The Nephilim are the giant offspring of the fallen angels and mortal women — the monstrous half-celestial beings whose violence and corruption, in Hebrew tradition, brought the world to the brink of ruin and called down the great Flood. They are the dark fruit of the Watchers’ sin, the children who should never have been born.
The Sons of the Watchers
Their origin is told in the cryptic verse of Genesis: “The sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair; and they took them wives... There were Nephilim in the earth in those days... mighty men who were of old, men of renown.” The Book of Enoch unfolds the tale: the fallen [grigori], led by [semyaza], descended and took human wives, and from these forbidden unions were born the Nephilim — giants of immense and terrible stature, neither fully angelic nor fully human.
The Devourers of the Earth
The Nephilim grew into a scourge upon creation. The Book of Enoch describes their insatiable appetite: they consumed all the labor of humankind until people could no longer sustain them, and then the giants turned against humanity itself, devouring flesh and drinking blood, and warring against the beasts and birds and fish. The earth, filled with their violence and bloodshed, cried out to heaven. Their very name is linked to the Hebrew root for “to fall” — the fallen ones, or those who cause others to fall.
Judgment and Remnant
So great was the corruption loosed by the Nephilim that God resolved to cleanse the world with the Flood. The archangels were sent to bind the Watchers and to set the giants against one another, that they might destroy themselves in mutual slaughter; the waters then swept away what remained. Yet tradition held that the disembodied spirits of the dead Nephilim became the evil spirits and demons that afflict the earth thereafter — and that giants appeared again in later ages, the [anakim] and [rephaim] whom Israel encountered in the promised land. In the Nephilim, Hebrew tradition gave form to the terrible consequences of the mingling of heaven and earth — the monstrous progeny of a transgression that nearly unmade the world.