HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did a second angelic incursion after the Flood reseed the Nephilim?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: plausible — the reading has a real grammatical hook and it is the only one of the three rivals that keeps both the Flood's totality and the Nephilim pedigree of the conquest-era clans, which is more than its critics usually concede. But it buys that by positing an event Scripture never narrates, and the one body of ancient literature most invested in the Watchers — 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the New Testament texts that use them — explains post-Flood evil by the spirits of the dead giants while keeping the offending angels bound. Coherent and not ruled out; short of probable.

Related arguments: the post-Flood Nephilim problem — see also the giant lineage surviving aboard the ark · Og surviving on the ark's roof · the giants as a warrior category rather than a lineage

The claim

Genesis 6:4 reports that "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them."¹ Numbers 13:33 then finds the sons of Anak "of the giants" in Canaan, generations after a Flood in which — on the text's own account — every human being outside the ark died. The interpretation assessed here takes the "and also after that" to reach past the Flood, and fills the gap with a repetition of the original transgression: divine beings came down a second time, took human wives a second time, and the resulting offspring are the Anakim, Rephaim, Emim and Zamzummim whom Israel meets in the conquest narratives. On this reading no Nephilim survived the Flood at all. The later giants are not descendants of the first set; they are a fresh production by the same means.

Who advances it

The reading's leading modern advocate is Michael S. Heiser (1963–2023), who lays out the post-Flood problem in The Unseen Realm (2015) as a choice between a small number of trajectories — that the Flood was a localized regional event, that "the 'bad seed' was carried through the flood in Noah's bloodline," or that "the behavior of Gen 6:1–4 happened after the flood as well" — and favours the last. He grounds it grammatically in the ʾasher clause of Genesis 6:4, arguing that rendering it "whenever the sons of God used to go in to the daughters of men" rather than "when" "creates continuity in the sense that the behavior recurred."² The position is carried downstream by the popular supernaturalist literature that reads the conquest as a holy war against giant clans, and it is catalogued as the characteristic Christian supernaturalist option in Joel Richardson's survey of Jewish and Christian answers to the question, over against the Ham's-wife legend on the Jewish side and John Walton's figurative reading on the other.³

The evidence for

The phrase is really there, and it really is awkward. "And also after that" is not an invention of the reading's proponents; it is a clause in the verse that has generated commentary for two millennia because it does not sit easily where it stands. Whatever one concludes, an interpretation that simply ignores it has not finished the job.¹

The grammatical hook is genuine, not manufactured. The verb in the ʾasher clause (yābōʾû) is an imperfect, and an imperfect in a past-time narrative frame naturally carries iterative or durative force — "used to go in," "would go in," "whenever they went in." That reading is not peculiar to supernaturalists: a 2025 study in Religions that argues strenuously against the supernaturalist construal of the passage nonetheless registers the same syntactic point, that the yiqtol yābōʾû supports an iterative or durative sense of the unions rather than a single completed event. If the unions are a recurring class of event rather than one episode, a recurrence after the Flood is at least a grammatically available thought.⁴

It is the only rival that pays both debts at once. The reading's real strength is structural. Its two competitors each surrender something the text appears to assert. The ark-bloodline reading keeps the pedigree but breaks the Flood's completeness, and has to insert a carrier the passenger list does not contain. The generic-term reading keeps the Flood intact but dissolves the pedigree, treating Numbers 13:33's "which come of the giants" as rhetoric or as a later gloss. The second-incursion reading is the only one that lets both stand as written: the Flood killed everyone outside the ark, and the conquest-era clans really are Nephilim in the Genesis 6 sense. On a page whose whole premise is that the supernatural is not excluded in advance, that is a point in its favour rather than against it.

And recurrence is the pattern the rest of the material asserts anyway. The wider supernaturalist reconstruction does not treat the Genesis 6 rebellion as a one-off but as one of a series of divine rebellions, and the biblical narrative does have the heavenly host offending repeatedly after the Flood — the gods of the nations at Babel, the rebellious elohim of Psalm 82. A reading on which a class of divine beings transgresses once and never again would be the odd one out.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The clause needs an account; the iterative force of the verb is real; and the reading is internally consistent in a way its popular critics rarely credit, since it is the only option that does not require either a hole in the Flood or a demotion of Numbers 13:33. It also cannot be dismissed on the ground that it requires angels to do something extraordinary — that objection begs precisely the question this timeline refuses to beg.

The decisive difficulty is that no source narrates it — including the sources that wanted it most. This is not an argument from generic silence. Second Temple Judaism produced an entire literature devoted to the Watchers and their offspring, and that literature is acutely conscious of the problem of how evil persists after the Flood. It is neither vague nor late: its Aramaic copies were recovered at Qumran — the Book of the Watchers in 4Q201, palaeographically of the second century BC and by Milik's reckoning copied from a third-century exemplar, and the Book of Giants across as many as ten manuscripts (4Q203, 4Q530–532) — so the Watcher tradition is pinned hard to second- and third-century-BC Judaea, older than any Christian handling of the question (a point about the antiquity of the tradition, not of the events it narrates).⁵ Its answer is not a second incursion. 1 Enoch has the offending Watchers bound in the valleys of the earth until the great judgement, and explains the continuing trouble by the spirits that went out of the bodies of the dead giants, which "shall be called evil spirits upon the earth" and afflict humanity until the end — a mechanism this wiki weighs separately.⁵ Jubilees follows the same line. The New Testament texts that draw on this material keep the offenders confined: Jude has the angels who left their own habitation "reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day," and 2 Peter has God casting them down and delivering them "into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment."⁶ That is the exact opposite of a repeat performance. The second incursion therefore has to be staged by a different set of divine beings than the ones the tradition names — a supplement the sources do not supply.

The patristic tradition, which read Genesis 6 with the giants firmly in view, never reaches for it either. Bede reads the giants as "men with immense bodies and excessive power, of which there were also many after the flood, that is, in the times of Moses or David" — post-Flood giants affirmed, with no second incursion required to produce them. Augustine states flatly that "there were more giants before the flood than in all subsequent ages," a comparative that presupposes ordinary giants on both sides of the Flood. Neither reaches for a second angelic descent, and neither seems to feel the pressure that generates the reading.⁷

"After that" has cheaper readings, and one of them is very old. The clause need not reach past the Flood at all. Rashi takes "and also after that" to mean after the warning the flood-generation had already received — on his account the Ocean had risen and flooded a third of the world in the days of Enosh, and the generation "did not humble itself and take a lesson" — which places the whole notice inside the pre-Flood era.⁸ Alternatively the clause is the narrator's aside from his own vantage, noting that the readers' famous giant clans are of the same sort. Either way the sentence is satisfied without an unnarrated cosmic event, and a reading that requires one is more expensive than a reading that does not.

The proponent's own strongest philological work cuts against him here. Heiser argues elsewhere that the clause in Numbers 13:33 identifying the sons of Anak as coming "of the giants" is a scribal gloss, added to solve exactly this problem: "the scribe thinks that the word nephilim solves the problem of the giants being there, so he creates the link to Gen 6 via the gloss."⁹ That is a defensible text-critical judgement, but it removes the second pillar the second-incursion reading rests on. If the Nephilim pedigree of the Anakim is an interpretive gloss rather than a datum, then the only thing needing explanation is that Canaan contained some notably tall clans — which the deflationary reading handles without any incursion at all. The two arguments are each reasonable and they pull in opposite directions; that tension belongs on the proponent's page and is flagged there.

And it makes no material prediction. On a timeline that asks what the ground holds, this reading is exegesis rather than evidence. A second incursion at conquest-era dates would imply a population of anomalously large people in Bronze- and Iron-Age Canaan, and that is the one part of it that can be checked — the measured skeletal record from the region shows an ordinary human stature surface, with the Ashkelon cemetery at the roster's most locatable claim yielding a mean male stature of 154.6 cm.¹⁰ That does not refute the reading — a second incursion could in principle produce something other than exceptional stature, and advocates who define the Nephilim by violence rather than height would say so. It does mean the reading survives by not being testable at the point where it could have paid off.

Assessment

Plausible — and plausible is a real rating here, not a polite dismissal. The clause is genuinely there, the iterative force of yābōʾû is granted even by scholars arguing the other side, and the reading is the only one of the three that leaves both the Flood's totality and Numbers 13:33's pedigree standing as written. It is not weak, and it is not refuted by the bare fact that it requires supernatural agency.

What keeps it short of probable is the shape of the silence. Second Temple Judaism wrote at length about the Watchers precisely because it was worried about persistent evil after the Flood, and its answer was the giants' surviving spirits with the offending angels bound — a solution Jude and 2 Peter carry forward. The Fathers who affirm post-Flood giants affirm them as ordinary large men. So the second incursion is a solution proposed by no ancient source to a problem every ancient source noticed, and it needs a cast of divine beings the tradition does not name. Add that "after that" has at least two cheaper readings, one of them Rashi's, and that the reading makes no check-able prediction about the ground, and the verdict is a live possibility rather than the best available account. The deflationary reading is the more economical explanation of the same data, and is rated accordingly.

Sources