hisalone said:
First, to attribute this to Seth's line, we must assume that there was a strict mandate to not inter-marry with non-believers. Secondly, it means there had to be a strict law prior to the mosaic law forbidding this. Along the lines, if you intermarry you shall surely be put to death.
The prohibition on intermarriage between God's people and unbelievers is elsewhere corroborated in Scripture:
Deut. 7:3-4: "Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons.
For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods; then the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you and He will quickly destroy you."
Josh. 23:11-13: "So take diligent heed to yourselves to love the LORD your God. For if you ever go back and cling to the rest of these nations, these which remain among you, and intermarry with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, know with certainty that the LORD your God will not continue to drive these nations out from before you;
but they will be snare and a trap to you, and a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which the LORD your God has given you."
II Cor. 6:14-18: "Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness? Or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? Or what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the people of the living God; just as God said, 'I will dwell in them and walk among them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate,' says the Lord. 'And do no touch what is unclean; and I will welcome you. And I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to Me,' says the Lord Almighty." (Note here as well who are the "sons of God.")
We well know how disobedience to this principal worked out in the case of Solomon (I Kings 11). Mind what Nehemiah said:
Neh. 13:23-27: "In those days I also saw that the Jews had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab. As for their children, half spoke in the language of Ashdod, and none of them was able to speak the language of Judah, btut the language of his own people. So I contended with them and cursed them and struck some of them and pulled out their hair, and made them swear by God, 'You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor take of their daughters for your sons or for yourselves. Did not Solomon king of Israel sin regarding these things? Yet among the many nations there was no king like him, and he was loved by his God, and God made him king over all Israel; nevertheless the foreign women caused even him to sin. Do we then hear that you have committed all this great evil by acting unfaithfully against our God by marrying foreign women?'"
This prohibition is part of the moral law of God. One's choice of spouse is fundamentally caught up with one's devotion to God. The one who loves God and seeks to obey Him will seek a spouse who also loves God. The one who does not put God before all else will follow after his own desires and seek out a spouse that best pleases his own sinful fancies, and in so doing he will be drawn away from God.
It is tantamount to idolatry to knowingly marry an unbeliever. Little wonder then that God would be angry with the descendants of godly Seth for taking to themselves ungodly wives from the line of Cain.
It seems to me for God to judge the whole race because of an issue of intermarriage and destroying them completely to be more than extreme, unless every single person intermarried.
Intermarriage was not the only reason for God's decision to wipe out humanity save Noah: "Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that
every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Gen. 6:5).
Now if there was an "unholy" race, such as could come about by an unnatural union, that could be seen as detrimental to humanity, it would need to be erradicated completely, much like a cancer.
But here's the problem: Nowhere in Genesis 6 does God say that he is destroying humanity because of an "unholy race" of human-angel hybrids. Nowhere in Genesis 6 does God express anger against fallen angels and promise to punish them. His anger and grief is entirely with
mankind.
I may not be able to prove it undeniably from scripture, but in the same way, you can't prove Seth's line, it just isn't clear and for both views it requires speculation and assumption.
This issue is which interpretation is most in line with the overall teaching of Scripture. What I'm saying about this passage is corroborated elsewhere in Scripture, e.g., believers are elsewhere described as "sons of God," and intermarriage with unbelievers is strictly prohibited. All the meanings you're putting into the text are
purely speculative. There is nowhere in all of Scripture that teaches that angels can procreate or that fallen angels live or have lived in human society; there is nowhere in all of Scripture where demons are treated as something different from fallen angels; there is nowhere in all of Scripture where demons are said to be the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim; and beyond on all, there isn't even anything in Gen. 6 that suggests that the Nephilim are actually the
offspring of the ungodly marriages! Your entire position begins with the totally unwarranted inference that the Nephilim are actually the offspring of these marriages.
BTW, I used to believe it spoke of Seth's line, but I always felt uncomfortable with that view. Attributing it to Seth's line leaves far more questions than to fallen angels.
What "more" questions does it leave? I mean, I can hardly think of any question regarding the Sethite intermarriage interpretation that is more difficult or speculative to answer than these: "What, exactly, is a human-angel hybrid?" "Would a human-angel hybrid be fertile, or, like mules, infertile?" "Why would God be angry specifically with
humanity for the evil actions of fallen angels and the existence of 'unholy' human-angel hybrids?"
