Who were the Nephilim?

Four strange verses

Between the list of Adam’s descendants and the story of Noah, Genesis pauses for four verses that read like a fragment of an older tale. People multiply, and “God’s sons saw that men’s daughters were beautiful” (Genesis 6:2). God sets a limit on human life, one hundred twenty years. Then:

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also after that, when God’s sons came in to men’s daughters and had children with them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

That is all. The next verse turns to the wickedness that fills the earth and brings the flood. Nobody even knows what the word means. It may come from the Hebrew naphal, to fall: the fallen ones, or those who fall upon others. The Greek translators of the Septuagint, two centuries or more before Jesus, wrote gigantes, and the King James Bible followed with “There were giants in the earth in those days” (King James Version, 1611).

Who were “God’s sons”?

Everything turns on that phrase, and readers have split three ways.

• Angels. Elsewhere the Hebrew Bible uses “God’s sons” for heavenly beings, who come “to present themselves before Yahweh” (Job 1:6). The Book of the Watchers, now part of 1 Enoch and written by about 200 BC, tells the story in full: two hundred angels led by Shemihazah come down on Mount Hermon, take wives and father giants who devour the earth. Josephus (Antiquities 1.73) and many early Christian writers read Genesis this way, and 2 Peter and Jude speak of angels kept in chains for judgment (2 Peter 2:4). Jude even quotes Enoch by name. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church keeps 1 Enoch in its Bible.
• Rulers. Classical Jewish interpreters mostly read bene elohim as nobles or judges, powerful men taking whatever women they wanted. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai called them “sons of judges” and cursed anyone who called them sons of God (Genesis Rabbah 26:5).
• The line of Seth. From the 3rd century, Christian writers such as Julius Africanus, and later Augustine (City of God 15.23), saw the faithful descendants of Seth marrying the daughters of Cain’s line.

Many modern scholars add a fourth view: Genesis keeps a scrap of the old Near Eastern belief in heroes born of gods and women, like the demigods of Greek myth, and tells it in passing, on the way to the flood.

Giants in Canaan

The Nephilim appear once more, after the flood, in the mouths of frightened scouts. Ten of the twelve men Moses sent into Canaan bring back “an evil report” of huge people there.

There we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim. We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.

The text calls the report evil, and it costs that whole generation the promised land. Still, Deuteronomy remembers tall peoples called Anakim and Rephaim (Deuteronomy 2:10–11), and Joshua says some Anakim survived in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod (Joshua 11:22). Gath is the hometown of Goliath. No skeleton of a giant race has ever been found; the photos of huge bones that circulate online are edited images. Genesis leaves the Nephilim a riddle, and moves on.