If everyone outside the ark died in the flood, how were there Nephilim afterwards?

Scripture never says that any of the Nephilim survived the flood, and Genesis 7 is plain that none did: “every man” on the dry land died, and “Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark” (7:21–23). Read closely, the other two verses do not say otherwise.

In Genesis 6:4 the words “and also after that” most naturally mean after the Nephilim first appeared: they were on the earth in those days, and were still there “when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men”. The whole verse is about the world before the flood. Keil reads it so, and Gill says outright that it is not to be understood of the time after the flood.

Numbers 13:33 is not the narrator’s statement but the words of ten frightened spies. Numbers calls their speech “an evil report” (13:32; Hebrew dibbah, a damaging report, the word rendered ‘slander’ in 14:36), and the men who spread it died by plague (14:36–37). In their first, plain report the spies spoke only of “the children of Anak” (13:28; compare 13:22). Only in this damaging report, given to stop Israel entering the land, do they reach for the dreaded name from the old stories and add that they looked like grasshoppers beside them. Scripture records truly what they said; it does not thereby vouch for every word of it. Elsewhere the Anakim have their own ancestor, Arba, “a great man among the Anakims” (Joshua 14:15).

Keil adds that the word may not name a single bloodline at all. He derives nephilim from naphal, ‘to fall’, in the sense ‘to fall upon’: men of violence who fell on others, ‘tyrants’, as Luther put it. A word for a kind of man, like ‘giant’ or ‘tyrant’, can be used again of new men who fit it without their being descended from the first.

A general name for giants

Tim Chaffey (Answers in Genesis) takes Nephilim either as a term for giants in general or as the name of a giant tribe to which the Anakim belonged; on the first reading the Anakim could be called Nephilim without being descended from the men before the flood. He notes that the Hebrew word behind ‘evil report’ need not mean a false one, and he does not think the spies invented what they saw. He takes the words ‘the sons of Anak, which come of the giants’ as an explanatory note added to their speech, and points out that the Septuagint lacks them.

After the flood as well

Some, from the medieval rabbi Ibn Ezra (as Gill reports) to Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, read “and also after that” in Genesis 6:4 as pointing ahead to the giants who appeared after the flood. Even on this reading the verse does not say that any survived the flood, only that men of the same kind appeared again.

An echo of the old world

Robin Routledge, writing in the Tyndale Bulletin (2015), argues that the Old Testament ties the Nephilim chiefly to the world before the flood, but deliberately links them with heroes of later times, so as to point up the perversity of the generation before the flood. On his reading the Old Testament writers show no interest in how the Nephilim might have survived the flood.

Christians remain divided over who ‘the sons of God’ in Genesis 6 were (angels, the line of Seth, or rulers), whether the Nephilim were their children or were already there, and whether the word means giants at all. The Septuagint, the old Greek translation, has a shorter text of Numbers 13:33 without the words ‘the sons of Anak, which come of the giants’. None of these questions requires any of the Nephilim to have lived through the flood.