Prepper Dave’s article, “Unravelling The Mystery Of The Nephilim: From Biblical Lore To Eternal Fascination,” April 2, 2023.
Enigmatically, Prepper Dave begins with, “The enigmatic Nephilim have captivated our imaginations with their alleged connection to the spirits of giants” but since he jumped from the specific ancient Hebrew word Nephilim to the vague, generic, subjective, and multi-usage modern English word giants: it’s tricky to know to whom he’s referring—much less what spirits have to do with it.
Clearly appealing to folklore from millennia after the Torah, he notes, “the Watchers – divine beings who sired gigantic offspring with mortal women, only to be imprisoned beneath rocks until their day of reckoning arrives.”
I could tell that he was referring to such folklore due to the employment of the term Watchers and he did go on to reference, “Jews of the Second Temple era.”
Now, due to the folklore, he refers to Nephilim as, “gigantic” and, “larger-than-life creatures.”
Now, he had referred to Nephilim’s, “connection to the spirits of giants” and goes on to write in terms of, “the Nephilim, some people believe these giants…” so that by giants he is referring to Nephilim.
Thus, his usage of giants is gigantic-larger-than-life creatures but that is not the usage of that word in modern English Bibles: it implies nothing about height whatsoever.
Prepper Dave notes, “some people believe these giants may have survived the Great Flood despite scripture suggesting otherwise. Some even speculate that their bloodline may have continued through trans-humanization or demonic interference in AI.”
The most well-known pop-researchers (and many scholarly ones) believe in post-flood Nephilim, despite scripture not suggesting but being crystal clear otherwise: see Genesis 7:7, 23; Hebrews 11:7; 1 Peter 3:20; and 2 Peter 2:5.
Claiming post-flood Nephilim implies God failed: He meant to be rid of them but couldn’t get the job done, the flood was much of a waste, He missed a loophole whereby they survived or just came right back.
And then, one has to literally invent a story about how they returned such as the neo-theo-sci-fi-tall-tale about, “trans-humanization or demonic interference in AI.”
Prepper Dave notes, “The search for evidence of their existence continues, but so far, most remains found have belonged to mammoths due to their sheer size.” Yet, that is misguided since we don’t have a reliable physical description of Nephilim, for what are we searching? And, “sheer size” has nothing to do with it.
He asserts, “These powerful beings, also known as Anakim, Rephaim, and Nephilim, were described as giants or warlords in various sources.”
Well, if we’re appealing to generic various sources then anything goes. Yet, biblically, that is an inaccurate statement since Nephilim were strictly pre-flood hybrids, Rephaim were strictly post-flood 100% humans, and Anakim were a clan of the Rephaim tribe.
There is a biblical correlation between Nephilim and Anakim but a biblical connection is a generic manner whereby to state it (which I used due to it being common parlance).
Such a correlation is recorded in the Bible after we are told that it was an assertion within an, “evil report” (Num 13:31-33) spoken by utterly unreliable guys whom God rebuked—and, by the way, there’s no such correlation in the LXX version of that text.
Again, Prepper Dave had written of Nephilim’s, “connection to the spirits of giants,” which bifurcated the two but then went on to write, “Nephilim…these giants…” and now went back to bifurcating them again by referring to Nephilim’s, “connection to angels, giants, and human-divine hybrids.”
He notes, “there’s no verse in the Bible that explains where demons came from” which is accurate. He is also quite correct that, “Christians typically assume that demons are fallen angels, cast from heaven with Satan (the Devil) right before the temptation of Adam and Eve. But guess what? There’s no such story in the Bible. The only description of anything like that is in Revelation 12:9—but the occasion for that whole episode was the birth of the Messiah (Rev 12:4-6), an event long after Adam and Eve. The idea of a primeval fall of angels actually comes from church tradition and the great English poet John Milton in his epic Paradise Lost.”
As for, “no verse in the Bible that explains where demons came from”: such is why most pop-researchers (and many scholarly ones) appeal to folklore from millennia after the Torah, such as the Bible contradicting 1 Enoch/Ethiopic Enoch (see my book In Consideration of the Book(s) of Enoch) which have demons/unclean spirits being the spirits of dead Nephilim.
For a Bible-based elucidation, see the article Demons Ex Machina: What are Demons?
What Rev 12 notes is that the war in heaven between loyal and fallen Angles is a post-Jesus’ ascension event—not a primordial one.
Yet, the fall of Angels is the Gen 6 affair and the fall of Satan (the Cherub, not Angel) is the Gen 3 affair.
Prepper Dave ends up commenting on Num 13:33, “the Nephilim appear again during Israel’s travels in the wilderness, which is supposed to be centuries after the Flood. If the Israelites saw the Nephilim in the land of Canaan, are we to assume that these are the offspring of the Nephilim from Genesis 6? Put differently, did the Nephilim survive the great Flood of Genesis 6–9?”
He is speaking too generically since even in that verse, that chapter, that text, there is no indication that, “the Israelites saw the Nephilim” but only that ten of them merely asserted that they saw them.
Thus, the, “are we to assume” questions are non-issues: Nephilim didn’t make it past the flood in any way, shape, or form—period, full stop.
He quotes 1 Enoch/Ethiopic Enoch to the effect that Nephilim were, “three thousand ells” which is MILES tall: great folklore, poor reality.
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