The Sethite View and Jude 1 & 2 Peter 2

I preached on Genesis 6:1-8 yesterday but didn’t have time to fit a treatment of Jude 1 and 2 Peter 2 into my sermon. Here are some quick notes explaining my approach to those passages.

Jude 1:5-8 and 2 Peter 2:4-6 are closely parallel. The pro-angelic view argues that Jude is saying that “Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them” (v. 7) engaged in the same specific type of sin as the angels in v. 6—namely, “gross immorality and [going] after strange flesh.” They contend that this supports the idea that the angels also “went after strange flesh” and that this serves as evidence that the “sons of God” in Genesis were angels who intermarried with human women. I, however, don’t see it this way and instead follow a majority-Reformed interpretation, which seems to have been largely overlooked in recent discussions. Let me explain, but first:

Jude 1:5-8 reads:

Now I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe. And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day, just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.

I agree with John Calvin that the mistake here is to assume that the specifics of the sin are shared among those being compared, rather than a more general category of rebellion.

Calvin writes:

This comparison is not to be pressed too strictly, as though he compared those whom he mentions in all things to be Sodomites, or to the fallen angels, or to the unbelieving people. He only shows that they were vessels of wrath appointed to destruction, and that they could not escape the hand of God, but that He would, at some time or another, make them examples of His vengeance. For his design was to terrify the godly to whom he was writing, lest they should entangle themselves in their society.

Following a similar line of thought, Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown offer a more detailed explanation:

It seems to me more natural to take ‘sons of God’ (Ge 6:2) as the Sethites, rather than angels, who, as ‘spirits,’ do not seem capable of carnal connection. The parallel, 2 Pe 2:4, plainly refers to the fall of the apostate angels. And ‘in like manner to these,’ Jud 1:7, refers to the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, ‘the cities about them’ sinning ‘in like manner’ as ‘they’ did [Estius and Calvin]. Even if Greek ‘these,’ Jud 1:7, refers to the angels, the sense of ‘in like manner as these’ will be, not that the angels carnally fornicated with the daughters of men, but that their ambition, whereby their affections went away from God and they fell, is in God’s view a sin of a similar kind spiritually as Sodom’s departure from God’s order of nature after strange flesh; the sin of the apostate angels after their kind is analogous to that of the human Sodomites after theirs.

Albert Barnes makes the same argument with a slight expansion. It’s worth reading as his prose is clearer:

In like manner. 'In a manner like to these,' (ὅμοιον τρόπον) The Greek word these, is in the plural number. There has been much diversity in interpreting this clause. Some refer it to the angels, as if it meant that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah committed sin in a way similar to the angels; some suppose that it refers to the wicked teachers about whom Jude was discoursing, meaning that Sodom and Gomorrah committed the same kind of sins which they did; some that the meaning is, that 'the cities round about Sodom and Gomorrah' sinned in the same way as those cities; and some that they were punished in the same manner, and were set forth like them as an example. I see no evidence that it refers to the angels; and if it did, it would not prove, as some have supposed, that their sin was of the same kind as that of Sodom, since there might have been a resemblance in some respects, though not in all. I see no reason to believe, as Macknight holds, that it refers to false teachers, since that would be to suppose that the inhabitants of Sodom copied their example long before the example was set. It seems to me, therefore, that the reference is to the cities round about Sodom; and that the sense is, that they committed iniquity in the same manner as the inhabitants of Sodom did, and were set forth in the same way as an example.

In my view, both Jude 1 and 2 Peter 2 refer not to Genesis 6 but more likely to the initial fall of the angels. I see the comparison as emphasizing rebellion against God's order rather than detailing a specific type of sin that mirrors that of Sodom and Gomorrah.

And now I can rest from my labors and move on to something else that people aren’t crazy obsessed with.