Are the sons of God in Genesis 6 a divine-human race producing the Nephilim, as Michael Heiser and others claim?
A viewer asks about people like Inspiring Philosophy who claim the creatures in Job are chaos creatures and compare the Bible to Iranian and Mesopotamian texts like the Enuma Elish, tied to Michael Heiser's reading of the sons of God and the Nephilim in Genesis 6.
Answer
It is total bunk. Michael Heiser was a Protestant Hebrew scholar of the Old Testament with a penchant for the sensational, and he uses uninspired books like the Book of Enoch to draw outlandish conclusions. He will not even say the sons of God in Genesis 6:4 were angels; he says they were divine-human beings, both divine and human, because he realizes that a purely heavenly being could not copulate with women. But that lands him in the Arian heresy, because 'divine' cannot be split into a lower divinity you then join to humanity; if a being lives for eternity it simply is divine, and you cannot manufacture a second-tier divine human creature, which is the same error the Arians made about Christ. The correct reading is simple. Genesis 4:26 says that in those days men began to call on the name of the Lord, and such men are called sons of God; Scripture is not ashamed to use that phrase for men many times, from Deuteronomy 32, where Israel is called the sons of God, to a dozen New Testament passages where Christians are called the sons of God. The only place in the entire Bible where the sons of God must be angels is Job 38, because men were not yet created when God laid the foundations of the earth. Even Job 1 and 2, where the sons of God come before God and Satan comes among them, can be read as the assembly of worshiping men, since Job lived around the time of Genesis and men were already worshiping God on the seventh day, and Satan is described as coming from roaming the earth, not from heaven. So the preponderance of evidence, roughly twenty passages, is that the sons of God are men, not angels. The Nephilim, the 'men of renown,' are simply the great, worldly big names produced when the godly line married the ungodly daughters of men, exactly the unequal yoking Paul warns against in 2 Corinthians 6, which is why the world filled with sin and the flood came. That is what the Bible wants to tell us, not Heiser's science fiction.