From dlupher@ups.edu Sun Apr 28 00:52:42 2002 Received: from mailscan5.cac.washington.edu (mailscan5.cac.washington.edu [140.142.32.14]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with SMTP id g3S7qew3034410 for ; Sun, 28 Apr 2002 00:52:40 -0700 Received: FROM mxu1.u.washington.edu BY mailscan5.cac.washington.edu ; Sun Apr 28 00:52:39 2002 -0700 Received: from mail.ups.edu (mail.ups.edu [192.124.98.111]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with ESMTP id g3S7qdc6025027 for ; Sun, 28 Apr 2002 00:52:39 -0700 Received: from [207.207.116.56] (wyatt1dhcp56.ups.edu [207.207.116.56]) by mail.ups.edu (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g3S7qc902689 for ; Sun, 28 Apr 2002 00:52:39 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: dlupher@mail.ups.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <009601c1ee61$90735340$70c3578a@cas.ilstu.edu> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 00:52:38 -0700 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: Ovid and the Bible??? Janice Siegel writes: >Didn't bother to look at the Hebrew, which was at home and I was at work >anyway, and it would have taken me a long time to figure it out anyway (too >long) - that's why I go to the list. I still don't know who the Nephilim >are. *They* are the ones begotten by human women, sired by the "sons of >God"???? Well, it is certainly a natural inference, and it has often been taken thus. See James L. Kugel's excellent study of biblical "reception", "The Bible as It Was" (Harvard, 1997), pp. 110-12, "The Wicked Giants": "It was not clear to interpreters if these Nephilim *were* the divine- human hybrids, or if they merely were around at the time when this mating took place....If the Nephilim were giants, then it did make sense that *they* were the offspring of the 'sons of God' and human females---where else would giants come from but such a divine-human union?" (The idea that the Nephilim were giants seems evident from the nervous Israelite spies' comparison of the "great-statured" Canannites with Nephilim at Num. 13:32-33---and the LXX renders Nephilim at Gen. 6 as "gigantes") Also, the Torah commentary edited by W. Gunter Plaut in 1981 for the Union of American Hebrew Congreations assumes that the Nephilim were the offspring of the divine-human matings: "The notation about the legendary 'divine beings' and their giant offspring may be regarded as the one mythological fragment retained in Genesis" (p. 55). > I thought the "they" and "them" were the "sons of God", not the >Nephilim - can someone look at this text please and tell me? I was always >under the impression that the Nephilim were just there - before and after - >the "b'ne elohim" mated with "the daughters of men": My reading of the Hebrew (my Hebrew is fearfully rusty, but I have been plying my Brown, Driver and Briggs manfully here) does not yield any clear evidence for the Nephilim having existed *before* the "sons of God" mated with the daughters of men. The phrase is "in those days---and also before" (bayamim hahem v'gam achre-cen---sorry: I don't know the rules on Hebrew transliteration). Now, that doesn't *prove* that the Nephilim were the products of the unions---one could fault that as a post hoc propter hoc fallacy, I suppose---but the drift of the passage certainly implies it. Here, for example, is E.A. Speiser's translation: "It was then that the Nephilim appeared on earth---as well as later---after the divine beings had united with human daughters to whom they bore children." >I haven't really worked this out, so I won't be surprised if it doesn't >fly...but I just want to be clear about what I am and am not saying. I do >think David has mixed up things in a different way than I have in mny last >post. *This* post offers totally new confusion. Sorry. I was trying to straighten things out, not mix them up. I'm still not quite sure how I *have* mixed them up. But it was certainly not my intention to do so. David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .