This story hits you like a mack truck, out of nowhere, and then just disappears again like it never happened. Why is it in the Bible? Who are these guys? What the heck is going on here?
If you can’t see the podcast player, click here.
Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
(Parents, all scripture is from the CSB unless I say otherwise)
Gonna tell you kids that this week we are going to talk about one of the strangest things in the whole Bible. In fact, it is so strange and mysterious that no one has ever totally agreed on what is going on here. Why don’t we know? Because when Moses wrote this, everyone knew what the heck he was talking about and so it’s like he just made a casual reference to it, in passing…but there is nothing casual about this story! Not to us! What’s it about? I will read it to you right now.
6 When mankind began to multiply on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful, and they took any they chose as wives for themselves. 3 And the Lord said, “My Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt. Their days will be 120 years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth both in those days and afterward, when the sons of God came to the daughters of mankind, who bore children to them. They were the powerful men of old, the famous men.
Well, what the good gravy does that even mean? Does the Bible explain who the sons of God are? Nope. Does the Bible actually explain who the Nephilim are? Nope. UGH. And the very next verse, it’s like this never even happened at all. Like, you know, a commercial interrupting your tv show. It’s like you are watching Gilligan’s Island and then a toilet paper commercial comes on, with bears wearing underwear and what the heck is that all about anyway? We don’t know! And then before we can answer that question, we’re back to watching Gilligan’s Island again. *sigh* So, what does this mean? No one alive today knows for sure. But, we have some ideas. Some ideas are based on the Bible and other ideas are based on imagination and others that are based on the history of the ancient Near Eastern world of the Bible. And I wish I could tell you that this is definitely whatever, but I can’t do that. But, because I love you guys and I know how smart you are, I am going to tell you some things that it might be about. I have three possibilities to teach you. There are more but we’re just going to do three of them. When you grow up, if you want, you can study for yourself. You can even write to me and ask me for book recommendations, and I will be very glad to help point you in some interesting directions.
First of all, we’re going to talk about the most interesting belief—and this is one that we find a lot in some of the fictional writings from Jewish authors from before the time of Jesus. And this theory even has stuff in the Bible to back it up. Of course, in every theory we have two questions that need to be answered: (1) who are the Sons of God and (2) who are the Nephilim. So, every theory has to answer both of those. Throughout the Bible, we have sons of God mentioned, and although the Jews were sometimes called the sons of the Lord their God, there were no Jews before the flood so that can’t be the answer. Also, every king from the line of King David was called the son of God, but as a group they were never called the sons of God and besides, there were no kings from the line of David for at least a thousand years after this so that doesn’t count either. But there was a group called the sons of God in the Bible and that group was made up of the angels who were with God in His throne room. They go out on missions for Him and come back to report to Him what they have seen. They show up in the Book of Job, which was written at around the same time. Scholars call them the “Divine Council” but that’s not really important for you to remember—it just sounds cool.
And this was who the writers of fictional books like Enoch and Jubilees assumed were the sons of God, these angels. And that when they were on their missions for God on earth, they saw and fell in love with human women because they were so beautiful. So, according to these stories, they made a pact, an agreement, with each other to disobey God and to live as humans and marry these women and have families with them. And the stories tell us that when the women had babies, the babies grew up to be huge! In fact, the stories are very ridiculous—having them grow up to be like 450 ft tall! That’s 1/3 as tall as the Empire State Building, 150 ft taller than the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. Just think of how much someone like that would eat. Obviously, these stories were meant to be fantastic. But when the Bible describes some of the giants later, they say that they are less than ten ft tall and in the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, which is older than any of our Hebrew texts, it says 6’6”. Both of those make a lot more sense. Men like these would be much stronger than normal ancient men, who would maybe be somewhere between 5’ and 5’6” tall. I am 5’1” tall, just barely, and if you ever saw me with my friend Ryan, who is like 6’2” and built like a mountain, you would see how easy it would be for him to beat the snot out of me. It would take me a miracle to even give him a bruise. He could put his hand on my forehead and hold me far enough away that the only part of him I could touch would be his arm.
So, maybe that’s what happened. We know that angels exist. Maybe they decided they didn’t want to live angel lives anymore. Maybe they didn’t want to be what God wanted them to be, and they decided to live as humans instead. If so, then their children would have been half human and half angel and who even knows what someone like that would be capable of. One thing for sure, if that happened, it would mean that not only had humans rebelled against God’s plans for them but angels had as well. If that was the case, then right now the world would have been one huge mess. If this is what happened, then angels and humans teamed up together against God and refused to be what God had created them to be. This is terrible. Who can God count on if humans and angels are both doing terrible things? And those kids, they aren’t angels and they aren’t humans—you can’t have that! If God had wanted people to be half angels and half humans, He would have created them that way. This isn’t like taking cornbread and hot dogs and making corn dogs—which are awesome, by the way—this is making a new kind of person who isn’t a person at all and isn’t an angel either. So, that’s our first option. That’s certainly the most interesting and weirdest. And it is based on some other Bible stuff. And it is what Jewish writers and even the historian Josephus believed—but Jesus never said anything about it Himself. If that’s what happened, then we can read it like this:
6 When mankind began to multiply on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the angels who stood in the throne room of God saw that the human women were beautiful, and the rebellious angels took any they chose as wives for themselves. 3 And the Lord said, “My Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are ruined. Their days will be 120 years.” 4 The half-human/half angel giants were on the earth both in those days and afterward, when these angels came to the human women, who bore children to them. Their children, who were neither pure human nor pure angel were the powerful men of old, the famous men.
The second one isn’t nearly as interesting. Just telling you that up front. In fact, it will be super boring compared to all that but who on earth can compete with angel-human hybrids, right? The next one is based on the fact that the kings of the Bible, the ones who are descended from King David, are called God’s sons. Not as a group, but each king of Israel was called the son of God because God said He would adopt those kings as His own sons and hold them responsible and even punish them as though they were His own kids. And, in addition to that, we do know that kings in the ancient world were known as the sons of the gods they worshiped. The problem with this is that we have more than one, we have a whole group of them being talked about. And it would be really weird for them all to be called the sons of God. But, let’s just say that a large group of human kings were called that way back in ancient times. I mean, we don’t have everything they ever wrote, maybe there were groups of kings called that. Let me tell you, when I see Moses in the world to come, we are going to have some words about his lack of helpful explanations. He’s got a lot of explaining to do. He could have made this all a lot easier, dang it. And so, these kings, these powerful men from rich families, supposedly just took as many women for wives as they wanted. Like Solomon. Solomon had three hundred wives and six hundred women in his harem. I bet he couldn’t even remember all of their names.
Now, I will tell you who believed this. Hundreds of years after Jesus, there were religious leaders called Rabbis and they didn’t like the whole thing with the angels and the humans getting married. They thought it was embarrassing and scandalous that that sort of thing would be in the Bible so they came up with this explanation instead. Some modern scholars, and scholars are people who study the Bible, agree with them that it couldn’t possibly be angels and humans getting married. So, if they are right then let’s read it again with this story plugged in:
6 When mankind began to multiply on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the powerful kings and wealthy men saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful, and they took as many as they chose as wives for themselves. 3 And the Lord said, “My Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt. Their days will be 120 years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth both in those days and afterward, when these powerful kings and wealthy men came to the daughters of mankind, who bore children to them. Their children were the powerful men of old, the famous men.
And that could be true but it doesn’t really seem strange enough to write a story about, to me. I mean, powerful kings marrying a whole bunch of women wasn’t that odd even if it wasn’t God’s will from the beginning. David did it, Solomon did it, Saul did it. I imagine that maybe all of the Davidic kings did it. This wasn’t out of the ordinary. It never turned out well in the Bible, but it wasn’t strange.
A third option is very popular nowadays, not with scholars but just with people who really don’t want it to be a story about angels and humans getting married because that’s scary. That story is that the sons of God are the sons of Adam’s son Seth and that the daughters of men are the daughters who came from Adam’s son Cain. The whole idea with that is that Cain’s daughters are supposed to be somehow evil and Seth’s sons are supposed to all be righteous and so when righteous men married evil women, they produced children who were powerful and famous but that really doesn’t make any sense to me. One, there is no reason to think that all of Seth’s descendants were good and no reason to believe that all of Cain’s descendants were evil. Also, Genesis 5 says that Adam and Eve had a whole lot more kids after Seth so it isn’t like there are only two families on the earth—Seth’s and Cain’s. Two, why on earth would their kids be powerful and famous? I mean, they come from the same exact grandparents. Again, boring option and it doesn’t seem like Moses would waste his time writing about it. It would have made more sense to just say sons of Seth and daughters of Cain. But there is a fourth option, and this one is interesting. Not as interesting as the first one, but interesting.
Have you ever heard of a legend? How about a parable? The ancient world was full of stories about gods coming down from their mountains (because that is where people thought that their gods lived) and having babies with human women. Have you ever heard of Hercules? Perseus? Gilgamesh? The Greeks had almost thirty legends about this. The Egyptians only had three that we know about. These men were called demi-gods, a word meaning “half-god.” So, these stories were floating around out there and Moses’s audience would have known about them. Some scholars wonder if maybe God was taking these stories, about people they would naturally be afraid of running into, and retelling the stories in such a way as to understand that God Himself was against these types of things and that they weren’t actually the sons of any god at all—because they were not His sons. At most, they were just the sons of his angels, who were also just other created beings. And if they were created beings, they could be killed just like anyone else—but they weren’t His children or the children of any other false gods that the Israelites in the desert should be worried about them being under special protection.
You see, there were very tall men living among the Canaanites and you can check that out in Numbers 13:13. Men like Goliath and his brothers and Og, king of Bashan, and Sihon, king of the Amorites. They were huge and became kings because no one was big enough to stand up to them in battle. To look at a person who was a foot or more taller than anyone else around them, people would naturally think that they must be sons of gods, under special protection and maybe impossible to kill. Maybe Moses was telling the children of Israel that these were half angels and half human or at least a part angel after so many generations. Or maybe Moses was telling them that there were mighty warriors out there with many wives churning out kids who were also much bigger and stronger than normal. It isn’t like they knew about genetics. And maybe all that just doesn’t matter because God is going to use the story of the flood to tell His people that these Nephilim (which is a Hebrew word that might mean fallen ones but the Greek version of the Bible calls “Gigantes” which we would translate as giants) are mortal. That means that they can be killed. In fact, God is going to kill them along with everyone else in the flood. If someone can be killed just like anyone else, then you don’t need to be as afraid of them. If God tells you to go in and wage war against them, then you know you can actually win against them. If they were immortal, and if God was protecting them, then you can’t touch them.
So, we keep having these things come up in the Bible where we aren’t given the sort of information we want and if you will remember, whenever that happens, people come up with the most fantastic stories about what was going on and maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong. But remember, God is telling us a story about Himself and not about the sons of God or the daughters of men or the Nephilim. We have to look at this story and ask ourselves, what is God telling us about Himself? Well, that message is the same no matter who the sons of God or the daughters of men or the Nephilim are. This story tells us that God isn’t threatened by the Nephilim and because He is on our side, neither are we. Giants aren’t the only enemy out there for God’s people. They’re just the tallest! But tall doesn’t mean invincible, not even for someone as tiny as I am.
The Book of Daniel talks about crazy looking monsters that represent what cruel countries and their kings looked like from God’s point of view. And in the Book of Revelation, all those beasts are combined into a new one that was meant to show people what the wicked Roman Empire looked like to God. Human kingdoms always see themselves as beautiful, no matter what they are doing to other people, but when God looks at governments that are behaving badly, He just sees beasts that aren’t behaving like humans at all but like fearsome animals. And in both of those Bible books, God defeats them. They don’t stand a chance against Him. No matter how scary they look, God just shrugs and topples them over like dominoes. Let’s look at Psalm 2. It’s about Jesus being our King.
1 Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? 2 The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers conspire together against the Lord and his Anointed One: 3 “Let’s tear off their chains and throw their ropes off of us.” 4 The one enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord ridicules them. 5 Then he speaks to them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath: 6 “I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain.”
This Psalm tells us the same thing that the story about the Nephilim tells, us, and the story of David and Goliath, and Daniel and Revelation. We look at appearances—at how tall and strong someone is, at how cruel and powerful a government is. But all God cares about is, “Who is on my side?” A government can’t be cruel, and can’t oppress people, or discriminate against them if it is on God’s side. Jesus taught us that because when He came, He showed us exactly how God feels about the kinds of people whom human governments hurt. “They are the truly strong ones because God is on their side,” Jesus said. “They are the blessed ones,” Jesus told us. “They’re going to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven,” Jesus promised. “They will be the ones who get all the mercy,” Jesus warned.
Psalm 2 talks about how these superpowers do their very worst, and how they are rebels against God and His Kingdom. It tells us the story of these rulers who don’t want to do things God’s way and want to make their own rules about who does and does not deserve to be treated with mercy. Is God afraid of these rulers with all of their power to make people’s lives miserable? Not at all, He rolls His eyes and laughs at their miserable efforts to be powerful in this life because He knows they are doomed and their kingdoms are also doomed. When He finally does speak to them, because they have made Him furious with how they treat people, they don’t feel very powerful at all and they can’t do a thing to stop Him. In the same way, the children of Israel will be meeting the giants who live in the Promised Land and they have to understand that it doesn’t matter how powerful they look, how tall they are, what armies are standing behind them because God is going to fight against them. They’re nothing but over-sized bullies! These mighty men don’t stand a chance against Him. After all, even mighty men are still just men. Why do they need to remember this? Because the first time they have a chance to fight them, everyone is too scared to go and they want to run back to Egypt instead—everyone except for Joshua and Caleb, anyway. They didn’t understand Moses’s story about the Nephilim, or maybe Moses hadn’t written it down and told them about it yet. Maybe he wrote it all down after that—because they were stuck wandering in the wilderness for forty long years because of it. Next time had to be different.
Maybe you know a thing or two about dealing with bullies. I was a tiny little thing in school. I am still a tiny little thing. There were people who were a lot bigger who felt like they could push me around and they sure made my life miserable, not gonna lie to you about that. I was so miserable that sometimes I wished I was dead. And whenever you have big bullies who won’t stop hurting you, that’s a very natural thing to feel. But you know what? I got older and I learned that nothing lasts forever. We can always know that someday, God is going to deal with the people who make other people miserable. Sometimes, He is able to change their heart and they become kind—and that is the absolute best thing that can happen! Sometimes, He uses what they are doing to us to change us. He can use what they are doing to turn us into the kinds of people He can use to help others later and not be afraid of bullies when we grow up because we’ve already survived the bullies that were around us when we were kids. God can use that to make us into powerful warriors for His Kingdom and I am not just saying that. I know it for a fact. //I am going to tell you something. Someone was trying to bully me this morning in emails. They were trying to push me into doing what they wanted and they weren’t being very nice about it. It actually happens to me quite a bit. There are even people who are angry that I am teaching anyone, just because I am a woman. And so, they bully me. Sometimes they try and get other people to hate me and sometimes it works. Sometimes they make nasty videos lying about me because they don’t like something I said, maybe they don’t agree with it. But because I was bullied by kids who make what they do seem pathetic in comparison, I am strong enough to just ignore them, and I know that nothing lasts forever. They generally forget about me after a while because it’s no fun to bully someone who ignores you. I just let God deal with them. So hang in there, guys.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray you have a wonderful week studying the Bible with the people who love you.