Who Were the Nephilim? The Giants of the Book of Enoch

Chapter 6 of Genesis reads like a thriller with the last pages torn out, right where the solution was supposed to appear. Four short verses tell of “the sons of God” who saw the daughters of men and took wives for themselves, and then comes the line: “There were giants in the earth in those days.” The Hebrew word behind “giants” is Nephilim. Who were they? Where did they come from? What became of them? The Torah moves on to Noah and the Flood, and leaves the reader holding the questions.

The Book of Enoch is, among other things, an attempt to put the missing pages back.

Who were the Nephilim: the short answer

According to 1 Enoch, the Nephilim were the children of angels and mortal women. Two hundred angels, known as “the Watchers,” came down on Mount Hermon and took wives from among the daughters of men. The women conceived, and the children born to them were unlike anything the world had seen before. The book describes them in four verses that are hard to forget:

The women conceived and gave birth to the Nephilim, giants three hundred cubits tall. They devoured everything humans had worked for, until there was nothing left for people to eat. They began to sin against birds and beasts, against creeping things and fish; they ate their flesh and drank their blood. Then the earth cried out against the violence.

1 Enoch 7:2–5

Three hundred cubits is about 140 meters, or some 460 feet, roughly the height of a forty-story tower. One can argue about whether the author meant the number literally. It is harder to argue with the picture: creatures so large that the world is simply not enough for them.

A hunger without end

Notice what the book chooses to tell about the Nephilim. It does not describe their faces, their voices or their weapons. It describes their appetite. First they eat everything people grow. When that runs out they move on to birds, beasts and fish. In the end only the earth itself is left, and it is the earth that cries out.

We are used to thinking of monsters as creatures that threaten us by force. The Book of Enoch offers a more unsettling idea: the real danger is a creature that consumes more than the world can produce. Whoever wrote these words more than two thousand years ago had never heard of climate change or overfishing. And yet the description is very familiar to us.

Why the story is so short in Genesis

Genesis gives the whole affair just four verses. Many scholars believe these verses allude to a longer story that ancient readers already knew, so there was no need to spell it out. Others think it happened the other way around, and that the Book of Enoch expanded the brief verses into a full story. Either way, anyone who wants to know what happened there will find a hint in the Torah and a plot in the Book of Enoch.

The name itself remains a riddle. The word Nephilim sounds as if it comes from the Hebrew root for “fall,” and commentators have offered various explanations: those who fell from heaven, or those who made others fall. The ancient translators of the Torah into Greek did not get tangled up in this, and simply wrote “giants.” That is also how the spies in the Book of Numbers understand them when they return from the land and report: “and there we saw the giants... and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers.”

What became of them

The Book of Enoch tells that the cry of humankind rose up to heaven, and four angels brought it before God. The response was harsh. The angel Gabriel was sent to set the giants against one another until they destroyed themselves in war. Then the Flood came and washed away whatever was left.

But the book is not content with that ending. What do you do with a creature that is half flesh and half spirit? The body can die, but the spirit has to go somewhere:

And now these giants, born of spirit and of flesh, will be called evil spirits on the earth, and on the earth will be their dwelling.

1 Enoch 15:8

This is one of the oldest answers to a question that troubled many generations: where do demons and evil spirits come from? According to the Book of Enoch, they are leftovers. The giants died, and what remained of them still roams the world, doing harm.

The Nephilim and the Flood

In Genesis, the story of the sons of God and the story of the Flood sit side by side, and the reader is left to guess how they are connected. The Book of Enoch connects them explicitly. The Flood, according to the book, is first of all an act of cleansing. The earth was filled with blood and violence because of the giants and because of what their fathers had taught, and there was no way to repair it without washing it clean. Before the waters came, an angel was sent to the son of Lamech, Noah, to warn him and teach him how to escape, so that his descendants would survive and live throughout the earth.

There is a simple narrative logic to this. Anyone who tells of so great a catastrophe must also explain what justified it. The ordinary sins of ordinary people probably seemed to the author too small a reason for an entire Flood. Giants who eat the world are a cause of the right size.

The Nephilim outside the Book of Enoch

The Book of Enoch is not the only source. The Book of Jubilees, a Jewish work from the Second Temple period, also tells of the giants and their sins. In the caves of Qumran, near the Dead Sea, fragments were found of an Aramaic work known as the Book of Giants, which tells the story from the giants’ own point of view: their bad dreams, and their fear of the punishment drawing near. One fragment mentions a giant named Gilgamesh, like the hero of the famous Mesopotamian epic. Stories travel too, it turns out, and sometimes they switch sides along the way.

The sages of the Midrash, on the other hand, did not like the idea of angels marrying women. Genesis Rabbah cites Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai as saying that “the sons of God” were the sons of judges, that is, men of high rank. In this way a story about an invasion from heaven became a story about the corruption of the powerful. Perhaps that is a smaller change than it seems.

Why we need giants

Almost every culture has a story about ancient days when everything was bigger: the heroes, the sins and the punishments too. We tend to imagine the past as a place where giants lived, perhaps because that makes it easier to explain the ruins they left behind.

The Book of Enoch adds one detail to this story that makes it more than a legend. The Nephilim in the book are not born evil. They are a consequence. Someone crossed a line that should never have been crossed, and the world received creatures it had no way to feed. The giants themselves vanished long ago. The question of what happens when great power meets limitless appetite is still with us.