calling the Hebrew-literate

[cellio]

A friend asked me about the word "n'filim" (or sometimes "nefilim"), which is the noun for the giants talked about in Gen 6:4 and Num 13:33. Or is it? ORT asserts that the former is literally "fallen angels", but armed with a dictionary, 501 Hebrew Verbs, and the knowledge that "angel" is usually a completely different word, I'm not seeing it. Oh, and there's a slight difference in the Hebrew in the two places cited, a small matter of an extra yud, and I don't know if that's a root change or some grammatical transformation.

The discussion is here (and specifically here). We'd welcome further clues from you folks who know a lot more of this language than I do. :-)

Comments

[the-never.livejournal.com]

The meaning of 'angel' changes over time, too. In Greek 'angel' (angelos) is used interchangeably to designate a celestial entity and/or to siginify the original meaning 'a messenger' (which can also be an absolutely ordinary, mortal messenger).

[cellio]

And then there's the whole issue of angels vs men when Yaakov wrestles with someone, and when the three visitors appear to Avraham, and probably other places. The latter are clearly messengers in any case.

A lot of what's written about angels isn't in the Torah but came later. Discussions of the heavenly host show up in various places in the talmud, and have found their way into the liturgy, but I don't know the history of any of it.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I know nothing, and I'm doubtful how useful a page without the Hebrew is likely to be, but <Geocities>this page</Geocities> (http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Capsule/6859/Texts/nephilimroot.html) also thinks it's related to "fall", saying its root sense is "one who fells".

[cellio]

That looks like excerpts from Strong's Concordance, which is reputable. Thanks! Hey, I didn't think to check for an online copy of Strong's. I just added a dead-tree copy to my Amazon queue, along with BDB, but now it looks like I don't have to. Handy!

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Nfilim would be "those who fell," usually understood as angels or angelic beings, but that's an extrapolation based on the context, i.e. the strange things the Torah says about them and their appearance out of the blue in Genesis. It's often understood as the complement to the reference to "the sons of God and the daughters of man." The references in the Torah are probably fragments of some other mythic tradition that wasn't otherwise preserved. Very rich midrash stuff, as you can imagine.

The extra yod -- there's a technical term for it that I forget -- basically the yods and vavs in many words indicate an ee, ay, or oh sound, and there is no hard and fast rule for them being there or not being there when there's that sound. Essentially at some point (long before the Masoretic notation system (all the dots)) people figured out that these "vowel" thingees were useful, so sometimes they used 'em. Like how in modern Hebrew sometimes the dots are put in, but often not, because if you're a native speaker you can figure out the meaning and pronunciation from the consonants. But the extra yod in nfilim wouldn't affect the meaning.

[cellio]

Thanks for the information! And something I forgot to check -- can you compare n'filim to k'kufim, which in the morning blessings is commonly translated as "the fallen"? (IIRC, this also appears in Psalm 146, which I haven't checked yet either.) Completely different root, so is it a different sense of falling (stumbling vs. full-scale falling?), or what?

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I sometimes forget that not everyone has taken courses in Biblical Hebrew... not that they did me much good! If you're writing divrei torah on a regular basis, you should get a Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon. It'll mention every occurrence of that root in the Bible and give you a good exploration of the roots. Your synagogue might even have one.

Anyway, BDB has the root k-f-f as "bend, bend down, be bent, bowed," with kefufim "those bowed down -- in distress, humiliation, etc., Ps 145:11, 146:8."

On the other hand, n-f-l's root is "fall, lie," with one branch of meanings in Qal being "fall prostrate, fall at full length, sink down, fall at one's feet, fall upon." "Lie prostrate" and "take to one's bed" are also idioms. In Hiphil you've got "cause to fall, cause death, casting, let drop." So I guess the root of difference between nefalim and kefufim is "fallen ones" versus "bended ones" -- not really the same meaning, except by analogy.