Nephilim

Deuteronomy pauses, in the middle of a war report, to mention a bed. It was made of iron, nine cubits long and four across by the ordinary cubit, and it was kept at Rabbah of the Ammonites where anyone passing could go and look at it. It had belonged to Og king of Bashan, the last of the Rephaim, who was already generations dead when the sentence was written down. That aside is the closest the Hebrew Bible comes to producing evidence for its giants. Not a description. A piece of furniture too big for a man, and a note saying where to find it.

Everything else rests on four verses at the head of the Flood story, and those verses sit there like a door left open. People multiplied, daughters were born, the sons of God saw that the women were good and took whichever ones they chose. A limit of a hundred and twenty years was set on human life. And then: the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore them children, and those were the mighty men of old, the men of renown. The Hebrew never quite says the Nephilim are the children. It says they were around while it happened. The grammar leaves a gap wide enough to have swallowed two thousand years of argument, and the phrase and also afterward leaves a second one, because if they were still on the earth later, the Flood did not finish them.

The name will not settle either. The obvious root is nafal, to fall, which gives the fallen ones, though the form is awkward and the word Hebrew ought to have produced looks different. A close Aramaic noun, naphila, simply means giant, and Ronald Hendel is among those who argue that the Hebrew preserves a wider Semitic word for giants rather than a pun about falling. The ancient translators felt no difficulty at all. The Septuagint, the Vulgate and the Samaritan Pentateuch all say gigantes, giants, and most English Bibles have followed them, which flattens whatever strangeness the word once carried into a question of height. There may be one further sighting. Ezekiel 32:27 puts fallen warriors in Sheol with their swords laid under their heads, and the consonants there can be read as nophlim, fallen, or repointed as nephilim. Hendel takes it as a deliberate reference back to Genesis. Others call the change unnecessary. It is a possible echo, not a third clear use of the name.

The one unambiguous return is a report from frightened men. Twelve scouts went up from the wilderness of Paran and came back after forty days carrying a branch with a single cluster of grapes so heavy that two of them slung it on a pole between their shoulders, with pomegranates and figs besides. At Hebron they had seen Ahiman, Sheshai and Talmai, the children of Anak. Ten of the twelve told the assembly that the land ate its own inhabitants, that everyone in it was of great stature, and that they had seen the Nephilim there. Then the sentence that stuck: we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight. That is a soldier’s confession rather than a measurement, and it remains the most vivid thing the Hebrew Bible says about them.

Those tall peoples reappear under other names, and the naming is the interesting part. Deuteronomy notes that the nation Moab called the Emim and the nation Ammon called the Zamzummim were both reckoned Rephaim, as tall as the Anakim. One vanished population, three labels, each supplied by whoever moved onto the land afterwards. Nobody in these passages is describing a face. They are describing a rumour that came with the ground.

So who were the sons of God? The oldest answer, and the one the Second Temple writers took as obvious, is that they were heavenly beings who abandoned their station. By the third century a rival reading existed: Julius Africanus, in his Chronographiae, made them the righteous line of Seth marrying into the wicked line of Cain, a moral collapse rather than a biological one. Augustine argued the same case at length in the City of God and had to deal with the objection that the children came out giants. His answer was that giants get born anyway, and he had seen one. A woman at Rome, in the years before the Goths took the city, overtopped everyone around her though both her parents were of ordinary height, and crowds came in from all quarters to stare at her. Jewish readers had a third option, and one of them held it fiercely: Genesis Rabbah records that Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai rendered the phrase as sons of judges and cursed anybody who translated it as sons of God.

The angelic reading is the one that produced literature. In the Book of the Watchers, the oldest section of 1 Enoch, two hundred of them descend in the days of Jared onto the summit of Mount Hermon and bind themselves there by a mutual oath, which the text notes is how the mountain got its name. Their leader is Semyaza. What they carry down is as ruinous as what they father. Azazel teaches the making of swords and knives and shields and breastplates, the working of metals, bracelets and costly stones, antimony and the beautifying of eyelids. Semyaza teaches enchantments and root-cutting, Baraqijal astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezeqeel the knowledge of the clouds, Sariel the course of the moon. Heaven’s technical secrets arrive on earth in the same season as heaven’s children.

Then the giants. Their height in the Ethiopic text of 1 Enoch is three thousand ells; the Greek says three hundred cubits, and the standard modern commentary prefers the smaller figure, on the reasonable ground that the larger one stops being a monster and becomes terrain. Either way the problem is appetite. They eat everything people can grow, and when people can no longer sustain them they eat the people. Then the birds, the beasts, the creeping things and the fish. Then one another, and the blood. There was not enough world to feed them. In the next line the earth itself lays a formal accusation against the lawless ones, and the machinery of judgment starts to turn.

Jubilees keeps the story and files it into a ladder. There the Watchers beget the Naphidim, the offspring come out all unlike one another, and they devour each other in strict order: the giants slew the Naphil, and the Naphil slew the Eljo, and the Eljo mankind, and one man another. Three grades of the half divine, each feeding on the grade beneath it, with humanity at the bottom of the list. Jubilees counts this among the reasons the Flood was sent.

The strangest surviving branch is the Book of Giants, ten fragmentary Aramaic manuscripts from the Qumran caves and a scatter of Manichaean translations that travelled as far as Turfan. It gives the giants names and bad nights. Ohyah and Hahyah are sons of Shemihazah, Mahaway is the son of Baraq’el, and enrolled among them without any explanation are Gilgamesh and Hobabish, the latter being the Mesopotamian monster Humbaba worn down by a few centuries of retelling. They dream, and cannot read what they dream. One of them sees a garden with trees standing in rows, two hundred of them, and watches the trees pulled out of the ground. They send Mahaway flying to Enoch for an interpretation, and he comes back with tablets: the trees are the Watchers, and the giants will see the destruction of their own children. In the Manichaean telling Ohyah kills Leviathan and is then killed by the angel Raphael.

The judgment, when it comes, is handled like paperwork. Gabriel is sent to set the children of the Watchers against each other so that they destroy one another in battle, since length of days they shall not have, and no petition from their fathers is to be granted, though the fathers had hoped each son would live five hundred years. Azazel is bound hand and foot and thrown into an opening in the desert at Dudael, with rough and jagged rocks laid over him and his face covered so that he cannot see light. Semyaza is bound for seventy generations, and made to watch his sons kill each other first. Then the water.

What survives the water is the part that mattered most to everyone afterwards. Because the giants were made of spirit and flesh together, 1 Enoch says, evil spirits came out of their bodies when the bodies were destroyed, and those spirits stayed here: they afflict, oppress, attack and work destruction, and they take no food but hunger and thirst all the same. That is where the demons of later Jewish and Christian thought come from. Jubilees supplies an ending with a shrug in it. Noah prays to be rid of them, God orders the lot of them bound, and Mastema, chief of the spirits, asks that some be left to him because otherwise he cannot do his work. A tenth are left. Noah is taught every medicine against their diseases by way of compensation, and writes it all down in a book for his son Shem.

Through all of it nobody describes them. There is no face in the record, no colouring, no account of what a Nephil’s hand looked like closing on a roof beam. The texts give scale and they give effect: the grasshopper feeling, the bed nobody could fill, a height that had to be written in thousands to land. They are described the way anything is described by the people it frightened. Modern giants have been added since, and they are modern. The photographs of vast skeletons that circulate under the name are composites, and the reading that turns the Nephilim into extraterrestrial colonists comes from Zecharia Sitchin’s The 12th Planet in 1976, which welded them to the Sumerian Anunnaki on translations Assyriologists reject.

Their power was never a technique or a trick. It was inheritance: the strength of heaven poured into a body that could bleed, with none of heaven’s patience attached. They took what they wanted because for a while nothing on earth could refuse them, and the crafts their fathers had taught armed the rest of humanity for them. Their weakness is in the same sentence. A creature half divine and half mortal is a seam under strain, and the strain is what opens. Being born, they could die. Being hungry past the point where food exists, they turned on each other, which is exactly what the sentence against them relied on: they did not have to be beaten so much as pointed inward. The Flood only finished the job. And Genesis, having said they were on the earth afterward as well, declines to explain how.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Nephilim?

The Nephilim are giants named in Genesis 6:4, who were on the earth before the Flood in the days when the sons of God took human wives. The same passage calls them the mighty men of old, the men of renown. Later Jewish writings, above all 1 Enoch and Jubilees, treat them as the direct offspring of that union and make their violence one of the reasons the Flood was sent.

Who were the “sons of God” who fathered the Nephilim?

Three answers have competed since antiquity. The oldest, and the one behind 1 Enoch and the Book of Giants, is that they were heavenly beings, the Watchers, who left their station and came down to Mount Hermon. Julius Africanus and later Augustine argued instead that they were the righteous descendants of Seth marrying into the line of Cain, while Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai in Genesis Rabbah read the phrase as sons of judges and cursed anyone who took it literally.

How tall were the Nephilim?

The Hebrew Bible never gives a figure. It gives an impression: the scouts who saw their descendants in Canaan said they felt like grasshoppers beside them, and Og king of Bashan is remembered by an iron bed nine cubits long. The enormous numbers come from 1 Enoch, where the Ethiopic text makes the giants three thousand ells tall and the Greek three hundred cubits, and modern commentators generally prefer the smaller reading.

Did the Nephilim survive the Flood?

Genesis 6:4 says the Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, and Numbers 13:33 has the Israelite scouts seeing them among the children of Anak in Canaan, long after the Flood. The texts never resolve the contradiction. The tradition handles it by treating the later giant peoples of Canaan, the Anakim, the Rephaim, the Emim and the Zamzummim, as their heirs rather than as survivors.

Why do people say the Nephilim were aliens?

That reading is modern and traceable. Zecharia Sitchin’s The 12th Planet, published in 1976, identified the Nephilim with the Sumerian Anunnaki and presented them as visitors from another planet, a case built on translations that Assyriologists reject. No ancient source makes the Nephilim extraterrestrial, and the photographs of giant skeletons that circulate alongside the claim are composites.

Related Entries

Grigori, Azazel, Anak, Zamzummim, Og, Noah, Leviathan, Demons, Satan, Sheol, Gilgamesh, Humbaba, Giant, Gigantes, Jötunn