Scripture
1 When men began to multiply on the surface of the ground, and daughters were born to them, 2 God’s sons saw that men’s daughters were beautiful, and they took any that they wanted for themselves as wives.
Audio Commentary
Abstract
Genesis 6:1-2 opens the account of the wickedness that brings the Flood. The commentary asks a plain question: what made humanity so corrupt? The first answer is a blessing turned against itself. Fallen people obeyed the command to be fruitful and multiply, and corruption multiplied with them. That is sin’s power — it turns a gift into a curse. Scripture records the decline in careful detail. It does so to glorify the justice of God. It also recovers something the modern West has lost: a sense of God’s holy government, and of what a just society requires. The decisive failure here is spiritual intermarriage. The sons of God, Seth’s godly line, took wives from the daughters of man, the apostate line of Cain. This was never about race. It was godliness mixing with godlessness — wives chosen for their beauty, with no regard for their character.
Brief Observations
- Sin leads to judgment — Scripture details the pre-Flood decline to show how sin ends in judgment. It also warns the wicked to expect the same.
- A lost moral category — The modern West argues only over whether a person is evil. It has lost the older question of God’s holy government and a just society.
- The Flood as justice — The Flood was a just act, not a whim. A holy God will not stand by while humanity corrupts everything.
- A blessing turned curse — As fallen humanity multiplied, its corruption multiplied too. Sin can turn even God’s blessing into a curse.
- Sin spreads — Sin answers mercy by growing worse. It spreads like a disease, and crowds only embolden it.
- Sons of God, daughters of man — The sons of God were Seth’s godly line; the daughters of man, Cain’s apostate line. The sin was godliness mixing with godlessness, not race.
- How the marriages failed — They chose wives by beauty rather than character. They took as many as they wanted, and scoffed at the warning against being unequally yoked.
- Marriage is a covenant — Marriage is a sacramental covenant meant to sanctify us. To marry the godless, or to treat it lightly, is sin.
- Christians should marry Christians — An unbeliever’s power to corrupt a believer far outweighs the reverse. A child of God should not marry those God does not endorse.
Full Commentary
Part of the reason why scripture is meticulous in its account of human degeneracy in the years leading up to the flood is to show us how sin leads to judgment. Connecting the plot from man’s sin to God’s wrath glorifies the justice of God. It also broadcasts a warning to the wicked, that if they don’t repent they can expect a similar outcome.
Revealing the path from sin to judgment simultaneously reveals what a just society should look like. The idea of God’s holy government or that of a just society has largely been lost from our moral conversation in the West. We’ve shallowed the discourse into whether a specific individual is evil or not. We’ve lost the Socratic contemplation of whether a certain action contributes to a just and polite society.
You might say Greek philosophy has no place in biblical Christianity — but I would argue scripture is making the same move a thinker like Socrates would. It’s saying the flood was a necessary act of justice for maintaining the honor of God’s government. A holy and just God will not standby while humanity corrupts the entire enterprise.
So what exactly led to the burgeoning corruption God punished with the flood? Well the first contributor was simple multiplication of people. Humanity reproduced in accordance with God’s blessing to be fruitful and multiply. Man had been corrupted by sin in the Fall, and so the multiplication of man meant the multiplication of corruption. That’s the pernicious nature of sin and its ability to turn God’s blessing into a curse. God’s blessing to be fruitful and multiply became a fundamental driving force in the destruction of humanity as such.
In addition to sin’s proclivity to transform God’s blessing into a curse, we also see sin’s response to the mercy of God. Its response is to become all the more sinful. Sin has a multiplicative effect in this way. Scripture says when the wicked increase, sin increases. If you add more sinners, you’ll get more sin. Not only this, but the multitude of sinners will embolden each other to increase the depravity of their sin. Sin spreads like an infectious disease, and so more populous areas are particularly vulnerable to it.
Human beings looking to each other for validation is a universal trait — and so this spread of sin happens both inside the church and outside the church. We even saw the roots of it in the early church when the disciples, having multiplied, began murmuring against their leadership.
You might label this correlation between metastatic sin and urbanization the way Douglas Murray did when he called it the Madness of Crowds. The premise of his claims was that institutions and public debate can become driven by group-based grievance, ideological conformity, and fear of dissent rather than by evidence, open discussion, or individual judgment. This is not to say cities are inherently sinful, but it is to say human beings are inherently sinful and cities contain much larger amounts of human beings. Governance is important at every level, but especially so in densely populated major cities.
When we read about the sons of God taking the daughters of man in marriage, there are diverse interpretations for what this passage might mean. I hold to the view that the sons of God were pious, religious men from Seth’s lineage. The daughters of man were profane strangers to God and godliness. They were very likely part of Cain’s excommunicated race. The men in Seth’s line should have kept the preservation of their own purity and repelled the attraction of the apostate women in Cain’s house. Instead they intermingled with them and took wives of all they chose.
I want to be careful here: at no point does scripture admonish us toward any kind of racial purity. That’s not the kind of purity in question. It happens to be that apostasy was relatively compartmentalized by familial heritage at this point in history — so that’s why readers have referred to apostates as being from the race of Cain. The problem was never ethnicity or cultural differences, the problem was godliness mixing with godlessness.
So where did these marriages go wrong? First is that they chose women based on their outward beauty with little or no regard for their character. This is the lust of the eyes. Second is that they took as many wives as they wanted with no consideration of seeking counsel. This is the lust of the flesh. Third is that they scoffed at warnings about being unequally yoked with unbelievers. This is the pride of life. Later in the Torah we’ll read about God’s people Israel being warned against this same temptation. They were prohibited from making marriages with the tribal people of Canaan because God knew these people would corrupt them.
Marriage is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make in life. Just as it is a sin to marry a godless person, so it is a sin to take the institution of marriage lightly. Marriage is a sacramental covenant designed by God to sanctify us and draw us close in relationship with Him. If we abuse marriage or attempt to strip it of its significance, we lose that sacramental covenant.
King Solomon was the wisest man to ever live and even he allowed his wives to pull his heart into idolatry. If inappropriate marriages can make an apostate out of the wisest king in human history, we should take it very seriously as a fundamental function of our Christian faith.
After the Babylonian Exile and Jewish diaspora, Jews lived among many non-Jewish people and intermarried with them. Ezra, who was their priest and religious leader, was concerned foreign influence would cause the Jews to adopt the religious practices of surrounding nations. Ezra required the men who had married foreign women to separate from those wives and children. Nehemiah echoed this concern when he warned that such marriages could cause people to abandon the language, law, and worship of Israel.
The moral principle is overwhelmingly clear: Christians should marry Christians. The power of an unbeliever to corrupt a believer is far more attested to in scripture than the reverse. The only endorsement Paul gives for a marriage between believers and unbelievers is if they are already married, they should remain married rather than seek divorce. Paul discourages divorce in this instance because the unbelieving spouse is sanctified through the marriage relationship. If you profess yourself to be a child of God, you should not make marriages to people whom God does not endorse.