I read an interesting theory about the connection of the Nephilim mentioned in Genesis and Neanderthals.

Also read that there is evidence that Neanderthals and humans lived together at the same time in the Holy Land.

I thought it was intriguing, anyone else read this?

Here you can see Fields of the Nephilim performing Preacher Man:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsSFR43Z600

You may now return to the program already underway.

sons of Angels/mankind in Genesis chapter 6. Many believe they are the demonic spirits running around today since they have a heavenly spirit but a body of a carnal.


some theorize that the flood was sent to get rid of the tainted race (mankind and angelic beings). Remember the verse in Genesis that says I will strike your heal and bruise my heal but I will crush your head (I paraphrased this). The seed of the serpent were the Nephililm and the seed of the woman is Christ.

Nephilim were also spoken in Deut and Numbers while the Jews were approaching the HOly land and the reason that the Jews said we are lke grasshoppers in their site. Goliath was a Nephilim.

the angels that sinned are already thrown in the pit (1st or 2nd Peter and I think 1st John).

Read the Book of Enoch and it really goes into detail (not saying it's factual but has some details that might explain Genesis Chapt 6 and Peter and John).

Really we don't know. They seem to be some kind of human/angelic offspring. They only make two appearances in the Bible, just before the flood and just before the Israelites enter the promised land.

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I read an interesting theory about the connection of the Nephilim mentioned in Genesis and Neanderthals

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Without getting too far down the rabbit hole, this seems a little unlikely. The Neanderthals were extinct by about 30,000 years ago (and they were pretty confined to Europe by then), so I doubt that they could have been confused for angel/human offspring by early Semites.

It's true that early humans did come into contact with Neanderthals (and maybe other hominids, like the H. floresiensis hobbits in Indonesia), but the timing wouldn't seem to be right for a Nephilim/neanderthal connection.

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The Neanderthals were extinct by about 30,000 years ago (and they were pretty confined to Europe by then)

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And T-Rex drug his tail around until the late 80s.

I don't believe that Neanderthals and the Nephilim were the same thing, but wow do we say things with such confidence when we are really just making, often, nothing more than educated guesses. Sorry to pick on you amercer, as we are all guilty of it.

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but wow do we say things with such confidence when we are really just making, often, nothing more than educated guesses.

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Actually Neanderthals are pretty well understood, and it is an area of active research, so it's quite a bit more than an "educated guess". A number of different analyzes (including recent DNA evidence) are used to come up with the extinction date, so that is pretty solid.

As for the topic of this thread, of course it is all just speculation, but I think the evidence exists to say that Neanderthals weren't hanging out in the middle east any time in the last 40,000 to 50,000 years--and thus could not have been the source of the Nephilim idea/story/myth.

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Actually Neanderthals are pretty well understood, and it is an area of active research, so it's quite a bit more than an "educated guess"

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We're probably arguing semantics, but archaeology and anthropology are ultimately nothing more than educated guesses. Determining when Neanderthals became extinct is based on an assumed timeline and the absence of evidence after some point on that timeline.

I guess I just have less faith in science than you do.

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We're probably arguing semantics, but archaeology and anthropology are ultimately nothing more than educated guesses. Determining when Neanderthals became extinct is based on an assumed timeline and the absence of evidence after some point on that timeline.

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I agree that it's sort of a silly argument (especially considering that we basically agree). My point is that we do have physical evidence that makes up the Neanderthal timeline. It's pretty solid. To me that's more than an educated guess--but I do tend to view the term "educated guess" as a bit of a pejorative in this sort of discussion.

Now of course if we found some Neanderthal bones in Syria that dated to 6,000 years ago that time line would have to be radically altered. However, with all the evidence we have now, that is very unlikely.

Yes, in some sense science requires faith. I have faith that the scientific method allows us to formulate an accurate description of the natural world. I don't think this is a blind faith however, as science has proven itself over the last couple of centuries to be incredibly valuable in describing the natural world.

I understand that some people may have varying degrees of faith in science to produce answers about the natural world--I suppose we could really be living in Plato's cave, or even the matrix--but I think that the evidence shows that science does work.

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Yes, in some sense science requires faith. I have faith that the scientific method allows us to formulate an accurate description of the natural world. I don't think this is a blind faith however, as science has proven itself over the last couple of centuries to be incredibly valuable in describing the natural world.

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Sure. Not sure what blind faith really means though. I can't say I have blind faith in anything.

Anyways, sorry to pirate the thread. It's all good.

Cool.

I wasn't trying to imply anything by saying "blind faith" other than I think my faith in the scientific method is well founded. But I guess that would make for a whole different thread (and I think we may have done that one before )

Dang you Beretta!!! I've been looking into this for waaaay too long now. I've been to websites about aliens and Gilgamesh and whatnot. This would be a great idea for a movie though...so many possibilities.

Sorry i told you it was interesting

Why couldnt the story have been passed down for 30K years?

You are correct it would make a good movie

Nephilim are not Neanderthals.

We do not known when Neanderthals dead out and DNA test have shown a that they are very likely just human.

Now a question to all that understand:

If a man lives 600+ years what would he look like?

His skull would be huge and his ears would be large.

Not one person including Darwin first thought that Neanderthals were anything but Homo sapiens who had lived long and had lack of vietiman C.


Nephilim were all over the land of what today is Israel, upper Jordan, lower Syria and Lebanon.

There have been a number of grave yards dug up over the last 100 years in these areas, one of which had the average height of 9 feet for the people burried in it; near 9 1/2 for male and 8 1/2 for the females.

Now why do these types of finds get no press vs a Lucy?

And what is Lucy, just another of number of monkies that at one time or another was called an Australopithecus afarensis.

The bones of Lucy were found over an area the size of a small country, and not together.

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We do not known when Neanderthals dead out and DNA test have shown a that they are very likely just human.

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nope. we are on our way to sequencing the whole Neanderthal genome, and not only are they indeed another species, but their DNA sequence puts them exactly in on the common decent tree as the theory of evolution predicted.

for instance:

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BERKELEY, CA —The veil of mystery surrounding our extinct hominid cousins, the Neanderthals, has been at least partially lifted to reveal surprising results. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) have sequenced genomic DNA from fossilized Neanderthal bones. Their results show that the genomes of modern humans and Neanderthals are at least 99.5-percent identical, but despite this genetic similarity, and despite the two species having cohabitated the same geographic region for thousands of years, there is no evidence of any significant crossbreeding between the two. Based on these early results, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis last shared a common ancestor approximately 700,000 years ago

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http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/Genomics-Neanderthal.html

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The bones of Lucy were found over an area the size of a small country, and not together.

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that's not really accurate.

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His skull would be huge and his ears would be large.

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I don't know if you have ever actually seen an old person, but they don't turn in to giants. In fact most people shrink when they get old. So a six hundred year old person--assuming we ignore absolutely everything we know about biology and fantasize that a person could live 600 years--would look like Yoda, not a Neanderthal.

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Now why do these types of finds get no press vs a Lucy?

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Perhaps because they didn't happen?




[This message has been edited by amercer (edited 12/23/2008 11:58p).]

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There have been a number of grave yards dug up over the last 100 years in these areas, one of which had the average height of 9 feet for the people burried in it; near 9 1/2 for male and 8 1/2 for the females.

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I work in the field of archaeology and this has never been dug up.

amercer,
I see you have not read much on Lucy:

There has been a lot of discussion of Lucy's knee joint, the one found far away was found two to three kilometers away from the skull and 60-70 meters deeper in the strata. Dr. Johansen does not claim that the knee joint belonged to Lucy. Instead, it was part of another fossil he found some time earlier. He does put them together logically, though, claiming that they were of the same species.

Also you do know the lower jaw of Lucy does not fit the skull 1470.

Solly Lord Zuckerman is one of many anatomist that have said australopithecines do not belong in the family of man.

Dr. Charles Oxnard completed the most sophisticated computer analysis of australopithecine fossils ever undertaken, and concluded that the australopithecines have nothing to do with the ancestry of man whatsoever, and are simply an extinct form of ape.

Stern and Sussman also mentions that the hands and feet of Australopithecus afarensis are not at all like human hands and feet; rather, they have the long curved fingers and toes typical of arboreal primates.

Dr. Chas. Oxnard (USC) writes "Although most studies emphasize the similarity of the australopithecines to modern man, and suggest, therefore that these creatures were bipedal tool-makers at least one form of which (A. africanus--"Homo habilis," "Homo africanus" was almost directly ancestral to man, a series of multivariate statistical studies of various postcranial fragments suggests other conclusions.

Lucy has more probelms than just the above, the question of was the bones all together in a tent at one time with finds from both Hadar, Ethiopia and form Laetoli; which in any circles of work in these types fields is a no no.

Richmond and Strait identify four skeletal features of the distal radius of the living knuckle-walking apes, chimpanzees and gorillas. They also identify similar morphological features on two early ‘hominids’, including Lucy:

‘A UPGMA clustering diagram … illustrates the similarity between the radii of A. anamensis and A. afarensis and those of the knuckle-walking African apes, indicating that these hominids retain the derived wrist morphology of knuckle-walkers.’5


The knee joint has more problem than just being found 1.5 miles away, the question of is it from the same species.

Yes I have read everything on this monkey held up by NG as a missing link after much has proven otherwise.

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There have been a number of grave yards dug up over the last 100 years in these areas, one of which had the average height of 9 feet for the people buried in it; near 9 1/2 for male and 8 1/2 for the females.

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I'm not claiming the neanderthals were Nephilim I just thought it was interesting. But this claim of 9 foot tall people is completely false. As far as I can tell no one has ever dug up a skeleton of a human in the middle east any larger than 6'4".

It is also the learned opinion of most theologians that Nephilim does not mean giants as translated in Kings James version.

"Giants" is how the Greek Old Testament translated "Nephilim," and the KJV followed this translation.

We now know that this is a bad translation.

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We now know that this is a bad translation.

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can you elaborate?

Sure!

There are two places where the term appears in the OT:

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

Numbers 13:33 - "There also we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight."

The Hebrew word "Nephilim" is very ambiguous, so the translators of the Septuagint took the idea of Numbers 13:33, and thought these men must be giants, so they translated both instances as "giants." The problem is, there is a word for "giants" in Hebrew, rapha.

In the numbers passage, though, it seems that the fact that they seemed like grasshoppers is not to be taken literally, but because of the mightiness of the Nephilim, they seemed insignificant.

The best translation we have now is "strong warriors." Here is part of the entry from the Lexicon:

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While some scholars attempt to relate this term etymologically to n¹pal I via the noun n¢pel "untimely birth" or "miscarriage" (as productive of superhuman monstrosities), a more likely reconstruction is the proposal of a root n¹pal II, akin to other weak verbs, pûl II "be wonderful, strong, mighty," p¹l¹° "be wonderful," and even p¹lâ "separate, distinguish, " p¹lal "discriminate. "This pattern of semantically related groups of weak verbs with two strong consonants in common is a notably recurrent phenomenon in Hebrew lexicography. Actually, the translation "giants" is supported mainly by the LXX and may be quite misleading. The word may be of unknown origin and mean "heroes" or "fierce warriors" etc, The RSV and NIV transliteration "Nephilim" is safer and may be correct in referring the noun to a race or nation. M.C.F.

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I watched this program today, I was surprised to find that the site they used for the "hybrid" is a site I've studied before a couple years ago.

Some criticisms of it from what I can remeber:

1. They claim that neanderthals were buried there, this is a highly controversial claim in any neanderthal site so I wouldn't take this as fact.

2. The archaeologist of the site claims that its a hybrid or at most, not neanderthal and not sapien. This claim has also been refuted by most anthropologists, they looked at the data the archaeologist provided and most came to the conclusion that its just neanderthal.

According to theologian Jeff Cavins in the Great Adventure Bible CD's, the sons of God were the descendants of Seth, and the daughters of men were the descendants of Cain. Nephilim means "the fallen ones" in Hebrew, or the result of intermarriage between the two bloodlines of Seth and Cain.

[This message has been edited by Thaddeus73 (edited 1/3/2009 1:49p).]

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According to theologian Jeff Cavins in the Great Adventure Bible CD's, the sons of God were the descendants of Seth, and the daughters of men were the descendants of Cain. Nephilim means "the fallen ones" in Hebrew, or the result of intermarriage between the two bloodlines of Seth and Cain.

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Thaddeus, I don't think this answer explains the text entirely (e.g. why only males from one line and females from the other?), but it does fit well with my own study of the context.

I had been taught this demon-woman hybrid theory, but it doesn't make sense. After all, creatures produce after their own kind, and the idea that fallen angels could reproduce, forming some fleshly offspring - well, there are a number of theological problems with that, starting with the atonement question.

I think we have to look at the context of the Fall, when God promises that there will be several forms of "enmity" (Gen. 3:15) First, there is enmity between God and man, which was overcome by the reconciliation offered through Jesus Christ. Second, there is enmity between the woman and the serpent, as evidenced by the hatred of Satan for the children of God. Third, there is enmity between the children of God (the woman's seed) and the children of Satan (the unsaved). The union of the saved and the unsaved (the sons of God and the daughters of men) may be the meaning of the text, but it still doesn't explain characteristics of the offspring. In addition, the text of Gen. 6 does not seem to indicate that the Nephilim were the result of this union; it is ambiguous in my opinion.