On his YouTube channel, Sam Shamoun posted a video titled Who Were the Sons of God in Genesis 6? Enoch, Watchers, and Nephilim Explained.
He begins by noting, “the oldest extant Jewish document that we have regarding Genesis 6 is the Book of Enoch” a section of which is, “called the Book of Watchers…telling you that the sons of God were Angels and gives them their names. And interestingly, Jude cites [quotes] from this Book of Watchers.”
Indeed, and Paul quotes Greek poets. 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.
Sam Shamoun notes, “if you want to go with the early church, the consensus of the early church agreed with this interpretation” 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.
He notes that as per 1 Enoch the wives of the Angels, “became pregnant and bear great giants whose height were 3,000 ells, whatever that means.” Well, I provided the measurements in my book, the bottom line is that it has Nephilim, the giants, as being MILES tall which is great folklore but poor reality.
He adds, “I am not saying Enoch is inspired, historically accurate, and these details are accurate. No, I believe Enoch contains a lot of historical truth embellished…exaggerated like all myths…myths are not lies, myths are actual historical events that have been embellished and exaggerated.”
Well, certainly, when 1 Enoch mirrors the historical record of what I term the Gen 6 affair it’s accurate but there’s no indication that the additional data it provides is accurate. The term myth is somewhat shifty and so it’s myopic to assert that it can only refer to, “actual historical events that have been embellished and exaggerated” even though that’s within the overall range of the usage of that term.
Sam Shamoun then asserts, “if you read the bible carefully, believe it or not, Goliath was a Nephilim and he was a giant. But if you read the biblical account he was over 9 feet tall. So, the Bible, which is tame calls, these giants giants, not because they are 300 ells but because they were 9 feet, they were not 30, 40, 50, 60 feet. Goliath, the measurement given to him, he had six fingers, six toes and if you measure the cubits he comes out to a little over nine feet that was considered a giant.”
This touches upon the utterly subjective nature of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word giants. In common parlance, the usage is to refer to something vaguely generic about subjectively unusual height of some unknown level above the parochial average (and yes, that is how useless the common parlance usage of that modern English word is).
Biblically, the usage 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.
For details, see my linguistics book Bible Encyclopedias and Dictionaries on Angels, Demons, Nephilim, and Giants: From 1851 to 2010.
The only reason to even imagine (and imagination is all that it could be), “Goliath was a Nephilim” (the proper grammar would be the singular Nephil) is one single unreliable non-LXX sentence from one single unreliable evil report (Num 13:33) by 10 unreliable guys whom God rebuked.
That’s because non-LXX versions of that single sentence merely assert that Anakim are related to Nephilim (in some logically, bio-logically, and theo-logically impossible way) and since Goliath was of the Anakim clan of the Rephaim tribe then some jump to such a conclusion.
As per my point above, whenever English readers read of Goliath being a giant they’re reading about him being a Repha, not anything about his size at all.
Also, the Masoretic text has Goliath at just shy of 10 ft. Yet, the earlier LXX and the earlier Dead Sea Scrolls and the earlier Flavius Josephus all have him at just shy of 7 ft. (compared to the average Israelite male who was 5.0-5.3 ft. in those days) so that’s the preponderance of the earliest data.
Now, even if for some odd reason, one actually believes that sentence (and 100% of pop-Nephilologists do since they’re all post-flood Nephilologists and make a living by selling un-biblical tall-tales to Christians) they then have to invent un-biblical fantasy tall-tales about how Nephilim made it pas the flood, past God. Any and all such fantasies imply that God failed, missed a loophole, the flood was much of a waste, etc., etc., etc.
Yet, a good point was made despite the problems in that there’s no indication in the whole Bible about anyone who’s even taller than 9 feet—see my How Nephilim Absconded from the Tanakh and Invaded Folkloric Territory.
Now, based on his myopic view of Goliath’s height and his misidentification of him as a Nephil, he concludes that Nephilim, “were…over 9 feet, over 8 feet.” Yet, since the only physical description we have of them is that one unreliable sentence by unreliable guys then 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 un-biblical pop-Nephilology.
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