Augustine of Hippo

Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430) was bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa and the most influential theologian of the Latin church. He wrote The City of God between about 413 and 426, after the sack of Rome in 410. His discussion of Genesis 6 is in Book 15, chapters 22 and 23.

Platonism shaped Augustine’s thinking before and after his conversion. He read “the books of the Platonists” in Milan (Confessions 7.9). He held that angels are spirits by nature. In City of God 15.23 he reports stories of spirits who seek women, and he says he will not decide rashly whether angels could take bodies and lust. He then settles the question another way. He reads “sons of God” as the godly descendants of Seth and “daughters of men” as women of Cain’s line. He supports this by noting that Scripture sometimes calls human messengers “angels,” as it does of John the Baptist (Malachi 3:1).

Augustine had to account for the giants. He argued that giants were born before these unions as well, and that great size comes from natural causes. He pointed to a huge human molar he and others had seen on the shore at Utica (City of God 15.9). On his reading, the Nephilim were large men of the earthly line, and the unions caused wickedness and not size.

Augustine also dealt with Enoch. He said the book was not in the canon, that the Jewish canon had excluded it because of its great age and doubts about its authenticity, and that Jude’s quotation of it did not make it canonical (City of God 15.23; 18.38). Enoch fell out of use in the Western church after Augustine.

The Sethite view did not begin with Augustine. Julius Africanus taught it in the early third century, and later writers such as John Chrysostom followed him. But the angelic reading was the dominant reading in the earlier period. Jewish writers in Enoch, Jubilees, Philo, and Josephus held it, and so did Christian writers such as Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tertullian, and Lactantius. Augustine’s authority carried the Sethite view through the medieval West. Luther and Calvin held it, and Calvin called the angelic reading a fable.

No new manuscript or discovery prompted the change. One theologian brought a philosophical framework to the text, and his influence carried it forward.

The Sethite view faces two long-standing objections. Genesis 6:4 ties the Nephilim to the moment “the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men,” and a godly line marrying Cainite women gives no reason for giants. The phrase bene ha’Elohim also refers to heavenly beings everywhere else it appears with the article (Job 1:6; 2:1). Augustine’s answers, that giants were already on the earth and that Scripture can call men angels, do not address either point directly.

## My View

I believe the sons of God in Genesis 6 were angels. I believe Augustine’s rejection of that reading was a mistake that came from his philosophy, and that no new evidence supported it.