“In those days, when the sons of the gods had intercourse with the daughters of men and got children by them, the Nephilim were on earth.  They were the heroes of old, men of renown” (Gen 6:4 NEB).

“One of the most amazing facts revealed by paleontology (the study of fossilized remains of creatures which inhabited the earth in a former age) is that nearly all modern animals were once represented by larger ancestors.  One thinks of the mammoths and cave bears, giant cockroaches and dragonflies, and huge reptiles like the dinosaurs.  Along with them are occasionally found giant human footprints, suggesting indeed that ‘there were giants in the earth in those days’.  Not only in the Bible, but in numerous other ancient books, are preserved traditions of giants….The children of the unions of the demonically controlled men and women of this period are the ones said to have become the ‘giants’, the mighty men of old” (Morris, H. 1976, p. 172).

Introduction

The Apostle Peter, and Jude the brother of James, give us a glimpse of a mysterious prison in which angels are incarcerated.  These angels must have sinned in a particularly grievous manner because their punishment happened in ancient times, and would not wait until the judgment of all things at the end of time.  What could this sin be that God wouldn’t wait until the appointed time of the Day of Judgment, and which provoked him to immediate and severe action? 

The Sin revealed

Peter wrote: “For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment ….” (2 Pet 2:4).  He goes on to describe other acts which offended God so deeply that he drowned the whole world in a universal deluge not long, relatively speaking, after he had created it: “He did not spare the world of old…but brought the deluge upon that world of godless men.  The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah God burned to ashes, and condemned them to total destruction, making them an object-lesson for godless men in future days….and reserve the wicked under punishment until the day of judgment to be punished…Above all he will punish those who follow t3heir abominable lusts” (2 Pet 2:5-10 NEB).

Peter gives us a hint, a partial revelation, as to what the sin was; it was some kind of indulgence of the flesh in depraved lust (v 9).  The judgment of the Flood on the corrupt world destroyed every living thing except Noah and his family (eight people) because of Noah’s righteousness (v 5). 

But this isn’t the half of it.  Jude reiterates what Peter said, but reveals clearly what the sin of these angels was which hastened their punishment: “Remember too the angels, how some of them were not content to keep the dominion given to them but abandoned their proper home; God has reserved them for judgment on the great Day, bound beneath the darkness in everlasting chains” (Jude 6).

The sin of these angels was that they didn’t remain in their proper domain, their own abode.  These can only be the angels in Genesis 6:4, described there as sons of the gods (see Ps 82:1). 

Some objections

It is objected by some that a spiritual being can neither conceive nor impregnate.  And they “prove” it from scripture, even from Jesus’ words when he talked about the resurrection of believers: “At the resurrection men and women do not marry; they are like angels God in heaven” (Matt 22:30).  Their objection is that angels in heaven don’t marry, presumably because they are sexless; that angels are incapable of marrying and of impregnating either another angel or a human female.  There are problems with this objection:

• Jesus didn’t say that angels can’t marry, only that they don’t.  And only the angels in heaven.  Consider also that angels ought not to be able to consume food and drink and digest it, but they did (Gen 18:8).
• The passage in Genesis 6:4 says that the fallen angels on earth (sons of the gods) did marry and impregnated human women (6:2, 4).  They thus left “their proper domain”. Their progeny were giants, beings called both Nephilim and giants in scripture: “They were the heroes of old, men of renown” (Gen 6:4). 
• We can identify some of these Nephilim as historical beings – Goliath of Gath (1 Sam 17:23), a warrior who was 10 feet tall; four giants named and killed by some of David’s “mighty men” – Ishbibenob, Saph or Sippai, and two unnamed giants, all of whom were sons of “the giant” i.e.  Rapha (KJV margin v. 16); and Lahmi, the brother of Goliath the Gittite (1 Chron 20:5). And King Og, last of the descendants of the Rephaim, a family of the Nephilim, whose bed was 14 feet six inches long and 6 feet wide (Deut 3:11; Num 21:33-35).
• There were whole nations of giants in Canaan before the Israelites conquered the land and destroyed them (Num 13:33; Deut 2:10-11; Deut 2:20-21; and Josh 11:21-22).
• There were likely other nations of giants that aren’t clearly specified as such.
• The bible takes pains to identify Samson’s parents as being human, and that his prodigious strength was due to the power of the Spirit of God, thus ruling him out as of the Nephilim.

Sons of Seth?

The popular belief among many conservative Christians is that the sons of God were the children of Seth and the daughters of human beings were the children of Cain, an idea proposed by Julius Africanus (160-240 CE).  But apart from the fact that there is no scripture to directly support this view, that the whole line of godly men married the whole line of ungodly women, or that the men of the godly line of Seth only married women from the ungodly line of Cain, is preposterous.  Adam and Eve had other sons and daughters who also had sons and daughters so why didn’t the “godly” men of Seth marry at least some women from these other lines – especially when there were likely to be godly women amongst them.  It is as unlikely that every man of Seth was godly and every woman of Cain was ungodly as that every person who goes to church today is godly and every person who doesn’t go to church is ungodly.

And where do people get the idea that the whole line of Seth was godly anyway?  And why does the text say that they married human women?  Why would anyone say that if the men of Seth were also human?  It only makes sense to identify the women as human if the sons of God were not human. 

As far as scripture is concerned, all of humanity has been born in sin from the time of the fall of Adam and Eve (Rom 5:12, 15-19; Eph 2:1-9; Ps 51:5; Rom 3:9-18).  And all who are saved are saved by grace.  Even Seth was born with a sinful, fallen, nature”(Gen 5:3).  And every human being who has been born since that time, and every human being yet to be born, is born with a sinful nature, just like our father, Adam.  We are all conceived in sin (Ps 51:5); we are all enemies of God from our conception (Eph 2:1-9).  So the sons of Seth were also born as enemies of God – but for some of them, as with all of humanity, God intervened and saved them (Eph 2:4-9).  And although the text doesn’t specify, God would most certainly have saved other descendants of Adam and Cain.

Divine kings

Another proposal is that the sons of the gods were kings, and that they took whatever women they liked.  There are several examples of this in the Old Testament and it was a well-known practice of kings throughout the ancient world, so why would Moses point out that these imagined kings chose out of the daughters of Cain those whom they preferred and married them?  If this was a common practice, why focus on it in this passage as if it was unusual?

But these kings, so the theory goes, were divine, as were all kings of the time – they were all sons of God or gods.  But in reality, it was only the kings of Egypt that were the sons of God, specifically of Ra, and were thus gods on earth.  The Mesopotamian kings had kingship given to them by the gods and were not literally or inherently divine sons of God or regarded as such.

The gods

Besides, the passage does not say that they were kings, even though called sons of the gods.  Moses tells us that God put each nation under the authority of a “son of God” or angel or heavenly being.  He writes: “When the Most High parcelled out the nations, when he laid down the boundaries of every people, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For the Lord’s portion is his people according to the number of the sons of God; but the LORD’s  share  was his own people, Jacob was his allotted portion” (Deut 32:8-9). 

Furthermore, the prophet Daniel tells us of the angel Gabriel who was delayed in bringing God’s answer to Daniel’s prayer.  He explains: “But the angel prince of the kingdom of Persia resisted me for twenty-one days, and then, seeing that I had held out there, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me against the prince of the kingdom of Persia” (Dan 10:13).  The apostle Paul warns Christians: “…our fight is not against humans, but against cosmic powers, against the authorities and potentates of this dark world, against the superhuman forces of evil in the heavens” (Eph 6:12).

Presumably, these heavenly beings were the gods of the ancient world (Ps 82:1, 6-7).  There are other such mentions of “divine councils”, e.g. Job 1:6 and 2:1 and 1 Kings 22:19-22.

The wickedness of sexual relations between angels and human women

Besides, the fact that giants were born of these perverted unions tells us that this was a monstrous aberration, an abomination, something that is corrupt and totally unnatural, so much so that it is singled out for mention in scripture.  “Now God saw that the whole world was corrupt and full of violence.  In his sight the world had become corrupted, for all men had lived corrupt lives on earth”(Gen 6:11-12).  So extensive, so widespread, so common to all, was the sinfulness on the earth, and so utterly hateful to God, that God told Noah, “The loathsomeness of all mankind has become plain to me, for through them the earth is full of violence.  I intend to destroy them, and the earth with them” (Gen 6:13).  But this one sin, the sons of the gods marrying human women and producing the vilest and most detestable progeny – monsters both in size and corruption – is the one which the Holy Spirit chose to record for all time.  It was so heinous that God would not – could not – allow it to continue.   

And in a world filled with corruption and violence, those monsters, which were intrinsically evil, were feted as heroes: “They were the heroes of old, men of renown” (Gen 6:4).  Prowess in warfare, bloodshed, and violence were regarded as desirable, and these Nephilim were universally known for such.  Ancient Greek mythology abounds with heroic characters, demigods, who were sons of gods or goddesses and humans, and who performed incredible deeds, fought and killed fierce and hideous monsters; heroes in the pagan mind, such as Heracles, son of Zeus; Theseus, son of Poseidon; Perseus, son of Zeus; Achilles, son of Thetis, a sea goddess; Jason, great-grandson of Hermes; to name a few.  Likewise, fierce monsters like the hydra, the gigantic Cyclops, the gorgons, the Minotaur, and other hideous creatures, all dangerous and hostile, were born of gods and humans.  These characters, although mythical, no doubt have their origins in the stories of the Nephilim, who were likewise demigods and “mighty men of renown”. 

The Nephilim

The belief that the sons of God described in Genesis were angels or heavenly beings was common among the Church Fathers, partly because they used the Septuagint as their bible; it has the reading “angels” for “sons of God”. The term “sons of God” in the text can only mean “angels of God”, or spiritual beings of some sort, because every other time it is used in the Old Testament, it refers to angelic or spiritual or heavenly beings. 

The early Church also included the apocrypha as canonical Scripture, and there are several references to the giants therein.  One example is that found in Ecclesiasticus (Wisdom of Sirach): “There was no pardon for the giants of old, who revolted in their strength” (Sir 16:8 NEB).  Another is: “There in ancient times the giants were born, a famous race, great in stature, skilled in war.  But these men were not chosen by God, nor shown the way of knowledge.  So their race died out because they had no understanding; they lacked the wit to survive” (Baruch 3:26 NEB).  Again: “Even in the beginning, when the proud race of giants was being brought to an end, the hope of the world [Noah] escaped on a raft and, piloted by thy hand, bequeathed to the world new breed of men”(Wisdom of Solomon 14:6 NEB).  These books, whether one regards them as scripture or not, reflect the understanding of pre-Christian Jews, and therefore should not be dismissed.

The Book of Enoch

Then there is the non-canonical “The Book of Enoch”, from which much information about the “sons of God” is gleaned – how much of this information is true I don’t know but it is the major source, after the bible, from which most authors get their ideas about the Nephilim.  The Book of Enoch has canonical status in the Ethiopian church and some branches of Eastern Orthodoxy. 

The physical size of the giants

The stature of the Nephilim was truly intimidating.  Goliath (and probably, his brothers) was about 10 feet tall; and King Og’s bed was 14 feet 6 inches wide.   And in Numbers, when Moses sent the twelve men to spy out the land as a preparation for invasion, they returned in terror, saying, “All the people we saw there are men of gigantic size.  When we set eyes on the Nephilim (the sons of Anak belong to the Nephilim) we felt no bigger than grasshoppers; and that is how we looked to them” (Num 13:33).  Several other references in Deuteronomy and Joshua also mention these same giants.

The height of the giants given in Enoch 7:2 would make them 22,500 feet tall (3000 ells ch 7:2), according to some calculations.  But while the Titans in ancient Greek mythology were said to be so tall that they could stand in the ocean and the water would only come up to their knees, and the stars get tangled in their hair, I don’t think we can equate this with the height of real giants, the Nephilim in Enoch 7:2.  The most likely explanation is that in the Ethiopic text the height given is a scribal corruption, and the Greek text is more likely to be the correct version, not specifying any height to the giants at all.

Giants in modern history and Christian folklore

Some of the genes of the various tribes and nations of the races of giants somehow survived the Flood of Genesis.  This is evidenced not only by the recorded events in the bible, such as the giants in Canaan at the time of the Hebrew conquest, but by much more recent reports, with photographs, of the discovery of giant skeletons in North America; and of the accounts of North American Indian tribes, particularly the Pawnee, of warfare between them and a race of redhead giants.  And in Central and South America the mythology, based on sightings, abounds with descriptions of giants.  These are usually treated with scorn by those who haven’t read the relevant books about them. 

’10-foot-tall people’ discovered by archaeologists in Nevada cave

Mediaeval European folklore had stories of sexual spirits which invade human beings as they slept; stories most likely based on Genesis 6:4 and some of the early Church Fathers.  These were the succubus, a female demon which seduces human males; and more pertinent to our discussion, the incubus, which is more violent, and has sex with human females.

However, this article is not about proving these accounts but simply to bring together what the bible has to say about the Nephilim.  Despite the biblical references, the response of many Christians to them is also scornful unbelief and a frantic search for more acceptable explanations because it threatens their theology; this has led to stretched explanations such as those discussed above.

Whether their survival from pre-Flood to post-Flood was because human women were once again impregnated by fallen angels after the flood; or whether they came from one or both of the two wives of Lamech, Adah and Zillah (Gen 5:17-24), who were corrupted by the fallen angels; or whether Ham, Noah’s son, married a daughter of one of these wives – none of it can be established. 

Why did the sons of the gods want to have sex with human women?

The reason is clearly stated, both in the bible and the Book of Enoch – sexual lust (Gen 6:1-2).  The Book of Enoch backs this up: “…when the children of men had multiplied in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters.  And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another, ‘Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and get us children” (Enoch 6:1-2).

Last word

Finally, there is no end to the number of Christian books which have the Nephilim returning in the last days to take part in the fictional final battle at Armageddon, at which time they will join forces with the beast and the false prophet.  One collaboration of authors, one of whom is Thomas Horn, speaks of portals to other dimensions, and Nephilim waiting on the planet Mars to take their role in the final battle at Armageddon.  One only has to go to the Amazon website and type in “Nephilim end times” to see pages of such books.  This demonstrates the looney-tunes fantasies which can be found in fundamentalist Christianity.  But there is no mention of any of this in scripture. 

According to the bible, as I showed at the beginning, the original fallen angels who copulated with human women are bound in eternal chains in fiery Tartaros forever (Jude 6); their mighty progeny, who terrorised the world of their day, are all dead. King Sihon and King Og are dead, along with their people, killed by the Israelites under Moses’ leadership. The several nations of giants mentioned in the book of Numbers are all dead, killed in the Israelite conquest under Joshua’s leadership, as described in the book of Joshua.  Goliath and his brothers and their sons are all dead, killed by King David and his mighty men, as described in the books of Samuel and Chronicles.  The giants in North America are all dead, killed by a coalition of Pawnee and other local indigenous tribes, and in the deep cave into which the last of them fled, they were smoked to death – the Pawnee made a great fire at the cave’s entrance to finish off the last of the giants once and for all.  And that cave has since been rediscovered, the walls at the entrance blackened by flames and smoke.  The fearsome giants in Middle and South America are all dead.  And the giant skeletons found and photographed in caves in the 19^th century are all dead, as is obvious in the fact that they, being now skeletons, were once living.

There are no more giants, no more Nephilim.  They are all dead, every last one of them.  And they are not coming back!  The Christian books which look for the return of the Nephilim are not only pure fiction and wishful thinking but the lunatic theology of Dispensational Premillennialism,

References

Morris, H. “The Genesis Record”, Copyright 1976 Henry M. Morris, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, USA

All scripture references in this article are taken from New English Bible with Apocrypha, Oxford University Press, New Testament 1961, Old Testament 1970, Apocrypha 1970.

The Book of Enoch 2^nd edition, Guadeloupe Baptist Theological Seminary Press edition, 1995, 2000 by Ronald K. Brown.  Originally published in 1997 by James C. Winston Publishing Company, Inc.

Succubus vs. Incubus: How They Prey on Humans in Different Ways – English Study Online