Who Were the Nephilim?

The religious world is deeply divided over the following passage from Genesis.

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose. And Jehovah said, My spirit shall not strive with man for ever, for that he also is flesh: yet shall his days be a hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them: the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown (Genesis 6:1-4, ASV).

The term Nephilim, as portrayed in the more recent translations of the Bible (ASV, RSV, NIV), is found in two Old Testament texts — here in Genesis 6:4 and in Numbers 13:33. In the King James Version, the original term is rendered "giants."

Many people believe the Nephilim were the offspring of sexual relationships between men and angels (Laney 1997, 20-22). There is absolutely no evidence for that theory, which actually has roots in Greek mythology.

This interpretation contradicts Scripture's explicit testimony. Angels are spirits (Hebrews 1:14) and therefore do not possess physical attributes (Lk. 24:39). While angels sometimes temporarily assumed human form (cf. Acts 10:3, 30), they were not physical beings. Jesus emphatically stated that angels do not marry (Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:34ff).

The language of Genesis 6:1ff does not require that the Nephilim of verse six were the offspring of the unions mentioned in verse two. The Nephilim may be regarded as merely contemporary ("in those days") with the marriages described in the context.

It also is exceedingly fanciful to suggest that the Nephilim were the offspring of "demonically controlled men and women of this period" (Morris 172). Even more ludicrous is the novel notion that the Nephilim were an animal-human species on the path to becoming fully human through evolution.

The root meaning of the Hebrew term is debated. That is why most modern Bible versions transliterated the term rather than attempting a pure English rendition.

The King James Version "giants" derives from the Greek Old Testament (LXX), which has the word gigantes. Some suggest the original word meant "fall," perhaps yielding the sense of one who has "fallen"(Youngblood 678). If true, this could hint at these people's apostate character. Others view the term in the sense of "to fall upon," i.e., an attack (Leupold 258), which might suggest a violent sort of men who assaulted others.

The term's later contextual use suggests that, in that setting at least, the Nephilim were men of extraordinary size (Numbers 13:32-33). Other biblical references describe exceptionally large people. Og, king of Bashan, had an iron bed about thirteen feet long and six feet wide (Deut. 3:11). Goliath, the giant David slew, was about nine feet tall (1 Samuel 17:4). Such great size may have resulted from genetic defects. For example, 2 Samuel 21:20 mentions a giant with twenty-four toes and fingers.

Archaeology has confirmed that large people existed in the ancient world. One writer notes: "The remains of a man of enormous stature have been discovered at Grimaldi on the Mediterranean coast by the Franco-Italian frontier" (Atkinson 72).

All in all, the term remains obscure, as do these ancient people themselves. But there is no reason to surmise that the Genesis record has a mythological aura.