Who were the Nephilim and what was their aim? Genesis 6:1-4
We try our best to keep from speculation and ideas of men, conspiracy theories, hidden knowledge. Let’s follow the trail of evidence, though, and attempt to answer this fascinating question.
In Job 1 and 2, we discover that Satan still had access to the Earth in the earliest years of the planet. Job’s story is considered to be among the earliest of the record.
Notice in those first chapters of Job that Satan is pictured as “walking up and down on the earth,” with his fellow angels. Then as now, he is looking for someone to accuse before the Father, and his eye fell on Job. You remember what happened after that.
From the concept of a fallen angel named Satan, along with his fellow fallen angels, it is not so much of a stretch to imagine a class of beings on the earth that stood out from the rest. The word “Nephilim” has as one of its meanings, “the fallen.”
The King James and others use the word “giants” to explain the Nephilim. That’s not as far from “fallen” as you might think. The base of the word means “to fell”, or to conquer others. It seems a little murky as to whether they were the “fellers” or the “fallen”, but you can understand the confusion of the translators.
Suppose they were a class of mighty – fallen – angels, assigned by their head to circulate among the growing population of the Earth with one idea in mind: deceive the human females into having relations with them, and creating a Satanic super-power on the earth that would one day reign supreme.
There is no question that such has been the purpose of Satan. Whether by lusts of the flesh, lusts of the eyes, or pure unadulterated pride and desire for power, Satan gives his all in every generation to conquer. This seems to have been his next major attempt after the Garden.
These “men” thus become the persons of the myths. So many of the stories we have written off as impossible could well have happened through this budding super-race.
It is mankind’s yielding to these beings that finally made God, after centuries of patience, draw the line on his creation, and decide to start over.
So my understanding of the passage is that the “sons of god” and the “giants” or “the fallen ones” (Nephilim) of Genesis 6 are one and the same. “These were the mighty ones who were of old, men of renown.”
Of course, they are all wiped out in the flood, at least the ones that came from angelic-human seed. But the fallen angels lived on with Satan and his bunch, in the atmosphere above us. It is not clear from the Job text, but some say he may have lived in the days of Abraham, meaning that there is a new infestation of Satanic spirit-men in those days.
And they are still here in the days of Moses in the wilderness. The sons of Anak are mentioned in numbers 13 and Deuteronomy 9, as “giants” (again Nephilim).
And Joshua is still l wiping out the anakim in his day. It was Caleb who came to Joshua and requested the mount on which Hebron stands, a place ruled by one Arba, the greatest of the Anakim of his day.
“Giants” even plague Israel later, as in the encounters with David and others.
Satan’s influence has been less than subtle in our history. He has found other techniques and will find other men and methods in our day, but learn the lesson of the Nephilim and remember that the battle still rages.