Numbers 13 · a question people ask
Did the spies really see the Nephilim?
The Nephilim are named only in Genesis 6:4 and here. The chapter's own voice calls the people at Hebron "the children of Anak" (13:22), and the spies' first report says the same (13:28). "Nephilim" comes in what the chapter calls "an evil report" (13:32): "There we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim" (13:33). Protestants read this in two main ways. All agree that the sons of Anak were real and tall, "a people great and tall, the sons of the Anakim" (Deuteronomy 9:2), and that Caleb later "drove out the three sons of Anak: Sheshai, and Ahiman, and Talmai" (Joshua 15:14).
How Christians read it
Where Christians differ, Favor sets out the main views side by side and doesn't pick one.
Part of the evil report
"Nephilim" is the spies' word, not the narrator's. The chapter itself says only "the children of Anak" (13:22, 13:28), and it calls what the spies said next "an evil report" (13:32). When Moses retells it, the people quote the spies as saying, "we have seen the sons of the Anakim there!" (Deuteronomy 1:28), without the Nephilim.
Numbers 13:22 · Numbers 13:28 · Numbers 13:32 · Deuteronomy 1:28
A real line of tall people
Genesis 6:4 says "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also after that", and those who hold this view read "after that" as reaching past the flood. The spies say the sons of Anak "come from the Nephilim" (13:33), and Deuteronomy groups the Anakim with other tall peoples who "are considered to be Rephaim" (Deuteronomy 2:11).
Genesis 6:4 · Numbers 13:33 · Deuteronomy 2:10-11
The verses
“They went up by the South, and came to Hebron; and Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the children of Anak, were there. (Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.)”
“However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large. Moreover, we saw the children of Anak there.”
“They brought up an evil report of the land which they had spied out to the children of Israel, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that eats up its inhabitants; and all the people who we saw in it are men of great stature. There we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim. We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.””
“The Nephilim were on 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.”