Cain's Daughters Brought the Angels Down From Heaven

What Genesis Leaves Out

Four verses. The sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and they took them as wives from all that they chose. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and afterward. Then the flood.

The Torah offers no backstory, no explanation of what the sons of God were, no account of what the daughters of men did or wanted or understood. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the early medieval narrative midrash from Palestine, fills in the gap that Genesis left, and the picture it reveals is not a story of random desire. It is a story of deliberate seduction that crossed the boundary between heaven and earth.

The Women of Cain's Line

The daughters who drew the angels down were from the line of Cain. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer describes them with a precision that is almost clinical: they walked about naked, eyes painted, adorning themselves in the manner of those who seduce. This was not incidental behavior. Cain's culture had developed specific techniques for the manipulation of desire, passed down through his line from the time of the exile from Eden, and his daughters carried those techniques into the world at precisely the moment when the boundary between heaven and earth was already thin.

The boundary was thin because Cain's line and Seth's line had been meeting and intermarrying. The righteous descendants of Seth had been drawn into proximity with the practices of Cain's culture. The daughters of Cain moved in the same world as the sons of Seth, and what they wore and how they painted themselves was visible to more than human eyes.

Creatures of Fire Looking Down

Rabbi Joshua, quoted in Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, adds a detail that makes the angels' descent stranger and more tragic. They were creatures of flame. Psalm 104:4 says God's servants are a flaming fire. The beings looking down at the daughters of Cain were not flesh. They were fire.

The question Rabbi Joshua is working toward is how beings made of fire could descend and mix with human women at all. His answer involves the cooling effect of proximity: when the fire looked down long enough, when the gaze lasted long enough, the descent became possible. But what that descent cost them, what they became when they passed from the element they were made of into the world of flesh and earth, was irreversible. They came down as angels. They stayed down as something else.

The tradition in apocryphal sources, including texts gathered in Ginzberg's synthesis, describes the children of these unions as giants of enormous size. An ell as a measure of height becomes almost meaningless when applied to beings whose fathers were fire and whose mothers were flesh. The Nephilim were neither fully human nor fully angelic. They were the offspring of a crossing that the world was not designed to accommodate, and the flood that came afterward was God's answer to what the crossing had produced.

The Flood as a Reset

The connection between the daughters of Cain, the descent of the angels, and the flood is structural in the midrashic reading. Genesis places the Nephilim account immediately before the account of God looking at the world and finding it ruined. The rabbinic tradition reads the sequence causally. The daughters of Cain did what Cain's culture had trained them to do. The angels did what looking too long at what they should not have been looking at caused them to do. The giants did what beings who were neither flesh nor fire, and who were too large for the world they were born into, inevitably did.

And then the rain came.