What are the Nephilim? Who were the sons of God and daughters of men? - Podcast Episode 120

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. This is the conclusion of our series on angels and demons.

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So if you haven't listened to some of the previous episodes where we discuss some of the stuff we talk about, we'll apply today.

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But today as a conclusion, we're going to talk about an issue that's definitely an ancillary or it's a side issue, but it's also fascinating.

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So today's episode, we'll be talking about Genesis 6 verses 1 to 4 and the sons of God, daughters of men episode that resulted in the

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Nephilim. What exactly is going on in this passage? Is it important? Why should we care? And all of that.

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Joining me today is Jeff, the managing editor for BibleRef .com and Kevin, the managing editor for Got Questions Ministries.

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So gentlemen, let's maybe start out with a little story, just going to illustrate some of the struggles with this issue.

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Several years ago, I got an email from a

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Christian financial accountability company that we work with to help make sure

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Got Questions is doing everything above the board. Well, one of the other requirements they have to be a member is to agree with their statement of faith.

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Well, someone had made a complaint about questions to this organization, and so they had to follow through.

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So they emailed, and it's been a phone call with them saying, well, so this person complained, and then it was about this issue.

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And I was like, how in the world is this even related to anything else? And she explained that, well, they're claiming that because you believe that the sons of God in Genesis 6, 1 to 4 were the fallen angels, and that you even mentioned that literature outside the

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Bible strongly leans in that direction, that you are denying the sufficiency and inerrancy of Scripture because you believe more in the

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Book of Enoch than you do in the Bible. And I was just like, no, that is absolutely not what we're doing.

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Well, yes, outside of the Bible, virtually all the literature up until really the last several centuries took the view that they were fallen angels.

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In no sense is this a view we take from outside of Scripture. You can very easily come to the conclusion that they were fallen angels based on Scripture and how the term sons of God is used throughout

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Scripture. But that was just like, if not before, a major wake -up call for me is like, wow, for some reason, this issue is blown out of proportion for a lot of people.

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They make it their hobby horse, their soapbox issue, and if you possibly have a different view them on this, they want nothing to do with you to the point of they want to get you somehow punished or banished or I guess canceled would be the popular term these days.

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But that is not the view we take. I mean, we take the view that the sons of God in Genesis 6 were fallen angels who somehow made it with human females, resulting in some sort of angelic -human hybrid, the men of renown, so to speak, that they were eventually wiped out in the

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Flood and possibly that either some of the DNA continued or some fallen angels repeated the act afterwards because they were

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Nephilim again after the Flood. Eventually, through the conquest of Canaan, they seemed to be completely wiped out.

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But this is not a major issue. This is not something we spend all the time studying or thinking about.

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We have a few articles related to it because it's a very common question, but this is not a hill to die on. This is not something worth fighting about or dividing over.

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So before Kevin outlines the viewpoint, let me just go ahead and read the passage here. So this is

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Genesis 6 1 -4 from the ESV. When man began to multiply in the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were attractive, and they took as wives any they choose.

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Then the Lord said, My spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh. His days shall be 120 years.

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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.

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These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown. So Kevin, maybe break this down a little bit in your study of the passage.

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What leads you to the conclusion that these sons of God in the passage were fallen angels? Yeah, there are some good reasons,

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I think, to take that position. This is the position that I lean toward, is the Nephilim were actually some type of an angelic being that had fallen and were committing a great sin.

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There are four groups that are listed in Genesis 6. There are the human beings, there are the daughters of these human beings, there are the sons of God, which is listed as a separate category, and then the

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Nephilim, which seem to be the offspring of the daughters of humans and the sons of God.

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So these four groups we have to identify, and all of them are pretty easy to identify,

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I guess, except for the sons of God, and then specifically who are these

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Nephilim that are mentioned here. The Nephilim are called heroes of old, they're mighty men, they are powerful men, they are men of renown, that is, they're famous, they had made a name for themselves.

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When we get to Numbers chapter 13, I'll just throw this passage in here too, because they are mentioned again by some of the spies that go into the promised land, as Caleb and Joshua are trying to get people to go in, and these 10 other spies are saying, no, no, we can't.

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Numbers 13, these spies had gone up with Joshua and Caleb, said, we can't attack those people that are in Canaan, they're stronger than we are, and they spread among the

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Israelites a bad report about the land that they had explored. They said, the land we explored devours those living in it.

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All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there, the descendants of Anak come from the

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Nephilim. We seem like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them. So, a couple possibilities here, as they mention

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Nephilim and the descendants of Anak being part of that Nephilim group.

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One is that these 10 spies were just exaggerating. They were talking about the great stature of these people, and they were trying their best to not go into the land, and so they could have just exaggerated, blown everything out of proportion.

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But because of this description, we also sometimes see the Nephilim there in Genesis 6 described as being giants.

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In fact, that's how some translations actually put it. They don't transliterate the word Nephilim, they translate it as giants.

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And the CEV takes this position as well, or that the sons of God are actually spiritual beings.

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The contemporary English version says the children of the supernatural beings who had married these women became famous heroes and warriors, and they lived on the earth at that time.

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I personally lean toward the position that these sons of God are fallen angels.

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So, they basically said, we're not going to live as angels anymore. We're going to take on a human form, and we're going to have sex with human women.

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And so, we know that holy angels can take on human form. We see examples of that in Scripture, as many

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Bible characters actually talked to angels in human form, many of them thinking that they were human.

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So, we don't have any examples in Scripture of a fallen angel doing this, but since the holy angels can, it kind of makes sense that the fallen angels would be able to have that same ability.

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And we know that the holy angels, when they did take on human form, sometimes ate food and did other things that seemed to be very human.

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And so, who's to say that the fallen angels taking on human form could not also have the capability of having sex and procreating?

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And so, in doing so, assuming these are fallen angels, they are committing a great sin. They're rebelling against God's design for them, and they are corrupting the human bloodline.

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They're introducing some type of a manufactured DNA into the human bloodline.

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And so, the offspring of these illicit unions then had great strength, performed mighty feats.

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They were famous in their day. They were, in fact, half angelic and half human,

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I guess we could say, and then possibly of great size, if you throw in Numbers chapter 13 there.

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So, some of the reasons that this seems to be a viable theory, and it's actually the most traditional theory.

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It's the one that probably goes the furthest back. Church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Athenagoras, and Tertullian all held to this view.

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But the phrase sons of God throughout Scripture is used in reference to angelic beings.

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Probably the clearest example of this would be in Job 1 and verse 6, Job 2 and verse 1, where the phrase sons of God undoubtedly refers to angelic beings that are being summoned before God in those two passages.

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Also, we have a couple passages in the special sin that some of the angels committed, not all of the angels, but some of the angels committed some heinous sin, and they were punished for it.

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2 Peter 2 verses 4 and following says, if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment.

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And then Peter goes on in the next verses to speak of Noah's flood and Sodom and Gomorrah. So, all three of these stories that he references come from the book of Genesis, and possibly

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Peter is speaking of the angels that sinned as being this passage in Genesis chapter 6.

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Also, Jude verse 6 says that the angels who did not keep their positions of authority, but abandoned their proper dwelling, these

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God has kept in darkness bound with everlasting chains for the judgment on the great day. So, both Peter and Jude refer to some group of angels that did something that required them to be bound and awaiting a future judgment, and both of them talk about a sin.

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Neither one of them, neither one of these apostles speak of the sin being having sex with human women, but Jude does mention that they left the place that God had put them.

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They left their station, and they did something different, and this was a big enough sin for God to judge them immediately.

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So, it's an interesting subject. It's not one that I spend a whole lot of time studying or delving into, but when

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I'm faced with the passage there in Genesis chapter 6, this is what my mind runs to, is just that this was an extraordinary sin in a very unusual circumstance in which some fallen angels decided that they were going to do something that was going to mess up the human race, and God put a stop to it.

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Probably a good idea for us to remember, as was said, that it's not a critical issue, and that's where I usually fall in with the

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Nephilim conversation. There's a lot of things in Scripture that have a lot of immediate consequences.

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What you believe about that has really important impacts on your day -to -day life, what you believe, how you act, what you think.

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Everything that we believe means something, so it's not that what a person believes about Nephilim is totally inconsequential.

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It connects to other beliefs. If we take the position that angels themselves, only an angel and a human female, were able to produce an offspring, that implies beliefs about what angels are capable of doing and what life is like and things like that.

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If we believe that they were manipulating people, if we believe that they were possessing people, then all of those things have different implications.

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They mean something, but at the end of the day, it's not something that Scripture spends a lot of time talking about, and it's not something that has a really profound impact.

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So the conversations are interesting. It's kind of fun to talk about what it might mean and what it might not mean, but it's not something that we need to stress over or divide over, because as long as we're not crossing lines into blatant biblical contradiction, there's a lot of room in there for different interpretations.

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One different interpretation, Kevin, you were mentioning the idea that there's references to sons of God being references to angels.

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There's also references in Scripture where sons of God are made in reference to human beings in the terms of believers or Israel.

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In Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Hosea, we see places where those who believe in God worship

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God properly are referred to with that sonship sort of a reference. That's why some people believe that the

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Nephilim were from the sons of Seth, the sons of God, the believers, not

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Cain's, but Seth's group, who were tempted in some way to interact with the daughters of men.

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That's one of the options. Another option is that the sons of God and their influence was in some sort of genetic engineering sense, that what they're doing is that they're possessing or they're manipulating physical human males in order to guide or to direct the procreation of the human race, lead them in certain directions, come up with certain combinations, and so on and so forth.

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Science fiction fans will remember that's a major plot line in Frank Herbert's Dune series, is that there's this shadowy group behind the scenes who's manipulating who marries who and in order to seek a particular kind of person.

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That's a possibility. Anytime that we go too far or too deep into a theory and get too obsessed with it, that's when we start to run into problems.

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It's not that what we believe about the Nephilim doesn't make any difference. Everything we believe matters to some extent.

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It's just a question of to what extent it matters. When it comes to the actual Nephilim, as long as we're sticking to what's actually in the

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Bible, then I think we're in good shape. That brings up the idea that there are a lot of things from outside Scripture that we want to be careful not to draw in.

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There are ancient writings, and those are interesting because they do tell us what other people believed about this, but the book of Enoch, for example, may talk a lot about the

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Nephilim. That doesn't necessarily mean that what it says is something that we should take seriously. We certainly shouldn't take it as seriously as what we see in the

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Bible. We also don't want to let pop culture affect us. I brought up the idea before that there's a lot of things about the

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Bible that we tend to just assume because we get them from pop culture. We don't realize that it's not from the

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Bible. A famous example of that is the idea that Moses didn't know that he was Jewish. We see that in movies all the time.

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There's nothing in Scripture that suggests that Moses somehow just magically learned one day.

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What? On Hebrew? That's not actually in Scripture, but we sort of just assume that because it's such a common theme in media.

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We have the Nephilim presented in the movie with Russell Crowe, where they're fallen angels coated in lava or Play -Doh or something like that.

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It's interesting. It's okay. There's a computer game series,

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Diablo, where the Nephilim, spelled a little differently, is used as a reference to a group of superhero -type people.

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Those things are interesting, but that's not exactly what Scripture says. I tend to lean back on the idea that the word, as Kevin mentioned, is often transliterated.

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What that means is that when translators put the word into another language, they don't actually translate it.

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They just leave the same basic sounds in place. That's sometimes a sign that it's a word that's very difficult to translate or that it's meant to be used as a specific title.

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It doesn't really refer to some other thing. It just refers to that one thing.

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There's a lot of different ideas for how we can handle the Nephilim, what they can mean, what they don't mean. For me, the most important thing is not to get too far down a rabbit hole to where we try to cram a specific belief about the

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Nephilim and force other things that we believe into it. The guy question's position is that these are a supernatural type of event.

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This is fallen angels, in some sense, mating with human women.

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That's very biblically plausible. I think as long as we follow what we can see in scripture and don't try to jam something else into there,

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I think we're okay. When we get in trouble is where we just insist on something like a conspiracy theory, and then we just drive that into forcing other beliefs into different directions.

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Jeff, you're absolutely right. You run into people on both sides of this equation who take extreme positions, the people that think that there's still massive amounts of Nephilim today that half of humanity is polluted with demonic

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DNA and all these crazy, wild conspiracy theories. The Bible possibly indicates that the

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Nephilim incident was repeated after the flood, so I don't deny the possibility that it could happen. But to think that half of the human race, really?

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And then all of our political leaders around the world are actually Nephilim or they're reptilians or they're spawn of alien or who knows what.

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You can take a very interesting passage in the Bible and then blow it into all sorts of weird conspiracy theories.

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Even on the viewpoint that we take, we believe that a plain reading of scripture would lead you to the conclusion that somehow fallen angels mated with human women is the biblical viewpoint.

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You can take that and run with it to way beyond what the Bible possibly even hints at.

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We recently did a podcast with a person who studied the different flood traditions around the world.

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And when I was talking with him and doing a little research, it's also interesting that there's a lot of ancient cultures that had some sort of story about the gods coming down, mating with human women resulting in superheroes.

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If you look at Greek mythology, that's exactly the story of Zeus and Hercules. And I guess

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Zeus seemed to be particularly interested in mating with human females. So it's not just the Bible that mentions this concept or it's not just the

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Book of Enoch or the Book of Giants or other ancient Hebrew literature. All around the world, there's stories like this that all seem to point something happened with some sort of angelic, demonic, spiritual creatures coming and doing something they shouldn't resulting in some sort of superpowered humans.

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So it's not just a myth in one particular culture. It's all around the world.

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I think just like the flood, all the stories are pointing to something that actually happened. But then over the centuries or millennia even, the stories got warped and twisted to the point that it's barely even resembling what the

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Bible says. So it's again, fascinating to study, but this is not something we need to be focusing our time or attention on.

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And again, let me say this is not worth dividing over. There are a couple other theories that could be conformable to the biblical text.

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And one is going right along with what Jeff was speaking of with the sons of God being the line of Seth.

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Well, an expansion of that or a variation of that is that the sons of God are simply godly people in general who were going against God's will and going after ungodly women, whether they are from descendants of Cain or what, but kind of broadening out that theory to cover just all godly people.

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And then another theory is that the sons of God is a reference to kings or princes, magistrates of some kind that were gathering to themselves large harems.

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And this was also against God's will at that time. So a couple of other theories, minor theories that go along with Genesis chapter six as well.

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But again, a lot of speculation, but we don't have a lot of detail in scripture.

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So in no sense, am I accusing those who take the human rulers, powerful kings or descendants of Seth viewpoint, but really it didn't become common to deny the fallen angel's view until there was kind of an anti -miraculous, anti -supernatural bent against the

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Bible is when those viewpoints started becoming more and more prominent. I remember having a conversation with the friend who takes that viewpoint and it's like, well, how can you even explain how can an angel take on human form to the point that it can replicate human reproduction?

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And I'm like, I have no idea, but I also have no idea how it's even possible for a being to be spiritual, to have no physical body or how it'd be possible for a spiritual being to take on any physical form, which clearly the

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Bible says angels can do. So just because I can't explain how it's possible, there are a lot of things in Bible.

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I have no idea how to explain how it works. It does seem pretty extreme to think that a demon could take on human form to point of replicating human reproduction, but there's so much about demons and angels and their essence and their being and their nature that we don't understand, but scripture just doesn't go into great deal.

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And there's a passage in Matthew where it talks about in heaven, we will be like the angels who neither marry nor are given in marriage.

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And again, I mean, yes, I think that's absolutely true. The angels in heaven do not marry, but we're talking about the demons here.

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Even that passage says they do not, it doesn't say they can't.

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So I don't think that's a strong argument against this viewpoint either, but all that to say, I mean,

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I have no interest in arguing for this viewpoint. Again, I think it's fascinating, interesting to study, but it's not something we spend a lot of time on, nor is it something we want to spend a lot of time on.

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That to me is an important thing to continue to emphasize is the idea that as interesting as it is and as much as it could affect certain things,

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I sincerely wish that some of my Christian brothers and sisters who spend so much time and effort, the concept of the

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Nephilim would apply that much interest to what the Bible says about things like sanctification and salvation and spreading the gospel and so on and so forth.

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It's fine, I suppose, but in terms of what it means for our day -to -day life, what it means for our ability to spread the gospel, what it means the choices that we have to make in the world, it is so inconsequential that at some point in time, if a person can't just say, you know what,

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I just don't know and I'm okay with not knowing, then that's maybe a little bit of a problem.

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That's a hobby horse that they need to be careful about. For sure. So I hope this conversation has been educational, encouraging to you.

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We have several different articles discussing the various things related to the sons of God, daughters of men and Nephilim, different theories that are out there.

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And we don't have time to delve into this, but there are some who think that when the Nephilim were wiped out in the flood, that their souls, spirits, whatever you want to call them, resulted in a special type of demon.

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So that's another interesting side issue related to this. But again,

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I hope you've caught our spirit here that this is interesting to study. Everything in scripture has importance and value, but like Jeff just said, there are so many things, better things, more important things we could spend our time and energy on, including declaring the gospel and teaching people how to more closely follow

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Christ. So that's our heart. That's what we want to get across today. So Jeff, Kevin, thank you for joining me.

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And we got a question the other day about the podcast, someone asking like where are we actually located?

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So not going to give you our address, but I record here from Colorado Springs at the main

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GotQuestions headquarters. Jeff is actually in Ohio and Kevin is in Kansas. So there's a little more background on the podcast for our listeners.

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So again, hope this conversation has been encouraging to you. Please go back and listen to some of the other episodes we've done in the

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Angels and Demons series, because a lot of the issues are very intertwined. So again, this has been the

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GotQuestions podcast on who are these sons of God, daughters of men, and Nephilim. GotQuestions.