The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim

by Scott Alan Roberts

  Watcher Psych 101

  The Book of Enoch is more of an accurate record of how the Watchers were perceived within a framework of antediluvian worship of God than it is a reflection of who the Watchers really were or what they really did. In these accounts of the “fallen” caste of Watchers, we are given very little insight as to what their intent was, or into their personalities or their motivations. We only know that they lusted, sought out, and carried through with a plan that they were convinced was something they should carry out, but that would also bring down the wrath of God on their heads. This is why Shamyaza was second-guessing his decision, and why he looked pleadingly to the others of his kind to bolster him in his decision. They, in response, joined in with him and set the pact in concrete. Their devilish intent and malicious bloodplay are ascribed later by scholars and researchers who parse the texts with ecclesiastical intent, or who are merely disingenuous with the context when it falls outside their theological or denominational beliefs. Never once in the passages about the Watchers does it say they descended with intent to thwart the bloodlines of the coming Messiah, but that very sin has been ascribed to them by later interpreters of the text. It is axiomatic that people have an innate fear and mistrust of those whom they perceive as knowing more than they do, and most certainly of those who wield a greater power over them. It is also a given (just ask Machiavelli) that people fear, resist, and rise against any brand of change that accompanies new knowledge and new ideas. This is precisely what the Watchers brought to the ancients—change, revolutionary and evolutionary concepts, and knowledge; the sweet, fruity filling of forbidden knowledge baked within the pie crust of taboo and prohibition.

  But the corruption seems to go far beyond the mere transmission of knowledge and wisdom. The offspring of the Watchers were guilty of grievous crimes against mankind that Enoch equates to the “whole earth being filled with blood,” and the souls of those who perished at their hands crying in some dreadful ghostly complaint to gain the attentions—if not the vengence—of God.

  “5 Thou hast seen what Azazyel has done, how he has taught every species of iniquity upon earth, and has disclosed to the world all the secret things which are done in the heavens. 6 Shamyaza also has taught sorcery, to whom thou hast given authority over those who are associated with him. They have gone together to the daughters of men; have lain with them; have become polluted; 7 And have discovered crimes to them. 8 The women likewise have brought forth giants. 9 Thus has the whole earth been filled with blood and with iniquity.

  10 And now behold the souls of those who are dead, cry out.

  11 And complain even to the gate of heaven.

  12 Their groaning ascends; nor can they escape from the unrighteousness which is committed on earth. Thou knowest all things, before they exist. 13 Thou knowest these things, and what has been done by them; yet thou dost not speak to us. 14 What on account of these things ought we to do to them?”

  (1 Enoch 9:5-14)

  Naturalness of awareness is synonymous with wisdom—true wisdom. And true wisdom holds a true power, not to oppress or manipulate, but to enlighten and illuminate; it’s a power that is innate in every single being. In ancient times, however, wisdom was synonymous with power, and power especially for those who did not possess it was more often than not perceived to be synonymous with oppression.4 Indeed, the Nephilim were accused of such when it was written:

  “12 All the earth has been corrupted by the effects of the teaching of Azazyel. To him therefore ascribe the whole crime. 13 To Gabriel also the Lord said, Go to the biters, to the repro- bates, to the children of fornication; and destroy the children of fornication, the offspring of the Watchers, from among men; bring them forth, and excite them one against another. Let them perish by mutual slaughter; for length of days shall not be theirs…. 18 ‘Destroy all the souls addicted to dalliance, and the offspring of the Watchers, for they have tyrannized over mankind. 19 Let every oppressor perish from the face of the earth; 20 Let every evil work be destroyed…’”

  (1 Enoch 10:12-13, 18-20)

  As is common in apocalyptic Jewish texts, as well as mythological tales from around the world, the oppressors in the tales are ascribed attributes of enormously epic proportion. In the Book of Enoch, the offspring of the Watchers, the Nephilim, are described as a race of giants who committed acts against both mankind and nature to monstrous, mythic degrees:

  “11 Then they took wives, each choosing for himself; whom they began to approach, and with whom they cohabited; teaching them sorcery, incantations, and the dividing of roots and trees. 11 And the women conceiving brought forth giants, 12 Whose stature was each three hundred cubits. These devoured all which the labor of men produced; until it became impossible to feed them; 13 When they turned themselves against men, in order to devour them; 14 And began to injure birds, beasts, reptiles, and fishes, to eat their flesh one after another, and to drink their blood.”

  (1 Enoch 7:11-14)

  They consumed birds and fish, “devouring their flesh one after another and drinking their blood.” This resembles the highly exaggerated claim of a peasant tenant who watches his feudal overloads feast on fatted calves and flambéed fowl while he and his family subsist on the broth of roots and bark, with a side helping of gruel—and then he makes up horrible stories about it to exaggerate his classist angst. However, most major religions and countless legends and mythologies speak of a time when giants walked the Earth. Why would diverse and widely separated traditions all make the same outrageous claims unless it had some basis in truth? All myth and legend have at their primordial headwaters some kernel of fact and truth. And if that truth was not there at the core, what are the odds that all these traditions could concoct such similar stories?

  In the Watchers we see an emerging prototype of Satan, the adversary, deciver, accuser, liar. We can also see a variation on the theme of Original Sin. Just as with Eve and the forbidden fruit, the sin of the Watchers involved a specific combination of infractions, having to do with both disobedience and knowledge. And in a very real sense, Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, became the first of the Nephilim.

  If one were to look behind the mythic elements of the story of the Watchers, there are many various historical events that could come to the forefront in ways to explain the spread of such incredible tales. But what ought to intrigue us beyond all fanciful stories is the persistence of the myth itself; the ongoing story of a race of gods and their descendants, who somehow come to be perceived as demonic.

  Where Their Feet Hit the Ground

  The Watchers. They first appear on the scene in Sumer. Shumer, it seems, literally means the “land of the Watchers.” For American author Zecharia Sitchin, they are alien beings whose specific task is to orbit the earth, monitoring events on earth. For Sitchin, the Watchers are not a race or a species; they are merely a job specification. Their colleagues had abandoned their ships and had landed on Earth—they continued to orbit the Earth. Those who did land, either mated or genetically engineered mankind into its present form. As a consequence, mankind worshipped the Watchers as gods.

  Going a step further back, however, It is recorded in the Book of Enoch that these so-called “Watchers” descended first to the slopes and foothills of Mount Hermon (Ha Hermon in Hebrew), also known as Jabal el-Shaykh in Aramaic, meaning, “Mountain of the Chief.” The mountain is actually a cluster of mountains made up of three distinct summits that straddle the current-day border between Lebanon and Syria in the highly political, much-disputed Golan Heights region of northern Israel. To set it in more modern context, it was this mountain that exchanged hands back-and-forth between Israel and Syria during the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. On this mountain it is said the Watchers first descended to the earth and made their pact to cohabitate with human women and to teach “forbidden” skills to mankind.

  Mt. Hermon, Golan Heights, Israel/Syria/Lebanon, where the Watchers descended to the earth.

  Photo is licens
ed under Wikipedia Creative Commons.

  In the occult science of Numerology, the number 33 represents the ultimate attainment of consciousness. Keeping that in mind, it is very interesting to note that the geographic location of Mount Hermon, the very place where the Watchers are said to have descended to the earthly plane, lies on the 33rd parallel, which is a latitude of 33° north of the equator. If you trace the 33rd parallel to the exact geographic global opposite from Mount Hermon, you will find yourself directly on top of the most controversially mythic place in current ufological history: Roswell, New Mexico. Mount Hermon, where the Watchers descended to the earth, and Roswell, New Mexico, are exact polar opposites on the same 33rd degree north latitude. The global coordinates of Mount Hermon and the Roswell crash site are no accident, and speak to some deeper, perhaps secret significance.

  “If aliens used the thirty-third latitudinal line as a weigh point—a landing point for planet earth, what biblical people saw thousands and thousands of years ago on Mount Hermon, were entities that came down from the sky. They called them angels.”

  Bill Birnes, Ancient Aliens,

  UFO Magazine, UFO Hunters5

  Two significant sites on the 33rd parallel north. Mt. Hermon, Israel, and the highly controversial Roswell, New Mexico, UFO crash site are exact geo-global opposites.

  Photo courtesy of the author. Copyright 2011.

  Could the Watchers who descended to the slopes of Mount Hermon thousands of years ago, and the UFOs that reportedly crashed at Roswell in 1947 be from the same extra-terrestrial race? If these two events spanning the entirety of recorded human history indeed involve alien races, then they have been with us for the long haul, since the beginning of time. And it begs the question of whether or not they were left behind to monitor us, or to help establish and guide our civilizations and culture. And the even bigger question: Are they still among us today?

  Some Christian ufologists, such as Chuck Missler, believe that the “Sons of God” in Genesis 6:2 are actually extra-terrestrials or grey aliens,6 and that these beings are actually fallen angels or demons that have appeared during the antediluvian times in order to genetically alter the human race, and to pollute the bloodline of Jesus.7 Thus, the Nephilim would be the hybrid race of these beings in this view.

  Sumer

  The land of “Shumer,” or Sumer, “Shinar” of the bible (literally, “Land of the Watchers” or “Land of the Bright Shining Ones”), as it has been identified in the Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent region, in modern-day Iraq, is the place where the Watchers and their offspring, the Nephilim, had their first great influence on human history. Or at least this is where they made their prehistoric, tangible mark on humanity, beyond their initial contact and intercourse.

  On today’s map, the Land of Sumer lay roughly 400 miles east—as the crow flies—from the slopes of Mount Hermon, which is just a few miles northeast of Damascus. That seems like quite a distance to cover from the Watchers’ geographic touchdown on the planet to where they bore the greatest influence in mankind’s earliest of histories, but it is extremely important to take note of the region and all its connectivity to early biblical and Middle Eastern religious accounts.

  For hundreds of years, we regarded Egypt as the world’s “oldest” civilization, but now the land of the pharaohs has been relegated to the periphery of the civilized world in the fourth and third millennia BCE. Despite the progress of archaeology and anthropology, we still know very little about the history of the peoples of the Mesopotamian region prior to 2500 BCE. And the Sumerians seemed to rise suddenly out of nowhere, predating Egyptian culture by at least 1,500-2,000 years.

  In speaking of the Sumerian culture, Carl Sagan once remarked that we still have no clear perspective about their origins: “Their language is foreign; it shows no resemblance to Indo-European, Semitic or any other language. We can only map them by the actions of their successors, the Akkadians, who created a voluminous Sumerian-Akkadian dictionary.”8

  The Sumerian culture of ancient Mesopotamia is the earliest human civilization known to contemporary science and the archaeological record, and Sumar’s sudden onset of civilized culture remained a mystery for many years despite representing an exponential quantum leap in humanity’s intellectual development. It all began about 6,000 years ago when the very first cuneiform writing was developed by the Sumerians to record a dramatic astronomical event: the visible star-burst of Vela X, a star that went supernova about 1,300 light years away from our solar system. It can still be seen today as a faintly flashing pulsar. Virtually overnight, in evolutionary terms, the Sumerians gave the world written language, the first fundamental character of which was the Sumerian symbol for the word star, commemorating the astronomical event. The cuneiform word was then linked to the symbol for “deity,” and the term star god was born.

  In the blink of an eye, historically speaking, the Sumerians gave humanity written language when it had never before existed. The ancient Sumerians left behind, in the ruined mounds of their ancient cities, cuneiform tablets that listed everything from the spiritual form of worship to the mundane business receipts drawn up between merchants. The Sumerians, in their written language, gave us the first love song, the first prescription of pharmaceutical concoctions (all without any inclusion of magic or spirituality), the first school system, the first law code of jurisprudence, and the first parliament. And it all came out of nowhere, in the twinkling of a bursting supernova.

  Why is this contextual to the Watchers? Because it was the Watchers who, according to the Book of Enoch, brought these skills to the ancient Sumerians—and not only the Watchers, but other races that are recorded in the annals of ancient history and religious spirituality. All of the citings of ancient god-like entities appearing in various cultures, teaching mankind advanced skills, can all be collectively lumped together as superstitious myth-building, but, all myth and legend have at their core at least a kernel of truth and fact. The skeptic will ask you to cite evidences that other species interfered in the evolutionary ascendancy of mankind’s civilization, while at the same time ignoring or at the very least watering down the pan-cultural evidence that already abundantly exists. It merely boils down to your “leaping off” point. That point with the skeptically and scientifically minded eliminates the possibility of spiritual or extra-terrestrial influence, as they seek to merely boil all anthropological studies down to what humanity achieved on its own accord. The possibility of external influence in cultural development—or physiological development, for that matter—is eliminated as a possibility because it smacks of too much superstition and unfounded, spurious claims. Yet the spiritual-historical documentation of every culture possesses an exponential thread of commonality in that they all express similarities. Even the Bible itself, in its many fables and Judeo-Christian mythologies, has an underlying code that exposes at least the possibility that there was influence from a more supreme being or race of infiltrators set on tangibly altering the course of homo-nid development and cultural establishment. It can’t all be chalked up to superstitious myth.

  Religious Mythology vs. Alien Influence

  So much of what we read and interpret as mythology—especially from ancient religious texts—are things that we in our modern, much more advanced culture dispatch with a broad swath. We tend to do this so we can claim a higher intellectual ground than that of our ancestors, avoiding any possibility of being labeled as superstitious or appearing as if our theories and conclusions are being drawn from outmoded ways of perceiving and thinking.

  But what if the old superstitions and mythologies are true, and we only label them as being myth because they lie outside the realm of a more sterile scientific view? In a universe as vast as the physical one in which we are only the tiniest drop in the motion of a vast, endless, blue sparkling sea, there are obviously more things at play than we can possibly fathom or even conceive in our wildest imaginings. So, instead of brushing aside the mythologies as irrelevant and lacking in any subs
tantive fact, let’s take the opposite approach and examine some of what has been left for us to consider by our ancient forebears.

  Oannes, the Fishman

  In the third century BCE, Babylonian priest-historian Berossus chronicled the coming of the Annedoti and their leader, Oannes, a race described as being half-human, half-fish, that surfaced from the Persian Gulf to instruct the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia in the arts of culture and civilization. According to the chronicles of Berossus, the ancient Sumerians were like “beasts of the field,” prior to the arrival of Oannes, living under no law, order, or conduct of governance. It was this half-fish/half-man entity who surfaced, appearing in the midst of the Sumerians, and though described in the writings of Berossus as being frightfully hideous in appearance, spoke with superior intelligence, ability, and instruction for the prehistoric, uncivilized Mesopotamians. According to Berossus, the leader of the Annedoti Fishman, Oannes, would rise up out of the sea every morning and instruct the people in all manner of arts and insights into all manner of letters and sciences. Oannes taught them how to construct houses, to found and build temples, and to compile laws and codes of conduct, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge—all things that were necessary to devise and construct a cohesive, civilized culture. Oannes also taught the art of agriculture and the discerning of seeds and fruits and all manner of husbandry. In short, it is said by Berossus, Oannes “humanized” the savage, uncivilized humans that lived as un-unified, scattered animals in the wilds of Mesopotamia.