Whose Children Are the Nephilim

Genesis places several features together: the Nephilim, the sons of God entering to the daughters of humanity, the children born to them, and the mighty men of old. Their closeness naturally invites a connection.

The exact connection is harder to establish. The sentence does not give us the kind of explicit family tree that would settle every identification. Readers disagree about how its clauses and pronouns relate, and whether the Nephilim are directly identified as the children of the unions.

Later traditions make the parentage much clearer. Enoch's giants belong to a developed account of heavenly fathers and human mothers. That account shows one influential interpretation of Genesis; it should not erase the difficulty of the earlier wording.

We can recognize a strong narrative association without claiming that every grammatical question has been solved. The difference matters when we ask whether a Greek heroic genealogy describes the same kind of ancestry. We first need to understand how much of the biblical genealogy is actually present.