Genesis 6 contains a very strange passage. It says,
The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.
The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (vv. 2-5).
Biblical scholars of all persuasions have concluded that this is one of the most mysterious passages in the Old Testament. The reason for this is that the author of Genesis is giving us a summary account of a much longer story that is not found in the Bible.
Among the things we’d like to be able to figure out are the following:
- Who are the “sons of God” in this passage?
- Who are the “daughters of men”?
- Why does God say that man’s “days shall be 120 years”?
- Who were the Nephilim?
- What is the relationship between the sons of God, the daughters of men, and the Nephilim?
- Why does the text say the Nephilim were on the earth “in those days, and also afterward”?
- Do these events have anything to do with the Great Flood, which this passage introduces?
Multiple theories have been proposed to answer these questions, and some of them are really wild.
One that has been extremely common in pop culture for the last few years was proposed by Zechariah Sitchin (1920-2010), an Azerbaijani-American journalist who claimed to have taught himself Sumerian cuneiform and profoundly affected the popular conception of the Nephilim in modern culture.
According to Sitchin, Mesopotamian tablets reveal that there is a planet in the outer solar system called Nibiru that has a highly elliptical orbit and swings through the inner solar system every 3,600 years. (Don’t worry; it’s not due again till around 2900.)
Nibiru is inhabited by a race of aliens that the Sumerians called the Anunnaki and that Genesis calls the Nephilim. That’s right, the Nephilim are . . . aliens (because it’s always aliens . . . or demons).
When serious Christians hear this claim for the first time, they can be tempted to dismiss it out of hand. As far as believing in it, that’s the right instinct. No Christian should take Sitchin’s claims seriously for reasons we will go into.
However, not believing something doesn’t mean not interacting with it. If you want to do apologetics—and be serious about it—you have to be willing to interact with ideas that are out there in the culture, and this is one of them.
If you want to help people find their way to Christian faith, you have to help them take a look at the evidence for the Faith, and that includes evidence that Sitchin’s understanding of Genesis is simply mistaken.
One of the individuals who called attention to this was Dr. Michael Heiser (1963-2023), a Protestant scholar of the Old Testament and Semitic languages who critiqued Sitchin’s work in a variety of venues, including his provocatively named website SitchinIsWrong.com.
Unlike Sitchin, Heiser was not self-taught. He had an accredited Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Semitic languages, which include the cuneiform that Sitchin claimed to have learned.
Over and over again, Heiser showed the problems with Sitchin’s claims, most of which concerned the Mesopotamian writings he claimed to have translated. Heiser regularly cited scholarly reference works—some of them online so that they could be easily checked by the reader—and the truth is that Sitchin was simply making up his claims.
The Sumerians did not envision a planet named Nabiru, and it was not inhabited by a race called the Anunnaki or the Nephilim.
You can read Heiser’s takedowns of Sitchin for youself, but most of them concern Sitchin’s claims about Mesopotamian literature rather than the Bible. Here, we’re interested in the Nephilim from Genesis 6, so we’ll look only at that.
In keeping with his ancient astronaut theory, Sitchin claimed that the Nephilim’s name meant “those who came down from above” in Hebrew, and that they came down in rocket ships.
However, Heiser points out,
Sitchin assumes “nephilim” comes from the Hebrew word “naphal,” which usually means “to fall.” He then forces the meaning “to come down” onto the word, creating his “to come down from above” translation. In the form we find it in the Hebrew Bible, if the word nephilim came from Hebrew naphal, it would not be spelled as we find it. The form nephilim cannot mean “fallen ones” (the spelling would then be nephulim). Likewise, nephilim does not mean “those who fall” or “those who fall away” (that would be nophelim).
The only way in Hebrew to get nephilim from naphal by the rules of Hebrew morphology (word formation) would be to presume a noun spelled naphil and then pluralize it. I say “presume” since this noun does not exist in biblical Hebrew.
Instead, Heiser argues, the word Nephilim appears to be a loan-word from Aramaic, where it means “giants.” In fact, this is how the Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Old Testament—renders the word in the two passages where it appears (Gen. 6:4, Num. 13:33). In both places, it uses the Greek word gigas or “giant.”
This also fits with Genesis 6:4’s statement that the Nephilim “were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown” and with Numbers 13:32’s statement that their descendants are “of great height” and the following verse’s statement that “we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”
This doesn’t mean that they were giants in the way we would think of them today. The average man in ancient Israel was only about five feet, five inches tall. According to the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Greek Septuagint, and the Jewish historian Josephus, the biblical giant Goliath was four cubits and a span tall, which works out to only six feet, six inches. So the text doesn’t ask us to envision superhumanly large giants.
Setting aside Sitchin’s unfounded claim that the Nephilim were “those who came down from above” in rocket ships, we thus see that the evidence points to their being unusually tall humans or “giants.”
That solves one of the mysteries we began with (number 4), but there are still more mysteries about this text to solve. We’ll take them up another time.