Did angels have children with humans? What were the Nephilim?

Genesis 6 describes exactly that — and calls it a transgression.

The passage opens with "the sons of God" seeing "the daughters of humankind" and taking them as wives. The offspring of these unions are called הַנְּפִלִים (ha-nephilim, "the Nephilim," H5303) — a proper noun that appears only three times in the entire Hebrew Bible (Genesis 6:4 once, Numbers 13:33 twice). The text also calls them הַגִּבֹּרִים (ha-gibborim, "the mighty men") and "men of name" — epithets of power and renown.

"The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of humankind and they bore children to them. They were the mighty men of old, men of name." — Genesis 6:4

But notice what the text doesn't do. Across Genesis 1, God assigns every created creature a "kind" — in Hebrew, מִין (min). Plants have a kind. Sea creatures have a kind. Birds have a kind. Land animals have a kind. The word appears ten times in Genesis 1 alone. When Genesis 6:4 describes these hybrid offspring, that word never appears. The text gives them three names of power — and then withholds the one thing that would taxonomize them as a legitimate category: a kind. The narrator registers the violation without ratifying the category.

The New Testament treats this as settled history. Jude 6 describes angels who "did not keep their own domain (ἀρχήν) but abandoned their proper dwelling (οἰκητήριον)" — now "kept in eternal chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day." Second Peter 2:4 says God "cast them into Tartarus," using a Greek verb (ταρταρόω) that appears nowhere else in the New Testament. The language of proper domain and proper dwelling is the language of categorical violation: these beings had a place, they left it, and they are now imprisoned because they left it.

The verb that describes how the sons of God acted in Genesis 6:2 is telling: they "saw... and took" — the same verb pair (H7200 ra'ah + H3947 laqach) that appears in Genesis 3:6 when Eve "saw... and took" the fruit. The narrator is staging Genesis 6 as the second great fall. The pattern of the first violation is repeated, but this time the motion is from heaven to earth rather than from creature to forbidden tree.

The Nephilim trail continues through the conquest narratives — the Anakim, the Rephaim, and eventually four warriors in Gath whom David's men kill in 2 Samuel 21 — though the connections at each step are inference rather than direct statement. What runs as a direct lexical thread is the H5303 spine: Genesis 6:4 to Numbers 13:33, where the spies call the Anakim "Nephilim" in their report (which the narrator frames as part of a fearful, exaggerated account).

The full study After Their Kind traces every node of this trail and distinguishes what the text says directly from what is probable inference — including why the Luke 20 resurrection saying is the structural inversion of Genesis 6:2, and what that means for how the categories hold into the age to come.