SittingNarrativeGenesis 6
The flood begins
Scene 1 of 4
The violence that began with one murder has filled the whole earth. God looks at what the world has become, grieves, and resolves to start again with one man who still walks with him.
One6:1–4narrative
The sons of God
The history
This is the strangest fragment in the primeval history, and the editors kept it almost raw. Divine beings, “sons of God”, take human women, and the children are the Nephilim, the “fallen ones”, giants, “the mighty men of old”. It is a shard of older myth, the kind of demigod-hero story told all across the ancient Near East, where Gilgamesh himself is two-thirds god. The hundred-and-twenty-year limit is God drawing a hard line between the divine and the human after that line had been crossed.
Westermann · Smith
1Now when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, 2the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took as wives whomever they chose. 3So the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days shall be 120 years.” 4The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and afterward as well—when the sons of God had relations with the daughters of men. And they bore them children who became the mighty men of old, men of renown.
Meaning
The scene is about a boundary blurring, heaven and earth bleeding into each other, and God answering by setting a limit. Right before the flood the text shows a world where the categories are coming undone. There is not much to moralize here. Mostly it sets a tone: things have gotten strange, and out of bounds.
Theological+
The text guards the difference between the maker and the made. The trouble in these verses is not desire, it is the erasing of a line that was meant to hold. Much of what follows is God re-establishing the boundary between creator and creature.
The turnnames you
You live inside limits you did not choose, mortality first among them, and the standing temptation is to treat them as insults rather than the shape of being a creature.
Which of your limits have you been fighting as though they were enemies?