(December 31, 2013 at 11:20 pm)Minimalist Wrote:Quote:I'm not entirely sure that the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures
The root word for nephilim (naphal) means "to fall." Where they got "giants" from is beyond me. Again, this is why the KJV is considered a horrible translation...no matter how much the fundies swear by it.
http://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/...aphal.html
The KJV definitely isn't the best translation, but I do think that here, it's following in a long tradition of interpreting the phrase as referring to giant human beings. Whether that was what the original author intended is harder to know. His note that the nephilim were "men of renown" suggests that his readers would have known what he was going for, but whatever legends he was referring to are long lost. At the point when Numbers was written, though, the nephilim were already apparently interpreted as giants. When the Book of Enoch was written in 300 B.C.E., the description was being applied to the nephilim in Genesis, so even if the earlier nephilim and those mentioned in Numbers were understood as different by the original readers (the word isn't one used often enough in ancient Hebrew for us to have any certainty about what it means, so that's a possibility), they were conflated by the Hellenic period.
