The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim by Scott Alan Roberts

hero Gilgamesh, seeking immortality, searches out Utnapishtim in Dilmun, a kind of paradise on earth. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh how Ea (equivalent of the Sumerian Enki) warned him of the gods’ plan to destroy all life by means of a great flood. Utnapishtim then passes on instructions he had been given on how to build an enormous barge-like vessel in which he could save his family, his friends, and his wealth and cattle. After the deluge subsides, the gods repented of their action and granted immortality to Utnapishtim and his wife.
     
    Short of historical and comparative religious and mythological research, there is no scientific methodology that can be applied to a study of the Nephilim and the disastrous deluge that killed a world of living beings as a result. You can’t ring up a spirit, angel, demon, or some other form of extra-terrestrial being on the telephone, lure it into a laboratory and coax it to have sex with a human woman for the purposes of observing conception and birth of offspring. There is no means to have the ability to hypothesize, study, and repeat the procedure to gain quantifiable data. You can, however, look to the ancient annals. There is a certain scientific methodology at play when you consider that nearly every culture of the ancient world has its version of these phenomena as mentioned in the Books of Genesis and Enoch.
     
    Including the Genesis account of Noah’s Flood, in which we have the introduction of the Sons of God and their mixed-blood offspring, there are more than 600 ancient tribal legends from around the world giving account of the global deluge that consumed the antediluvial (pre-flood) world. And every major civilization of the ancient world has its corresponding mythological gods, demigods, and star children that all seem to have common source points. Despite mainstream anthropological explanations of these ancient accounts as referring less to a global flood than localized rivers over-spilling their banks, nearly all of the ancient tribal legends comprising the 600 tales speak of a “world covering” flood. And most of those tribal histories mention the intercourse between spirit beings and human women as partial cause for a deity to send flood waters to wipe them out.
     
    The various accounts of a great, ancient flood come from hundreds of tribes in Europe, Asia, the Near East, Africa, Australia, the Pacific islands, and the Americas. To enlist them all here would require a volume of its own, so suffice it to say that these various tales are found not only in what we would consider the major, well-known cultures of antiquity, such as Greek, Roman, Celtic, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern, but also from tribes such as the Masai, Yoruba, and Mandingo of Africa; the Vogel, Samoyed, Yenisey Ostyak, Tibel, Lepcha, Sagaiye, Ifugayo, Bahnar, and Kammu tribes of Asia; the Australian tribes of Maung, Gunwinggu, Gumaidje, and Manger; North America’s Inuit, Kwakiutl, Kootenay, Cherokee, Mandan, Choctaw, Navajo, and Lakota; the Tarascan, Yaqui, Tlaxcalan, Chol, Toltec, and Maya of Central America; and the South American Acawai, Yaruro, Arawak, Murato, Toba, and Selk’nam. The list is so vast that even the scant few shown here are barely the tip of the iceberg.
     
    All this illustrates is that every culture, every tribal system, every clan, region, city-state, and religion had its version of the Genesis Flood and the events surrounding its purpose, from the utilitarian to the obscurely mythological.
     
    Although I list here only a few of the cultural variants on the flood story, take note of how most of them reference the gods, giants, and anger of a deity against the corrupt and sinful inhabitants of the earth.
     
Lithuanian
     
    From his heavenly window, the supreme god Pramzimas saw nothing but corruption, war, and injustice among mankind. He sent two giants, Wandu and Wejas (water and wind), to destroy the earth. After 20 days and nights, little was left. Pramzimas looked to