Who Were the Nephilim? Were They Really the Offspring of Fallen Angels and Humans?

The Nephilim are one of the great mysteries of the Bible. Some people say they were giants. Others say they were the children of fallen angels and human women. Still others say they were simply powerful men who became famous in a violent age.

So which is it? Let’s go slowly, and let’s start with something surprising.

The Bible Says Very Little

We often talk about the Nephilim as if the Bible had a lot to say about them. It doesn’t.

The word appears in only two verses in the entire Old Testament: Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33. That’s it. Everything else we think we know comes from somewhere else — later Jewish writings, church tradition, movies, or our own imagination.

So if we want the truth, we have to look very carefully at very few words.

What Does the Word Actually Mean?

Here’s the first surprise: the Hebrew word doesn’t mean “giants.”

The Hebrew is nephilim (נְפִלִים). Most scholars trace it to the root naphal, which means “to fall.” So the plainest meaning is “the fallen ones.”

Where did “giants” come from, then?

About two hundred years before Jesus, Jewish scholars translated the entire Hebrew Bible into Greek. That Greek Bible is called the Septuagint. When those translators reached the word nephilim, they chose the Greek word gigantes — “giants.” From Greek it passed into Latin, and from Latin into English.

So “giants” is a translation choice, not the Hebrew word. Height isn’t in the original at all. Falling is.

And that translation choice tells us something important. In Greek stories, the gigantes were the children of divine beings. So those ancient Jewish translators — the people closest to the original language and culture — clearly understood the Nephilim to be the offspring of something more than human.

That’s worth pausing on. Long before any of our modern debates, the earliest readers we can trace already understood this passage in supernatural terms.

Let’s Read the Verse Slowly

Here is Genesis 6:4, translated as literally as possible:

“The fallen ones were in the land in those days — and also afterward — when the sons of God would come to the daughters of mankind, and they bore to them. Those were the mighty ones who were from of old, men of the name.”

Three details usually get lost in English.

First, “would come” is ongoing. The Hebrew verb here isn’t a one-time past action. It carries the sense of kept coming — over and over, across a stretch of time. Whatever happened, it happened repeatedly. This wasn’t a single moment of weakness.

Second, “men of the name” means famous. The Hebrew word is shem — name, reputation, renown. These were men who made a name for themselves. A few chapters later at Babel, the people say, “Let us make a name for ourselves.” Same word. Genesis is quietly linking the two.

Third — and this is the honest part — the verse is genuinely unclear about who the Nephilim were.

Look at that last sentence again: “Those were the mighty ones.” Who does “those” mean? It could be the children who had just been born. Or it could be the Nephilim, mentioned back at the start of the verse. Hebrew allows either. The verse simply doesn’t say.

So Who Were the “Sons of God”?

This is the real question. Answer this, and the Nephilim question mostly answers itself.

There are three main views held by serious Christians:

1. They were angelic beings — members of God’s heavenly court

2. They were the godly line of Seth, marrying into the ungodly line of Cain

3. They were ancient kings who claimed to be part-divine

The third view has the fewest defenders, so let’s set it aside and focus on the two that most Christians actually hold.

Everything turns on one question: what did that phrase mean to a Hebrew reader?

What “Sons of God” Means in Hebrew

In English, “son of” means a child. In Hebrew, it usually means something different: belonging to a group or class.

The Bible calls a brave man a “son of valor.” It calls wicked men “sons of worthlessness.” It calls a group of prophets “sons of the prophets” — they weren’t the prophets’ children, they were members of a prophetic school.

So “sons of God” in Hebrew most naturally means “beings of the divine class” — not “children God fathered.”

Now, where else does this exact phrase appear?

• Job 1:6 — the sons of God present themselves before the Lord
• Job 2:1 — the same scene again
• Job 38:7 — the sons of God shouted for joy at creation

Look carefully at Job 38:7. God asks Job where he was when the earth’s foundations were laid — “when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy“.

This is before any human being existed.

Whatever the “sons of God” are in that verse, they cannot be people. There were no people yet.

That single verse is very difficult to get around. Everywhere else the phrase appears in the Hebrew Bible, it refers to heavenly beings.

What About the Line of Seth?

This is the view I was taught, and it’s held by many faithful Christians. It deserves a fair hearing.

The idea is that Seth’s descendants were the godly line, Cain’s were the ungodly line, and the sin in Genesis 6 was believers marrying unbelievers.

It’s a reasonable thought. But it has a problem worth naming honestly.

Genesis never actually says that. Read chapters 4 and 5 slowly. Seth’s descendants are not described as godly. Cain’s are not described as uniquely wicked. We bring that idea to the text because we know Cain murdered Abel — but Genesis doesn’t draw the line for us.

The Seth view removes anything supernatural from the passage, which makes it comfortable. But it does that by supplying details Genesis never gives us.

“But Paul Says Believers Are Sons of God”

Someone will immediately think of this verse — and rightly, because it’s one of the most precious verses in the New Testament:

Romans 8:14 — those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

If Paul says believers are sons of God, doesn’t that settle it? Couldn’t the sons of God in Genesis simply be godly men led by God’s Spirit?

I held that view myself. But there’s a problem with it, and it took me a long time to see.

Paul isn’t using the same phrase.

Genesis was written in Hebrew, roughly a thousand years before Paul. Paul wrote in Greek. And Paul has a specific word for what he’s describing. He calls it adoption.

That word appears again and again in his letters — in Romans 8, in Galatians 4, in Ephesians 1. Adoption is a legal word. It means someone who was not born into a family is brought in and given the full rights of a child.

And that’s the beauty of it. Paul’s whole point is that this is something we receive — not something we always were. We were outsiders. Now we’re family. It cost the death of God’s own Son to make it possible.

The Hebrew phrase in Genesis 6 isn’t doing that at all. In Hebrew, “son of” usually just means belonging to a class. It’s the same construction as “sons of the prophets” or “son of valor.” It describes what kind of being someone is — not a relationship that was granted.

So we have two different ideas, in two different languages, written a thousand years apart, that happen to look identical once they’re translated into English.

And here’s the turn.

The verse many of us use to argue that the sons of God were human actually points to something far better — and it points the opposite way.

Adoption as God’s children is offered to us. It was never offered to angels.

So Romans 8:14 isn’t really about Genesis 6 at all. It’s about you.

Angels may be older, stronger, and more glorious than we are. But no angel was ever adopted. No angel was ever called a child of God in the way you are, if you belong to Christ.

That’s not a smaller truth than the one we were looking for. It’s a much bigger one.

“But Jesus Said Angels Don’t Marry”

This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a careful answer.

Jesus said that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are “like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30).

Notice those last two words: in heaven.

Jesus is describing angels in their proper place — standing before God, doing what they were made to do. He is not making a statement about what a rebellious angel might do after abandoning that place.

And Scripture tells us plainly that some did abandon it:

Jude 6 says certain angels “did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode.”

That’s the key. If some angels left heaven, then a verse about angels in heaven doesn’t tell us what those particular beings could or couldn’t do.

There’s another detail worth knowing. In Luke’s version of the same teaching, Jesus says resurrected people are “equal to angels” — and in the very same sentence He calls them “sons of God” (Luke 20:36). So Luke uses the phrase “sons of God” while comparing humans to angels. The two categories aren’t as neatly separated as we sometimes assume.

“But Angels Are Spirits — They Can’t Have Bodies”

This is the second big objection, and honestly, it’s the one that falls apart fastest when you read the Bible carefully.

Yes, Hebrews 1:14 calls angels “ministering spirits.” But look at what spirits actually do in Scripture:

In Genesis 18, three visitors come to Abraham. He washes their feet. He prepares a calf, and bread, and curds. And they eat it.

In Genesis 19, two of those visitors go on to Sodom. Verse 1 calls them angels. Everyone else in the chapter calls them men. The men of the city surround Lot’s house and demand them for sex — which means these beings looked completely, convincingly human to an entire city. Then the angels reach out, pull Lot inside, and strike the crowd with blindness. That is a physical body doing physical things.

In Hebrews 13:2, we’re told some people have hosted angels without knowing it. That only makes sense if angels can appear so ordinary that you’d serve them dinner and never suspect a thing.

So the idea that “spirit” means “cannot take physical form” isn’t from the Bible. It comes from Greek philosophy, where spirit and body were treated as opposites.

The Bible doesn’t think that way. Paul writes about a “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44). To a Greek philosopher that phrase would be nonsense — like saying “a square circle.” To Paul, it wasn’t a contradiction at all.

What Jude and Peter Add

Two New Testament writers seem to point straight back to this event.

2 Peter 2:4-5 — angels who sinned were cast down and kept in chains of darkness for judgment. And the very next verse is about Noah and the flood.

Jude 6 — angels who abandoned their proper place are being held in chains until the day of judgment.

Now read the next verse in Jude very carefully:

Jude 7 — Sodom and Gomorrah, “in like manner to these,” gave themselves over to sexual immorality and went after “other flesh.”

“In like manner to these” points back to the angels in verse 6. Jude is saying Sodom’s sin was the same kind of sin as theirs.

And “other flesh” doesn’t mean “someone else’s flesh.” The Greek word means flesh of a different kind — a different category altogether. At Sodom, humans pursued angels. Jude presents the angels’ sin as the mirror image of that.

This is the closest the Bible comes to telling us what those imprisoned angels actually did.

And if you’re wondering how beings held in chains could have fathered anyone, notice the order. They left their proper place first — that was their own choice — and God chained them afterward. The imprisonment wasn’t their condition when it happened. It was their punishment for it, and it is what brought it to an end. That is why it never happens again after the flood. The ones responsible were removed.

It also explains something else. Everywhere else in Scripture, fallen spiritual beings are active — Satan prowls, demons possess, evil powers work in the world. But this particular group is locked up. Two different groups, in two different conditions. They can’t be the same beings.

What About the Nephilim After the Flood?

Here’s the question that troubles most readers. In Numbers 13:33, the spies come back from Canaan and report seeing Nephilim there.

But everyone died in the flood except Noah’s family. So how?

I used to think the spies were using the word loosely — the way we might call a tall man “a giant.” But there’s a much simpler answer, and it’s sitting right there in the text.

Look at what the Bible says about that report.

Numbers 13:32 calls it an evil report — the Hebrew word dibbah means a slander, a false and damaging story.

And Numbers 14:36-37 tells us what happened to the men who brought it: they died by plague, as judgment for bringing that report.

Read that again. God struck down the men who gave this report, because the report was false.

So there may be nothing to explain at all. The same report claimed the land “devours its inhabitants” and that the spies looked like grasshoppers. It was fear talking. It was exaggeration. And Scripture doesn’t just record it — Scripture condemns it.

The two faithful spies, Joshua and Caleb, saw the same land and said nothing about Nephilim.

So What Can We Actually Say?

What the Bible does tell us:

• The word Nephilim means “fallen ones” — not “giants”
• Everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, “sons of God” refers to heavenly beings
• It wasn’t one incident. It continued over a period of time.
• Jude and Peter both say certain angels abandoned their assigned place and are now imprisoned
• Jude compares their sin to Sodom’s — a reaching across the line between human and angel
• After the flood, it never happened again

What the Bible does not tell us:

• It never explains how offspring could come from such a union
• It never says clearly whether the Nephilim were those offspring or a group already present
• It never says the Nephilim caused the flood

That last point matters. Genesis gives its own reason for the flood, and it isn’t the Nephilim. It’s that human wickedness was great, that every thought of the heart was evil, and that the earth was filled with violence.

The story of the sons of God sits right before that verdict. Genesis places them side by side and lets us feel the connection — but it never spells out the chain.

A Final Word

You may finish this chapter still uncertain, and that’s all right. Faithful Christians have disagreed about the Nephilim for nearly two thousand years, and they will keep disagreeing.

What I’d ask is this: hold your view humbly. Genesis gives us four short verses about something enormous, and then moves on. God chose not to explain it fully. Perhaps the details were never the point.

What He did make plain is who He is, and what He has done.

Hebrews sharpens it with a question: to which of the angels did God ever say, “You are My Son”? None. Not one of them. Whatever those heavenly beings in Genesis were called, that title was never theirs to hold.

But it was always His. Philippians 2 says that though He was in very nature God, He didn’t cling to equality with God. He emptied Himself and became obedient — even to death on a cross.

He didn’t need to reach for the throne. He owned it. And He laid it down anyway, for people who had nothing to offer Him.

Not a hand reaching up to seize.

A hand opening to let go.

Last updated 25 August 2026