The story goes that the champion of the Philistines, Goliath from Gath, stood just shy of 10 feet and he challenged Israel, only to be defeated by a young man named David. Goliath, though the best known, is not the only giant found in the Old Testament. The groups of giants we come across are the Nephilim, the Rephaim, the Emim and the Anakim.
The Nephilim are generally seen as the oldest and possibly the founding race of the other three groups of giants. We run into the Nephilim first in Genesis 6:1-4 which proves to be a very difficult passage to understand…
Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
The most common explanation of this passage is that some of the fallen angels came and had children with some women on earth and the children ended up as giants. This holds up at a glance but looking closer at the verses we see some problems. The first thing we notice is this group of “people” being referred to as the “sons of God”. There are at least three explanations that I have found about who they are:
- The default explanation is that they are fallen angels. The reason for this is that the term “sons of God” is usually used to refer to angels in the OT. Of course there are many problems with that theory, some biological and the fact that it is just weird.
- One of the more conservative explanations says that “sons of God” means those in the chosen lineage thus descended from Seth. This seems to be logical since the Godly are sometimes called sons, except the usual usage of sons of God in the OT still means angels.
- They could have been kings since many ancient texts use “sons of god” to describe kings. However the OT is not like other ancient texts in that it does not call kings “sons of god”.
Another enigma comes with the sons of God’s relationship to the Nephilim. Many people think that this verse implies that the Nephilim came about from the sons of God, but the text does not necessarily say that. It seems to say that the Nephilim were already “on the earth in those days”.
This passage only refers to them as mighty men, but we know that they were giants from later passages referring to them as giants. The spies who went into Canaan reported that the people who lived there were Nephilim and they made them feel like grasshoppers in their sight. Of course this could have been an exaggeration since the Nephilim were more than likely destroyed in the flood. I guess though that Noah had a little Nephilim in him as you can see in They Might Be Giants: Part Deaux.
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