Nephilim

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nephilim are figures in the Hebrew Bible whom the text names but never explains. In Numbers 13:33, ten of the Twelve Spies come back from Canaan shaken by what they saw. Of the people there, they say, "we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight." That line has fed a long tradition of giants. A second, earlier mention in Genesis is only a few lines long and leaves nearly everything unsaid. So who were the Nephilim, and what does the word actually mean? Were they towering monsters, the children of angels, or mortal warriors whose reputations grew in the retelling? The answers have changed with every language, century and community that read these few verses.

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• 2. A Name Without a Meaning

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  In 1908, the Brown-Driver-Briggs Lexicon defined Nephilim as "giants". In the same entry, it warned that every proposed origin of the word is "all very precarious". Most guesses start from the Hebrew root n-p-l, which means "fall". One argument holds that the word comes from a causative verb form. On that reading, the name means "those that cause others to fall down".

  Ronald Hendel prefers a passive reading, "ones who have fallen". He compares it to paqid, "one who is appointed", meaning a deputy or overseer. He also cites asir, "one who is bound", meaning a prisoner. Another suggestion is that the fallen are those who fell in battle, like the gibborim, the Hebrew word for mighty warriors.

  The ancient translators did not agree with one another. The Septuagint, Theodotion, the Latin Vulgate, the Samaritan Targum, Targum Onkelos and Targum Neofiti all took the word to mean giants. Symmachus translated it as "the violent ones". Aquila's version has been read two ways, either "the fallen ones" or "the ones falling upon their enemies".

  The Bible itself offers only three passages to test these guesses against.

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• 3. Three Passages

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  Genesis 6:4 is the verse on which most of the debate hangs. It reads: "The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them; the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown." The verse comes directly before the account of Noah's Ark. "Those days" were a time when the human population had begun to grow and men were becoming plentiful on the earth.

  Translators handled the word differently. The Jewish Publication Society simply writes Nephilim in English letters. The King James Version gives "giants". The grammar is also unclear on a basic point. It does not say whether the Nephilim are the sons of God themselves or the children born of the union. Richard Hess and P. W. Coxon both take them to be the offspring.

  The second passage, Numbers 13:32-33, names the Anakites, described as a Rephaite tribe, and calls them descendants of the Nephilim.

  The third passage, Ezekiel 32:17-32, refers to them only indirectly. Verse 27 has a phrase whose meaning is disputed. With the vowels added in the medieval period, it reads gibborim nophlim, "fallen warriors". Some scholars read it as gibborim nephilim, "Nephilim warriors".

  R. S. Hendel reads it as "warriors, the Nephilim", a pointer back to Genesis 6:4. In his reading, these warriors lie in Sheol, the realm of the dead, and "placed their swords beneath their heads and their shields upon their bones". B. R. Doak takes the word as the plain verb "fallen". He still sees a clear echo of the Nephilim tradition.

  That picture of warriors lying in the underworld was one of the threads the Greek translators picked up.

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• 4. How Giants Took Hold

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  The Septuagint, composed in the 3rd or 2nd century BC, rendered the Hebrew word as gigantes. In Greek mythology, the gigantes were beings of great strength and aggression, but not necessarily of great size. A strict translation of "the fallen ones" would have been peptokotes. That word does appear in the Septuagint version of Ezekiel 32:22-27, so the choice of gigantes elsewhere was deliberate.

  The translators seem to have wanted a term that would mean something to Hellenistic readers. They saw real overlap. Both groups had an ambiguous identity, part human and part divine, and both drew fascination mixed with moral contempt. Both stood for chaos and threatened gods and humans. Both were tied to the underworld, said to have come from the earth and to end up shut inside it.

  The Latin Vulgate, compiled in the 4th or 5th century AD, carried over the Greek term rather than translating the Hebrew. From there, the idea of giant children born to the sons of God spread into later medieval Bible translations.

  In the Ethiopic version of 1 Enoch, the Nephilim are "great giants, whose height was three hundred cubits". At 18 inches to the cubit, that makes them 450 feet tall. Scholars regard the figure as a translation error. The earlier Greek text instead reads, "The giants gave birth to Nephilim, and from Nephilim, 'Elioud' came out." Jubilees 7:21-22 likewise lists three races of giants, the Naphidim, the Naphil and the Eljo. The verse is therefore about three races rather than height, and John Baty followed the Greek reading in his 1839 translation of the Ethiopic text.

  The Quran has its own giants. Quran 26:130 has the prophet Hud describe the people of Ād as jabbarin, the Arabic counterpart of the Hebrew gibborim, probably a reference to the Nephilim. The tallest of them are said to have stood 100 feet high. In Islamic legend, the Flood could not drown some of them because they were too tall. God destroyed them later, after they rejected further warnings, and banished them to the lower layers of hell.

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• 5. The Watchers

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  From the 3rd century BC onward, a different story about the Nephilim appears in the Enochic literature. Echoes of it turn up in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jubilees, the Testament of Reuben, 2 Baruch, the historian Josephus and the Book of Jude. The Greek, Aramaic and main Ge'ez manuscripts of 1 Enoch and Jubilees reached the British Museum and the Vatican Library in the 19th century. They trace the Nephilim to fallen angels, and in particular to the egregoroi, the watchers.

  In 1 Enoch 7, the angels see the beautiful daughters of men and say, "Come, let us select for ourselves wives from the progeny of men, and let us beget children." Their leader is Semjaza, an angel of high rank. He fears that he alone will pay for so great a sin. The angels answer by swearing a shared oath. Two hundred of them descend in the days of Jared onto the summit of Mount Hermon. They named it Hermon because of the oath they swore there.

  Some readers believe these angels were cast into Tartarus, a place of "total darkness", citing 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 1:6. Jubilees 7:21-25 says that ridding the Earth of the Nephilim was one of God's purposes in sending the Flood. One interpretation holds that God let ten percent of their disembodied spirits remain afterward as demons, to lead humanity astray until the final Judgment. Michael Heiser, an Old Testament scholar, argues in his book The Unseen Realm that these spirits became what tradition calls demons or unclean spirits. Jude 14-15 quotes 1 Enoch 1:9, which to most commentators shows that its author accepted the Enochic reading of Genesis 6.

  The case for angels also rests on the text. In Job 1:6 and 2:1, the phrase "sons of God" clearly refers to angels. The Codex Alexandrinus version of Genesis 6:2 reads "the angels of God", while Codex Vaticanus keeps "sons". Tertullian and especially Lactantius shared the view. The earliest commentary to say outright that angelic beings mated with humans is the rabbinical Targum Pseudo-Jonathan.

  Objections came from Jesus's remark that angels do not marry. Others answered that he also compared angels to men, and that angels are never explicitly said to be unable to marry. Arab pagans told their own version. According to Al-Jahiz, a common belief held that Abu Jurhum, ancestor of the Jurhum tribe, was the son of a disobedient angel and a human woman.

  One ancient and widely held rival reading removes the angels altogether.

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• 6. Sons of Seth

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  Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, in the 2nd century AD, pronounced a curse on anyone who taught that angels fathered the Nephilim. Orthodox Judaism has taken the same stance, and Rashi and Nachmanides followed him. The alternative reading appears in Jewish and Christian sources from the 2nd century AD onward, including Augustine of Hippo, Sextus Julius Africanus and letters attributed to St. Clement. In it, the sons of God are the formerly righteous descendants of Seth, who rebelled against God. The daughters of men are the descendants of Cain, and the Nephilim are their children.

  Several ancient translations support a human reading of the phrase. Targum Onkelos, Symmachus and the Samaritan Targum read "sons of the rulers". Targum Neophyti reads "sons of the judges". Pseudo-Philo, in Biblical Antiquities 3:1-3, may also imply that the sons of God were human. Holders of the view point to Jesus's statement that people before the Flood were "marrying and giving in marriage".

  Augustine, John Chrysostom and John Calvin took this line. They read "angels" as referring to men of Seth's lineage, called sons of God probably because of their earlier covenant with Yahweh. In their account, these men turned to bodily interests and took wives from Cain's line, or from any people who did not worship God.

  The Ethiopian Orthodox Church holds the same view, supported by its own Ge'ez manuscripts and the Amharic Haile Selassie Bible. Its canon counts 1 Enoch and Jubilees as scripture, though they differ from the Western academic editions. In its Amharic text of Henok, the offspring of Seth "upon the Holy Mount" see the daughters of Cain and decide to choose wives from among them.

  The 3rd-century Cave of Treasures and the Ge'ez work The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan, from about the 6th century, tell the same story. The Conflict says outright that the old claim of angels mingling with women is mistaken, because angels are spirits. In its telling, the children of Seth lived high on a mountain, kept their innocence like angels, and so were called "angels of God". When they mingled with Cain's descendants, ill-informed people said that angels had come down.

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• 7. Roots of the Legend

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  The archaeologist G. E. Wright traces the Nephilim as giants to something the Hebrews could actually see. He points to the megalithic structures in Transjordan and the cyclopean masonry walls of Canaanite cities, some of them 18 feet thick. He also notes that the Canaanites were relatively short, both before and after 3000 BC, and that nothing of abnormal size has been found.

  Brian R. Doak, a professor of the Bible, thinks the lore is a polemic against the tropes of epic and heroism. J. C. Greenfield finds its roots in "the negative aspects of the Apkallu tradition" of Sumerian mythology. The Apkallu were seven ancient culture heroes, praised for exceptional wisdom, and some were called "the son of Ea". Brand and colleagues argued in 2023 that the Nephilim were elite or royal warriors from legendary antiquity. On that view, they need not have had unusual height or divine parents, and those in Numbers 13-14 were native warriors of pre-Israelite Canaan.

  The Egyptian Execration texts of the Middle Kingdom, dated 2055-1650 BC, name the Anakites, who are linked to the Nephilim, as one of Egypt's political enemies in Canaan. Other biblical writings touch on the same world. Related terms or ideas appear in Judith 16:6, Sirach 16:7, Baruch 3:26-28 and Wisdom 14:6.

  In Aramaic culture, the word nephilim sometimes referred to the offspring of Orion in mythology. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon calls that origin dubious. In the meantime, people kept looking for actual bones.

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• 8. Bones and Fiction

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  In 1577, large bones found near Lucerne were read as the remains of an antediluvian giant about 19 feet tall. In 1786, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach showed they came from a mammoth. In 1705, Cotton Mather decided that fossil leg bones and teeth found near Albany, New York, belonged to Nephilim killed in a great flood. Paleontologists have since identified them as mastodon remains. In 1869 came the Cardiff Giant, supposedly discovered in Cardiff, New York. It was a hoax meant to fool believers in the Nephilim.

  The name has since moved into popular culture. In his best-selling Chariots of the Gods (1968), Erich von Daniken claimed the Nephilim were "skyfallers" from higher dimensions. The gothic rock band Fields of the Nephilim takes its name from them. Cassandra Clare's Shadowhunter Chronicles, Becca Fitzpatrick's Hush, Hush series and Madeleine L'Engle's Many Waters all draw on the idea. So do the television series The X-Files, Hex and Supernatural.

  Video games have reshaped the Nephilim. In Darksiders, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are Nephilim, created by a union of angels and demons. In DmC: Devil May Cry (2013), the brothers Dante and Vergil are called Nephilim, the sons of the demon Sparda and the angel Eva. Diablo 3 gives the name Nephalem to the first humans on Sanctuary.

  Indiana Jones and the Great Circle carries the idea into a secret order inside the Vatican. Its members are giants said to descend from the Nephilim.

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