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The Brown-Driver-Briggs Lexicon gives the meaning of Nephilim as "giants"
Robert Baker Girdlestone argued the word comes from the Hiphil causative stem. Adam Clarke took it as passive, "fallen", "apostates".
Ronald Hendel states that it is a passive form "ones who have fallen", equivalent grammatically to paqid "one who is appointed" (i.e. overseer), asir, "one who is bound", (i.e. prisoner) etc.
In truth, the Nephilim are all of these. They are giants, or gods once revered in apocalyptic forms, but now fallen and restrained by something in the universe cursing them to humanity, unaware or incapable of tapping into the true inner power of their souls.
They are a spiritual enigma; the composition of Polytheism and Monotheism, of Creation and Destruction, of Existence and Nonexistence.
In the Hebrew Bible
The term "Nephilim" occurs just twice in the Hebrew Bible, both in the Torah. The first is Genesis 6:1–4, immediately before the story of Noah's ark:
"When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown."
The second is Numbers 13:32–33, where the Twelve Spies report that they have seen fearsome giants in Canaan:
"And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, "The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them."
The nature of the Nephilim is complicated by the ambiguity of Genesis 6:4, which leaves it unclear whether they are the "sons of God" or their offspring who are the "ancient warriors".
Richard Hess in The Anchor Bible Dictionary takes it as read that the Nephilim are the offspring, as does P. W. Coxon in Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible.
