A pronoun that will not agree
The antecedents on offer — Σόδομα, Γόμορρα, and αἱ … πόλεις (“the cities”) — are feminine. πόλις is feminine in every case and number it appears. If Jude meant “in like manner to these [cities],” ordinary Greek concord calls for the feminine demonstrative ταύταις.
Instead the text reads τούτοις — and there is no feminine parsing of τούτοις available anywhere in the paradigm of οὗτος. This is the observation J. N. D. Kelly presses in his commentary on Jude: on strict grammatical grounds, the cities cannot be what τούτοις refers back to.
| Masculine | Feminine | Neuter |
|---|---|---|
| τούτοις | ταύταις | τούτοις |
Notice the actual shape of the ambiguity: τούτοις is common to masculine and neuter alike — it is not, by its bare form, proof of a masculine referent as such. What it does rule out cleanly is the feminine. Kelly's argument therefore stands or falls less on “τούτοις is masculine” than on “τούτοις is not feminine,” which is the narrower and more defensible claim. Whatever τούτοις points to, it is not Σόδομα καὶ Γόμορρα καὶ αἱ πόλεις read as a bare noun-for-pronoun swap.
Back to the angels of verse 6
If τούτοις cannot be the cities, the nearest available plural — masculine or neuter — sitting in the discourse is οἱ ἄγγελοι, “the angels,” from the immediately preceding verse:
“And the angels who kept not their own principality, but left their proper habitation, He hath reserved…”
On this reading, Jude 7 is not comparing Sodom's sin to Sodom's own preceding description — it is comparing Sodom's sin to the angels' sin. Both pursued σάρξ ἑτέρα, “flesh of another kind” — the angels by leaving their proper order to take human wives (Genesis 6:2, on the Watcher reading), the Sodomites by pursuing flesh outside the ordinary bounds set for them. The two verses become a matched pair of transgressions rather than two separate illustrations, which is exactly the kind of tight typological pairing Jude's compressed style elsewhere favors (compare v. 11's three-beat Cain/Balaam/Korah sequence). It also folds Jude 7 into the larger Second Temple stream — 1 Enoch, and the parallel in 2 Peter 2:4 — in which the “sons of God” of Genesis 6:2 are read as the Watchers.
Calvin and the analogy of faith
Calvin does not contest the Greek so much as refuse where it seems to lead. His governing concern is systematic, not philological: if Genesis 6:2's “sons of God” are angels who took human wives, then Scripture appears to narrate literal angelic-human procreation — which Calvin takes to collide with Christ's own teaching that the angels of God οὔτε γαμοῦσιν οὔτε γαμίζονται, “neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30). Rather than let one crux in Jude override that broader Christological datum, Calvin holds the line at what he judges the analogy of faith — Scripture's parts read in submission to its clearer, more central teaching.
Genesis 6:2 — Calvin's Reading
The “sons of God” are the godly line of Seth; the “daughters of men” are the ungodly line of Cain. The sin of the antediluvian world was not angels crossing into human flesh, but the covenant people intermarrying with — and being assimilated into — the surrounding godlessness: an unequal yoking of the faithful line to unbelief.
Jude 7 — The Corollary
To keep this reading coherent, τούτοις cannot be permitted to reach back to angels behaving as Genesis 6 might otherwise suggest. Calvin's line construes the comparison as resting on the men of the cities themselves — the ungodliness of Sodom compared to ungodliness in kind, without requiring the angelic-marriage premise Jude 6 would otherwise supply.
The tension is worth naming plainly: Calvin's move protects a theological commitment at some cost to the most natural grammatical antecedent, while Kelly's move honors the grammar at some cost to a smooth harmony with Matthew 22:30 — unless one holds, as much of the Second Temple and Petrine witness seems to, that the transgression in view is not marriage in the ordinary sense but a boundary-crossing collapse of created order, for which “neither marry nor are given in marriage” describes the angels' proper state rather than foreclosing the possibility of their falling from it.
What stays open
The morphology is not, by itself, decisive proof of any single antecedent — it is decisive only against the feminine cities-as-antecedent reading. That much is secure Greek grammar, not interpretive preference.
Everything past that point — whether τούτοις reaches to the angels of v. 6, or is read more loosely as pointing to a general class of transgressors implied but not named — is exegetical judgment, weighed against Jude's use of 1 Enoch, the Petrine parallel, and one's prior commitments about Matthew 22:30.
Calvin's Sethite reading of Genesis 6:2 has its own long pedigree (Augustine among the fathers), and does not stand or fall on Jude 7 alone — but Jude 7 is the passage most often brought forward to unsettle it.