Aaron Reich wrote an article titled Nephilim: Who are the giants of the Bible, Jewish lore?
Since he beings by asserting, “Nephilim are giants” we need to be on the lookout for whether, in one way or another, he will answer these key questions:
What’s the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants” in English Bibles?
What’s Reich’s usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants”?
Do those two usages agree?
Reich oddly claims that they, “appears in three locations in the Bible…Genesis…Numbers and…Ezekiel.” Most sources list the first two so let’s work our way through them.
First, “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of the nobles would come to the daughters of man, and they would bear for them; they are the mighty men, who were of old, the men of renown” since, “in Genesis 6:2, it says the following verse: ‘That the sons of the nobles saw the daughters of man when they were beautifying themselves, and they took for themselves wives from whomever they chose.’
Reich notes, “the phrase ‘sons of the nobles’ is a translation of ‘bnei elohim,’ which can be translated as ‘sons of God’” yet, “According to the biblical commentator Rashi, the phrase refers to the sons of princes and judges” while, “Others have posited that the sons of God were angels who had children with humans.”
Rashi—Rabbi Shlomo ben Yitzchaki or Salomon son of Isaac—lived 1040-1105 AD which is after centuries of commentary upon that text. 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 princes or judges or nobles view is actually one of the earliest ones but was held by about 1% of the sources. That claim is that it pertained to polygamy—which would have apparently become too rampant since Lamech was a polygamist but no flood resulted from that.
Reich notes, “this theory is especially popular among Christians, it is present in Judaism too, specifically in the Midrash[im]…in the Talmud [Bavli], in Nidah 61a and Yoma 67b.”
As a side note, he notes, “Satan is but another angel” but he’s actually a Cherub (Ezek 28:14).
Continuing, “The next mention of Nephilim in the Bible is in the Book of Numbers, regarding the tale of the spies…‘They spread an [evil] report about the land which they had scouted, telling the children of Israel, ‘The land we passed through to explore is a land that consumes its inhabitants, and all the people we saw in it are men of stature. There we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, descended from the giants. In our eyes, we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes” (brackets by Reich).
Let’s slow down a sec since reference was made to, “the spies…They” but 12 spies were dispatched but it was the 10 unfaithful, disloyal, unreliable ones who presented that within the evil report and were rebuked by God: there’s literally no reason to believe their mere assertions—see my post Chapter sample: On the Post Flood Nephilim Proposal.
He notes, “the word ‘Nephilim’ translated as giant” but technically that’s a rendering, not a translation. In fact, he noted, “Rashi says that the word Nephilim is actually derived from the word ‘naflu,’” typically transliterated as naphal, “itself a root of the verb ‘to fall.’” Aaron Reich notes, “The inconsistency regarding the translation of this word is a recurring issue here” and it is, it’s a HUGE issue which leads to all sort of assertions and problems such as word-concept fallacies.
Now, he points out, “Here, the verse identifies the giants as the sons of Anak” and note that he’s surely consulting a Masoretic version while the LXX version lacks any reference to Anakim in that text. Bottom line is that since there’s never been any such thing as post-flood Nephilim, in any way, shape, or form, then no one post-flood could have come from them, be in any way related to them, etc., and that’s because God didn’t fail, didn’t miss a loophole, the flood wasn’t much of a waste, etc.
Reich concludes, “The question of angelic descent isn’t really an issue here” since Nephilim weren’t really there and Anakim aren’t related to them and, “In this case, these Nephilim seem to simply be giants” but we still don’t know to what the word, “giants” refers.
We then come to, “the Book of Ezekiel…‘But they will not lie with the mighty men, [for they are] inferior to the uncircumcised who descended to the Grave with their weapons, and they laid their swords under their heads and their iniquities were upon their bones, for the destruction of the mighty was in the land of the living’…the phrase ‘mighty men’ in Hebrew is either ‘Gibborim noflim’ or ‘Gibborim Nephilim.’”
Well, it’s more like naphal gibborim as in a mere reference to once mighty men who have fallen, dead which is actually Aaron Reich’s point, “If the case is the former, which seems likely, then it simply means ‘fallen heroes’ or ‘fallen warriors.’”
Regarding, “other giants in the Bible” I would ask, “other” besides whom? He notes, “aside from the Anakim, there were also the Repha’im…though whether they are physical giants or ghosts or deified ancestors is another debate altogether…Amorites…the Bible describes them as massive, gigantic figures…Among specific giants in the Bible, however, two stand tall above the rest: Og and Goliath…”
Let’s unpack that:
It would appear that by, “giants” Reich means something vague generic about subjectively unusual height. Thus, the answer to the third key question is, “no” since that’s not the English Bible’s usage since therein, 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.
Now, since the only physical description we have of Nephilim is from an unreliable evil report then we’ve no reliable physical description of them.
Anakim were a clan of the Rephaim tribe and, on average, they were, “tall” yet, “tall” is just as vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage as the word “giants.” So, they were, “tall” subjective to the average Israelite male who was 5.0-5.3 ft. in those days.
As for being ghosts well, that’s just based on (un-contextual) linguistics and Pagan mythology. The root rapha ranges in meaning and usage from healing to dead. Ugaritic literature has it that when kings or heroes died, they were referred to as kings and heroes. Yet, when they had been dead for some time they were called Rephaim and could be summoned form the grave to attend rituals, etc.—see Dead Kings and Rephaim The Patrons of the Ugaritic Dynasty. Biblically, they are a 100% alive people group.
As for, “Amorites…as massive, gigantic figures” well, that’s based on one single sentence, “Amorite…whose height was like the height of the cedars.” Yet, we can’t just take that one statement and run with it. Amos when on to directly quote God as stating, “I destroyed his fruit above and his roots beneath” but I’ve yet to encounter anyone who thinks that Amorites had literal fruits and roots growing out of their bodies. Amos was just telling us they were big and strong.
As for Goliath, sure, 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. As Reich put it, “oldest texts, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the writing of Josephus, and are at a much more conservative estimate.”
When it comes to Og, we’ve no biblical physical description of him at all. Yet, as Aaron Reich notes, “Midrashic and rabbinic commentaries” from millennia later, “describe him in greater detail….Og was a survivor of the biblical Flood, either being too tall for the Flood or clinging to Noah’s Ark” even though he wasn’t even born until centuries post-flood and he was a Repha, not a Nephil. Also, “Og picked up a massive mountain to throw at the Israelites” and on and on goes that folklore about him—see my book The King, Og of Bashan, is Dead: The Man, the Myth, the Legend—of a Nephilim Giant?
He then notes, “giants in…apocrypha, such as the Book of Enoch, Book of Jubilees and so on” about which you can consult my books The Apocryphal Nephilim and Giants: Encountering Nephilim and Giants in Extra-Biblical Texts and In Consideration of the Book(s) of Enoch.
Bottom line is that there’s no indication that such are anything but folklore from centuries, if not millennia, after the Torah: see my article How Nephilim Absconded from the Tanakh and Invaded Folkloric Territory.
Aaron Reich closes with, “these texts are still apocryphal and have not been accepted in the Jewish canon…Dead Sea Scrolls are believed to be the work of the Essenes, a known Jewish mystic sect that not all Jews took much stock in. As such, the validity of any of them as legitimate Jewish religious writing is the subject of debate.”
Overall, having produces a ridiculous amount of output, in various formats (article, books, and videos) as what I style myself, a Systematic Biblical Paranormologists, with much of that output being on Nephilology, I must say that Reich’s article is much better than 99% of what’s out there: it has some shortcomings but he overall hit various key points and included various very important qualifiers.
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