According to Missler:
"In the mouths of two or three witnesses every word shall be established… In Biblical matters, it is essential to always compare Scripture with Scripture. The New Testament confirmations in Jude and 2 Peter are impossible to ignore. For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell [Tartarus], and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly (2 Peter 2:4-5)...Peter's comments even establishes the time of the fall of these angels to the days of the Flood of Noah.”
Peter’s comments do nothing of the sort! How does Missler get this from the text? There is no reason to see the flood of Noah as a response to the sins of fallen angels. These sins do not even have to be sexual. This is another example of how Missler “tortures the data” of the biblical text (to use one of his terms).
Missler refers to Luke 20:36 apparently to prove that angels have bodies. However, the Luke passage says that believers, who will have bodies because of the resurrection, will be like the angels in that they will never die or procreate. This does not require the leap that angels also have bodies capable of engaging in sexual intercourse. Though there are references to appearances of angels with bodies that can eat food (Genesis 18), there are no references to angels, fallen or otherwise, engaging in sexual activity with women, unless, of course, one insists on interpreting “sons of God” in Genesis 6:4 as angelic beings.
In 2 Corinthians 5:2 the word “dwelling” means body, something all human beings must have in order to be fully human, and refers to the resurrection. The word as it is used in Jude 6 refers to the place where the angels dwell, that is, heaven.1 Missler seems to forget that words take their meaning from the context in which they appear. There is no evidence that fallen angels had a body capable of engaging in sexual acts with women and the Jude passage certainly cannot be used to support such an assertion.
Ronald Hendel’s article When the Sons of God Cavorted with the Daughters of Men takes a similar approach to the identity of the “sons of God” in Genesis 6:4 as Missler, but from a more scholarly perspective. Hendel points to the discovery at Qumran of a Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 32:8 (4QDeutj) that refers to “sons of God.” The phrase found in this text would agree with the LXX and supplant the text “sons of Israel” used by the Masorites and found also in the Samaritan Pentatuech. It is clear that the text makes more sense if “sons of God” is the correct variant. The passage says that in times of old, God established the boundaries according to the number of the “sons of God” or heavenly beings. If we take the passage to read “according to the number of the sons of Israel, we have the problem brought out by the question: How does God establish boundaries according to the number of the sons of Israel if Israel did not exist at that time?
While I would agree that the Deuteronomy 32:8 reading “sons of God” was probably the original text, I do not agree that it helps shed light on Genesis 6:4. I have already pointed out that “sons of God” can refer to godly character traits whether displayed in angels or men, and therefore, the “sons of God” in Genesis 6:4 could refer to godly men. I have also pointed out that there is no other allusion or otherwise mention of angels mating with women in the Bible and, in fact, as I already said, the New Testament seems to discount the possibility (Luke 20:35, 36).
Hendel continues his explanation of Genesis 6:4 by looking for parallels in Ugaritic literature which identify the banu ili or banu ili-mi or “sons of God” as deities, and the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic with its parallels in language with Genesis. He does not give us a parallel of gods mating with humans, but uses similarity in language between the Babylonian story and Genesis (“the people multiplied,” the destruction of humanity in a flood) to draw his conclusions.
In asserting that Genesis must have been influenced by the Babylonian story, Hendel feels that the writer of Genesis apparently left vestiges of Babylonian mythology in the text. Just as the Babylonian flood was the result of a “cosmic imbalance” of overpopulation, the Genesis 6:4 text was originally a story of a cosmic imbalance brought on by sex between gods and women. According to Hendel the Genesis account tries to cover up, unsuccessfully, this original understanding and attributes the Flood in Genesis to sin—rebellion against God.
However, why do we have to assume that Genesis 6:4 is an import from Babylon or influenced by the Canaanites of Ugarit? When Abraham came into the land of Canaan, he undoubtedly knew of the original flood story and its corruption by the Babylonians. He took over the words for God (ۥēl, ۥělôhîm) and recast “sons of God” as godly beings, heavenly or human. Like modern missionaries, he was trying to find something in the Canaanite context that would help him communicate about his God, Yahweh (YHWH). For example, when Jesuit missionaries went to China in the Sixteenth Century they wrestled with what word in the Chinese language should be used for “God” and ended up adopting the term shang di or “above the emperor,” a term also used by Confucius to describe God.3 This does not mean that these missionaries were also importing Chinese mythological concepts of gods. Instead they were simply using language in a new way.
Following the assumption that all facts available to the unbiased researcher have been thoroughly researched, we conclude that although the phrase “sons of God” could linguistically be understood as angels or heavenly beings in Genesis 6:4, it does not have to be understood as such. We do not have to understand the language in Genesis 6 as mythological and, therefore, the story as myth. If an interpretation of a passage does damage to the overall theology and unity of Scripture as the Word of God, then this interpretation must be suspect. In the words of John Warwick Montgomery in regard to forming a proper hermeneutic, we should never allow an outside source to master Holy Scripture:
“Extra-biblical linguistic and cultural considerations must be employed ministerially, never magisterially, in the interpretation of a text; and any use of extra-biblical material to arrive at an interpretation inconsistent with the veracity of the scriptural passage is to be regarded as magisterial and therefore illegitimate. Extra-biblical data can and should put questions to a text, but only Scripture itself can in the last analysis legitimately answer questions about itself.”3
Those who hold to a high view of Scripture can make use of Ugarit and Babylon to help in understanding a biblical text, but never at the expense of an understanding of the unity and authority of Scripture.4
This is a modification of a chapter from my book “Qumran: New Light on the New Testament”