“There were giants (nephilim in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”
Genesis 6:4

Just about all ancient religions feature legendary characters who are the offspring of humans and gods. Some of the most obvious examples are Herakles (son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene), Cuchullain (son of the Celtic god Lugh), Gilgamesh (whose mother was the goddess Ninsun), the Japanese Emperor Jimmu (grandson of the sea-god Ryujin and great-great-great grandson of Amaterasu, Goddess of the Sun) and Achilles (son of the nymph Thetis). The authors of the Bible would obviously have difficulty incorporating this feature into their mythology, since their god Yahweh was not given to physical interaction with His subjects, and was hardly one to brook other deities, even demigods, in His neck of the woods. Thus, they dropped in these few verses in Genesis, implying the existence of a race of legendary giants back in pre-Flood days. The origin of these giants, the Nephilim, is expanded upon in the Apocryphal Book of Enoch, which tells of how a group of angels, led by one Semjaza, found the newly created mortal women rather appealing, and decided to engage in a bit of seed-sowing of their own. Naturally, God finds out and zaps all the randy angels off to Hell. Given that He now has a bunch of superhuman giants running about the place, He decides the best course of action would be – can you guess? – to flood the whole fucking world. Overkill? Yahweh would say He was “being thorough.”

The ironic thing is, of course, that drowning everything on the face of the planet (bar Noah’s family and a hastily assembled floating bestiary) doesn’t seem to have worked. In Numbers 13, the Israelite spies whom Moses sent to Canaan report that, yes, there’s milk and honey and all kinds of sweet shit over there, but also:

“…we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” Numbers 13:33

Giants, you say? Well, they can’t be the same giants as before, since all those big buggers drowned in the Flood, surely? Except that the Hebrew word used in Numbers is “nephilim” – that’s the same “nephilim” as is used to describe the half-angelic beings who were causing so much ruckus prior to Noah’s little boat trip. The Hebrew language has a number of other words for “giant” – “rephaim”is the one most commonly used to describe the giants they encountered in Canaan – so it’s telling that the spies specify that they saw “nephilim”, and not another sort of giant. Nowhere else in the entire Bible, save in the earlier Genesis passage, is the word “nephilim” featured, so there’s a clear link between the spies’ report and the angelic progeny of pre-Flood days. It looks as though these giants were bloody good swimmers.

Trying to get around this problem, the Book of Jubilees (also apocryphal) claims that God allowed the survival of one-tenth of the Nephilim, in order that they might act as demons and tempt humanity to sin. Cheers for that, God! Of course, if the whole point of the Flood was to cleanse the world of wrongdoing, allowing a group of sinners to stick around and perpetuate their evil scheming might somewhat hinder its effectiveness… You could have thought it through a little better, that’s all I’m saying.

So if the Nephilim managed to walk away from the Flood, what else might have survived? Unicorns, possibly? Perhaps the Yeti is actually a pre-Flood creature that managed to survive by climbing to high altitudes in the mountains. Maybe there are still a few dragons out there, who knows? Or – and here’s a really wild and out-there proposition – could it be that the antediluvian Nephilim, the Canaanite giants and the very Flood itself were all pre-existing mythic fictions woven together by the Judean editors of the seventh century BCE, to try and create a meaningful history for the state of Judah?

Now that’s a crazy idea!