Directors Jon Erwin and Jon Gunn dedicated an entire episode of their hit Prime Video series “House of David” to the story of the Nephilim and the possibility that Goliath was descended from fallen angels.
The Nephilim, which some Bible translations render as “giants,” are mentioned in Genesis 6:4: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.”
The circumstances surrounding the Nephilim in the Old Testament are hotly debated among biblical scholars and theologians.
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ChurchLeaders asked Erwin and Gunn how they came up with material for Episode 6, titled “Giants Awakened.” The show’s synopsis reads:
Dark powers strengthen outside Saul’s kingdom as Israel’s enemies summon legendary warriors that were long deemed myth. A relationship at court complicates the lives of the heroes severely and Queen Ahinoam must take drastic actions to help King Saul.
“We wanted to be careful to tell it as a story, as a myth,” Gunn said. “Because who knows the real answers to this stuff, but it was certainly one of the great opportunities of this season. We don’t want to shy away from the giants being giants.”
Erwin chimed in, “What I love about the Nephilim and the mythology—and you’re not the first person to ask about this. It’s one of the reasons why we call the studio Wonder—the magic of everything you don’t know and the awe and wonder of the world being as big as it is.”
“There’s open ended questions in the Bible, like the mythology or the history or the legend of the Nephilim,” Erwin continued. “And what I discovered was, when you really wrestle the story down to truth, to authenticity, you have to ask the question: Goliath, no matter how big he was, he taunted Israel for 40 days and struck terror into Israel. Why?”
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He added, “Here’s what I found out. If you really study and you read like when Moses sent spies into the land 500 years before, they came out and said, ‘The land is amazing, but there’s fortified cities there. There’s giants, and the Sons of Anak are there.'”
“Now,” Erwin said, “what they meant was that not only are there giants—I guess demigods would be the right way to say it—there’s descendants of fallen angels.” These myths “would have been the conversation around the campfire in that day,” argued Erwin.
