Genesis 6:4

Look at the verse closely and the first thing you notice is that the writer is doing something almost cinematic — he pans the camera over the world right before the flood and shows you giants walking around. "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days." These were the strongmen, the warlords, the celebrities of a violent age — "the mighty men of old, men of renown."

Now catch the thing that's easy to miss: the Nephilim are already there. The verse says they were on the earth "in those days—and afterward as well—when the sons of God had relations with the daughters of men." Read carefully, the text doesn't actually say the Nephilim are the offspring of those unions. The Nephilim are a separate, ongoing fact ("and afterward as well"), and then a second thing happens: the sons of God take wives, and they (the sons of God) father children who become mighty men. So the giants and the marriages overlap in time but aren't necessarily cause and effect. People miss this constantly.

Then there's the famous fight: who are the sons of God? Three camps. (1) Fallen angels — the oldest reading, and what Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 seem to lean on. (2) The godly line of Seth marrying into the wicked line of Cain — the "Sethite" view, defended by those who point out Jesus says angels don't marry ( Luke 20:34–36). (3) Power-hungry kings and rulers who took whatever women they wanted. I lean toward the first as the most natural read of the words, but I won't pretend it settles cleanly.

In the story's flow, this is the last straw. It's the verse just before God looks at the wreckage (verse 5) and decides to send the flood.

Genesis took its lasting shape for people of Israel — traditionally through Moses, somewhere in the centuries after the exodus from Egypt (most conservative scholars put the writing roughly 1400–1200 BC, though it carries far older memory). Picture the first readers: a young, fragile nation, freshly out of slavery, surrounded by neighbors who told their own grand stories about gods who slept with humans and bred half-divine heroes. The kings of Egypt and the warlords of Canaan all claimed some thread of divine blood — that's how you justified ruling over everyone else.

Genesis 6 walks straight into that world and tells a darker version of the "hero" story. Israel's neighbors celebrated their giant-warriors and god-kings. Genesis says: yes, there were such men — and God drowned the world because of them. The "mighty men of renown" aren't admired here; they're evidence of how rotten things had gotten. The Hebrew won't let you soften them into noble heroes.

There's a real-world echo too. When Israel later sent spies into Canaan, the spies came back terrified, saying they'd seen "the Nephilim... we seemed like grasshoppers" ( Numbers 13:33). The giant Og of Bashan slept on an iron bed nine cubits long ( Deuteronomy 3:11). Goliath of Gath stood head and shoulders over everyone ( 1 Samuel 17:4). For Israel, "giants" weren't a fairy tale — they were the looming, intimidating powers that stood between them and the land God promised. Genesis 6 is telling them: these terrors are old, they are God's enemies, and God has dealt with their kind before.

The hinge word is נְפִיל (nᵉphîyl, H5303). Strong's gives its core sense as "a feller, a bully or tyrant," and ties it to the root נָפַל (naphal, H5307), "to fall." So even at the level of the word, you get two flavors at once: these are fallers — fallen ones, the toppled — and fellers — those who knock others down. That's not romantic. The very name hums with violence.

Then בֵּן (bên, H1121), "son," joined to אֱלֹהִים (ʼĕlôhîym, H430) — "the sons of God." Notice the breadth Strong's flags for ʼĕlôhîym: it can mean God, gods, or even mighty/heavenly beings. That very flexibility is why the debate exists; the phrase genuinely can point to angels, to a godly human line, or to powerful rulers.

The closing punch is גִּבּוֹר (gibbôwr, H1368) — "powerful; by implication, warrior, tyrant." It's the same word used later for Nimrod, the "mighty hunter" ( Genesis 10:8). These men of "renown" — literally men of a name (shem) — are grasping for greatness. Hold that word shem in your mind, because in just a few chapters the people at Babel will say, "let us make a name (shem) for ourselves" ( Genesis 11:4). Same hunger. Same God who brings it down.

Here's the thread to follow: this verse is about people grabbing for a name. The "men of renown" — literally men of a name — bullied and built their way to greatness, and the whole pre-flood world drowned in the wreckage of human self-exaltation. You see the same grab at Babel: "let us make a name for ourselves" ( Genesis 11:4). The story of fallen humanity is the story of us clawing upward to make ourselves great.

And then comes Jesus, who runs the whole thing in reverse. Philippians 2:6–9 says he, "being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped," but emptied himself, went down into a servant's body, down into death on a cross. The Nephilim climbed over others to make a name; Jesus laid his glory down and let himself be crushed. And here's the turn: "Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name" ( Philippians 2:9). The name the giants murdered for, the name Babel built a tower for — God gives it freely to the one who went low.

There's even a haunting echo in 2 Peter 2:4–5, which ties the angels who "sinned" and the flood together as a warning, then promises rescue for the righteous. Where the old world found only judgment, the cross opens a door of mercy. The flood was God's "no" to a world that made itself its own god. Jesus is God's deeper "yes" — the one truly mighty man who used his might to save instead of to crush.

Strip away the giants and the angels and the strange marriages for a second, and ask yourself the uncomfortable question under this verse: what are you trying to make a name for yourself with?

Because that's the sin God flooded the world over. Not just bad behavior — a whole civilization organized around human beings making themselves big, taking what they wanted, trampling whoever was in the way, and being admired for it. The terrifying thing about the Nephilim isn't that they were monsters. It's that they were celebrities. People looked up to them. The "mighty men of renown" were exactly the men everyone wanted to be.

Now look at your own quiet ambitions. The promotion you'd step on a colleague to get. The reputation you protect by shading the truth. The way you want to be seen as strong, capable, impressive — the person no one messes with. That's the same root the giants grew from, just smaller and more respectable. You build your tower out of achievements and approval, and you call it being a good provider, a hard worker, a person of standing.

The cost this verse asks of you is the cost of letting your name go. Of deciding you don't need to be great — that you can be small, overlooked, even taken advantage of, because your name is already safe in the hands of the One who went lowest and was lifted highest. That's not weakness. The strongest thing a human being can do is refuse to claw upward. Whose name are you living for today — yours, or his?

• Lord, show me the places where I'm quietly trying to make a name for myself, and forgive the people I've trampled to do it.
• Teach me to want your name lifted up more than my own.
• Where I feel small and overlooked, let me rest in the truth that my name is safe with you.
• Thank you, Jesus, for refusing to grasp at greatness and going low to save me — make me willing to go low too.
• Guard my heart from admiring the wrong kind of strength in the world around me.

• When you imagine being truly successful, whose admiration are you picturing — and what does that tell you about what your heart actually worships?
• Where in your life are you using strength, talent, or position to get your way at someone else's expense, even subtly?
• The pre-flood world celebrated the very people God was about to judge. Where might the things you admire be exactly backward from how God sees them?
• What "name" would you have to let die for Jesus to be the one who makes you great?
• Is there a relationship where you've been climbing over the other person instead of going low to serve them? What would it cost to reverse that this week?