The Hebrew word at Genesis 6:4, from a root meaning to fall, and the pivot of Zecharia Sitchin’s whole project: he dated the beginning of it to a schoolroom in Mandate Palestine where he objected to his teacher’s gloss of the word as “giants” and was told to accept the traditional interpretation. The objection has something in it. “Giants” reaches English through the Septuagint’s gigantes and the Vulgate rather than from the root, which is a real observation about the transmission. The step Sitchin then takes, from a root meaning to fall to “those who came down from the sky” and so to the Anunnaki descending in craft, is a gloss rather than a translation, and the parallel literature reads them differently: the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees make the Nefilim the offspring of the Watchers and human women. One textual detail carries weight in the alternative reading. The King James rendering of Genesis 6:4 has the giants in the earth in those days rather than on the earth, and Heather Lynn takes the preposition seriously enough to ask whether the beings described are interterrestrial rather than extraterrestrial. The Hebrew ba’aretz carries both senses and is read as in the land by modern translations, so the distinction is an artefact of the English; it is worth recording because the subterranean reading recurs across the field. The derivation is not what is disputed. The identification is. See Michael S. Heiser. The theme returns as the seed of Sitchin’s last book, There Were Giants Upon the Earth (2010).
Connections
Zecharia Sitchin · Anunnaki · Michael S. Heiser · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Enuma Elish · Watchers · Apkallu · Heather Lynn · Book of Enoch