The Nephilim: Sons of God and the Giants of Genesis
The text itself
✝️ Genesis 6:1-4 (ESV)
1 When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. 3 Then the LORD said, "My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years." 4 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.
Four verses, and nearly every phrase in them is debated: who are the "sons of God," what does "Nephilim" mean, and how does a group present "in those days" turn up again, by name, centuries later at the edge of the Promised Land? The second question comes from Numbers:
✝️ Numbers 13:33 (ESV)
33 And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.
This study works through both passages on their own terms first. Then it follows the giant clans across Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Samuel, to answer the two questions that prompted it. Did the Nephilim exist after the flood, and are they still around?
In one sentence: The giant clans of Canaan and Transjordan are a historical reality Genesis, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Samuel narrate plainly; their claimed descent from a second Nephilim incursion after the flood rests on one verse spoken inside the spies' discredited report, and no biblical text anywhere describes them as continuing today.
Key Takeaways
(This section follows the Key Takeaways format — see that page for what each part is for.)
Lessons about Jesus. Jesus himself supplies the only New Testament comparison to this era, and he is precise about what the comparison covers. "As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man" (Matthew 24:37, ESV) is about people "eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage" in total unawareness, "until the flood came and swept them all away" (24:38-39). It describes ordinary complacency meeting sudden judgment. Jesus makes no claim there about giants or genetics. Take the comparison exactly as far as he took it, and no further.
Memory verses. Genesis 6:3 (ESV) — "My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years." Matthew 24:37 (ESV) — "As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man."
Be Transformed. The ten spies who invoked the Nephilim by name did so inside a report Scripture itself calls "evil" (Numbers 13:32), and they died for spreading it (14:36-37). Caleb and Joshua saw the identical giants and drew the opposite conclusion (Numbers 14:6-9). The same facts, filtered through fear or through trust, produced opposite reports. Examine which of those two you default to when a real obstacle is in front of you.
Prayer. Lord, you know every uncertain thing in this text better than any commentator does. Where Scripture speaks plainly, give me the courage of Caleb. Where Scripture leaves a question open, give me the humility to leave it open too, rather than trading your authority for the confidence of a guess. In Jesus' name. Amen.
Historical and literary context
Genesis 6:1-8 sits at a hinge point in the book. Chapter 5's genealogy has just carried the line from Adam to Noah, and this short unit explains why God is about to judge the whole earth with a flood. "The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth" (6:5) is the verdict. Verses 1-4 are the narrator's explanation of what led to it. Much about "sons of God" and "Nephilim" is uncertain. The passage's own job in the book's argument is not. It is the hinge between the world's expanding population, echoing the "be fruitful and multiply" of 1:28 now curdled into "great" wickedness, and the flood that follows.
Numbers 13:25-33 has a different, equally clear job. It is the spies' report from their forty-day mission into Canaan, and Numbers itself distinguishes it from a straightforward account. The narration in 13:17-24 is plain reconnaissance -- routes, terrain, a cluster of grapes so large it took two men to carry it. The report in the people's hearing (13:26-33) is a different register. Fortified cities "very large" (13:28). A long list of named nations (13:29). Then the claim that "the land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that eats up its inhabitants" (13:32), and that its Anakite population "come from the Nephilim" (13:33). Numbers' own narrator labels this report a dibbah, a word the study takes up below. The consequence for the ten men who brought it is immediate and severe: "the men who brought up a bad report of the land... died by plague before the LORD" (14:36-37). That framing matters for how much weight the Nephilim claim in 13:33 can bear, and the word study below addresses it directly.
Word studies
Nephilim
Nephilim, נְפִלִים / נְפִילִים (nephilim, H5303). The word occurs exactly twice in the entire Old Testament, at Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33. That is itself worth pausing on. Nearly everything popularly "known" about the Nephilim is inference and tradition built on two verses. The noun's root is naphal (נָפַל, H5307), "to fall." A root is not automatically a word's live meaning, the caution any word study has to observe, and lexicographers have proposed several distinct senses from this one. "Fallen ones," morally fallen or fallen from a heavenly status. "Those who fall upon" others, meaning aggressors or tyrants, from a different sense of the same verb. Or, via a later interpretive tradition, "giants." The earliest attested interpretation is the last. The Septuagint renders nephilim as γίγαντες (gigantes, "giants") in both of its two occurrences. That is a real, old reading. The ESV Study Bible's note on Genesis 6:4 adds an important caution. Numbers 13:33 is the more vivid of the two verses, with spies comparing themselves to grasshoppers next to men of "great stature" (13:32). So the "giant" sense may have been read back into Genesis 6:4 from Numbers, rather than being Genesis's own point. The Hebrew word's core meaning is more uncertain than the popular "giant" gloss suggests.
Sons of God
Sons of God, בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים (bene ha-elohim). This exact construct phrase occurs in only four other places in the Hebrew Bible, and all four are in Job -- 1:6, 2:1, and 38:7 -- where it unambiguously names members of God's heavenly court presenting themselves before him, Satan among them in the first two. That is a genuine data point in favour of reading Genesis 6:2 and 6:4 the same way, as angelic beings. Three views have been argued historically, and no single one commands universal agreement:
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Fallen angels. Supported by the phrase's consistent angelic sense in Job, and by New Testament texts that pair angelic sin with the flood in the same breath — 2 Peter 2:4-5 ("God did not spare angels when they sinned... and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah") and Jude 1:6-7 (angels who "did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling," paired immediately with Sodom's "unnatural desire," ESV).
The objection usually raised is Jesus's statement that in the resurrection people "neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven" (Mark 12:25). That describes angels' present state in heaven. It makes no claim that angels are incapable of the transgression Genesis 6 and Jude both describe as already having happened. 2. Tyrannical human kings. In this view "sons of God" is an ancient Near Eastern idiom for despotic rulers claiming divine status, in the way some ANE kings styled themselves. It is drawn from Cain's ungodly line running through Lamech (Genesis 4:19-24). On this reading the kings may have acted under demonic influence without being angels themselves. 3. The godly line of Seth. The most common view in later church history: Seth's descendants (the line that "called upon the name of the LORD," Genesis 4:26) intermarrying with Cain's ungodly line, blurring the distinction between the two lines the genealogies of chapters 4-5 had carefully kept separate.
The Septuagint itself translates the identical Hebrew phrase two different ways within its own pages. It has ἄγγελοι τοῦ Θεοῦ ("angels of God") in Job 1:6 and 38:7, but literally υἱοὶ τοῦ Θεοῦ ("sons of God") in Genesis 6:2 and 6:4. That is a real observation about how one ancient translation handled the phrase in two different books. Old Greek Job is a notably freer, more periphrastic translation than Old Greek Genesis. It is no proof that the LXX's translators held a settled view on Genesis 6 specifically, and reading more into it would overclaim the evidence.
Mighty men, men of renown
Mighty men, men of renown, גִּבֹּרִים אֲשֶׁר מֵעוֹלָם אַנְשֵׁי הַשֵּׁם (gibborim... anshei ha-shem). Genesis 6:4 identifies whoever is in view as gibborim (H1368, "mighty men," from a root meaning "strong"), further described as anshei ha-shem, "men of the name" or "men of renown." Whether that means the Nephilim themselves or their offspring from the sons-of-God union, the Hebrew syntax doesn't force a choice. Gibbor carries nothing inherently sinister. The same root describes David's own elite warriors, the gibborim of 2 Samuel 23, and God himself ("Mighty God," El Gibbor, Isaiah 9:6). What made these gibborim notable enough for the narrator to name them isn't stated beyond "men of renown." The next verse settles how he regards them: "the wickedness of man was great" (6:5).
Rephaim
Rephaim, רְפָאִים. A lexical wrinkle to mark carefully and not build on. The consonants r-p-'-y-m carry two distinct Strong's numbers for two distinct senses. H7497 is the historical giant clan named repeatedly in Deuteronomy and Joshua, below. H7496 is an entirely different poetic usage: "shades" or "departed spirits" of the dead in the underworld (Isaiah 14:9's "it stirs up the rephaim for you," Proverbs 21:16, Psalm 88:10). The standard reference tools track these as separate lexical entries rather than two shades of one meaning, and this study treats them the same way. It is a real point of interest about the word, and no doctrine should be built on the coincidence of spelling.
Anak / Anakim
Anak / Anakim, עֲנָק / עֲנָקִים (H6062). A proper name/gentilic with no separate root entry in the standard word lists. Numbers 13:33 is the only verse in the whole Bible that calls the Anakim "sons of the Nephilim" — and, as the historical-context section above already flagged, it's a claim made inside the spies' dibbah, not stated anywhere else in Scripture as settled fact.
Evil report (dibbah)
Evil report, דִּבָּה (dibbah, H1681). The word Numbers 13:32 itself uses for what the ten spies "brought up" to the people. It's a strong, negative term — "slander" or "defamation" is closer to its force than a neutral "report" — and it recurs at 14:36-37 to identify precisely why those ten men died: not for scouting the land, which Moses had commanded, but for the dibbah they spread about it. Whatever the Anakim-from-Nephilim claim in 13:33 means historically, the text's own vocabulary flags the report carrying it as something Israel was meant to disbelieve, not receive as reliable intelligence.
Did the Nephilim exist after the flood?
This is the first question the study set out to answer, and it has to be split into two separate claims that the text does not treat identically.
The giant clans are historically secure
The giant-statured population groups are historically secure, independent of any spy report. Long before and after Numbers 13, Scripture narrates — in plain, unremarked-upon fact, not embedded in anyone's fear-driven speech — a cluster of unusually large peoples in Canaan and Transjordan:
✝️ Deuteronomy 2:10-11, 20-21 (ESV)
10 (The Emim formerly lived there, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim. 11 Like the Anakim they are also counted as Rephaim, but the Moabites call them Emim... 20 (That also is counted a land of Rephaim. Rephaim formerly lived there — but the Ammonites call them Zamzummim — 21 a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim...)
✝️ Deuteronomy 3:11 (ESV)
11 (For only Og the king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. Behold, his bed was a bed of iron... nine cubits was its length, and four cubits its breadth, according to the common cubit.)
Deuteronomy 9:2 confirms the Anakim specifically: "a people great and tall, the sons of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you have heard it said, 'Who can stand before the sons of Anak?'" Joshua narrates Israel's actual conquest of them: "There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain" (Joshua 11:22). That surviving remnant in Gath is exactly where 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel later place Goliath: "a champion... named Goliath of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span" (1 Samuel 17:4). After him come four more named men "born to the giant in Gath," who fell to David's men (2 Samuel 21:15-22). None of this narration is anyone's frightened claim. It is the plain record of who Israel fought, across four centuries, from the conquest to David's reign.
Numbers 13:33 is the only verse making that claim
What is not stated this plainly is that these clans specifically descend from a second episode of Genesis 6:1-4's "sons of God" union. The only verse anywhere in Scripture making that genealogical claim is Numbers 13:33. It is spoken by the ten spies, inside the report Numbers 13:32 itself calls a dibbah, by men who die for having brought it (14:36-37). The ESV Study Bible's note on this passage states the caution plainly: "Given the exaggerated tone of the spies' account, their reference to Nephilim is most likely an expression of their fear and an excuse for their disobedience, rather than an accurate statement indicating that the Nephilim were still living after the flood." Genesis's own genealogy in chapter 10 traces Canaan's descendants through ordinary human lineage from Ham (Genesis 10:15-19). Canaan is the ancestor of the very peoples later called Anakim and Rephaim, and the text narrates no second supernatural incursion anywhere.
So: unusually large, formidable population groups in Canaan and Transjordan are not in question. Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Samuel establish that as plainly as any other historical detail in those books. Whether they were the literal genetic continuation of Genesis 6:4's Nephilim is a different matter. That would mean surviving a flood which, per Genesis 7:21-23, destroyed "all flesh" outside the ark. Scripture puts that claim only in the mouths of ten men under judgment for exaggerating, and the text never makes it in its own narrating voice. Holding the first as established and the second as unproven tracks where the text's own evidentiary weight falls.
An archaeological footnote: the Kfar Monash spearheads
One physical find belongs here, with its limits stated as clearly as its facts. In 1962 farmer Zvi Yizhar uncovered a buried cache of copper tools and weapons at Kfar Monash, on Israel's coastal Sharon Plain. Its excavators dated it to the Early Bronze Age, the third millennium BC -- centuries before Israel's conquest narratives, but from the same land later associated with the Anakim and Rephaim. Archaeologists Ruth Hestrin and Miriam Tadmor published the hoard in 1963. Alongside axes, adzes, daggers, and hundreds of copper plates, it contained four spearheads. The largest runs 66 cm long and weighs 2.05 kg, oversized by the standard of Bronze Age Levantine weapons typology, with a pronounced midrib and a massive hooked tang. It is on permanent display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
What this does not establish is a population of giants. Nothing about the hoard's context ties it to unusually tall skeletal remains, and no burial or human remains were found with it at all. It is a buried weapons-and-tools cache, not a grave. The open scholarly question about pieces this large in Bronze Age Levantine hoards is whether they were made for combat, or as display and prestige objects signalling a smith's or owner's status. That question is raised about oversized Levantine bladed weapons generally, and is no verdict specific to Kfar Monash. An oversized spearhead is real, dated, museum-held evidence of skilled and ambitious Bronze Age metalworking in Canaan. Popular giant-hunting literature reads it as evidence for giant-statured owners; the archaeologists who published it do not. The physical fact and the Nephilim-adjacent interpretation are two different things, and this study reports only the first as established.
Are the Nephilim still around?
The Bible's own narrative gives this one a clean stopping point. 2 Samuel 21:22 names the last four "born to the giant in Gath" and records that "they fell by the hand of David and by the hand of his servants." The giant clans do not appear again in the Old Testament narrative after that. No further mention, Old Testament or New, describes Nephilim, Rephaim, Anakim, or any comparable group as present, active, or expected to return.
The one New Testament text that gets reached for here is Jesus's own comparison in Matthew 24:
✝️ Matthew 24:37-39 (ESV)
37 For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, 39 and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.
Jesus tells his hearers, in the same breath, exactly what the comparison is about. Ordinary life continuing -- eating, drinking, marrying -- in complete unawareness, "until the flood came and swept them all away." That is the whole content of the analogy as Jesus states it: sudden judgment arriving on people who saw no reason to expect it. He does not mention the Nephilim or the sons of God, here or anywhere else, and says nothing about their supposed return. Extending "as the days of Noah" into a claim about giants or angelic corruption reappearing before Christ's coming reads a great deal into four words that Jesus himself immediately defines in a different direction. That extension is popular in some corners of prophecy teaching, and a curious reader can pursue it (see References below). It is not what this passage says, and this study will claim no more for it than the text supports.
Theological principle
Two questions, two different kinds of answer, and the difference between them is itself the lesson. Where Scripture speaks in its own narrating voice, the text is plain and this study can be equally plain -- the giant clans' historical reality, their eventual defeat, Jesus's own stated content for "the days of Noah." Where Scripture leaves a question open, three centuries of serious, orthodox interpreters have disagreed. That covers the identity of the "sons of God," and whether a second angelic incursion followed the flood. The responsible response is to say so, rather than manufacture a false certainty in either direction. This shows that God has told his people what they need and withheld what they do not, and reverence for Scripture means resisting the pull to sound more certain than the text itself is.
Discussion questions
- Before this study, which view of "sons of God" would you have assumed without knowing there were others? Does knowing Job uses the identical phrase for angels change how you weigh that view?
- Numbers 13:32 calls the spies' report a dibbah — "evil report" — and the text records real consequences for it. What does it look like, in your own life, to let real fear curdle into an exaggerated account that others then act on?
- Caleb and Joshua saw the same fortified cities and the same tall Anakim the other ten spies did (Numbers 14:6-9), and drew the opposite conclusion. What made the difference wasn't the facts on the ground — what was it?
- This study concludes that Matthew 24:37 is about complacency, not about giants returning. Where else have you seen a short, memorable phrase from Scripture get stretched to carry more than its own context supports?
Group study sheet for a 40-minute group: two A4 sheets, or one with the guided path
The point, the passage, the questions and the response, from this study. Print on both sides of two A4 sheets, flipping on the long edge. While this block is open, printing the page prints the sheet; close it to print the study.
The Nephilim: Sons of God and the Giants of Genesis
Genesis 6:1-4The point The giant clans of Canaan and Transjordan are a historical reality Genesis, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Samuel narrate plainly; their claimed descent from a second Nephilim incursion after the flood rests on one verse spoken inside the spies' discredited report, and no biblical text anywhere describes them as continuing today.
Ask: Who were the Nephilim?
Hear a few answers before anyone reads.
Genesis 6:1-4 1Now when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, 2the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took as wives whomever they chose. 3So the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days shall be 120 years.” 4The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and afterward as well—when the sons of God had relations with the daughters of men. And they bore them children who became the mighty men of old, men of renown.
Also read:
The Nephilim: Sons of God and the Giants of Genesis
The Nephilim: Sons of God and the Giants of Genesis
1Before this study, which view of "sons of God" would you have assumed without knowing there were others? Does knowing Job uses the identical phrase for angels change how you weigh that view?
2Numbers 13:32 calls the spies' report a dibbah — "evil report" — and the text records real consequences for it. What does it look like, in your own life, to let real fear curdle into an exaggerated account that others then act on?
3Caleb and Joshua saw the same fortified cities and the same tall Anakim the other ten spies did (Numbers 14:6-9), and drew the opposite conclusion. What made the difference wasn't the facts on the ground — what was it?
4This study concludes that Matthew 24:37 is about complacency, not about giants returning. Where else have you seen a short, memorable phrase from Scripture get stretched to carry more than its own context supports?
The Nephilim: Sons of God and the Giants of Genesis
References & Recommended Reading
- ESV Bible (Crossway) — primary translation quoted throughout, per this repo's translation conventions.
- World English Bible (WEB), queried via this repo's
references/build/bible-text.db— base translation for the site's default lookups; no meaningful divergence from the ESV on any verse cited here. - ESV Study Bible (Crossway, 2016) — notes on Genesis 6:1-2, 6:1-8, 6:3, and 6:4, and on Numbers 13:1-14:45 and 13:25-33, consulted for the three-view survey of "sons of God" and for the caution (quoted above, with attribution) against reading Numbers 13:33's giant-sense back into Genesis 6:4.
- Brenton Septuagint (LXX), queried via
bible-text.db— source of the gigantes/angeloi/huioi translation comparisons cited in the word studies. - Ruth Hestrin and Miriam Tadmor, "A Hoard of Tools and Weapons from Kefar Monash," Israel Exploration Journal 13 (1963) — the original excavation publication for the Kfar Monash spearheads cited above; current display at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
- MACULA Hebrew Linguistic Datasets (WLC) and TWOT (Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament), queried via this repo's
references/build/tooling — source of all Strong's numbers, roots, and bare glosses cited above. - 1 Enoch (Book of Watchers) — not Scripture, and not quoted here, but the background for why Jude 1:14-15 reads the way it does; a reader curious about the fuller Second Temple angelic-Watcher tradition that Jude draws on can start there, remembering its non-canonical status.
- Chuck Missler's teaching on Genesis 6 (Koinonia House, khouse.org) — already cited elsewhere on this site (see The Rapture) as a starting point for dispensational prophecy teaching; his well-known reading connects the Nephilim to a targeted corruption of the messianic bloodline and to a possible end-times recurrence. That extension goes beyond what this study's own exegesis of Matthew 24:37 supports (see above) — worth hearing as a popular voice in this tradition, not adopted here as this study's conclusion.