Genesis 7:21-23 insists that every living thing outside the ark perished, yet Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33 have the Nephilim — the giant offspring of the 'sons of God' — still walking around after the flood in the days of Moses. The text cannot have both a hermetic global extinction and a post-flood population of antediluvian monsters.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
21All flesh died that moved on the earth, including birds, livestock, animals, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every man.22All on the dry land, in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died.23Every living thing was destroyed that was on the surface of the ground, including man, livestock, creeping things, and birds of the sky. They were destroyed from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those who were with him in the ship.
4The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when God’s sons came in to men’s daughters and had children with them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The tension is plain on the surface: Genesis 7:21-23 (a Priestly composition) insists on total extinction outside the ark — "all flesh died... and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." The Hebrew piles up universalizing terms (*kol-basar*, "all flesh"; *wayyimmach*, "and he wiped out") to leave no survivors. Yet Numbers 13:33 places the Nephilim — and specifically the Anakim, whom it derives "from the Nephilim" (*min-hannephilim*) — in Canaan in Moses' day, and Genesis 6:4 had located that same race "in those days, and also after that." If the Nephilim are the pre-flood giants and they reappear after the flood, a global extinction that left only eight humans alive is incoherent.
The strongest harmonization, advanced by Kenneth Mathews and Victor Hamilton, parses Genesis 6:4's "and also after that" (*wegam acharei-ken*) as flagging a second, independent emergence of giant-sized beings after the deluge — a recurring phenomenon rather than a surviving lineage. On this reading Numbers 13:33 names a distinct Canaanite population, and the scouts' comparison to the Nephilim is hyperbole or folk-memory, not genealogical continuity. Lexically the phrase does permit an iterative sense, and the spies' report is explicitly framed as a frightened exaggeration that Caleb and Joshua reject (Num 14:6-9), so one need not take their giant-talk as sober ethnography. That defense has real force for Numbers as a rhetorical unit.
It does not, however, dissolve the underlying problem, which is compositional rather than merely lexical. Genesis 6:1-4 is a self-contained fragment whose source affiliation is debated. Friedman and Speiser assign it to the older Yahwistic (J) stratum; Westermann, by contrast, argued that 6:1-4 is an originally independent mythic fragment — a fossil of older Near Eastern divine-council lore — only loosely incorporated, and was skeptical of a clean documentary attribution. Either way it is an etiological aside explaining the origin of the *gibborim*, the "mighty men which were of old, men of renown," born of unions between "the sons of God" (*bene ha-elohim*) and human women, a motif with close cognates in Ugaritic divine-council material. This fragment was set immediately before a flood narrative whose Priestly frame demands comprehensive annihilation. Westermann observes that the redactor juxtaposed an account of semi-divine survivors-in-memory with an account of universal death without smoothing the seam, because the two traditions served different ends: the interest in the corruption that provokes the flood, and P's interest in cosmic re-creation.
The most telling evidence that the incoherence is real, not a modern skeptic's invention, is its ancient reception. Ronald Hendel's study of Genesis 6:1-4 shows that Second Temple interpreters felt the bind acutely. The Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 6-16) and Jubilees resolved it by developing a demonology: the flood destroyed the giants' physical bodies, but their disembodied spirits survived as the malevolent spirits that afflict humanity thereafter. Archie Wright's monograph traces how this maneuver became the seedbed of early Jewish and Christian demon-lore. The interpreters invented an entire spirit-cosmology precisely to explain how giant-derived beings could persist past a flood that supposedly killed everything — an extravagant fix that testifies to the perceived contradiction. A reading that requires constructing a demon ontology to reconcile two verses has conceded that the verses, read plainly, do not cohere.
Apologists are right that the canonical text never says individual antediluvian Nephilim physically survived the ark, and a charitable reader can keep the Numbers giants as a separate, post-flood stock. But Numbers 13:33's explicit derivation of the Anakim "from the Nephilim" reasserts the link the harmonization must sever, and the compositional seam — a giant-etiology fragment lodged before a total-extinction flood frame — explains why the link is there.
Where the critical reading lands: a genuine tension rooted in the splicing of independent traditions, only superficially harmonizable and historically felt as a problem by the text's own earliest readers.
Sources for this reading
Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed (HarperOne, 2003) commentary on Gen 6:1-4 and the flood narrativeGenesis 6:1-4
E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1; Doubleday, 1964) on Gen 6:1-4Genesis 6:1-4
Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary (Fortress, 1984) on Gen 6:1-4 as an independent mythic fragmentGenesis 6:1-4
Ronald S. Hendel, "Of Demigods and the Deluge: Toward an Interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4," Journal of Biblical Literature 106 (1987): pp. 13-26
Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26 (NAC; B&H, 1996) on Gen 6:4Genesis 6:4
Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17 (NICOT; Eerdmans, 1990) on Gen 6:4Genesis 6:4
Archie T. Wright, The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6:1-4 in Early Jewish Literature (Mohr Siebeck, 2005)
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The tension is plain on the surface: Genesis 7:21-23 (a Priestly composition) insists on total extinction outside the ark — "all flesh died... and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." The Hebrew piles up universalizing terms (*kol-basar*, "all flesh"; *wayyimmach*, "and he wiped out") to leave no survivors. Yet Numbers 13:33 places the Nephilim — and specifically the Anakim, whom it derives "from the Nephilim" (*min-hannephilim*) — in Canaan in Moses' day, and Genesis 6:4 had located that same race "in those days, and also after that." If the Nephilim are the pre-flood giants and they reappear after the flood, a global extinction that left only eight humans alive is incoherent.
The strongest harmonization, advanced by Kenneth Mathews and Victor Hamilton, parses Genesis 6:4's "and also after that" (*wegam acharei-ken*) as flagging a second, independent emergence of giant-sized beings after the deluge — a recurring phenomenon rather than a surviving lineage. On this reading Numbers 13:33 names a distinct Canaanite population, and the scouts' comparison to the Nephilim is hyperbole or folk-memory, not genealogical continuity. Lexically the phrase does permit an iterative sense, and the spies' report is explicitly framed as a frightened exaggeration that Caleb and Joshua reject (Num 14:6-9), so one need not take their giant-talk as sober ethnography. That defense has real force for Numbers as a rhetorical unit.
It does not, however, dissolve the underlying problem, which is compositional rather than merely lexical. Genesis 6:1-4 is a self-contained fragment whose source affiliation is debated. Friedman and Speiser assign it to the older Yahwistic (J) stratum; Westermann, by contrast, argued that 6:1-4 is an originally independent mythic fragment — a fossil of older Near Eastern divine-council lore — only loosely incorporated, and was skeptical of a clean documentary attribution. Either way it is an etiological aside explaining the origin of the *gibborim*, the "mighty men which were of old, men of renown," born of unions between "the sons of God" (*bene ha-elohim*) and human women, a motif with close cognates in Ugaritic divine-council material. This fragment was set immediately before a flood narrative whose Priestly frame demands comprehensive annihilation. Westermann observes that the redactor juxtaposed an account of semi-divine survivors-in-memory with an account of universal death without smoothing the seam, because the two traditions served different ends: the interest in the corruption that provokes the flood, and P's interest in cosmic re-creation.
The most telling evidence that the incoherence is real, not a modern skeptic's invention, is its ancient reception. Ronald Hendel's study of Genesis 6:1-4 shows that Second Temple interpreters felt the bind acutely. The Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 6-16) and Jubilees resolved it by developing a demonology: the flood destroyed the giants' physical bodies, but their disembodied spirits survived as the malevolent spirits that afflict humanity thereafter. Archie Wright's monograph traces how this maneuver became the seedbed of early Jewish and Christian demon-lore. The interpreters invented an entire spirit-cosmology precisely to explain how giant-derived beings could persist past a flood that supposedly killed everything — an extravagant fix that testifies to the perceived contradiction. A reading that requires constructing a demon ontology to reconcile two verses has conceded that the verses, read plainly, do not cohere.
Apologists are right that the canonical text never says individual antediluvian Nephilim physically survived the ark, and a charitable reader can keep the Numbers giants as a separate, post-flood stock. But Numbers 13:33's explicit derivation of the Anakim "from the Nephilim" reasserts the link the harmonization must sever, and the compositional seam — a giant-etiology fragment lodged before a total-extinction flood frame — explains why the link is there.
Where the critical reading lands: a genuine tension rooted in the splicing of independent traditions, only superficially harmonizable and historically felt as a problem by the text's own earliest readers.
Sources for this reading