The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Of the readings in the Revised Common Lectionary for 29 November 2013 (Friday before the First Sunday in Advent) I choose to reflect on Genesis 6:1-10. (I'm filling in with reflections on that portion of the lectionary that occurred before I started doing these at the start of 2014.)

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward Genesis 6:4a

Oh what a curse a little knowledge is!  A statement I'm going to be applying to much that has been written about the Nephilim and that might well end up getting applied to me in the manner of Matthew 7:2, yet I shall risk that in this reflection.

Trying to explain how any Nephilim survived the flood to be present in the land of Canaan is one of those things much ink has been spilt over, largely to no point, and not because I hold to the flood being mythical.  Even if one believes in a literal flood, there is no need to ponder overmuch on the survival of the Nephilim.

The etymology of "Nephilim" in Hebrew refers to "fallen ones".  Because of its proximity to the phrase "sons of God" in Genesis 6:4, some have been led to think of fallen angels, mating with human females to beget literal giants.  Yet nowhere does the Bible explicitly state that, and quite a few Jewish and Christian interpretations have the phrase "sons of God" here refer not to angels but man.  After all, is not Adam referred to as the son of God in Luke 3:38?  What needs to be kept in mind is that in Hebrew the "Son of ..." formulation can be used to indicate membership in a group, a fact occluded in most translations of the Bible by replacing "son of ..." with "...-ite".  Thus instead of numerous mentions of the sons of Israel, we get mentions of Israelites and other groups as well.

What I think has happened is that "Nephilim" was originally used in the sense of apostates: those who had fallen away from the worship of Yahweh. Maybe its meaning went beyond that to meaning not just a rejection of Yahweh, but of all gods: atheism.  In either case, its use both here and in Numbers 13:33 can be explained without any need for a miraculous survival of a race of angel-human hybrids.  However, once Nephilim's original sense was lost and it became only a name, I think human inventiveness created additional myths about them as part of the general trend to blame evil not on human motivations but supernatural agencies.

Thus I shall hope for a flood of understanding that instead of drowning our modern day Nephilim, shall wash away their cynicism and let realize there is more to this world than its physical essence.

[Mopsus]

Because I know several people who subscribe to the "fallen angels mating with human women" interpretation of Nephilim, this is a topic that interests me. Incidentally, I recently read a somewhat kooky book that put forth the hypothesis that the "Nephilim" referred to in the Bible were in fact the Olympic gods of Classical Greece (a hypothesis that ignored the fact that the Olympians killed giants - they didn't beget them).

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Yeah, there is so little in the Bible itself to indicate what exactly the Nephilim are that the scions of fallen angels idea isn't entirely ludicrous, especially since a bunch of the extracanonical literature such as Enoch and Jubilees does use that interpretation.  Yet if you take that tack, then you have to come up with how did the Nephilim survive the flood.  The only thing novel in my position is that I've abandoned the idea that the Nephilim were a race, be it of men or demiangels, but instead taken the term as indicative of a belief system that the writer(s) of the Pentateuch would be opposed to. If you take that position, there is no need to explain how they survived the flood since both apostasy and atheism could arise again.

[Mopsus]

I guess that my only quarrel with that would be over why Scripture would choose to refer to "the sons of God and the daughters of men", if the sons of God were not in fact a race separate from the daughters of men.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I guess that my only quarrel with that would be over why Scripture would choose to refer to "the sons of God and the daughters of men", if the sons of God were not in fact a race separate from the daughters of men.

The usual interpretation by those who hold a wholly human origin of the Nephilim is that the sons of God refer to the descendants of Seth while the daughters of men refer to the descendents of Cain.  However, my interpretation doesn't care whether the pre-flood Nephilim were purely human or not, since I am taking the term as indicative of their religion, not their race.

[The Mikado]

King Og of Bashan in Numbers was said to be the last of the giants, a group I often see conflated with the Nephilim.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

King Og of Bashan in Numbers was said to be the last of the giants, a group I often see conflated with the Nephilim.

You could say that Goliath was the last of the giants, except we have textual evidence that Goliath grew in the telling from an initial 4½ cubits (~6' 9") to a later 6½ cubits (~9' 9").

My own personal views on Og and the other Rephaim is that they too grew in the telling, but for now, I'll spare you the details of why I think that other than the generic tendency for larger thn life figures to get described as being literally larger than life.

[patrick1]

Do you think some of these more mythical elements in the Bible could be part of some passed down and mis-remembered lore about actual events? Recent DNA evidence has shown Neanderthal did contribute to Homo sapiens.  Or maybe the Cain and Abel story about how we killed off our cousins.  Sorry for shoehorning this random, whacky musing in your thread...

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Yes and no.  I feel there is almost certainly is some prehistory buried within the mythology of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, but I see no reason to ascribe any of it to interactions between H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis. Neanderthals appear to have died out at least 30,000 years ago.  No, to the degree that Cain and Abel represent historical tensions between groups, it's the tension between pastoral herders (Abel) and settled agrarians (Cain) at the start of agriculture.