Father Andrew Stephen Damick, author of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy and prolific podcaster for several years, and Father Stephen De Young, have created a wonderful podcast for Ancient Faith Radio, the Lord of Spirits. Over the years I have seen many theories on the nature of the Nephilim mentioned in Genesis and Numbers. Answers in Genesis provides a representative view of the general treatment of the question: “There is a great deal of confusion over the word Nephilim. No one today really knows what it means. It is related to the verb series “to fall” (naphal) in Hebrew, which is why some direct this to fallen angels or more appropriately, the offspring thereof. However, this also gives strong support to the view that men had fallen away from God.” And the various fictional treatments I have sampled missed the target in my opinion.
The priests at the Lord of Spirits have very broadly surveyed the religions of the Biblical world and developed some very interesting theories on who the Nephilim were and why, when translating the Hebrew into Greek, Septuagint scholars chose to translate Nephilim as Gigantes, the Greek word for giants. Who were the Nephilim, how do they bridge the Flood when we have accounts of all eight survivors of that cataclysm, how do they relate to the Greek legends of Gigantes, and how do they relate to powers and principalities? Give it a listen and tell me what you think.