The Nephilim and the Book of Enoch
c. 300 BC
Just before the story of Noah's flood, the Book of Genesis pauses for four puzzling verses. Divine beings take human wives, and "the Nephilim" appear on earth, "the heroes of old, the men of renown". That is nearly all the Hebrew Bible says about them, yet the Nephilim have grown into one of the most debated mysteries in scripture, thanks largely to an ancient Jewish book that most Bibles left out: the Book of Enoch. Here is what the texts say, how different faiths have read them, and what history can and cannot tell us.
Four verses in Genesis
In the Jewish Publication Society translation on Sefaria, Genesis 6 tells how, as humanity multiplied, divine beings (the traditional "sons of God") saw that human women were beautiful and took wives from among them. God then limits human life to 120 years. The text continues that the Nephilim appeared on earth in those days and later too, when the divine beings had children by human women, and that these were the heroes and famous men of old.
Even the grammar is unclear. Wikipedia notes that the verse does not make plain whether the Nephilim are the divine beings themselves, their children, or simply people who lived at the same time. Some scholars read them as the offspring; others disagree.
The Nephilim appear once more, in Numbers 13. Moses has sent spies into Canaan, and most of them return frightened. In the JPS wording on Sefaria they report people of astonishing size, say they saw the Nephilim there, linking them to a group called the Anakites, and add that they felt like grasshoppers beside them. Wikipedia points out that some scholars read this as a scared report rather than a literal measurement.
What does the name mean?
Nobody is sure. Wikipedia says many interpretations tie the word to n-p-l, a Hebrew root meaning "to fall", producing readings such as "fallen ones" or "those who make others fall". Most ancient translations, including the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, rendered it "giants", which is why the King James Version says giants too. A classic Hebrew dictionary from 1908, quoted by Wikipedia, warned that proposed origins of the word are all very precarious.
The Book of Enoch tells the full story
Genesis also mentions Enoch, a man who "walked with God" and was then taken by God. The Jewish Encyclopedia explains that this brief verse inspired a whole cycle of legends: Enoch toured heaven with angels, learned the secrets of nature, and saw what had become of the sons of God who sinned with human women. Those legends were gathered into what is now called 1 Enoch.
Wikipedia says the opening section, the Book of the Watchers, tells how a group of angels called the Watchers came down to earth, took human wives and fathered the Nephilim, described as destructive giants. Enoch is sent to announce their punishment, and the Jewish Encyclopedia notes that he tries to intercede for the fallen angels, in vain. In this telling, the angels' sin and their giant children help explain why God sent the flood.
The book is old. Wikipedia dates its earliest sections to about 300 to 200 BC and its latest part to around 100 BC, and says copies of the early sections in Aramaic were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, which our Dead Sea Scrolls story covers. It was widely read. Both Wikipedia and the Jewish Encyclopedia note that the New Testament Letter of Jude quotes Enoch.
Then it largely vanished. The Jewish Encyclopedia says the Christian church began to discredit it around 300 AD and that, apart from quotations by a few Greek writers into the ninth century, it was lost in the West until 1773, when a traveller named Bruce found two manuscripts of it in Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia). Wikipedia confirms that the complete book survives only in Ge'ez, the classical language of Ethiopia.
Three ways of reading the Nephilim
Faith traditions have read these passages in very different ways, and each view deserves to be stated on its own terms. Wikipedia summarises the main ones:
- Angels and human women. Following Enoch and the Book of Jubilees, many ancient Jewish and early Christian writers understood the "sons of God" as angels and the Nephilim as their giant children. For the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo and Eritrean Orthodox churches, and for the Beta Israel community, 1 Enoch is part of the Bible.
- The line of Seth. From the second century AD onward, both Jewish and Christian teachers, including Augustine of Hippo, read the "sons of God" as godly descendants of Adam's son Seth who married into the line of Cain. Wikipedia notes that mainstream rabbinic Judaism rejected the idea that angels could marry humans, and that the 2nd-century sage Shimon bar Yochai is said to have cursed anyone who taught it.
- Legend and literature. Many modern scholars read the Nephilim against the background of ancient Near Eastern tales of semi-divine heroes, or as a literary device. One archaeologist quoted by Wikipedia suggested that the massive walls of old Canaanite cities may have encouraged stories of giant builders.
Giants in the ground?
Belief in ancient giants has had a long afterlife. Wikipedia lists examples of bones once taken for giants: a find near Lucerne in 1577 later identified as mammoth, and fossils near Albany, New York, in 1705, which the Puritan minister Cotton Mather thought belonged to giants drowned in the flood and which paleontologists identify as mastodon. In 1869 the Cardiff Giant, a carved stone figure, was passed off as a petrified giant. No genuine skeletal evidence of giant humans has ever been found.
Belief vs evidence
Tradition: Angels fathered a race of giants before the flood. Evidence: This is a religious teaching found in Genesis as read through 1 Enoch; history cannot test it, and many believers themselves read Genesis differently.
Claim: Giant skeletons prove the Nephilim existed. Evidence: Every famous example has turned out to be animal bones or a hoax.
What history can say is remarkable enough: a few lines in Genesis inspired a book read for centuries, preserved in caves by the Dead Sea and in Ethiopian churches, and still argued over today.