The Kingdoms Unveiled YouTube channel posted a vid by the subject tile. Since I’ve written about Douglas Van Dorn in my posts Review of Paul “Dr. Reluctant” Henebury’s review of Douglas Van Dorn’s book “Giants: Sons of the Gods” and My review of Zachary Garris’ review of Douglas Van Dorn’s book “Giants Sons of the Gods”, I thought to review it.
The vid’s info section reads, “The term ‘Nephilim’ is often translated as ‘fallen ones.’ Is this correct? Jon and Doug delve into why that translation is so common and why it is the wrong interpretation. Showcasing evidence from scripture that the ‘Nephilim’ are truly giant beings with unholy origins.”
I don’t know who Jon is, especially since the channel doesn’t seem to say and also, since I just copied and pasted the transcript from YouTube, I will just refer to the statements made by them in general since it would just take too much time to re-watch the vid and divide every statement amongst who, specifically, made it.
They begin by referring to “the Nephilim, the Giants” so we will have to see if they elucidate the following key questions:
The key questions are:
What’s the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants” in English Bibles?
What’s Jon and Douglas Van Dorn’s usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants”?
Do those two usages agree?
They notes, “a lot of arguments are made saying, really, the Nephilim just mean the ‘fallen ones.’” Well, technically it’s that the Hebrew root “naphal” means fallen/to fall/feller/to cause to fall, etc. The claim is that, “it doesn’t work, not only in the narrative but for the rest of scripture.”
They note and quote, “Genesis 6:4 ‘the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.’”
They specify, “three words that are going on here in the Hebrew and two of them are what really matters for us here: Nephilim and mighty men.”
They take a moment to note, “people will say, ‘Oh, that means ‘fallen ones’…people get the
thought that the Nephilim are actually fallen Angels.” Well, they were the offspring of those Angels.
See, “the sons of God came into the daughters of man and they bore children to them” and so the Nephilim were on the earth due to that so that they were, “the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.” The Gen 6 affair narrative’s contextual focus is the sons of God and daughters of men: their attraction, their marriage, and their offspring. Thus, it would violate that narrative’s contextual focus to artificially insert a mere passing reference to some unrelated Nephilim guys who just happened to be around at the time, are mentioned for no apparent reason, and about whom nothing more is said in relation to the narrative’s contextual focus.
Now, we come to a key issue when they note, “Nephilim are,” should be were, “what mythology calls the demigods so our Hercules, Achilles, Perseus, any of those kinds of guys.” Well, they could only be those specific guys if they lived pre-flood since Nephilim didn’t make it past, of course.
They next note, “the word Nephilim only appears one other place in the whole Bible and that’s in Numbers 13” now note that the narrative there is post-flood so what about what I just noted about Nephilim? Well, they note, “that’s the story where the spies go into the land of Israel and they come back with a ‘bad report,’ 10 of them, and they tell Moses, they say, ‘look, we went in there and we’re not able to defeat these tribes because we’re like grasshoppers in their sight,’ and then it talks about how gigantic and tall they are so that’s a contextual clue here that that we’ll also talk about when we get to Deuteronomy.”
Just to clarify, 12 spies were sent but it was the 10 unreliable ones who presented a bad/evil report and were rebuked by God. Within that report, they actually made five mere assertions that aren’t backed by even one single over sentence in the whole Bible. I know Jon and Douglas Van Dorn were conversationally paraphrasing but I will quote it for the sake of accuracy, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are” but since merely referring to strength wasn’t enough, they took their fear-mongering scare-tactic up a few notches, all the way to 11, “So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, ‘The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants” which flatly contradicts the original, reliable report by reliable guys (Joshua and Caleb) which noted, “the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit,” and following, “and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. 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” and note that the reference to Anakim is missing from the LXX version.
So, since this is the one and only physical description of Nephilim, even if just their height, but it’s from an unreliable report by unreliable guys whom God rebuked then we’ve no reliable physical description of Nephilim—and that alone debunks 100% of un-biblical Nephilology, particularly modern pop-Nephilology.
For example, Gary Wayne is one of the top-pop-Nephilologists and has been teaching for decades that Nephilim were, “giants” by which he means very, very tall. Yet, one little question from me forced him to admit, “we don’t know how big Nephilim were…we don’t know how tall that they were” (sic.) and yet, he then affirmed that he will keep referring to them as “giants”: what sense does it make to refer to the height of someone whose height you don’t know?
So, there’s literally zero indication of, “gigantic and tall,” and, “monstrously huge,” as they go on to assert—keeping in mind that those terms are all vague, generic, subjective, and multi-usage.
Now, since the only post-flood reference to Nephilim is unreliable then all that follows from that unreliable source is unreliable. Now, they note, “creatures…not normal entities, the entire world was afraid of them” well, that might have been the case, in a manner of speaking, if folklore about them was being told post-flood—if not then the bad/evil report started such folklore.
They then speculate that the 10 spies were, “exaggerating…but they weren’t exaggerating to the point where these were 7 foot people versus 5 foot people or even worse with Goliath: the Septuagint height, he’s 6.9 and King Saul is 6.6.” Well, no version has Saul’s height but since we’re told he was a head and shoulder above the average Israelite (male, presumably) and that was 5.0-5.3ft. then they added over a foot. Now, one of my reasons for writing this is to correct various errors in an iron sharpening iron manner. Yet, it’s interesting that they certainly come off as if they know that of which they speak, because they do in part, yet they miss some utterly fundamental issues and make missteps along the way.
So yes, it’s well researched of them to note that what I will in greater detail note as 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 7ft. so that’s the preponderance of the earliest data. I’m unsure why they mentioned Saul but some say that the taller range must be accurate because the shorter one places him to close to Saul’s height.
Yet, that’s an example of having one’s head stuck in a little box of thinking giantly and ignoring that the narrative about Goliath isn’t just about his height but specifies that he was, “champion” so it’s not just about pulling out the ol’ measuring tape and being done with it.
They then go back to the bad/evil report and make a common objection to the demonstrable fact that it’s utterly unreliable form beginning to end (see my Chapter sample: On the Post Flood Nephilim Proposal) by stating, “Joshua doesn’t correct them, he doesn’t say, ‘What are you talking about? There’s no Giants in the land. You guys are nuts. We can take it.’ He doesn’t say that.” Now, I’m glad that they followed up with, “that’s might be…an argument from silence” and there’s no might about it. See, the premise, the hidden assumption, is that it’s some sort of moderated debate and we have the full manuscript but that portion of the narrative ends at the end of the bad/evil report and the next thing we know about the 10 is that they are rebuked by God—to death.
So, we don’t need Joshua, nor Caleb, to tell us that God didn’t fail, the flood wasn’t much of a waste, those guys contradicted Moses, Joshua, Caleb, God, and the rest of the whole entire Bible, etc. since we can discern that for ourselves and do so quite easily.
For some odd linguistics reason, they note that in Num 13:33, “even though it doesn’t say Giants, necessarily, although we come back to this in Genesis 6” it does say that that they’re Giants, here they’re of great height.”
But that’s linguistically incoherent. We should never chase the English word around a Hebrew Bible. Also, note how they jump from the specific ancient Hebrew word Nephilim to the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word giants which makes it very hard to follow.
So, I might as well answer the key questions at this point:
What’s the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants” in English Bibles?
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.
What’s their usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants”?
Something about subjectively unusual height.
Do those two usages agree?
No.
Now, whatever version they’re quoting renders Nephilim as Giants so it’s mysterious why they asserted that Num 13:33, “doesn’t say Giants” since it does. Moreover, they think that Giants is referring to height so they refer back to Genesis 6 where, “it does say that that they’re Giants” but doesn’t provide a physical description, it’s also merely rendering Nephilim.
And, incidentally, even if one imagines that Nephilim means giant and giant means subjectively unusually tall if we jump to the conclusion that they were subjectively unusually tall based on one word then that’s a word-concept fallacy. For example, my wife has called me a giant many, many, many times but I’m just 6.0ft. Also, I can think of 5-6 usages of the term giants (and usage can vary even more than meanings/definitions).
They also make an odd statement (maybe based on an odd version) that, “it says,” keeping in mind that, “it” are 10 unreliable guys whom God rebuked and they’ll appeal to what they said from a non-LXX version, “that they are actually the sons of Anak…a guy who appears later in the Pentateuch.” Indeed, we know that Anakim were named after Anak who was Abra’s son: we have zero indication that any of them had anything to do with Nephilim. Nephilim were strictly pre-flood hybrids, Anakim (and they were a clan of the Rephaim tribe) were strictly post-flood humans, and there’s zero correlation between them.
They then get into linguistics (and I wrote the book on that, Bible Encyclopedias and Dictionaries on Angels, Demons, Nephilim, and Giants: From 1851 to 2010) since in Num 13:33, “the word Nephilim appears two times but the thing is it’s not spelled the same way in Hebrew…one…has the extra yod, or y, there’s no way to account for how you get that spelling with the verb,” the Hebrew root word, “naphal…there’s only one way that you can actually account for it, which is that it’s actually an Aramaic word that means a giant.”
Let’s assume that the root of Nephilim is actually the Aramaic naphiyla and that, “means a giant” well, that only begs the question: what does giant mean? See, it’s circular. Now, this is where it becomes a battle of the scholars since Dr. Michael Heiser argued for the Aramaic root and asserted it means giant but what did he mean by that? Well, he told us, “I don’t think the biblical giants were taller than unusually tall people of modern times (between 7-9 feet).”
Yet, The J. Edward Wright Endowed Professor of Judaic Studies, who is J. Edward Wright, Ph.D. himself, and who is the Director of the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona notes, “The term traditionally translated as ‘giants’ in both the Greek Septuagint (γιγαντες) and now in English is נפילים nephilim, a term based on the root נפל npl meaning ‘fall.’ It has nothing to do with size” and specifies that this goes for both Hebrew and Aramaic as “The root npl in Aramaic also means fall and not giants.”[1]
But still, we don’t really need scholars to ensure we don’t commit word-concept fallacies and accept an impossible to defend report.
Then “back to Genesis 6, what you would see is that there’s a translation of the Old Testament that
would call the Septuagint, this is the Greek translation of the Hebrew and it was done about 200 years before Jesus…and they actually chose the word gigantes to translate,” technically just render, “Nephilim and the word gigantes is very well known in Greek mythology because it means a giant.” Again, what does, “giant” mean? And why insert Greek mythology into the Hebrew scripture? What they failed to note is that gigantes means earth-born (as in born of the false Earth goddess Gaia). What the Greeks though about it or even what the Jews doing the translating/rendering centuries after the Torah is also irrelevant, actually, to the original meaning of the original text in the original Hebrew.
At this point, they take stock, “you have confirmation in two different ways the word does not actually mean the fallen ones or to fall” and yet, they admit, “although I do think that there’s a probably a word play going on there.” Well, neither of those are confirmations: both are circular and the second was asserted without telling us the actual meaning.
Now, the declare, “they’re Giants and…so now all of a sudden, when you see this, you have to ask yourself how is it that sons of God coming to daughters of men produces Giants.” The answer is simple: given their misusage of that term, there’s zero reliable indication that it does and only one unreliable sentence’s worth of indication that it does.
They also note, “the word mighty men is the word gibborm and the Septuagint actually translates that as giants as well. So it actually translates two different Hebrew words with one Greek word. Very interesting that the next time that word appears is with Nimrod and it says, ‘became a mighty man on the earth’ or, became a giant. And Nimrod, through all the scholarly work that’s been done on who he is, is almost always associated with one of the demigods of the ancient world. Somebody like Gilgamesh or Orion or Hercules, it just depends on who you’re reading, but the point is that that even he, through the word gigantes, is connected back, somehow, to these Nephilim.”
See what I mean about word-concept fallacies? Now we have God failing and the flood being much of a waste, with a fundamental feature left un-elucidated being just how that happened, base on one single Greek rendering of one single Hebrew word from centuries after the Torah.
Let’s review:
1) “the word mighty men is the word gibborm and the Septuagint actually translates that as giants as well” well, no, the Septuagint is Greek to it renders gibborim as gigantes not the English giants.
2) “So it actually translates two different Hebrew words with one Greek word” well, no, it renders three Hebrew words with one Greek word: Nephilim, gibborim, and Rephaim. And it was a terrible idea to render three very different words with three very different meanings and three very different morphologies with just one word.
3) “…Nimrod and it says, ‘became a mighty man on the earth’ or, became a” what it says is that he was a regular guy who became mighty, “Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man [gibbor]. He was a mighty [gibbor] hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, ‘Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the Lord.’” They would surely prefer the KJV, “Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one” but it matter not due to what I’ve noted and what I’ll note in the next point.
4) Yes, many play name-games with Nimrod if (and that’s a big IF), “the word gigantes, is connected back, somehow, to these Nephilim” then we have the God/flood problem and also that gibbor is supposed to connect him but apparently not so we had to wait for the Greek and then commit a word-concept fallacy.
If gibbor means connected to Nephilim then Gideon, some of David’s soldiers, Boaz, oh, and God are all connected to Nephilim since they’re all referred to as such. If gigantes means connected to Nephilim Rephaim are connected to them but they weren’t and also, it’s another circle since gigantes also renders gibborim so it’s the same issue.
This is another good sounding point, “a lot of times when the New Testament writers are quoting the Old [Testament] they’re using the Septuagint…I think it’s more than more than 50% of the time…they
are making translation and they’re also making interpretation…you have the Aramaic translation and you have the Septuagint Greek translation and they’re both translating it not as fallen ones…they’re both translating it going these are giants.” That was good sounding but we have seen is much ado about nothing, it’s just a big circle, and it’s based on various linguistic and logical errors.
[1] Private communique, July 2019
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