Who were the women that the sons of God took as wives in Genesis 6?

Answer 1

The difficulty here is in establishing which out of a number of possibilities was the original meaning of this story. The "sons of God" come to notice "the daughters of men" and take them as wives. Some learned commentators argue that the sons of God are superhuman beings, for example, demigods or angels or mythic heroes of the sort known in other traditions (and whom, some add, The Bible introduces here only to let them be drowned in the Flood).

A simpler assumption actually favoured by many traditional commentators is that the two lines that meet and merge are the descendants of Cain (Genesis 4) and the descendants of Seth (Genesis 5). There is inter-tribal rivalry that leads God to believe that the whole world is wicked.

Robert Sacks favours the view that the line of Cain that are the sons of God and the line of Seth that carries the daughters of men. He says it is only in the generations of Seth that we hear constantly of the birth of daughters, whereas daughters, reminders of birth and hence of man's dependence on woman were not mentioned in the line of Cain, the line that sought god-like self-sufficiency.

Leon R. Kass prefers to see the line of Seth as the "sons of God", while the line of Cain includes the "daughters of men". He says that the descendants of Seth are portrayed as in the likeness of God, whereas the description of the line of Cain makes not even the slightest reference to God. Either way, the result is mixed marriage, with an illicit mixing of the god-like and the human, leading to the corruption of one by the other.

Answer 2

A:The Bible seems to introduce the sons of God in Genesis chapter 6 only to explain the Flood. Some commentators assume that the sons of God are superhuman beings such as demigods or angels or mythic heroes of the sort known in other traditions.

Leon R. Kass (The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis) says a simpler and more reasonable assumption, favoured by many traditional commentators, is that the two lines that meet and merge are the line of Seth (Genesis 5 ) and the line of Cain (Genesis 4). One argument is based on the parallel names in the genealogies of Seth and Cain and on the fact that the line from Adam and Seth to Noah is introduced by the chapter heading "This is the book of the generations of Man ['adam]," while the line of Cain includes some mighty men - beney ha'elohim, which could be translated as "sons of God." An opposing argument is that the sons of Seth could be the "sons of God." Either way, the children are from the intermarriage of the line of Cain and the line of Seth in the Book of Genesis.