I’ve been reading 1 Peter recently; a top book by all accounts. However, one part of it has really intrigued me and that is the passage in 1 Peter 3:18-22:
I was reading this passage in my NIV study bible and they had some interesting ideas about the interpretation of this passage. There are three viewpoints described here:
- This passage is meaning that the pre-incarnate Christ went and preached through Noah to the wiked generation of that time.
- This passage is meaning that Christ went to the place of the dead in the time between his death and resurrection and preached to spirits of Noah’s wiked contemporaries.
- This passgage is meaning that Christ went to the place where fallen angels are incarcerated in the time between his death and resurrection and preached to the angels who left their proper state and married human women in Genesis 6.
Hold the phone - angels can do that?
So I followed the trail into Genesis 6 to find the following verses:
The interesting phrase used here is ’sons of God’ in verse 2. Some believe that this does indeed refer to angels as the same phrase is used in Job 1:6 and Job 2:1. However some people believe that the intermarriage is just impossible if it implies angels and this is backed up by the term ’sons of God’ being used to refer to humans in other passages such as Deuteronomy 14:1 or 1 John 3:1-2. ‘Sons of God’ could simply imply godly men, i.e. not born from the wiked line of Cain.
To me, the most plausible explanation is that the godly men (and by this we probably mean decendants of Abel) started marrying ‘any of them’ and this proabably does not refer to angels. However, there is no way for us to really know this - especially as our huge God often does the last thing you expect. So I’m probably interpretting this in the most simple way possible and am open to correction… For now I am content with my limited understanding - does anyone else have any thoughts on the matter?
6:50 pm
I think you are probably right. I’ve been doing a little digging and it seems Henry, Gill, and Wesley all agree with you.
People who God new, Godly people started to intermarry with those who were not Godly; probably the descendants of Cain.
We see from Gen 6 v4 that the Nephilim (translated in KJV as Giants) were around then and that the children bore were “…heroes of old, men of renown…”
This almost sounds positive but the very next verse starts with “God saw their wickedness…”, so it’s probably safe to assume that it wasn’t.
Commentators seem to agree that the heroes would have been tyrannical warriors; giant by proportion and that their names would have been know (and probably used in stories to scare children).
It seems that the Nephilim were wiped out by the resultant Great Flood as they are only mentioned again in Numbers when the spy’s reported that great Giants, like the Nephilim (the sons of Anak) were in the promised land and made them look like grasshoppers.
Why did this intermarriage result in tyrannical giants? Was this the reason for the flood or was it simply because God did not want his people to mix with the others?