Nephilim

Also Known As: the Fallen Ones; the Gibborim, the mighty men; rendered gigantes, giants, in the Septuagint
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East (ancient Israel and the Levant)
Mythos: Jewish Mythology, Christian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A race of giants born from the union of the divine sons of God and mortal women, whose strength and violence helped fill the earth with corruption before the Flood.
Role in Mythos: They are the giant offspring of a forbidden mixing of heaven and earth whose wickedness is one of the reasons God sends the deluge, and whose blood is later said to run in the giant peoples of Canaan.
Relation to Humans: Half-human by birth, they tower over humankind and prey on it, stripping its fields and, in the expanded tradition, turning at last to its flesh. Their memory alone is enough to unnerve the Israelite scouts who see their descendants holding the walled towns of the promised land.

Ten men came down out of the hill country of Canaan carrying a single cluster of grapes so heavy it had to be slung from a pole between two of them, and still their faces were grey. They had gone up to spy out the land and had seen the people who lived behind its walls. Some of those people were enormous. The scouts came back and said the thing no soldier likes to say aloud: beside those men we felt like grasshoppers, and that is how we must have looked to them. Then they named the bloodline. The giants of Canaan, they said, were the sons of Anak, who came of the Nephilim, the beings who had walked the earth before the Flood and, the account adds almost under its breath, afterward as well.

That single backward glance is nearly everything the Hebrew Bible says about them plainly. The founding passage is four verses long and famous for how little it explains. In the days when men began to multiply, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and took wives from among them as they chose, and the women bore children to them. Those children, or the age that produced them, were the Nephilim, called the mighty men of old, the men of renown. The grammar leaves a gap on purpose. It never quite says whether the Nephilim are the offspring of that union or merely the strong men who happened to be on the earth while it was going on. Readers have been falling into the gap for two thousand years.

The name itself refuses to settle. It comes, most likely, from the root that means to fall, which is why the oldest instinct is to call them the fallen ones. But the Greek translators who made the Septuagint reached instead for gigantes, giants, and that word stuck to them so firmly that in most Bibles the Nephilim simply are giants, their strangeness flattened into height. The Hebrew is stubborner than that. It is not clear who fell, or from where, or whether falling is even the right idea. What is clear is the fear the word carries. It is the name people used for a thing too big and too wrong to belong.

Who, then, were the sons of God? Three answers have competed for the passage. The oldest and eeriest holds that they were angels, heavenly beings who abandoned their station and came down for mortal women. A tamer reading makes them the godly descendants of Seth marrying into the wicked line of Cain, a mingling of the pure and the corrupt with no anatomy involved. A third takes the sons of God as human kings and rulers, tyrants who called themselves divine and bred a violent aristocracy. The book of Genesis does not choose. The Jewish writers of the centuries just before the common era chose emphatically, and they chose the angels.

Their expansion, preserved in the Book of the Watchers inside 1 Enoch, turns four cryptic verses into a full disaster. Two hundred of these Watchers, under a leader the texts call Shemhazai, look down from heaven with desire, swear an oath binding them all to the crime, and descend on the peak of Mount Hermon. They take the women. They also teach them things heaven had meant to keep back: the working of metal into swords and ornaments, the painting of eyelids, the reading of the stars, the cutting of roots, the casting of spells. From the women come the giants, and the giants are the problem the whole story has been building toward.

They are born hungry in a way the earth cannot satisfy. Enoch describes them consuming the yield of all the fields, and when that runs out the flocks and herds, and when that runs out the wild beasts and the birds and the fish, and when even that is gone they turn on one another and drink the blood. There was not enough world to feed them. In one telling the ground itself lodges a complaint against the blood soaking into it. This is the reason the Book of Jubilees gives for the deluge in almost administrative terms: the Flood came, in part, to scrub the Nephilim off the face of the earth. The Watchers who fathered them are bound in darkness to wait for judgment. Their giant sons are set against each other to die in a single generation, and the disembodied spirits that escape their ruined bodies stay behind as the evil spirits that afflict the living, which gave later readers a tidy account of where demons come from.

The physical record is thin and honest about being thin. Beyond the fact of size, the Bible gives almost no anatomy. It gives instead the effect of size: the grasshopper feeling of the scouts, the memory of a giant king whose iron bed was nine cubits long, the awe that clings to the words mighty and renown. Everything more specific belongs to the later expansions, where a scribal slip in the Ethiopic Enoch swells the giants to three hundred cubits, a height that turns them from monsters into landscape. The truth is that the Nephilim are described the way a thing is described by the people it frightened, in scale and dread rather than in feature.

Their power was simply the sum of what they were, the strength of heaven poured into a mortal frame with none of heaven’s restraint. They could take whatever they wanted and for a while nothing on earth could stop them. Their weakness was written into the same fact. A creature half divine and half human is a seam under strain, and the strain is what undoes them. Being born, they could die, and being violent, they turned that violence inward and thinned their own numbers. The water finished what their appetite began. Even the afterward the verse promises, the giants of Canaan whose descendants the scouts saw, ends the same way it started, in men falling to slings and swords. The lesson the tradition kept returning to is quiet and grim. Whatever comes of mixing what should stay apart is mighty, and briefly, and then it is gone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Nephilim?

The Nephilim are a race of giants in Jewish and Christian tradition, first named in Genesis 6:4 as beings on the earth before the great Flood. They are connected to the union of the “sons of God” with mortal women and are described as mighty warriors, “the men of renown.” Later texts identify them as the giant offspring of that union and the ancestors of the giant peoples of Canaan.

Who were the parents of the Nephilim?

According to the dominant ancient interpretation, the Nephilim were born from the “sons of God” taking human women as wives. In the Book of Enoch these “sons of God” are the Watchers, rebellious angels who descended to earth, and their children with mortal women became the giants. Other readings identify the “sons of God” as the godly line of Seth or as human rulers rather than angels.

Were the Nephilim giants?

Yes. The Greek Septuagint translated the Hebrew word as gigantes, or giants, and the Bible describes their descendants as so large that Israelite scouts felt like grasshoppers beside them. The Hebrew Bible emphasizes their great size and strength without detailed description, while the Book of Enoch exaggerates their height to enormous, impossible proportions.

Why did the Nephilim bring about the Flood?

In the Book of Jubilees, ridding the earth of the Nephilim was one of the reasons God sent the Flood. The expanded tradition in Enoch portrays the giants as insatiable, devouring crops, livestock, wild animals, and finally human beings, filling the earth with violence and corruption. The deluge destroyed them, and their fathers, the Watchers, were imprisoned to await judgment.

Are the Nephilim mentioned after the Flood?

Genesis 6:4 notes that the Nephilim were on the earth “in those days, and also afterward,” and Numbers 13:33 says the giant Anakim of Canaan descended from them. This created a long-debated puzzle, since the Flood was said to have destroyed the Nephilim. The tradition bridges the gap by treating the later giant peoples of Canaan, such as the Anakim and Rephaim, as their heirs.