Who are the Nephilim?

[Pergamum]

In Genesis 6:4


BUT ALSO IN NUMBERS:

Numbers 13:30-33
30 Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, "We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it." 31 But the men who had gone up with him said, "We can't attack those people; they are stronger than we are." 32 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. 33 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." NIV


Didn't these fellers die out in the Flood?

Or where the people so scared that they were like, "We saw folks that looked like BIGFOOT or KING KONG they were so big [i.e. they were wrong and made an allusion to a myth, but the OT writer quoted their words anyway]

 

[Pergamum]

And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, which come of the Nephilim: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."
- Numbers 13:33

"The Emim - a large and numerous people, as tall as the Anakim - had formerly inhabited it [Moab]. Like the Anakim, they are usually reckoned as Rephaim, though the Moabites call them Emim."
"Now only King Og of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. In fact his bed, an iron bed, can still be seen in Rabbah of the Ammonites. By the common cubit [63.5 cm/25 in] it is nine cubits [5.7 m/18.75 ft] long and four cubits wide."
- Deuteronomy 2:11, 3:11

 

[Pergamum]

And how are giants related to this topic.

 

[Contra_Mundum]

My thoughts,
I think using "nephilim" as a proper name might be justified in Gen 6, but not afterward. The older translation was "giants" and I think it fits very well. Some of the genes from the elder days (ante-deluvian) produced some persons of tremendous physical presence, but the gene-pool was greatly constricted by the reduction to 6 persons of childbearing stock by the flood. So, giants became rare.

If the physical problems (not to mention the appetite) of a guy like Andre the Giant in our day presents almost insurmountable problems for such persons in our fallen, flood-altered world, the elimination of giants was almost inevitable. But for a time after the flood, there would have been far more.

 

[Reformed Baptist]

AiG has an interesting article..

Who Were the Nephilim? - Answers in Genesis