The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim by Scott Alan Roberts Page B

start in sifting through the many mythological evidences that seem to point to a great historic event.
     
    As mentioned, there are many cultural references to “giants” and “visitors from the sky,” whom most tales refer to as angels, demons, or spirit beings. These “spirits who descended” are found in nearly every account of the ancient deluge, and are found in innumerable ancient accounts such as the Anaaye (Diné/Navajo), the Nunhyunuwi(Cherokee), the Cawr (Welsh), the Dev (Turkish), the Velikan (Russian), the Yak (Thai), the Rephaim (Hebrew), the Famangomadan (Spanish), the Wrnach (Welsh), Fomorians (Celtic), Dasa Maha Yodayo (Sri Lanka), the Puntan (Micronesia), the Azrail (Armenian), the Gigantes (Greek), and many, many others.
     
    The notion that the accounts of the Nephilim reached every culture of the world is not as far-fetched as we might think. Though the story of the descent of the Watchers to the top of Mount Hermon is the Hebrew version, other cultural mythologies have their own variations on the tale. Whether borrowed and incorporated into their own mythologies and legends, or experienced firsthand by their own ancient inhabitants, it is clear that the Nephilim in one form or another affected the populations of nearly all ancient cultures, exponentially spreading around the globe.
     
    But where did the Nephilim come from, in the first place?
     

chapter
5
The Watchers
     
“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel…”
     
    —The Creature, from Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
“The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.”
     
    —Francis Bacon
    Enoch, a book found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, called them “The Watchers,” these non-earthly beings who seemed to hold some sort of superior capacity over the inhabitants of the earth. The writer of 1 Enoch even subtitles a section of the book, “The Book of the Watchers”: 1 Enoch 6-36. In the Aramaic the Watchers are the Irin, which is translated as “angel” (Greek
angelos;
Coptic
malah)
in the Greek and Ethiopian translations, although the commonly used Aramaic term for angel,
malakha
, never appears in the Book of Enoch, which is written in Aramaic. Irin is a word also found in the Old Testament’s historical/prophetic Book of Daniel, where three times throughout the book the author links them directly to God’s holy angels. It is in the Book of Daniel that the great Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar falls into a period of madness upon seeing a “Watcher, a holy one (singular) come down from heaven” and appear to him in a dream and prophesy. The singular form of the word in this context suggests that “a Watcher” and “a Holy One” are two different titles for the same entity or caste of entities.
     
    In the Book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar goes on to describe the message delivered to him in his dream, wherein he is told that he will be reduced to madness and shall crawl upon the ground as a beast, eating grass, and that this divinely ordered punishment is “by the decree of the Watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones” in order that “the living may know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men.” Nebuchadnezzar then falls into an undefined period of mental illness and temporal insanity after which, when he comes back to his full senses, he states:
     
“34 At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the Most High; I honored and glorified him who lives forever. His dominion is an eternal dominion; his kingdom endures from generation to generation. 35 All the peoples of the earth are regarded as nothing. He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth. No one can hold back his hand or say to him: ‘What have you done?’ 36 At the same time that my sanity was restored, my honor and splendor were returned to me for the glory of my