Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 6:4
There were giants in the earth. The Hebrew word, Nephilim, does not itself mean giant.
Genesis 6:4, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a translator centuries ago rendering a foreign name as though it were the English word it merely resembles. Readers ever since picture something the original text never specified, size, when the word may instead be naming a group by what happened to them, not by how tall they stood.
Because the word behind giants is not a Hebrew word for large size at all, and the King James's giants comes from the Septuagint's Greek gigantes, not from a Hebrew word that means that, shaping a thousand years of popular imagination around a translation of a translation.
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
The King James, following the Septuagint's gigantes, reads giants, and that rendering has shaped virtually all popular imagination about this verse. Modern versions increasingly leave Nephilim untranslated, since the Hebrew word's own root does not mean large in stature.
נְפִלִים Nephilim (נָפַל naphal, to fall) · H5303
Nephilim is usually connected to the root naphal, to fall, giving fallen ones, though the derivation is debated and the word is rare, recurring only here and at Numbers 13:33, where the spies again call inhabitants of Canaan Nephilim and compare themselves to grasshoppers beside them, a comparison about being overwhelmed rather than a precise measurement. The Septuagint's gigantes, giants, is itself an interpretive choice, not a translation of a Hebrew word that means large, and the King James inherited that Greek interpretation rather than translating the Hebrew directly.
English giants specifies enormous physical size; Nephilim, whatever its root, does not obviously specify that on its own. The chain from Hebrew Nephilim to Greek gigantes to English giants adds a claim about height that the Hebrew word itself does not make explicit, though the size language later applied to their descendants, the Anakim, at Numbers 13:33 keeps the association alive.
When a familiar English word traces back through a second ancient language rather than directly to the Hebrew, check what that intermediate translation was doing. Giants is a translation of a translation, and each step can add a claim the earlier text did not make.
Giants keeps the King James's inherited Septuagint reading and the popular tradition built on it. Leaving Nephilim untransliterated, as many modern versions now do, admits that the Hebrew word's own meaning, fallen ones or something similar, is not primarily a statement about height, even though later texts associate the same families with great size.
- Only other occurrence: Numbers 13:33, comparing the spies to grasshoppers beside the Nephilim's descendants, the Anakim
- Septuagint renders Nephilim as gigantes, giants, at Genesis 6:4
- naphal, to fall, as the most commonly proposed root, though disputed
