12 myths
The giants of Genesis 6, born when the sons of God descended to earth; later tradition links them to the fallen Watchers and to the corruption of the world before the Flood.
12 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines nephilim, drawn from the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Talmud, Kabbalah, and later Jewish literature. Each story below synthesizes primary sources into a single narrative; follow any myth to read it, and from there into the source passages behind it.
God warned them that the pull toward their own desire would rise in them too, down there in bodies. They went anyway. Azazel crafted the paint and the gold.
Seth's descendants lived near Paradise for generations, pious and untouched. Then they looked down at the Cainites and made a choice they could not take back.
The giants ate everything the earth grew, then the animals, then each other. Shemhazai hanged himself between heaven and earth. Azzael was buried in the dark.
When the angel Shemhazai demands her love, Istehar agrees on one condition: teach her the Name. She speaks it and rises into the sky forever.
Two hundred angels swore an oath together on Mount Hermon. Azazel taught men to forge blades and women to paint their faces. Raphael buried him upside down.
Before the waters rose, titans ruled a fertile earth. When the deep broke open, the giants jammed their feet into it and drowned defying God.
Three towering brothers boasted that no one dared face them, and twelve scouts saw themselves as insects while one man broke away to beg the dead for courage.
Summoned before Solomon's seal, a restless demon confesses it is what became of the Nephilim, and the wise king binds it to labor on his Temple.
Angels wore men's forms, giants rose hungry, and the earth filled with blood until kin ate kin and the flood waited.
A heavenly boundary breaks when a star falls and Watchers take wives, until the waters answer the violation and eight souls cannot hold the world.
Heaven had sentenced the world to erasure, and when the scalding rain fell the giants of Noah's generation charged the ark and clawed for a seam.
The giant sons of the Watchers dream of a flood that erases their kind and send Mahaway winging to Enoch to beg mercy heaven has already refused.
