1 Enoch 7, 15-16 · Drama
The Nephilim: What the Book of Enoch Actually Says About the Giants
Enoch gives the giants a size, an appetite, and an afterlife. The numbers are less certain than the internet suggests — here is what the text says.
The offspring
Chapter 7 follows directly from the descent. The Watchers take wives, and those wives bear children the text calls great giants. From there the account escalates in stages, and the order of the escalation is the point.
First the giants consume everything people produce. When that is no longer enough, they turn on people themselves. Then they turn on birds, beasts, reptiles and fish — and begin to eat flesh and drink blood. The story reads as a collapse of every boundary in sequence, ending with the earth itself laying an accusation against the lawless.
About that height
The Charles translation gives the giants' height as three thousand ells. Popular retellings usually convert this to a figure around 450 feet, and you will see that number repeated confidently across the internet.
It deserves more caution than it usually gets. An ell is not a fixed unit — it varied by region and era — so any conversion into feet is an estimate built on a choice of standard. On top of that, the manuscripts disagree: some Greek witnesses give 300 cubits rather than 3,000 ells, an order of magnitude smaller.
None of that makes the passage less dramatic. It just means the honest version is 'the text says three thousand ells, and here is why the familiar 450-foot figure is an approximation of a disputed number' rather than a flat statement of fact.
“And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells.”
Where the spirits went
Chapters 15 and 16 contain the idea that gave this section its long afterlife in Western thought. When the giants die, their bodies return to the earth — but the text says their spirits do not go where human spirits go.
Because they were born of both heaven and earth, the giants' spirits are said to remain on the earth as evil spirits, afflicting, oppressing and causing trouble, and they do so without eating, without thirst, and without being seen. This is one of the earliest surviving explanations of where demons come from, and it makes them the residue of the flood generation rather than fallen angels in their own right.
The distinction matters. In Enoch's scheme the Watchers are imprisoned, and it is their children's disembodied spirits — not the Watchers themselves — that remain loose in the world.
Enoch and Genesis, side by side
Genesis 6:4 mentions the Nephilim in a single verse, notes that they were on the earth in those days and afterwards, and calls them mighty men of old, men of renown. It gives no height, no diet, and no account of what became of them.
Everything else — the scale, the cannibalism, the origin of evil spirits — is Enoch's contribution. When someone says 'the Bible describes giants who ate people', they are describing the Book of Enoch.