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In the Hebrew Bible and several
non-canonical Jewish and early Christian writings, nephilim (in
Hebrew הנּפלים means the fallen [ones]) are a people created by the
cross-breeding of the "sons of God" (beney ha’elohim,
בני האלהים) and the "daughters of men". (See Genesis 6:1.)
The word nephilim is loosely translated as giants or titans in some
Bibles, and is left untranslated in others.
...The sons of God saw that the
daughters of man were good, and they took themselves wives from
whomever they chose. God said, ’My spirit will not continue to
judge man forever, since he is nothing but flesh. His days shall
be 120 years’. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and
also later. The sons of God had come to the daughters of man and
had fathered them. They were the mightiest ones who ever
existed, men of renown.
The traditional Jewish view, deriving
from the Book of Enoch, is that the fathers of the nephilim, the
"sons of God", were the Grigori (a class of fallen angels also
called the Watchers); however, there is some controversy on this
point (Targum Jonathan) [1]. Some commentators suggest the nephilim
were believed to have been fathered by members of a proto-Hebrew
pantheon, and are a brief glimpse of early Hebrew religion, most of
the details of which was later edited out from the torah. Others,
especially some Christians, suggest the "sons of God" were fully
human. It is sometimes suggested that ridding the Earth of these
nephilim was one of God’s purposes for flooding the Earth in Noah’s
time.
Despite the literal text of the Bible and its traditional
interpretation, the idea that heavenly beings mated with humans is
controversial, particularly among Christians, who cite the teaching
of Jesus in the Book of Matthew that angels do not marry. Others who
find the idea of angels mating with humans as distasteful have
suggested more figurative interpretations of the nephilim, such as
the idea that they were the offspring of men possessed by demons, or
of aliens.
Still others believe that the most reasonable view of Genesis 6:1 is
that the allusion refers to the fact that some men, from the Godly
lineage of Seth, called sons of God (an expression denoting those in
covenant relationship with
YHWH - cf. Deuteronomy 14:1; 32:5), began
to pursue fleshly interests, and so took wives of the daughters of
men, i.e., those who were unbelievers.
Rephaim
Rephaim is a general
title that the Joshua states was given to the aborigines of
Palestine, which were afterwards conquered and dispossessed by
the Canaanite tribes. They were known to the Moabites as Emim,
i.e., "fearful", (Deut. 2:11), and to the Ammonites as
Zamzummim.
In the books of Samuel, it states that some of them found refuge
among the Philistines, and were still existing in the days of
David. We know nothing of their origin.
Anakim
In the torah, the Anakim
are the descendants of Anak, and dwelt in the south of
Palestine, in the neighborhood of Hebron. In the days of
Abraham they inhabited the region afterwards known as Edom and
Moab, east of the Jordan river. They were probably a remnant of
the original inhabitants of Palestine before the Canaanites, a
Cushite tribe from Babel. They are mentioned during the report
of the spies about the inhabitants of the land of Canaan. The
book of Joshua states that Joshua finally expelled them from the
land, excepting a remnant that found a refuge in the cities of
Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod. The Philistine giants whom David
encountered were supposedly descendants of the Anakim.
...We also saw ha’anak
descendants there .... All the men we saw there were huge
men. While we were there, we saw the nephilim, they were
sons of anak, who descended from the nephilim, and we saw
ourselves as tiny grasshoppers and that’s what we were in
their eyes...
(Numbers 13:21-33, abridged)
Note that it is more commonly
suggested by traditional Jewish sources that the spies saw large
and powerful inhabitants in Canaan and because of their own
fears, cowardice, and inadequate faith in
YHVH, saw themselves
as grasshoppers in the eyes of the Canaanites, whether they were
actual ’giants’ or not.
Nephilim in other
works
The story of the nephilim
is chronicled more fully in the
Book of Enoch (part of Ethiopian
biblical canon).
There are also allusions to these descendants in the
deuterocanonical books of Judith, Sirach,
Baruch, and Wisdom of
Solomon.
Nephilim in
parahistory
There have been many
interesting attempts to reconcile science with evolution, the
theory being that mythology often contains grains of truth in
the form of a highly distorted "folk memory" of events in the
remote evolution of the human past.
In this context, the nephilim have been associated with
everything from Atlantis to extraterrestrials in efforts to
rationalize their literal existence. One theory is that nephilim
were actually surviving Neanderthals, or a Homo
sapiens-Neanderthal hybrid.
It is believed by such people that modern man shared several
thousand years of history with Neanderthals, and also that the
Middle-Eastern region was home to some of the last surviving
pockets of Homo sapiens neandertalensis or H. neandertalensis.
Therefore, it is conceivable that a Folk Memory of these
creatures survived by way of mythology- but not necessarily in
the way that is is imagined. In addition, it appears that the
very last Neanderthals adopted some of the technological and
cultural innovations of their contemporaries. So, the theory
goes, surviving Neanderthals or hybrids might have been very
large, powerful men, possessing the intellect and societal
characteristics of our species, explaining their identification
as: "mightiest ones" and "men of renown," which could be a great
exaggeration based on some level of prowess.
One major flaw in this "theory" some
have suggested is that neanderthalensis were in fact slightly
shorter in height than H. sapiens and unlikely to have been
named giants. On the other hand, they were giants relative to
their even shorter predecessors, Australopithecus and Homo Habilis. Of course, this flaw is easily resolved when one
remembers that the word Nephilim earlier described means "fallen
ones" and not giants, the word being translated in the King
James Bible as "Giants", recognized now as somewhat of a
mistranslation.
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