A/N: This was for a project I did for my Bible class. Thanks for reading, enjoy!

The Rise and Demise of the Nephilim:

A Midrash

“When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the LORD said, “my spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.”

-Genesis, 6:1-4

Hundreds of years after man’s first transgression, God’s Cherubim remained in Eden, guarding his beloved Tree of Life. With swords of brilliant blue flames, they paced in shifts between its quivering roots to ensure that mankind, no longer placated by paradise, would never challenge their rule with cunning and immortality.

When they were not patrolling under the youthful shade of the mighty, breathing Tree, the Cherubim would walk the Earth, disguised, and observe the men who lived there. It was not long before they noticed and began to observe the women alongside those men, even sooner that they observed these women to be appealing and sooner still that they observed the pleasure in lying with these women.

One such Cherubim, Abdiel, had heard of these unions and witnessed the extraordinary offspring that they produced. These children were called the Nephilim. They were born resembling human infants and grew rapidly into massive warriors ripe with brute power and divine intellect. Abdiel knew God to be weary of these relations and suspicious of the resulting Nephilim, so he had never allowed himself to be tempted by the women and their delicate flesh. Never, until today.

Abdiel had come every day for many days to the hill country east of the city of Enoch, to watch Zorrah, the unmarried youngest daughter of Lamech. Each day she carried water from a nearby stream, and each day Abdiel made himself invisible and walked beside her. Panting and glistening with sweat, she was more beautiful than anything Abdiel had seen in Eden. Being celestial, his love for her was dulled by the presence of God in him, but even this was not enough to quell the gleeful torment her every movement brought him. Today he could bear it no longer.

As she knelt alone by the stream, he appeared in front of her in blurred human form, ankle-deep in the softly flowing water.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I am Abdiel.” She knew he was not a man when he spoke, for his voice sounded like the wind singing with the branches of a tree. His eyes were like two cloudless summer skies, each with their own sun that nearly dazzled her into blindness. She loved him immediately, for she had to. They lay together on the bank of the stream and Abdiel felt almost as much bliss as the Lord could grant him.

Because they had just lain together and because her mind had been stimulated with her body and mostly because her grandmother Eve had eaten from the Other Tree, Zorrah asked him questions until it was time for her to return home. Then she did and Abdiel returned to the Tree.

When the girl’s family discovered she had conceived a child, they threatened to send her away from them. Her eldest brother Noah was the most enraged, thinking she had dishonored them all. They did not believe her story about Abdiel the son of God, and so he appeared to her father Lamech. He did not appear in his human form like he had for Zorrah, but in his true Cherubim form as to frighten and impress Lamech. When he did so, the old man fell to his knees and hid his face.

Abdiel said, “The child is mine,” and Lamech praised him until he vanished. Then he hurried to find Zorrah.

When Noah heard that Abdiel had appeared to Lamech and that Zorrah and the child were to be honored, he was suspicious, for he knew that Abdiel’s words had come from him and not from the Lord. He knew that because of this, both Zorrah and Lamech now loved and feared Abdiel more than the Lord.

For this reason, God was also displeased. He waited until it was time for the child to be born, then killed Zorrah in childbirth. In dying, Zorrah cried out to Abdiel and not to the Lord.

Abdiel heard her and knew that she was dead. As he dropped his flaming sword and wept beside the Tree, God sent Michael and Barachiel to him.

“The Lord does not trust these Nephilim,” Barachiel said to him. “The Lord resides in them as he does us, yet they are still mortal and flesh. They are neither Cherubim nor human; they are not what He intended any being to be.”

Abdiel nodded because he had to.

Michael said, “We have been forbidden from entering human women, so that the spirit of the Lord shall no longer abide in mortals, for they are flesh and He is not.”

“But what of the Nephilim that already live,” Abdiel asked, because his son was still alive.

“Their days shall be one hundred and twenty years,” said Barachiel.

Because the Lord detested the Nephilim, Abdiel could not go to his son. Lamech had taken the child into his household and named him Abijah. Noah did not approve of Abijah, but he felt sorry for his father at losing Zorrah and so left it to the Lord to decide the boy’s fate.

As Abijah was raised in the hill country, his family began to see all that he could do. He was a skilled hunter and fighter without training and he possessed knowledge he had never been taught. He grew taller and wider than any man in the country, with arms the size of his sisters and a torso chiseled like mountain stone. He never got ill and rarely got angry; when he fought a man it was for honor and sport.

He became such an impressive man that they spoke of him in distant countries, where other Nephilim lived. They heard of this young Abijah and how he wrestled beasts in the wilderness and drew models of the night sky in the sand, and many traveled to the east of Enoch to meet him. They were all of varied appearance and skill; some large and powerful, some small and agile; some who thought only of battle, some who thought of art; some who acquired great wealth, some who lived as wild nomads. Abijah delighted in the visitors and Lamech received them like kings and family members. Noah complained loudly that their foreign caravans crowded the land and that their animals ate up the family’s fodder.

Under swirling night skies, they exchanged stories of their fathers and other Nephilim that lived and had lived throughout their young world. A favorite and dreaded tale was of the one hundred and twentieth year, the supposed age that all Nephilim were destined to die.

“Nature won’t kill a man that young,” said Abijah, whose father was nearing his five-hundredth year.

“These aren’t natural deaths,” smiled Nazrael, a raw-faced Nephilim from the coastlands. The legend that had proceeded his arrival sang of him slaying sea monsters. “These are weird, horrible, random ways of dying. Illnesses that come from nowhere, simple wounds that get infected, attacks from amiable animals; things that amuse a man of a hundred and eighteen, a hundred and nineteen, are the end of a Nephilim of a hundred and twenty.”

“But why?”

“Because the Lord abhors us.”

Such was the answer of every Nephilim Abijah asked this question; they were wretched in the eyes of the Lord; their creation and existence was a sin against Him; they made him sorry he had ever given life to man. Some spoke these words with regret in their voice, but most spoke with spite; spite fueled by their logic and knowledge, spite they would never have been capable of if their grandfather Adam had not eaten from the Other Tree.

“Our mortality is the only part of us that keeps us below them!” they would seethe, for their spite extended also to their own fathers, who were omnipotently subordinate to Him and watched them die and did nothing. “If we could not die, we could usurp them!” And they would cheer and curse the Lord.

Lamech heard all of this and remembered the stories of his childhood. The tales of life in the Garden that had been handed from Adam to Seth to Enosh to Kenan to Mahalalel and all the way down the line to Lamech himself. They had spoken of a tree that moved and shone with light, a tree that yielded fruit which pulsed like human hearts upon the branch and whose warm juices would grant immortality to any who tasted them; the guarded Tree of Life. Then Lamech, son of Methuselah, told his grandson and the other Nephilim about the Tree, for he still missed his youngest daughter Zorrah and still hated the Lord for taking her from him.

When they heard of the Tree their faces gleamed with recognition; they had all seen it in their dreams. It was a distant relative of theirs, the boon their fathers protected each day with divine diligence.

“We could take it,” Nazrael said, “If we joined together against the Cherubim, we could defeat them.”

“But you don’t know where it is,” Lamech lamented, “Since Adam no man has ever seen Eden, or known where to find it.”

But they were not men. Just as they set their minds to wondering where Eden might be, they knew the way, for the Lord was present in them and the Lord knew all. And this was why the Lord hated and feared them.

Word of the rebellion spread quickly. From country to country, ordinary men with their own private grudges against the Lord hurried to inform and rally the Nephilim and send them to the hill country east of Enoch. Too soon, Abijah found himself among a legion of Nephilim, armed and advancing west toward Eden. Nazrael marched beside him shouldering a long, thick-headed spear, one that had no doubt seen the oily inside of at least one sea monster.

With flames licking their red-hot swords, Michael, Gabriel and Barachiel stood before a company of Cherubim beside the Tree and watched the Nephilim approach through shifting space and time. Abdiel stood in silent formation and watched also.

Eden was much closer to the hill country than Abijah and the rest had suspected; closer, in fact, than it had been in the days when Adam and Eve were exiled from it. In front of them they watched the sun sink to the horizon and linger there too long, an orange mass of light that stained the rest of the sky scarlet. Then they saw that it was not the sun at all, but the glow of the Cherubim and their holocaust swords. There was no Garden; there was only the beautiful Tree, the harsh sand and the patient Cherubim.

The battle was brisk.

Retreating numbly, Abijah was not entirely sure there had even been one. He could not remember exactly what the Cherubim had looked like, only that they had swung those blazing swords with expert ease and suddenly the sand was covered in Nephilim blood. A handful had survived with him, but Nazrael was not among them. Their flight flew them to a cave in the hills east of Enoch. From his pasture, Noah saw them disappear into the earth.

“The battle was nothing,” Abdiel reminded Michael as they, Barachiel and Gabriel strolled over the hills, leisurely pursuing the escaped Nephilim.

“The intent was everything,” he responded.

They passed through the land of Noah and he came out to them on his knees. They asked him, “Where is the son of your sister Zorrah?” and, trembling, he pointed toward the cave. Barachiel pressed him, “Why has your family sinned against the Lord?”

“Not my household,” Noah begged, “Not I, nor my sons, Shem, Ham or Japheth. It was my father Lamech who told them of the Tree,” he paused and glanced at Abdiel, “and my sister Zorrah who seduced a son of God.”

“For these words, your household alone will be spared,” Michael said.

Then they took Noah with them to the cave where Abijah hid. They killed the others promptly, but Abijah they dragged out under the sky. They knelt him before his father Abdiel.

To Abijah and Noah and all of men, Michael said, “The Lord has seen that the wickedness of humankind is great upon the earth and so He will blot out from the earth the human beings He has created, for He is sorry that He has made you.”

And then he handed Abdiel a flaming sword and Abdiel took off his son Abijah’s head, because the Lord resided in him and because he had to.