Movie Review: The Prophecy II (1998)
Religious horror with research
Review at Letterboxd: 3 and a half stars:
Love the last shot. Love anything that has Christopher Walken as a menace.
Love any horror based in Biblical scholarship, and those few passages on the Nephilim have always unnerved me and fascinated me.
The series:
The Prophecy (1995) dir. Gregory Widen — Christopher Walken, Virginia Madsen, Eric Stolz, Moriah ‘Shining Dove’ Snyder (Letterboxd)
The Prophecy 2 (1998) dir. Greg Spence — Christopher Walken, Jennifer Beals, Brittany Murphy, Bruce Abbott, Eric Roberts (Letterboxd)
The Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000) dir. Patrick Lussier — Christopher Walken, Brad Dourif, Vincent Spano, Moriah ‘Shining Dove’ Snyder from the first one (Letterboxd)
The Prophecy: Uprising (2005) dir. Joel Soisson — Kari Wurher, Doug Bradley, Jason London (Letterboxd)
The Prophecy 5: Forsaken (2005) dir. Joel Soisson — Kari Wurher, Tony Todd (Letterboxd)
All five collected on one Blu-ray/Digital
There’s only two verses in the Biblical canon that mention the Nephilim by name, and they are both eerie. If anyone with more Biblical scholarship then I can shed further light on them, please comment.
Number 1 is Genesis 6:4
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.
New Revised Standard Version
The context of this verse actually brings in the story of Noah, oddly enough (God is so appalled by what is happening that he wants to wipe out his creation). And the verses before this one refer to the Nephilim as the “sons of God”:
1 When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” 4 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. 5 The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. 7 So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord. 9 These are the descendants of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation; Noah walked with God.
NRSV
The second verse is Numbers 13:32:
There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakites come from the Nephilim); and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.
NRSV
The context is the time of Moses. They are actually spying on the peoples around them when they find the people of Anak inhabiting the land of Canaan; the Anakites are the descendants of the human women who had children with the Nephilim and are still apparently giants, hence the reference to feeling like “grasshoppers” next to them.
30 But Caleb quieted the people before Moses, and said, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.” 31 Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against this people, for they are stronger than we.” 32So they brought to the Israelites an unfavorable report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land that we have gone through as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people that we saw in it are of great size. 33There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakites come from the Nephilim); and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.
You can see how this inspired these horror movies! Look above at God’s displeasure at the Nephilim, which are “sons of God” and therefore thought to be angels, coming amongst humans. And combine that with the war in heaven caused by Lucifer’s fall (whoops, spoiler alert for the first movie, but I think that’s embedded into our culture, even amongst the nonreligious, right?)
In many different Bible translations, “Nephilim” is translated as “giants”. I trust the New Revised Standard Version because my best friend, Joshua, who has a degree in both religion and philosophy, has studied both ancient Hebrew and ancient Greek, and it’s the version he recommends. It uses, as you see above, “Nephilim”. Some Jewish traditions view them as fallen angels, which feeds right back into the war in heaven.
There is a lot of argument about the etymology of the word; you can see some of it at the Wikipedia page. Fascinating.
There is one more verse referring to the “fallen”: Ezekiel 32:27. Interestingly, it has a phrase that has a meaning that is disputed amongst Biblical scholars–they argue whether is actually says “Nephilim” or “fallen” “or “fallen warriors”. Here’s the NRSV translation of it:
27 And they do not lie with the fallen warriors of long ago who went down to Sheol with their weapons of war, whose swords were laid under their heads, and whose shields are upon their bones; for the terror of the warriors was in the land of the living.
NRSV
There is much more information about both Nephilim and why some angels fell from heaven (and therefore the war in heaven) in 1 Enoch, which is an ancient Hebrew text found as part of the Dead Sea scrolls. Here’s the Wikipedia page describing it, and you can read it in a lovely translation here. I have it on my to-be-read list; I’ll report back after I do.
And when the angels, the sons of heaven, beheld them, they became enamoured of them, saying to each other, Come, let us select for ourselves wives from the progeny of men, and let us beget children.
1 Enoch 7:2
The Book of Giants: The Watchers, Nephilim, and The Book of Enoch by Joseph Lumpkin
Some more on the etymology and nature (thank you, Wikipedia):
The decision of the Greek translators to render the Hebrew nefilim as Greek gigantes is a separate matter. The Hebrew nefilim means literally “the fallen ones” and the strict translation into Greek would be peptokotes, which in fact appears in the Septuagint of Ezekiel 32:22–27. It seems then that the authors of Septuagint wished not only to simply translate the foreign term into Greek, but also to employ a term which would be intelligible and meaningful for their Hellenistic audiences. Given the complex meaning of the nefilim which emerged from the three interconnected biblical passages (human-divine hybrids in Genesis 6, autochthonous people in Numbers 13 and ancient warriors trapped in the underworld in Ezekiel 32), the Greek translators recognized some similarities. First and foremost, both nefilim and gigantes were liminal figures resulting from the union of the opposite orders and as such retained the unclear status between the human and divine. Similarly dim was their moral designation and the sources witnessed to both awe and fascination with which these figures must have been looked upon. Secondly, both were presented as impersonating chaotic qualities and posing some serious danger to gods and humans. They appeared either in the prehistoric or early historical context, but in both cases they preceded the ordering of the cosmos. Lastly, both gigantes and nefilim were clearly connected with underworld and were said to have originated from earth and as well end up closed therein.[22]
In 1 Enoch, they were “great giants, whose height was three hundred cubits.” A Cubit being 18 inches (45 centimetres), this would make them 442 ft 10 61/64 inch tall (137.16 metres).
The Quran refers to the people of Ād in Quran 26:130 whom the prophet Hud declares to be like jabbarin (Hebrew: gibborim), probably a reference to the Biblical Nephilim. The people of Ād are said to be giants, the tallest among them a hundred feet high.[23] However, according to Islamic legend, the ʿĀd were not wiped out by the flood, since some of them had been too tall to be drowned. Instead, God destroyed them after they rejected further warnings.[24] After death, they were banished into the lower layers of hell.[25]