4 - THE NEFILIM - SEX AND DEMIGODS

The biblical record of human prehistory moves at a fast clip through the generations following Enoch - his son Metus-helah, who begot Lamech, who begot Noah ("Respite"), getting us to the main event - the Deluge. The Deluge was indeed a story of major proportions as newscasters would say nowadays, a global event, a watershed both figuratively and literally in human and divine affairs. But hidden behind the tale of the Deluge is an episode of Divine Encounters of a totally new kind - an episode without which the Deluge tale itself would lose its biblical rationale.

The biblical tale of the Deluge, the great Flood, begins in chapter 6 of Genesis with eight enigmatic verses. Their presumed purpose was to explain to future generation how was it - how could it have happened? - that the very Creator of Humankind turned against it, vowing to wipe Man off the face of the Earth. The fifth verse is supposed to offer both explanation and justification:

"And Yahweh saw that the wickedness of Man was great on the Earth, and that every imagination of his heart’s thoughts was evil."

Therefore (verse six) "Yahweh repented that He had made Man upon the Earth, and it grieved Him at His heart."

But this explanation by the Bible, pointing the accusing finger at humanity, only increases the puzzle of the chapter’s first four verses, whose subject is not at all humanity but the deities themselves, and whose focus is the intermarriage between "the sons of God" and "the daughters of the Adam."

And if one wonders. What has all that got to do with the excuse for the Deluge as a punishment of Mankind, the answer can be given in one word: SEX... Not human sex, but Divine Sex. Divine Encounters for the purpose of sexual intercourse.
 

The opening verses of the Deluge tale in the Bible, echoing ancient sins and calamitous purgatory, have been a preacher’s delight: That was a time that set an example, the time when,

"there were giants upon the Earth, in those days and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bare children to them."

The above quote follows the common English translation. But that is not what the Bible says. It speaks not of "giants" but of the Nefilim, literally meaning "Those who had descended," "sons of the Elohim" (not "sons of God") who had come down to Earth from the heavens. And the four initial incomprehensible verses, a remnant (as all scholars agree) of some longer original source, become comprehensible once it is realized that the subject of these verses is not Mankind, but the Gods themselves.

Properly translated, this is how the Bible describes the circumstances that preceded and led to the Deluge:

And it came to pass,
When the Earthlings began to increase in
number upon the face of the Earth,
and daughters were born unto them,
that the sons of the Elohim
saw the daughters of the Earthlings,
that they were compatible.
And they took unto themselves
wives of whichever they chose.

The Nefilim were upon the Earth in those days, and thereafter too, when the sons of the Elohim cohabited with the daughters of the Adam and they bore children to them.

The biblical term Nefilim, the sons of the Elohim who were then upon the Earth, parallels the Sumerian Anunnaki ("Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came"); the Bible itself (Numbers 13:33) explains that by pointing out that the Nefilim were "sons of Anak" (Hebrew rendering of Anunnaki). The time preceding the Deluge was thus a time when the young Anunnaki males began to have sex with young human females; and being compatible, had children by them - offspring part mortal and part "divine": demigods.

That such demigodswere present on Earth is amply attested in Near Eastern texts, be it in regard to individuals (such as the Sumerian Gilgamesh) or long dynasties (such as the reported dynasty of thirty demigods in Egypt that preceded the Pharaohs); both instances, however, pertain to post-Diluvial times. But in the biblical preamble to the Deluge tale we have an assertion that the "taking of wives" from among the human females by the "sons of the Elohim" - sons of the DIN.GIR - had already begun well before the Deluge.

The Sumerian sources that deal with pre-Diluvial times and the origins of Humankind and civilization include the tale of Adapa, and we have already touched upon the question whether having been called "offspring of Ea" simply meant that he was a human descended of The Adam whom Ea had helped create, or more literally (as many scholars hold) an actual son born to Ea by intercourse with a human female, which would make Adapa a demigod.

If that would have required Ea/Enki to have sex with a female other than his official spouse, the Goddess Ninki, no eyebrows should be raised: several Sumerian texts detail the sexual prowess of Enki. In one instance he was after Inanna/Ishtar, the granddaughter of his half brother Enlil. Among other escapades was his determination to attain a son by his half sister Nin-mah; but when only a daughter was born, he continued the sexual relationship with the next and next and next generations of Goddesses.

Was Enmeduranki, by all accounts, the seventh and not the last (tenth) ruler of a City of the Gods well before the Deluge, such a demigod? The point is not clarified by the Sumerian texts, but we suspect that he was (in which case his lather was Utu/Shamash). Otherwise, why would a City of the Gods (in this case, Sippar) be put under his charge, in a succession in which all the previous six listed rulers were Anunnaki leaders? And how could he reign in Sippar 21,600 years were he not a genetic beneficiary of the relative "Immortality" of the Anunnaki?

Although the Bible itself does not say when the intermarriage began, except to state that it "came to pass when the Earthlings began to increase in number" and to spread upon the Earth, the Pseudepigraphic books reveal that the sexual involvement of young Gods with human females became a major issue in the time of Enoch - well before the Deluge (since Enoch was the seventh Patriarch of the ten pre-Diluvial ones).

According to the Book of Jubilees one of the matters regarding which Enoch had "testified" concerned,

"angels of the Lord who had descended to Earth and who had sinned with the daughters of men, those who had begun to unite themselves, and thus be defiled, with the daughters of men."

According to this source, this was a major sin committed by the "angels of the Lord," a "fornication",

"wherein, against the law of their ordinance, they went whoring after the daughters of men, and took themselves wives of all which they chose, thus causing the beginning of uncleanliness."

The Book of Enoch throws more light on what had happened:

And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied, that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the Children of Heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: "Come, let us choose wives from among the children of men, and beget us children."

According to this source, this was not a development resulting from individual acts, from a young Anunnaki here and another one there getting overcome by lust. There is a hint that the sexual urge was augmented by a desire to have offspring; and that the choosing of human wives was a deliberate decision by a group of Anunnaki acting in concert.

Indeed, as we peruse the text further, we read that after the idea had germinated,

Semjaza, who was their leader, said unto them:
"I fear ye will not agree to do this deed, and I
alone shall have to pay the penalty for a great sin."

And they all answered and said:

"Let us all swear an oath, and all
bind ourselves by mutual imprecations, not to
abandon this plan but to do this thing."

So they all gathered together and bound themselves by an oath "to do this thing" although it was a violation of "the law of their ordinance." The scheming angels, we learn as we read on, descended upon Mount Hermon ("Mount of Oath"), at the southern edge of the mountains of Lebanon.

"Their number was two hundred, those who in the days of Jared came down upon the summit of Mount Hermon."

The two hundred divided themselves into subgroups of ten; the Book of Enoch provides the names of the group leaders, "the chiefs of Ten." The whole affair was thus a well-organized effort by sex-deprived and childless "sons of the Elohim" to remedy the situation.

It is obvious that in the Pseudepigraphic books the sexual involvement of divine beings with the human females was no more than lust, fornication, defilement - a sin of the "fallen angels." The prevalent notion is that that is the viewpoint of the Bible itself; but in fact this is not so. The ones to be blamed and, therefore, to be wiped out are the Children of Adam, not the sons of the Elohim. The latter are, in fact, fondly remembered: verse 4 recalls them as "the mighty ones of Olam, the people of the Shem" - the people of the rocketships.

An insight into the motivation, calculations, and sentiments that brought about the intermarriage and how it was to be judged, might be gleaned from a somewhat similar occurrence related in the Bible (Judges chapter 21). On account of the sexual abuse of a traveler’s woman by men from the tribe of Benjamin, the other Israelite tribes made war on the Benjaminites. Decimated and with few childbearing females remaining, the tribe faced extinction.

The option of marrying females from other tribes was also blocked, for all the other tribes took an oath not to give their daughters to the Benjaminites. So the Benjaminite men, on the occasion of a national festival, hid themselves along a road leading to the town of Shiloh; and when the daughters of Shiloh came out dancing down the road, they "caught every man his wife" and carried them off to the Benjaminite domain. Surprisingly, they were not punished for these abductions; for in truth, the whole incident was a scheme concocted by the elders of Israel, a way to help the tribe of Benjamin survive in spite of the boycott oath.

Was such a "do what you have to do while I look away" ploy behind the oath-taking ceremony atop Mount Hermon? Was it at least one principal leader, an elder of the Anunnaki (Enki?) who looked away, while another (perhaps Enlil?) was so upset?

A little-known Sumerian text may have a bearing on the question. Regarded as a "mythical tablet" by E. Chiera (in Sumerian Religious Texts), it tells the story of a young God named Martu who complained about his spouseless life; and we learn from it that intermarriage with human females was both common and not a sin - providing it was done by permission and not without the young woman’s consent:

In my city I have friends,
they have taken wives.
I have companions,
they have taken wives.
In my city, unlike my friends,
I have not taken a wife;
I have no wife, I have no children.

The city about which Martu was speaking was called Nin-ab, a "city in the settled great land." The time, the Sumerian text explains, was in the distant past when "the city of Nin-ab existed. Shed-tab did not exist; the holy tiara existed, the holy crown did not exist." In other words, priesthood existed, but not Kingship as yet. But it was a time when "cohabitation there was ... bringing forth of children there was."

The city’s High Priest, the text informs us, was an accomplished musician; he had a wife and a daughter. As the people gathered for a festival, offering the Gods the roasted meat of the sacrifices, Martu saw the priest’s daughter and desired her.
Evidently, taking her as a wife required special permission, for it was an act - to use the words of the Book of Jubilees - "against the law of their ordinances."

The above-quoted complaint by Martu was addressed to his mother, an unnamed Goddess. She wanted to know whether the maiden whom he desired "appreciated his gaze." When it was so determined, the Gods gave Martu the needed permission. The rest of the text describes how the other young Gods prepared a marriage feast, and how the residents of Nin-ab were summoned by the beat of a copper drum to witness the ceremony.

If we read the available texts as versions of the same prehistoric record, we can envision the predicament of the young Anunnaki males and the unwelcome solution. There were six hundred Anunnaki who had come to Earth and another three hundred who operated the shuttlecraft, spacecraft, and other facilities such as a space station. Females were few among them.

There was Ninmah, the daughter of Anu and a half sister of both Enki and Enlil (all three from different mothers) who was the Chief Medical Officer, and with her there came a group of female Anunnaki nurses (a depiction on a Sumerian cylinder seal portrays the group - Fig. 19).

Figure 19
 

One of them eventually became Enlil's official consort (and was given the title-name NIN.LIL, "Lady of the Command"), but only after the incident of the date-rape for which Enlil was banished - an incident that also highlights the shortage of females among the first Anunnaki groups.

An insight into the sexual habits on Nibiru itself can be gleaned from the records, in various God Lists that the Sumerians and subsequent nations had kept, concerning Anu himself. He had fourteen sons and daughters from his official spouse Antu; but in addition he had six concubines, whose (presumably numerous) offspring by Anu were not listed. Enlil, on Nibiru, fathered a son by his half sister Ninmah (also known as Ninti in the Creation of Man tales and as Ninharsag later on); his name was Ninurta.

But, though a grandson of Anu, his spouse Bau (also given the epithet GULA, "The Great One") was one of the daughters of Anu, which amonts to Ninurta marrying one of his aunts. On Earth Enlil, once having espoused Ninlil, was strictly monogamous. They had a total of six children, four daughters and two sons; the youngest, Ishkur in Sumerian and Adad in Akkadian, was also called in some God Lists Martu - indicating that Shala, his official consort, might well have been an Earthling, the daughter of the High Priest, as the tale of Martu’s marriage reported.

Enki’s spouse was called NIN.KI ("Lady of Earth") and was also known as DAM.KI.NA ("Spouse who to Earth came"). Back on Nibiru she bore him a son, Marduk; mother and son joined Enki on Earth on subsequent trips. But while he was on Earth without her, Enki did not deprive himself ... A text called by scholars "Enki and Ninharsag: A Paradise Myth" describes how Enki stalked his half sister and, seeking a son by her, "poured the semen into her womb."

But she bore him only daughters, whom Enki also found worthy of conjugation. Finally Ninharsag put a curse on Enki that paralyzed him, and forced him to concur in a quick assignment of husbands to the young female Goddesses. This did not stop Enki, on another occasion, from forcefully "carrying off as a prize" a granddaughter of Enlil, Ereshkigal, by boat to his domain in southern Africa.

All these instances serve to illustrate the dire shortage of females among the Anunnaki who had come to Earth. After the Deluge, as the Sumerian God Lists attest, with second and third generations of Anunnaki around, a better male-female balance was attained. But the shortage of females was obviously acute in the long pre-Diluvian times.

There was absolutely no intention on the part of the Anunnaki leadership, when the decision to create Primitive Workers was taken, to also create sexmates for the Anunnaki males. But, in the words of the Bible, "when the Earthlings began to increase in number upon the face of the Earth, and daughters were born unto them," the young Anunnaki discovered that the series of genetic manipulations have made these females compatible, and that cohabiting with them would result in children.
The planetary intermarriage required strict permission.

With the behavioral code of the Anunnaki viewing rape as a serious offense (even Enlil, the supreme commander, was sentenced to exile when he date-raped the young nurse; he was forgiven after he married her), the new form of Divine Encounters was strictly regulated and required permission which, we learn from the Sumerian text, was given only if the human female "appreciated the gaze" of the young God.

So two hundred of the young ones took matters into their own hands, swore an oath to do it all together and face the results as a group, and swooped down among the Daughters of Men to pick out wives. The outcome - totally unanticipated when The Adam was created - was a new breed of people: Demigods.

Enki, who himself may have fathered demigods, viewed the development more leniently than Enlil; so, evidently, did Enki’s cocreator of The Adam, Ninmah, for it was in her city, the medical center called Shuruppak, that the Sumerian hero of the Deluge resided. The fact that he was listed in the Sumerian King Lists as the tenth pre-Diluvial ruler indicates that it was to demigods that key roles as intermediaries between the Gods and the people were assigned: kings and priests. The practice resumed after the Deluge; kings especially boasted that they were "seed" of this or that God (and some made the claim even if they were not, just to legitimize their assumption of the throne).

The new kind of Divine Encounters, resulting in a new (though limited) breed of humans, created problems not only for the leadership of the Anunnaki, but also for Mankind. The Bible recognizes the sexual intercourse between Anunnaki and humans as the most significant aspect of the events preceding and leading to the Deluge, doing so by the enigmatic prefacing of the tale of the flood with the verses that record the intermarriage phenomenon.

The development is presented as a problem for Yahweh, a cause for grief and being sorry for creating the Earthlings. But as the more detailed pseudographical sources relate, the new kind of Divine Encounters created problems also for the sex partners and their families.

The first reported instance concerns the very hero of the Deluge and his family - Noah and his parents. The report also raises the question whether the hero of the Deluge (called Ziusudra in the Sumerian texts and Utnapishtim in the Akkadian version) was in fact a demigod.

Scholars have long believed that among the sources for the Book of Enoch there was a lost text that had been called the Book of Noah. Its existence was guessed from various early writings; but what had only been surmised became a certain and verified fact when fragments of such a Book of Noah were found among the Dead Sea scrolls in caves in the Qumran area, not far from Jericho.

According to the relevant sections of the book, when Bath-Enosh, the wife of Lamech, gave birth to Noah, the baby boy was so unusual that he aroused tormenting suspicions in the mind of Lamech:

His body was white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his locks were white as wool, and his eyes were fair. And when he opened his eyes, he lighted up the whole house like the sun, and the whole house was very bright. And thereupon he arose in the hands of the midwife, opened his mouth, and conversed with the Lord of Righteousness.

Shocked, Lamech ran to his father Metushelah and said:

I have begotten a strange son,

diverse from and unlike Man,

and resembling the sons of the God of Heaven;

and his nature is different, and he is not like us . . .
And it seems to me that

he is not sprung from me hut from the angels.

In other words, Lamech suspected that his wife’s pregnancy was induced not by him but by one of the "sons of the God of Heaven," one of the "Watchers"!

The distraught Lamech came to his father Metushelah not only to share the problem with him but also to request specific assistance. We learn at this point that Enoch, who was taken by the Elohim to be with them, was still alive and well, residing in a "dwelling place among the angels" - not in the distant heavens, but "at the ends of the Earth." So Lamech asked his father to reach there his father Enoch, and ask him to investigate whether any of the Watchers had mated with Lamech’s wife.

Reaching the place but prohibited from entering it, Metushelah called out for Enoch, and after a while Enoch, hearing the call, responded. Thereupon Metushelah related the unusual birth to Enoch, and Lamech’s doubts about the true identity of Noah’s father. Confirming that intermarriage resulting in demigod children had indeed begun in the time of Jared, Enoch nevertheless assured his son that Noah is a son of Lamech and that his unusual countenance and brilliant mind are omens that "there shall come a Deluge and great destruction for one year," but Noah and his family are destined to be saved.

All that, Enoch said, he knows because "the Lord has showed me and informed me, and I have read it in the heavenly tablets."

According to the Hebrew-Aramaic fragment of the Book of Noah that was discovered among the Dead Sea scrolls, the first reaction by Lamech on seeing his highly unusual son was to question his wife Bath-Enosh ("Daughter/offspring of Enosh"). As translated by T.H. Gaster (The Dead Sea Scriptures) and H. Dupont-Sommer (The Essene Writings from Qumran) column II of the scroll fragment begins with Lamech confessing that, as soon as he saw the baby Noah,

I thought in my heart that the conception

was from one of the Watchers,

one of the Holy Ones...
And my heart was changed within me

because of the child.
Then I, Lamech, hastened and went to Bath-Enosh,
my wife, and I said to her: I want you to take an oath
by the Most High, the Lord Supreme, the King of all
the worlds, the ruler of the Sons of Heaven,
that you will tell me the truth whether...

But if one examines the original Hebrew-Aramaic text of the scroll, one finds that where the modern translators use the term Watchers - as translators have done - the original text (Fig. 20) actually says Nefilim (author’s italics).

Figure 20
 

(The mistranslation of the word as "Watchers" before the Hebrew-Aramaic text was discovered resulted from reliance on the Greek versions, which were the product of Greek-Egyptian translators in Alexandria who took the term to mean the same as the Egyptian one for "God," NeTeR, literally meaning "Guardian." The term is not without a link to ancient Sumer, or more correctly Shumer, which meant Land of the Guardians).

Lamech, then, suspected that the child was not his. Asking his wife to tell him the truth under oath, she responded by imploring that he "remember my delicate feelings" although "the occasion is indeed alarming." Hearing this ambiguous, even evasive answer, Lamech grew even more "excited and perturbed at heart." Again he implored his wife for the truth "and not with lies."

So, she said,

"ignoring my delicate feelings, I swear to you by the Holy and Great One, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, that this seed came from you, this conception was by you, and this fruit was planted by you and not by some stranger or by any of the Watchers, the heavenly beings."

As we know from the rest of the story, Lamech remained doubting in spite of these reassurances. Perhaps he wondered what Bath-Enosh was talking about when she said that "her delicate feelings" should be taken into consideration. Was she covering up the truth after all? As we have already described, Lamech then rushed to his father Metushelah and sought through him Enoch’s help in getting to the bottom of the puzzle.

The pseudepigraphical sources conclude the tale with the reassurances about Noah’s parentage and the explanation that his unusual features and intelligence were just signs of his forthcoming role as the savior of the human seed. As for us, we must remain wondering, since according to the Sumerian sources of the tale the hero of the Deluge was, in all probability, a demigod.

The sex-oriented Divine Encounters began, according to the sources quoted above, at the time of Jared, the father of Enoch. Indeed, his very name is explained in those sources as stemming from the root Yrd which in Hebrew means "to descend," recalling the descent of the plotting sons of me Gods upon Mount Hermon. Using the chronological formula that we had earlier adopted, we could calculate when it had happened.

According to the biblical record, Jared was born 1,196 years before the Deluge; his son Enoch 1,034 years before the Deluge; then Metushelah 969 years before the Deluge, Lamech his son 782 years before the Deluge; and finally Noah, the son of Lamech, 600 years before the Great Flood.

Multiplying these numbers by 60 and adding 13,000 years, we arrive at the following timetable:

• Jared born 84,760 years ago

• Enoch born 75,040 years ago

• Metushelah born 71,140 years ago

• Lamech born 59,920 years ago

• Noah born 49,000 years ago

Bearing in mind that these pre-Diluvial patriarchs lived on for many years after giving birth to their successors, these are "fantastic ages" (as scholars say) when expressed in Earth-years - but just a few Nibiru-years when measured in Sars. Indeed, one of the tablets with the Sumerian King Lists data (known as W-B 62, now kept in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England), accords to the hero of the Deluge ("Ziu-sudra" in Sumerian) a reign of ten Sars or 36,000 Earth-years until the Deluge’s occurrence; this is exactly the 600 years the Bible assigns to Noah’s age by the time of the Deluge, multiplied by sixty (600 x 60 = 36,000) - corroborating not only the symmetry between the two, but also our suggestion for correlating the biblical and Sumerian pre-Diluvial patriarchal/ruler ages.

Developing a plausible chronology from these combined sources, we thus learn that the new form of Divine Encounter began some 80,000 years ago, in the time of Jared. They continued in the time of Enoch, and caused a family crisis when Noah was born, some 49,000 years ago.

What was the truth about Noah’s parentage? Was he a demigod as Lamech had suspected, or his own seed as the offended Bath-Enosh had reassured him? The Bible says of Noah (to follow the common translation) that he was "a just man, perfect in his generations; and Noah walked with God." A more literal translation would be "a righteous man, of perfect genealogy, who walked with the Elohim.’"

The last qualification is identical to that employed by the Bible to describe Enoch’s divine contacts; and one must wonder whether there is more than meets the eye in the innocuous biblical statement.

Be it as it may, it is certain that the by breaking their own taboos the young Anunnaki/Nefilim launched a chain of events which was full of ironies.

They took the daughters of Man as wives because they were genetically compatible; but it was as a consequence of having been so reengineered and perfected, that Mankind was doomed to be terminated ... It was not the human females who lusted after the young Anunnaki, but the other way around; ironically, it was Mankind that had to bear the brunt of punishment, for "Yahweh had repented that He had made The Adam upon the Earth," and resolved "to wipe The Adam, whom I had created, off the face of the Earth."

But what was supposed to have been the Last Encounter, the Sumerian sources reveal, was undone by a brotherly dispute. In the Bible, the God vowing to wipe Mankind off the face of the Earth is the very same one who then connives with Noah to nullify the decision. In the Mesopotamian original version, the events again unfold against the background of the Enlil-Enki rivalry. The divine "Cain" and "Abel" continued to be at loggerheads - except that the intended victim was not one of them but the Being they had created.

But if a new kind of Divine Encounter - the sexual one - had led to the near-demise of Mankind, it was yet another kind of Divine Encounter - a whispered one - that led to its salvation.

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