Nephilim - in The Hebrew Bible

In The Hebrew Bible

The term "Nephilim" occurs just twice in the Hebrew Bible, both in the Torah. The first is Genesis 6:4, immediately before the story of Noah's ark:

1. When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them,

2. The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.

3. Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."

4. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

The second is Numbers 13:32–33, where The Twelve Spies report that they have seen fearsome giants in Canaan:

32. And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, "The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size.

33. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them."

The nature of the nephilim is complicated by the ambiguity of their mention in Genesis 6:4, after a seemingly unrelated passage discussing "the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose."Genesis 6:2 which leaves it unclear as to why they are mentioned other than to place their existence into a chronological context. Richard Hess in The Anchor Bible Dictionary takes it as read that the nephilim are the offspring from this union, as does P. W. Coxon in Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible.