The Nephilim in Mythology: were they giants and sons of God ?
Traditionally, the term 'nephilim' is translated as 'giants'. But the translation of the term in no way provides a complete description of these beings. Some dictionaries describe the Nephilim as giants with superhuman strength.
Who were the nephilim, the mysterious beings mentioned in the Bible? Until today, most scholars have paid little attention to these curious creatures mentioned in the sacred text, simply because their existence is archived in the category of legend.
But are we really sure that this is the case? Perhaps, the Bible reports ancient testimony of super-human beings that once inhabited our planet?
Recently, there have been some attempts to reconcile mythology with science by theorizing that at the root of these ancient tales there may be elements of truth reported in the form of "legend".
In this context, the Nephilim have sometimes been associated with the "ancient humans", i.e. the possible survivors of Atlantis who would have contributed to the reconstruction of the post-diluvian world, other times they have been associated with what are defined as "ancient astronauts", that is, a group of aliens who visited our planet in the past, being recognized as divinities.
But who were the Nephilim? A clue to their identity could be revealed by the analysis of their nickname: "nephilim".
Traditionally, the term 'nephilim' is translated as 'giants'. Even the official translation of the Catholic Church opts for this choice. But the translation of the term in no way provides a complete description of these beings. Some dictionaries describe nephilim as giants with superhuman strength.
The Nephilim appear in the Old Testament twice. The first time in the book of Genesis, the section of the Bible that describes the remote times of the origins and then, in the largest part, the story of the history of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. The title “Genesis” means “Origin” or “Generation”.
In Hebrew the book is indicated with the initial expression Bereshìt, "In the beginning". In the first part, the book addresses the great enigmas of existence: origins of the universe and of man, what is man's right relationship with God, the problem of good and evil, of pain, of death, growth of humanity and its differentiation over the passage of time. The verse that interests us is found in chapter 6, verses 1, 3 and 4:
“When men began to multiply on the earth and daughters were born to them, the Sons of the Gods (benei ha-elohim) saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and took them as wives of their choice. […].There were giants (nephilim) on the earth in those times - and also after - when the Sons of the Gods united with the daughters of men and these bore them children: these are the heroes of antiquity, famous men".
Looking at the passage, we notice that, in addition to men and their daughters, three types of individuals are mentioned: the Children of the Gods, the nephilim and the "heroes of antiquity". Let's try to understand who they are.
The Sons of the Gods
First of all, these mysterious Benei ha-elohim, literally "sons of the gods", appear. Who are these? According to what the Bible reports, in a remote time, there existed a "divine offspring" who cohabited the Earth with primordial men.
The first Christian writers, such as Tertullian and especially Lactantius, in an attempt to explain the origin of these mysterious characters, accepted the idea clearly present in the Book of Enoch that the Benei ha-elohim were the fallen angels, as the passage also seems to allude to of Genesis.
Be careful, however, these are children, therefore a second generation of gods, the offspring of entities that presumably already lived on our planet. So, who are the “elohim”?
Elohim, translated as "God" in modern editions of the Bible, is actually a plural noun: it is the plural of Eloah, in Hebrew, in fact, the suffix -im is used to make the plural of a noun.
We immediately find this plural term in the opening phrase of Genesis “Bereshit barà Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'arets”, which translated as “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth”.
Apparently, according to the Bible the creation of the world is not the work of a single entity that monotheistic culture identifies as God, but is the result of a joint action of different entities. The same collaboration is confirmed when it is decided to create man. In this case, the translation from the original preserves the plural when the “creative symposium” exclaims: “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness”.
Taken literally, the Bible reveals the news that man was created in the image and likeness of a group of entities considered divine called "elohim". But who are they?
Mauro Biglino is an Italian historian and writer, specialized in the translation of the first ancient Hebrew codes at the origin of the Old Testament, such as the Torah and the Tanakh, based above all on the oldest available text, the Leningrad codex.
On the basis of these studies, reported in his book "The book that will change our ideas about the Bible forever - The gods who came from space?", he arrived at surprising results, of a ufological nature, which are very close to the conclusions obtained by Zecharia Sitchin.
Biglino was a translator of ancient Hebrew on behalf of Edizioni San Paolo, the largest Catholic publishing house, a collaboration that ended once he began his career as a writer in which he brought to light the surprising discoveries made in 30 years of analysis of the so-called sacred texts which have always been omitted.
In his latest work, a resounding editorial success, perhaps even superior to the author's expectations, which already in the title sounds like a promise, Biglino interprets the meaning of the word "elohim" as:
"The correct meaning is "the shining ones", individuals much superior to men, but not spiritual. So not gods. This is a term that did not belong to the culture of the person who wrote it, but which emerged later, in a process that lasted centuries.Adam and Eve are the ancestors of homo sapiens. And they were not created from nothing, but the Elohim intervened on them with genetic engineering, giving a kind of accelerator to human evolution. Adam, as a name, means "he of the earth", in short, born on this planet.
Literally it is more correct to translate him as "the terrestrial", to evidently distinguish him from those who were not terrestrial. Eve, on the other hand, is Hawà, or "the mother of the living", in short, the progenitor of the entire human species".
In short, there's enough to leave you speechless. Furthermore, Biglino also has very clear ideas about the value to be given to what is written in the Bible:
“What I write today, and what I repeat in my conferences around Italy, derives from a long experience of literal translations. And what I tell you in the book is what first amazed me.I am convinced that the religion in which we were educated was actually born from a contact between humanity and technologically superior beings. The Bible is a true story, it tells concrete episodes, but then with the passage of time we lost contact with this "physicality" and theological elaboration took over."
Returning to the "Sons of the Gods" we can assume that they were the second generation of the "shining ones", the Elohim, who had arrived on Earth and had already started the creation of man.
The Nephilim
The Hebrew term 'nephilim' appears in the story, translated in our Bibles as “giants”. The author of the sacred text is keen to point out that while the Sons of the Gods were intent on mating with the Daughters of Men, the Nephilim were on Earth, and even after!
The word “nephilim” is believed to come from the root of the Hebrew verb 'naphal', meaning to fall. Scholarly opinions differ on the interpretation of the term. In biblical circles, the root has made people think of the Nephilim as fallen angels. However, the term nafal cannot be directly linked to this concept.
As Biglino explains in an interview given to brunildaternova.blogspot.it, according to the very famous author Zecharia Sitchin, the term derives from the verb nafàl and means "those who have fallen" but we know that there is a notable semantic difference between "to fall" and "to descend , to come down”: the verb “to go down” clearly carries within itself the character of intentionality, which is not however present in the act of “falling”, an action that is normally suffered.
The other Genesis
Zecharia Sitchin
Michael Heiser of Wisconsin University emphasizes precisely this aspect. He maintains that nephilìm does not derive from nafàl because its vocalization differs from the usual derivations of this root and, consequently, the intentionality inherent in "coming down" cannot be attributed to it.
Professor Ronald S. Hendel - University of Berkley - documents how the use of the verb nafàl with the meaning of "to fall" is present in other places in the Bible and states that nephilìm represents the "qatil" form of the verb, which can therefore be seen as the passive adjectival of the root nafàl with the meaning of "to fall": in short it would be a sort of conjugated adjective.
On the other hand, the scholar cites a passage from chapter 32 of Ezekiel in which the verb nafàl clearly indicates a voluntary descent carried out by warriors. It therefore does not seem like a stretch to extend the meaning of nephilìm and attribute to it, as for yaràd, both the value of an "involuntary fall" and that of an "intentional descent".
It therefore remains an open question whether the Nephilim passively fell from the sky, or came voluntarily from the sky. Translating nafàl as falling or coming from the sky, many authors believe that the Sons of the Gods and the Nephilim are synonymous, or that in any case the Sons of the Gods are the sons of the Nephilim, the gods of the first generation.
However, another possible hypothesis is interesting based on a different translation of nafàl, to be understood as "to prostrate", "to lower oneself", "to serve". In this sense, nephilim could mean “those who have prostrated themselves” or “those who have been forced to prostrate themselves.”
Is it possible that a race of ancient pre-diluvian men came into contact with an alien civilization that forced them to prostrate themselves at their feet? Or, seduced by the flattery of the visitors, did they deliberately decide to put themselves at their service, dazzled by the power and wonders they performed?
The seduction of origins and the reptilian hypothesis
Almost all human cultures have myths that tell of a "guilt of origin" of an ancient event that would have "deviated" man from his natural evolutionary path.
The best known is certainly the one told by the Bible and according to the interpretation of a 3rd century Christian author, Irenaeus of Lyon, Adam's sin was a sin of impatience, a desire to skip ahead.
If we consider homo sapiens, we are disconcerted to consider that the genus homo appeared on the planet only 2 million years ago and, through a daring series of evolutionary leaps, managed to build - practically from nothing - the first modern cities in Mesopotamia about 6 thousand years ago, to arrive, in a few thousand years, at moving from cuneiform to information technology and from the exploration of habitable territories to space exploration. Why is Homo Sapiens so fast?
According to David Icke's hypothesis, some reptilian aliens, in the human guise of public men, have taken control of our planet, preventing humanity from normal spiritual, social and technological evolution.
Their aim would be to enslave humanity and definitively take possession of planetary resources (including humanity).
The ideas contained in the book Children of the Matrix, apparently original and extravagant, but validated by a long and scrupulous series of documented evidence, our life on planet Earth is nothing more than a deception managed by extraterrestrial, intraterrestrial and interdimensional forces to keep us in a mental, emotional and spiritual prison.
We are trapped in a frequency range, the matrix, and the "world" we see around us is only a tiny fraction of a multidimensional infinity.
It is interesting that in the biblical story of original sin, the seducer of humanity has the appearance of a serpent. According to the story of Genesis, the serpent offers Adam and Eve an alternative way to that foreseen by the cosmic order to "become like God".
What does it mean? According to some exegetes, Adam and Eve see in the serpent's proposal the path to immortality which would make them similar to God. Others, however, see in the proposal the possibility for humanity to establish on its own what is good and what is evil, without no external authority.
The serpent proposes to man to become his own god, in fact, to Eve's objection the serpent responds seraphically:
“You will not die at all! Indeed, God knows that the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
It is no longer the creator who establishes what is good or bad, but the creature.
Still others interpreted the tale of original sin as an evolutionary shortcut offered to humanity for a process that would likely last thousands (if not millions) of years. The serpent would have become the bearer of technological and cultural capabilities that men would have developed naturally and in perfect harmony with the cosmic laws of the universe.
In this interpretation, the stories of Sumerian mythology about Enki (bringer of civilization) and also the myth of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods to deliver it to men, intersect. The short span of time in which humanity evolved leaves some anthropologists baffled. Compared to the times of nature, man seems like a bolt of lightning that appeared on the planet.
And it is an evolution that is actually not completely in harmony with the cosmos: the cost of this rapid evolution was the separation of man from nature and the consequent destruction of the planet (Eden), the separation between men (tower of Babel) and the consequent loss of unity of purpose and alienation of individuals. In this perspective, the serpent embodied the symbol of the devil (diabolos = that which separates).
The Book of Numbers
The term Nephilim returns to the Bible in chapter 13, verse 33, of the book of Numbers, the narration of the journey that takes the people of Israel from the slopes of Mount Sinai to the border of the promised land. It reads like this:
“The land we crossed to explore is a land that devours its inhabitants; all the people that we saw there are people of high stature. There we saw the giants (nephilim), descendants of Anak, of the race of giants, in front of whom we seemed to be like locusts, and so we must have seemed to them."
The Bible confirms that the Nephilim are beings of tall stature. In order not to lengthen the article further, I refer you to three posts published previously on the giants and the clues to their existence:
It is interesting to note the mention of the "descendants of Anak", whose root of the name refers to the Anunnaki of the Sumerians, made famous from Sitchin's studies.
The heroes of antiquity
The biblical text states that from the union of the Sons of the Gods and the Daughters of men, under the impassive gaze of the Nephilim, the heroes of antiquity are generated. In fact, we are faced with being hybrids, half god and half man. How to interpret this disconcerting conclusion of the biblical author?
Zecharia Sitchin and Erich Von Daniken have written books claiming that the Nephilim are our ancestors and that we were created (through genetic engineering) by an alien race (for the Sumerians the Anunnaki).
Since his first book, The Planet of the Gods, Zecharia Sitchin states that the biblical Elohim who said
"Let us create Adam in our image and likeness"
were the gods of Sumeria and Babylon, the Anunnaki, who came to Earth from their planet Nibiru.
According to the author, Adam was genetically engineered approximately 300,000 years ago, when the genes of the Anunnaki were combined with those of a hominid. Then, according to the Bible, mixed marriages were celebrated.
Giants lived on Earth, who took Adam's descendants as wives, giving birth to "heroic men", figures that Sitchin traces back to the demigods of Sumerian and Babylonian traditions, including the famous Mesopotamian king Gilgamesh, the one who claimed the right to immortality and Utnapishtim, the Babylonian hero of the Flood.
Is it possible that we are all children of the gods? In his book When giants inhabited the Earth, which represents the sum of his work, Zecharia Sitchin proceeds step by step through the analysis of an enormous quantity of ancient writings and artefacts, accompanying the reader until the astonishing discovery of the final resting place earthly world of a pair of Anunnaki deities, where the answer to this question seems to be kept.
In short, the ancient sources of human wisdom, such as that represented by the Bible, taken literally reveal an evolutionary past of man, much more complex and decidedly less linear than what is presented to us by, so to speak, official anthropology.
The implications of such reflections and hypotheses, if they were to one day be confirmed by material archaeology, are immense and would force human beings to reevaluate their position in the cosmos and to decisively reformulate the most important questions that inhabit us: who we are and where are we going.
