I’ll just let Biblical Scholar Ben Stanhope in this video respond to all of your points.
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Women are "not gullible or susceptible to the influence of fantastic or “Supermen” … “contrary to popular culture”???
SERIOUSLY??
The female, from the Garden (almost), is almost named as being ruled by her hormones and emotions. (emotions are hormones as I understand it)
We all have a right to our opinions but I’d like to know just exactly WHERE you live. I’d like to meet some of the “superwomen” you are accustomed to! Here in America.. women are ABSOLUTELY all those things you said your women are not
lol
Not ALL women of course. We SHOULD have a cut above here on Logos 
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And there was I thinking male chauvinism was dead.
Ah well, it’s a long time since I was criticised for my view of women.
Richard
I only told you what American women are “like”
And suggested that I’d love to meet some of the women where you live 
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In the account of Genesis, after the “fall” of Adam and his lovely bride, Eve, the Almighty assigned to Eve circumstances she (it would seem) was not subject to prior
More pain when giving birth
She will.. USURP the authority of her husband
Authority.. legal “power” given to one from one ABOVE who actually HAS Authority
Women are.. compelled… (Adamic women) to rebel against the authority of their husband. Why? “Because you have done this”. What did she do? She had sex with a fallen angel
I think… she was gullible and was susceptible to “superman” presence. The fallen angels were the fathers of the Titans! Genesis calls the angle a “shining one” iirc
I think it’s very compassionate to hold women in high regard but let’s not forget what He told her was her lot in life after ignoring the Instruction of the Almighty
No! It wasn’t an apple
Enoch, iirc, tells us of the angel mama Eve had Cain with. Azazel. We shouldn’t use their names if the Scriptures are to be believed
The woman.. the… “weaker vessel”. Not my words
There’s nothing in archaeology to back that up. The Nephilim of Genesis are not a caste, nor are the later Anakim, etc. They would have been members of a class, but to extend that to identify that class with them is a logical error.
The text doesn’t assume the modern idea that beautiful women have to consent.
That’s a mathematical fallacy that ignores real population interactions.
Given the nature of warfare at the time it isn’t impossible at all.
And I don’t agree that this is an assumption; it’s an assertion. I don’t know why you would take one assertion, i.e. the supernatural element, and set aside the other.
The real question is why there would be any left after the Flood.
Exactly. The NT abounds with second-Temple material, assuming it.
That’s some pretty heavy-duty allegory.
In that context with the grammar it certainly should be as it is identifying a certain ethnic group.
Nephilim has “the” in front of it so it’s not a proper name. The ethnic group is identified as the “sons of Anak”
Maybe you are right. But the bones we do have I think point in the direction that they are Nephilim. The polemic was pointed at very specific people. We have the graves of this Early Dynasty at Ur which Mesopotamian legend says was descended from the Apkallu. These would have been peers to people like Gilgamesh who is identified in the Book of Giants as a Nephilim. The Polemic targets the royal ideology of Mesopotamia that says these Early Dynastic kings and queens were descended from the gods. True, in their mythology this is after the flood but the Bible says that the Nephilim were on the earth even afterwards regarding the flood. Then there’s the Rephaim. Canaanite mythology didn’t believe the Rephaim were giants, they described them as normal sized chariot warriors who happened to be descended from gods. We have bones from the tombs where the Rephaim ancestor cults were strongest which just happens to be exactly where the Nephilim are said to be in Canaan in the Bible, and all the bones we’ve found are normal humans. These are the Rephaim, they were worshipped as Rephaim and the kings poured libations to their bones. These bones go back to the Early Bronze Age, so very far back.
Then there’s the elites at Hebron which was the capital of the Anakim called Kirth-Arba after Arba the father of Anak. The Nephilim ruled that city and called it their capital, and named the place after them. They were the ruling elite there. We have the ruling elite from around that time, and their bones, they are normal humans. You could say these are not the Nephilim and maybe you are right. But these are the very places that the Nephilim are said by the Bible to have a presence for thousands of years in the exact classes or caste they were supposed to be a part of. The Anakim you mentioned started out as an ethnic group in the Southern Hill country but ended up conquering that area and setting themselves up as a military aristocracy or at least this is what historical scholarship says. The fact is we’ve found bones from the elite of all of these places, and elite burials are overrepresented. If there were six to seven foot populations of giants that were somehow distinct from the Early Dynastic Mesopotamian kings that the Bible is polemicizing against, somehow distinct from those the Canaanites called Rephaim which is the population that the Bible is polemicizing against, somehow distinct from the elite at Hebron which the Bible says were Nephilim and were polemicizing against, we probably would have found them.
Not really, every person of European descent is descended from Charlemagne, the Vikings, the prophet Muhammed, and everyone even remotely related to Europe that left children one thousand years ago. Go back even further then everyone is descended from everyone who had children back then. The Nephilim were elites, they would have had a lot of children and they inhabited the Middle East for thousands of years in an unbroken lineage. In order for their lines to die out they would have to be 100% endogamous. If even one Nephilim had children outside the lineage they sould be connected the wider pool of human ancestry.
Because I believe in the supernatural and put it on an equal footing of reality with non supernatural things. Nevertheless in both things I follow the evidence where I believe it leads.
That’s a very easy question to solve. 1. The flood was local. 2. The Rephaim were said to be descended from Canaanite gods.
OK, so lets have an outrageous thought, that the so called development of Homo Sapiens was not as linear as ToE would assert.
Neandethals were very tall, right? What if they directly sired a branch of humanity, while, say Cromagnon sired a different branch. Meaning that just a Big cats are not linear, neither is humanity. Giants would not longer be from Angelic stock and the Nephilim would be just another folk tale or myth
Aw shucks!
It would ruin all this provarication and wrangling to make the Biblical view of the Nephilim real. (Not to mention change the linear direction of the development of humanity)
I had better duck now
Richard
You say this and then all the examples of bones you give are normal human bones… so there you go.
No they were shorter and stockier with an average height of 5’-5"
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That doesn’t mean that your interpretation of the text is right. It most certainly isn’t by any objective standard. If I’m right, and I might not be, I’m waiting for St. Roymand’s rebuttal, it means there is a discrepancy between the text and the evidence that must be reconciled
That is a simplification that is probably not true.
It is likely that a large proportion of people from western and central Europe have some sort of heritage (ancestry line) that can be tracked back to Charlemange, but not all. I live in Europe and as far as I know, Charlemange is not one of my ancestors.
The claim of Viking ancestry hits closer. I have some heritage from Sweden, so probably also from ancestors who belonged to the people that were once known as Vikings (although that name was mainly used from Norsemen when they were fighting and robbing). Yet, the Viking heritage is probably also limited to some part of the European population, not all.
If we go further back in history, it is more possible that a person with many children was one of the genealogical, possibly even genetic ancestors of many humans today. However, it should be remembered that people did not roam freely during the ancient times. There were social and geographical barriers between the tribes and nations. Mortality was relatively high, so many genetic lines ended without leaving any living descendants.
I had this conversation with AI, and it seems that while it is true that all Europeans basically descend from Charlemagne and anyone who was alive in Europe a thousand years ago, and you do come to a point where everyone today is descended from everyone in a certain time period who had children if you trace it back far enough, it’s also true that lineages can go extict. St. Roymand’s points are starting to to make more sense. Perhaps these bones found are not the nephilim.
In grad school I had a professor who could trace his descent back to Charlemagne. A fellow student took it on himself to check to see if any other faculty members could do so also, and found that only two out of dozens could possibly make that claim.
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And there are many lineages that do not cross. We don’t think of that much today, but in a culture where ethnicity/tribe was important it was common. For a modern example, I knew some Danes who were immensely proud of the fact that they could trace their lineage as pure Danish as far back as 700 A.D., and some Sicilians who could do the same back even to about 500!
I don’t think anyone in England could make such a claim; the various waves of immigration and conquest clear back into Roman times broadens the ancestry there immensely.
AI can be a useful starting point when you do not know much of a topic but AI is not an expert. If the material used to train the AI included more false than correct information, AI repeats what the misleading training material claimed. Popular claims get into the answers even when they are not true. AI can claim something but it cannot truly separate truth from false information.
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What do you have to say to this? What is your take on it?
I know, I use it as an advanced search engine. It’s usually easy to see if it’s saying something that’s not making sense. They key is usually to ask questions from it from every angle, nail it down. But also to supplement it with academic studies and books or rather use the AI to supplement the academic studies and books. But the conclusions it drew were not based on nothing. They are based on studies by mathematicians, geneticists, geneologists and the like, though it may be outdated.
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Like right here Michael Heiser explains two options for the Nephilim passages, one is biological hybridization and the other is not. The second one is completely compatible with what I’ve been saying here and works even if they are completely human, have human DNA, were normal sized, and even had descendants (because their direct line was wiped out and their ethnic/national identity was destroyed like the ten lost tribes of Israel even if literally all of their descendants were not wiped out.)
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