Holy Moly: Nephilim

Oh, the Nephilim.  There are so many different translations of this passage and different commentaries, and it's difficult to untangle them all.  I don't think I'm even going to try, because I'd just like to say something different here.

But first, here's the Common English Bible's translation of Genesis 6:4.

In those days, giants lived on the earth and also afterward, when divine beings and human daughters had sexual relations and gave birth to children. These were the ancient heroes, famous men.

They footnote "giants" as "Nephilim" because that's the Hebrew word and we can't be sure whether the authors meant literal giants or just that "Nephilim" was a tribal name, or possibly that by "giants" they meant the same thing as we mean when we say we "stand on the shoulders of giants," meaning great men (this seems the most likely).

Sometimes "divine beings" is translated as "sons of God," which has led some people to speculate that what is actually meant is that the children of Adam through Seth were uniquely blessed, being these sons of God, and meanwhile there were other strains of humanity, either descendants of Cain or of Adam's other, unnamed children, and the children of Seth polluted their divine bloodline by intermarriage (as opposed to, say, incest, which would seem like the only other option, but don't judge too harshly; it was pretty common in the old days when one wanted to keep one's tribe pure).

And sometimes it seems like these "giants" are the result of the sons of God and daughters of men having sex, but other times it seems like the Nephilim might actually be those sons of God or divine beings.  Like I said, it's confusing.

Before I leave that by the wayside, people who believe in the literal Bible have to believe in this stuff too.  Because if there's one thing that "ancient heroes, famous men" and "giants" says to me, it's that we should be taking everything we read literally.  And also, they're not reading the Hebrew original, so they're probably taking King James' version literally, which is:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Yeah, so they're literally believing that about 6000 years ago, humans and giants literally interbred.  I've heard justifications, but they don't hold much water.  Nor do I care to make any wild theories, because... well, give me a second.

See, here's how I read it:

Once upon a time, when the world was young, there were great men, heroes, who arose from the divine bloodline.  We've already given you the names of some of them.  Remember Enoch?  He was a giant and lived for 365 years.  Now let me tell you the story of when one of those great men, Noah, was the last righteous man in the world, and what God did to save him from destruction.

Gods intermarrying with mortals?  Yep, the Greeks did that.  So did the Egyptians.  So did pretty much every other ancient culture.  How else to explain great deeds and great men?

So I don't think it's that strange a passage, really.  It's setting up the story.  But what annoys me is that clearly there were plenty of good stories about the Nephilim because they were great men and so forth, but we don't hear about any of them.  If you start a story with, "Once upon a time there were great heroes on the Earth..." I want to hear about more than just, "... and then God got mad that the heroes were falling into sin and decided to wipe them all out with a flood."

How many of these great heroes, these Nephilim, are we missing out on?  Gilgamesh has a great flood too (as do many other traditions and stories) but we also get to see him kicking some ass and adventuring.  Did the writers of the Bible take all the old stories and just pick this one?  Did there used to be whole other books of the Bible where other Nephilim fought Enkidu, invented fire, forged magic rings, or any other adventures that other "giants" of myth have got up to?

I tend to think that there was probably some recycling going on.  Likely some of the stories of these heroes made it into the Bible in other places where they needed great heroics.  But still, wouldn't it be amazing to hear some of the stories as they originally were told?

But be that as it may, we've got the set-up: there were and still are heroes in the world, and one day the last righteous man was Noah, descended from a long line of giants.  And so God said... well, we'll get to that next.