Q&A: What are the Nephilim?

By Micah Murphy truthandcharity.net

A friend of mine, a youth minister in Montana, sent me a question from one of her youth. Q. Genesis 6 mentioned the Nephilim. Im aware of this race of giants from mythology. Why are they in the Bible?

Statue of an Athenian Giant. Photo credit: Giovanni Dall'Orto, Wikimedia Commons.

A. Yes, there is an interesting passage about the Nephilim in Genesis 6:1-4. We should look at the broader passage for context: When human beings began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of human beings were, and so they took for their wives whomever they pleased. Then the LORD said: My spirit shall not remain in human beings forever, because they are only flesh. Their days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years. The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown. Some scholars believe that this was intended by the sacred author (traditionally, Moses) to support Hebrew mythology. While Middle Eastern folklore did contain fables about things like the Nephilim, I find it unacceptable to believe that the Moses would have written anything with the intention to support mythology for the sake of mythology. The sacred author wrote for the purpose of revealing the God, and so any reference to the Nephilim of fable must have been intended to serve that purpose. A few centuries ago, it was not uncommon for missionaries to adopt and adapt certain stories from indigenous cultures for use as an analogy to the faith. For example, the Jesuits in the Huron Territory near the New York/Canadian border adapted the Huron myth about the Great Spirit and used their name for him, Gitchi Manitou, to refer to the God they came preaching, the true Spirit, God the Creator of all things, the only God. Eventually, they even wrote a Christmas carol about Gitchi Manitou becoming man. It remains popular in the area today. The passage from Genesis 6 mentions the Nephilim in connection to the offspring of the sons of God and daughters of men, so perhaps that is where we should start. The whole passage in context is relating the fall of humanity into the sinful state that preceded the Flood. There are various mythologies also about these sons of God who are mentioned. It is true that this phrase sometimes refers to angels, but this cannot be the case here. Angels remain angels by nature, even if they fall, and cannot take part in biological reproduction. The sons of God must therefore mean something else. As many

scholars believe, it is simply a poetic reference to the righteous line of Seth (the often forgotten third son of Adam and Eve), while the daughters of men would be the wicked line of Cain. Now it becomes more clear what the Nephilim represent. These are the offspring of two families and from the flow of the story toward the Flood, we know that the offspring are sinful. Why are they called the Nephilim? The Haydock Commentary suggests that the reference to the Nephilim isnt so much an appeal to the size of the fabled creatures as to their temperament, violent and savage in their dispositionsmonsters of cruelty and lust. In fact, the Hebrew root word for nephilim may mean fallen, which makes a great deal of sense with our interpretation. In light of this, it seems that Moses wanted to show just how bad the human race had really gotten to be at this time and compared them to a horrible race of giants. There is another important but passing reference to the Nephilim in the Bible, in Numbers 13:32-33. When the Israelites spy out the land of Canaan, the Nephilim are seen there. However, the last we saw of the Nephilim, they were around before the flood, and surely drowned. It is likely in this passage that the spies were making claims concerning the actual Nephilim of mythology. The sacred author in this case is simply attesting to the fact that some Israelites believed the mythology and used it to spread fear among their own people, which is not the same as an endorsement of the mythology itself.