Noah, son of Lamech, had reached the age of five hundred years, and had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet; and at this time men had begun to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them; then “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all that they chose.”
The question naturally arises, “Who were these sons of God?” According to Job xxxviii. 7, where we have the statement that “The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” it would seem to be the angels that are intended by these words, and this is apparently the opinion generally held by scholars and divines on the subject. This view seems to be favoured by the Second Epistle of Peter (ii. 1), though, as the words do not actually agree with those of the text of Genesis quoted above, nothing very positive can be maintained concerning the apostle's dictum—in fact, his words in the passage referred to, “for if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains and darkness, to be reserved unto [pg 086] judgment,” can much more reasonably be regarded as referring, and therefore giving authority to, the story of the fall of the angels, as indicated in Avitus, Caedmon, and Milton, a legend of which the germs are found in the Babylonian account of the Creation, referred to in Chapter I. The other passages of Job where this expression occurs (i. 6, and ii. 2) are not conclusive as to the meaning “angels,” for the expressions “sons of God,” in those passages, who are said to have come before the Almighty, may very well have been merely men.
However the matter may stand, for the passages in Job, there is every probability that it is not the angels that are intended in the description we are examining as to the reasons of the coming of the Flood. As the late George Bertin was the first to point out, the Babylonians often used the phrase “a son of his god,” apparently to designate “a just man,” or something similar. The connection in which this expression occurs is as follows—
“May Damu, the great enchanter, make his thoughts happy,
May the lady who giveth life to the dead, the goddess Gula, heal him by the pressure of her pure hand,
And thou, O gracious Merodach, who lovest the revivification of the dead,
With thy pure incantation of life, free him from his sin, and
May the man, the son of his god, be pure, clean, and bright.”
In this passage the phrase in question is (in Akkadian) gišgallu dumu dingirana, and (in Assyrian) amēlu mâr îli-šu. It is a frequent expression in documents of this class, and always occurs in a similar connection. In some cases, instead of “the man, the son of his god,” the variation “the king, the [pg 087] son of his god” occurs, and is apparently to be paraphrased in the same way, and understood as “the pious king.”
May it not be, then, that “the sons of God,” who saw that the daughters of men were fair (lit. good), and took of them as many wives as they wanted, were those who were regarded as the pious men of the time? For who among the angels would at any time have thought of allying himself with an earthly and mortal spouse, and begetting children—offspring who should turn out to be “mighty men which were of old, men of renown,” as verse 4 has it? In this case, the “daughters of men” would be children of common people, not possessing any special piety or other virtue to recommend them, the only thing being that their daughters were fair, and good enough, in the opinion of those “sons of God,” to have as their wives.