The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim (32 page)

They were closely associated with the wicked Cana’anites after the Flood.

In one case they are described as having polydactyly (extra fingers and toes).

Unlike the Cana’anites, there are no examples of Nephilim who became followers of God.

The Genesis account clearly states that the Nephilim were on the earth both before and after the Great Flood. This generates another
question all on its own: If God sent a devastatingly tragic universal deluge that killed off all human beings and every other living thing, for the purpose of wiping out and completely exterminating this hybrid race,
why did it not work?

Did God in all his biblical attributes of omniscience and foreknowledge not know that his act of judgment would not have the desired effect? Did God make a huge blunder, or was there something more going on? Was the great flood not as universal as we are told, allowing for the escape and survival of some of the Nephilim? Perhaps, as Ancient Alien theorists suggest, the Nephilim bugged out as soon as they knew of the Great Flood’s impending arrival. Could the same space craft have returned to take away the remnant, only to redeposit them on the earth after the flood waters had receded? These are all—pardon the pun—giant questions. As we’ll see at the end of this book, there may be some answers that will explain their return, and why Moses penned this:

“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the Sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them…”

(Genesis 6:4a)

We’ve talked extensively about Elohim, and we know that the word refers to both the singular God and the multitude of gods of the Divine Council, the context of the passage defining which usage is to be incorporated. The Princes of the Divine Council are also referred to as angels, as they are seen in the biblical texts and the apochryphal books of Enoch. One such instance of the word elohim in the plural was when King Saul visited the witch of Endor in 1 Samuel 28:13. The noun elohim is used in conjunction with a plural when the witch tells Saul that she sees “gods” (elohim) coming up out of the earth; this seems to indicate that the term was used to mean something like “divine beings” among spiritists in ancient Israel.

Elohim (
) is used nearly 3,000 times in the Old Testament for the name of God, and in addition to meaning “God,” it can also mean gods, goddesses, divine rulers, angels, god-like being or beings, or judges. In the New American Standard version of the Hebrew Old Testament, the word
elohim
is used in these instances for:

God, 2,326 times.
God’s, 14 times.
divine, 1 time.
divine being, 1 time.
exceedingly, 1 time.
god, 45 times.
goddess, 2 times.
godly, 1 time.
gods, 204 times.
great, 2 times.
judges, 3 times.
mighty, 2 times.
rulers, 1 time.
shrine, 1 time.

The shortened, singular name for God is the word
El
(
), which has the same meanings as above, but in a shortner, singular form: god, mighty man, and strength. It is very interesting to note that the Sons of God, the angels, and gods of the Divine Council had the name El incorporated into many of their names to denote their status as Sons of God, names such as the archangels bore: Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, Uriel, and even Azazel, who introduced the art of weaponry and warfare, as well as harlotry and prostitution to the humans. As mentioned earlier when talking about the bright shining gods, various other cultures have beings that have variants of the same word:

Sumerian
el
meant “brightness” or “shining.”
Akkadian
ilu
meant “radiant, shining one.”
Babylonian
ellu
meant “the shining one.”
Old Welsh
ellu
meant “a shining being.”
Old Irish
aillil
meant “shining” or “to shine.”
English
elf
meant “shining being.”
Anglo-Saxon
aelf
meant “radiant being.”

Philo of Alexandria (20
BCE
-50
CE
) wrote a commentary of Genesis 6 called
Concerning the Giants
. In it, he emphasized that the passage was not a myth:

And when the angels of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful, they took unto themselves wives of all of them whom they Chose.” (Genesis 6:2) Those beings,
whom other philosophers call demons, Moses usually calls angels;
and they are souls hovering in the air. And let no one suppose, that what is here stated is a fable, for it is necessarily true that the universe must be filled with living things in all its parts, since every one of its primary and elementary portions contains its appropriate animals and such as are consistent with its nature; the earth containing terrestrial animals, the sea and the rivers containing aquatic animals, and the fire such as are born in the fire (but it is said, that such as these last are found chiefly in Macedonia), and the heaven containing the stars: for these also are entire souls pervading the universe, being unadulterated and divine, inasmuch as they move in a circle, which is the kind of motion most akin to the mind, for every one of them is the parent mind. It is therefore necessary that the air also should be full of living beings. And these beings are invisible to us, inasmuch as the air itself is not visible to mortal
sight. (But it does not follow, because our sight is incapable of perceiving the forms of souls, that for that reason there are no souls in the air; but it follows of necessity that they must be comprehended by the mind, in order that like may be contemplated by like. [author’s emphasis])
²⁴

It was sometime during the mid-1990s, while deep in an engaging conversation with friends, that a little light bulb popped on over my head, rather suddenly. We had been talking about aliens, D&D,
Star Trek
, and general metaphysical and ufological genre stuff, enjoying the heady, mystical, metaphysical atmosphere we seemed to be conjuring up in front of the fireplace. Of course, the Guinness was flowing pretty freely, and we all had reached that “higher plane” of enlightenment—you know, the one where all your thoughts suddenly have no filters, and your words come out as if they’d been under restraint for all the days of your life prior to that moment.

Well, this was one of those moments.

I jumped to my feet, yelling several exclamatory expletives of joy upon realizing that I had just stumbled upon a new discovery—at least for me. The information was nothing new, nor was it going to win me a Pulitzer or high praise around the world, but at that moment, it was completely new to me: UFOs and aliens are somehow inextricably linked to the Flood of Noah and the wildly fantastic breed of hybrid Nephilim that appeared at the beginning of the biblical account.

See? Nothing new.

But what occurred to me at that moment was a sudden understanding of the link between events that took place thousands of years ago, and what seemed like events that were taking place today. And this was
the biblical passage that spawned the entire
gadzooks!
scene in front of my friends’ living room fireplace:

“26 Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.”

(Luke 17:26-27)

And cross-referenced in Matthew’s gospel:

“37 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”

(Matthew 24:37-39)

These were the words of Jesus, spoken to his disciples. In their context, they were speaking less about the
conditions
of the times of Noah, than they were speaking to the suddenness of God’s wrathful judgment, in that people were still marrying and partying all the way up until they heard the slamming door of the ark that Noah had been building for 120 years. When the first little droplets of rain started to pitter-patter off their foreheads, they suddenly realized that all Noah had been saying was coming to pass. It’s not that they hadn’t
heard
Noah’s words of warning; it was that they didn’t
believe
them.

There was a deeper application of the passage than the simple suddenness of judgment—the idea that the things that were taking place all around us in current-day ufology and alien contact scenarios, seemed to be exactly what was taking place when the Watchers interbred with human women and sired the Nephilim. We asked ourselves that night:
Is this a repeat of angelic or demonic beings attempting to infiltrate the human bloodline to stave off a second judgment? Was this the precursor to the fulfillment of all the eschatological prophecies and the path to Armageddon?