Sethite View

The first theory says the sons of God were Seth's sons. The daughters of men were the daughters of Cain. In this view, godly men from Seth's line married ungodly women from Cain's line. The sin was marrying outside the faith. This is how the theory has been stated. The sons of God or (bene ha’Elohim) are thought by some to be only the sons of Seth, and the daughters of men just the descendants of Cain. In this view, the crime was the marriage of the holy line of Seth to the unholy line of Cain. This view sounds tidy. Two family lines, one holy and one corrupt, mix together and bring down judgment. But the theory is young. It did not exist when Genesis was first written, and it did not exist for thousands of years afterward. The “son of Seth” interpretation appeared about 400 AD. This was the first dispute of the angel view, which a majority of Jews and Christians held prior to that time. Four hundred years after Christ. That is when this theory first shows up. Before that point, the angelic view stood unchallenged among both Jewish and Christian readers. The Sethite view was not a recovery of some forgotten original meaning. It was a late invention, built centuries after the fact to avoid a conclusion that made people uncomfortable. The theory has other problems beyond its late arrival. Nowhere does the Hebrew Bible call Seth's line “holy.” Nowhere does it call Cain's line uniquely corrupt in a way that sets it apart from the rest of humanity. The text simply does not support the moral split this theory requires. There is also a historical problem. If the sin was simply marrying across two human family lines, the punishment does not fit the crime. Intermarriage between groups of people, even sinful ones, has never produced giants. Nowhere in history has interbreeding between two human populations changed the size or nature of the offspring in the way Genesis describes the Nephilim. And nowhere did the Lord destroy an entire civilization with a Flood simply because two family lines intermarried. The Sethite view asks Genesis 6 to describe an ordinary sin with an extraordinary punishment. The text does not support that imbalance. The theory survives only by ignoring how the rest of Scripture already uses the exact phrase bene ha'Elohim.