Sons of God (Biblical Hebrew: בְנֵי־הָאֱלֹהִים, romanized: Bənē hāʾĔlōhīm[1] literally: "the sons of Elohim"[2]) is a phrase used in the Tanakh or Old Testament and in Christian Apocrypha. The phrase is also used in Kabbalah where bene elohim are part of different Jewish angelic hierarchies.
In the early writings of the Hebrew Bible, both bene elohim (Hebrew: בְנֵי־הָאֱלֹהִים, romanized: Bənē hāʾĔlōhīm, lit. 'Sons of Gods') as well as the malak (Hebrew: מַלְאָךְ, romanized: mal’āḵ, lit. 'messenger') are aspects of God.[3] In the earliest records, the Bənē hāʾĔlōhīm are in heaven. They are depicted as the heavenly court or the pantheon of religious belief-system of their time.
The phrase is a possible survival of Hebrew Polytheism, in which the Elohists refer to the Divine in a plural (ʾĔlōhīm).[4] In the Pentateuch, the Bənē hāʾĔlōhīm form the Divine council, comparable to the "sons of God" in Canaanite religion.[5] In the latter, the "sons" are gods or manifestations of the Divine.[6]
As such, the Bənē hāʾĔlōhīm reflected the transcendent aspect of the Divine, but became progressively differentiated from the good aspect of God when the Hebrew religion shifted towards monotheism. In contrast to the mal’āḵ, the Bənē hāʾĔlōhīm do not express a mediator between God and humanity.[7] The fusion of the Bənē hāʾĔlōhīm with the mal’āḵ is evident in the Book of Job. Here, Satan is both one of the Bənē hāʾĔlōhīm in the heavenly court, as well as a mal’āḵ expressing God's interaction with humanity.
That the "sons of God" were separate enough from the "daughters of men" that they warranted such a distinction, has spawned millennia's worth of debate regarding the meaning of the term. Historically, in Jewish thought, this passage has had many interpretations. Here are three:
- Offspring of Seth: The first references to the offspring of Seth rebelling from God and mingling with the daughters of Cain are found in Christian and rabbinic literature from the second century CE onwards e.g. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Origen, Augustine of Hippo, Julius Africanus, and the Letters attributed to St. Clement. It is also the view expressed in the modern canonical Amharic Ethiopian Orthodox Bible. In Judaism "Sons of God" usually refers to the righteous, i.e. the children of Seth.
- Angels: All of the earliest sources interpret the "sons of God" as angels. From the third century BCE onwards, references are found in the Enochic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Genesis Apocryphon, the Damascus Document, 4Q180), Jubilees, the Testament of Reuben, 2 Baruch, Josephus, and the book of Jude (compare with 2 Peter 2). This is also the meaning of the only two identical occurrences of bene ha elohim in the Hebrew Bible (Job 1:6 and 2:1), and of the most closely related expressions (refer to the list above). In the Septuagint, the interpretive reading "angels" is found in Codex Alexandrinus, one of four main witnesses to the Greek text.
- Deified kings/Tyrant judges: There is also a large consensus within the scholarly community, that the "sons of God" were simply the deified kings of the various Canaanite city-states. These would be the same Canaanite city-states that the later proto-Israelites would eventually flee, before resettling in the Judean highlands.