What Does Genesis 6:2 Mean?

The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and took wives from among them, whomever they chose. This verse opens the most interpretively contested passage in Genesis, and the controversy itself carries covenantal significance. The two dominant readings, that the "sons of God" are divine beings crossing the boundary between the heavenly and human realms, or that they are men from the covenant line of Seth abandoning their distinctiveness by marrying outside the community of faith, agree on the essential point: a boundary was violated. What was meant to be separate was collapsed.

The specific phrase "whomever they chose" is the moral hinge of the verse. Selection was made on the basis of visual beauty without regard for covenant faithfulness or any criterion beyond appetite. The same pattern appears in Lot's choice of the Jordan valley in Genesis 13 ("Lot looked up and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan was well watered... so Lot chose for himself") and in Canaan's attractions that drew the Israelites into repeated covenant violations. The autonomous choice driven by what is seen rather than what is faithful to the divine design is one of the Old Testament's most consistent signals of impending judgment.

The boundary-crossing of this verse anticipates the Incarnation's boundary-crossing in reverse: the Word became flesh not by autonomous choice driven by appetite but by the will of the Father and the consent of Mary, not to take but to give. The sons of God in Genesis 6 took from humanity and generated something that corrupted the creation; the Son of God in John 1:14 came to humanity and gave life to all who received him. The direction of the crossing and the character of the purpose distinguish the two movements entirely.