What Second Temple Judaism Actually Believed About Genesis 6
Genesis 6:1–4 is one of the shortest passages in the Torah, yet it is one of the most debated. Modern Christians often approach it cautiously, sometimes even nervously, but in the centuries before Christ, Jewish interpreters were far less hesitant. If we want to understand how the New Testament world heard references to “the days of Noah,” we must understand how Genesis 6 was interpreted between roughly 300 BC and AD 100. The evidence is not speculative. It is textual, historical, and substantial. I will argue that understanding Second Temple views of Genesis 6 makes Jesus’ references to the days of Noah more theologically and historically meaningful than a simple ‘normal life’ interpretation.
In Genesis 6 we read that “the sons of God” saw that the daughters of man were beautiful, took wives, and the Nephilim were on the earth in those days. The Hebrew phrase בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים (bene ha’elohim) appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible and refers to heavenly beings rather than human rulers. In Job 1:6 and 2:1, the same phrase clearly describes members of the divine council presenting themselves before the LORD. While later rabbinic Judaism would move toward interpreting Genesis 6 as referring to human rulers, the Second Temple period preserved a different and very prominent reading.
By the Second Temple era, many Jewish interpreters understood Genesis 6 to describe angelic beings who transgressed heavenly boundaries, took human women, and produced giants. This interpretation is preserved most fully in 1 Enoch, particularly in what scholars call the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 6–16). There, heavenly beings descend, take wives, and produce violent giants who corrupt the earth. The sin described is not merely sexual immorality but cosmic boundary violation. Created order collapses as heaven intrudes unlawfully into earth.
The Book of Jubilees, another Second Temple work, retells the same event and explicitly identifies the “angels of God” as the ones who took wives and produced giants. It connects their actions directly to the spread of lawlessness prior to the Flood. This is not an obscure marginal tradition. Fragments of these very texts were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, including portions of Enoch and a separate text known as the Book of Giants. That discovery alone demonstrates that the Watchers interpretation was circulating within Jewish communities in the centuries immediately preceding Christ.
Scholars such as Loren Stuckenbruck and Annette Yoshiko Reed have shown that the angelic interpretation of Genesis 6 was a major strand of Jewish thought in this period. It was not the only interpretation, but it was certainly influential and widely known. If you lived in Judea in the first century, you would have recognized Genesis 6 not merely as a puzzling footnote, but as the opening act of a supernatural rebellion narrative that shaped how pre-Flood corruption was understood.
This historical reality matters profoundly when we turn to Jesus.
In Matthew 24:37–39 and Luke 17:26–27, Jesus declares, “As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage…” Most readers immediately hear normalcy and routine. Life going on as usual. People oblivious to judgment. That reading is certainly valid, and Jesus is clearly emphasizing human blindness in the face of impending catastrophe.
However, when Jesus speaks of “the days of Noah,” He does so within a Second Temple interpretive world where Genesis 6 was already understood as a time of extraordinary corruption linked to heavenly rebellion. In that world, Noah’s era was not spiritually neutral. It was remembered as a period when boundaries were violated, flesh was corrupted, and violence intensified across the earth.
The language Jesus uses about marrying and giving in marriage corresponds to the Genesis 6 narrative of taking wives. While He does not explicitly quote Enoch, He speaks into a context saturated with that tradition. At minimum, His audience would not have heard “days of Noah” as a bland reference to routine living. The phrase carried interpretive weight. It evoked a world descending into corruption beneath the surface of ordinary activity.
| 1 Enoch 6-7 | Jubilees 5:1-2, 6 |
| “And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: “Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children. . . And they took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them . . . And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.” | “And it came to pass when the children of men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born unto them, that the angels of God saw them on a certain year of this jubilee, that they were beautiful to look upon; and they took themselves wives of all whom they chose, and they bare unto them sons and they were giants. And lawlessness increased on the earth and all flesh corrupted its way . . . And against His angels whom He had sent upon the earth, He was exceedingly wroth, and He gave commandment to root them out of all their dominion . . .” |
I am not arguing that Jesus canonized Enoch. I am arguing that He spoke into a historical interpretive environment where the Watchers reading was deeply embedded. When He warns that the end will echo those days, we should not flatten the background against which those words were spoken.
The discussion of giants inevitably raises broader cultural questions. Why do so many civilizations preserve stories of unusually large and violent beings? Ancient Near Eastern literature contains giant motifs. Greek mythology speaks of Titans. Mesopotamian traditions include semi-divine warrior figures. Various Native American traditions preserve accounts of unusually large, hostile beings.
For example, Paiute oral tradition from Nevada includes stories of red-haired cannibalistic enemies later associated with Lovelock Cave discoveries. These accounts became amplified in popular retellings. Yet responsible analysis requires caution. Postmortem chemical processes can cause dark hair to appear red over time. Oral traditions evolve. Modern sensationalism frequently exaggerates ancient narratives.
Similarly, the widely circulated claim that the Smithsonian Institution destroyed thousands of giant skeletons has been traced to modern satire and internet myth rather than verifiable excavation records. There is no credible archaeological documentation supporting the conspiracy version of that story. References to Abraham Lincoln mentioning “giants” in a speech about Niagara Falls reflect nineteenth-century rhetorical flourish about ancient peoples and fossils, not confirmation of massive pre-Columbian humanoids roaming North America.
Therefore, my argument does not depend upon museum conspiracies or viral claims. It does not require hidden bones or suppressed skeletons.
The theological and historical weight rests elsewhere.
Second Temple Judaism overwhelmingly treated Genesis 6 as a story of supernatural rebellion and giant offspring. That fact alone reshapes how we read certain New Testament references. Jude and 2 Peter both refer to angels who sinned and were kept in chains until judgment. Many scholars connect these passages to the Genesis 6 tradition as interpreted in Enochic literature. Whether one agrees fully with that identification or not, the intertextual conversation is undeniable.
If Jesus says the coming of the Son of Man will resemble the days of Noah, and if those days were widely understood as a period of escalating corruption and boundary collapse, then His warning may involve more than ordinary moral decline. It may involve intensification. Corruption deepening beneath apparent normalcy. Blindness continuing while judgment approaches.
The point of this study is not sensationalism. It is historical clarity. Even if one ultimately adopts a different interpretation of Genesis 6, intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that the Watchers interpretation was a major Second Temple Jewish reading. Ignoring that context flattens the interpretive world of the New Testament and disconnects Jesus from the intellectual environment of His audience.
The days of Noah looked ordinary on the surface. People were eating, drinking, marrying, and planning futures. Yet beneath that surface, corruption had reached a breaking point. Jesus warns that similar blindness will characterize the end. The pressing question is not whether we can find a giant skeleton. The pressing question is whether we recognize the signs of deepening corruption while life appears outwardly normal.
That warning is not entertainment. It is sobriety.
Endnotes
- The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), Gen 6:1–4; Job 1:6; 2:1; Matt 24:37–39; Luke 17:26–27; Jude 6–7; 2 Pet 2:4.
- George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), esp. commentary on 1 Enoch 6–16.
- R. H. Charles, trans., The Book of Enoch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 1 Enoch 6–7.
- R. H. Charles, trans., The Book of Jubilees (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1902), chap. 5.
- James C. VanderKam, The Book of Jubilees (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989).
- Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Myth of Rebellious Angels: Studies in Second Temple Judaism and New Testament Texts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).
- Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- Michael E. Stone, “The Book of Giants,” in Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. Michael E. Stone (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 382–391.
- Florentino García Martínez and Eibert J. C. Tigchelaar, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition (Leiden: Brill, 1997–1998), texts 4Q201–4Q212 (Enochic fragments) and 4Q530–4Q533 (Book of Giants fragments).
- Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Niagara Falls,” September 1848, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:14–15.
- Richard J. Clifford, “The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men,” in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981): 305–314.
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