Unravel one of the Bible’s wildest mysteries! Jimmy Akin dives into Genesis 6, debunking aliens, Bigfoot, and Sethites to reveal the Nephilim as giant offspring of fallen angels and human women. He tackles 120 years’ meaning, pre- and post-Flood connections, and the Flood’s trigger—backed by ancient texts, Jude, and Aquinas. Mind-blowing evidence awaits!

 

TRANSCRIPT: 

 

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The book of Genesis contains a very strange passage that describes the sons of God marrying the daughters of men.

It also describes a mysterious group known as the Nephilim.

In recent years, a lot of people have tried to explain this passage, claiming that the Nephilim are anything from aliens to Bigfoot.

Others have said that the sons of God, the daughters of men, and the Nephilim are all just humans.

In this episode, I’m going to tell you want the evidence says about who these groups actually are in the text.

Let’s get into it!

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Howdy, folks!

We’re in our second year of the podcast now, and you can help me keep making this podcast for years to come—and get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast

 

Introduction

Genesis 6 contains a very strange passage. It says:

Genesis 6:2-5, ESV

The sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Biblical scholars of all persuasions recognize that this is one of the most mysterious passages in the Old Testament, and 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:

1) Who are the “sons of God” in this passage?

2) Who are the “daughters of men”?

3) Why does God say that man’s “days shall be 120 years”?

4) Who were the Nephilim?

5) What is the relationship between the sons of God, the daughters of men, and the Nephilim?

6) Why does the text say the Nephilim were on the earth “in those days, and also afterward”?

7) 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.

 

Nephilim = Aliens?

One that has been extremely common in pop culture for the last few years was proposed by Zechariah Sitchin (1920-2010), an Azerbijani-American journalist who claimed to have taught himself Sumerian cuneiform, and he 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 A.D. 2900.

According to Sitchin, 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, and 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, because 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 on his provocatively named website SitchinIsWrong.com.

Unlike Sitchin, Heiser was not self-taught. He had an accredited PhD 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 falsely claimed to translate.

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 Nibiru, 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 only look 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,

SitchinIsWrong.com/nephilim/nephilim.htm

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 (Genesis 6:4, Numbers 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 the Nephilim’s 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 5’ 5” tall, and according to the Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Greek Septuagint, and the Jewish historian Josephus, the biblical giant Goliath was only four cubits and a span tall, which works out to 6’ 6.” So the text doesn’t ask us to envision superhumanly large giants.

There’s also zero evidence—contrary to what some folks say—that the Nephilim were Bigfoots.

When the Israelites went into the Promise Land, they found it inhabited by big people, not big people who were covered in hair from head to foot.

If they had found sasquatches living in the Promised Land, the spies would have mentioned the fact the Nephilim were covered in hair, and they don’t.

Also, Bigfoots are not reported to be tool users, but the Canaanite inhabitants of the Promised Land—including the Nephilim—were tool users, so we have another reason to dismiss the Bigfoot claim.

As fun as it may sound to some folks, it’s just not supported by the evidence.

If we also set 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 the Nephilim being unusually tall humans or “giants.”

That solves one of the mysteries we began with (number 4). They were giants.

But now let’s see if we can answer more of these questions.

 

Why 120 Years?

The one I’d like to focus on first is Question 3, or why God said that man’s “days shall be 120 years.”

Some have taken this to be a declaration that man’s lifespan would decrease from the centuries-long lifespans of the pre-Flood patriarchs (Genesis 5). This is possible, but there are problems with the proposal.

First, people in Genesis continued living for centuries long after this announcement. Noah himself lives to be 950 (Genesis 9:29), other biblical figures live for centuries (see Genesis 11), and the Israelite patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob live to be 175, 180, and 147 respectively (Genesis 25:7, 35:28, 47:28). In fact, nobody in Genesis is said to live to 120 years old, and Psalm 90:10 is frank that

Psalm 90:10, ESV

The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty.

I thus tend to favor the theory advocated in the Jewish Publications Society’s commentary on Genesis, which notes:

Jewish Publications Society Genesis 6:3

Early exegesis of this verse [Genesis 6:3] prefers to see here a reference to the interval of time remaining before the Flood.

In other words, the 120 years was a grace period before the Great Flood. After all, Genesis 6:3 is at the beginning of the Flood narrative, and it makes sense for it to be a reference to

1 Peter 3:20, ESV

When God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared.

This is my proposed answer for Question 3. God is giving a 120-year grace period before the Flood.

 

The Nephilim TWICE?

Next I’d like to look at Questions 5 and 6.

After the statement that the sons of God took wives from among the daughters of men and the statement about man’s days being 120 years, Genesis says,

Genesis 6:4, ESV

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.

From the first part of this sentence, you might conclude that the unusually tall Nephilim were a new and unrelated group that the text just happens to mention being on the earth before the Flood. However, the second part of the sentence rules that out.

It says that they were also on the earth after the Flood, and it tells us when this happened—i.e., “when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.” The Nephilim are thus the children of the sons of God and the daughters of men, answering Question 5.

We can then answer Question 6: The Nephilim were on the earth both before and after the Flood because the sons of God and the daughters of men mated twice.

Genesis 6 records one mating, but it alerts the reader that it happened a second time, which reflects Numbers 13:33, where the spies Moses sends into the Promised Land report that there, “we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim).”

The ancient reader would have known that the Israelites had encountered Nephilim in the Promised Land, and so the author of Genesis includes his remark to explain how they could be around both before and after the Flood.

 

The Sons of God & the Daughters of Men

This provides us with a clue that can help us answer Questions 1 and 2, because if the sons of God and the daughters of men mated both before and after the Flood, then they must have been around both before and after the Flood.

That eliminates one of the possibilities for who they were. According to some authors, the “sons of God” represent the righteous line that came from Adam and Eve’s son Seth, while the “daughters of men” were the wicked line that came from their son Cain.

This “Sethite/Cainite” interpretation is problematic because the language of the text does not suggest it. There is nothing in this passage that mentions either Seth or Cain.

So it is unsupported speculation to propose that the sons of God were descendants of Seth.

Even worse, the phrase “the daughters of men” does not suggest the descendants of Cain.

But Genesis 6:4’s statement that “the sons of God came in to the daughters of men” both before and after the Flood eliminates this possibility, because the line of Cain did not survive the Flood.

That’s something we discussed in Episode 55, because some racists have occasionally tried to argue that dark skin is a result of being of the line of Cain.

But as Peter tells us only “a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water” in Noah’s Ark.

Noah’s family is a population bottleneck, and—at least the way Genesis presents it—Noah’s family was of the line of Seth and the line of Cain went extinct.

It’s not impossible that Noah had some Cainite ancestry, but this is not indicated in the text, and the way Israelite genealogies reckoned ancestry by the male line, the line of Cain itself did not survive.

We can thus eliminate one of the more popular theories regarding Questions 1 and 2.

The line of Cain did not survive the Flood, so the Sethite/Cainite interpretation isn’t correct.

But if that’s true, then who else might the sons of God and the daughters of men be?

Another interpretation is that the sons of God are rulers, and the daughters of men are common women.

In support of this, it can be pointed out that the king of Israel was sometimes described as God’s son. Thus in Psalm 2, God tells the king,

Psalm 2:7, ESV

You are my son; today I have begotten you.

The problem is that the phrase “sons of God” is never applied to rulers like kings. This is an unknown usage in Hebrew.

Worse yet, there is an established meaning for the phrase “sons of God” in biblical Hebrew, and it does not point to rulers.

The standard Old Testament usage of the phrase “sons of God” refers to high ranking members of God’s heavenly court, or what we would call angels. Thus at the beginning of the book of Job, we read,

Job 1:6, ESV

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them.

Deuteronomy 32:8 also says that when God “divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God,” which reflects the Israelite belief that God had assigned the nations to different angelic beings but kept Israel for himself. Jacob his allotted heritage.

But these angels went bad, began resisting God’s will, and were worshipped by men. See Deuteronomy 32:17, for example.

Thus the Greek Septuagint of Psalm 96 says,

Psalm 96[95]:5

All the gods of the nations are demons.

And St. Paul similarly says,

1 Corinthians 10:20, ESV

What pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God.

We see this reflected in Daniel 10, where the angel Gabriel tells how he was delayed for three weeks in answering Daniel’s prayer by the demonic “prince of Persia,” how he needed help from Michael in battling him, and how he and Michael would defeat the prince of Persia, and the “prince of Greece” would come to prominence.

The third interpretation of who the sons of God were in Genesis 6 is thus that they were angelic beings, and this would allow the phrase “daughters of men” to have its normal, expected meaning: human women.

But in recent centuries, the idea that angels mated with human women has struck many as incredible.

Some have pointed to Jesus’ statement that in the resurrection humans “neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven.”

But this doesn’t settle the matter, because Jesus is describing “angels in heaven,” and he does not say that no angels ever abandoned their place in heaven and did things they weren’t supposed to do.

In fact, we know that some did. The New Testament book of Jude mentions “the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling.”

Other people have appealed to the fact that angels don’t have physical bodies.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church thus describes angels as “spiritual, non-corporeal beings” (CCC 328) and as “purely spiritual creatures [who] have intelligence and will” (CCC 330).

However, this does not mean that angels can’t assume physical forms.

For example, in Genesis 19, two angels arrive in Sodom to investigate the outcry against the city, and the men of the town attempt to rape them. Abraham’s nephew Lot goes out of his house to try to talk them out of it,

But things go badly and the angels “reached out their hands and brought Lot into the house with them and shut the door” (Genesis 19:10).

This makes it sound very much like these two angels had temporarily assumed physical form.

In the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274) held that angels could fashion temporary, material bodies for themselves out of the air (ST I:51:2).

He also explained a way in which an angel—or rather a demon—might be able to father a child, which we’ll get to in a bit.

The fact is, the phrase “sons of God” is consistently used in the Old Testament to refer to high ranking angels, which would support the third interpretation.

Modern people tend to dismiss the third option because angels don’t have physical bodies, but this is something doctrinal development has made clear to us.

This fact was not clear to the ancient Israelites, who didn’t have a problem with embodied angels, and when trying to figure out what an ancient text means, we need to determine what it would have meant to the original author.

Further, Christian thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas have held that—even if angels don’t normally have physical bodies—they can assume them. So before we set the third theory aside, let’s consider what evidence we have for it.

 

Other Evidence

One of the books that some New Testament authors read was 1 Enoch. We know that, because this book is directly quoted in Jude 14-15, which describes it as containing prophecy.

In 1 Enoch, a group of angels decide to leave heaven and marry human women. They also teach mankind destructive skills like how to make weapons for war, how to make cosmetics for seduction, and how to perform magic.

They corrupt mankind with these skills, and after they get married, their sons are violent giants, and the resulting corruption brings on the Great Flood.

The fact is that the angelic interpretation of Genesis 6 is the most ancient one we have on record. In The Word Biblical Commentary on Jude 6, the British scholar Richard Bauckham writes:

Word Biblical Commentary, Jude 6

According to Jewish tradition, [angels] descended from heaven to marry human wives and corrupt the human race in the period before the Flood. This was how the account of the “sons of God” in Gen 6:1–4 was universally understood (so far as our evidence goes) until the mid-second century A.D., though the tradition took several varying forms. From the time of R. Simeon b. Yohai in the mid-second century A.D., the traditional exegesis was replaced in Judaism by an insistence that the “sons of God” were not angels but men. In Christianity, however, the traditional exegesis had a longer life, questioned only in the third century and disappearing in the fifth century.

This understanding was not limited to just one or two ancient sources. In The Word Biblical Commentary on Genesis 6:1, another British scholar—Gordon Wenham—writes:

Word Biblical Commentary, Genesis 6:1

The “angel” interpretation is at once the oldest view and that of most modern commentators. It is assumed in the earliest Jewish exegesis (e.g., the books of 1 Enoch 6:2ff; Jubilees 5:1), [the Septuagint], Philo De Gigant. 2:358), Josephus (Ant. 1.31) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1QapGen 2:1; CD 2:17–19). The [New Testament] (2 Pet 2:4, Jude 6, 7) and the earliest Christian writers (e.g., Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen) also take this line.

The angelic interpretation of the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 is thus the universal and earliest view in both Jewish and Christian circles, across a wide range of sources.

What all of the sources have in common, though, is that they were all written in the period around the birth of Christ—either a few centuries before or afterward.

But Genesis itself is from an earlier period, and how a text was later interpreted does not automatically tell us how it was interpreted at the time it was written.

What would help is if we had material from before Genesis was written that could shed light on the matter, and we do.

One of the things that scholars of Genesis have noted is that its author frequently engages in anti-pagan polemics by giving an orthodox alternative to the ideas of surrounding pagan cultures.

This is why—in Genesis 1:16—he says that “God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night,” but he does not name them as the sun and the moon.

The reason is that the words for sun and moon were also the names of the sun god and the moon god, and he doesn’t want the reader thinking that the high God made the sun god and the moon god. The message is, “They’re just lights! Don’t worship them!”

For those familiar with the Ancient Near Eastern background that the author of Genesis is undermining, the background to Genesis 6 is clear.

In Mesopotamian literature, there was a group of demigods known as the Apkallu. They were wise and taught mankind the skills that made Mesopotamian civilization great.

The Apkallu also mated with human women before the Great Flood and fathered divine-human hybrid children who were Mesopotamian king-heroes.

The Flood itself comes about differently in Mesopotamian mythology. There, the Flood happened because the human race multiplied so much that it was making too much noise at night and keeping the gods awake, so they sent the Flood to get rid of the problem.

It thus appears that the author of Genesis is rebutting these Mesopotamian ideas in his introduction to the Flood narrative.

Instead of the Apkallu being the good guys who made Mesopotamia great, the sons of God were fallen angels who abandoned heaven and improperly mated with human women.

And the skills they taught corrupted mankind and brought on the Flood, which wasn’t a petulant act of the gods because mankind was making too much noise; it was a just judgment sent because of man’s wickedness.

It thus looks like we have evidence for the angelic interpretation of Genesis 6 both before Genesis was written (with the Mesopotamian Apkallu) and after it was written (in the Jewish literature from around the time of Christ).

This provides significant support for the angelic interpretation, but is there any way we can confirm it?

 

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