GIANTS IN THE EARTH
The Nephilim were said to have been fathered by lust-filled angels who had descended to Earth
Did fallen angels once disobey God, descend to Earth and mate with mortal women to produce a race of gigantic beings?
TED HARRISON explores our fascination with the mysterious Nephilim of the Bible – monsters, myths or visiting aliens?
Did fallen angels once disobey God, descend to Earth and mate with mortal women to produce a race of gigantic beings? TED HARRISON explores our fascination with the mysterious Nephilim of the Bible, which now finds expression in fantasy fiction, Internet hoaxes and alien conspiracy theories.
“The union of angel and demon created a third essence. And we are those children. We are the nephalem. We exist as half angel and half demon, yet fully a new entity.”
ans of digital fantasy worlds such as Diablo and Darksiders will be familiar with the ‘nephalem’ or Nephilim, as will be followers of the gothic rock band Fields of the Nephilim; but next time the Jehovah’s Witnesses call, try asking them about these incredible giants.
Is it true that angels once disobeyed God, came down to Earth and mated with mortal women to produce a race of gigantic beings? Of course, the JWs will say, opening their Bibles to Genesis Chapter 6.
Or perhaps, to avoid getting drawn into a lengthy conversation, you could take a look at the JW website, where you will read: “The Nephilim were giants, the violent superhuman offspring produced when wicked angels mated with human women in the days of Noah.” The products of this unnatural union were no ordinary children. “The Nephilim were giant bullies, tyrants who filled the Earth with violence. The Bible describes them as ‘the mighty ones of old times, the men of fame’. They left behind a legacy of violence and fear.” 2
Those who take a literal approach to the Bible, as do the eight million Jehovah’s Witnesses around the world, are in no doubt that there were indeed “giants in the Earth” a long time before any were created to inhabit an imaginary digital universe. The Nephilim of Scripture were said to have been fathered by lust-filled angels who had descended, or fallen, to Earth from Heaven to rape or seduce mortal women. The word ‘Nephilim’ is translated as ‘giants’, but derives from Hebrew, meaning ‘fallen ones’.
Three hundred years ago, Cotton Mather, the Massachusetts-based Puritan famous for his part in the Salem witch trials, was shown bones that had been found near Albany, New York. He had no hesitation in declaring that they were the remains of Nephilim who had been drowned in Noah’s flood. Centuries later the bones were identified as the remains of a mastodon, a prehistoric elephant, but in the days before the development of palæontology the Nephilim explanation made complete sense. There have been several cases in history of the remains of large animals such as mammoths, sloths, and bison being taken for those of giant humans.
Then there was the discovery in 1928 by a Peruvian archæologist, Julio Tello, of a collection of some 300 strangely elongated skulls in a graveyard on the Paracas Peninsula in Peru. Some of the skulls were believed to be over 3,000 years old. Inevitably, there was speculation that the skulls might be the remains of Nephilim. DNA tests in recent times produced confusing results, suggesting that the people whose remains had been unearthed had links with the other side of the Atlantic. Artificial cranial deformation has been put forward as one explanation for the curious misshapen heads and there was nothing unusual in the dimensions of the remains to suggest they had come from a race of giants. BIBLICAL GIANTS
The Nephilim lived, it is believed, through that ancient biblical epoch which followed Adam and Eve’s departure from the Garden of Eden and which ended when God destroyed the Earth in the flood, leaving only Noah, his family and the inhabitants of the ark alive. The Bible relates that it was the wickedness of both humankind and the giants that provoked God to kill off his creatures.
However, the Bible hints that not all the giants perished. The Book of Numbers in the Old Testament tells of a time, many centuries later, when the Israelites had escaped from slavery in Egypt. In Chapter 13 there is the story of the first reconnaissance of the area they hoped to settle after their 40year journey with Moses through the wilderness: it was the Promised Land, which was said to flow with milk and honey. However, it was already occupied by, among other tribes, “the descendants of a race of giants called the Anakim”.
Verse 33 is more specific. Seeing the giants, the Israelite spies reported back that they “felt as small as grasshoppers, and that is how we must have looked to them.”
In some translations, such as the
New InternationalVersion, the word ‘giants’ is not used, but instead the word ‘Nephilim’, making the direct connection between the giants of Numbers 13 and the descendants of the lust-filled fallen angels of Genesis.
Thus, to a Bible literalist it is clear that although God destroyed the Earth and all wicked men and women in the flood, at least some of the giants must have survived into the time of Moses. Later books of the Old Testament contain direct or indirect references to these weird, huge and evil beings. The Hebrew word for ‘fallen’ links these passages.
In the Book of Ezekiel, this section in Chapter 32 is interpreted by some Bible scholars as referring to the Nephilim: “And they shall not lie with the mighty that are fallen of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to hell with their weapons of war: and they have laid their swords under their heads, but their iniquities shall be upon their bones, though they were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living.”
Another race of giants turns up in three other Old Testament books, Deuteronomy, 2 Samuel and Joshua. They have been identified as The Rephaim, meaning ‘the dead ones’ and, says Dr Ellen White of The Biblical Archæology Society, they are “often conflated with the Nephilim.”
They are almost always mentioned by a specific name, such as Goliath who fought David, and as being in opposition to Israel. “Their purpose in each narrative is to die. The juxtaposition of the mighty Biblical giants defeated by the underdog, God’s chosen, is foreshadowed in the very name attributed to these characters.”
So the writers of several books of the Bible appear to be of the opinion that giants had not been wiped out by the great flood. Biblical scholars who do not take every word literally might have another way of looking at the scriptural evidence. Perhaps the spies sent out by Moses saw warriors from the tribes occupying the Promised Land and had second thoughts about challenging them; perhaps they reported back in the most exaggerated terms that these soldiers were huge and super-human. They were like the Nephilim they had heard stories about. Later, this term from Jewish folklore might have been used to describe any strong, or larger than average, opponent. If the Israelites had turned back at that stage and never settled the Promised Land, the subsequent history of the area would have been very different.
MYTHIC HYBRIDS
JR Porter, former Professor of Theology at Exeter University, in his Companion to the Bible, described the story of angels and humans mating as an ancient myth. “In Hebrew thought the human and the divine ought not to be confused, so these children violate the whole structure of the world. As punishment God frustrates any attempt on humanity’s part to attain divinity and immortality by… restricting the human lifespan. The children appear in a later chapter as the embodiment of absolute power in the ancient world, but also described as ‘Nephilim’, which probably means ‘fallen ones’. This is one source of the myth of the fallen angels that plays such a prominent part in such books as Enoch and Jubilees. Jewish thought came to see these angels, rather than the sin of Adam, as the source of sin in the world.” 4
Yet it is not so much the size of the giants that has intrigued later generations, but the suggestion in Genesis 6 that the Nephilim were the result of cross-breeding between human women and supernatural beings. “When people had spread all over the world, and daughters were being born, some of the heavenly beings saw that these young women were beautiful, so they took the ones they liked… In those days, and even later, there were giants on the earth who were descendants of human women and the heavenly beings.” 5
The Books of Enoch are strange and ancient texts that form part of the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible, and were a candidate for, but ultimately excluded, from the Roman and Protestant versions. Enoch describes the arrival of lustfilled angels on Earth in greater detail:
“And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: ‘Come, let us choose us
Perhaps the spies sent by Moses reported back that these soldiers were huge and super-human
wives from among the children of men and beget us children.’ And Samyaza, who was their leader, said unto them: ‘I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin.’ And they all answered him and said: ‘Let us all swear an oath, and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing.’ Then sware they all together and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. And they were in all two hundred who descended… on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it.”
Enoch gives a list of all the leaders of this band of fallen angels. They have been identified as being of the angelic class or rank of Watcher. The watchers get mentioned in the Bible in The Book of Daniel Chapter 4. It was one of the good watchers who brought a message to King Nebuchadnezzar.
William Henry is a Nashville-based art historian, who describes himself additionally as an ‘investigative mythologist’. He is the author of The Lost Secrets of the Watchers (2015) and is one of several ‘researchers’ who make claims that the fallen angels of the Bible may have been aliens, and more specifically Martians. “They brought humanity technology and taught us the secrets of heaven,” he says. He is one of the voices heard on a YouTube video that has so far attracted 100,000 views. “For over 100 years mythologists have been contemplating the idea that the fallen angels came from Mars to Earth.” The video argues that humans living on Mars would evolve physiologically in the weaker gravity to be taller and take on the giantism associated with the Nephilim. Their skin would be paler and their eyes would be larger, due to lower levels of sunlight on the red planet, and they would look not like Earthbound humans and more like angelic beings.
There is a familiar genre of pseudo-science that argues that aliens arrived on Earth sometime in prehistory and gave the human race the know-how and brain-power to develop from primitive into technologically sophisticated beings. The ‘was God an astronaut?’ school of thought was first given a popular boost by ErichVon Däniken in 1968 (see FT169:30-37).
The Russian-American author Zecharia Sitchin has popularised a hypothesis that a race of aliens came from the hidden planet Nibiru in ancient times to inhabit the Earth ( FT138:47, 173:40-41, 271:24). They created Homo sapiens through genetic engineering to be their workforce. Named the Anunnaki, though possibly also the source of the Nephilim stories, they built the pyramids, introduced agriculture and may possibly have produced human-alien hybrids, descendants of whom may still be alive today, with no idea of their alien origins.
In another variation of that ‘theory’ it is suggested that Homo sapiens is a crossbreed of alien and Neanderthal. This idea was explored, although not endorsed, by Carl Sagan in a paper presented in 1962 at a meeting of the American Rocket Society and subsequently published in the journal Planetary and Space Science in 1963. Titled ‘Direct contact among galactic civilizations by relativistic interstellar spaceflight’,
the paper explored the feasibility of interstellar voyages from other worlds and cautiously considered the possibility of extraterrestrial contact with Earth in the past.
But wherever they came from, what happened to the Nephilim? If they truly existed and then survived the flood, where might they be now? Are they hiding in our own DNA? Perhaps we should we go back to Enoch for clues.
ENOCH’S ANGELS
Enoch has an intriguing passage which suggests that the fallen angels so displeased God that he had them bound, waiting for Judgement Day when they will be finally punished. The New Testament Book of Revelation describes what will happen to them at the end of time. Meanwhile, they are imprisoned on Earth and when Enoch describes his travels we discover where they are:
“I saw the path of the angels. I perceived at the extremity of the earth the firmament of heaven above it. Then I passed on towards the south… And there I saw a place on the other side of an extended territory, where waters were collected… I likewise beheld terrestrial fountains, deep in the fiery columns of heaven… And in the columns of heaven I beheld fires, which descended without number, but neither on high, nor into the deep. Over these fountains also I perceived a place which had neither the firmament of heaven above it, nor the solid ground underneath it; neither was there water above it, nor anything on wing; but the spot was desolate. And there I beheld seven stars, like great blazing mountains, and like spirits entreating me. Then the angel said, This place, until the consummation of heaven and earth,
will be the prison of the stars, and the host of heaven. The stars which roll over fire are those which transgressed the commandment of God before their time arrived; for they came not in their proper season. Therefore was He offended with them, and bound them, until the period of the consummation of their crimes in the secret year.” 8
There has been much speculation as to where this place described by Enoch might be. His journeys are said to describe real places – it has been said that in one passage he appears to have visited Stonehenge, and even identified its latitude. In the context of the angels, the fiery columns of Heaven are said to refer to the volcanic activity around the Pacific Rim in South America; from there, Enoch crosses the ocean to the desolation of Antarctica.
The conjecture broadcast by Steven BenNun from the online channel Israeli News Live was that the evil host of Heaven is imprisoned in the region of MountVinson, the continent’s highest mountain. He believes he has matched features of the physical geography of the area with Enoch’s description. So somewhere beneath the ice of the Earth’s southernmost continent there are supernatural giants in chains awaiting punishment!
More recently, such theories were given added impetus by claims that satellite images had shown a giant staircase cut into an Antarctic hillside. British tabloid newspaper the Sun published speculation that the staircase had been built by either the Nephilim or by aliens from another world. The paper quoted one on-line conspiracy theorist who thought it must have been the fallen angels as it showed ‘Strictly high-tech demonic activity.’ 10
The Sun expanded on the theme of the ice continent being the centre of many conspiracy theories over the years. It reported on rumours that the US Navy had led a mission to investigate several mysteries. “This expedition was called Operation High Jump, which conspiracy theorists believe was an attempt to find the entrance to a secret world hidden
underneath Earth.”
LANDOFTHEGIANTS
Another theory about the fate of the Nephilim is less mystical, but equally strange. LA Marzulli is the author of The Nephilim Trilogy and believes he has identified a massive coverup of the evidence of what he believes are the remains of the biblical giants – hoaxed photos of which continue to do the Internet rounds every year.
His suggestion is that the Nephilim came to America and were responsible for building some large structures that can be seen, abandoned, to this day. “When the first white settlers came into The Great Circle Mound in Ohio, they asked the Native Americans living there... Who built this? The natives replied that they didn’t know who built them, as these large mounds were there and abandoned when they arrived. Some posited the mounds were built by an unknown lost tribe of people, who migrated, perhaps, from the Old World. Others thought they could be one of the lost tribes of Israel.” 11
Myths, legends and folklore are often thought to contain elements of historic fact, although distorted over time as stories are relayed orally from generation to generation. The Jewish legend that there were once offspring of mortal and heavenly beings living on the Earth finds echoes in similar stories from other unrelated cultures. There are the Hindu stories of the Daitya, offspring of a revered sage and a goddess. The ancient Greek myths have several references to Gods falling in love with beautiful human women. And tales of giants are found in Celtic, Norse, Native American and Tibetan legends, as well as in children’s books and fairy stories. Similarly, in several cultures there are stories of great floods.
The same stories become archetypes and are recycled by film makers, fantasy writers and the makers of videogames. There is a human fascination with the idea that even if the world today is mundane, its people and animals relatively under-sized, there was once a time when everything was more extraordinary – and much larger. The dinosaurs are long dead, but they live on in books, films, pictures and toys. The Nephilim too, although there is no proof they ever existed, continue to have a real presence in our collective imagination.
NOTES
1 diablo.fandom.com
2 From the Jehovah’s Witnesses website jw.org
3 biblicalarchaeology.org
4 JR Porter, The New Illustrated Companion to the Bible, Watkins, 2003, p26.
5 Good News Translation.
6 Book of Enoch, Chapter 6.
7 Ancient Aliens: Were Mythical Fallen Angels Actually Martians? www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Uhsgs5996Q4
8 Book of Enoch 18, 7-16
9 Israeli News Live, 14 Mar 2017.
10 Sun, 10 Jan 2017.
11 lamarzulli.net.
TED HARRISON is a writer, artist and filmmaker. A former religious affairs correspondent for the BBC, he has been a regular contributor to Fortean Times for many years. His books include The Death and Resurrection of Elvis Presley (Reaktion, 2016).