So are the Jews. None of whom interpret it as xenophilia.
The sons of God are always used to refer to God’s chosen people such as the Israelites
Deuternomy 14:1 “You are the sons of the Lord your God; you shall not cut yourselves nor shave your forehead for the sake of the dead. 2 For you are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.
Psalm 82:6 I said, “You are gods, And all of you are sons of the Most High.
Could this be talking to angels? Not according to Jesus in John 10:34.
The New Testament makes it clear that angels are servants and it is human beings saved in Christ who are to be the sons of God: Matthew 5:9, Luke 20:36, Romans 8:14-19, Galatians 3:26
What about Job? The sons of God are spoken of but it never says that these are angels it is talking about.
No the obvious meaning of “sons of God” in Genesis 6, consistent with the rest of the Bible, is the descendants of Adam and Eve, saying they took their wives not from sisters never mentioned but from the daughters of all those other people who filled the earth, so much that Cain was afraid they would kill him if they wandered about.
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Can you put a number on that they might not? In our galaxy, let alone our infinitesimal universe with only 10^21 stars (downgraded from 10^22 by the University of Michigan’s computer model…)
Job, as wisdom literature, could simply be the exception rather than the precedent. 
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Thank you dear lady… my point exactly.
Mythology, like all human stories, has a base point in reality, as we are incapable of imagining anything beyond what we can know: Re the need for Special Revelation from Elohim God for the spirit Realm. General Revelation is left up to us to discover which our friend @mitchellmckain is so excellent in detailing. (John 3:1-14) Yet that very focus is that which has “hidden” the spiritual warfare and deeper meaning behind so much of modern interpretations of Christianity.
Why I think Demons are a more likely explanation than Aliens:
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All human mythology is based on some event or perception of fact from the past. We cannot invent something beyond our existence. Re Special Revelation from Elohim God. We have no insight into the spiritual world other than what the Bible gives us. That does not mean it is an exhaustive account. General Revelation is left up to us to discover on our own.
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Aliens are a new concept in human history. Angels, fallen or otherwise, are well documented. Aliens are a speculative extension of the “scientific” rational world-view. If we are the product of the (godless) evolutionary process, then there are certainly other beings of similar nature “out there.”
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Humans with superhuman power is not just a figment of past religious stories. Hence Marvel movies of superhero’s (genre invented by a group of disenchanted secular Jews yearning for a Messiah figure – go look up Marvel Comics history! (including the “golem” stories of the 1600’s). The modern alien is very much in the same vein of invention. It carries more believability for some portion of our population hoping for the “revelations” they will bring.
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What do “demons” look like? What does Satan look like? We know he is an “angel of Light” who has fallen. But what is his appearance? A roaring lion? YHWH spoke through a donkey. Cannot demons play maskirovka and appear as benevolent aliens “To Serve Man”? (a most memorable Twilight Zone episode).
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We live in a complete Spiritual/Physically enmeshed universe. It is more than likely demons use the current alien mania to exhibit their activities, just as they always have done in the past. They are just as capable of performing misleading signs and wonders to match the current world-view of the people they are enticing.
The current plethora of sightings of strange lights in the sky are increasing. Enough photos and video has been shot to verify that something is occurring that is not within the ken of our technology.
Groundside evidence, doubted by so many of the scientific minds doing the verification process, has an impressive volume that certainly cannot explain how so many people could manufacture so many crop-circle patterns and not get caught doing it! And the technology required to accomplish it in limited timeframe is equally impressive. Certainly far beyond any group of alien enthusiast out for a night of cow slaughter and corn-field fun!
There is more, but that is the general outline.
It’s either a three thousand year old figure of speech for guys and dolls or interstellar alien astronaut human males who must be our ancestors (fertility wouldn’t work with parallel evolution) or actual fertile incubi. What’s the most rational here I wonder? And what does any of it have to do with Christianity?
For this the Drake equation is useful:
10^21 stars*
~0.5 with planets*
~0.2 Earth-like and habitable zone*
unknown proportion with large planets in the outer system (to reduce impacts)*
unknown proportion without hot jupiters messing up orbits*
unknown proportion with a large enough moon to provide long term stability*
unknown number with a decently strong, long-lasting magnetic field*
unknown proportion that develop life (sample size is 1, and it’s not exactly random)*
unknown proportion with life that develop intelligent life (sample size is 1, and it’s not exactly random)
So the honest answer at present is “we don’t have enough data to make any reliable conclusions”.
Of course we do. Even if the Earth is the only planet in the universe out of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 potential habitats where life has evolved to shared intentionality, universes are from forever. Therefore there are infinite conscious species and already have been. At one per universe. Let alone one per galaxy. Let alone one every 10kly. Let alone…
explanation of what?
I don’t think Job is historical. I think it concocts a setting for the theological discussion which dominates the book. So I agree this setting is not the most reliable source for information about angels and the sons of God. But the point is that it doesn’t even say the sons of God mentioned in Job are referring to angels and so there is not much justification for thinking that it is intended to mean angels.
What about the book of Enoch, “Paradiso,” “Doctor Faustus,” “Fallen,” and “Silence”? Although there is far more fiction about angels in modern times, angels have long had a role in our fiction for entertainment. These of course make up all kinds of things about angels, and half breed Nephilim. I enjoy such stories and films a lot too, just as I enjoy Star Trek and Star Wars.
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Not true. No Israelites/chosen people are around in Genesis 6. Later eras identified the “sons of God” as renegade angels.
Glad you asked. “Sons of God” can’t be referring to people since the passage is talking about the creation of the earth, when God laid the earth’s foundation.
Yes true… and backed up by actual passages (I provided 6 of them) from the Bible, compared to 1 passage in Job which does not say that these are angels. The sons of God are ALWAYS used to refer to God’s chosen people in both the OT and NT. You have yet to show us one passage which actually supports your claim that “sons of God” EVER refers to angels completely contradicting where the Bible says that the angels are nothing of the kind.
Yes this is your personal conclusion which you are coming to from fitting these passages of Job into your own philosophical/theological framework. But nobody has to accept the premises which you have, let alone believe that this portion of Job is anything more than a fictional pretext for the theological discussion which follows and thus something where such deduction might even be valid.
God’s Chosen People are the Jews and they simply aren’t around in Genesis 6! There are no Jews until God calls Abraham the Chaldean.
Job 38:4-7
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
The NIV translates Sons of God as angels. It’s a reasonable translation. God is talking to uppity Job here–pointing out that Job wasn’t around when God created the earth. Are you saying that people were actually around at this time? Maybe God didn’t notice them?
That is another claim not actually in the Bible. I see the Bible speaking of God chosen people (Isaiha 43:20) but not giving the Israelites an exclusive title as such. We call them that because of the promise in Genesis 12. But in the whole Bible, we see that God’s chosen people is something which changes or he chooses different people for different things. Adam and Eve were chosen. Noah was chosen. It was the choosing of Abraham which is the beginning of the Jewish people. But later we see God choosing Gentiles in Christianity.
Yes the NIV often inserts it own interpretation into the text.
Various writers in the Bible speak of people existing from the beginning. I don’t believe that is actually the case, but the writer of Job may have been speaking in that same way. The point is that nothing in the book of Job says that “sons of God” means angels, unlike all the passages which I gave you where it does tell you what the “sons of God” refers to and this is not angels.
In fact in Ephesians 1:4 I can demonstrate both points: “even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.” Here Christians are chosen and according to the author we are chosen before the beginning of the world.
So as it couldn’t just be a three, four thousand year old figure of speech, it has to be incubi or our ET ancestors? How did they get here? As interstellar travel is absolutely impossible it must be fertile male demons. Not poetry. And this has what to do with the Kingdom of God?
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I’m not insisting that there is no life elsewhere, but I’m not going to be at all surprised if additional info and research points to it being less likely than some religiously demand.
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What do you do with Deuteronomy 7:6?
And 7:7?
Paul more than faintly echoes it in the NT, as well.
I didn’t say they were not chosen. I said they were chosen.
I am just putting it in the context of all the others it says God has chosen.
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