Why the Watchers Fell and the Giants Drowned in the Flood

One verse in (Genesis 6:4) cracks the door open and then slams it shut. "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown." No names. No explanation of where they went. A hole the size of a mountain.

Jewish tradition spent nearly a thousand years filling it. 1 Enoch (roughly 300 to 100 BCE), the Book of Jubilees (around 160 BCE), the Book of Giants from Qumran (Aramaic, 3rd to 2nd century BCE), the Chronicles of Jerahmeel (a 12th-century CE Hebrew compilation translated by Moses Gaster in 1899), and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan (Land of Israel, 7th to 8th century CE) each add pieces. Together they tell a single story: two hundred angels made a choice, their children dragged the world down with them, and one giant somehow got out.

Who were the Watchers?

The angels are called the Irin, the Watchers, the B'nei Elohim. According to the Book of Jubilees, they were a high order who never needed to sleep, originally sent to instruct humanity in righteousness. The tradition names the leaders: Shemhazai (also Shamchazai) and Azazel (also Azael, Uzziel). Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 6:4), preserved in this Aramaic paraphrase, drops their names into the biblical text itself: "Shamchazai and Uzziel, who fell from heaven, were on the earth in those days." For a Targum that usually smooths the plain sense for a synagogue audience, naming two Watchers inside Genesis 6 is a startling move.

One caution. These angels "fell" in the sense that they descended. Jewish theology does not frame the Watchers as soldiers in a cosmic war against God. There is no rebel army, no celestial battlefield. They crossed a boundary they were warned not to cross, and were punished. The Jewish imagination here is about discipline and violated post, not about rebellion.

Why did the angels come down?

The Chronicles of Jerahmeel preserves the sharpest origin. Before the Flood, Shemhazai and Azael stood before God and argued that humanity had been a mistake. God answered with a wager. "If you lived on earth, the evil inclination would sway you just as it sways humans, and you would be even more stubborn." The angels were sure they would not fall. God let them descend.

They failed on contact. A girl named Estirah outsmarted Shemhazai by refusing him unless he taught her the Ineffable Name. He did. She spoke it, ascended, and was placed among the stars of the Pleiades. The rest did not stop. According to 1 Enoch 8-10, Shemhazai's crew of two hundred descended on Mount Hermon and swore an oath binding themselves together so no single angel could be blamed alone. Then they took wives, taught forbidden arts, and fathered the Nephilim. Azazel taught men to forge weapons and women the arts of enticement. Others revealed the secrets of roots, charms, and astrology. Knowledge meant to stay above the firmament spilled across the earth.

What did the giants actually do?

The Apocrypha collection (1,628 texts in our database) holds the most vivid descriptions. In the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, Shemhazai's sons Heyya and Aheyya each consumed a thousand camels, a thousand horses, and a thousand oxen daily. The Book of Giants from Qumran goes further, describing giants slaughtering animals, devouring flesh, drinking blood, and turning on each other. One fragment even names Gilgamesh as one of them, folding the Mesopotamian hero into a Jewish expansion of Genesis.

The theological point is not just that the giants were violent. The mingling of heavenly and earthly flesh produced creatures that should not exist. Echoing (Genesis 6:11-12), the earth itself cried out. The Flood was not arbitrary wrath. It was a reset, because the boundary between heaven and earth had been so thoroughly trampled that the world had become unsustainable.

Did the giants know the Flood was coming?

Yes, and this is the eeriest thread in the tradition. In the Book of Giants, Shemhazai's sons Ohya and Hahya begin to dream. Ohya sees a huge tablet descending from heaven covered in writing; when it is read, it describes the destruction of all flesh. Hahya dreams of a garden of trees, and an angel chops them all down except one tree with three branches standing.

The giants send a messenger, Mahaway, son of the Watcher Baraq'el, across the inhabited world to find Enoch, the only human who can interpret. Enoch gives no comfort. The Flood is coming. One man and his three sons will survive. The Chronicles of Jerahmeel adds that God sent Enoch's successor Metatron to warn Shemhazai directly, and Shemhazai wept for his children. He could not unmake what he had made.

How did the giants die?

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds a scene no other source spells out this clearly. In its expansion of (Genesis 7:11), on the day the fountains of the great deep broke open, the gibborim gathered at those fountains with their sons and tried to stop them. The waters of the deep are erupting from below, and the towering half-angelic children throw their bodies into the breach, trying to plug the earth like a shattered dam. Meanwhile the windows of heaven open above them. The Flood comes at them from both directions at once, and they drown at the exact spot where they tried to hold it back. When the Holy One opens both the deep and the sky, there is no wall anyone can build between them.

How did Og survive the Flood?

Almost every giant drowned. One did not. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 14:13) takes the single Hebrew word ha-palit — "the fugitive" who brings news of Lot's capture to Abram — and names him. It is Og. The same Og who will later appear as the giant king of Bashan defeated by Moses at Edrei (Numbers 21:33, Deuteronomy 3:11). In this Targum passage, Og rode out the Flood clinging to the top of the ark, sustained by food Noah handed him through the window.

The Aramaic is blunt. Og survived "not being spared through high righteousness, but that the inhabitants of the world might see the power of the Lord." He is not a reward. He is an exhibit — a living giant preserved so the post-flood world could see what the antediluvian titans looked like. And when Og arrives at Mamre on the eve of Passover — yes, the Targumist quietly plants the first Passover in the patriarchal era — he hopes Abram will go to war with the four kings, die trying, and leave Sarah for him to take. The giant who survived the Flood has been nursing a grudge since the ark.

Where are the Watchers now?

Raphael chained Azazel hand and foot and cast him upside down into a canyon in the desert of Dudael. Michael bound Shemhazai and his company in the valleys of the earth for seventy generations. Shemhazai himself repented and, in one tradition, hangs suspended between heaven and earth, head downward, too ashamed to face God. Azazel never repented. The tradition connects him to the scapegoat of (Leviticus 16:8), the goat driven into the wilderness on Yom Kippur, carrying Israel's sins back to the fallen angel who first taught humanity to sin.

The takeaway across all nine sources is consistent. The Watchers were not villains in a cosmic drama. They were disciplined beings who underestimated the pull of the world, and their children paid for the miscalculation. The Midrash Aggadah collection (6,276 texts here) treats their fall as a warning about crossing assigned boundaries. The Memra, the divine word that set those boundaries, is the same word that opens both the deep and the sky. You can be a Watcher, a giant, or a man on an ark. The boundary holds regardless.