“As in the Days if Noah” …A Return of the Nephilim?

I kind of skimmed the subject of the Nephilim in Strangers and Aliens, mostly because there was so much material to cover and I simply couldn’t expound upon every subject I touched.

The Nephilim are mentioned in Genesis 6:1-8:

1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

² That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

³ And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

⁴ 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, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

⁵ And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

⁶ And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

⁷ And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

⁸ But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Like me, proponents of the Demonic Hypothesis of UFO believe that the “sons of god” here refer to fallen angels, the “angels who left their first estate of Jude 1:6. They were giants, described as mighty men of old.(I am aware of the several views of what the sons of god of Genesis 6 were. For my money, the best resource on this particular subject is Fallen: The Sons of God and the Nephilim by Tim Chaffey. I don’t receive a dime for that endorsement. It’s simply my honest opinion.) While I agree that the passage seems most likely to point to Nephilim as human-angel hybrids, I disagree with much of the rest of what they preach.

According to Chuck Missler, author of the influential Alien Encounters espousing the Demonic Hypothesisof UFO, the Nephilim were the reason God judged the world with the Flood of Noah’s day:

The Nephilim were the strange hybrids of Genesis 6, apparently the principal reason for the judgment of the Flood of Noahs time. However, Genesis 6:4 also includes the haunting phrase, “…and also after that….” Apparently these strange events were not confined to the period before the Flood.

We find that there seems to be some recurrence of those bizarre things which resulted in unusual “giants” appearing in subsequent periods later in the Old Testament narrative, specifically the giant-races of Canaan.

Missler also promotes the idea that the Nephilim will return to usher in the so-called “Great Coming Deception.” If you’re not familiar with the Great Coming Deception, this is sci-fi author and Christian Ufologist LA Marzulli’s term for Missler’s popularization of the Demonic Eschatalogical Hypothesis of UFO (first voiced by revivalist WV Grant back in the early 1950s): the idea that the Strong Delusion of 2 Thessalonians 2:11 and Matthew 24:24 will involve fallen angels and/or their hybrid half-human offspring posing as extraterrestrials. They propose that Nephilim hybrids will be used to help usher in a false flag alien event which will explain away the Rapture and unite the world under the Antichrist. This belief is summarized by the slogan, “We go up, they come down.”

GotQuestions.org (the brainchild of fundamentalist S. Michael Houdmann) also suggests fallen angels posing as aliens as a plausible End Times scenario fulfilling Bible prophecy in answer to the question, “Could an alien deception be part of the end times?”

We know that the events surrounding the end times, as described in the Bible, will include a powerful deception (Matthew 24:24). Recently, interest has been rising in the theory that this deception will include alien beings from another planet. Odd as it may seem, this theory is entirely plausible from a Christian perspective. Although the Bible gives us no word about whether or not aliens exist—there is no inclusion of them in the creation account in Genesis, and no mention of them elsewhere—the Bible does tell us about visitors from another world—the spiritual world.

Of course, they identify fallen angels as suspects.

The Genesis account states that these powerful beings had sexual intercourse with women and produced a super race of beings known as the Nephilim. This sounds like the stuff of science fiction, yet it is right there in the Bible. There are striking similarities between this account and the accounts of other ancient cultures. The writings of the ancient Sumerians, for example (who were the first to produce a written language) mention the presence of the “Anunnaki” who were deities that came from heaven to dwell on earth with men. It is also interesting to note that the Sumerians’ gods often came to them in the form of snakes.

These accounts, seen alongside the amazing things created by ancient man, make it possible to theorize that demons, in the form of beings from another world, came to earth, bringing spectacular wisdom and knowledge to men, and “intermarrying” with their daughters in an attempt to draw men away from God. We already see from Eve’s experience with the serpent that demons will use the temptation of superior wisdom to ensnare man and that man is very susceptible to it.

Could the end times include a similar alien deception? The Bible doesn’t directly address the issue, but it is certainly plausible, for a variety of reasons. First, the Bible tells us that the world will unite under the power of the Antichrist. In order to achieve an agreement between all the world’s religions, it would make sense for the “uniter” to come from an entirely new source—an extraterrestrial source. It is hard to imagine one religion becoming head of all the others, unless new, unearthly knowledge were the source of the appeal and power of the new “religion.” This would be in keeping with past deceptions and would be a very effective way to deceive a large number of people.

This sounds plausible on the surface, but there are a number of problems with this interpretation of the Bible. The chief problem being that it reads too much into Scripture. The linchpin of this view is that Jesus prophesied that the Nephilim of Genesis 6 will be returning in the Last Days. Missler, Marzulli and all the rest claim that Jesus’ prophecy in Matthew 24 that the Last Days would be “as the days of Noah” indicates a return of the Nephilim. But did He?

This is what the Bible records Jesus as saying:

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. [Matthew 24:36-39]

The argument then is that Nephilim were present in the days of Noah, therefore they will be making a return. But is that what Jesus was trying to convey? How might we establish that? Problematically, in making the claim that this passage points to Genesis 6 and a return of the pre-Flood Nephilim, these conspiracy theorists (that’s what they are) ignore the parallel passage of Luke 26 that provides context to Jesus’ prophecy:

And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all. Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.In that day, he which shall be upon the housetop, and his stuff in the house, let him not come down to take it away: and he that is in the field, let him likewise not return back. Remember Lot’s wife

[Luke 17:26-32]

A quick note regarding Bible interpretation is helpful here. If we have two parallel passages of the same event or speech, the fuller narrative is likely more complete. This means that the quote in Matthew is correct, but incomplete. In other words, Jesus said a bit more than Matthew quoted (though Matthew didn’t misrepresent Him with the shorter excerpt).

With this additional context in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ meaning becomes clear. The coming of the Son of Man will be sudden. People will be going about their everyday lives and most will be caught completely unprepared. Both passages also concern judgment for wickedness on a near universal scale in their generations (Noah) or their cities (Lot lived in Sodom and Gomorrah).

No Nephilim are even hinted at in this passage, and there’s no real reason to bring them in.

Now, I’m sure that those who buy into the whole Return of the Nephilim scenario will say that both Genesis 6 and the passage about Sodom and Gomorrah involve humans having sex (or wanting to have sex) with angels, but God had already judged those infamous cities for their wickedness BEFORE he sent the angels to rescue Lot (not as a result of their presence) and the angels sent to rescue Lot were not fallen, were not desirous to have sex with humans, and were actually more than capable of stopping the men who sought to rape them! Furthermore, homosexual sex between angels and humans would not have resulted in any offspring, much less Nephilim. Likewise it is the wickedness of mankind (not the existence of the Nephilim of the preceding verse) that is cited as God’s reason for the judgement of the Flood [Genesis 6:5]. The claim that “every imagination of the thoughts of [man’s] heart was only evil continually” because his genetics were corrupted by fallen angels simply because Nephilim are mentioned in the preceding verse is an unnecessary logical leap.

To be fair, proponents of this theory suggest that there is corroborating evidence. According to Missler:

When Moses sent his twelve spies to reconnoiter the Land of Canaan, they came back with the report of giants in the land. (The very Hebrew term used was Nephilim.) Their fear of those terrifying creatures resulted in their being relegated to wandering in the wilderness for 38 years. When Joshua and the nation Israel later entered the land of Canaan, they were instructed to wipe out every man, woman and child of certain tribes.That strikes us as disturbingly severe. It would seem that in the Land of Canaan, there once again was a “gene pool problem.”

Deuteronomy 20:16-18 actually gives God’s reasons for commanding that certain people’s in Canaan be utterly destroyed:

16 But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:

¹⁷ But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee:

¹⁸ That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the Lord your God.

Deuteronomy 9:5 underscores the fact that it wasn’t a gene pool problem; it was a sin problem, just as it was regarding the Genesis Flood. Both Deuteronomy and Levitt used contain references to Canaanite practices, which included the worship of demonic idols, taboo sexual acts, and even the sacrifice of children to the Canaanite gods. The history of Israel shows that they didn’t quite obey God’s commands in this area and as a result Israel fell into the very practices God warned they’d be tempted into.

So what support then does the Bible provide that the Nephilim will return in the Last Days? Well, none, unless you read more into Jesus’ words than He actually said. And I think most of can agree that it might not be a good idea to put words into God’s mouth that He never intended to say.