Who are the Nephilim?
The Nephilim are beings in the Old Testament thought to be giants. Chapter 6 of Genesis briefly records that “the sons of God” were drawn to the beauty of human daughters and took them as wives, and that the Nephilim were on the earth in those days. The meaning of the name is unclear, but because it may be related to the Hebrew word for “fall,” it is sometimes interpreted as “the fallen ones.”
In the Book of Numbers, Israelites who scouted the promised land of Canaan reported, “We saw the Nephilim there, and we seemed like grasshoppers,” which is why the Nephilim came to be thought of as giants.
The Book of Enoch and fallen angels
The apocryphal Book of Enoch tells this story in more detail. Two hundred angels called the “Watchers” (Grigori) came down from heaven and took human women as wives, and the children born to them became giants of enormous height. The giants devoured all the food on earth and finally began to eat humans, so God decided to cleanse the earth with a great flood. The angels are also said to have taught humans how to make weapons and how to do magic.
Urban legends about the Nephilim
Online, photos of “excavated giant skeletons” sometimes circulate as evidence of the Nephilim. However, many of the best-known giant skeleton photos have turned out to have been made for photo-editing contests and the like. There is also an ancient astronaut theory linking the Nephilim with aliens who visited Earth in ancient times. Among giant myths, they are compared with the Gigantes of Greece and Ymir of Norse myth.
