Who Were the Nephilim?
Who were the Nephilim? Who were the descendants of Anak? Who were the sons of God?
Mentioned only three times in the Bible, in two books, the Nephilim have long been a source of controversy. Pagans believed that fallen angels came down to Earth and demanding worship, and reproduced with humans, while others have depicted the Nephilim as extra-terrestrials. The Christian position which holds the most merit is that the Nephilim were Godly individuals who knew the way of the Lord but chose to reproduce with Pagans and non-Godly oriented individuals, producing corrupt humans that were raised without the morals commanded by God, leading to the Anak. However, if this is true, would the Nephilim not have been eradicated during Noah’s flood? To add to the confusion, the Bible states that “The Nephilim were on the earth both in those days and afterward,” referencing before and after the flood, which chronologically appears later in the text. Additionally, Nephilim lived for hundreds of years.
Analysis -
The first mention is in Genesis 6:1 (CSB), which describes that “[w]hen mankind began to multiply on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful, and they took any they chose as wives for themselves. And the LORD said, ‘My Spirit will not remain with mankind forever, because they are corrupt. Their days will be 120 years.’ 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.”
The second time Nephilim are mentioned is in Numbers 13:31-33 (CSB) “The land we passed through to explore is one that devours its inhabitants, and all the people we saw in it are men of great size. We even saw the Nephilim there — the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim! To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and we must have seemed the same to them.”
Conclusion -
The only logical conclusion is that Noah himself was a Nephilim. Noah had children at 500 years old, dying at 950 years of age. As it is written that the Nephilim survived the flood, could Noah have also been a “Nephilim?” Would that make Noah’s wife a former sinner? Were Noah’s children “Anak?”