gives the true force of the original is evident from the other passages in which the phrase “sons of God” occurs, Job i. 6, Π. 1, xxxviii. 7, Dan. iii. 25, 28, Ps. xxix. 1, Ixxxix. 6. It has been suggested that the phrase per ἐκεῖνο may be a marginal note having reference to Num. xiii. 33, where the Nephilim are mentioned as a gigantic race, “in whose eyes the spies were as grasshoppers,” inhabiting a part of Canaan at the time of the Exodus. The translation γίγαντες implies not only superhuman size, but also superhuman insolence and impiety. According to Greek mythology they were children of Heaven and Earth, who rose up in insurrection against the Gods and were hurled down to Tartarus or buried beneath the mountains. This resemblance is noted by Josephus in the passage quoted below.
It is evident that the passage in Gen. vi. is a fragment unconnected either with what precedes or follows. Driver says of it: ‘We must see in it an ancient Hebrew legend . . . the intention of which was to account for the origin of a supposed race of prehistoric giants, of whom no doubt (for they were ‘men of name’) Hebrew folk-lore told much more than the compiler of Genesis has deemed worthy of preservation”. Ryle (Early Narratives of Genesis, pp. 91-95) speaks of it as “an extract from a very early legend which gives an alternative explanation of the Fall, in which woman is again tempted by one of higher race”’.
The story was variously commented on by later Jewish writers, most of whom supposed that the Nephilim were the offspring of the intercourse between the angels and the daughters of men, and that they were destroyed in the Flood.
_ The Fall of the Angels is largely treated of in the collection of treatises which goes under the name of the Book of Enoch. The ‘earliest portion of the book is considered by the latest editor, Mr. R. H. Charles, to have been written in the first quarter of the second century B.c. Two hundred of the angels, or watchers, ᾿Ἐγρήγοροι as they are called in the Greek versions of Dan. iv. 13 by Aquila and Symmachus, conspired together under the leadership of Semjaza (else- where called Azazel, as in Enoch, chapters viii. and ix.) and descended on Mount Hermon in the days of Jared, father of Enoch (vi.). There they took to themselves human wives whom they instructed in magic and various arts, and begot giants, who afterwards begot the Nephilim :΄ cf. viii, οἱ δὲ γίγαντες ἐτέκνωσαν Ναφηλείμ . . . μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα ἤρξαντο οἱ γίγαντες κατεσθίειν τὰς σάρκας τὰς ἀνθρώπων (like Polyphemus). Com- plaint having been made of the sin and misery thus introduced into the world, Raphael is sent down from heaven to bind Azazel hand and foot and shut him up in darkness till the judgment day, when he