Were there really giants (Nephilim)?

Question 8015.

Nephilim giants are one of those biblical subjects where sober readers go quiet and speculative readers go loud, and the result is that most Christians have no settled view at all. My position is that the Bible describes real people of unusual size and strength, that it does so without embarrassment, and that the accounts belong to history rather than to legend.

That said, a great deal of what circulates about the Nephilim giants goes far beyond anything the text supports. This article tries to separate the two, because the biblical material is interesting enough without help.

What Genesis 6 actually says

The key verse is Genesis 6:4. 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.

Notice how compressed that is. The verse tells us when they were present, that they continued afterward, that their appearance coincides with the union described in the preceding verses, and that they became famous. It does not describe their height, their behaviour, or their end.

The context matters enormously. Genesis 6 is the introduction to the flood narrative. Verse 5 immediately reports that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Whatever the Nephilim giants were, they belong to the account of why the flood happened.

The Hebrew word itself

The Hebrew is nephilim, and the derivation is disputed. The most common suggestion connects it with the root naphal, to fall, giving fallen ones. Others link it to a root meaning to be extraordinary, and some read it as those who cause others to fall.

The Septuagint translators, working in Greek some two centuries before Jesus, rendered it gigantes, giants, and that decision has shaped every English translation since. They clearly understood the Nephilim giants as beings of great size.

Numbers 13:33 supports that reading directly, since the spies use the word Nephilim and immediately explain that they seemed like grasshoppers by comparison. Whatever else the word means, the people using it in Scripture associated it with size.

Nephilim giants after the flood

Genesis 6:4 contains a clause that has caused endless discussion: and also afterward. If the flood destroyed all flesh outside the ark, how do Nephilim giants appear again in Numbers?

Several explanations have been offered. One is that the phrase simply anticipates the later occurrences without explaining them. Another is that whatever produced the first group happened again after the flood. A third is that the genetic factor came through the ark, since Scripture never says the wives of Noah’s sons were unconnected to that line.

I do not think the text settles it, and I am wary of anyone who says it does. What the text does is record both facts without treating them as a problem, which suggests the original readers had a framework we lack. Read the passage at Genesis 6 and see how briskly the narrator moves on.

The spies and their report

Numbers 13 is where the Nephilim giants become a live issue for Israel. Ten of the twelve spies return from Canaan and say the land devours its inhabitants, and all the people they saw in it are of great height. Then verse 33: there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim, and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers.

It is sometimes argued that this was exaggeration born of fear, and the text does describe the report as a bad report. But notice what the two faithful spies dispute. Caleb and Joshua do not deny the size of the inhabitants. They say the LORD is with us, do not fear them.

That is a significant detail. The counterargument in Numbers 14 is theological rather than factual. Nobody in the chapter suggests the Nephilim giants were imaginary. The dispute was about whether their size mattered.

Og, Anak and the record of measurements

Deuteronomy 3:11 gives us one of the odder pieces of data in the Old Testament. Og the king of Bashan was the last of the remnant of the Rephaim, and his bed was of iron, nine cubits long and four cubits wide. That is roughly thirteen feet by six.

The verse reads like an antiquarian note, and it even tells us the bed could still be seen in Rabbah of the Ammonites. Whether the bed indicates Og’s height or was ceremonial is arguable, but the writer clearly expects us to be impressed by a measurement we could go and check.

Then there are the Anakim, descended from Anak, driven out by Joshua and Caleb from the hill country. Joshua 11:22 notes that none were left in Israel, though some remained in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod. That last detail turns out to matter a great deal later.

Goliath and the giants of Gath

Gath is where Goliath comes from. 1 Samuel 17 describes him at six cubits and a span, around nine feet six inches in the Masoretic text, though some manuscripts and the Septuagint read four cubits and a span, closer to six feet nine.

I lean towards the taller reading, mainly because the Israelite reaction only makes sense if he was extraordinary. A man of six feet nine would have been striking; he would not have paralysed an army for forty days. His armour weighs around one hundred and twenty five pounds, which fits a very large man.

And Goliath is not alone. 2 Samuel 21 lists four more giants from Gath, including one with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, and Ishbi benob whose spear weighed three hundred shekels of bronze. The Nephilim giants of the Old Testament are not one legendary figure. They are a documented family line in a named city.

Where did they come from?

This is the contested part, and it depends on how one reads the sons of God in Genesis 6. My own view is that these are fallen angels who cohabited with human women, and that the Nephilim giants were the offspring of those unions.

The reasons are set out more fully in my answer to who are the sons of God in Genesis 6. In brief, the phrase bene elohim consistently refers to angelic beings elsewhere in the Old Testament, particularly in Job, and both Jude and 2 Peter connect a specific angelic sin with the period before the flood.

The alternative reading, that the sons of God are the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the line of Cain, has a respectable history and avoids some difficulties. What it struggles to explain is why such marriages would produce Nephilim giants at all. Mixed marriages between two ordinary human lines do not produce men of renown.

Are these accounts mythology?

The objection is predictable and deserves a serious answer. Every ancient culture has stories of giants and demigods, from the Greek titans to Mesopotamian heroes. Does the biblical material belong in that category?

I would argue the opposite conclusion is more reasonable. Widespread traditions about beings of this kind, appearing independently across unconnected cultures, are more easily explained by a shared memory of something real than by coincidence. That is the ordinary way we treat other widespread ancient traditions, such as flood accounts.

There is also a decisive difference of tone. The Greek myths celebrate their heroes. Genesis mentions the Nephilim giants in a single verse, calls them men of renown without approval, and immediately reports that God grieved over the state of the earth. That is not how legend behaves.

What about the evidence outside the Bible?

I want to be careful here, because this is where the subject attracts bad material. The internet is full of photographs of enormous skeletons, and effectively all of them are fabrications or misidentifications. I would not build anything on them, and I would encourage you not to circulate them.

What can be said soberly is that unusually tall individuals are attested in the ancient world, that Egyptian records mention notably tall peoples in Canaan, and that the biblical accounts locate the Nephilim giants in specific cities with specific names in a way that legends generally avoid.

Absence of physical evidence is not surprising either. Human remains from that period are scarce in general, and the biblical record indicates these groups were largely destroyed. Building a case on missing bones would be as unwise as building one on fake photographs.

Why the judgement was so severe

Joshua’s campaigns against the Anakim, and the commands regarding the inhabitants of Canaan, trouble many readers. If the Nephilim giants and their descendants were part of what was being removed, the severity begins to make more sense within the biblical framework.

Genesis presents the flood as a response to a corruption so complete that only one family remained. Whatever role the union of Genesis 6 played in that corruption, the text places the Nephilim giants in the middle of the description. God acted to preserve a line through which the promise of Genesis 3:15 could come.

That does not make the accounts comfortable, and I would not pretend otherwise. But it does place them within a purpose rather than presenting them as arbitrary violence.

What the Nephilim giants are not

Some cautions are needed, because this subject has been thoroughly colonised by speculation. The Nephilim giants are not, in Scripture, an ongoing bloodline secretly running world affairs. They are not extraterrestrials. They are not returning in the last days according to any text I can find.

Jesus said that as it was in the days of Noah so will it be in the days of the Son of Man, and He then explained exactly what He meant: eating, drinking, marrying, and being unaware. He did not mention the Nephilim giants at all.

Nor are the Nephilim a hidden key to prophecy. I would treat any teaching that makes them central with considerable caution, particularly where it draws its detail from the Enoch literature rather than from Scripture. See are there other named angels in Scripture for the same problem in a different form.

The Rephaim, Anakim and other names

Scripture does not use one term. Alongside the Nephilim giants we meet the Rephaim, the Anakim, the Emim, the Zamzummim and the Zuzim, and Deuteronomy 2 explains that different peoples used different names for what were evidently comparable groups.

Deuteronomy 2:10 and 11 says the Emim formerly lived in Moab, a people great and many and tall as the Anakim, and that like the Anakim they are also counted as Rephaim, though the Moabites call them Emim. Verse 20 does the same for the Zamzummim in Ammon.

This is the kind of detail that argues against legend. Legends do not usually pause to record what the neighbouring tribe called the same people. It reads like a historian noting terminology, and it places the Nephilim giants within a mapped geography of named territories.

How Israel dealt with them

The conquest narratives track these groups carefully. Joshua 11:21 and 22 records that Joshua cut off the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, Debir, Anab and all the hill country of Judah and Israel, and that none were left in the land of Israel, though some remained in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod.

Caleb, who forty five years earlier had been one of the two spies willing to go up, personally asks for Hebron and drives out the three sons of Anak. There is a satisfying justice in that. The man who refused to be intimidated by the Nephilim giants as a young spy was the man who eventually cleared them out as an old one.

And the survivors in Gath explain Goliath. The Philistine cities became the last refuge of that stock, which is exactly where David meets it a few centuries later. The biblical record is internally consistent in a way that rewards careful reading.

What the Nephilim giants were for, narratively

Every appearance of these groups in Scripture functions the same way. They exist in the narrative as an obstacle that human strength cannot overcome, and they are always overcome by someone acting in dependence on God.

Caleb takes Hebron at eighty five. David runs at Goliath with five stones and a sling, and tells him plainly that the battle is the LORD’s. Israel refuses at Kadesh Barnea and wanders for forty years, and the difference between the two outcomes has nothing to do with the size of the opposition.

That is why I resist reducing the Nephilim giants to a curiosity. Scripture keeps them in view because they make a theological point about where confidence comes from, and the point survives whatever conclusion you reach about their origins.

Reading the giant accounts as history

One final methodological point. The biblical writers treat these accounts exactly as they treat the rest of their material. There is no shift of genre, no signal that we have moved into legend, and no distancing language of the kind ancient writers used when repeating a tale they doubted.

Deuteronomy gives measurements and a location where an artefact could be inspected. Joshua names towns. Samuel names individuals and their weapons. Numbers records a report and the reaction to it. The Nephilim giants sit in the same narrative fabric as the census lists and the boundary descriptions, and I see no principled reason to lift them out of it. Read Deuteronomy 3 and judge the tone for yourself.

So, now what?

Take the biblical accounts at face value. There were people of extraordinary size in the ancient world, Scripture names them, locates them, measures them, and treats them as historical. You can hold that without embarrassment and without joining the wilder end of the conversation.

And then take the lesson Israel failed to learn. Ten men measured the giants against themselves and concluded they were grasshoppers. Two men measured the giants against God and concluded the land was theirs. Both groups saw the same Nephilim giants. What are you currently measuring against the wrong thing?

And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.

Numbers 13:33 (ESV)

For Further Study

Readers who want to go further will find careful treatments in Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology, which handles the angelic view of Genesis 6 with characteristic restraint, and in J. Dwight Pentecost’s work on Old Testament backgrounds. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology gives the fullest older dispensational discussion, while Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology surveys the interpretive options fairly for those who want to see the alternatives argued. Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s writing on Genesis is particularly useful on the Hebrew vocabulary and on Jewish interpretive tradition, and John Walvoord’s work is worth consulting for the way this material connects to prophecy without overreaching.