This post was originally written in December 2016.
1 It happened, when humankind began to increase on the earth, and daughters were born to them, 2 that the divine beings saw that human women were beautiful, and they took themselves wives, whomever they chose. 3 And Yahweh said, My spirit will not ydwn b- humankind forever, bšgm he is flesh, and his days will be one hundred twenty years. 4 The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the divine beings would intermingle with human women, and the women gave birth to children: they were the heroes of old, men of renown.
divine beings . . . human women. Literally, the sons of God . . . the daughters of humankind.
My spirit. According to Dillman, “[The Hebrew expression] is not the Holy Spirit of God working upon men and judging them, but, as appears from the conclusion drawn in the second part of the verse, the spirit of life given by God to men (ch. ii. 7), the principle of their physical and mental (spiritual) life.” The verse (2:7) that Dillmann references refers to the first human being given life via the ‘breath of life’ breathed into him by God.
ydwn. I don’t know what this Hebrew word means.
bšgm. Nor this one.
his days. I most commonly hear that this was God announcing his intention to decrease the maximum human lifespan to one hundred twenty years. But Genesis goes on to record at least a dozen generations of people living longer than one hundred twenty years. And it would seem strange if, in the lead-up to the Flood, God were to announce that he is fed up and will, until fifteen generations hence, gradually decrease human lifespans to one hundred twenty years. Another proposal has been that this is God announcing, one hundred years ahead of time, the coming of the global flood.
Nephilim. Mythological demigods, described her as heroic (in the Greek sense, not the moral sense) in this passage, and as gigantic in physical stature elsewhere.
intermingle with. Literally, come to, a standard euphemism for sexual relations in the Bible.