, the Word must become flesh to reclaim and re-sanctify human nature from within. The Spirit's limitation is not God's defeat but the preparation of a deeper intervention.

On the Nephilim and the corruption of the image: The Catechism affirms that every human being is created in the image and likeness of God (imago Dei, CCC §1701), and that sin distorts but cannot wholly destroy that image. The Nephilim, as products of disordered union and celebrated for purely earthly "renown," represent the human person re-defined entirely by power and physical greatness — a perversion of the imago Dei into a purely immanent heroism. St. Augustine (City of God XV.1) frames the entire pre-Flood narrative as the contest between the City of God and the City of Man; the Nephilim are the City of Man in its most grandiose and self-sufficient expression.

On the 120 years as a period of grace: The Church's understanding of divine mercy as always preceding judgment (cf. Misericordiae Vultus, Francis, §20) is prefigured here. God does not destroy immediately; He announces, waits, and — as 1 Peter 3:20 tells us — in that waiting, Noah preaches. The 120 years is thus not merely a countdown but a call to conversion, a structure that recurs throughout salvation history (Nineveh, the preaching of John the Baptist, the age of the Church itself).

Genesis 6:1–4 confronts the contemporary Catholic with a question that is not merely mythological: what happens when the boundaries between the sacred and the profane dissolve, when beauty becomes a pretext for possession, and when "flesh" — appetites, power, and self-assertion — crowds out the Spirit?

The "sons of God" who "saw" and "took" trace the same arc as every disordered desire: perception, wanting, seizure. This is the logic of pornography, of exploitation, of any culture that treats the human person as raw material for another's gratification. The Nephilim — mighty, famous, celebrated — mirror every age's obsession with power and celebrity as the highest human goods.

For Catholic readers, God's words in verse 3 are not simply ancient history: "My Spirit will not strive with man forever." The Spirit's indwelling — received in Baptism, renewed in Confirmation, nourished in the Eucharist — is a gift that can be grieved (Eph 4:30) and quenched (1 Thes 5:19) by the sustained choice of flesh over spirit. The 120-year reprieve is an invitation to examine: in what areas of my life has "flesh" — comfort, appetite, ego, status — been slowly displacing the Spirit? The Flood that follows this passage is also a baptismal type (1 Pet 3:21): judgment and cleansing are always two faces of the same divine act.