The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim

by Scott Alan Roberts

  Flavius Josephus, a Palestinian, wrote Antiquities of the Jews to educate the Roman-Hellenistic world about Judaism and the history of the Jews. In it he recounts the tale of the Watchers, Nephilim, and Noah as follows:

  “For many angels of God accompanied with women, and begat sons that proved unjust, and despisers of all that was good, on account of the confidence they had in their own strength; for the tradition is, that these men did what resembled the acts of those whom the Grecians call giants. But Noah was very uneasy at what they did; and being displeased at their conduct, persuaded them to change their dispositions and their acts for the better: but seeing they did not yield to him, but were slaves to their wicked pleasures, he was afraid they would kill him, together with his wife and children, and those they had married; so he departed out of that land.19”

  Despite the rather warmed-milk version of events given by Flavius Josephus, the overt implication is, then, that all other human families on the Earth had been contaminated by the blood of the Nephilim, save for Noah and his children. And if the biblical implication is that humanity was completely tainted by the blood of the serpent as represented in the lines of the Nephilim, it is no wonder that God pronounced such a universal fiat of judgment.

  As for the fallen members of the Divine Council who descended to the earth to commit themselves to interbreeding with humans, participating in the abomination, God put them in custody “in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6). This is sometimes interpreted as Tartarus or the “nether realms” (2 Peter 2:4). In Greek mythology, Tartarus () is a deep, gloomy place, a pit, or an abyss used as a dungeon of torment and suffering that resides beneath the underworld. In the Gorgias, Plato (c. 400 BCE) wrote that souls were judged after death and those who received punishment were sent to Tartarus, and it is only known in Hellenistic Jewish literature from the Greek text of 1 Enoch 20:2, where the archangel Uriel is the jailer of the 200 Watchers who sinned by cohabiting with human women and producing the bloodline of the Nephilim.20 It is, further, interesting to note that even Peter—“Saint Peter,” the big fisherman, the “rock” upon which Christ would build His church, the friend and disciple of Jesus and the apostle who wrote the New Testament Books of first and second Peter—refers to the Greek mythological place of punishment in the afterlife:

  “4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to Tartarus, putting them in chains of darkness in gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment; 5 if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; 6 if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; 7 and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless 8 (for that righteous man, living among them day after day, was tormented in his righteous soul by the lawless deeds he saw and heard)—9 if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for punishment on the day of judgment. 10 This is especially true of those who follow the corrupt desire of the flesh and despise authority.”

  (2 Peter 2:4-10)

  The punishment was reserved for those fallen who had participated in the great seeding of the human bloodline, and would also explain why some fallen angels are kept in custody and others are free to roam the heavens and torment mankind. Such a severe and dramatic punishment presupposed a severe and dramatic sin, something infinitely more evil and more sinister than mere mixed marriages. It was nothing less than the fallen, perhaps even demonic, realm attempting to pervert the bloodlines of the human world. By genetic control and the production of hybrids, the serpent of the Garden of Eden, and those who left their place on the Divine Council, following him, were out to rob God of the people He had made for Himself. The serpent character in the Bible, as we examined earlier, was none other than the leader of the fallen. And were the purpose of this book to examine Lucifer, the Star of the Morning, the Glory of God, and a Prince of the Divine Council, we would say a lot more about the implications, but we’ll save that for another time. Suffice it to say that if the serpent from the garden who fathered the very first of the Nephilim in Cain had succeeded in corrupting in entirety the human race, he would have hindered the coming of the perfect Son of God, the promised “seed of the man,” who would defeat the fallen and restore man’s dominion (Genesis 3:15).

  In what is considered to be the very first Messianic prophecy in the Bible, God said to the serpent character in the Garden of Eden:

  “15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

  (Genesis 3:15)

  The bloodline of the serpent was manifested in Cain, his offspring conceived during the seduction of Eve in the Garden of Eden. The bloodline of the woman was manifested in her son Abel, whom Eve conceived with Adam. The prophetic implication of this verse in Genesis is that the Messiah would be born through pure human bloodlines, the seed of Adam and Eve, uncorrupted by the blood of the serpent and his host of fallen Watchers. That is why you find the lineage of Mary, the wife of Joseph and mother to the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ, being traced through King David and all the way back to Adam, through the younger son Abel.

  According to Christian theology, if the bloodlines of the Nephilim had by any means prevented the birth of the “only begotten” Son of God, they would obviously have averted their own doom. It was for this reason, according to Christian theology, that God drowned all of mankind in the Great Flood of Noah.

  There is a state of what I will call “contingent dualism” at play here: Had the bloodlines of the serpent and the Watchers succeeded in contaminating all of humanity, there would have been no immaculately born Son of God, who the Jewish Messianic prophecies referred to as the “Kinsman Redeemer,” the seed of the man, the divine savior of our own bloodline who would take away the sins of the world. Because the bloodline of the Watchers was eliminated in the flood, the pure human genealogies would be allowed to continue through the pure human sons of Noah, producing a messiah of pure human birth.

  But wait—is not the Messiah, according to Christian theology, born of a human bloodline, mixed with the bloodline of God? Was not Mary the mother of Jesus impregnated by elohim in the same fashion as the daughters of men were impregnated by the Watchers, the elohim of the Divine Council? Did not the mother of Jesus conceive the Messiah as a result of a divine sexual interference? And are not the genealogies of Mary, tracing her lineage back to the throne of David the king, and further back to the line of Adam through Abel written into the story of the birth of Jesus, written for the sole purpose of establishing the untainted human bloodline of the Christian messiah, who was said to be both God and Man? For, indeed, the greatest Son of God was the messiah, himself, born to a virgin, fathered by a God. Yet he is called the “only begotten” son of God. Not simply a prince of heaven, but God Himself in human form. The mysteries of the universe compound exponentially when the elohim who stands in the midst of the elohim and pronounces judgment on the gods of the Divine Council, holds the ability to strip the other gods of their divinity, yet strips Himself of divinity in order to become a human being in a singular act the Koinae Greek calls the kenosis (). This, according to Christian theology, placed Jesus Christ in a place far above the gods and angels. God out-did the Watchers and the serpent in that he made the perfect melding of human and god.

  Pardon Me, but There’s a Giant in My Soup

  There is some confusion when reading all these passages as to whether or not these Watchers were a caste of hierarchical angels, or whether they were lesser gods, as expressly stated in Psalm 82. I believe it is as simple as understanding that the angels of God had different titles in the heavenly domain than they did after their collective descent to the earth. In short, they were both. But gaining an understanding tha
t these beings existed far outside the story-bookish view many people have of angels is important to understanding the princely majesty of these beings, as well as the devastation that they brought to the bloodlines of humanity.

  Could the term Nephilim, though generally accepted as the offspring of the Watchers, also be used to describe the Watchers themselves? After all, the definition of the word Nephilim means to fall or descend. The children of the Watchers did neither of those things, as they were the product of the Sons of God interbreeding with human women. They descended from nowhere, other than the wombs of their earthly mothers. As I alluded to much earlier, a good illustrative example would be the monikers we place on immigrants from foreign countries. When an Irish family emigrates from Ireland to the United States, their children are known as Irish-Americans. But then the term extends also to the parents, who also become Irish-Americans. Once the Nephilim were bequeathed, the titles spread across the board to both the parents and the children.

  There is another completely unique distinguishing factor to the children of the Watchers: They were called “giants.” And there is some textual evidence to support a larger size. When the wandering Israelites finally reached the Promised Land, an advance party was sent to spy on the country. They came back with this report:

  “32 So they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, “The land through which we have gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. 33 There also we saw the Nephilim [the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim]; and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.”

  (Numbers 13:32-33)

  Although I do not fully subscribe to the Creationist views of Dr. Henry Morris, he has some interesting things to say about the “giants” and their further offspring:

  “There were giants “also after that,” in the days of the Cana’anites, and these were likewise known as, among other things, the Nephilim (Numbers 13:33). Humanly speaking, they were descended from Anak, and so were also known as the Anakim. These people were, of course, known to Moses and it was probably he who editorially inserted the phrase “and also after that” into Noah’s original record here in Genesis 6:4. Moses probably also inserted the information that these were the “mighty men of old, men of renown,” men whose exploits of strength and violence had made them famous in song and fable in all nations in the ages following the Flood. To rebellious men of later times, they were revered as great heroes; but in God’s sight they were merely ungodly men of violence and evil.21”

  During the campaign of the Five Kings in Abraham’s day, several tribes nestled around the Valley of Siddim in the Dead Sea region, evidently intermingled with the Cana’anites, and are considered to be the Nephilim or hybrids of Nephilim. These tribes are identified in both Genesis 14 and Deuteronomy 2 as the Rephaim (“titans,” children of “Rapha”), the Zuzim or Zamzummim (“terrible ones”), the Emim, Horites, and Anakim (“crushing tyrants”). It is the tribe of the Anakim that is directly connected with the Nephilim in the report given to Moses and the Hebrews by the spies in Numbers 13:33. The context of the Dueteronomy and Numbers passages suggest that the other tribes of giants were relatives of the Anakim or other lines of Nephilim, particularly the Rephaim, whose descendant is described as living in the city of Gath along with the Anakim giant, Goliath, and Lahmi. The Rephaim are giants and are generally described as being tall or large, and seem to be synonymous with the Nephilim, based on the translation of the word giants in Genesis Chapter 6.

  The tribe of the Anakim were descended from a giant named Anak, who was a son or grandson of a giant named Arba, from which the ancient city of Hebron was originally called “Kiriath Arba” or “The City of Arba” because “Arba was the greatest man among the Anakim” Joshua 14:15. This tribe was so tall, that the weak-kneed spies reported, “we are like grasshoppers to them” (Numbers 13:33).

  The Old Testament scriptures tell of how the tribes of giants were fought and destroyed by the tribes of normal men who replaced them, including the Israelites. Moses killed Og, king of the Rehpaim who lived on the Golan heights near Mount Hermon, the original spot where the Watchers descended and fathered the Nephilim. Og apparently did not travel far from home. According to the biblical passage, Og had a bed that was nine cubits long (13.5 to 15.5 feet, depending on which cubit was used) and was called “last of the remnant of the giants” (Dueteronomy 3). Og may be the source of the word ogre in the English language.

  According to Issac E. Mozeson’s The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals the Hebrew Source of English, an “ogre” () is a hideous monster or giant (and is never mentioned as having “layers,” so get the picture of Shrek out of your mind completely). The mighty King Og of Bashan was said to be the last of the original line of Nephilim giants of scripture, so we are told in Numbers 21:33 and Dueteronomy 3:11. The old etymological notion that the word ogre came from the French language was probably written by men who had never heard of the biblical King Og. The French version explains the “re” suffix to be French in origin.

  “The Illiterate Greeks, who clumsily borrowed an alphabet from the Semites, probably paganized the stuff of many biblical epics. One of these was the account of the Mighty Og and the Anakim—or Nephilim—battling the armies of god for the rights to settle Cana’an. Gigas [Og] is a major figure in their mythic battle between the Titans and the Gods. As for Og’s wife, note the Old Norse term for ogress, gygr. This is the given source for the Scottish word for an evil spirit or ogre.”22

  Joshua, Moses’ successor, drove the three remaining sons of Anak out of Hebron in his first campaign after leading the Children of Israel into the Promised Land. The sons of Anak evidently reoccupied the city of Hebron while Joshua was waging his campaign against Cana’anite cities in the North. Caleb later retook Hebron and killed the three giants.23 Surprisingly, there was probably heavy motivation for Caleb to drive them out and keep them from retaking the territory, as this is the region where, 40 years earlier, Caleb was one of the spies who said to Moses, “Yeah, they’re giants, all right, but we can take ‘em! Oh, and by the way, I have this great piece of land I want where these three giants live….” Caleb had his eyes and heart set on a piece of land for 40 years. His motivation to kill the residents was strong indeed, bolstered by sand in his sandals for four decades.

  David and King Saul fought a remnant of smaller giants who had taken refuge in the Philistine city of Gath. They included Goliath, who was “six cubits and a span” (roughly 9′ 3″), and his brother Lahmi “whose spear had a shaft like a weaver’s rod.” The last of the Gittite giants was slain “In still another battle, which took place at Gath”:

  “20 In still another battle, which took place at Gath, there was a huge man with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot—twenty-four in all. He also was a giant, descended from Rapha.”

  (2 Samuel 21:20)

  The last scriptural reference to the giants, chronologically speaking, may be Isaiah 45:14, which prophecies that Sabean “men of stature” will become slaves in chains of the redeemed Israelites:

  “14 This is what the LORD says: ‘The products of Egypt and the merchandise of Cush, and those tall Sabeans—they will come over to you and will be yours; they will trudge behind you, coming over to you in chains. They will bow down before you and plead with you, saying, Surely God is with you, and there is no other; there is no other god.’”

  (Isaiah 45:14)

  These are the characteristics of the remnant tribes of giants described in Scripture:

  Their height was two or three times the height of normal men.

  They were associated with some kind of unholy intermixing before the Flood.

  They were closely associated with the wicked Cana’anites after the Flood.

  In one case they are described as having polydactyly (extra fingers and toes).

  Unlike the Cana’anites, there a
re no examples of Nephilim who became followers of God.

  The Genesis account clearly states that the Nephilim were on the earth both before and after the Great Flood. This generates another question all on its own: If God sent a devastatingly tragic universal deluge that killed off all human beings and every other living thing, for the purpose of wiping out and completely exterminating this hybrid race, why did it not work?

  Did God in all his biblical attributes of omniscience and foreknowledge not know that his act of judgment would not have the desired effect? Did God make a huge blunder, or was there something more going on? Was the great flood not as universal as we are told, allowing for the escape and survival of some of the Nephilim? Perhaps, as Ancient Alien theorists suggest, the Nephilim bugged out as soon as they knew of the Great Flood’s impending arrival. Could the same space craft have returned to take away the remnant, only to redeposit them on the earth after the flood waters had receded? These are all—pardon the pun—giant questions. As we’ll see at the end of this book, there may be some answers that will explain their return, and why Moses penned this: