Troublesome Topic: WHAT ROOT DOES THE WORD NEPHILIM COME FROM?

Nephilim sounds like a proper name and is used either as a name or a title. But we don’t read anything about someone with a name like it who founded a group of people who followed after him. Therefore it is possible that Nephilim is a title that the righteous gave the powerful wicked rulers. That title was expanded and became more popular the more individuals from various bloodlines lived up to the reputation that accompanied that word.

Most Hebrew scholars say the plural noun Nephilim comes from the verb NPHL (Naphal) which means “to fall down, to bow down, to force others to fall, to down people in battle,” and related ideas. It came to be used of ruthless giants who used their strength to “down/flatten” people in any type of confrontation. Thus, the term does not really mean “giants” but it came to be used of giants who were known for flattening people. It was common for a word meaning one thing to gain a usage over time which pointed a slightly, or largely different direction. In my opinion, the root meaning should always be considered or kept somehow connected to the usage, even if that usage seems totally other than the root meaning.

But Heiser disagrees about the word Nephilim coming from the Hebrew verb which means “to fall or make fall”. He says the significance of the fact that the second place we see the word Nephilim (Numbers 13:33) uses the spelling Nephiylim is that it must be the plural of another noun. He says it comes from the Aramaic noun naphiyla. The equivalent noun in Hebrew would be naphiyl, but it is never used in the Old Testament as a singular noun. It only appears in the plural form Nephiylim in numbers 13:33 (pages 106 & 107).

However, in the group of languages called semitic languages, the group which includes both Hebrew and Aramaic and a few others, the nouns are usually derived from the verbs because the verbs are the most basic form of the word. So I looked on the internet to see what the root verb behind the Aramaic noun naphiyla was. It took me only about 5 seconds to find the answer. Because Hebrew and Aramaic are cousin languages, I was not surprised at all to see that the root verb is NPHL, probably pronounced Nephal in Aramaic, which is similar to Naphal in Hebrew. Like Hebrew, Nephal means “to fall,” and other words related to falling or forcing others to fall.

I feel like Michael Heiser is being dishonest here. He knows that the nouns come from the verbs in both Hebrew and Aramaic, and surely he knows the meaning of the Aramaic verb Nephal is the same as the meaning of the Hebrew verb Naphal. Yet he chooses to point to another noun as its origin, one which had already come to be used of giants.

The next lesson is WERE THE NEPHILIM THE OFFSPRING OF ANGELS THAT MARRIED HUMAN WOMEN?