Bible Science: Who were the Nephilim?

"Does the bible account for the creation of Neanderthal man?"

DISCLAIMER: If you are easily offended by ideas that are not traditional to teachings of the bible, then you may not want to read this…and you do this at your own risk.

I was just watching a show narrated by Simcha Jacobovici, called "The Naked Archaeologist," on the History Channel. In this particular episode he was in the search of proof that giants existed in the holy land. What he found intrigued me.

The obvious place to start was with the Philistine giant, Goliath. In one account he was said to equal 9ft tall…whereas in the Dead Sea Scrolls he is said to be a more realistic height of 6ft 7in tall. Common sense say's this discrepancy is contributed to scribal error?

The next lesser known figure he researched was King Og of Basham… who is legend for owning a giant iron bed. Simcha went to a site believed to King Og's burial mound. Upon questioning the leading authority on this subject, Simcha found that yet again the proof was lacking. Evidently the tomb had been looted leaving only traces of jewelry and some gold pieces. The tomb had obviously been a memorial to a very great man, but without bones, the iron bed, or even a sarcophagus, it is impossible to know the true height of the tomb's owner. But one thing we do know is that no skeletons have ever been found, ancient or otherwise, that have a height measuring greater than 6ft 7inches in the ancient middle east.

Then, Simcha realized that the Greeks must have also gotten their definition of the word giant wrong…and instead of looking for giants in the holy land, he should actually be looking for proof of the Nephilim in the holy land. The current translation say's that the Nephilim were the giant hybrid offspring between fallen angel's and humans… and that this offspring (giants) looked like humans, only they had no soul. Kind of hard to believe right? Try changing the definition of the word giant to mean "the fallen ones," which is what Simcha debates is the real meaning of the word giant. The "fallen ones" in this sense is supposed to refer to another specifically hominid type creature.

Of course this leads us down another exciting avenue we could possibly pursue. We know that humans are hominids, but humans have souls. The only other hominid that we know lived at the same time as early humans was Neanderthal man. Simcha proposes that humans originated in Africa and another hominid species originated in Europe and Asia. As each migrated toward the equator they inevitably met up somewhere near the mountains of Israel. Bones of both humans and hominids discovered within the same sediment layer suggests that, at some point in history, they were living together as a family unit (at least in this instance). One of the excavated skeletons even appears to have traits of both species. The obvious conclusion here is that this individual is a possible offspring.

Simcha goes on to say that survival meant that the two species must mate and that the resulting offspring became Neanderthal man. Fate would then have it that humans would survive and the other "soulless" hominids, along with the Neanderthal offspring, became "extinct"…explaining the name "the fallen ones."