The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim

by Scott Alan Roberts

  Reality can be stranger than fiction, it has been said, yet when we see the expositing of ideas from people who seem to have slippery holds on historical accuracy, let alone common sense and sanity, we tend to laugh them off into the other room and seat them at the children’s table so they can do their thing while we adults converse at the grown-ups’ table about the hardcore truisms of life and the universe. However, as crackpot as some of the ideas surrounding reptilians may sound, and whatever pseudo-political ideologies have been built on their shoulders, a kernel of truth may still lie quivering at the core. Although Reptilian art and religious application of serpents and dragons exist all throughout human history, there is little—if any—evidence that they dwelled on this planet and interacted with human beings on the level that is expressed in the theorizing of pseudo-scientific thought. Yet their presence in one form or another is pervasive and ultimately convincing to a certain degree.

  Snake on a Stick

  The remarkable fact is that throughout all ancient and modern civilizations, the serpent or dragon bestowing knowledge upon the human race figures prominently in all religions and histories: the Judeo-Christian reptilian “fallen angel” Lucifer; the Mayan serpent god, Quetzalcoatl; the enormous plumed serpent god of the Hopi Indians, Baholinkonga; the East Indian mystical human-like reptilians known as NAGAS; the Egyptian serpent god, Enuph; the Phoenicians Agathodemon; and even the Hebrews Nakhustan or Brazen Serpent that Moses cast and placed high on a pole when the Israelites were plagued by serpents in the wilderness—which is a biblical scene all on its own that begs the question of more encoded language from Moses. The actual passage reads:

  “4 They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; 5 they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!’ 6 Then the LORD sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, ‘We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people. 8 The LORD said to Moses, ‘Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.’ 9 So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.”

  (Numbers 21:4-9)

  As a punishment for griping and complaining against God and Moses, the biblical account written by Moses tells us that God sent “firey serpents” into the camp of the wandering Israelites. The people were being bitten and dying in hordes. So God instructed Moses to cast a bronze snake and place it high upon a pole, and all who were bitten and taken ill could look on the serpent from anywhere within the camp and be healed. The brazen serpent remained with the Israelites for another 700 years, where it eventually stood in the Temple in Jerusalem. But the people, during the time of King Hezekiah (715-687 BCE) had begun worshipping the snake and making an offering to it. So in a vast iconoclastic reform, Hezekiah cut down all the pagan groves, smashed all the idols, and destroyed the Nakhustan, which didn’t bear that name until his reign on the throne of Israel, suggesting that he may have given it that name himself.

  It is interesting to note that originally the second commandment written by Moses included this prohibition:

  “4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

  (Exodus 20:4)

  Moses and the Brazen Serpent: Sebastien Bourdon, 1653-54.

  Photo is licensed under Wikipedia Creative Commons.

  This mandate was so strong in its wording that the Jews incorporated into their laws an extremist prohibition against portraiture and sculpted imagery of any kind, of man, beast, animal, or deity. Illustrating the power of the Jewish law, two first-century Jewish historians, Philo and Josephus, recorded revolts by the Jews during the tenure of Roman Praefect Pontius Pilatus (26-36 AD; Pilate), over the placement of graven images and effigies. According to Josephus, Pilate demonstrated a fairly insensitive approach to the Jews religious customs, and he ignored their protests by allowing his soldiers to bring the images of Caesar into the city by the dark of night. When the citizens of Jerusalem discovered these the following day, they appealed to Pilate to remove the ensigns of Caesar from the city. After five days of deliberation, Pilate had his soldiers surround the demonstrators, threatening them with death, which they were willing to accept rather than submit to desecration of Mosaic Law. Pilate finally removed the images. The incident proved to be an early example of effective resistance to tyranny by aggressive, nonviolent means, yet Pilate quelled the rebellion by signaling other of his plain-clothed troops who had positioned themselves within the crowds, to begin a very brief but bloody massacre of many of the protestors.12

  Philo describes a similar incident in which Pilate was officially reprimanded by Emperor Tiberius after antagonizing the Jews by setting up gold-coated shields in Herod’s palace in Jerusalem. The shields were ostensibly to honor Tiberius, and this time did not contain engraved images. Philo writes that the shields were set up “not so much to honor Tiberius as to annoy the multitude.” The Jews protested the installation of the shields at first to Pilate and then, when he declined to remove them, by writing to Tiberius. Philo reports that upon reading the letters, Tiberius “wrote to Pilate with a host of reproaches and rebukes for his audacious violation of precedent and bade him at once take down the shields and have them transferred from the capital to Caesarea.”13

  The point is that the Jewish law forbade iconoclastic imagery of any kind, in a preemptive strike to stave off idol worship. But the Brazen Serpent was an exception, and it was imbued with divine power to cure illness and heal snake bites, and the people eventually worshipped it as a result, although centuries later. The worship of the serpent grew out of the fact that the serpent is so represented in creation scripture as the “god of the earth.” But he is also clearly presented as being subservient to the higher Divine, Elohim, who curses him in coded, symbolic language in Genesis Chapter 3, as a result of the seduction of Eve. And Although it is true that the Bible itself never uses the word reptilian, but serpent, it is clear that the serpent is not simply a snake. There are only four characters mentioned at the dawn of mankind in the Garden of Eden: God, Adam, Eve, and the serpent.

  Ancient Jewish beliefs about this serpent explicitly state that it had arms and legs, and walked upright. This claim is found in the Bereshit Rabbah, an ancient Jewish commentary on the Book of Genesis. While dealing with the story of the Garden of Eden, the Midrash also deals with the serpent. It declares that before causing Adam and Eve to sin, “it had legs” (Bereishit Rabbah, 19). According to this, the serpent was once a tall, splendid and regal creature. When its fate was decided and it is written that “upon thy belly shall thou go” (Bereishit 3:14), “the ministering angels descended and cut off its arms and legs” Bereishit Rabbah, 20. This descriptive tradition gives the physical image of the enticing serpent an impressive dimension that has repercussions on many viewpoints of the ancient world, which saw the serpent as representing forces of evil on one hand and as possessing supernatural powers on the other hand. Down through the ages, the description of the reptilian archtypical being that Adam and Eve may have encountered has been altered and evolved. By calling it a serpent and nothing more, biblical revisionists have effectively simplified the description and robbed humanity of a more mysterious, and possibly accurate, reality of which we are only now recognizing. Another point that should also be noted is that in the Book of Genesis, Elohim condemns the serpent by saying “On your belly you shall go,” which suggests that he wasn’t on it before.

  The ancient Jewish accounts of the Garden of Eden describe a being that is more like the ufological, extra-terrestrial reptoids than
just a plain serpent. They also tell how the reptilians’ behavior amid early mankind resulted in their being cast down into the earth, hinting at a subterranean realm, having all traces of hands, feet, and the ability to walk upright, hidden from surface-dwelling humans, erased from man’s memories, and placed permanently out of sight.

  The Mighty Men of Renown

  “4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”

  (Genesis 6:4)

  There is also an alternate, not-so-pretty picture of the motivation behind the descent of the Watchers, and that is the story of enslavement and the breeding of a “worker class” by a superior race of extraterrestrial beings perceived by the simple-minded humans as divinity. The homonids found on the earth by the Watchers—the divine caste set in place, according to scripture, to protect and watch over the earth—were bettered by the genetic interbreeding of a superior, extraterrestrial race for the purpose of creating a slave caste. Accordingly, the Watchers as described in the religious Hebrew texts were none other than beings of superior intellect, strength, and technical advancement who saw opportunity to subjugate a lesser race, improving them by impregnation or genetic tampering. It is also a wave of thought among Ancient Alienists that the “interbreeding” mentioned in the Genesis and Enochian accounts was ancient, poetic, picturesque coded language used to describe what would be described in our modern terminology as cloning and genetic engineering.

  The Book of Genesis tells us that the offspring of the cohabitation between the Watchers and humans were known as “the heroes of old” and the “mighty men of renown”; the Gibborim, the Hebrew word for “mightiest,” the intensive noun for Gabar, or “mighty.” The word was many times used to describe the valiant, brave, and of great stature. But in the usage of this word in Genesis chapter 6, it speaks of a class of beings in its description of the Nephilim as being “mighty.” The word Gibborim is also used more than 150 times in the Tanakh, an acronym formed from the initial Hebrew letters of the Masoretic Text’s three traditional subdivisions: the Torah (“Teaching,” also known as the Five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (“Prophets”), and Ketuvim (“Writings”), and is applied not only to the Nephilim and men, but also to lions (Proverbs 30:30), hunters (Genesis 10:9), soldiers (Jeremiah 51:30), and leaders (Daniel 11:3). The ancient, divine connotation of the word is nearly lost in the modern usage of the word Gibbor, which means “hero” and “brave” (as a verb).

  The Gibborim have even made it into current-day pop culture. Marvel Comics has their Gibborim of the Demogorge, created by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, as a race of three six-fingered giants, among the various Elder Gods of Earth (having somehow survived ancient judgmental catastrophe) whose goal is to wipe the Earth clean of all humanity. Averaging a rough height of 100 feet, the Gibborim despise all humans.

  Despite the watering down of the ancient usage of the word and its further pop cultural diminutives, it is this class of cross-bred “mighty heroes,” these Nephilim offspring of the Watchers, who begin the ravaging of humanity and the earth. It is also this race of hybrid offspring who are said to have begun the slave enforcement of mankind. As they grew in influence and power, the Gibborim began to extract more and more natural resources for their sustenance, and all the peoples of the earth, who inhabited a relatively small region of what is now the Middle East, were oppressed and completely entrenched in a slave caste societal bondage to these beings. It was this interplay and corruption that the Book of Genesis hails to as the cause of the “wickedness of mankind,” the stench to the nostrils of God that had him “grieving” that he had ever created mankind on the earth. And that grieving was not a hatred of humans, but rather a deep agonizing on the part of the deity that he had created a race that was so easily manipulated and altered by the Watchers, his own emissaries. The course of action taken by the divine was to then wipe out the entire race of Nephilim/Gibborim, as well as the rest of the tainted-blood humanity, in one, great universal catastrophic judgment: the Great Flood of Noah. But to preserve the human race, Noah was chosen to build an ark, a great barge to preserve all animal life as well as the one pure-blooded human family—his own.

  It seems impossible for we who exist at this far end of antiquity, for such a salvational vessel to be created out of “shittim wood and tree sap tar,” as the Bible recounts, and even more implausible for a man and his three sons to take 120 years to build it, then to gather two of every kind of animal in existence to load into its many stalls and chambers. Yet one must remember that the passage itself never says that Noah went out with a net and a lasso to gather the species of animals; it says that they were “brought to the ark” by God. And, of course, as we are beginning to see, this act in and of itself is more likely than not one of two things: perfect in its illustrative descriptions and true to the scriptures as read, or poetic code language utilized to set in place a mythological cover story for an event that may have been nothing short of genetic storage at the hands of a much superior race understood by ancient man to be gods.

  Demonic Interbreeding

  According to Roman Catholic theology, fallen angels have been attempting to interbreed with mankind for the purposes of creating a perfect hybrid mix of demonic and human ever since the fall of man.

  The Watchers themselves were not demons, nor were they fallen angels, but their act of descending to the earth in defiance of their divine charge, certainly placed them in a position of dangerous disobedience as attested to by their leader:

  “3 Then their leader Shamyaza said to them (the other prefects of the Watchers); ‘I fear that you may perhaps be indisposed to the performance of this enterprise (intermingling with human women); 4 And that I alone shall suffer for so grievous a crime.’”

  (1 Enoch 7:3-4)

  Against whom was Shamyaza concerned about committing a crime? God? A racial hierarchy? The humans? It is clear by this text that whoever Shamyaza really was, he was a bit nervous about his plans, as he alone would be held responsible, being their leader. He seemed to have a clear understanding that his act would bring hierarchical consequences. But he was, as the text indicates, immediately followed by the rest of the Grigori, and as we will see, they all bore the consequential brunt of their deeds, for it was this act on their collective part that placed them—at least in religious and scriptural terms—in the camp of the “fallen angels,” as some contend.

  Whereas the New Testament uses the Greek word “demon” to refer to these “sons of the mighty,” the Old Testament uses revealing descriptive names. Words that describe these beings, such as bene ha’Elohim, meaning “sons of God,” Zophim, meaning “the watchers,” and Malakh, meaning “messengers” (this reference was translated to angel in English), are used for the “aerial host” often regardless of alignment. The Book of Enoch tells us the origin of certain “interdimensional intelligences”—called in the monotheistic New Testament “demons,” who were understandably associated with evil because originally the Greek term daimon meant “any deity”—was in the Days of Noah, and didn’t end with the Flood but continued, according to Genesis 6, “even after.” There are three main terms for demons in the New Testament: daimonion (demon; 60 times, 50 in the Gospels); pneuma (spirit; 52 times) usually with a qualifying adjective such as akatharton (unclean; 21 times) or poneron (evil; sight times); and angelos (seven times of demonic agencies). Daimon (demon), the term commonly used in classical Greek, appears only once, in Mark 8:31.”14

  Divine Judgment

  In short, the reason for the flood as recorded in the Book of Genesis was not an imposition of divine judgment on a race of humans who had simply grown too wicked for their own good. That would seem an awful waste of humanity, even for God himself, especially when there would have been much better ways to offer repentance and forgiveness short of the complete destruction of the earth and all things dwelli
ng on it. This entire issue of a great deluge being used simply to eradicate a race of sinners, sending them all to the eternal hell of infinite separation from God, is lost in its grandiosity, akin to dropping an atomic bomb in order to squash a beehive hanging from the eave of your house.