Nephilim

The Nephilim are mysterious beings or humans mentioned in the Bible. Traditionally understood as beings of great size & strength, or alternatively as beings of great power & authority.

The 1st biblical reference to them happens in Genesis 6:4. According to Numbers 13:33, 10 of the 12 spies reported the existence of Nephilim in Canaan before its conquest by the Israelites.

Interpretations vary vastly across traditions. Second Temple texts like 1st Enoch & Jubilees picture the Nephilim as offspring of fallen angels (Watchers) & of human women, portraying them as evil giants whose corruption led to the flood that’s told in the book of Genesis.

Some viewed the Nephilim as the descendants of Seth intermarrying with Cain’s lineage. Just to put this into perspective, Seth & Cain are biological brothers (half or whole, depending on the story). Their descendants married each other. It would be like marrying your cousins. Not 1st or 2nd cousins. But cousins nonetheless.

While others support the fallen angel theory. This was later supported by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Islamic tradition links them to the giant tribe of ‘Ad. While other theories link them with the Sumerian Apkallu myths or elite Canaanite warriors.

Over time, the Nephilim have been reimagined in popular culture: they appear in novels, films, video games, & conspiracy theories unrelated to religion. They are often pictured as powerful hybrids, ancient gods, or remnants of a lost superhuman race. Or the race of giants that Goliath descended from.

In the Bible, 3 interconnected passages refer to the Nephilim. 2 of them are in the Torah (Old Testament). The 1st appearance in Genesis 6:1-4. This is immediately before the Noah’s Ark story. Genesis 6:4 says: The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, & also after that when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men & they bore children to them; the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.

A few things hit differently in this passage:

• Heavenly beings can have biological human children? How is this physically possible? If, after all, they’re spiritual beings?
• Why would God give/allow these “angels” the ability to even have kids in the 1st place? In modern times, we don’t think of angels as having the ability to have kids. Even the fallen ones. We do tend to think that Satan himself is the only 1 that can somehow have kids (the Antichrist).
• Who, exactly, were these “men of renown”? Like we, personally, just want 2-3 of the names. Is it some guys we’ve never even heard of? Or would it confirm some names we already know? Like yep, our fav demigod Hercules made the short list. But some decisions happened on the editing room floor. Sorry Herc!

“Those days” were a period when the human population on the earth had started to really take off. This was when people began “to be plentiful on the Earth.”

The 2nd is Numbers 13:32-33, where 10 of the 12 spies describe the Anakites (a Rephaite tribe) as descendants of the Nephilim. Outside the Pentateuch, there are 1 more passage indirectly referencing nephilim & this is Ezekiel 32:17-32.

The earliest translation of the Bible (the Septuagint), which was composed in the 3rd or 2nd century BC, gives the said word as gigantes. In Greek mythology, the gigantes were beings of great strength & aggression. But not necessarily of great size.

The Vulgate (compiled in the 4th or 5th century AD) transcribes the Greek term rather than translating the Hebrew nefilim. From there, the tradition of the giant progeny of the sons of God & the daughters of men spread to later medieval translations of the Bible.

From the 3rd century onwards, references are found in Enochic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Jubilees, the Testament of Reuben, 2 Baruch, Josephus, & the Book of Jude.

The New American Bible commentary draws parallels between the Epistle of Jude & the statements in Genesis. This suggests that Jude refers implicitly to the paternity of the Nephilim as heavenly beings who came to earth & had spicy adult time with human women.

The story of the Nephilim is elaborated in the Book of Enoch. The Greek, Aramaic, & main Ge’ez manuscripts of 1 Enoch & Jubilees acquired in the 19th century (held in the British Museum & the Vatican Library) connect the origin of the Nephilim with the fallen angels, & in particular with the egregoroi (watchers).

In this tradition, the kids of the Nephilim are called the Elioud. They’re considered a separate race from the Nephilim. But they end up sharing the same fate as the Nephilim.

Some believe the fallen angels who sired the Nephilim were cast into Tartarus (II Peter 2:4, Jude 1:6), a place of “total darkness.” An interpretation is that God granted 10% of the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim to remain after Noah’s deluge, as demons, to try to lead the human race astray until the Final Judgment.

The Book of Jubilees also says that ridding the Earth of these pesky Nephilim was 1 of God’s purposes for flooding the Earth in Noah’s day. It describes the Nephilim as being evil giants.

A long-held view in some Christian sects is that the “sons of God” were the formerly righteous descendants of Seth (Adam & Eve’s 3rd kid) who rebelled. While the “daughters of men” were the unrighteous descendants of Cain. The Nephilim were their offspring. This view dates to at least the 1st century AD in Jewish literature. It was found in Christian sources from the 3rd century.

Some individuals & groups (including St. Augustine, John Chrysostom, & John Calvin) take the view of Genesis 6:2 that the “angels” who fathered the Nephilim referred to certain human males from Seth’s lineage. They were called sons of God in reference to their prior covenant with Yahweh (Deut. 14:1, 32:5). In these sources, these men had begun to pursue bodily interests, & so took wives of “the daughters of men.”

This view is also held by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. This is supported by their own Ge’ez manuscripts & Amharic translation of the Haile Selassie Bible (1 Enoch & Jubilees also), which count as canonical by this church. The “Sons of Seth” view is the view presented in a few extra-biblical, yet ancient texts.

In these sources, these kids of Seth were said to have disobeyed God by breeding with the Cainites & producing wicked kids “who were all unlike.” This angered God into bringing about our boy Noah’s flood.

If you subscribe to the ancient alien theory, then you’ll be familiar with Zacharia Sitchin. In his The Earth Chronicles series, Mr. Sitchin makes the claim that the Nephilim were an extraterrestrial race called the Anunnaki. The Anunnaki came down from the 12th Planet (Nibiru) & mated with (or at least genetically messed with) human women. They also gave humanity a few things: civilization, makeup, weapons, warfare, & farming. (Our founder is currently reading The 12th Planet right now, as of the date this posts. They are about done with it, like 2 more chapters!)

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Found my short footage of #Ethiopia Ayalew Mesfin's first ever European performance at #LeGuessWho 2019

He was so full of joy and giving it all to the crowd after a hard life of #protest, #oppression, #political prisoner, #exile.

More of the concert and background at:
https://leguesswho.com/recordings/ayalew-mesfin-debo-band-live-at-le-guess-who-2019?id=893

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayalew_Mesfin

#music #live #concert #Amharic #funk

A 🆕 geography quiz. This time about the regions of Ethiopia.

Maybe not a quiz for everyone, but have a look at the beautiful Amharic script in the screenshot. By default the quiz is in English.

Link: https://geographyquiz.app/quiz/ethiopia-regions/460

#Ethiopia #quiz #Amharic #geography

New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

CALL and DOT

Two conferences in the last three weeks: my first Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (as a speaker), in Leiden as always, and a day and a half of the 35st Deutscher Orientalistentag, in Erlangen.

Both were a lot of fun. I saw many different talks at CALL, too many to summarize, and mostly too off-topic as well. I was there to ask why we think Cushitic forms a single family within Afroasiatic (see also these blog posts). Despite the purposefully provocative title of my talk, I was not assaulted by any angry mobs of Cushiticists.1 The main question seems to be whether we really should disregard the lexicon when looking at subclassification (and then the next question should be whether the lexicon does show that Cushitic is a clade). It was also really cool to see several talks by young researchers whom I taught as first-years and who have now all finished their MAs and partially started PhD projects: shout-outs to Nina van der Vlugt, Melle Groen, and Jeroen van Ravenhorst. Post your slides online, guys!

At the DOT, I co-chaired a panel on Semitic (in practice: mostly Hebrew) reading traditions together with Harald Samuel. While some of our presenters sadly had to cancel, we still had a great line-up, with exciting findings in every talk:

Chanan Ariel (Tel-Aviv University) proposed a highly original new explanation for the Biblical Hebrew phenomenon of dehiq, where consonants following certain unstressed vowels are geminated. According to Ariel, this is an orthoepic feature and applies to vocalic suffixes that alternate with zero, as well as some cases where the geminated consonant had to be kept apart from a following guttural. Works really well IMHO.

Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) provided a thorough discussion of the ketiv-qere phenomenon, presenting an up-to-date linguistic view of its origins and purpose in hopes of spreading more awareness of this to less linguistically inclined Hebrew Bible scholars. One thing that stood out to me is that words that are present in the consonantal text but left unpronounced in the reading tradition (ketiv wela qere) are sometimes translated in targums and other ancient versions.

Jonathan Howard (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented his ongoing PhD research on the “Palestinian” vocalization system of Hebrew and Aramaic and pointed out that so far, there’s really no good evidence that it’s from Palestine. He’s hoping to find some, but it might be more impactful if he doesn’t.

Johan Lundberg (University of Oxford) walked us through the increasing complexity in Syriac punctuation signs, including the development of something that is roughly equivalent to an exclamation mark! Cool fact: in at least one of the few Syriac manuscripts of the entire Bible, the scribe has simply maintained the punctuation of each source text, resulting in several different systems coexisting in the same final work.

Emmanuel Mastey (Tel-Aviv University) presented a nice statistical inquiry into h-final spellings of 2m.sg. perfect verbs in Biblical Hebrew. Besides the very frequent case of נָתַתָּה ‘you gave’, Mastey finds that this spelling is especially common with verbs that have t as their third radical and, less so, with third-weak verbs. He suggests a phonological explanation for both classes; I wonder whether with the III-t roots, it may rather be motivated by the usefulness of distinguishing e.g. שתה ‘you placed’ from שת ‘he placed’.

Isabella Maurizio (University of Lorraine according to the programme, but I think that may be outdated? Sorbonne soon from what she told me) presented her recently completed research on the Second Column of Origen’s Hexapla, the oldest fully vocalized source (in Greek script!) for Biblical Hebrew. Big shock to me: Maurizio dates the Secunda to the 2nd c. BCE-1st c. CE, not the 3rd c. CE!

Marijn van Putten (Leiden University) appeared virtually to frighten the Hebraists with the tricky history of the Qur’anic reading traditions, with examples like one where a certain reader’s Arabic is notably more archaic than that of his teacher’s teacher. Since we barely know anything about who transmitted the Hebrew reading traditions, how much of this stuff are we missing due to a lack of data?

Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen) continued the sceptical line by noting some features of Tiberian Hebrew that appear to be really late (quoting me[!] from an informal conversation in which I said that a certain change must have taken place “about two hours before Ben-Asher went to work that morning”). How do we reconcile this with the alleged presence of extremely early, First Temple period features in the reading tradition as well?

Christian Stadel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented on some clearly late and some unquestionably early features of the Samaritan reading tradition and talked about how it relates to the consonantal text of the Samaritan Pentateuch more generally. It reminded me a bit of a presentation I gave on a similar topic several years ago. I only have one semester of Samaritan Hebrew, though—taught by Christian Stadel!—while Stadel is a real expert on the Samaritan languages. So it was reassuring to hear him argue for similar conclusions as well as present a whole lot more interesting data.

Last of all (due to alphabetization, but it worked out alright), I got to present on the project on the construction of the Biblical Aramaic reading tradition that I’ve been doing at Leuven since 2019. I’m not sure the argument I presented is fully sound, so it was great to be able to discuss it with some colleagues afterwards.

The Semitics section continued this morning. In her section keynote, Na’ama Pat-El (University of Texas Austin) presented her SemitiLEX project (recorded talk by another project member, haven’t watched it yet), looking at cognate Semitic lexemes not just in terms of roots, but also looking at morpho-lexical features like gender and pluralization. Unexpected result: building phylogenetic trees based on these data shows Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic clustering as four or five separate branches, instead of Northwest Semitic clustering together and then being closer to Arabic than to Akkadian.

Maria Rauscher (Université Félix Houphouet-Boigny) presented her ongoing work on a dictionary of Arabic verbal nouns, focusing on the difficult case of k-r-h ‘to dislike’. As we had some extra discussion time for both Pat-El’s and Rauscher’s talks, there was time enough for the audience to draw up battle lines and get into the details of linguistic theory (such as: are morphemes even a thing?).

Stefanie Rudolf (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) presented on two Qur’anic phrases that she suggests are unrecognized borrowings from Ethiosemitic. “The Lord of the East and the West” is attested in an Ethiopian Early Sabaic inscription, while Rudolf proposes the Arabic root f-t-w ‘to judge’ may be borrowed from Ethiosemitic f-t-ḥ. While she acknowledges the phonological difficulty of the last case, maybe we should reckon with the possibility of an unknown (South?) Ethiosemitic language that lost the pharyngeals acting as an intermediary: in the beginning of her talk, she pointed out that early Islamic sources refer to an Abyssinian with a name that is not Ge’ez but pre-Amharic (I think Ababut?), which I found very cool.

Jan Retsö (University of Gothenburg) pulled off the trick of reading out a text with no slides or handout while being perfectly easy to follow and entertaining. After an overview of the scholarship on Semitic–Ancient Egyptian cognates and loanwords, Retsö responded to Alexander Borg’s recent claim that there are lots of specifically Arabic loanwords in Egyptian. Retsö thinks there’s something there but urges for methodological precision.

Mohammad I. Ababneh (University of Halle) presented on some difficulties in Safaitic paleography, including merged letters and ligatures and other weird letter shapes. Nice to see some discussion of former Leiden colleague Chiara Della Puppa’s dissertation!

Finally, Vera Tsukanova (Philipps-Universität Marburg) took a look at the phonological adaptation of Persian loanwords into Arabic from a Semiticist and diachronic perspective. Historical differences in aspiration go a long way in accounting for prima facie unexpected sounds in borrowings.

And now, the conference is kind of on hold for various business meetings, which I took as my cue to leave. In conclusion, I would like to note that I am posting this from a high-speed train, which feels very futuristic. While some discussions in the field stay the same for what seems like forever—Paul Kahle’s lecture at the first DOT in 1922 1921 was referenced multiple times—I take this as a sign that like Deutsche Bahn passengers, no matter the inevitable delays, detours, and frustrations, overall, we are getting somewhere.

#Akkadian #Amharic #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Bible #Cushitic #EastCushitic #Egyptian #Hebrew #linguistics #Samaritans #Syriac #Ugaritic

The Linguistic Politics of Ethiopian Philosophy:
Navigating Tradition, Modernity, and Globalization between Ge’ez, Amharic and English

Fasil Merawi (Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia)
Jonathan Egid (SOAS University of London)

July 10, 2025, 2:15 pm (CEST)
Cultural Campus, Aula & Live Stream

https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/glophi/2025/07/07/the-linguistic-politics-of-ethiopian-philosophy-fasil-merawi-jonathan-egid/

#africanphilosophy #amharic #Ethiopia #geez #linguistics
#politics

Endemn adderu

#BonDia
Idioma: #Amharic
#BondDia