Everytime I read David’s scholarly writings, I can picture his enthusiastic smile and friendliness. But I know he is communicating very clearly to me (though I have not been officially introduced to him), “Surrender your Christianity and your interpretations on the Scripture to the overwhelming sweep of ancient near eastern literature and belief systems outside the biblical text.”

I admit that conservative, traditional biblical scholars in America have alreadly lost the battle over presenting creaturely distinctiveness (and creatio ex nihilo) through exegetical, historical and archaeological thought.

your friend,
et

I thought you might be interested in a grammatical analysis of the phrase bene elohim. I think it is untenable grammatically and historically to affirm that these beings are mere humans.

http://www.davidbokovoy.com/?p=94

Best wishes,

TYD

And this is where TYD knows I would disagree with BJM.

(smiling)

Thanks for stopping by again! I would ask you though, who do you think these “angelic beings” are? That’s why I provided a discussion of the divine council in the Hebrew Bible.

And I’d love to hear your response to Bridget,Todd [smiling].

Best wishes,

TYD

In essence? I think TYD is right. Genesis 6:2 is most naturally read as a reference to angelic beings mating with humans.

You don’t even need to break down the Hebrew to see this. Just do a word search in your English Bible for “sons of God” in the Old Testament and see what you get. Every other reference to “sons of God” in the Old Testament arguably refers to angels. Humans weren’t referred to as “sons of God” until the New Testament. To try and read Genesis 6:2 as a reference to human men of noble/righteous/demonic status of some sort seems fairly eisegetical to me. I came to this conclusion with nothing but my NIV Study Bible when I was 16, just thumbing through and cross-referencing “sons of God,” long before I ever learned Hebrew. And I haven’t found a convincing counter-argument since, even though I would like to.

We all know I believe every word of the Bible to be inspired and I believe in inerrancy, so does that mean I believe angels (or possibly demons) can breed with humans?

Well, my knee-jerk reaction is to say “that’s stupid/icky/absurd/gross.” But if you want to get technical, the Bible never clearly delineates the abilities and biology of angels. So why not?

Sure, it’s crazy. But is it really any crazier than believing that some cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree?

So I guess my answer is, I’m open to the possibility. Nevertheless, I can’t say that fear of an angel or demon lusting after me keeps me up at night.

My friend JP Holding at Tekton takes this view. Here is another decently-researched article by Bob Deffinbaugh arguing this view from the evangelical perspective, which carefully examines and dismisses attempts to identify the sons of God as mortal men. His arguments on God changing His mind in Gen. 6 will make our open theists snort, and I disagree with his assertion that there are no female angels, but he covers the basics on why the other views are untenable.

BJM, Chuck Missler would be the popular Idahoan pastor/teacher promoting demons mating with human girls to create the giants.

Nephilim and Gibborim are a fascinating study in the O.T.