And I recounted before them all the visions which I had seen in sleep, and I began to speak the words of righteousness, and to reprimand the heavenly Watchers.48
Does this not suggest, rather strongly, that the bad Watchers are physical beings? I don’t know what the good Watchers are, because they only appear to Enoch in his dreams. Quite possibly they are real at some level. Readers of my book Supernatural, which is about shamanism, will know my view that in altered states of consciousness (including dream states) the “receiver wavelength” of the brain may be retuned allowing us to make contact with other dimensions of reality.49 But in Enoch’s story the bad Watchers must be real—real on the earthly plane of physical existence—because when he wakes up he’s able to climb Mount Hermon and reprimand them.
We must also entertain the possibility that the bad Watchers—whoever or whatever they are—may not in fact be bad. All we can say is that they are judged to be bad and portrayed as bad in Enoch’s dream-visions. One possibility that we should keep in mind, alongside the alternative possibility that the “Book of Enoch” is just an ancient work of fantasy fiction, is that Enoch’s encounters with the “bad” Watchers really did happen and that he hated and resented them for changes they were seeking to introduce to the hunter-gatherer way of life of his people. In that case the reprimands he delivers to them, mediated through his subconscious as coming from the good Watchers, may simply express his own deeply entrenched views, the views of a bigoted old shaman who feels threatened by change—even though he himself will later be transformed by his contacts with the Watchers.
There isn’t space here to review the entire, bizarre, impenetrable, wildly suggestive text of the Book of Enoch. What I’m interested in is the much more specific possibility that the two hundred Watchers who “descended” on Mount Hermon were indeed real beings, not phantasms. I’d like to understand more about what kind of beings they could have been. And I want to look at the picture Enoch paints of them, laden with hatred and resentment though it is, as bringing skills and sciences to our ancestors—skills and sciences which, ultimately, will also be revealed to him by the good Watchers, and with which his own name will come to be associated in legend and tradition.50
Mystery of the Nephilim
The Watchers begin their development project in quite small ways, teaching “charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots” to humans, and making them “acquainted with plants.”51 This sounds fairly harmless; apart from a bit of “enchantment,” it’s not really above and beyond basic hunter-gatherer level skills. But pretty soon, as we saw earlier, our ancestors are being initiated into the secrets of metals, and how to make swords and knives, and how to study the heavens—and also how to beautify themselves with eye-makeup and jewelry.
In return (a bit like the GIs who allegedly bought favors from British women with gifts of nylon stockings, cigarettes and chewing gum during World War II),52 the Watchers are getting sex—lots of sex!—and it seems this is what annoys Enoch the most. He speaks reprovingly, again and again, of the “fornication” of the Watchers,53 of their “lust” for “beautiful and comely” human women54 who they “sleep with,”55 “go into”56 and “defile themselves” with,57 and to whom they reveal “all kinds of sins.”58
From such admonishments we may reasonably deduce a number of things about the Watchers, most particularly that they must be about the right size and shape, and equipped, moreover, with the necessary organs and impulses to want, to have and to enjoy sex with human women. To me, the obvious conclusion from this is the Watchers are in fact human, or at any rate extremely closely related at the genetic level to anatomically modern human beings—close enough, indeed, to make human women pregnant and to have “children of fornication”59 with them. These offspring are not sickly as one might expect from an even slightly mismatched genetic makeup. On the contrary, they thrive so vigorously that Enoch, or the “good” angels speaking through him, want not only to destroy the Watchers but also to “destroy the children of the Watchers.”60
But there is something very odd about the hybrid offspring, at least if we take Enoch’s word for it, because he tells us that when human women “became pregnant” by the Watchers they gave birth to:
great giants whose height was three thousand ells, who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.61
Three thousand ells is equivalent to 4,500 feet or 1,371 meters. Whatever the truth behind this account may be, therefore, it’s obvious the angry old shaman is embellishing it fantastically here in his bid to discredit the Watchers. The prospect of human women giving birth to babies who would grow to more than a kilometer in height is patently absurd. Nonetheless, it brings us back to familiar Biblical territory again—indeed to one of the more notorious passages in the Book of Genesis which reads:
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, “My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.62
That’s the King James Version (I’ve added the emphasis in the final lines), but other translations give the original word Nephilim, that the KJV translates as “giants,” and we read:
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans, and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.63
So now further clarity begins to emerge. A group of bad angels, “Watchers of the heaven,” have come to earth—“descended,” specifically, on Mount Hermon in Lebanon—transferred some technology, mated with human females, and produced offspring who are in some way gigantic and are called Nephilim. Here’s what we’re told in the very next verses:
The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.64
An amazing amount of credulous nonsense has proliferated around these verses in recent years on the internet, much of it deriving from the late Zecharia Sitchin’s science-fiction novels, notably the Earth Chronicles series, which he successfully passed off to the public as serious factual studies. I’ve already touched in Chapter Thirteen on Sitchin’s misrepresentation of Baalbek and while I’m not saying that everything he wrote was fiction—he did throw in some quite valuable and interesting facts—his overall body of work is marred by enough blatant fabrications and fantasy to call for caution, rather than immediate, trusting acceptance, on the part of his readers.
His treatment of the subject of the Nephilim (he spells the word Nefilim, but this is not important) is a case in point. Claiming to be an expert in Biblical languages he asks:
What then does the term Nefilim mean? Stemming from the Semitic root NFL (“to be cast down”), it means exactly what it says. It means those who were cast down upon earth!65
The problem, however, as Michael S. Heiser, a genuine Biblical scholar and ancient Semitic languages expert, has conclusively demonstrated, is that:
Sitchin assumes “nephilim” comes from the Hebrew word “naphal” which usually means “to fall.” He then forces the meaning “to come down” onto the word, creating his “to come down from above” translation. In the form we find it in the Hebrew Bible
, if the word nephilim came from Hebrew naphal, it would not be spelled as we find it. The form nephilim cannot mean “fallen ones” (the spelling would then be nephulim). Likewise nephilim does not mean “those who fall” or “those who fall away” (that would be nophelim). The only way in Hebrew to get nephilim from naphal by the rules of Hebrew morphology (word formation) would be to presume a noun spelled naphil and then pluralise it. I say “presume” since this noun does not exist in biblical Hebrew—unless one counts Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33, the two occurrences of nephilim—but that would then be assuming what one is trying to prove! However, in Aramaic the noun naphil(a) does exist. It means “giant,” making it easy to see why the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) translated nephilim as gigantes (“giant”).66
Heiser is plainly right about this because, as he points out, there is a later passage in the Old Testament, in Numbers 13, where the word Nephilim appears again. This is thousands of years after the Deluge, indeed in the historical period, surely not later than 1200 BC, when the Israelites first entered Canaan after the Exodus from Egypt. Advance scouts report to Moses:
All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there … We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.67
The context leaves no room for doubt that the Nephilim are people of “great size,” the references to them as “giants” in the King James and other versions of the Bible therefore make complete sense, and the “translation” that Sitchin gives is obviously bogus. Did he know it was bogus even as he retailed it in his books? There can be no certainty because, as Heiser goes on to prove, Sitchin’s grasp of Biblical languages was so weak that he was unable to distinguish Aramaic from Hebrew.68 The notion that the Nephilim were beings who were “cast down from heaven,” or who “came down from heaven,” was deployed by Sitchin, Heiser believes, simply because it served his argument and allowed him to “make the nephilim sound like ancient astronauts.”69
Again the criticism is justified because Sitchin goes beyond what could be an innocent error to give further “translations” of the word Nephilim that are even more self-serving and phoney. For example, he makes them “Gods of Heaven upon Earth,”70 and, worse still, “the People of the Rocket Ships”71—an interpretation for which there is no possible justification in any ancient text but that allows him to speak, among other egregious and deceptive fictions, of “the Aeronautics and Space Administration of the Nefilim.”72
It is also important, while reviewing this material which has had such an impact on public perceptions of the past, to be clear that the Watchers, who are never mentioned at all in the Bible, but are said in the Book of Enoch to have descended from heaven, are quite distinct from the Nephilim. There is nothing in the Book of Enoch that says the Nephilim fell or were cast down or came down from heaven in any way. The most we may gather from the Book of Enoch is that the Nephilim are the progeny of the mating of Watchers and human women, but even this is complicated.
An authoritative English translation of the Ethiopic text brought back by Bruce was made by the Reverend R.H. Charles and first published in 1917.73 It contains no mention of the Nephilim and describes the Watcher-human offspring simply as “giants.”74 Likewise the word Nephilim does not appear in the 1979 translation of Professor Michael A. Knibb which, as well as the Ethiopic text, takes account of newly discovered Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls.75 However, a more recent translation, by George W. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, published in 2012, draws on further fragments not considered by Knibb and here, in Chapter 7, Verse 2, the word Nephilim appears twice, as follows:
And they [human women] conceived from them [the Watchers] and bore to them great giants. And the giants begot Nephilim, and to the Nephilim were born Elioud. And they were growing in accordance with their greatness.76
The Nephilim do not appear again in the Nickelsburg and VanderKam translation. Nonetheless, the verse quoted above leaves no room for doubt: they are not to be considered as “fallen” or “cast down” or any such thing but as the progeny of Watcher-human mating. Nor is it the first generation, the “great giants,” who are named as Nephilim. It is the second generation, i.e. the offspring of the giants, who are the Nephilim, and they in turn will produce offspring of their own—the “Elioud.”
If nothing else these “Elioud,” about whom very little is known outside Jewish mystical traditions, are further evidence of the close genetic relationship between Watchers and humans—so close that they must really be classified as the same species. Generally when two different species breed, even when they are close enough to produce offspring—such as horses and donkeys for example—those offspring are themselves sterile. But unlike the sterile mules that result from horse-donkey matings, the Nephilim are clearly not sterile, since they themselves are able to go on to produce offspring, i.e. the Elioud.
The only reasonable conclusion, as I have already indicated, is that the Watchers must have been human beings—no doubt surrounded by some aura or glamor to do with their mastery of technology and the sciences, but no more and no less human than the women they mated with—and that therefore their offspring were human too. Quite possibly they were of large stature. Quite possibly the epithet of “giants” attached to them may also have had something to do with their intellectual abilities, which might have been seen to be superior. But they were human nonetheless and I see no good reason to conclude otherwise.
Meanwhile, because this is a subject around which much confusion swirls, it is necessary to reiterate that there is no suggestion either in Genesis or in Numbers—the only places they are mentioned in the Bible—that the Nephilim had “fallen,” even in the metaphorical sense of having sinned. On the contrary, far from being censured, they are described as “mighty men of old,” “heroes,” “men of renown.” Genesis is unequivocal, as the reader can confirm from the passages cited earlier, that it is human wickedness, and the evil in human hearts, that causes God to send the Flood—a cataclysm that is survived not only by Noah’s descendants, but by the Nephilim themselves who were still in Canaan, and still of great stature as the Book of Numbers attests, when the Israelites came to take possession of the Promised Land.
Emissaries
After this brief excursion into the foundations of the Sitchin Nephilim cult, let us return to the Watchers, and who and what they might be.
Enoch’s condemnation of them for “fornicating” with human women finds its counterpart in Genesis where, though not named, they are clearly “the sons of God” who “saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” Thereafter the story of exactly what happened is only preserved in Enoch, where we’re led to understand that the Watchers:
taught all unrighteousness on earth and revealed the eternal secrets which were preserved in heaven, which men were striving to learn.77
Turning now to another of the non-canonical scriptures, the Book of Jubilees, which purports to be a revelation given by God to Moses, we read of the Watchers again and in a context that brings us back to the Sabians and Harran. According both to the Islamic historian Al-Masudi, and the Christian chronicler Gregory Bar Hebraeus, Harran was originally founded by Cainan,78 the great-grandson of Noah.79 By definition, therefore, though early, Harran is a post-diluvian city. Cainan (sometimes the name is spelled Kainam) was the son of Arpachsad:
And the son grew, and his father taught him writing, and he went to seek for himself a place where he might seize for himself a city. And he found a writing, which former generations had carved on the rock, and he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it and sinned owing to it, for it contained the teaching of the Watchers in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun, moon and stars in all the signs of heaven.80
Here, then, is the origin of the star worship of the Sabians traced all the way back to the mysterious Watchers—whoever they were, whatever they were—who settl
ed in the Near East in antediluvian times, taught our ancestors forbidden knowledge, broke some fundamental commandment by mating with human women and, as a result, were remembered as being responsible for the great global cataclysm of the Deluge.
Were these Watchers the emissaries of a lost civilization of the Ice Age? Perhaps a civilization as far ahead of the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, who made up the majority of the population of the world at that time, as our own civilization is ahead of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest today? When I say “ahead” I am, of course, not speaking of moral or spiritual values but simply of technology, skills and knowledge. Since such discrepancies still exist in the twenty-first century I see no reason in principle why they should not have existed in the remote epoch before the great cataclysms of the Younger Dryas set in between 10,800 BC and 9600 BC.
To continue with this line of speculation, could it be that there was some sort of outreach before those cataclysms?
A very careful, considered, structured outreach program, to observe, to study—in other words to watch—hunter-gatherer populations, but not to intermingle with them, not to enter into the complicated entanglements of sexual and family relationships with them, and above all not to transfer any technology to them?
One could imagine that a group of anthropologists and scientists sent off to study a previously uncontacted Amazon tribe today might be bound by similar strictures. But suppose some of them disagreed? Suppose some of them “went native”—as used to be said of colonialists in the days of the British Empire who allowed themselves to get too close to indigenous populations they interacted with.
Is that perhaps what happened to the troop of two hundred “Watchers” on Mount Hermon? Somewhere around 10,900 BC, did they break the commandments of their own culture and “go native” among the hunter-gatherers of the Near East? And were the first chance encounters with the fragments of a giant comet a century later in 10,800 BC—encounters that devastated the world—somehow blamed upon their moral lapse?