Sons of God: How the Bible Came to Us
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
A Verse on Jerome’s Desk
The Bible did not fall from heaven as a single bound book. It came to us through many hands over more than a thousand years: speakers and scribes, copyists and translators, councils and congregations. One short verse shows how that process worked better than any summary can.
Near the end of the fourth century, the scholar Jerome sat in Bethlehem translating the Old Testament into Latin. When he reached Genesis 6:2, his sources disagreed. The Hebrew text read b’nei ha’elohim, “the sons of God,” who saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and took them as wives. Some copies of the Greek translation he also had in front of him read “the angels of God” instead.
Jerome had to choose. What he chose, and what readers did with his choice, tells the larger story of how the Bible was made and handed down. This essay examines that story.
From Voice to Scroll
The first stage was the people of Israel receiving and keeping God’s words. Much of what became Scripture was first spoken: laws given at Sinai, prophetic oracles, songs sung at worship, and the family histories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Over generations, people wrote these down in Hebrew, with a few later portions in Aramaic.
Writing did not end the work; it began a new kind of work. Scrolls wore out. A scribe had to make each new copy by hand, letter by letter. Scribes were careful, and Jewish scribes became famously careful, but a hand-copied text always carried some risk of a skipped word, a repeated line, or a smoothed-out spelling.
By the time of Jesus, Jews recognized the Scriptures in three broad parts: the Law (Torah), the Prophets, and the Writings. Jesus himself spoke of “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). Genesis stood at the head of the Law, and Genesis 6 was read as part of it in Hebrew.
The Greek Bible
The second stage was translation, and it began before the time of Christ. After Alexander the Great, Greek became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean. Many Jews, especially in Alexandria in Egypt, no longer read Hebrew well. Beginning in the third century BC, Greeks translated the Torah, and the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures followed over the next two centuries.
This Greek Old Testament is called the Septuagint, from the Latin word for seventy. The name comes from a legend that seventy-two Jewish elders translated it for an Egyptian king. Whatever the legend’s details, the Septuagint became the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews and then of the early church. When the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they often quote it in this Greek form.
A translator must decide what a phrase means before rendering it. At Genesis 6:2, some copies of the Septuagint read hoi angeloi tou theou, “the angels of God,” where the Hebrew has “sons of God.” The Greek translators did something similar in Job 1:6, where the “sons of God” who present themselves before the Lord also appear as angels. In those places, the translation was already an interpretation. Greek readers encountered the angel reading in their Bible itself, not only in commentary.
Many Copies, One Message
The third stage was copying, and it ran alongside everything else. No original manuscript of any biblical book survives. What we have are copies of copies, and the copies do not agree in every letter. The study of these differences, and the effort to recover the earliest wording, is called textual criticism.
For centuries the oldest complete Hebrew Bibles were medieval. They preserve the Masoretic Text, named for the Masoretes, Jewish scholars who between about the seventh and tenth centuries AD added vowel signs and marginal notes to protect the traditional text. The Leningrad Codex, copied in AD 1008, remains the oldest complete Hebrew Bible and underpins most modern translations.
Then, beginning in 1947, archaeologists found the Dead Sea Scrolls in caves near Qumran. They include biblical manuscripts copied between roughly 250 BC and AD 68, a thousand years older than the medieval codices. Most of them confirm the Masoretic Text closely. Some show that more than one form of the Hebrew text circulated before Christ, and that the Septuagint was sometimes translated from a Hebrew text different from the one the Masoretes later preserved.
The same phrase from Genesis 6 shows this in another book. In Deuteronomy 32:8, God divides the nations “according to the number of the sons of Israel” in the Masoretic Text. A Hebrew scroll from Qumran reads “the sons of God” there, and the Septuagint reads “angels of God.” So the question at Genesis 6 was not an isolated quirk. Copyists and translators repeatedly had to decide what “sons of God” meant, and their decisions entered the text itself.
These differences should be kept in proportion. Most variants are spelling, word order, or obvious slips. None of them overturns a teaching of the faith. But they show that the Bible we read came to us through a real history, and that faithful people had to make careful judgments to preserve it.
Jerome’s Latin Bible
By the fourth century the western church spoke Latin, and it already had Latin Bibles. Scholars call them the Old Latin versions. They translated the Old Testament from the Greek Septuagint, not from Hebrew, and the copies varied widely.
In 382, Pope Damasus asked Jerome to revise the Latin Gospels. Jerome went further. Settled in Bethlehem, he learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers and, between about 390 and 405, translated most of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew. He called this returning to the “Hebrew truth” (hebraica veritas). He still consulted the Septuagint and later Greek versions by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, but he based his work on the Hebrew. Not everyone welcomed this. Augustine worried that departing from the Greek text the church had long used would unsettle believers.
At Genesis 6:2 Jerome followed the Hebrew. His Latin reads videntes filii Dei filias hominum, “the sons of God, seeing the daughters of men.” He had the Latin word angeli available and some Greek copies to justify it, but he did not use it. In his Hebrew Questions on Genesis, written around 390, he discussed the verse and noted that the Greek translator Symmachus had rendered it “sons of the powerful,” a reading also found in Jewish Aramaic paraphrases. Jerome knew the phrase could be taken in more than one way, so he chose a translation that left it open.
Jerome’s version was used alongside the Old Latin for centuries before it prevailed. Over time, it became the common Latin Bible and gained the name Vulgate, meaning the common or popular version. In 1546 the Council of Trent declared it the authoritative Latin text for the Roman Catholic Church.
The Text Leaves It Open; the Tradition Answers
A faithful translation did not settle the question, because readers never met the text alone. They met it within a reading tradition, and that tradition had worked on Genesis 6 for centuries.
The most influential voice was the Book of Enoch, a Jewish writing from before Christ. Its section called the Book of the Watchers expands Genesis 6 into a full story: two hundred angels descend, take human wives, father giants, and teach mankind forbidden arts. Aramaic fragments of Enoch were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Jewish writers Philo and Josephus also understood the sons of God as angels in the first century.
The New Testament shows that this reading was familiar to the apostles’ audience. Jude quotes Enoch directly (Jude 14–15) and speaks of angels who left their proper home and are kept in chains for judgment (Jude 6). Second Peter 2:4 speaks of angels who sinned and were cast into Tartarus, and 1 Peter 3:19–20 links imprisoned spirits to the days of Noah. These passages do not quote Genesis 6, but readers have long connected them to it.
Many early Christian writers took the angel view, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Lactantius and Ambrose. Through the Greek Bible and Enoch, Latin readers inherited that view as well. But a second reading was already rising. In the early third century, Julius Africanus proposed that the sons of God were the godly descendants of Seth, and the daughters of men the descendants of Cain. Augustine, Jerome’s own contemporary, argued for this Sethite reading at length in The City of God (Book 15, chapter 23). He noted that copies of the Septuagint differed, some reading “angels” and some “sons,” and he judged that the passage described men.
Augustine’s authority in the West was immense. After him, the Sethite reading became the standard in medieval Latin commentary, while Jewish interpreters shifted toward “sons of nobles” or “sons of judges.” So some readers read the same Latin words, filii Dei, as angels, while others read them as men, depending on which teachers they followed. Jerome’s wording left the door open. The tradition around the text decided which way most readers walked through it.
Gathering the Books
Alongside copying and translating ran a fourth process: recognizing which books belonged in the Bible at all. This list of recognized books is called the canon, from a Greek word for a measuring rod.
The Book of Enoch shows that this question was live. Jude quoted it, and many early Christians valued it, yet the church as a whole did not receive it as Scripture. Only the Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes it in its Bible today. A book could shape how believers read Genesis 6 without becoming part of the canon itself.
The Septuagint carried several books not found in the Hebrew Bible, such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and 1–2 Maccabees. Jerome, following the Hebrew canon, said these could be read for edification but not used to establish doctrine. The councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) included them, and the Council of Trent later confirmed them for the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformers followed Jerome’s judgment and the Hebrew canon, printing these books separately as the Apocrypha or leaving them out.
The New Testament books were written in Greek between about AD 50 and 100. Letters and gospels circulated among the churches and were read in worship. Around 180, Irenaeus defended the four Gospels as a fixed set. The churches weighed whether a writing came from an apostle or his close circle, agreed with the handed-down faith, and was widely received. In 367, Athanasius of Alexandria listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament exactly. Councils later confirmed what the churches had largely come to recognize.
The Translator’s Choice Today
Modern translators stand where Jerome stood. They work mainly from the Masoretic Hebrew, check it against the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, and then face the same decision at Genesis 6:2.
They can keep the literal “sons of God” and let the reader work out its meaning. Most major English versions do this. They can follow the Greek and render it as “angels.” Or they can choose a phrase that leans toward one view while softening it, such as “divine beings” or “heavenly beings.”
| Version | Rendering of Genesis 6:2 |
|---|---|
| Hebrew (Masoretic Text) | b’nei ha’elohim, “sons of God” |
| Septuagint (some copies) | “angels of God” |
| Symmachus (Greek, 2nd century) | “sons of the powerful” |
| Jerome’s Vulgate | filii Dei, “sons of God” |
| King James Version (1611) | “the sons of God” |
| Jewish Publication Society (1962) | “the divine beings” |
| Good News Translation | “some of the heavenly beings” |
None of these choices is neutral. A reader who meets “heavenly beings” has been guided toward the supernatural view before he reads a word of commentary. A reader who meets “sons of God” has been handed the question. Footnotes help, and many modern Bibles use them here to list the alternatives.
What This Means for the Reader
The Bible came to us through four processes working together: God’s word received and written, copied by hand across centuries, translated into the languages of new peoples, and recognized by the church as Scripture. Genesis 6:2 touches all four. One Hebrew phrase was copied, translated into two Greek versions, rendered faithfully in Latin, and read differently by the communities that received it.
Some people find this history unsettling, as if human involvement must weaken the Bible’s authority. It need not. God has always worked through people, and the history shows remarkable care: scribes counting letters, translators learning hard languages, and churches testing books over generations. The variants are real, but small, and the message of creation, fall, covenant, and redemption remains unchanged across all the manuscripts.
The history also gives the reader a duty. Every Bible in his hands carries choices made by translators, and every reading habit he has was learned from someone. A careful reader asks three questions. What does the original text actually say? What choices has my translation made? And what tradition taught me to read it the way I do?
At Genesis 6, the honest answer is that the Hebrew says “sons of God,” that faithful believers have understood the phrase as angels, as the line of Seth, or as powerful rulers, and that the text itself does not compel one answer. Jerome left that question where he found it. A reader today can do the same: hold his own view with reasons, stay open to a better argument, and let the text say no more and no less than it says.