The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim (25 page)

Paul’s epistle to Church at Laodicea (Colossians 4:16).

Because we have spent so much time talking about and around, and quoting from the book of Enoch—as well as mentioning its exclusion from the scriptural canon—it seems time to give a little bit of history about the author and the book itself.

The Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish religious manuscript ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah (the same Noah associated with the Ark and Flood account of Genesis 6-9) and, according to the New Testament Book of Jude, the seventh generation from Adam. Enoch is one of those ancient manuscripts that was dropped out of the now-traditional biblical canon (the word
canon
comes from the Greek “
”, meaning “rule”). Simply said, you won’t find Enoch’s book in a current-day Bible, but it is grouped with several other books referred
to as the apocryphal writings, meaning they were considered to be hidden, esoteric, spurious, or of questionable authenticity by the Church leaders of the day. You can find some of these books in their own section in various versions of the Christian Bible, but they are clearly labeled as being “non-scriptural.” And though the Book of Enoch is considered to be questionable by Judaism and all of Christianity, it is regarded as canon by the Ethiopian Orthodox and Eritrean Orthodox Churches.

Dead Sea Scroll Fragment of Enoch 1. The backside of P.Mich.inc. 5552, showing portions of the Book of Enoch in Greek. This manuscript is part of the Chester Beatty Papyri, and is the third leaf of the surviving manuscript
.
Photo is licensed under Wikipedia Creative Commons.

The Book of Enoch, along with several of the other apocryphal books, were excluded from the Bible during the Council of Nicea in 325
CE
, which was convoked by the Roman emperor, Constantine, the first “Christian” emperor of the Roman Empire. But Constantine’s
status as a “Christian” is held in as dubious regard as some of the books that his empirically appointed church emissaries booted out of the Bible.

The first section of the Book of Enoch (Dead Sea Scrolls) describes the fall of a group of non-human entities known as the Watchers—the bene haElohim—the Sons of God who fathered the Nephilim. Their descent to the earth is chronicled not only in the Book of Enoch, but also in the old testament’s Book of Genesis, where the subject was edited down to a few mere sentences by either by Moses himself, or by later scribes. In the Genesis 6:1-4 passage, we find Moses doing what Moses often did: abbreviating and extrapolating vital information without much detail. The passage is obviously a series of quotations from a much older source regarding the Nephilim, but contains distinct earmarks of having been edited at a later date, as the writing style doesn’t match that of the rest of the book.

Despite modern scholars dating the authorship of the Book of Enoch to a time period in Jewish history known as “The Captivity” (around the third or fourth century
BCE
, when the Diaspora—the scattered nation of Israel—were living in Babylon), Enoch is a much older book. In the New Testament Book of Jude, the Book of Enoch is quoted, and obvious authorship attributed to Enoch, the seventh-generational descendant from Adam.

“14 Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: ‘See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones 15 to judge everyone, and to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts they have committed in their ungodliness, and of all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.’”

(Jude 1:14-15)

The apostle Paul, who wrote the little epistle of Jude, was an educated member of the Jewish Sanhedrin prior to his conversion to Christianity, and the Book of Enoch was very well-known to his educated, religious class.

The Book of Enoch opens with these brief words about Enoch himself, saying:

“2 [Enoch] a just man, whose eyes were opened by God so that he saw a vision of the Holy One in the heavens, which the sons of God showed to me, and from them I heard everything, and I knew what I saw….”

(Enoch 1:2)

This fragmentary manuscript is similar to portions of the Book of Jubilees, an important writing of Second Temple Judaism that survived only among Christian readers and that has long been known to us from versions in Greek and Ethiopic. Among Ethiopian Christians, Jubilees was so treasured that it actually became a part of their version of the Old Testament. Fifteen fragmentary pieces of Jubilees have turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls, establishing the work as one of the most common among those caches and clearly testifying to its importance for those who hid the texts. Like the Ethiopian Christians, they may have considered the book a part of the canon of Holy Writ.

In that light, the Book of Enoch seems to be a retelling of the Book of Jubilees, just as Genesis seems to be a very brief highlight of what is found in the Book of Enoch in its Nephilim segment. It may be that we should consider Enoch an example of “rewritten Bible,” the interpretive phenomenon we encounter so often in the scrolls. Surviving fragments of the scrolls labeled “4Q227” relate to Jubilees 4:17-24, but give the material in a different order.

Jubilees 4:18 reports that the angels taught Enoch the calendar.

Jubilees 4:22 says that Enoch testified against the Watchers, or fallen angels, who had taken human wives and whose progeny were the Giants.

Jubilees 4:23 speaks of the judgment of the entire world.

Frag. 2 i[…E]noch, after we taught him 2 […he was with the angels of God] six full jubilees 3 […the la]nd, into the midst
of the sons of man and he testified against them all 4 […] and also against the watchers. And he wrote all […] heaven and the ways of their hosts and [ho]ly ones 6 […So that the ri[ghteous ones] shall not commit error […]

According to Hindu philosophy, life in the universe is created, destroyed, and re-created once every 4.1 to 8.2 billion years. Each one of these creation cycles is a repeating period of time divided by four yugas, or epochs/eras. The cycles are said to repeat like the seasons of a year, waxing and waning within a greater time-cycle of the creation and destruction of the universe. Like summer, spring, winter, and autumn, each yuga involves stages or gradual changes that the earth and the consciousness of mankind goes through as a whole. These cycles, devolving from light to darkness are the Satya yuga, the Treta yuga, the Dvapara yuga, and finally the Kali yuga. A complete yuga cycle from a high Golden Age of enlightenment to a Dark Age and back again is said to be caused by the solar system’s motion around another star, a binary star system that rotates around our solar system.

In accordance with this cosmology, we are currently in the final yuga cycle, the Kali yuga, which is the darkest of the “seasons,” also known as the Age of the Male Demon [Kali], and the Age of Vice. According to the Surya Siddhanta, Kali yuga began at midnight on 18 February 3102
BCE
, and will last for 432,000 years.
⁵

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!”

—William Shakespeare
(Hamlet
II, ii)

Now we are on it. The “brass tacks” of this entire book: the Nephilim themselves. We have taken many words to get to this chapter, and we have examined many different foundations and rabbit-trailing facets that have lead us to this point, albeit
not exhaustively
. As I mentioned in the Introduction, I am certainly not the end-all and be-all on the topic of the Nephilim, the Watchers, their religious and spiritual aspects and ramifications, nor the alternative alien angle we have touched on in oh-so-cursory a fashion. I am, however, another in a long, ever-lengthening line of interested, invested researchers to study, examine, and come to somewhat scholarly conclusions. I have melded the scholarship done by so many others before me, broached the pop cultural, fringe, metaphysical science, and presented ideas and hypotheses drawn from the historical, cultural, archaeological, and anthropological data that is so scattered and diverse on this topic.

What is clear is that something phenomenal happened in our ancient past—and is still happening today—that ought not be relegated simply to the realm of the supernatural or the paranormal only because
it deals with subject matter that falls outside the lines etched in the sand by the scientific and religious communities. I have found it extremely daunting yet strangely interesting that the two differing camps in nearly any phenomena, theory, or topic out there, seem to unwittingly come together in their opposing dissentions and dogmatic stances when it comes to the Nephilim and all the surrounding information.

As I have mentioned in my public lectures many times, a study of the Nephilim is no simple task, for it encompasses a plethora of hugely diverse information that delves into so many other aspects of human existence. The story of the Nephilim is an enormous topic, for it goes to the roots of religion, faith, science, and the existence of humanity as we know it—or don’t know it—today.

On one hand, the Nephilim speak to the foundations of human development; the encoding of DNA and ancient anthropological development of human civilization. On the other hand, the Nephilim represent a caste of mutated, corrupt progeny, bequeathed by the Watchers, part of the military structured host of created beings who were subservient to the Holy God of the Jews and the Christians. And what you come down to is nothing short of a religious-scientific quandary: to decide which end of the spectrum you choose to believe regarding these characters who are so much the product of a mythological history. And, yes, it is about
belief
, because even the facts used to establish a more-or-less solid case for the existence of these beings does not follow the dictates of historical, scientific, and anthropological rules. Their source point lies within religious texts and the faith writings that comprise scriptures from all different spiritual aspects, and as you have already experienced in the earlier pages of this book, I have used as my starting point the Book of Genesis in the Judeo-Christian scriptures—after all, the word Nephilim itself is sourced from those pages.

You are reading this book because these things are of interest to you. You either possess a belief that they exist, and you want to know more about it. Or you have a curiosity about these sorts of mysteries that leads to you to find out what others have to say about them. Or you are simply looking on these pages to point out what I have missed or
where my theories are disingenuous or lacking in scholarship. Whatever the case may be for you, when it comes to the Nephilim and all the surrounding mass of information used to build up a case, you have to—in your own mind—come to one of two conclusions: Either the Nephilim are figments of spiritually based imaginations, or they are actual beings who existed, whether having non-supernatural explanations or spiritual ones.