Nephilim

The Nephilim or Nephilites are mysterious beings or ancient heroes in the Hebrew Bible who are described as “large and strong.” The word Nephilim is loosely translated as giants in some translations of the Hebrew Bible, but left untranslated in others. Jewish explanations interpret them as hybrid sons of fallen angels. The main reference to them is in Genesis 6:1–4, but the passage is ambiguous and the identity of the Nephilim is disputed. According to the Book of Numbers 13:33, they later inhabited Canaan at the time of the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Most of the contemporary English translations of Genesis 6:1–4 and Numbers 13:33 render the Hebrew nefilim as “giants”. This tendency in turn stems from the fact that one of the earliest translations of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, composed in the 3rd or 2nd century BCE, renders the said word as gigantes. The choice made by the Greek translators has been later adopted into the Latin translation, the Vulgate, compiled in the 4th or 5th century CE, which uses the transcription of the Greek term rather than the literal translation of the Hebrew nefilim. From there, the tradition of the giant progeny of the sons of God and the daughters of men spread to later medieval translations of the Bible. The decision of the Greek translators to render the Hebrew nefilim as Greek gigantes is a separate matter. The Hebrew nefilim means literally “the fallen ones” and the strict translation into Greek would be peptokotes, which in fact appears in the Septuagint of Ezekiel 32:22–27. It seems then that the authors of Septuagint wished not only to simply translate the foreign term into Greek, but also to employ a term which would be intelligible and meaningful for their Hellenistic audiences. Given the complex meaning of the nefilim which emerged from the three interconnected biblical passages (human–divine hybrids in Genesis 6, autochthonous people in Numbers 13 and ancient warriors trapped in the underworld in Ezekiel 32), the Greek translators recognized some similarities. First and foremost, both nefilim and gigantes were liminal beings resulting from the union of the opposite orders and as such retained the unclear status between the human and divine. Similarly dim was their moral designation and the sources witnessed to both awe and fascination with which these figures must have been looked upon. Secondly, both were presented as impersonating chaotic qualities and posing some serious danger to gods and humans. They appeared either in the prehistoric or early historical context, but in both cases they preceded the ordering of the cosmos. Lastly, both gigantes and nefilim were clearly connected with the underworld and were said to have originated from earth, and they both end up closed therein. In 1 Enoch, they were “great giants, whose height was three hundred cubits”. A cubit being 18 inches (46 cm), this would make them 450 feet (140 m) tall. The Quran refers to the people of Ād in Quran 26:130 whom the prophet Hud declares to be like jabbarin (Hebrew: gibborim), probably a reference to the Biblical Nephilim. The people of Ād are said to be giants, the tallest among them 100 ft (30 m) high. However, according to Islamic legend, the Ād were not wiped out by the flood, since some of them had been too tall to be drowned. Instead, God destroyed them after they rejected further warnings. After death, they were banished into the lower layers of hell.