The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim

by Scott Alan Roberts

  We may never know in this lifetime if these beings are of God or from some distant corner of our physical galaxy, but there is much fodder for thought, and a good starting point for examining the issue further.

  chapter 7

  Constantine: One Emperor, One God

  Constantine, the first “Christian” emperor of Rome.

  Photo courtesy of the Capitoline Hill Museum, Rome, Italy (en.museicapitolini.org).

  The story of the Nephilim and their divine parentage is one that the early Church fathers did not want told—at least in the entire form as it was written down in the Book of Enoch. It was a tale that transgressed the Church’s teachings that spirit beings were sexless, and spoke of beings who were considered to be gods among early mankind. Their presence in the story of Noah’s flood was something that created ecclesiastical panic among the early church fathers, and when push came to shove, there was no unanimous consensus, and Enoch was booted from the canon of God-breathed scripture. This was done under the influence of Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine, who ruled from 306 to 337 CE.

  Constantine used his power to establish and promote the religion of Christianity, but he always remained a controversial figure, especially through the eyes of those who recorded his histories, which are abundant and detailed, but have been strongly influenced by the official propaganda of the period and are often skewed.1 According to the various contradictory accounts of the life of Constantine, he was seen by some as the great Christian Prince, and by others, during his decline, as a noble war hero corrupted by Christian influences who transformed into a tyrannical despot in his old age—“a hero…degenerating into a cruel and dissolute monarch.”2

  Among the great accomplishments of Emperor Constantine were his ecclesiastical councils, which came as he began to enter the latter part of his reign. It is said that he did not personally adopt Christianity until well into his 40s, but once he did, he instituted laws that allowed Christians to worship and practice freely in the Roman empire, as well any other religion. Constantine established a precedent for the position of the emperor as having some influence on the religious discussions going on within the Catholic Church of that time, mainly because he disliked what he considered to be the risks to societal stability that religious disputes and controversies brought with them. And so he sought, wherever possible, to establish an orthodoxy. In fact, the emperor saw it as his duty to ensure that God was “properly worshiped” in his empire, and that “proper worship” would be determined by the Church.3

  The Council of Nicea, 325 CE. Melkite icon from the 17th century. Artist unknown.

  Photo courtesy of the Peter Paul Reubens Gallery.

  The first ecclesiastical council summoned by Constantine was the Council of Nicea, 325 CE, in which several Church resolutions were discussed and set into motion. Among them was the beginnings of the canonization of scripture, which set a precedent for removing from the scriptures, any book on which the entire council could not unanimously agree. The Book of Enoch, despite its many mentions throughout the writings of both the Old and New Testaments, as well as being quoted by Moses and the Apostle Paul, was not unanimously accepted, and it fell under the surgical knife of the council.

  Keep at the forefront of your mind, when considering the facts behind the Council of Nicea, the overall motivations on the part of Emperor Constantine when summoning them. Although Constantine’s reputation was bolstered by his propaganda machine, it is well-known4 that he was motivated by the desire to establish only two things:

  1. One God/one emperor.

  2. One religion/one empire.

  Constantine was above all a pragmatist, and his Christianity was only prominent when it was politically expedient—and he did not become more compassionate after his conversion to Christianity. On the heels of presiding over the Council of Nicea, he went immediately back home to Constantinople and murdered both his wife, Fausta, and his eldest son, Crispus. Fausta was Crispus’s stepmother, and there were rumors that she and Crispus had been engaged in immorality while the emperor was away. Constantine had his wife slowly boiled to death in a bath, and his son was cold poisoned. Indeed, Constantine was the poster boy for living your life as licentiously and perverted as possible, saving baptism for his deathbed. Which is exactly what he did. He lived his life as wickedly as any other Roman emperor, despite the paths he paved for Christianity and its spread, and went screaming into heaven simply because he was baptized minutes before he died.

  Within the first 400 years of Christianity there were in existence more than 20 gospels, 15 apocalypses, and nearly 50 other texts about Jesus. In some of these texts, Jesus didn’t die, took revenge on his enemies, was not human at all, was not God at all, and was a wise teacher instead of a miracle worker. The Gospel of Thomas, attributed to “Doubting Thomas,” has been discovered in its entirety and contains what is claimed to be direct quotes from Jesus, yet it has been left out of the Bible. The Gospel of Peter, Jesus’ best friend among the disciples, says Jesus was silent on the cross and did not feel any pain, for he only appeared to be human, yet this Gospel was also left out of the Bible. Only a select four of the written gospels made it into the Bible—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and only those Gospels that told their followers what the early Roman Church wanted them to hear. Constantine’s desire to have one single authority in the Church apparently worked quite well.

  Lost books referred to in the Bible, but removed by Council:

  Book of Jasher (Joshua 10:13, 2 Samuel 1:18).

  Book of the Acts of Solomon (1 Kings 11:41).

  Book of Samuel the Seer (1 Chronicles 29:29).

  Book of Gad the Seer (1 Chronicles 29:29).

  Book of Nathan the Prophet (1 Chronicles 29:29; 2 Chronicles 9:29).

  Prophecy of Ahijah (2 Chronicles 9:29, 13:22).

  Visions of Iddo the Seer (2 Chronicles 9:29, 12:15, 13:22).

  Book of Shemaiah (2 Chronicles 12:15).

  Book of Jehu (2 Chronicles 35:25).

  Sayings of the Seers (2 Chronicles 33:19).

  Lament for Josiah (2 Chronicles 35:25).

  Paul’s epistle to Corinthians before our “1 Corinthians” (Corinthians 5:9).

  Paul’s epistle to Church at Laodicea (Colossians 4:16).

  The Book of Enoch

  Because we have spent so much time talking about and around, and quoting from the book of Enoch—as well as mentioning its exclusion from the scriptural canon—it seems time to give a little bit of history about the author and the book itself.

  The Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish religious manuscript ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah (the same Noah associated with the Ark and Flood account of Genesis 6-9) and, according to the New Testament Book of Jude, the seventh generation from Adam. Enoch is one of those ancient manuscripts that was dropped out of the now-traditional biblical canon (the word canon comes from the Greek “”, meaning “rule”). Simply said, you won’t find Enoch’s book in a current-day Bible, but it is grouped with several other books referred to as the apocryphal writings, meaning they were considered to be hidden, esoteric, spurious, or of questionable authenticity by the Church leaders of the day. You can find some of these books in their own section in various versions of the Christian Bible, but they are clearly labeled as being “non-scriptural.” And though the Book of Enoch is considered to be questionable by Judaism and all of Christianity, it is regarded as canon by the Ethiopian Orthodox and Eritrean Orthodox Churches.

  Dead Sea Scroll Fragment of Enoch 1. The backside of P.Mich.inc. 5552, showing portions of the Book of Enoch in Greek. This manuscript is part of the Chester Beatty Papyri, and is the third leaf of the surviving manuscript.

  Photo is licensed under Wikipedia Creative Commons.

  The Book of Enoch, along with several of the other apocryphal books, were excluded from the Bible during the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, which was convoked by the Roman emperor, Constantine, the first “Christian” emperor of the Roman Empire
. But Constantine’s status as a “Christian” is held in as dubious regard as some of the books that his empirically appointed church emissaries booted out of the Bible.

  The first section of the Book of Enoch (Dead Sea Scrolls) describes the fall of a group of non-human entities known as the Watchers—the bene haElohim—the Sons of God who fathered the Nephilim. Their descent to the earth is chronicled not only in the Book of Enoch, but also in the old testament’s Book of Genesis, where the subject was edited down to a few mere sentences by either by Moses himself, or by later scribes. In the Genesis 6:1-4 passage, we find Moses doing what Moses often did: abbreviating and extrapolating vital information without much detail. The passage is obviously a series of quotations from a much older source regarding the Nephilim, but contains distinct earmarks of having been edited at a later date, as the writing style doesn’t match that of the rest of the book.

  Despite modern scholars dating the authorship of the Book of Enoch to a time period in Jewish history known as “The Captivity” (around the third or fourth century BCE, when the Diaspora—the scattered nation of Israel—were living in Babylon), Enoch is a much older book. In the New Testament Book of Jude, the Book of Enoch is quoted, and obvious authorship attributed to Enoch, the seventh-generational descendant from Adam.

  “14 Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: ‘See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones 15 to judge everyone, and to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts they have committed in their ungodliness, and of all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.’”

  (Jude 1:14-15)

  The apostle Paul, who wrote the little epistle of Jude, was an educated member of the Jewish Sanhedrin prior to his conversion to Christianity, and the Book of Enoch was very well-known to his educated, religious class.

  The Book of Enoch opens with these brief words about Enoch himself, saying:

  “2 [Enoch] a just man, whose eyes were opened by God so that he saw a vision of the Holy One in the heavens, which the sons of God showed to me, and from them I heard everything, and I knew what I saw….”

  (Enoch 1:2)

  This fragmentary manuscript is similar to portions of the Book of Jubilees, an important writing of Second Temple Judaism that survived only among Christian readers and that has long been known to us from versions in Greek and Ethiopic. Among Ethiopian Christians, Jubilees was so treasured that it actually became a part of their version of the Old Testament. Fifteen fragmentary pieces of Jubilees have turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls, establishing the work as one of the most common among those caches and clearly testifying to its importance for those who hid the texts. Like the Ethiopian Christians, they may have considered the book a part of the canon of Holy Writ.

  In that light, the Book of Enoch seems to be a retelling of the Book of Jubilees, just as Genesis seems to be a very brief highlight of what is found in the Book of Enoch in its Nephilim segment. It may be that we should consider Enoch an example of “rewritten Bible,” the interpretive phenomenon we encounter so often in the scrolls. Surviving fragments of the scrolls labeled “4Q227” relate to Jubilees 4:17-24, but give the material in a different order.

  Jubilees 4:18 reports that the angels taught Enoch the calendar.

  Jubilees 4:22 says that Enoch testified against the Watchers, or fallen angels, who had taken human wives and whose progeny were the Giants.

  Jubilees 4:23 speaks of the judgment of the entire world.

  Frag. 2 i[…E]noch, after we taught him 2 […he was with the angels of God] six full jubilees 3 […the la]nd, into the midst of the sons of man and he testified against them all 4 […] and also against the watchers. And he wrote all […] heaven and the ways of their hosts and [ho]ly ones 6 […So that the ri[ghteous ones] shall not commit error […]

  Ancient Cosmology

  According to Hindu philosophy, life in the universe is created, destroyed, and re-created once every 4.1 to 8.2 billion years. Each one of these creation cycles is a repeating period of time divided by four yugas, or epochs/eras. The cycles are said to repeat like the seasons of a year, waxing and waning within a greater time-cycle of the creation and destruction of the universe. Like summer, spring, winter, and autumn, each yuga involves stages or gradual changes that the earth and the consciousness of mankind goes through as a whole. These cycles, devolving from light to darkness are the Satya yuga, the Treta yuga, the Dvapara yuga, and finally the Kali yuga. A complete yuga cycle from a high Golden Age of enlightenment to a Dark Age and back again is said to be caused by the solar system’s motion around another star, a binary star system that rotates around our solar system.

  In accordance with this cosmology, we are currently in the final yuga cycle, the Kali yuga, which is the darkest of the “seasons,” also known as the Age of the Male Demon [Kali], and the Age of Vice. According to the Surya Siddhanta, Kali yuga began at midnight on 18 February 3102 BCE, and will last for 432,000 years.5

  chapter 8

  The Nephilim

  “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!”

  —William Shakespeare (Hamlet II, ii)

  Now we are on it. The “brass tacks” of this entire book: the Nephilim themselves. We have taken many words to get to this chapter, and we have examined many different foundations and rabbit-trailing facets that have lead us to this point, albeit not exhaustively. As I mentioned in the Introduction, I am certainly not the end-all and be-all on the topic of the Nephilim, the Watchers, their religious and spiritual aspects and ramifications, nor the alternative alien angle we have touched on in oh-so-cursory a fashion. I am, however, another in a long, ever-lengthening line of interested, invested researchers to study, examine, and come to somewhat scholarly conclusions. I have melded the scholarship done by so many others before me, broached the pop cultural, fringe, metaphysical science, and presented ideas and hypotheses drawn from the historical, cultural, archaeological, and anthropological data that is so scattered and diverse on this topic.

  What is clear is that something phenomenal happened in our ancient past—and is still happening today—that ought not be relegated simply to the realm of the supernatural or the paranormal only because it deals with subject matter that falls outside the lines etched in the sand by the scientific and religious communities. I have found it extremely daunting yet strangely interesting that the two differing camps in nearly any phenomena, theory, or topic out there, seem to unwittingly come together in their opposing dissentions and dogmatic stances when it comes to the Nephilim and all the surrounding information.

  As I have mentioned in my public lectures many times, a study of the Nephilim is no simple task, for it encompasses a plethora of hugely diverse information that delves into so many other aspects of human existence. The story of the Nephilim is an enormous topic, for it goes to the roots of religion, faith, science, and the existence of humanity as we know it—or don’t know it—today.

  On one hand, the Nephilim speak to the foundations of human development; the encoding of DNA and ancient anthropological development of human civilization. On the other hand, the Nephilim represent a caste of mutated, corrupt progeny, bequeathed by the Watchers, part of the military structured host of created beings who were subservient to the Holy God of the Jews and the Christians. And what you come down to is nothing short of a religious-scientific quandary: to decide which end of the spectrum you choose to believe regarding these characters who are so much the product of a mythological history. And, yes, it is about belief, because even the facts used to establish a more-or-less solid case for the existence of these beings does not follow the dictates of historical, scientific, and anthropological rules. Their source point lies within religious texts and the faith writings that comprise scriptures from all different spiritual aspects, and as you have already experienced in the earlier pages of this book,
I have used as my starting point the Book of Genesis in the Judeo-Christian scriptures—after all, the word Nephilim itself is sourced from those pages.

  You are reading this book because these things are of interest to you. You either possess a belief that they exist, and you want to know more about it. Or you have a curiosity about these sorts of mysteries that leads to you to find out what others have to say about them. Or you are simply looking on these pages to point out what I have missed or where my theories are disingenuous or lacking in scholarship. Whatever the case may be for you, when it comes to the Nephilim and all the surrounding mass of information used to build up a case, you have to—in your own mind—come to one of two conclusions: Either the Nephilim are figments of spiritually based imaginations, or they are actual beings who existed, whether having non-supernatural explanations or spiritual ones.

  This reminds me of a true story I heard in my youth, as told by the head of Baptist Mid-Missions. A group of missionaries set up a bush hospital to help the population of several small villages in west Africa. As their medical outpost became established, the missionaries had to work very diplomatically with the tribal “witch doctor,” who saw the influence of modern medicine as a threat to his craft and sway over the locals. There had been an outbreak of disease in which it was found that certain bacteria were the cause of the illness, though the witch doctor had insisted it was demonic in nature. By invite, the tribal shaman came to the mission hospital and was shown a microscope, through which he could actually see the living bacteria and what it did to human cells to cause the illness that had been plaguing the villagers. The witch doctor left the meeting disgruntled and angry. Late that same night, the mission hospital was broken into by the witch doctor and his minions. They stole the microscope, took it to the village center, and smashed it to pieces. When he was confronted by the mission staff and asked why he did such a thing to such an expensive and valuable piece of medical equipment, the shaman smiled, with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, and said very softly, “Now there are no more bacteria.”