Nephilim

Nephilim, in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), a group of mysterious beings or people of unusually large size and strength who lived both before and after the Flood. The Nephilim are referenced in Genesis and Numbers and are possibly referred to in Ezekiel. The Hebrew word nefilim is sometimes directly translated as “giants” or taken to mean “the fallen ones” (from the Hebrew naphal, “to fall”), but the identity of the Nephilim is debated by scholars.

Scriptural references

The Nephilim are mentioned just before the Flood account in Genesis 6:4, which states:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.

They are mentioned again in Numbers 13:32–33 as the Israelites prepared to enter the land of Canaan:

So they brought to the Israelites an unfavorable report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land that we have gone through as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people that we saw in it are of great size. There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakites come from the Nephilim); and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

Some scholars have argued that the “fallen mighty men” in Ezekiel 32:27 is an indirect reference to the Nephilim, as the phrase in Hebrew is somewhat ambiguous. The passage is part of a description of the pit of the grave and states:

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And they do not lie with the fallen warriors of long ago who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war, whose swords were laid under their heads, and whose shields are upon their bones; for the terror of the warriors was in the land of the living.

Interpretations

Given the ambiguity of the Genesis passage, there are several interpretations about the relationship between the “sons of God” and the Nephilim. Some have understood the sons of God to be fallen angels, and the Nephilim are the offspring they produced with human women. This view was described in the First Book of Enoch, a noncanonical Jewish text, and remains a popular explanation. The First Book of Enoch also notes that the Nephilim were giants, which seems in accordance with the “people of great size” described in the Numbers passage. The apparent gigantism of the Nephilim is argued to stem from their supernatural origin, though some have countered that it is theologically problematic to suggest that angels or demons, as purely spiritual beings, could physically reproduce with humans.

A less supernatural view holds that the Nephilim were simply men who fell away from righteousness. Specifically, some theologians have held that “sons of God” is a reference to the descendants of Seth, the righteous son of Adam, and that the Nephilim were members of his bloodline who rejected God. This view, known as the Sethian view, was held by St. Augustine and other Church Fathers as well as by many Jewish theologians. The Sethian view is sometimes elaborated with the assertion that the “daughters of men” were the ungodly women of the bloodline of Cain, Adam’s murderous son. With the Nephilim as mere humans, their “great size” is variously taken literally or metaphorically, though they were undoubtedly considered great warriors.