Weird Stuff in the Bible

Who are the Nephilim?
Genesis 6

Introduction
What’s the weirdest thing you believe?
Everybody seems to have some far-out belief. Some people believe in Aliens, some people believe in Bigfoot, some people believe that a government-mandated income tax is Constitutional…
I’ll give you mine. Mine is that spiritual beings descended to the earth and reproduced offspring with human women, and that this happened about 5000 years ago.
Where would I get such an idea?
Something called The Bible.
Last week, we established who the sons of God are. The sons of God are first mentioned in chapter 6 of Genesis, and they engaged in some kind of rebellion against God that involved marrying human women. Now that we’ve laid that groundwork of who they are, we need to take the next step in our understanding of what they did.
And I’m telling you, it’s the weirdest thing I believe.
But I have to believe it, because it’s in the Bible. And I believe the Bible. It’s a lot more reliable than the United States tax code.
So grab your Bible with me, turn to Genesis 6, and let’s get weird.
[theme music]

Recapping the Sons of God
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be talking about the Nephilim.
Last week, I did an episode discussing why the Sons of God are spiritual beings. You could call them angels, but that’s a general term. They are a specific type of angel called the Sons of God. I believe they are also the same classification of what is called a Watcher in the Book of Daniel. They are assigned certain territories to observe and act as spiritual representatives for mankind before God. They are even present at God’s divine council meetings to report on what’s going on with humanity, as you can read about in the first couple of chapters of Job.
However, some of the Sons of God fell in love- or perhaps fell in lust- with human women, and this was an event that occurred back before the flood. They apparently created or manifested in physical bodies and tried to cohabitate with women. We read about this in
Genesis 6:1-2
When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.
So they married human women. Once you stop and observe the text and realize this fact, suddenly people don’t want to accept the Sons of God as angelic beings anymore. You will see Bible readers declare this as too weird, and they start trying to come up with alternative explanations of who the Sons of God are. That’s why I spent last week’s episode just explaining and proving that the Sons of God are indeed angels.
However, I’ll admit, this raises a lot of questions. How can spiritual beings create physical bodies? Well, I hate to keep saying “I’m going to explain that in a future episode,” but these are all subjects that I plan to talk about down the road. It’s actually very easy to demonstrate that angels are capable of creating physical bodies and interacting with the physical world.
But then a second objection or question arises: how could the Sons of God do this without God’s permission? And the answer is, they didn’t have God’s permission, but they did it anyway. Now, perhaps they were influenced by Satan? Perhaps the Book of Enoch will shed some light on it as we get into that later? But regardless, God was upset with the angels for doing this, and God has locked those angels away in the deepest dungeon in hell for this action.
Jude 6 says
the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day—
II Peter 2:4 says
For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment
And that word for “hell” in that verse is the Greek Tartarus, referring to the deepest and darkest part of hell. So these Sons of God were dealt with in a very harsh manner for their actions here. But why so harsh? What did this intermarriage with humans accomplish? Well, let’s go back to Genesis and keep reading.

Meet the Nephilim
Genesis 6:3
3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”
Side-note on this: some people take this verse to mean that God is putting a limit on the lifespan of humans, that from this point on, man will live no longer than 120 years. That is actually not what it’s saying. It’s telling us that from the time the stuff happened in verse 2, God put a countdown of 120 years until the flood was going to happen.
Genesis 6:4
4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
This is the ESV version of the Bible. Other translation might call them the Giants. But the Hebrew term is something more like Nephilim.
Now, most normal Christians read their Bible, the read about Nephlim or giants in Genesis 6:4, and they aren’t quite sure what it means, so they just go on to verse 5 and keep reading along. But this is not a podcast for normal Christians. The Bible is not a normal book, it’s a weird book. So let’s dig down and understand what was going on here.
Nephilim are a different race of people than regular humans. They had a spirit-infused DNA. They were considered gigantic in size. I am not saying they were 100 stories tall like the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. However, I think they were a few feet taller than your average human in height.
It’s predicted that the typical human male was probably closer to five feet tall in ancient times than six feet tall. I have no idea if that’s true, but the Nephilim seem to be 7 to 10 feet tall. We read about a few of them in scripture. Again, some translations will outright call them the giants. In one of the next couple of episodes, we’ll discuss how they show up again and again throughout the Old Testament, and also trace how their name changes over time. They’re called by different names, such as the Rephaim and the Anakim.
But we’ll stay in Genesis 6 for today. It calls these people “men of renown” and the “mighty men.” It almost makes them sound noble or heroic, but I think what it really means is that they were notorious. They were a scourge on the earth.
It’s interesting that virtually ever society and culture has stories of the ancient giants who once roamed the earth. Just like every culture that’s been around for a few thousand years has a flood story in its history, a time that the whole earth was covered with a flood. That’s not just from the Bible; it’s what all past cultures knew about. And likewise, they all have stories of the giants.
Buffalo Bill came across stories among the Native Americans of huge people, it’s in his autobiography. It came out in the 1920s, about 100 years ago, and this is what he wrote: “While we were in the sandhills, scouting the Niobrara country, the Pawnee Indians brought into camp some very large bones, one of which the surgeon of the expedition pronounced to be the thigh bone of a human being. The Indians said the bones were those of a race of people who long ago had lived in that country. They said these people were three times the size of a man of the present day, that they were so swift and strong that they could run by the side of a buffalo, and, taking the animal in one arm, could tear off a leg and eat it as they ran.”
Apparently, the traditions of Native Americans of holding up one hand when they meet strangers is to show that they only have five fingers, because the giants were known to have six fingers on each hand.
There are also some stories that the ancient Paiute Indians had of trapping some red-haired giants in Lovelock Cave in Nevada. They were violent and cannibalistic, and finally, the Paiute Indians decided to do whatever it took to wipe them out. The cave has been excavated and there have been conflicting reports of whether the skeletal remains were gigantic in stature. It was dug out about a century ago so the evidence is not something we can go observe today, except for the sandals they found which were apparently much larger than what would fit on a human’s feet. And the mummified remains indeed showed red hair.
The ancient apkallu of Mesopotamian legend, Mesopotamian myth. (As I believe it, real legend, real myth. Sure, some aspects may have been exaggerated over time, but there’s a truth at the core of it. The Titans of Greek Mythology; they’re half-human, half-god.)
Listen to this headline I read earlier this summer. Mysterious giant 300,000-year-old hand axes were found at an Ice Age site in England. Scientists can't work out why they are so big. Maybe we’ll dive deeper into this story on a later episode. This was reported on Business Insider. A major news source. Sure, lots of news is fake nowadays, but my point is that this was written not on some conspiracy-theory-fringe blog. It’s business insider. The report says: these particular hand axes "are so big it's difficult to imagine how they could have been easily held and used.” And they describe the axes as “giant.” Well, probably because they were weirded by giants. And as you read on in the Bible, you’ll read about giants whose spears were described as massive.
These axes were discovered in ice sediments in Medway Valley, Kent, Southern England. One line in the report was kind of funny. It said, "Right now, we aren't sure why such large tools were being made or which species of early human were making them.” Which species of early human. What an interesting phrase.
We could go to other ancient cultures to talk about this, too, but I just find it so fascinating that we see them show up over here on the Western hemisphere, which was an entirely different side of the world than what we’re talking about in the Biblical texts. But you might recall that the Israelites were afraid to take the Promised Land when they first came upon it in Numbers 13, claiming that there were giants in the land.
So they were exceptionally tall, exceptionally strong and exceptionally fast. What we’ll see next is that they were very evil beings.

Why God sent the Flood
They made a Noah movie about a decade ago. It was total trash, got so many things wrong. And one of the things it got wrong is that it made the Nephilim these angels who had rebelled against God, they got cast out of heaven, but then as an act of repentance they assist Noah in getting on the ark, and so God forgives them and beams them up to heaven. And they were also these rock creatures in the movie, not giants.
Totally wrong. Totally off-base. The real Nephilim were not angels who rebelled against God a long time ago. The Sons of God were the angelic creatures who rebelled against God. The Nephilim were their offspring. And the Nephilim did not repent. They were exceedingly wicked creatures.
Genesis 6:5-7
5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”
For 120 years, the Nephilim grew in population across the earth. In fact, it’s my belief that by the time of the flood 120 years later, the Nephilim had so spread throughout the earth that virtually all people had some trace of Nephilim DNA in their bloodline by the time the flood happened. And that this created a very wicked and evil society. So God had to wipe it out.
Genesis 5:8-12
8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. 9 These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God. 10 And Noah had three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
A note here before it went on, there are lots of ways to translate verse 9. ESV says blameless in his generation. King James says: Noah was a just man, perfect in his generations. I think this gets to the idea a bit better; it’s saying that Noah had a perfect bloodline. He was a good man whose DNA wasn’t tainted by the Nephilim. In his whole family history, there was no messing around with the Sons of God, so one of the major reasons that Noah was chosen to save the human race is because his bloodline was pure. I’ll go on but I think this knowledge brings greater context and clarity to what is going on in Genesis 6.
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence. 12 And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.
So saying they had corrupted flesh would be, I believe, an ancient way of saying that their DNA was tainted with this evil bloodline. It produced extra tall and extra evil violent beings.

Closing Thoughts
So this is why God sent the flood to wipe out everyone on earth. If it had continued much further, all flesh would have been corrupted, and God would have had no one to send the Promised Messiah through.
But perhaps you’re saying now: wait: but if God wiped out all the Nephilim in the flood of Noah, then how were there more Nephilim after the flood? Well, the Sons of God tried this again after the flood. They thought, I guess, that it almost worked the first time, and God said He wouldn’t send another flood, so they decided to try it again.
And how do I know this? Well, we already read it.
Genesis 6:4
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward,
The KJV says: There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that
So the Nephilim or giants were part of the pre-flood history, but not just pre-flood. We’ll see them again post-flood, too. The Sons of God tried it again. But this time, mankind fought back.
Next time on this podcast, we’ll talk about that. We’re going to go to that moment that the Israelites sent 12 spies into the Promised Land and saw these gigantic creatures called the Sons of Anak.
Make sure you’re subscribed so you can get it! It’s also going to bring us back into Jude’s book, too.
Have you got an objection or question or comment on what I discussed today? weirdstuffinthebible@gmail.com (or leave a comment if you’re on a platform for that)

Closing Thoughts
Jesus said the last days will be like two specific periods of time in Biblical history.

Luke 17:26
26 Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man.
Now, was He referring to Nephilim and Giants? IDK. He didn’t mention either of those things, but it was such an accepted part of Noah’s story, perhaps that was implied. I’m not sure one way or the other. He also said in
Verse 28
Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—
And the Book of Jude, which I believe is about the world right before the end of the world, tells us to learn some lessons from the Days of Noah and the Days of Lot.
So we’ll need to get back into Jude soon on this podcast and learn what those lessons are.
And now we’ve just about laid the groundwork for understanding Jude’s context that he was pointing to as he taught those lessons. But we’ll stop right there for today.
So if you think believing in half-human giants is weird, I hope you’re a little more weird today, too. It’s the weirdest thing I believe in. But I do believe it because it’s what the Bible says. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time.