The Nephilim are a group named in the Hebrew Bible, first in Genesis 6:4, where they appear on earth in the era when "the sons of God" took human wives, and again in Numbers 13:33, where Israelite spies claim to have seen them in Canaan. The Greek Septuagint translated the word as gigantes, "giants", and that is how most readers have known them ever since. Later Jewish writings, above all the Book of Enoch, turned those few verses into a full story of fallen angels, hybrid offspring and a flood sent to wipe them out.
The Nephilim matter because four short verses in Genesis sit at the root of a vast tradition: the Watchers of Enoch, the Anakim and Rephaim of Canaan, Goliath of Gath, early Christian demonology, and modern debates about ancient giants and [the Anunnaki](/topics/anunnaki). Knowing what the texts actually say, and what they do not, is the only way to judge the claims built on top of them.
What Genesis 6 actually says
Genesis 6:1–4 says that when humans began to multiply, "the sons of God" saw that "the daughters of men" were beautiful and took wives from among them; God then limited human life to 120 years; and "the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward," when the sons of God had children with human women. It closes by calling their offspring "the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown," using gibborim, the Hebrew word for warriors and heroes.
The passage is famously compressed. It never says outright that the Nephilim were the children of the sons of God, only that they were on the earth at the time, and it never describes their size. Because it sits directly before the Flood narrative, many readers have taken the unions as part of the corruption that prompted the Flood. The phrase "and also afterward" seems to place Nephilim on earth after the Flood too, which is exactly where Numbers later puts them.
What does the word "Nephilim" mean?
Nobody knows for certain, and the etymology is still debated. The most common derivation is from the Hebrew verb naphal, "to fall", giving "fallen ones", a reading that suits the later idea of fallen angels and their offspring. A second proposal links it to the Aramaic naphil, "giant".
The translation that shaped later tradition came from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah made in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE, which rendered Nephilim as gigantes. Through the Greek and the Latin Vulgate, "giants" became the default; the King James Version of 1611 reads "There were giants in the earth in those days." Modern translations such as the NRSV usually leave the word untranslated.
Who were the "sons of God"?
The "sons of God" (Hebrew bene ha-elohim) have been read in three main ways, and the choice determines what the Nephilim are.
Angels or divine beings
The oldest recorded interpretation treats them as heavenly beings who crossed a boundary they were not meant to cross. This is the reading of 1 Enoch and the Book of Jubilees, of the Jewish historian Josephus (Jewish Antiquities, book 1, who compares the offspring to the giants of Greek myth), and of most early church fathers, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian. It fits the way the same phrase is used in Job 1:6 and 2:1, where the "sons of God" present themselves before God in a heavenly council. The New Testament letter of Jude quotes 1 Enoch directly (Jude 14–15, citing 1 Enoch 1:9), and Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 refer to angels who sinned and are held in chains, which most scholars read as allusions to the Watcher story.
The line of Seth
From the late patristic period a different reading took hold: the "sons of God" were the godly descendants of Seth, and the "daughters of men" were women from the line of Cain. Augustine argued this in The City of God (book 15), and John Calvin adopted it in his commentary on Genesis. On this view the Nephilim were ordinary, if powerful, humans, and the sin was spiritual intermarriage rather than a breach between heaven and earth.
Kings and rulers
Rabbinic tradition and some modern commentators read the "sons of God" as rulers, nobles or tyrant kings who took whatever women they wanted. The Aramaic Targum Onkelos renders the phrase as "sons of the great ones", and the midrash Genesis Rabbah pushes back against the angelic reading.
The Nephilim in the Book of Enoch and Jubilees
The Book of Enoch turns Genesis 6 into a detailed account of rebel angels and monstrous children. Its opening section, the Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1–36), is generally dated to the 3rd century BCE. The site's full guide to [the Book of Enoch and why it was left out](/the-book-of-enoch-explained-the-watchers-nephilim-and-why-it-was-left-out) covers its history and canon status; here the focus is the giants.
In 1 Enoch 6, two hundred angels called Watchers, led by Shemihazah, descend on Mount Hermon in the days of Jared and swear an oath to take human wives. In 1 Enoch 7 the women bear "great giants" whose height is given as 3,000 cubits, a figure scholars read as deliberate hyperbole rather than a measurement. The giants consume the produce of human labour, then turn on humans and animals. Another Watcher, Asael (Azazel in many translations), teaches metalworking, weapons and cosmetics.
God's response in 1 Enoch 10 is judgement: the giants are made to destroy one another, the Watchers are bound, and the Flood cleanses the earth. 1 Enoch 15 adds a detail with a long afterlife in Jewish and Christian thought: the spirits that come out of the giants' bodies become evil spirits on earth.
The Book of Jubilees, a 2nd-century BCE retelling of Genesis, follows the same outline. In Jubilees 7, Noah tells his sons that the Watchers' offspring turned on one another and killed each other, and that this violence was the reason for the Flood.
The Book of Giants and the Gilgamesh connection
The Dead Sea Scrolls preserved fragments of a separate Aramaic work, now called the Book of Giants, which tells the story from the giants' side. Its fragments include 4Q203 and 4Q530–532. In it, two giant brothers named Ohyah and Hahyah have troubling dreams about the coming judgement, and they send to Enoch for an interpretation.
The most striking detail is that two of the giants carry Mesopotamian names: Gilgamesh, the hero-king of Uruk, and Hobabish, a form of Humbaba, the guardian monster Gilgamesh kills in the epic. This is a genuine textual link between Jewish giant traditions and Mesopotamian literature. It fits a wider pattern: the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh describes its hero as two-thirds divine and one-third human, and scholars including Amar Annus have argued that the Watcher story drew on Mesopotamian traditions about the apkallu, the sages said to have brought knowledge to humanity before the Flood. For background on those sources, see the site's guide to [the Sumerian tablets and what they say](/the-sumerian-tablets-explained-what-they-are-and-what-they-say).
Other giants in the Bible: Anakim, Rephaim, Og and Goliath
The Hebrew Bible names several peoples remembered as unusually tall, and only one text ties any of them directly to the Nephilim.
That text is Numbers 13:33. Twelve spies return from Canaan, and ten of them report that they saw the Nephilim there, adding that "the sons of Anak" come from the Nephilim, and that "we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers." The narrator introduces this as a "bad report" (13:32), and the rest of the story treats the spies' fear as a failure of faith, so even within the text the claim is framed as exaggeration. The Anakim were associated with Hebron, where Numbers 13:22 names Ahiman, Sheshai and Talmai.
Deuteronomy adds more names. The Emim, as the Moabites called them, and the Zamzummim, as the Ammonites called them, were "great and many and tall as the Anakim," and all were "counted as Rephaim" (Deuteronomy 2:10–11, 2:20–21). Og, king of Bashan, is described as the last of the Rephaim, and Deuteronomy 3:11 says his bed of iron, still on display at Rabbah of the Ammonites, was nine cubits long and four wide, roughly 13 by 6 feet. Some scholars suggest the "bed" was a basalt funerary couch or a dolmen-style monument, of which the region has many.
Goliath of Gath is the best-known giant, and the manuscripts disagree on his height. The Masoretic Text, the basis of most English Bibles, gives "six cubits and a span" in 1 Samuel 17:4, about 9 feet 9 inches. The Samuel scroll from Qumran (4QSam-a) and the Septuagint give "four cubits and a span," about 6 feet 9 inches: very tall for the Iron Age, but entirely human. Many textual critics consider the shorter figure the older reading.
Have Nephilim skeletons ever been found?
No. No verified skeleton of a giant human has ever been found, and the famous images offered as proof are known fakes. The widely shared photographs of enormous skeletons being excavated trace back to a 2002 image-manipulation contest on the website Worth1000, where entrants were asked to create fake archaeological discoveries. The story that the Smithsonian destroyed thousands of giant skeletons comes from a 2014 article on World News Daily Report, a site that publishes satirical and fabricated news.
Real archaeology does turn up tall individuals, such as Roman-era burials of people close to seven feet tall, but those finds sit within the known range of human height; the tallest person with a verified height, Robert Wadlow, reached 8 feet 11 inches in the 20th century. Nothing in the archaeological record approaches the scale described in 1 Enoch.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson connects the Nephilim to what he sees as a hybrid narrative running through both the Sumerian and the Enochian material. In his reading, the "sons of God" of Genesis and the Watchers of 1 Enoch are later, Hebrew-language memories of the same beings the Sumerian texts call the Anunnaki, and the Nephilim are the offspring of their unions with humans. He treats the overlap between the traditions (divine beings who come down, share forbidden knowledge and are followed by a catastrophic flood) as evidence of a shared historical core rather than literary borrowing. The site's guide to [who the Anunnaki were](/who-were-the-anunnaki-sumerian-texts-vs-ancient-astronaut-theory) sets out that framework and the Sumerian sources behind it.
This is Carson's interpretation, and it should be weighed against the evidence above. Mainstream scholars agree that the Enochian material borrowed from Mesopotamia; the Gilgamesh names in the Book of Giants prove contact between the traditions. Most read that contact as Jewish scribes reworking Babylonian stories, not as independent witness to real hybrid beings, and the archaeological record contains no physical trace of giants. Carson works through the Watcher texts in depth on the podcast episode Book of Enoch: Watchers, Fallen Angels, Forbidden Knowledge and Human Origins.
Watch, read and go deeper
For Carson on camera, start with [Best of Billy Carson](/watch/best-of-billy-carson) on 4BK TV. The Book of Enoch podcast episode covers the Watchers and the giants in long form. Then read the [Book of Enoch explainer](/the-book-of-enoch-explained-the-watchers-nephilim-and-why-it-was-left-out) for the text itself. Everything on Mesopotamian gods, the Watchers and human-origin theories is collected at the [Anunnaki topic hub](/topics/anunnaki).
Frequently asked questions
Are the Nephilim the same as fallen angels?
Not in the text of Genesis. In the oldest interpretations, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees, the fallen angels are the "sons of God" or Watchers, and the Nephilim, or giants, are their children. Popular usage often blurs the two, but the sources keep them distinct.
How tall were the Nephilim?
Genesis gives no height at all. Numbers 13:33 compares the spies to grasshoppers, in a report the narrator calls bad, and 1 Enoch 7 gives 3,000 cubits, a figure scholars treat as hyperbole. The only concrete biblical measurements belong to other figures: Og's bed at nine cubits and Goliath at either six or four cubits and a span, depending on the manuscript.
If the Flood destroyed the Nephilim, why do they appear later in Numbers?
Genesis 6:4 itself says the Nephilim were on earth "in those days, and also afterward," which some readers take as a hint that they survived or reappeared. Others read Numbers 13:33 as the frightened spies using an old, legendary name for tall inhabitants of Canaan. The text frames the report as exaggerated, so it is weak evidence either way.
Is the Book of Enoch in the Bible?
1 Enoch is part of the canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and it survives complete only in Ge'ez, the classical Ethiopic language. It is not in the Jewish, Catholic or mainstream Protestant canons, although Aramaic fragments were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and the letter of Jude quotes it.
Sources and further reading
- The Hebrew Bible: Genesis 6:1–4, Numbers 13, Deuteronomy 2–3 and 1 Samuel 17, in the NRSV or Robert Alter's The Hebrew Bible
- George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108 (Hermeneia)
- R. H. Charles, The Book of Enoch and The Book of Jubilees (classic English translations)
- Loren T. Stuckenbruck, The Book of Giants from Qumran
- Ronald S. Hendel, "Of Demigods and the Deluge: Toward an Interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4," Journal of Biblical Literature
- Amar Annus, "On the Origin of Watchers: A Comparative Study of the Antediluvian Wisdom in Mesopotamian and Jewish Traditions," Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha
- Augustine, The City of God, book 15
- Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, book 1
