If the Flood Destroyed the Nephilim, Why Did Giants Return?

Part 2 - The Problem That Refuses to Go Away

In the previous article, “The Watchers, the Nephilim, and the True Reason for the Great Flood: The Forbidden History of Fallen Angels,” we explored the ancient tradition that links the Flood to a world corrupted by the rebellion of the Watchers and the rise of the Nephilim. If that reading is true, then the Flood was not just a response to human wickedness in general, but a direct judgment on a world that had been defiled at a far deeper level.

But if the Flood was meant to wipe out that corruption, one question becomes impossible to ignore: why do giants appear again after the Flood? Why do the Anakim, Og of Bashan, and later Goliath still stand in the biblical story like shadows of a world that was supposed to have been buried beneath the waters?

That is the mystery this article follows. Because if the Nephilim were part of the reason the old world was destroyed, then their story should have ended in Genesis 6. Yet the biblical record refuses to let the problem disappear so easily. The Judgement and the Flood came, and yet, giant traditions returned.

This is one of the most unsettling tensions in biblical interpretation. Either something of the old corruption survived, the same kind of rebellion happened again, or the later giant traditions preserve the memory of that earlier horror in ways most readers have never fully considered. Whatever the answer, the post-Flood world may not be as cleansed as it first appears.

Gustave Doré’s The Deluge captures the totality of the Flood judgment, which makes the later reappearance of giant traditions all the more unsettling. Source: Wikimedia Commons.