Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
The Nephilim as extraterrestrials
The claim that the giants of Genesis were aliens, which rests on mistranslated Sumerian.
Genesis 6:1-4, in every translation this tool compares.
Assyriologists reject this reading of the Sumerian texts on language grounds, not religious ones. The words do not say what the claim needs them to say. The biblical material says less than the fringe version and more than the tidied-up version, and both halves of that are worth keeping.
Assyriologists reject Sitchin's reading of the Sumerian texts on lexical grounds, not theological ones. The biblical material says less than the fringe claims and more than the flattened reading allows, and the entry says both. Genesis 6:1-4 claims that the sons of God, read as divine beings in line with the heavenly council elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (Psalms 29:1; 82:6; 89:6; Job 1-2; 1 Kings 22:19-22; Isaiah 6:1-8), married human women and produced the Nephilim, whom the LXX and Vulgate both render "giants" (gigantes); the Nephilim of Numbers 13:33, after the Flood, lose the semi-divine overtones and read as an ordinary, if exaggerated, ancient people of great size (DDD s.v. "Nephilim," 618-619). Heiser frames Genesis 6:1-4 as a deliberate polemic against the Mesopotamian apkallu tradition of antediluvian divine sages, turning that story over point by point to warn Israel off it, and not a garbled memory of alien visitors (Reversing Hermon, ch. 1, 3). None of this is extraterrestrial contact, and none of it is merely folklore.
- Genesis 6:1-4
- Numbers 13:33
- Michael S. Heiser, "The Myth of a Sumerian 12th Planet: 'Nibiru' According to the Cuneiform Sources" (self-published paper, sitchiniswrong.com, written early 2003 while he was a PhD candidate at Wisconsin-Madison
- not peer-reviewed)
- Heiser, "The Myth of a 12th Planet in Sumero-Mesopotamian Astronomy: A Study of Cylinder Seal VA 243" (self-published paper, sitchiniswrong.com)
- *Chicago Assyrian Dictionary* N/2, 145-147, s.v. *neberu* (the lexical evidence Heiser's paper rests on, as he cites it)
- B. Landsberger and J. V. Kinnier Wilson, "The Fifth Tablet of Enuma Elish," *JNES* 20 (1961): 172ff.
- Heiser, *Reversing Hermon*, ch. 1, 3
- DDD s.v. "Nephilim," 618-619
- Dalley, *Myths from Mesopotamia*
