When the Giants Walked the Earth: The Nephilim and the Corruption of Creation
Last week, I explored the fallen angels of Genesis 6, the Watchers, and their descent into the human world. It is a strange story in its own right. But there is a subtle turn in the Scripture, one that shifts the focus away from the Watchers and onto something even stranger and more disturbing. And that is where the story becomes something else entirely. Their descent was not the full disruption. It was only the beginning of something terrible that took hold in the earth, something ancient writers describe as spreading beyond control, leaving consequences that may not be confined to the past.
The Bible tells us, almost in passing, that the “sons of God” took human wives and that their offspring were the Nephilim, the mighty men of old. And then, just as quickly, it moves on. There is no elaboration. No explanation. No pause to help the reader understand what has just been introduced into world history.
But ancient believers did pause. And what they understood from that brief mention was not a footnote in human history, but the beginning of something catastrophic and cosmos-shifting.
The Birth of the Nephilim
According to the Book of Enoch and related Second Temple Jewish traditions, the Watchers were not content with just marrying human women. They desired offspring. What followed was not ordinary human reproduction, but the emergence of beings that did not belong fully to either the spirit or physical realms.
Human women bore children described as giants, the Nephilim. But these are no ordinary children. How could they be? Their mothers were human, but their fathers were angels. In texts like the Book of Enoch, these births are not treated as ordinary human events but as fundamentally wrong, signaling a rupture in the created order itself.
The Nephilim are never described as children in the way we understand them. They are immense from the beginning, marked by excess, by scale, by a kind of presence that does not belong within the boundaries of human life. The texts do not linger on the physical details of their birth, and that silence creates its own unease. There are no named mothers. No stories of joy or family or ordinary life. Only the outcome, and that outcome is enough to suggest that whatever occurred was neither natural nor easily endured.
Some later readers have speculated about what such pregnancies might have meant for the women themselves, whether their bodies could have sustained what they were carrying, and whether these births came at a cost we can only infer. The earliest texts do not say. But they do not need to. The emphasis falls entirely on what entered the world, not on how gently it did or did not arrive.
What they do make clear is that these hybrid beings, the Nephilim, did not remain hidden or rare. The account of two hundred Watchers taking wives suggests not a single aberration, but a proliferation of relationships and giant progeny. The Nephilim soon appear across the land in numbers great enough to strain the earth itself. They are hungry and consume whatever is available. And when that is no longer enough, they take more.
Before I go on to the story as told by ancient sources, I should add a caveat. As I mentioned in my last post on the descent of the angels on Mount Hermon, this view of human/angel hybrid offspring is only one ancient interpretation, albeit one that was very widespread at the time. There are a couple of others. One is the Sethite view, which holds that “sons of God” were believed to be Seth’s descendants rather than angels. The other is that the angels who descended on Hermon produced “offspring” not in a physical sense, but through ritualized unions involving possession, where one parent was influenced or overtaken by a fallen being, resulting in progeny understood as partly human and partly something else. What follows in this post is the Enochic tradition, where actual physical offspring, giants, are described.
Whatever these unions were, they are remembered only for what they produced. And what they produced was not a new harmony between realms, but a distortion of both. And that may be the most unsettling part of all. The story does not present the Nephilim as a curiosity or even simply as a threat. It presents them as evidence. Evidence of what happens when a boundary meant to hold creation together is broken, and something enters the world that does not belong here, but remains anyway.
The Corruption of the Earth
If you try to imagine what this period would have felt like to live through, you have to set aside the fairly ordered world we tend to assume is normal. The texts do not describe a stable society with a few disruptions at the edges. They describe something far more total. A world collapsing from the inside out, where the familiar patterns of life no longer hold, and no one quite understands why.
At first, as the giants were born and grew, the change may not have seemed catastrophic. Life would have continued outwardly as it always had. Then whispers of trouble begin to spread, carried from village to village. The harvests are failing, not because the rains have stopped, but because something is consuming them before they can be gathered. What once fed entire communities vanishes in a matter of days. People begin to hide portions of their crops, burying what they can, guarding what little remains.
And then they see them. Not from a distance, not as rumor, but moving across the land itself, figures too large to ignore, giants stripping their fields with relentless efficiency. What had once been the steady rhythm of sowing and reaping becomes frantic, unstable. The earth still produces, but it is no longer enough for the people and the giants. It will never be enough again.
At some point, it gets even worse. The sounds of nature begin to change. The herds thin first. Livestock disappears, not in scattered losses, but in numbers that cannot be explained. Hunters go out and return empty-handed, or do not return at all. The forests grow strangely quiet. Birds lift off and do not return. The familiar patterns of migration and movement begin to break apart. People begin to notice patterns where none should exist. Places where the air feels wrong. Paths that once felt safe are now avoided without explanation. Those who travel speak less of what they saw and more of what they felt, an unease that lingers long after they return. People stop traveling alone. Then they stop traveling at all. They hunker down.
And then the stories shift. It is no longer just that the animals are gone, but also how they are found. Remains are scattered in ways that suggest something more than hunger, bones broken and left, carcasses torn without the logic of survival. Behavior that does not fit instinct. Predation without purpose. A sense, difficult to name but impossible to ignore, that the natural order itself is no longer holding, that something deeper than scarcity has arrived.
It is worth remembering that these are pre-flood times. According to the broader biblical tradition, the Creator gave humanity only plant-based foods at the beginning, and it is not until Noah survives the flood that permission is granted to eat animal flesh. Within that framework, the shift described here is not simply dietary. It is a boundary shift in the moral and created order itself. The line between stewardship and domination collapses. Killing and bloodshed spread across the earth at a scale never seen before. The natural world is no longer something tended or shared. It is something to be killed and consumed. And slowly, the natural world begins to break down, and creatures begin to disappear.
In some regions, survival begins to take on a different shape. There are places where the violence does not come randomly, but with a kind of terrible consistency. Territories form, though no one would have called them that before. Boundaries you do not cross. Valleys you do not enter. Roads that are simply abandoned. Those who live near these places learn quickly. You leave offerings for the giants, if you can. You hide if you cannot. You teach your children not just where to go, but where never to go, no matter what. And over time, a kind of understanding settles in, unspoken but shared: parts of the world no longer belong to humanity. The giants are in charge.
Crossing the Final Line
And then comes the final line that should never be crossed. According to the Book of Enoch, the violence turns inward. Cannibalism begins, and humanity itself becomes prey. The giants begin to slaughter and consume humans, and the texts do not describe this as rare or hidden, but as something that spreads insidiously across the earth. There is a sense of dread in the way the tradition moves through it, as if even language strains to hold what is being described. The giants not only shed blood; they drink it. The giants are not only violent when necessary; it becomes their norm, perhaps even ritualized. It is possible that this did not happen randomly but systematically, with human communities offering up lives at appointed times to survive. Could this be where the shared ancient pattern of human sacrifice originated?
The scale of this violence is difficult to imagine fully. Genesis 6 describes the corruption as global, and this becomes more plausible when considered alongside the Enochic framework. Two hundred Watchers descend and take wives, likely more than one each, and within a few generations, their offspring could number in the tens of thousands (speculatively). Given their physical dominance and access to the heavenly knowledge imparted by their fathers, knowledge about weaponry, sorcery, navigation, and manipulation of the physical world, they would have been mobile, organized, and capable of widespread control. No region of the world would have remained untouched.
Even Nature Itself Is Corrupted
As if the violence and cannibalism were not enough, the texts also suggest that the corruption was not limited to violence alone. Earlier in Enoch, the Watchers are described as teaching not only metallurgy and warfare, but also enchantments, incantations, and the manipulation of living things. Some later Jewish traditions, less detailed and more speculative, hint at further distortions emerging from this knowledge. It is not difficult to imagine that the boundaries between species, between spirit and matter, or even between life and non-life began to loosen during this period.
These traditions speak of poisons derived from herbs, of love potions, fertility manipulation, and ritual practices used to induce altered states. There are also references to incantations, spoken formulas meant to influence reality itself: to calm storms, reverse curses, heal, bind, or release unseen forces. Words are no longer simply for communication. They become tools for controlling the natural world and weapons for killing.
The Book of Jubilees records that even the animals became disordered. Jubilees is another ancient Jewish work that retells the stories of Genesis and early Exodus with additional detail and interpretation. It reflects the same world as Enoch, expanding on themes such as corruption before the flood, angelic involvement in human affairs, and the idea that history unfolds according to a divinely ordered pattern. While it is not considered canonical in most Jewish or Christian traditions, it is included in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church's biblical canon, where it is still read as Scripture. It is also respected as an important ancient text within Catholic and Orthodox scholarship.
What Jubilees means by animals becoming disordered is not fully explained, but it is not difficult to imagine that as the natural world came under pressure, behavior shifted. What had once been a kind of harmony between humans and animals begins to fracture. Practices emerge from ritual specialists who can use incantations to influence or control animal behavior through unseen means. Stewardship gives way to domination, and then to something more invasive.
It is more difficult to discuss some of the other elements related to the animals. There are accounts, fragmented, inconsistent, yet persistent, of things that do not look or behave as they should. Creatures that seem almost familiar, but not entirely. Movements that seem wrong. Monstrous creatures that suggest something has been altered, crossed, or malformed in ways no one can fully explain. Some descriptions hint at hybridization, as though the boundaries between kinds have been breached. These accounts are not systematic, and they should be approached with caution. But the sense of distortion remains.
As if Giants and Monsters are not Bad Enough
What emerges from all of this is not simply a world with giants and monsters in it. It is a world where human beings, the Creator’s image-bearers, are living under unbearable strain. Not only do they struggle to survive physically, but there is also, slowly, the erosion of what it even means to be human. The ground beneath them is no longer stable. The order they were meant to inhabit and steward is slipping, and something else, something evil and ugly, is pressing in.
Earth becomes a place where power has outpaced wisdom, where appetite has overtaken restraint, and where the fabric of creation itself is beginning to fray. Violence is no longer shocking. It is expected. Boundaries are no longer honored; they are crossed as a matter of course. And what was once clearly human begins to blur at the edges.
Ancient Jewish readers did not treat these stories as symbolic or as talking about ordinary human failure. They understood it as a real and total corruption of the earth, something that had reached a point where continuation, as it was, could no longer be allowed by the Creator. And this is where the story turns to the next phase, a phase we think we know so well in Protestantism - Noah’s flood.
Next Time
Turns out, the flood is not simply about judgment of human evil as we tend to imagine it. It is about what happens when a world has been so fundamentally altered that it can no longer sustain the life it was created to hold.
In my next post, now Part Three of this unfolding story, we will turn to the flood itself. We will look more closely at the judgment that follows the giants’ corruption of the Earth, the origins and role of Noah, and the deeper question that lingers beneath it all: what, if anything, remained of the Nephilim after the waters receded. Because, if the ancient traditions are true, the story does not end when the floodwaters fall, and humanity still lives with the echoes of that terrible time.
Grace and light to you all.