{"it":{"id":"TX009","kind":"text","sub":"Hebrew","name":"Genesis 1-11 (incl. 6:1-4 Nephilim)","place":"St Petersburg","date":"Final redaction c.6th-5th c. BCE (Persian period); sources debated","oldest":"Dead Sea Scrolls 4QGen fragments c.150 BCE-68 CE; Aleppo Codex c.930 CE; Leningrad Codex 1008 CE","inst":"Leningrad Codex B19a, National Library of Russia","lang":"Hebrew","src":[207,508],"lat":59.934,"lon":30.335,"tags":["Near East","Creation myths","Sky beings"],"sum":"Genesis 6:4, in the King James Version, says: \"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.\"\n\nThe verse sits just before the flood story. Two verses earlier the sons of God see that the daughters of men are fair and take wives of all which they chose. In the verse just before, God says that man's days shall be an hundred and twenty years.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is who the sons of God are. Ancient Israel worshipped one God, yet the text speaks of sons of God who father children with human women. It also brings in giants without saying where they came from.\n\nThe mainstream view is that the passage keeps a fragment of older myth, much as other ancient peoples told of heroes born to gods. Erich von Däniken goes further. In Chariots of the Gods he notes that giants crop up in myths across the world and asks whether they were our forefathers or skilled space travellers from another star. He reads the sons of God as beings who bred with humans.\n\nWhy would a text so careful about one God keep a story about sons of God at all?","why":"A single verse in Genesis mentions giants and sons of God who father children with women.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Compare KJV with a modern translation of 'Nephilim'.","rel":["TX013","TX010"],"hook":"Genesis 6:4 says there were giants on earth when the sons of God took human wives."},"S":{"207":["www.biblegateway.com","https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV"],"508":["Wikipedia: Book of Genesis","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis"]},"rec":{"id":"TX009","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA113","a":"Nephilim = hybrid offspring of ET visitors.","who":"Sitchin; von Daniken; L.A. Marzulli","main":"Polemical adaptation of Mesopotamian motifs; 'sons of God' = divine council members (or Sethites in later Christian reading).","ms":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"Genesis 6:4 KJV","q":"\"There were giants in the earth in those days\"","exact":"yes","tr":"KJV 1611/1769","url":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV","mo":"giants"},{"ref":"Genesis 6:2","q":"Sons of God took wives of the daughters of men. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"KJV","url":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV","mo":"interbreeding"}],"tr":[{"by":"KJV","yr":"1611/1769","t":"Authorized Version","lic":"public domain","url":"https://www.biblegateway.com/"}],"mo":[{"v":"clay_or_earth","ev":"Gen 2:7 dust [paraphrase]","n":"documented: Mesopotamia to Levant","url":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV"},{"v":"divine_blood_or_breath","ev":"Gen 2:7 breath [paraphrase]","n":"Levant","url":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV"},{"v":"giants_hybrids","ev":"P009","n":"Levant","url":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV"},{"v":"flood","ev":"Gen 6-9","n":"documented borrowing","url":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV"},{"v":"souls_in_bodies","ev":"Gen 2:7 'living soul' (KJV) [paraphrase]","n":"Levant","url":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV"}],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Polemical adaptation of Mesopotamian motifs; 'sons of God' = divine council members (or Sethites in later Christian reading).","alternative_reading":"Nephilim = hybrid offspring of ET visitors.","alt_proponent":"Sitchin; von Daniken; L.A. Marzulli","mistranslation_or_dispute":"'Nephilim' etymology ('fallen ones'?) uncertain; Sitchin's 'those who came down from heaven' gloss is disputed (Heiser).","key_theme":"sons of God + daughters of men; Nephilim/giants; flood","language":"Hebrew","physical_object_institution":"Leningrad Codex B19a, National Library of Russia","composition_date":"Final redaction c.6th-5th c. BCE (Persian period); sources debated","oldest_ms_date":"Dead Sea Scrolls 4QGen fragments c.150 BCE-68 CE; Aleppo Codex c.930 CE; Leningrad Codex 1008 CE","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0746","t":"www.biblegateway.com","u":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Book of Genesis","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis"},{"id":"VTX009-3","t":"Bible Gateway (KJV): Genesis 6","u":"https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%206&version=KJV"},{"id":"VTX009-4","t":"von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods? (Internet Archive)","u":"https://archive.org/details/chariotsofgods00vond"}],"qs":["Why would a text so careful about one God keep a story about sons of God at all?","Who did the first readers think the giants were?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Genesis_on_egg_cropped.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Genesis_on_egg_cropped.jpg","title":"Genesis on egg cropped.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/","by":"Sputnikcccp, edited by MPF","cap":"The first chapter of B'reshit, or Genesis, written on an egg, in the Jerusalem museum"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Bible.malmesbury.arp.jpg/1280px-Bible.malmesbury.arp.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bible.malmesbury.arp.jpg","title":"Bible.malmesbury.arp.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Anonymous (photo by Adrian Pingstone)","cap":"A Bible handwritten in Latin, on display in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England. This Bible was written in Belgium in 1407 AD, for reading aloud in a monastery"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Genesis_Chapter_One_from_a_1620-21_King_James_Bible.jpg/1280px-Genesis_Chapter_One_from_a_1620-21_King_James_Bible.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Genesis_Chapter_One_from_a_1620-21_King_James_Bible.jpg","title":"Genesis Chapter One from a 1620-21 King James Bible.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Classicalsteve","cap":"The Opening of Genesis Chapter 1 from a 1620-21 King James Bible in black letter type. The first edition of the KJV was 1611."}],"sum":"# Genesis 6: The Sons of God and the Giants\n\nA translator faces a word he cannot quite place. The Hebrew says nefilim. It is not explained. It appears in one short paragraph of Genesis, just before the flood, and the paragraph moves on without a pause. When Jewish scholars rendered the books of Moses into Greek, in the translation known as the Septuagint, they settled on gigantes, giants. Almost every early translation followed: the Latin Vulgate, the Aramaic targums, the Samaritan targum. One Greek translator, Symmachus, wrote \"the violent ones\" instead. Another, Aquila, may have meant \"the fallen ones.\" Two thousand years later, nobody is certain who was right.\n\nThat single choice of word is why the King James Bible of 1611 says what it does in Genesis 6:4: \"There were giants in the earth in those days.\"\n\n## Four strange verses\n\nThe passage is only four verses long, Genesis 6:1 to 4. It opens as people begin to multiply on the earth. \"The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.\" In the next verse God speaks: \"My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.\" Then comes the line that has generated libraries: \"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.\"\n\nImmediately afterwards, God sees the wickedness of humanity and resolves to send the flood.\n\nGenesis reached its final form, most scholars think, around the sixth or fifth century BC, in the Persian period, though its sources are debated. The oldest surviving fragments of it come from the Dead Sea Scrolls, written between about 150 BC and AD 68. The oldest complete Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex, was copied in 1008 and is kept in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg.\n\n## Who are the sons of God?\n\nThis is the knot. The Hebrew phrase is bene ha-elohim, literally \"sons of Elohim,\" or sons of the gods. In other early books of the Bible, the bene elohim are in heaven. They form the heavenly court, the divine council that stands around God, as in the opening of the Book of Job. The same idiom appears in the texts of Ugarit, the Bronze Age city on the Syrian coast: bn ilm, \"sons of the gods,\" and phr bn ilm, \"the assembly of the sons of the gods.\" There, as the scholar Simon Parker notes, \"sons of\" means membership in a category. The phrase names a group of divine beings, the sons of the high god El.\n\nSo the plainest reading is startling. The text appears to say that divine beings took human wives and fathered children, and that those children were the heroes of old. Ronald Hendel reads it exactly so: the sons of God were originally divine, the \"mighty men\" of verse 4 were their demigod offspring, the same as the Nephilim, and the mixing of heaven and earth crossed a boundary that made God limit human life to 120 years. The story resembles, he notes, Greek traditions of an age of heroes born to gods.\n\nAncient readers felt the problem too. Some manuscripts of the Septuagint changed \"sons of God\" to \"angels.\" Second Temple writings such as 1 Enoch and the Book of Jubilees told the story at length, with rebellious angels, the Watchers, descending to marry women and fathering destructive giants whose violence helped bring on the flood. Later Jewish and Christian commentators, uneasy with that, turned the sons of God into human beings: the righteous line of Seth intermarrying with the line of Cain, or simply powerful rulers. The text itself does not decide.\n\n## What were the Nephilim?\n\nThe word is equally uncertain. A standard Hebrew lexicon of 1908 gives \"giants\" and warns that every proposed derivation is \"very precarious.\" Many link it to the root n-p-l, \"to fall,\" making the Nephilim \"fallen ones,\" or \"those who cause others to fall,\" or warriors who fell in battle. Others connect it with violence and domination.\n\nThey return once more, in Numbers 13:33, where spies sent into Canaan report the \"sons of Anak, which come of the giants,\" and feel like grasshoppers beside them. That later passage did much to fix the image of the Nephilim as enormous.\n\nScholars offer several explanations of where the belief came from. The archaeologist G. E. Wright suggested that it grew from contemplating megalithic monuments east of the Jordan and the cyclopean walls of Canaanite cities, some 18 feet thick, though he noted that the ancient Canaanites were relatively short. Brian Doak reads the Nephilim as a polemic against the heroic ideal of neighbouring cultures. J. C. Greenfield traced the lore to \"the negative aspects of the Apkallu tradition,\" the seven sages of Mesopotamia who brought wisdom before the flood. A 2023 study argues that the Nephilim were elite warriors of legendary antiquity, not necessarily giant or divine.\n\n## The other reading\n\nModern writers have pushed the literal reading furthest. Erich von Däniken, in Chariots of the Gods, noted that giants appear in myths across the world and asked whether they were our forefathers or skilled travellers from another star. He read the sons of God as beings who bred with humans. Zecharia Sitchin glossed Nephilim as \"those who came down from heaven,\" a translation specialists reject. The record lists the claim as an interpretation without measurable data.\n\nYet the verses themselves invite the question. A book devoted to one God preserves, at the threshold of its great flood, a story about other heavenly beings who crossed into the human world, chose wives, and left children remembered as \"men of renown.\" The editors did not explain it. They did not remove it. They placed it where it would be read as one of the reasons the world had to be washed clean.\n\nWhy would writers so careful about one God keep a story about the sons of God at all, unless it was too old, or too important, to leave out?"},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"c. 150 BCE","h":"Dead Sea Scrolls 4QGen fragments c.150 BCE-68 CE; Aleppo Codex c.930 CE; Leningrad Codex 1008 CE","s":[281]},{"v":"Hebrew","h":"Language","s":[281]},{"v":"Leningrad Codex B19a","h":"Where the physical copy is held: Leningrad Codex B19a, National Library of Russia","s":[281]}],"hs":{"281":["www.biblegateway.com","https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=KJV"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX009.webp","w":765,"h":907,"o":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Genesis_on_egg_cropped.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled"}}