The Fallen Gods

“If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came…” (John 10:35, KJV).

This is how Jesus described the rulers of the people, alluding to Psalm 82.  The immediate context of Jesus’ use of the psalm was his defense of his self-description as “the Son of God” (10:36).  As a leader of the people (in a society in which leadership was by definition religious) Jesus rightly claimed such a title.

Such titles were assigned to rulers of old, who were invariably remembered as great heroes and warriors; the ancient religious imagination could scarcely encompass any other concept of a leader, especially a foundational leader.

Such were “the sons of God” of Genesis 6:2, who seized for themselves “the daughters of men,” and who constituted “giants in the earth in those days, and also after” (6:4).

Nothing in this interpretation is new, but it is worthy of note (and rarely noted) that the intrinsic aspect of sexual depravity in this Genesis story is both heterosexual and prior to the account of Lot and Sodom.  The “daughters of men” in this story were not selected (to say nothing of wooed) for their virtues apart from sexual attractiveness.  The “sons of God” (the psalmist would later say “gods”) fell to the satisfying of their base desires.

Against this background we can truly understand the tendency of sober observers to note a strain of sexual obsession in Genesis.  To be sure, the sexual drive is a crucial aspect to include in any analysis of a society; it is not at all strange that sexuality would loom large in Scripture.  What gives the standard analyses of Genesis an air of sexual fixation is the sudden-seeming introduction of sexual sin in the form of the violent homosexual (or is it pansexual?) behavior in Sodom.

However, the earlier (and much-overlooked) story of the sons of God and the daughters of men contains the necessary elements for accurately describing the corrosive effects of sexual sin on human society.  Since ancient times, and in defiance of the will of God, the powerful have discarded their duties and degraded their positions in pursuit of sexual gratification.

Also, since ancient times powerful men have sanctified their breadth of heterosexual activity by systematically demonizing homosexual activity.