The Nephilim and the Giants

The whole question hangs on one phrase in Genesis 6:2, the sons of God (Hebrew bnei ha'elohim). Everywhere else the phrase appears it names angelic beings (Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7), and this is the reading the site holds: the Watchers view. Angelic transgressors took human wives, and their offspring were the Nephilim, "mighty men which were of old, men of renown" (Gen 6:4, KJV).

The corruption helps account for the flood's severity, and the New Testament reads the episode the same way, Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4-5 speak of angels who "kept not their first estate," chained under darkness and tied to the flood generation. The Septuagint simply translates Nephilim as gigantes, "giants." (The full case for the reading has its own dedicated Watchers & the Nephilim study.)

The word Nephilim itself (H5303) is nearly a hapax, surfacing only twice: Genesis 6:4, before the flood, and Numbers 13:33, long after it. That second passage is deliberate. Israel's spies return from Canaan reporting, "there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers" (Num 13:33, ASV), the full report is Numbers' own hinge chapter. The text ties the giant clans of Canaan back to the antediluvian Nephilim, without narrating how they reappear on the far side of a flood that drowned all flesh. That seam is left open, not smoothed over.

The giants of Canaan are not a fading legend; they are a mapped, named military obstacle, and Deuteronomy keeps a careful ledger. The Emim of Moab were "accounted Rephaim, as the Anakim" (Deut 2:11); the Zamzummim of Ammon likewise (Deut 2:20-21). Og, king of Bashan, is called the last "remnant of the Rephaim," and his iron bedstead ran nine cubits long (Deut 3:11). At Hebron the sons of Anak, Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai (Num 13:22), held cities Israel itself called "great and fortified up to heaven," and the report that came back to camp asked, "Who can stand before the sons of Anak?" (Deut 9:1-2).

Then they fall. Caleb drives the three sons of Anak from Hebron (Josh 15:13-14). Joshua "cut off the Anakim," leaving a remnant only in Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod (Josh 11:21-22). That surviving pocket at Gath is where the line ends: Goliath, "six cubits and a span" (1 Sam 17:4), and the four men "born to the giant" in Gath, including one with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot (2 Sam 21:15-22). Amos later remembers the Amorite as one whose "height was like the height of the cedars" (Amos 2:9). The arc runs from the shepherd's stone back to Genesis 6.

The site names its posture plainly, and sets the alternatives beside it in full, because each takes the text seriously. Three readings of "the sons of God" descend from Genesis 6:2.

The Watchers / angelic view (the site's) reads bnei ha'elohim as angelic beings, consistent with its usage in Job, confirmed in force by Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4-5, and expanded in 1 Enoch (a labeled study resource, never treated as canon) and Josephus (Antiquities 1.3.1). Chuck Missler built the same case at length in Return of the Nephilim: fallen angels intermarried with human women, and the corruption of the human gene line was itself a driving reason for the flood.

The Sethite view, presented at full strength, takes the sons of God as the godly line of Seth and the daughters of men as the line of Cain, the sin is covenant-breaking marriage, not angelic union, and the "mighty men" are tyrants, with no giants required. It preserves the sexlessness of angels (cf. Matt 22:30), and became the majority reading after Augustine (City of God 15):

the sons of God saw the daughters of men--By the former is meant the family of Seth, who were professedly religious; by the latter, the descendants of apostate Cain. — Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Genesis 6:2

The dynastic view reads the sons of God as divinized kings whose sin is despotic polygamy, a minority position that fits ancient royal titulary.

The genuinely unresolved point is the post-flood reappearance of giant clans. Numbers 13:33 links the Anakim to the Nephilim but supplies no mechanism. The honest posture is to hold that seam open rather than invent a bridge the text never builds. Every claim here is Scripture or a sourced, attributed voice; what cannot be sourced is left out.