The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim: The Untold Story of Fallen Angels, Giants on the Earth, and Their Extraterrestrial Origins

by Scott Alan Roberts

  “She-Wolf Suckles Romulus and Remus.” Capitoline Wolf, traditionally believed to be Etruscan, fifth century BC, with figures of Romulus and Remus added in the 15th century by Antonio Pollaiuolo.

  Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:She-wold_suckles_Romulus_and_Remus.jpg).

  Amulius charged a servant with the deed of killing the twins, but the servant could not follow through with the act. Instead he placed them in a basket and left it on the banks of the Tiber River, which flooded and carried the twins downstream, unharmed. The river deity Tiberinus made the basket catch in the roots of a fig tree that grew in the Velabrum swamp at the base of the Palatine Hill. The twins were found and suckled by a she-wolf, Lupa, and fed by a woodpecker, Picus. A shepherd named Faustulus discovered the twin boys and took them to his hut, where he and his wife Acca Larentia raised them as their own children. Romulus went on to found the city of Rome.

  Hatshepsut

  This remarkable woman was the daughter of Thutmoses I, born in or around 1535 BCE. She went on to marry her half-brother Thutmoses II, fathered by Thutmoses I and to a “lesser” wife. He was weak and somewhat sickly in his reign, and she loathed the man. When he died, she became co-regent of Egypt with her stepson, Thutmoses III (from, yet again, a lesser wife), and eventually deposed him and took over the monarchy as ruler herself. Thutmoses III learned to hate his stepmother, and when she died, he had all Hatshepsut’s imagery stricken from every painting, obelisk, and relief, eradicating her from Egyptian history and the afterlife. Thutmoses III went on to bring Egypt’s United Kingdom during the 18th Dynasty to its golden pinnacle.

  In 1526, Hatshepsut would have been a mere child of about 7 to 10 years of age. When she found the baby Moses in a basket, floating into her bathing pool off the Nile; she claimed him and named him, but had no way to care for him on her own. It was then that Miriam emerged from the bulrushes and offered to help, taking the child back to his mother to have him cared for until the royal princess was old enough to legitimately adopt him, which she did a few years later.

  This remarkable woman, who reigned in Egypt’s 18th Dynasty, is most probably the stepmother of the biblical Moses, whom she found floating in the Nile in a basket made of bulrushes.

  Photo courtesy of the author. Copyright 2011.

  It can be speculated that a man named Senmut, very close to Hatshepsut and the tutor to her daughter, was none other than Moses himself. Though the evidence is only circumstantial, one must read a bit between the lines and hail to Egyptian mythology to make the connections.

  Senmut was very close to Hatshepsut and was her strongest ally, advisor, and friend, a lowly born man who rose to power with Hatshepsut. It is speculated that his lowly birth was as a Hebrew slave, and his close stepson relationship to Hatshepsut was nothing short of the love between mother and son, and the nepotism that came along with it. The name Senmut itself means “mother’s brother.”

  To understand the significance of this mother’s brother title, it is necessary to look, briefly, at Egyptian religion and the Pharaoh: The ancient Egyptians believed that the first king of Egypt was Osiris, married to his sister Isis. Set, the brother of Osiris, murdered him out of jealousy, and claimed the throne. Incorporating a spell of magic, Isis brought Osiris back to life for one night, made love with him, and conceived a child, after which Osiris returned to his death state. The child she bore was Horus, the reincarnation of Osirus, who reclaims his rightful place on throne. The child born to Isis was, all at once, her son, her husband, and her brother. All kings of Egypt were then said to be “Horus,” the reincarnation of Osiris.

  And this is the significance of the name given to Moses—Senmut. He was being “set up” by his mother, Hatshepsut, in the Egyptian economy to be the future king, the royal heir of his “grandfather-Pharaoh,” Thutmoses I, who had no living royal male heirs. But he had one royal daughter, Hatshepsut. The future king could only inherit the throne through the royal daughter. Hatshepsut convinced her father, the Pharaoh, to make her little adopted boy his future heir. Nefure, as the symbolic Isis, had her little “Osiris/Horus,” who was named Senmut, his “mother’s brother.”

  When Senmut/Moses makes the decision to identify himself with his slave people, the Hebrews, he forever cut himself off from the adopted pharohonic line of Hatshepsut.

  “By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.”

  (Hebrews 11:24)

  Some of Senmut/Moses’ many titles conferred on him by Hatshepsut were: Overseer of the Works, Overseer of the Fields, Overseer of the Double Gold House, Overseer of the Gardens of Amun, Controller of Works, Overseer of the Administrative Office of the Mansion, Conductor of Festivals, Overseer of the Cattle of Amun, Steward of the King’s Daughter Neferura, Chief of the King, Magnate of the Tens of Upper and Lower Egypt, Chief of the Mansion of the Red Crown, Privy Councillor, Chief Steward of Amun, Overseer of the Double Granary of Amun, Chief Architect, and none other than Hereditary Prince and Count.

  Murder and Flight

  “11 One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. 12 Looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. 13 The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, ‘Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?’ 14 The man said, ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?’ Then Moses was afraid and thought, ‘What I did must have become known.’ 15 When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian….’”

  (Exodus 3:11-15)

  Shortly before Hatshepsut’s death in 1483 BCE, Senmut mysteriously and completely disappears from the royal courts of Egypt and the historical records. Having been groomed to be the next Pharaoh, it becomes clear that Senmut/Moses’ adopted half-brother, Thutmoses III, the co-regent with his stepmother Hatshepsut, had every motivation to eliminate Moses after he murdered the Egyptian taskmaster. So Moses—formerly Senmut, Hereditary Prince and Count of Egypt—fled to the wilderness for his life. He would not return to Egypt for 40 years, but when he did, it was with a much different influence on the royal courts of Egypt.

  But Moses, at this point in his life, despite “identifying” himself with his Hebrew people, was thoroughly Egyptian, and he carried with him to the land of Midian a wealth of stored Egyptian knowledge that simmered in his head for 40 more years. The king-in-the-making, “mother’s brother” to the Pharaoh Queen, general in the armies of the Pharaoh, with a deep-set ambition to rule, was now married to the a daughter of the high priest of Midian and monarch to herds of sheep and goats in a dusty Arabian back water.

  Moses possessed a belief in the gods of Egypt, and this wouldn’t change until his miraculous encounter with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the great “I AM,” Yaweh, who, in the form of a burning bush, pressed him into service as the great emancipator of his people of heritage, the Hebrews.

  But did Moses see that blazing desert shrubbery as the only God? Was that encounter one of a spiritual nature or one that would come to fit the mold of an extra-terrestrial encounter that challenged all his beliefs in the pantheon of gods with which he was raised and whom he knew so well? The pages of scripture tell us that this calling was of Divine Origin, and that Jehovah God Himself was the power behind the upcoming miraculous events.

  The big question, if you step outside the box of faith, is whether or not Moses was encountering the God of the Universe or a being that only fit his perceptions and understanding of that which had been rooted in his mind since his earliest days.

  The Ogdoad

  In Thebes, the little town of Medinet Habu has, nestled on its low crest, the ruins of the magnificent 18th Dynasty Mortuary Temple of Rameses III. Medinet Habu, a small village situated a little more than 2 mile
s to the south of the Ramesseum, was called Djanet by the ancient Egyptians and, according to popular belief, was the place where Amun appeared for the first time. From ancient times, Medinet Habu was the place of worship dedicated to this god, as evidenced by the crumbled ruins of a temple of the 18th Dynasty dedicated to Amun of Djanet, built during the time of Hatshepsut and Thutmoses III, atop the ruins of a still more ancient temple. This was what later induced Rameses III to order the construction there of his own memorial temple.

  Growing up in the royal palace in Thebes, Moses would have known this place well and worshipped in its sacred halls. It was here that Moses was raised in his early years and spent the first 40 years of his life. He would have been taught not only the mathematics and sciences afforded a royal education in the courts of 18th Dynasty Egypt, but also would have experienced the worship and religious practices of the day.

  The Ogdoad is the Egyptian creation myth that Moses would have been very familiar with and that some say laid his basis for writing about the creation in the Book of Genesis. The Ogdoad myth originated in Hermopolis and consisted of eight personified primeval forces, each of which was represented in the four couples of deities. In Egyptian cosmology, the number 4 represented the number of totality and completeness. The significance of these four primeval couples is not easy to understand today, for they lack any greater mythological context, and neither is there much substantive personification of the four couples of deities.4

  The couples of the Ogdoad:

  Nu and Naunet, representing the primeval waters.

  Heh and Hauhet, signifying boundlessness.

  The Inner Gate of the Ramesseum, in Luxor, Egypt. The Ramesseum is the temple complex of Ramses III, built on the site of what is now known as Medinat Habu, “The House of a Million Years.” On this same site are the ruins of a much more ancient temple in which Moses would have learned of the Ogdoad.

  Photo courtesy of Dr. John T. Ward and Dr. Maria Nilsson, The Sirius Project copyright 2011. Used with permission.

  Kek and Kauket, signifying darkness.

  Amun and Amaunet, signifying air.

  The four couples of the Ogdoad are less about their personalities and characteristics than they represent elemental forces in the creation of the world. The cosmogony they represent are the primeval physical matters of existence rather than the actual springing to life of the organic world, and of these eight deities, only Amun developed into a remarkable status and moved to Thebes with his female counterpart, Amaunet. These four pairs of deities also complement each other: For every “male” deity is the “female” counterpart, to make up a whole, according to the ancient Egyptian complementary way of thinking. The males are shown with the heads of frogs and the females with heads of snakes; such physical attributes are frequently said in ancient texts to inhabit the primeval waters.

  At el-Ashmunein were unearthed only very scant inscriptions of the Ogdoad, telling us very little about this cosmogony, but they appear ever so subtly in the writings of Moses. The main part of evidence is taken from Theban monuments, which were pieced together in 1929 by Kurt Sethe in his survey, Amun und die Acht Urgotter von Hermopolis,5 but the earliest references to the Hermopolitan cosmogony is found in the Pyramid Texts:

  You have your offering-bread, O Niu and Nenet, you two protectors of the gods Who protect the gods with your shadow. You have your offering-bread, O Amun and Amaunet, You two protectors of the gods Who protect the gods with your shadow. You have your offering-bread, O Atum and Ruti, Who yourselves created your godheads and your persons. O Shu and Tefenet who made the gods, Who begot the gods and established the gods….6

  These deities were said to comprise the very substances out of which creation was brought to the universe. At Hermopolis, the opinion was that at some point these eight primeval beings interacted, whereupon a great explosion occurred, which somehow laid free the Primeval Mound. The mound later became Hermopolis, though at first it was called the Isle of Flame, as the sun god was said to be born and to rise there for the very first time. Hermopolis claimed to predate the cosmogony of Heliopolis. Just as other creation centers maintained that their location was the original place where creation first had come into being, so was also the case at Hermopolis.

  The Ogdoad were the fathers and the mothers who came into being at the start, who gave birth to the sun and who created Atum. From there on the rest of the cosmos is developed. But there are some twists to the story in which the eight divinities of the Ogdoad are thought to jointly have created what is known as the “cosmic egg” out of the primeval waters (Nun). This egg was invisible as it was created already before the sun came into being. From this egg, according to some sources, the bird of light, an aspect of the sun-god, burst. Other sources say that the egg was filled with air, the association of the elemental couple of Amun and Amaunet. According to the Coffin Texts, this is the first act of creation:

  O Atum give me this sweet air which is your nostrils

  for I am this egg which is in the Great Cackler,

  I am the guardian of this great prop which separates

  the earth from the sky.

  If I live, it will live; if I grow old, it will grow old;

  if I breathe the air, it will breathe the air.

  I am he who splits iron, I have gone round about the egg,

  (even I) the Lord of Tomorrow.7

  In another version of this myth, the egg is laid by a goose, the Primeval Goose, or the Gengen Wer, with which Amun was associated as the creator. The goose is thought to carry the egg out of which creation comes. This myth is only given in fragments, but obviously it states that the sun in the form of a bird came out of the egg that the Primeval Goose laid in the waters of creation. It is also a form of Amun in his creator-god aspect.

  The act of the creation, as performed by the Ogdoad, takes this basic chronological order:

  1. The Ogdoad created existence in the form of the Primeval Mound or in the form of the cosmic egg.

  2. The cosmic egg was created by the Primeval Goose.

  3. The cosmic egg held air, or

  4. The cosmic egg held a bird.

  5. And the bird was a form of the sun.

  To sum it all up, all forms of initial creation happened in the darkness of the primeval waters. Creation was circular, as was the egg. Birth led to decline-death-rebirth-renewal of the cyclic existence. The significance of all this is that some things existed before existence. One of these in preexistence was Nun. Another was primeval beings such as frogs and snakes, frogs being associated with fertility, snakes being associated with circularity and rebirth (that is, they shed their old skin). The first creator-god is created out of Nun by some interaction between all these primeval creatures. Then the creator-god creates the rest of the cosmos.

  These are the things Moses would have experienced in his religious training, growing up in the royal courts of Egypt. But how are they applicable to our study of the Nephilim, and why are these backdrops important to their study? Because the setting of a solid foundation is critical to an examination of the words he wrote in the Book of Genesis. As I stated earlier, it is important to sludge through some of what seems to be mundane history in order to understand why certain things were said in certain ways. Understanding what motivated Moses to write the things he did is an all-important step to understanding the objectives of the things he wrote about.

  Let’s look at how the Egyptian myth of creation was a foundation for what Moses wrote in the Book of Genesis.

  Moses the Heretic

  A great source for this examination of the influences on the writing of Moses are the writings of Irenaeus, a second-century Bishop of Lugdunum in Gaul, then a part of the Roman Empire (now Lyons, France). He was an early church father and apologist, and his writings were formative in the early development of Christian theology, which at the time was indistinguishable from Catholic theology. Irenaeus’s best-known book, Adversus Haereses, or Against Heresies, was written around 180 CE, and is a
detailed attack on Gnosticism, which was at the time considered to be a serious threat to the Church.8 As one of the first great Christian theologians, Irenaeus emphasized the traditional elements in the church, especially the episcopate, scripture, and tradition. Irenaeus wrote that the only way for Christians to retain unity was to humbly accept a single doctrinal authority, and that was the episcopal councils in union with the bishop of Rome. Against the Gnostics, who said that they possessed a secret oral tradition from Jesus himself, Irenaeus maintained that the bishops in different cities are known as far back as the Apostles, and none of them were Gnostics. He also maintained that the bishops provided the only “safe guide to the interpretation of Scripture.” His writings, with those of Clement and Ignatius, are taken to hint at papal primacy—the infallible word of the pope in all matters ecclesiastical and scriptural. Irenaeus is the earliest witness to recognition of the canonical character of all four gospels, and is really the precursor to the Constantinian Councils that established canonical rules for the bible.