Nephilim: Who Were the Giants of Genesis 6?
The mysterious offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men, named twice in the Bible and never fully explained.
The Nephilim are named in only two Bible verses, Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33. Genesis links them to the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men"; the King James Version calls them giants, following the Greek Septuagint.
The Nephilim appear in just two verses of the Hebrew Bible, and both are strange. Genesis 6:4 says: "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." The King James translators wrote "giants" because the old Greek translation, the Septuagint, used gigantes. The Hebrew word itself was left as a puzzle.
The second mention comes in Numbers 13:33. Spies sent into Canaan report: "there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers." That places Nephilim after the Flood, which raises an obvious question readers have argued about for more than two thousand years. Either the Flood did not wipe them out, or the spies were using the word loosely for any frightening people.
Most scholars link the name to the Hebrew root naphal, "to fall," giving "fallen ones" or possibly "those who fall upon others." Some suggest an Aramaic word for giant. Genesis 6:1–4 is widely seen as a compressed fragment of a longer story, and the Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch tells that longer version: two hundred angels descend, marry human women, and father giants who devour the earth's resources until the Flood ends them.
Interpretation split early. Enochic and many early Christian writers read the sons of God as angels. Later Jewish and Christian commentators, uneasy with angel marriages, read them as noblemen or as the righteous line of Seth. Modern ancient-astronaut writers read the Nephilim as hybrids of visitors and humans. The text itself says very little, which is exactly why it keeps drawing people in.
Genesis says the Nephilim were on earth "also after that," so the Bible's own wording has them surviving, or returning after, the Flood meant to erase them.
Many scholars read Genesis 6:1–4 as a borrowed fragment of ancient Near Eastern hero lore, and the Numbers passage as spies exaggerating to scare the people. The word "Nephilim" does not mean "those who came down from the sky"; that is a modern claim.
