Genesis 6 Summary: Sons of God, Noah, and the Ark (KJV)

God looked at the world He had made and was grieved at His heart. That one sentence sits in the middle of Genesis 6 and makes the chapter hard to read quickly. This Genesis 6 summary covers all of it, including the four verses at the start that stop most readers.

Setting the Stage

God made a promise while He was passing sentence. A serpent had talked the first woman into disobeying Him, and as God sentenced that serpent He said one of her descendants would crush its head (Genesis 3:15). Then He cursed the ground, so that food would come out of it only through hard work, and He sent the man and the woman out of the garden He had planted for them.

That promise was still unkept generations later. The line carrying it ran through Seth down to a man named Lamech, who named his own son Noah because he wanted relief from the ground the LORD had cursed (Genesis 5 Summary, verse 29). Genesis 6 opens with that hope still waiting, and with the world getting worse faster than the promise seems to be moving.

Concise Genesis 6 Summary

One Word Summary

• Corruption: the chapter’s own word, saturating verses 11 and 12.
• Grief: God’s own response in verse 6.
• Grace: the one word in verse 8 that turns the whole chapter.

In One Sentence

God sees a world so corrupt that every thought of the human heart is evil, grieves over the people He made and announces He will end them, then gives Noah grace and tells him to build an ark.

Theme of Genesis 6

Genesis 6 is about God’s grief over a world gone wrong, and the grace He gives inside that grief. Three ideas run alongside that one. The rot reaches even the family line the promise was travelling through, which is where the chapter opens (verses 1 to 4).

His patience is real and it has an end (verse 3). His judgment answers what He actually sees rather than arriving out of nowhere (verses 5 and 11 to 13). And the rescue is announced in the same conversation as the sentence, so that the ark is being described before the water is ever mentioned.

Genesis 6 Outline

• Genesis 6:1-4: The sons of God take wives, God speaks about His Spirit and a hundred and twenty years, and giants are on the earth.
• Genesis 6:5-7: God sees the wickedness of man, is grieved at His heart, and says He will destroy what He made.
• Genesis 6:8-10: Noah finds grace, and Genesis describes him and names his three sons.
• Genesis 6:11-13: The earth is corrupt and full of violence, and God tells Noah the end has come.
• Genesis 6:14-16: God gives Noah the ark’s materials and measurements.
• Genesis 6:17-22: God explains the flood, promises a covenant, names who will board, and Noah does everything he was told.

Comprehensive Genesis 6 Summary

The chapter opens on growth. People are multiplying across the earth, which is the blessing of Genesis 1:28 doing what God said it would do, and the corruption spreads inside the blessing rather than instead of it.

The sons of God see the daughters of men and take whichever ones they choose (verse 2), using the same two verbs Genesis used of the woman in the garden when she saw the fruit and took it. Who those sons of God were is one of the oldest arguments in Bible study, and it is taken up further down this page.

God then speaks, and what He says is a limit. His Spirit will not always strive with man, and the days set are a hundred and twenty (verse 3). Giants are recorded in that era, along with men of renown, and Genesis says no more about them than that.

What God sees next drives everything after it. The wickedness of man is great, and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually (verse 5).

Three words in that sentence leave no room: every, only, continually. So God is grieved at His heart, and He says He will destroy man whom He created (verses 6 and 7). Genesis records the grief first and the sentence after it.

Then one word interrupts the sentence. Verse 8 begins with But, and says grace was given to Noah. Only after that does Genesis describe the man, as just, perfect in his generations, and walking with God (verse 9).

The rest of the chapter is what that grace looks like once it is given something to do. God tells Noah the earth is filled with violence and the end has come, and in the next breath tells him to build (verses 13 and 14).

Measurements follow. The flood is named. A covenant is promised before a drop of water falls (verse 18). And the chapter closes with Noah doing it, in a sentence that says so twice.

Genesis 6 Verse by Verse in Table

The Ark

Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

Genesis 6:14-16.

The Ark’s Specifications

What God described is a box built to float rather than a ship built to sail. There is no rudder in the instructions, no mast, no sail and no destination, because the ark was never meant to go anywhere. It only had to stay up.

Noah is given the wood, the measurements and the door in verses 14 to 16, and he is not told that the judgment will come by water until verse 17. He was told to build before he was told why.

Observations from Genesis 6

Corruption Is Named Three Times Across Two Verses (vv. 11-12)

The earth was corrupt before God. God looked, and it was corrupt. All flesh had corrupted its way. Genesis says it as the earth’s condition, then as what God saw when He looked, then as what people had done to their own way of living.

By the third time there is nowhere left for a reader to stand, and verse 5 was already heading there.

Three Words in Verse 5 Leave No Exceptions

Every imagination. Only evil. Continually. God reaches past what people did to what they wanted, all day, without a break.

That is why the judgment lands on the heart as well as on the violence, and why everything that follows runs through the one man who received grace in verse 8.

Noah Is Named Five Times in Three Verses (vv. 8-10)

Genesis could have carried all of this with a pronoun and chose not to, putting the name once in verse 8, three times in verse 9 and once again in verse 10. After five chapters in which most men get a number and a death, the record slows down and says one man’s name over and over, at the moment God is deciding what to do with everyone.

“Walked with God” Is Said of Two Men in Genesis (v. 9)

Enoch walked with God and was taken (Genesis 5:22, 24). Noah walked with God and was told to build. The same phrase produced two different outcomes, and both men had it in a generation that had stopped listening. What the phrase describes is who a man is with, not what happens to him next.

Common Misunderstandings About Genesis 6

Who Were the Sons of God and the Nephilim?

Genesis does not settle this, and neither should anyone reading it. Three explanations have been held by serious believers for centuries, and each one has real difficulties.

• The line of Seth. The godly line of Genesis 5 marrying into the ungodly line of Cain. It fits the two family lines Genesis has just spent two chapters tracing. The difficulty is that “sons of God” elsewhere in the Old Testament refers to angelic beings (Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7), and it is hard to see why believers marrying unbelievers, which happens throughout the Bible, would bring a flood.
• Fallen angels. Supported by that same Old Testament usage, and by Jude 1:6-7, which speaks of angels who left their own habitation and went after strange flesh. The difficulties are that Jesus said angels in heaven do not marry (Matthew 22:30), that the judgment in this chapter falls on people rather than on angels, and that Genesis 8:21 describes human hearts after the flood in almost the same words as Genesis 6:5, which leaves little room for the idea that removing hybrid offspring fixed anything.
• Powerful rulers. Kings who claimed divine standing and took whatever women they wanted. Psalm 82:6 does call human judges gods and sons of the Most High. The difficulty is that Genesis 4 shows no interest in kings at all, and “took them wives” is an ordinary Hebrew way of saying someone married, the same phrase used of Abram and Nahor in Genesis 11:29.

As for the Nephilim, the King James “giants” comes through the Greek Old Testament, and Genesis 6:4 says only that they were on the earth in those days and afterward. Whether the verse means they were the children of these unions or simply that they were around at the same time is a question the wording leaves open. Numbers 13:33 mentions them again in Canaan, long after the flood.

Nothing about salvation rests on any of this, and a person can love and obey God without ever settling it. It is better to say the Bible does not tell us than to sound certain about something it left unexplained.

Does Genesis 6:6 Mean God Made a Mistake?

No, and Scripture rules that reading out directly. “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent” (Numbers 23:19), and 1 Samuel 15:29 says the same. So when Genesis says it repented the LORD that He had made man, it is not reporting that God discovered an error.

It is human language for something real. God’s purpose stands where it always stood, and the world He was looking at is what changed, so His dealings with it changed too.

Matthew Henry put it in a way worth keeping: God repented that He had made man, but He is never once said to repent that He redeemed him (Romans 11:29). And this is not a feeling God has outgrown, because Ephesians 4:30 still tells believers not to grieve the Holy Spirit of God.

Did Noah Earn His Place on the Ark?

Genesis puts grace first. Verse 8 records the grace he was given, and verse 9 then describes him as just and perfect in his generations. “Perfect” here means whole and honest rather than sinless, the same kind of integrity God asked of Abraham in Genesis 17:1. Hebrews 11:7 says Noah acted by faith and was counted righteous through it, which puts his rescue on the same footing as ours (Ephesians 2:8-9).

Christ Connection

Genesis 6 is the first place in the Bible where God announces a judgment and provides the way through it in the same conversation. Verse 13 says the end has come. Verse 14 says build. That order is the pattern the gospel follows, and the New Testament picks this chapter up and says so directly.

• The ark and baptism, stated by the New Testament itself. Peter names the eight souls who were “saved by water” and calls baptism “the like figure” (1 Peter 3:20-21). This is not a connection readers have to construct; the apostle makes it.
• Noah’s faith, and what it made him. “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith” (Hebrews 11:7).
• The one door. God put a single door in the ark’s side (verse 16), and everyone who lived went through it. Jesus said, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved” (John 10:9). The ark pictures what He later said plainly.
• The Hebrew word for the ark. It is tebah, and the only other thing in the Old Testament called by that word is the basket that carried the infant Moses through the water (Exodus 2:3). Both were sealed with pitch. The same shape turns up twice: a life God means to keep, carried through water that is killing everything else.
• The days of Noah. Jesus made this chapter a picture of His own return: “But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” (Matthew 24:37).

When, Where, and Why

• When: the years immediately before the flood, at the close of the age Genesis 5 has just counted out. Read straight, the figures of Genesis 5 with Genesis 7:6 put the flood 1,656 years after creation, though Bible genealogies sometimes skip generations, so treat that as the chapter’s own reckoning rather than a fixed date.
• Where: Genesis 6 names no place at all, and neither did Genesis 5. Genesis 4 had already put Cain’s family east of Eden building a city and working metal, so this is a developed world rather than an empty one, and the chapter keeps its attention on people rather than on any location.
• Why: Moses is showing his readers why the flood came, so that they can see it as God’s answer to what He saw rather than as something arbitrary, and he is laying the first stone of the covenant that God ratifies in full in Genesis 9.

Key Verses

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Genesis 6:5. This is the verdict the whole flood account rests on, and it reaches the heart rather than stopping at behaviour.

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

Genesis 6:8. Everything after the flood, including the line that reaches Christ, hangs on this one sentence and the word it begins with.

Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.

Genesis 6:22. The chapter’s last word is not Noah’s feelings about the task but what he did with it, and Genesis says it twice in one verse.

Key Lessons from Genesis 6

• God is grieved by sin rather than indifferent to it, which means sin is a wound to a Person and not a rule broken in the abstract (verse 6).
• God’s patience is real and it has an end, and verse 3 is Him saying so out loud before He acts.
• Grace is something Noah found rather than something he built, and Genesis chose the word found on purpose (verse 8).
• A person can walk with God in a generation that has stopped walking with Him, since Noah did it while the earth was filled with violence (verses 9 and 11).
• Obedience can look pointless for a very long time before it makes sense, and Noah kept building on nothing but what God had said (verse 22).

To go deeper into the lessons from this chapter, read our full study: 30 Critical Lessons from Genesis 6.

Bible Study Questions

1. Verse 5 says the imagination of man’s heart was only evil continually. What does it change to have God’s verdict fall there rather than only on what people did?
2. Read verse 6 slowly. What does it tell you about God that He responds to sin with grief before He responds with judgment?
3. Verse 8 begins with the word “But.” What would the chapter mean if that verse were missing?
4. Genesis records Noah’s grace in verse 8 and his character in verse 9. Why do you think it comes in that order?
5. Noah was told to build in verse 14 and told about the water in verse 17. What would you have needed to keep believing in the years between being told to start and understanding why?
6. Noah walked with God in the middle of everything verse 11 describes. What would walking with God have to look like in your own week for that phrase to be true of you?

Genesis 6 Paraphrased

People began to spread out over the earth. Daughters were born to them. Some powerful ones saw these women and took any they wanted as wives.

God said His Spirit would not put up with people forever. He said their days would be one hundred and twenty years. There were giants on the earth then, and later too. They were famous fighters.

God looked at people and saw how bad they had become. He saw that they thought about evil all day long.

It made Him very sad. He said He would wipe people off the earth. He would take away the animals and the birds too.

But one man was different. His name was Noah. God was kind to him. Noah did what was right.

He stayed close to God. He had three sons. Their names were Shem, Ham and Japheth.

The whole earth had gone bad. It was full of people hurting each other. God saw it all. He told Noah what He was going to do.

God told Noah to build a big boat. He told him what wood to use. He told him to cover it with tar inside and out.

He gave him the exact size. It had one door in the side. It had three floors inside.

God said a flood was coming. Water would cover everything.

But God made Noah a promise. Noah would go inside the boat. His wife would go too.

So would his sons and their wives. Two of every animal would come to him.

Two of every bird. Two of every small creature. Noah had to gather food for all of them.

So Noah did it. He did everything God told him to do.

Frequently Asked Questions

Genesis 6, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference.

1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

7 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

9 These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.

10 And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.

12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.

13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

14 Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

15 And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.

16 A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.

18 But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee.

19 And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.

20 Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

21 And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.

22 Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.

Continue the Genesis Series

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