Genesis mentions them in a single verse, almost in passing, as if the writer assumed everyone already knew who they were. The Nephilim, it says, were on the earth in those days, the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men, and they were the mighty men of old, men of renown. Then the flood comes two verses later and the text moves on, leaving the Nephilim as one of the shortest and strangest passages in the entire Hebrew Bible.
The Book of Enoch, a text that did not make it into most modern Bibles but turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, fills in a much longer version. In it, two hundred angels called Watchers descend to a mountain, take human wives, and teach humanity forbidden knowledge, metalworking, cosmetics, warfare, astrology, before their offspring grow into giants that the flood is sent partly to destroy. Ancient historians outside the Bible, including the Jewish historian Josephus, treated the giant offspring of angels as an accepted part of the old world’s history rather than a myth.
Archaeologists have found unusually large skeletal remains at scattered digs over the last two centuries, though none have held up to modern forensic review as genuinely oversized humans.
The truth may be far stranger than we have been told, if the flood story we all know is really just the ending of a much older story that got trimmed down to one verse.
Ancient metaphor, or history the editors of the Bible decided to leave mostly out?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
What do you think about this? Puma Punku’s H-shaped stone blocks, cut from andesite by a culture dating to roughly 600 CE, are flat to within a couple millimeters, with no known metal tools hard enough to do it. Lost technique, or something we haven’t caught up to yet?
What do you think about this? The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a man calling himself R.C. Christian, and no one ever learned his real name before the monument was bombed on July 6, 2022. Message, or a monument that did not deserve to stand?
What do you think about this? Pacifica’s Devil’s Slide has swallowed sections of Highway 1 since 1937, and a WWII watch bunker still perched on its cliff edge has sat abandoned there since 1949. Geology, or a stretch of coast that keeps trying to shrug people off?
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