Nephilim- Hebrew/Jewish RaceRace"Heroes of Old"

The Sons of God and the Daughters of Men

Genesis preserves the Nephilim's origin in a passage that reads like a fragment of a larger myth: "When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose... The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown."

The Hebrew word nephilim derives from the root n-p-l, "to fall." The fallen ones, whether fallen from heaven or fallen upon the earth in violence. The "sons of God" (bene elohim), a phrase used for angels elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (Job 1:6, 38:7), crossed the boundary between heaven and earth by taking mortal wives. Their children were giants. The Septuagint translated nephilim as gigantes. The identification with giants shaped all later tradition.

Genesis 6:5 follows immediately: "The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." The Flood was God's response.

The Descent of the Watchers

The Book of Enoch provides the fullest account of the Nephilim's origin. According to 1 Enoch 6-11, two hundred angels led by Semyaza descended to Mount Hermon, bound by mutual oath to take human wives. They did so, and their wives bore giants three hundred cubits tall.

The giants consumed all human produce, then began to devour humans themselves, and finally one another. They drank blood and filled the earth with violence. Meanwhile, the angels taught humanity forbidden knowledge: Azazel taught the making of weapons and the arts of cosmetics; others taught sorcery and enchantments. The corruption became so extreme that the earth itself cried out.

God commissioned the archangels to intervene. Raphael bound Azazel in the desert of Dudael, covering him with rocks to await final judgment. Gabriel stirred the giants to destroy each other in civil war. Michael bound the leaders of the Watchers in valleys of the earth until the great day of judgment. The Flood was sent to cleanse what remained.

The Book of Giants

Fragments of the Book of Giants, recovered from the caves at Qumran, preserve traditions about the Nephilim that predate and supplement 1 Enoch. The text names individual giants, Ohyah and Hahyah, sons of Semyaza, and gives them voices and dreams of their own. Ohyah dreamed of a great tablet submerged in water, with all the writing washed away except three names: a vision of the Flood that would spare only Noah's family. Hahyah dreamed of a garden with great trees uprooted and cast into water.

The giants consulted Enoch, the one human who moved between heaven and earth, to interpret their dreams. Enoch confirmed their fears: God had decreed their destruction.

The Spirits That Remained

When the giants' physical bodies perished in the Flood and the violence that preceded it, their spirits did not die. According to 1 Enoch, these disembodied spirits became the demons that continue to afflict humanity. They emerged from the giants' corpses as evil spirits, roaming the earth and leading humanity into sin. Because they were born of heavenly fathers and earthly mothers, their spirits belonged fully to neither realm: barred from heaven and unable to rest in the earth, they wandered until the final judgment.

The Nephilim in Jubilees

The Book of Jubilees preserves its own account of the Watchers and their offspring. In Jubilees, the angels were originally sent to earth to instruct humanity in justice, but they were corrupted by desire for mortal women and fell into transgression. Their giant children turned to mutual slaughter until God sent the Flood.

After the Flood, Noah prayed that all the evil spirits be imprisoned so they could no longer lead his descendants astray. But the chief of the spirits, Mastema, petitioned God: "Lord, Creator, let some of them remain before me, and let them hearken to my voice." God granted his request, binding nine-tenths but releasing one-tenth to serve under Mastema as instruments of testing and temptation until the day of judgment.

The Terror at Canaan's Gate

The Nephilim's most consequential appearance after the Flood came in the scouts' report from Canaan. Moses sent twelve men to survey the promised land; they returned bearing a single cluster of grapes so large that two men carried it on a pole. But ten of the twelve delivered a terrifying report: "The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them."

The people wept all night and demanded to return to Egypt. Only Caleb and Joshua dissented, insisting that God was greater than any giant. But the congregation threatened to stone them. God decreed that the entire generation, except Caleb and Joshua, would die in the wilderness, wandering forty years until the last of the fearful had perished.

The Giants of the Land

The biblical tradition connects the Nephilim to several named races of giants inhabiting Canaan and its surroundings. The Anakim, descendants of Anak, dwelt in Hebron and were so tall the scouts felt like insects before them. The Rephaim, whose name may mean "shades," inhabited Transjordan and were associated with the dead. The Valley of Rephaim near Jerusalem preserved their memory in the landscape itself.

Og king of Bashan, the last of the Rephaim, ruled sixty fortified cities. His iron bedstead, preserved in Rabbah of the Ammonites, measured nine cubits by four: over thirteen feet long. Deuteronomy records the systematic defeat of these peoples, and Joshua notes that while the Anakim were cut off from the hill country, "in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod some remained," placing the surviving giants in Philistine territory and connecting them to the later tradition of Goliath from Gath.

Nephilim in Rabbinic Tradition

Rabbinic literature preserves multiple traditions about the Nephilim. The Babylonian Talmud discusses Azazel in the context of the Yom Kippur scapegoat ritual, connecting the desert ceremony to the imprisoned Watcher. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan identifies the Nephilim with Shamhazai and Azael. Genesis Rabbah records the opinion that the "sons of God" were sons of judges (elohim as a title for judges, as in Exodus 21:6), offering a human rather than angelic reading of the primordial transgression.

Midrashic sources describe the Nephilim's enormous appetite, consuming a thousand camels and a thousand oxen daily, and their insatiable violence that left God no choice but the Flood. Rashi interpreted the name simply as "fallen ones" who fell and caused the world to fall. Nachmanides accepted the angelic reading, arguing that the bene elohim were heavenly beings who materialized in physical form.