Nephilim & Biblical Giants

The entire biblical foundation for the Nephilim rests on a strikingly short, strange passage — Genesis 6:1-4 — describing "the sons of God" seeing that "the daughters of humans were beautiful" and taking wives from among them. The passage then states: "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterward — when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown."

The word itself, Nephilim (נְפִילִים), is of disputed etymology — most commonly connected to a Hebrew root meaning "to fall," suggesting either "the fallen ones" or those who caused others to fall, though this derivation isn't universally accepted among Hebrew scholars. The Greek Septuagint translated the term as gigantes — giants — which is where the English translation tradition comes from, though the original Hebrew text never explicitly states a physical height for the Nephilim; their size is inferred rather than stated outright.

Whatever they were, the passage places them immediately before the account of the Flood, and the phrasing "and also afterward" has puzzled readers for centuries — if the Flood was meant to wipe out this corrupted mixed lineage, how were Nephilim still around afterward?

The brief Genesis account is massively expanded in the Book of Enoch, an ancient Jewish text dated to roughly the 3rd-2nd century BCE, considered scripture by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church but excluded from the Hebrew Bible, the standard Christian Old Testament, and the Quran. Enoch names the "sons of God" as the Watchers (Grigori) — angelic beings led by a figure named Semjaza, who descend to Mount Hermon and swear a mutual oath to take human wives.

Crucially, Enoch adds that the Watchers didn't just father giant offspring — they also taught humanity forbidden knowledge: metalworking and weapon-making, cosmetics and seduction, astrology, divination, and the reading of omens. Their children, the giants, are described as growing so large and consuming so much that they turned to devouring humans, animals, and eventually each other, provoking the earth itself to cry out for divine intervention — which Enoch presents as the direct trigger for the Flood.

This framing — forbidden angelic knowledge causing civilisational corruption, met with catastrophic divine judgment — has made the Book of Enoch a recurring reference point far beyond biblical scholarship, cited across esoteric, occult and UFO-contactee literature as an ancient account of "fallen" or non-human intervention in human development.

Later in the Hebrew Bible, the Nephilim reappear indirectly through several named "giant" peoples the Israelites encounter while entering Canaan. The Anakim are described in Numbers 13 as descendants of the Nephilim, so imposing that the Israelite scouts sent to survey the land report feeling "like grasshoppers" beside them — a report that, according to the text, caused the Israelites to lose faith and wander the wilderness for another forty years rather than attempt conquest immediately.

The Rephaim appear as a broader, related category of giant or otherwise formidable peoples across multiple books, associated with the region of Bashan and its king, Og, whose iron bed is described in Deuteronomy 3:11 as roughly 13.5 feet (4 metres) long — one of the few passages that attaches a specific, enormous measurement to a named biblical figure.

The best-known biblical giant, Goliath of Gath, is described in 1 Samuel 17 as roughly six cubits and a span tall — commonly rendered as around 9 feet 9 inches (nearly 3 metres) in the Masoretic Hebrew text, though the earlier Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek Septuagint give a shorter figure of about 6 feet 9 inches, a genuine textual variant scholars still debate. Goliath's defeat by the young David, using only a sling, is one of the Bible's most culturally pervasive stories, referenced constantly in art, language and popular idiom as shorthand for any underdog victory.

Goliath is explicitly identified as a Philistine, from the city of Gath, and several other giant Philistine warriors appear later in 2 Samuel 21, described as descendants of "the giant" (Hebrew ha-Rapha) — connecting the Philistine giants back to the broader Rephaim category.

The shift from an angelic to a more figurative reading is itself a documented piece of theological history — early Church figures including Justin Martyr held the angelic view, while later theologians including Augustine increasingly favoured a more allegorical interpretation, partly out of discomfort with the idea of angels fathering physical offspring. Modern biblical scholarship remains divided between reading the passage as preserved myth-fragment, later theological allegory, or genuine ancient tradition whose original meaning has been partly lost to time.