Kevin B. Potter wrote an article titled Giants, Dragons, and the Days of Noah: Job 41 Part 4 for his website The Septuagint (LXX) Scrolls (and I can’t find parts 1-3).
He’s described as “came to faith later in life after many years of agnosticism that followed his Mormon childhood. His unique journey brings a fresh perspective to biblical scholarship…As an independent researcher and author, he specializes in the Septuagint and early textual transmission of Scripture. His mission is to make ancient biblical scholarship accessible to believers and curious seekers alike.”
I will bypass dealing with the dragons issue since my main interest is Nephilology—yet, you can see my book The Paranormal in Early Jewish and Christian Commentaries: Over a Millennia’s Worth of Comments on Angels, Cherubim, Seraphim, Satan, the Devil, Demons, the Serpent and the Dragon.
He notes, “the biblical tradition doesn’t just give us dragons. It gives us giants” which, along with the title, 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 your usage? Do those two usages agree?
I will get to the answer of his usage up-front since we have much more pressing issue regarding a fundamental level contradiction which damages theology proper.
His usage is, “Nephilim were…particularly tall…Nephilim were…tall” yet, tall is just as vague, generic, subjective, and multi-usage as giants.
He added, “The Septuagint consistently translates Nephilim as γίγαντες (gigantes): giants. Ancient Jewish and Christian interpreters universally understood these to be beings of enormous size and strength. Numbers 13:33 confirms this: the spies felt like grasshoppers compared to them. Whatever the Nephilim were, they were terrifyingly large.”
He’s also aware that, “The word Nephilim is related to the Hebrew root נָפַל (naphal), meaning ‘to fall.’”
The qualifying term consistently seems hyperbolic since, after all, as he pointed out, “The word נְפִילִים (Nephilim) appears only twice in Scripture” so fine, I suppose we can all two times being consistent: even though the second time it’s actually spelled slightly differently.
In any case, giants really only refers 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).
In any case, 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.
There’s a missing data point in the statement, “Nephilim as γίγαντες (gigantes)” since ending it with, “: giants” not only begs the question as to the usage of giants but fails to note that gigantes actually means earth-born.
As for, “Ancient Jewish and Christian interpreters” well, they may have, “universally understood these to be beings of enormous size” but that’s in part by being undiscerning enough to rely on that, “Numbers 13:33 confirms…terrifyingly large” which is note the case: see below. Also see my article How Nephilim Absconded from the Tanakh and Invaded Folkloric Territory.
As we shall see, 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.
Now, let’s get to some crystal clear affirmations, as Kevin B. Potter assures us:
…the world before the Flood, a world so strange that it took a global deluge to reset it…
…divine judgment and a fresh start for the human race…
…Nephilim as the source of all monsters in the pre-flood era…
…before the Flood, the world contained creatures and hybrid beings that God had not originally intended…
According to Genesis 6…A world so corrupt that God determines to destroy it and start fresh…The Flood (Genesis 6-9): God judges the corrupted world. Only Noah’s family and pairs of animals are saved…
Nephilim as the source of all monsters in the pre-flood era…
Those very clear and straight forward statement are very welcomed since there’s no question about his view: “a global deluge…reset it…divine judgment…creatures and hybrid beings that God had not originally intended…God determines to destroy it…God judges the corrupted world” and the specificity that, “Only Noah’s family and pairs of animals are saved” and, “Nephilim as the source of all monsters in the pre-flood era.”
Problem identified, solution enacted.
Yet, Kevin B. Potter also wrote:
The Post-Flood Survival…
Genesis 6:4 says “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward.”
Also. Afterward.
Somehow, giants survived the Flood or reappeared after it. This is why Moses encounters them in the Conquest: Numbers 13:33: The spies see the Nephilim in Canaan.
…giants survived or reappeared after the Flood.
Post-Flood World (Genesis 10+): Giants somehow reappear or survive.
The Conquest (Joshua-Judges): Israel encounters and defeats the giant tribes. This is presented as finishing what the Flood started; removing the genetic corruption from the Promised Land.
This is a fundamental level contradiction of what he stated about the flood. It also shows how fallacious Nephilology damages theology proper since it implies that God’s enacted solution failed: He must have missed a loophole, the flood was much of a waste, etc., etc., etc.
Kevin B. Potter wrote, “The Flood was necessary to reset the corrupted creation” and yet, it didn’t since, “Some of these elements survived or reappeared post-Flood”: both imply that God failed and the survived option contradicts the Bible five times since that’s how many times we’re told who survived the flood but Nephilim aren’t ever listed (Genesis 7:7, 23; Hebrews 11:7; 1 Peter 3:20; and 2 Peter 2:5).
Now, he had actually written, “Some of these elements survived or reappeared post-Flood…The biblical text accurately describes all of this” so let’s review how it does so.
Firstly, note that he jumped from the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word giants to the specific ancient Hebrew word Nephilim and then back again. I certainly don’t know if such Nephilologists do that on purpose or not but it’s a common MO and comes into play just when it seems they may realize they can’t make their post-flood Nephilim case so they switch to chasing the modern English word giants around an ancient Hebrew Bible—regardless of contextual usage.
He wrote, “The Nephilim were literal hybrid giants” which biblically contextually would mean, “The Nephilim were literal hybrid Nephilim” which is redundantly circular.
Note that writing, “Genesis 6:4 says ‘The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward.’ Also. Afterward” suffers from another missing data point since he neglected to include the most important point: afterward of when? His implication is clearly afterward of the flood but he can only come to that conclusion by literally chopping that verse in half.
If you re-read it, you’ll see that it tells you to what days it refers: “those days” were when the sons and daughters first married, mated, and birthed (with the commencing timeline being given in v. 1) and so “afterward” meant just that, after they first did so (they kept doing so) yet, that is still all pre-flood.
Genesis 6:4, as he actually quoted it earlier in the article, reads, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.”
If you re-read it, you’ll see that it tells you to what days it refers: “those days” were when the sons and daughters first married, mated, and birthed (with the commencing timeline being given in v. 1) and so “afterward” meant just that, after they first did so (they kept doing so) yet, that is still all pre-flood.
Now to:
The word נְפִילִים (Nephilim) appears only twice in Scripture—here in Genesis 6:4 and in Numbers 13:33, where the Israelite spies report seeing them in Canaan:
“And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”
…Numbers 13:33: The spies see the Nephilim in Canaan.
That’s not specific enough to accurately represent that verse. It wasn’t generically, “the Israelite spies…The spies” since there were 12 of them but that was stated by 10 of them.
Anyone appealing to that verse for post-flood Nephilim needs to mention that they’re relying on:
1. One single unreliable sentence
2. From strictly non-LXX versions, which is what Kevin B. Potter quoted but without noting that the LXX’s version of that verse doesn’t even mention Anakim.
3. Of an unreliable “evil report”
4. By 10 unreliable guys
5. Whom God rebuked—to death
6. Who made five mere assertions unbacked by even one single other verse in the whole Bible
7. Who contradicted Moses, Cable, Joshua, God, and the rest of the whole entire Bible
8. Then post-flood Nephilologists have to invent un-biblical fantasy tall-tales about how Nephilim got past the flood, past God.
I could go on but see my post Chapter sample: On the Post Flood Nephilim Proposal.
Now, by jumping from Nephilim to giants or Anakim he supposed that he was exampling where, “The biblical text accurately describes…survived or reappeared post-Flood” via the following:
Deuteronomy 2:10-11: “The Emim formerly lived there, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim. Like the Anakim they are also counted as Rephaim.”
Deuteronomy 2:20-21: “That also is counted as a land of Rephaim. Rephaim formerly lived there… a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim.”
Deuteronomy 3:11: King Og of Bashan, whose bed was nine cubits long (about 13.5 feet), is specifically called “the remnant of the Rephaim.”
The Bible names multiple tribes of giants:
Nephilim (Genesis 6:4; Numbers 13:33)
Rephaim (Genesis 14:5; 15:20; Deuteronomy 2:11, 20; 3:11, 13)
Anakim (Numbers 13:33; Deuteronomy 2:10-11, 21; 9:2; Joshua 11:21-22)
Emim (Deuteronomy 2:10-11)
Zamzummim (Deuteronomy 2:20)
Goliath of Gath, at about nine feet tall (1 Samuel 17:4), came from a line of giants. His brothers are named: Ishbi-benob, Saph, and Lahmi, “whose spear shaft was like a weaver’s beam” (2 Samuel 21:18-22; 1 Chronicles 20:5-8).
Fascinatingly, he quotes the unreliable sentence from the unreliable non-LXX version of the evil report by unreliable guys whom God rebuked so show that Anakim are related to Nephilim but then quotes the reliable Deut 2:10-11 which shows they’re actually related to Rephaim: like a clan of a tribe.
Thus, Deut 2:20-21 and 3:11 are about Rephaim, not about Nephilim.
As for the, “multiple tribes of giants” that’s a list of two since the word Nephilim is rendered by some as giants and Rephaim were aka Emim, Zamzummim, Anakim were Rephaim and Goliath was a Repha.
Let’s rereview with his usage of giants in mind:
Nephilim: no reliable physical description.
Rephaim/Emim/Zamzummim/Anakim: the only contextually relevant this we’re told about them is that, on average, they were, “tall” which is subjective to the average Israelite male who was 5.0-5.3 ft. in those days.
Goliath: for some reason, Kevin B. Potter didn’t tell us that the Masoretic text has him 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., so that’s the preponderance of the earliest data.
That he, “came from a line of giants” biblically contextually means, “came from a line of Rephaim.”
“His brothers”: they were actually his sons and as for, “spear shaft was like a weaver’s beam,” regular guy Benaiah took a spear like a weaver’s beam, just like Goliath’s, from a 7.5 ft. Egyptian and successfully wielded it against him in hand-to-hand combat (2 Sam 23).
Thus, when Kevin B. Potter affirms, “The Conquest (Joshua-Judges): Israel encounters and defeats the giant tribes. This is presented as finishing what the Flood started; removing the genetic corruption from the Promised Land” there’s literally zero reliable indication that any of it had anything to do with Nephilim whatsoever.
Moving on, he wrote:
Modern interpreters often try to soften this passage. The “sons of God,” they suggest, were simply the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the ungodly line of Cain. The Nephilim were just particularly tall or powerful men.
But that’s not how the ancient world understood this text. And it’s not what the text itself most naturally says.
Who Were the Sons of God?…spiritual beings— angels.
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.
The view that they, “were simply the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the ungodly line of Cain” is a late-comer based on myth and prejudice.
Ergo, “The Nephilim are the offspring; hybrid beings, part angelic and part human”—incidentally, Nephilim were strictly pre-flood hybrids, Rephaim were strictly post-flood humans, and there’s zero correlation between them.
Touching upon the dragon issue a bit, he notes:
The phrase “all flesh had corrupted their way” (Genesis 6:12) may imply more than just moral evil. It may suggest genetic or biological corruption.
And here’s the crucial point: if the created order was corrupted before the Flood, that corruption would have extended beyond just humans. The megafauna of the antediluvian world— including creatures like Leviathan —existed in this corrupted environment.
Interestingly, according the Book of Enoch the Nephilim then procreated with animals, birthing monstrous hybrid creatures. This has been interpreted as pointing to the Nephilim as the source of all monsters in the pre-flood era.
And this, ultimately, is why Noah is told to preserve “every kind” in the ark. God was resetting creation, preserving genetic lines, and starting fresh. But the implication is twofold: first, that Noah was chosen because his bloodline was uncorrupted by angelic influence (one interpretation of being “perfect in his generations”) that before the Flood, the world contained creatures and hybrid beings that God had not originally intended.
Recall how his statement such as the last one just quoted contradict his post-flood Nephilology.
Reference to the Book of Enoch gets us into what I termed Folkloric Territory in the title of my article as with time and telling, Nephilim grow in stature and actions: ever wilder—and neo-theo-sci-fi-tall-tales in more modern times.
The fact is that what’s specifically 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.
To the list, he adds:
The Book of Giants: The Missing Link
Among the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran, archaeologists found fragments of a text called the Book of Giants. This text, dating to the 2nd century B.C. or earlier…we can piece together describes:
The Watchers’…producing the giant offspring called Nephilim. The Giants’ Corruption: These giants were not merely large humans…some scholars believe the Book of Giants was once part of 1 Enoch.
Giants and Dragons: Where the Evidence Actually Comes From…Source 1: The Manichaean Book of Giants (3rd-4th century A.D.)…Source 2: The Decretum Gelasianum (5th-6th century A.D.) Even more intriguing is a much earlier, independent attestation of this tradition. The Decretum Gelasianum— a Latin document traditionally attributed to Pope Gelasius I (492-496 A.D.), though likely compiled in its final form in the early 6th century —contains a list of books considered apocryphal by the Roman church. Among them is this entry:…“The book about the giant named Ogias, who the heretics claim fought with a dragon after the flood—apocryphal”…Source 3: The Babylonian Talmud…(Niddah 61a) [500 AD]
We can’t claim that a 2nd-century B.C. Jewish text explicitly states that antediluvian giants fought dragons. That’s what I originally implied, and it wasn’t accurate.
…the broader Enochic tradition (1 Enoch 7-8)
So, “2nd century B.C….3rd-4th century A.D.…5th-6th century A.D….492-496 A.D.” and The Babylonian Talmud from between 400-500 AD. The issue is that those late dated texts give no indication of providing any reliable pre-flood history but give every indication of being folkloric.
Kevin B. Potter added:
The Days of Noah and the Days of the Son of Man
Jesus Himself referenced this antediluvian period:
“For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24:37-39)
Yes, Himself referenced this antediluvian period but since that’s one of the most abused texts by the pop-Nephilologists who try to force Jesus to be referring to a return of Nephilim (which is utterly un-biblical) I’ll mention that Jesus’ words, His emphasis, His points, His context, were:
“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.”
But He kept speaking directly with:
“Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all—so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed” (Luke 17).
Thus, this was about examples of being unaware/unconcerned about coming judgment.
Lastly, he noted:
Angels violated created boundaries by mating with humans
This produced hybrid offspring of enormous size
The antediluvian world contained both giants and megafauna
Yes, “Angels violated created boundaries by mating with humans” yes, “This produced hybrid offspring” no indication of, “enormous size” and well, to whatever he’s referring by, “The antediluvian world contained both giants and megafauna.”
He offers these options:
Option 1: Rationalize or Allegorize
Genesis 6 is poetic or mythological
The Nephilim were just tall humans or tribal chiefs
Option 2: Take it Seriously
Genesis 6 describes actual historical events
The Nephilim were literal hybrid giants
…The Book of Giants preserves authentic traditions
Even on option 1 there’s no reliable indication, “Nephilim were…tall.”
Taking option 2 doesn’t result in, “giants” (as per his misusage) and so it’s not the case that, “The Book of Giants preserves authentic traditions”—The Apocryphal Nephilim and Giants: Encountering Nephilim and Giants in Extra-Biblical Texts.
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