Who are the mysterious Nephilim mentioned in Genesis, and how should modern readers understand such an unusual biblical story?
The Nephilim appear only briefly in the Bible, yet they have generated centuries of speculation. They have been described as giants, ancient warriors, supernatural offspring, and even creatures belonging to traditions that existed before the biblical text reached its present form.
GodBlog does not currently contain a separate post devoted entirely to the Nephilim. It does, however, explore a more basic question that matters greatly here: How should we read strange stories in Genesis and other ancient biblical texts?
This guide uses the Nephilim as a starting point for exploring several related GodBlog discussions about Genesis, biblical myth, literary interpretation, ancient traditions, and the difference between asking whether a story is literally historical and asking what the story is trying to say.
In this guide:
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- Where the Nephilim appear in the Bible
- Why Genesis contains difficult and mysterious stories
- Different ways of reading Genesis
- Myth as a way of expressing religious meaning
- The Bible as literature
- How biblical traditions developed
- Why mystery should not automatically become modern speculation
Related GodBlog reading is linked throughout the guide below.
The mystery begins in Genesis
The Nephilim appear in one of the strangest sections of Genesis.
Genesis 6 describes the “sons of God” taking human women and then mentions the Nephilim, figures remembered as powerful people of the ancient world.
The passage is remarkably short.
It does not clearly explain who the sons of God were. It does not tell readers exactly how the Nephilim were connected with them. It does not provide detailed descriptions of their appearance or explain their later history.
That absence of explanation has created space for interpretation.
Some readers understand the story literally. Others see it as a fragment of an older myth that became part of Genesis. Still others interpret the figures symbolically as violent rulers or mighty warriors.
Before choosing among those explanations, however, another question comes first:
What kind of book is Genesis, and how are we supposed to read it?
GodBlog approaches precisely that problem in Genesis: The Snake Had a Point.
More than one way to read Genesis
In Genesis: The Snake Had a Point, GodBlog considers two very different approaches to the opening book of the Bible.
One approach treats Genesis primarily as a direct historical account.
Under this view, its events describe things that happened much as the text reports them. Readers then try to determine exactly what each unusual event means within that history.
Another approach sees Genesis as a collection of ancient traditions and stories brought together to explore fundamental questions about God, humanity, morality, obedience, knowledge, violence, and human nature.
The second approach does not necessarily make Genesis meaningless.
Quite the opposite.
A story can express something important without functioning as modern historical reporting.
That distinction becomes especially useful with the Nephilim.
Instead of immediately asking:
“What biological species were they?”
we might first ask:
“Why does Genesis place these extraordinary figures immediately before its description of a corrupt and violent world?”
The second question may bring us closer to the concerns of the biblical story itself.
Related reading:
→ Genesis: The Snake Had a Point
Why are so many details left unexplained?
Modern readers often expect stories to answer practical questions.
Who were these people?
Where did they come from?
How tall were they?
What happened to them?
Ancient biblical narratives frequently work differently.
Important information may remain unstated. Motives can be unclear. Characters appear briefly and disappear. Readers are sometimes required to live with uncertainty.
GodBlog explores this literary quality in Why the Bible Is Subtler Than Homer or Plato.
That article draws attention to the Bible’s habit of leaving significant things unsaid.
The gaps are not always failures in storytelling. They can force readers to interpret.
The Nephilim passage is an extreme example.
Genesis gives us enough information to recognize something unusual and threatening, but not enough to construct the detailed history that many modern theories claim to provide.
Perhaps the silence itself should make us cautious.
If the biblical writer does not explain something, modern readers should be careful about presenting speculation as certainty.
Continue exploring:
→ Why the Bible Is Subtler Than Homer or Plato
Does calling something a myth mean it is false?
The word myth creates difficulty in religious discussions.
In ordinary conversation, calling something a myth often means saying it is untrue.
Scholars commonly use the word differently.
A myth can be a traditional story used to explain how a community understands the world, humanity, God, good and evil, suffering, or the structure of reality.
The historical accuracy of every detail is then not the only question that matters.
GodBlog discusses this directly in A Christmas Message, or Does It Matter if the Bible Is Myth?.
That article considers theologian Rudolf Bultmann’s argument that biblical writings came from a world in which supernatural beings, heaven, demons, miracles, and divine intervention were understood very differently from the way many modern people understand reality.
Bultmann’s solution was not simply to throw away biblical stories.
He wanted readers to ask what religious or human meaning those stories were trying to communicate.
The same approach can be applied to the Nephilim.
Even if the passage preserves ancient mythological material, the next question remains:
What is the story doing inside Genesis?
Related discussion:
→ A Christmas Message, or Does It Matter if the Bible Is Myth?
The Nephilim and a world becoming violent
The location of the Nephilim story may be more important than many modern theories suggest.
The passage appears immediately before Genesis turns toward Noah and the flood.
The larger story describes humanity moving toward corruption and violence.
Against that background, the Nephilim are remembered as powerful figures from an earlier age.
That description can be read in several ways.
Perhaps ancient people remembered legendary warriors.
Perhaps the story preserved traditions about supernatural beings.
Perhaps the figures represented rulers whose power had become uncontrolled.
The text does not settle the question.
But Genesis soon shifts attention away from their identity and toward the condition of humanity as a whole.
This suggests that the author may be less interested in giving readers a catalogue of supernatural creatures than in portraying a world in which power, desire, and violence have escaped proper limits.
The mystery attracts us.
The moral problem may be what Genesis actually wants us to notice.
Reading God as a character in biblical stories
The Nephilim passage also raises questions about God.
Why does God respond to the world as Genesis describes?
What does the flood story say about divine judgment?
Does God react to human behavior, regret decisions, change course, or remain outside the story?
These are not simple questions.
GodBlog explores this unusual way of reading scripture in Stories About God.
That article discusses Jack Miles’ approach to the Bible as though it were a literary biography of God.
Instead of beginning with theological doctrines and then forcing every biblical episode to fit them, this approach asks what kind of character God appears to be within the story itself.
What does God do?
How does God respond?
What changes?
What does the narrative reveal?
That perspective can make Genesis 6 more interesting.
The Nephilim are not isolated curiosities. They belong to a developing story about the relationship between God and humanity.
Explore that approach:
→ Stories About God
How did biblical traditions develop?
Another useful question is how stories like this became part of the Bible.
Modern readers often imagine the Bible being written as one continuous book.
Its history is much more complicated.
Different writings emerged at different times. Traditions were preserved, edited, collected, interpreted, and eventually treated as scripture.
GodBlog explores the larger history of biblical development in A History of the Bible.
That history matters when we encounter a short and mysterious passage like Genesis 6.
A strange story may preserve an ancient tradition whose full background was familiar to early audiences but is no longer available to us.
Later readers then inherit only a fragment.
This may help explain why the Nephilim passage feels incomplete.
The biblical text may be referring to traditions its original audience already knew.
Modern readers do not have that advantage.
As a result, we try to reconstruct the missing world from only a few sentences.
For broader background:
→ A History of the Bible
Were the Nephilim giants?
This is probably the most familiar interpretation.
The Nephilim appear again in Numbers, where Israelite spies give a frightening report about the inhabitants of Canaan. They describe themselves as tiny by comparison with the people they saw.
That imagery helped create the long association between the Nephilim and giants.
But even here, readers should be cautious.
The spies are describing people they fear. Their report is designed to emphasize how impossible conquest appears.
Language about enormous enemies can communicate terror without functioning as an exact physical measurement.
Genesis itself focuses more clearly on power and reputation than on height.
Calling the Nephilim “giants” therefore reflects an old and influential interpretation, but it does not answer every question about them.
Were they children of heavenly beings?
Another interpretation begins with the mysterious phrase “sons of God.”
Elsewhere in ancient biblical literature, similar language can refer to heavenly beings.
Under this reading, Genesis describes divine or supernatural figures crossing a boundary between heaven and humanity.
Their relationships with human women then become connected with extraordinary offspring.
This interpretation became especially important in later Jewish tradition.
But once again, Genesis itself provides very little explanation.
Later writings expanded the story with names, motives, battles, forbidden knowledge, and elaborate accounts of giant offspring.
Those later traditions are important for understanding how ancient people interpreted Genesis.
They are not identical with Genesis itself.
That distinction matters.
Readers should separate:
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- What Genesis says
- What later religious traditions added
- What modern writers have added still later
Without that separation, a few mysterious biblical verses can quickly become an entirely different story.
Why modern theories become so elaborate
The Nephilim are especially popular online because mystery invites imagination.
When a text leaves gaps, people naturally want to fill them.
That has produced theories involving hidden races, ancient superhuman civilizations, secret bloodlines, extraterrestrials, and discoveries allegedly concealed from the public.
Such ideas may make entertaining stories.
They are not the same as interpreting Genesis.
The more responsible approach is to recognize where evidence ends.
GodBlog’s discussions of biblical myth and literary interpretation offer a useful principle here:
A mysterious story does not become clearer simply because we add more speculation to it.
Sometimes the intellectually responsible answer is that we do not know.
The Bible can remain meaningful without answering every historical question
Readers sometimes assume there are only two choices.
Either every detail happened exactly as a modern literal reading imagines, or the story has no value.
GodBlog repeatedly challenges that choice.
Biblical stories can be historically complicated and still raise important questions about human beings.
Genesis certainly does.
Its early chapters ask about knowledge, shame, responsibility, violence, jealousy, power, mortality, and humanity’s relationship with God.
The Nephilim belong within that world.
Whether they were remembered giants, ancient warriors, supernatural figures, or something else, their brief appearance contributes to a larger picture of a world becoming increasingly disordered.
That may be more important than knowing exactly how tall they were.
What can we reasonably conclude?
The safest conclusions are modest.
The Bible gives us very little direct information about the Nephilim.
They appear in Genesis and again in Numbers.
They are associated with extraordinary power and with ancient traditions that clearly impressed or frightened later readers.
Beyond that, interpretations multiply.
Some explanations may be more historically plausible than others, but certainty is difficult.
The mystery should not prevent interpretation.
It should encourage humility.
That attitude fits well with the larger way GodBlog approaches scripture: taking biblical stories seriously without pretending that every question has a simple answer.
Guide Summary
The Nephilim open a much larger discussion about how difficult biblical stories should be read.
How should we approach the unusual stories in Genesis?
Genesis: The Snake Had a Point
Why does the Bible sometimes leave important details unstated?
Why the Bible Is Subtler Than Homer or Plato
Can a biblical story be mythic and still communicate religious meaning?
A Christmas Message, or Does It Matter if the Bible Is Myth?
What happens when we read biblical stories as stories about God?
Stories About God
How did the Bible and its traditions develop over time?
A History of the Bible
Read together, these posts offer a broader way to approach the Nephilim. Instead of pretending that a few biblical verses answer every modern question, they encourage readers to think about Genesis as ancient literature, religious tradition, and a continuing exploration of God and human nature.
About This Reader Guide
This page is intended as a guide to related ideas already explored throughout GodBlog.
GodBlog does not currently have a dedicated original post about the Nephilim, so the links above do not claim otherwise. Instead, they lead readers toward the existing posts that are most useful for understanding how Fred approaches Genesis, biblical myth, literary interpretation, and the history of scripture.
The short sections introduce the Nephilim question. The linked posts provide the deeper discussions that help readers decide how such a mysterious biblical story should be understood.
Baruch Spinoza is experiencing something of a Renaissance, not his first. He goes in and out of fashion. I attribute the recent rebirth to Gilles Deleuze’s book, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988), but so much has been written about Spinoza in the last several decades, and from such different perspectives, including neuroscience and feminism, that Deleuze could just be a part of a periodic eruption of interest. /1/ I return to Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza as a theorist of joy later. A lot depends on how one translates the Latin word for “joy.” 
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