²⁵ At the end of forty days they returned from spying out the land. ²⁶ And they came to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation of the people of Israel in the wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh. They brought back word to them and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land. ²⁷ And they told him, “We came to the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. ²⁸ However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. And besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there. ²⁹ The Amalekites dwell in the land of the Negeb. The Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country. And the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and along the Jordan.”

³⁰ But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.” ³¹ Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.” ³² So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. ³³ And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

— Numbers 13:25-33, English Standard Version

This is a rather interesting, and somewhat heavy, topic. The Nephilim are some of the weirdest and most difficult characters to understand in the entire Bible. One point of view on the subject comes from Dr. Michael Heiser, who argues that the Nephilim were the offspring of the Watchers – sons of God that chose to rebel against Him and descended to Earth to have relations with human women.

This is not by any means a widely held or orthodox view of Biblical tradition by modern standards. Quite a lot of modern Christians find the entire idea to be completely unbelievable. But, such a point of view would not be at all alien to Second Temple-era Jews who understood their Old Testament.

So let’s turn things over to Dr. Heiser to make us think about what the passages in Genesis 6 and Numbers 13 mean:

Here is a broader overview of the whole controversy over who and what the “Sons of God” were in Genesis 6:

Again, this is a hugely challenging and very controversial subject, which creates much disagreement between fellow Christians.

I personally take the view that Dr. Heiser does, because he insists on avoiding the characteristic mistake that most Christians make on the subject. He does not try to apply modern standards to the past, or to read the New Testament into the Old. He instead treats the Old Testament as its own text which the New Testament then completes and does not contradict.

We cannot go about things the other way, by insisting that the New Testament is correct and the Old is therefore somehow wrong. This will lead us to make grave mistakes in our understanding of the Bible’s message, and of the living physical embodiment of that message, Jesus Christ.

instead, we must always strive to look at what the Biblical texts meant according to those who wrote them, since the Holy Spirit guided their intent and their hand.