4.1.1 Gen. 6, 1-4 Prehistory: The Angelic Marriages

Unusually for the Bible, archaic terminology meets us here. One of the  very few passages in the Bible that expresses itself with elements that  we otherwise know only from extra-biblical myths. The increase of sin  now also concerns the communication with the heavenly world: The  story perhaps even takes up pre-Jewish ideas and processes them with  the Yahweh belief in order to drastically illustrate the prevalence of sin.  Already in old Judaism it was hotly discussed whether here really a  mixture of (fallen) angels with human women was meant. This was  widely regarded as heresy. Because of the purity of the angels, the story  was referred to the pious Sethites, who were worshippers of Yahweh  (4:26), as did Luther and the other reformers. 

Westermann (Bibelkunde zSt.) takes up another old Jewish tradition of  interpretation, according to which sons of princes (as “sons of God” and  bearers of the spirit of God) were meant, and sees in it a critical  retrospect to the past time of the kings. 

Most interpreters today agree that “Sons of God” also denote beings of the angelic world elsewhere in the OT, see above like בני הנביאים (bene hanebiim: 2. Kg. 2 u.ö.) not sons, but belongings or disciples of the prophets. So sin has now also got a demonic part.

The archaic nature of this story must not obscure our view of the critical  potential that is expressed here: In every ideology that lies in the idea of  the “superhuman” there is always a demonic factor. This is true for racist ideologies as well as for modern medical aberrations of selection of people. 

The 120 years (6, 3) mean either a “grace period” or the “ideal maximum age”, (Moses will live to be 120!). 120 is the product of  1x2x3x4x5, while the lifetime of normal people is limited to 70 years (Ps. 90,10) is shortened (Plaut zSt). Beautiful is the  summarizing formulation of Delitzsch: God’s “love in the midst of wrath”.