Answers to Giant Questions: How Understanding the Biblical Nephilim Will Enlarge Your Faith

by T.J. Steadman

We’ll cut to the chase. The first stage – the devouring locust represents the fallen angels and the original Nephilim. They are associated with “seeding” the earth with the original giants, which died in the Flood. This death is represented by the laying of locust eggs in the earth, as the earth is symbolic of the underworld. The use of “devouring” to describe this form is not accidental. Hebrew tradition makes much of the fact that the Nephilim were believed to have monstrous appetites. This is borne out in the pseudepigraphical text of 1 Enoch,[76] [lxxxix] which tells that the giants devoured all the food that men could produce, before eating the animals and then turning on humanity as a food source. Eventually, they became cannibalistic, as we have seen before, and they went as far as drinking the blood of their victims. Thus, the designation “devourers” is apt here. New Testament texts influenced by this concept of fleshly greed in connection with the appetites of evil include 2 Peter 2:13, Jude 12, and Revelation 2:14-15. Incidentally, we can perhaps see in new light the reason for God sustaining Israel on manna during their wilderness sojourn – as a statement against the culture of excess that existed in the land around them.