This post is for Daughter of Jay, coming out of a personal conversation, but also for my own reference. This excerpt was taken from the free sample of the The Ancient Book of Enoch (I put the leading “The” in there) by Ken Johnson, on Amazon. I found him from one of his videos, here: “Nephilim in the Dead Sea Scrolls”.
What’s translated as “angels” here are probably the rebellious sons of God referenced (canonically) in Genesis and Job, if you have a post-DSS translation. I don’t know how well the English-translated apocryphal texts incorporate Second Temple literature, but I definitely don’t think they were angels.
Johnson’s a theology guy, but what he says about genetics seem pretty basic that he probably couldn’t get it wrong. He’s really hard up on nailing down prophetic dates of things from apocryphal texts, which annoys me almost as much as the missing definite article in his book title. He omits another “the” again—and I fixed it again—in the appendix for “Book of Giants”.
The Ancient Book of Enoch
Appendix C
The Book of Giants
The entire Book of Enoch is preserved by the Ethiopic Church and fragments of the same book exist among the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Hebrew and Aramaic languages. There also exist fragments of what is referred to as the Book of Giants. These Dead Sea Scroll fragments may prove to be a previously unknown chapter of the story of Enoch. Though very badly fragmented, they provide more details on the practices of the fallen ones.
Dead Sea Scrolls are identified by a sequence of numbers and letters. The first number is the cave in which the scroll was found. The “Q” means it was found at the Qumran site, and the next number is the fragment or scroll number. Compiling the Dead Sea fragments 1Q23; 2Q26; 4Q530, 531, 532; and 6Q8, we come up with part of the original Book of Giants. It is still badly fragmented, so it is an educated guess as to some of the details.
The Book of Giants is made up of two sections.
Summary of the First Section
The first section of this work details how the fallen angels descended from heaven and studied all types of creatures from insects to mammals, birds, and even mankind. They took two hundred of each kind of animal or bird and cross bred them with another kind that had a similar chromosome count to create a creature with an unstable chromosome count. One example given in the text is sheep with 54 chromosomes and goats with 60 chromosomes. This produced a half-sheep, half-goat creature with 56 or 57 chromosomes. Only a few of the two hundred pair combinations would have the ability to reproduce. These unstable life-forms were then crossed with other unstable life-forms with a chromosome count not too different from their own. This process was continued until the desired creature was created. The Ancient Book of Jasher mentioned cross breeding cattle with birds. This might have been the origin of the legend of Pegasus, a winged horse. See the appendix on Genetic Experiments to see how today’s scientists are headed in the same direction.
Reconstruction of the First Section
When the fallen angels came, they brought great sin upon the earth. Using the secrets of heaven that they knew, they killed many people and animals and they begot giants. 1Q23 Frag. 9, 14, 15
They studied everything the earth produced, the fruit, grains, and trees, along with the creeping insects up to the great fish, beasts, reptiles, the flying birds. …every harsh deed …their oath …male and female, and among humans… 4Q531 Frag. 3
They took two hundred donkeys and assesᵃ, two hundred rams and goatsᵇ, two hundred of the beasts of the field, including various types of animals and birds, for the purpose of mixing species.
1Q23 Frag. 1, 6The angels defiled their women, who begot giants and monsters. The entire earth was corrupted by this blood and by the hand of the giants who devoured much flesh. What the giants did not eat, the monsters attacked. 4Q531 Frag. 2
The flesh of all the monsters… they would always arise without true understanding and knowledge and the earth grew so corrupt they were considering… from the angels, but in the end it would always perish and die and it caused even greater corruption in the earth… this did not suffice to… said “they will be…” 4Q532 Col. 2 Frags. 1 – 6
According to the books of Enoch and Jubilees, the two hundred angels had children who were called giants. Later, another species was created called the Nephal. The details are sketchy but most scholars seem to suggest the Nephal were the children of the giants, but dramatically inferior to the giants themselves. Later, another species…
ᵃ Donkeys which have 62 chromosomes and horses which have 64 produce mules which have 63 and are almost always infertile.
ᵇ Sheep have 54 chromosomes, but goats have 60. When cross mated, they rarely produce surviving offspring. When one does survive, it has either 56 or 57 chromosomes and is infertile.
2 Comments
I’m trying to understand who the Nephal and the later species were or are. I have this theory that some of these species created are the reptilians, the Sirens, the greys, etc and I’m sure there are countless others.
The general consensus among Biblical scholars that I can gather is that the giant clans mentioned in the OT–the Rephaim, Anakim, Emim, etc–were descendents of the Nephal/Nephilim, but there’s no other physical description than they were taller than normal humans. The post-flood clans were probably not as tall as the original Nephal ancestors, I suppose because whatever “tall” genes they had got diluted by mating with normal humans over the years. Whether or not the other non-human beings you mention were a part of the nephilim bloodline is hard to tell, but it’s very possible, though it’s a big task trying to separate what are fanciful descriptions from the truth.