Wives (Gen 6:2)

Adam’s Aftermath

New to the column? We’re doing a close reading of Genesis, which started in September 2022. Visit the Archive and plunge in, or look here to get oriented.

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Today, after our brief break exploring “the sons of the gods,” we return to our close reading of Genesis 6.

² They got themselves wives, וַיִּקְח֤וּ לָהֶם֙ נָשִׁ֔ים

Cassuto explains:

According to the traditional rabbinic interpretation as well as the view of most modern exegetes, the Torah refers here to grave offences, or opposition to the world-order approved by the Lord; and this was the reason for the punishment meted out to the generation of the Flood. But this exposition does not appear to fit the language of the text. And they took them wives is simply the usual expression for legal marriage. The passage contains not a single word, either here or in the Lord's speech in v. 3, alluding to rape or adultery or to any act against the Lord's will.

Indeed, to “take” a wife is not merely an English idiom (and perhaps our idiom comes from this biblical usage). You already knew that there was nothing violent or criminal about “taking” a woman, because we read it together in 4:19, when “Lémekh got himself two wives.”

Cassuto calls this “the usual expression” for marriage. I don’t say “legal” marriage, as he did, because we simply don’t know anything about the rituals that might have been involved in “marriage” — even at much later stages of biblical history, let alone in this mythological era when “the sons of the gods” were marrying human women.

Let me make two points before going on.

First, to “take” a wife, using the root l-q-ḥ, is Standard Biblical Hebrew, as opposed to the Late Biblical Hebrew of the Second Temple period. Marriage in Modern Hebrew is נִשׂוּאִים, from the root נשׂא n-ś-aleph ‘lift, carry’, which we saw previously in 4:13, when Cain said, “My culpability is too large for lifting,” and even earlier, in 4:7 (the post about 4:13 will talk about that one as well). In LBH you “pick up” a woman to marry her. Perhaps they were already carrying their new brides across the threshold? Compare Lemekh in Genesis with Jehoiada in Chronicles, both as NJPS translates them:

• וַיִּֽקַּֽח־ל֥וֹ לֶ֖מֶךְ שְׁתֵּ֣י נָשִׁ֑ים (Gen 4:19) Lamech took to himself two wives

• וַיִּשָּׂא־ל֥וֹ יְהוֹיָדָ֖ע נָשִׁ֣ים שְׁתָּ֑יִם (2 Chr 24:3) Jehoiada took two wives for him[self]

Those who are interested in learning more about how the language changed can get an overview from my series on Late Biblical Hebrew on my other Bible Guy blog, at WordPress.

The second point is to confess my own mistaken instinct to say — not in translation, but in our discussion of the topic — that these sons of the gods “came down” to get some human women. They didn’t, of course. Our text says nothing of the kind. Part of what makes this era mythological is that gods and humans are interacting down here on earth. We saw it with Enoch in 5:22, and perhaps that is the reason that God disappeared him in 5:24.

any that they chose. מִכֹּ֖ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר בָּחָֽרוּ׃

It has been common through the ages, as Cassuto said, to assume that something wrong is happening here. To give you two examples spanning a millennium, we start with Rashi, the 11^th-century French Jewish commentator, citing the NJPS translation that they took wives “from among those that pleased them”:

Any who pleased them, including women who were already married, and even men and beasts.

And we move to John Walton, a 21^st-century American Christian commentator:

An alternate understanding may be found in a practice noted in the Gilgamesh Epic as the prime example of Gilgamesh's tyranny, namely, his exercising the right of the first night with a new bride: "He will couple with the wife-to-be, he first of all, the bridegroom after." This practice accommodates the marriage terminology, and in Gilgamesh it is clearly both oppressive and offensive behavior.

But Cassuto argues:

Here, too, it does not appear to be the Bible's intention to condemn the actions of the sons of God, as though they took all the women they wanted — by force … It is more likely that the sense is this: each one of them took a wife from among those women who in general found favor in their eyes.

Another angle to suggest that this is not a condemnation of the sons of the gods is the one other place I’ve found where someone (God, no less) first “chooses” and then “takes”:

^{Ps 78:70} He chose [וַ֭יִּבְחַר] David, His servant, and took him [וַ֝יִּקָּחֵ֗הוּ] from the sheepfolds.

Indeed, there’s a bit of a love affair going on between God and David as well.

The one other place in the Bible where anyone “takes [לקח] … from all that [מכל אשר] …” is in Gen 14:23, in the strange story of the war of the four kings against the five. (Something for us to look forward to.) After the battle has been won and spoil has been taken, Abram insists to the King of Sodom:

^{Gen 14:23} I will not take [אֶקַּ֖ח] so much as a thread or a sandal strap of what [מִכָּל־אֲשֶׁר] is yours; you shall not say, ‘It is I who made Abram rich.’

It is one of the many cases where “all” means “any.” If you can choose “from all” of the daughters of the humans, that means you can choose “any” of them you like.

Well, who else are you going to marry? We still must wonder why we’re being told this.

I’m back to where I ended last time, with the conclusion that (just as in Genesis 2–3) God intended the human beings — even though they were created “in the image of God” (1:27) — not to be his rivals. The mixing of gods and humans (as we’ll see in v. 4) creates beings who, perhaps, can cross that line. Before we get there, we will see YHWH reprogramming humanity in an attempt to fix things without a complete reboot.