I noted, “Bart Ehrman’s site…” since the article undergoing review was authored by Joshua Schachterle, Ph.D (“in New Testament and Early Christianity”), “Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. – Dr. Bart D. Ehrman.”
So we can blame Schachterle for Nephilim: Uncovering the Giants of Genesis 6 ;o)
He answers, “What Are the Nephilim?” thusly:
The Hebrew word Nephilim comes from the root neh-peh-le which means “to fall.” The word can therefore be translated literally as “the fallen ones.”
In Fall of the Angels, Hebrew Bible scholar Ronald Hendel notes that the word Nephilim is a passive construction, literally meaning “the ones who have fallen.”
He follows that with:
Despite this meaning, most ancient translations from Hebrew, including the Septuagint (the ancient Greek version of the Hebrew Bible), the Latin Vulgate, and the Samaritan Pentateuch (a version of the Pentateuch written in Samaritan Aramaic), have simply called the Nephilim “giants.”
It’s rather odd to state that a Greek version, Latin version, and Samaritan Aramaic version, “called the Nephilim ‘giants’” since giants isn’t a Greek nor Latin nor Samaritan Aramaic word.
The Septuagint/LXX has γίγαντες, “gigantes” which means, “earth-born” as in born of the Greek false goddess Gaia (which is why some manuscripts simplify it to, “gigas”).
The Latin uses the very same transliteration of the Greek, “gigantes.”
The Samaritan Aramaic has the Nephilim as just that, ha Nephilim: והנפלים
For more linguistics details, see my book Bible Encyclopedias and Dictionaries on Angels, Demons, Nephilim, and Giants: From 1851 to 2010.
Yet, let’s just go with, “called the Nephilim ‘giants’” well, that merely begs these key questions: What’s the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants” in English Bibles? What’s Schachterle usage? Do those two usages agree?
He quotes the Gen 6 affair, as I term it, thusly:
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair, and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
He notes, “It is a curious, fragmentary, and ambiguous reference that, at first glance, doesn’t seem to fit with the story that follows…it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the ‘wickedness of humans’ that follows in verse 5 and sets the stage for the Great Flood” and yet, it’s positioned as its premise.
He notes, “Clearly, this passage needs some unpacking” since it is extremely succinct whilst packing a lot of references into a few sentences.
Schachterle notes of the sons of God:
…long-standing traditions in Judaism and the Christian church have claimed that these were fallen angels in league with Satan, John Drummond states that the original audience for this passage would have believed them to be members of the divine council over which God presided. This was a common assumption among ancient Near Eastern cultures, and is found in several instances in the Bible, such as this passage from Psalm 82:1-2:
God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
“How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked?”
In short, indeed, the original, traditional, and majority view among the earliest Jewish and Christians commentators, starting in BC days, was the “Angel view” as I proved in my book, On the Genesis 6 Affair’s Sons of God: Angels or Not?: A Survey of Early Jewish and Christian Commentaries Including Notes on Giants and the Nephilim.
Juxtaposing the long-standing tradition and Drummond seems like a false dichotomy since the these, “members of the divine council” were Angels (aka, “lesser heavenly beings” as he has them) who fell: in the Psalm, God notes that they will, “Die like men.”
Oddly, after telling us of, “long-standing traditions” again, starting in BC days, “in Judaism…claimed that these were fallen angels” he followed that up with, “unlike the ancient Greeks, Israelites seem less comfortable with the notion of semi-divine beings” even though they held to that long-standing tradition.
He notes, “other references to the Nephilim are scanty at best” indeed, scant enough that there aren’t other, plural, “references” but only one.
He notes:
In this passage [Numbers 13:33], the Israelites have arrived at Canaan, the Promised Land. Before attempting to conquer the current inhabitants, Moses sends in spies to do some reconnaissance. While two spies, Joshua and Caleb, suggest going in and conquering the land immediately, the other 10 spies do not agree:
Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against this people, for they are stronger than we.”
So they brought to the Israelites an unfavorable report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land that we have gone through as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great size. There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakites come from the Nephilim), and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”
He adds, “This is the first explicit reference to the Nephilim as giants, since the size of the Nephilim was not referred to in the Genesis passage.”
Thus, we got the answer to his usage: by giants he’s referring to size—something generically vague about subjective height of some unspecified level above the parochial average.
This means that his usage disagrees with the English Bibles’ usage since the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word giants in English Bibles is that it merely renders (doesn’t even translate) Nephilim in 2 verses or Repha/im in 98% of all others and so never even hints at anything to do with any sort of height whatsoever.
In fact, the dirty little secret is that since we’ve no reliable physical description of Nephilim then their height is a non-issue and that alone debunks 99% of un-biblical Nephilology—the modern branch of which is just un-biblical neo-theo sci-fi tall-tales.
That’s because the report was unfavorable in consisting of five mere assertions that are unbacked by even one single other sentence in the whole Bible—see my post Chapter sample: On the Post Flood Nephilim Proposal.
The, “they” who, “brought to the Israelites an unfavorable report” were 10 unreliable guys whom presented an unreliable report and were rebuked by God. They contradicted Moses, Caleb, Joshua, God, and the rest of the whole Bible.
Schachterle asks, “who were these Anakites, who seem to be offspring of the Nephilim in this passage?” simple, they weren’t offspring of the Nephilim: that’s logically, bio-logically, and theo-logically impossible.
Also, he’s basing the question on non-LXX versions since that version’s version of that sentence doesn’t mention Anakim.
He notes, “It’s unclear from the passage if the Anakites were truly believed to be the offspring of the Nephilim”: it’s unclear if they asserted that or if it’s a gloss in latter manuscript families such as the Masoretic. And one issue is what was believed vs. what was reality: Anakim were like a tribe of the Rephaim tribe (Deut 2) and Nephilim were strictly pre-flood hybrids, Rephaim were strictly post-flood humans, and there’s zero correlation between them.
Schachterle wrote, “…if the Anakites were truly believed to be the offspring of the Nephilim and, thus, giants” which biblically contextually reads as, “…if the Anakites were truly believed to be the offspring of the Nephilim and, thus, Rephaim” which makes no logical, bio-logical, nor theo-logical sense.
But he means, “…if the Anakites were truly believed to be the offspring of the Nephilim and, thus, something generically vague about subjective height of some unspecified level above the parochial average.” Well, what we’re reliably told about them is that, on average, Rephaim and thus Anakim were, “tall” (Deut 2) which is just as vague, generic, subjective, and multi-usage as giants and is subjective to the average Israelite male who was 5.0-5.3 ft. in those days.
He continued that thought with, “…or if the fearful spies were merely not brave enough to face them in battle and used hyperbolic statements to discourage Moses from attacking them.” Yes but there’s more to it than that. Num chap 13 contains two post-reconnoitering reports and the first, the reliable one, the one that’s accepted as is lists whom they really did see, “we saw the descendants of Anak there. The Amalekites…The Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites…And the Canaanites” (no mention of Nephilim).
Thus, it was a case of, “the fearful spies were merely not brave enough to face Anakim and Amalekites and Hittites and Jebusites and Amorites and Canaanites in battle and used hyperbolic statements to discourage Moses from attacking them” by artificially inserting Nephilim into the mix by embellishing the original/reliable/as is report—they literally took it up a notch via an fear-mongering, scare-tactic, “Don’t go in the woods!!!” style of tall-tale.
Schachterle continued with:
Another group often identified with the Nephilim in the Hebrew Bible are the Rephaim, who are also said to be giants. According to Jonathan Yogev, there is a possible reference to the Rephaim as divine (or believing themselves to be divine) in Ezekiel 28:2:
Because your heart is proud
and you have said, “I am a god;
I sit in the seat of the gods,
in the heart of the seas,”
yet you are but a mortal and no god,
though you compare your mind
with the mind of a god.
In Hebrew, the word Rephaim simply means “the dead.” This makes their references in the Hebrew Bible puzzling to say the least. Like the Anakites, they are said to be one of the peoples conquered by the Israelites in Canaan. However, later references seem to characterize them as mere representations of those who have died:
The dead will not live, the Rephaim will not rise, you punished them and brought them to ruin; you wiped out all memory of them.
Isaiah 26:14
This is actually a linguistics issue and there is no other group ever identified with the Nephilim—not even Anakim, reliably, as we have seen.
Note that biblically contextually, “Rephaim, who are also said to be giants” means, “Rephaim, who are also said to be Rephaim.” Yet, we know he mistakenly means, “Rephaim, who are also said to be generically vague about subjective height of some unspecified level above the parochial average” so that they were subjectively taller than 5.0-5.3ft.
The linguistics issue is that some compound the root rapha with the Rephaim people group. Rapha is a rather complex root which ranges in meaning from dead to healing. It is must like unto that the root naphal is used for fallen and is applied to the Nephilim. Yet, naphal isn’t necessarily a reference to the Nephilim people group nor is rapha necessarily a reference to the Rephaim people group.
Thus, as noted, Ezekiel 28:2 is referring to “the dead” thus, in this case, it’s not, “However” but consistent that, “later references” also, “seem to characterize them as mere representations of those who have died.”
So that Isaiah 26:14 is, “The dead will not live, the dead will not rise…”
Or, perhaps in some cases we’re being told that the rapha Rephaim are in big trouble.
Schachterle notes, “it’s not clear in the Bible whether the Israelites truly equated the Nephilim and the Rephaim” yet, it is: there’s no such indication even reading into root words.
As for, “by the 3rd century BCE, Drummond notes that pseudepigraphical books such as the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees clearly believed that the Nephilim were the ghastly giant offspring not of gods but of fallen angels and human women” sure, that was a time of notoriously wild historical-fiction, myth-making, folklore, speculation, tall-tale telling, etc., etc., etc., “a kind of fan fiction” as he puts it: see my article How Nephilim Absconded from the Tanakh and Invaded Folkloric Territory and book The Apocryphal Nephilim and Giants: Encountering Nephilim and Giants in Extra-Biblical Texts.
He continues:
The last time a form of the word Nephilim comes up in the Hebrew Bible is in Ezekiel 32:27. However, in this later context, it seems to mean something different:
And they do not lie with the fallen [Hebrew: nō·p̄ə·lîm] warriors of long ago who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war, whose swords were laid under their heads and whose shields are upon their bones; for the terror of the warriors was in the land of the living.
In this case, the word Nephilim merely refers to those fallen in battle, not those fallen in a moral or divine sense.
This is much like the Ezekiel 28:2 issue, it’s about the naphal gibborim (fallen mighty ones).
He also notes:
According to Megan Sauter, the Book of Enoch reimagined the role of the Nephilim for generations of Jews. In it, we meet a group of beings known as the Watchers, fallen angels who had children with human women and produced giant offspring— the Nephilim. How tall were the Nephilim? The Book of Enoch says they were 300 cubits tall. Since a cubit was about 18 inches, this would put their height at 450 feet, a monstrous height indeed!
1 Enoch is Bible contradicting folklore from centuries, if not millennia, after the Torah, see my book, In Consideration of the Book(s) of Enoch.
“300 cubits tall” is more of a fallback position for those who are shocked or embarrassed that the text actually asserts that they were 3,000 ells tall: which is MILES tall—great folklore but poor reality.
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