Genesis 6: The Sons of God

"God's sons saw that men's daughters were beautiful, and they took any that they wanted for themselves as wives... The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when God's sons came in to men's daughters and had children with them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown" (Genesis 6:1-4). Read plainly and in its own context, this is not a story about rival human dynasties intermarrying. It describes a real supernatural transgression.
The Hebrew phrase bene elohim ("sons of God") is the same term used elsewhere for members of the divine council — the spiritual beings who present themselves before Yahweh's heavenly assembly (Job 1:6; 38:7). Their crossing into human marriage in Genesis 6 is best understood as the second in a pattern of escalating rebellions running through the early chapters of Genesis: Eden, this transgression, and later Babel — each widening the scope and consequence of the one before it. Where Eden involved a single supernatural being corrupting two humans, Genesis 6 involves a collective of supernatural beings corrupting humanity far more broadly, introducing troubling new realities the text and later tradition both trace to this event: a new hybrid category of being in the Nephilim, the spread of illicit and destructive knowledge, and the origin of ongoing malevolent spiritual activity in the world.
The contrast could not be sharper with an earlier scene in the same divine council: "when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7). That was the council as it was meant to be — celebrating a very good creation. Genesis 6 shows what happens when members of that same council turn their created authority against the creation they were meant to serve.