נְפִלִים
giants
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H5303 appears — 2 distinct verses across 2 books. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Hebrew form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Hebrew Bible; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences are not indexed here.
Genesis 1 verse
Numbers 1 verse
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
נפיל (nᵉphîyl) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “giants.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. Genesis dominates its distribution — 1 of 2 verses. Scripture first uses it in Genesis 6:4. Sharing its root, it stands alongside נפל, מפל and מפלה. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5303 catalogs a Hebrew word from the Hebrew Old Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Hebrew Old Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Each share is this word’s portion of its verses in that division of the Hebrew canon. Each figure is a share of the word’s 2 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 100%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: Come of the giants 1×, Giants 1×, Were giants 1×
- American Standard Version: Nephilim 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Nephilim 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Nephils 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5303 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5303 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5303 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5303 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense BDB distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- giants, the Nephilim
Word origin
Derived from נפל (nâphal) (H5307) — to fall.
Jastrow Dictionary
A second Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon for comparison, covering Aramaic and post-biblical (Talmudic, Targumic, Midrashic) usage that the biblical-Hebrew BDB does not. Matched by lemma rather than by Strong’s number, so a lemma may carry more than one Jastrow headword (shown separately below), and the entries cover usage well beyond the Bible.
נָפִיל
- giants. Gen. R. s. 26 נ׳ שהפילו וכ׳ they are called n’filim, because they caused the downfall of the world; a. e.—בֶּן הַנְּ׳ a) name of a demon. Bekh. 44ᵇ רוח בן נ׳ nervous prostration, v. נָאלָא II.—b) name of a species of lizards, living in the water. Sifra Sh’mini, ch. VI, Par. 5; Ḥull. 127ᵃ (not כן). Ex. R. s. 15 בן הפילי׳ some ed. (corr. acc.).
נָפִיל ²
- 1. giant. Ruth R. to II, 1 נסיב נ׳ לנ׳ when a giant marries a giantess.
- 2. Orion.—Pl. נְפִילִין, v. נִיפְלָא I.
נְפִיל
- = h. נֵפֶל, untimely birth, not viable. Targ. Y. I Lev. XXII, 27 דלא נְפִיל (ed. Vien. נָפִיל, ed. Amst. נֵפִיל) that it is not an untimely birth. Targ. Ps. LVIII, 9 Ms. (ed. נְפוּלָא). Targ. Job III, 16 נִפְלָא (Bxt. נְפֵלָא; Ms. נָפְלָא).—Pl. נִפְלֵי, נִי׳. B. Bath. 101ᵇ בדנ׳ (v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 30, ed. בנ׳) it means a lot set aside for burying untimely births. Ib. 102ᵇ תרתי בנ׳ וכ׳ we do not presume two lots to be set aside for &c.
A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Marcus Jastrow; London, Luzac, 1903) — Public Domain. Digitized via Sefaria. Digitized via Sefaria. Full attribution on Sources.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms H5303 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that state’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/נְּפִילִ֛ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Numbers 13:33 | 1 |
| הַ/נְּפִלִ֑ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Numbers 13:33 | 1 |
| הַ/נְּפִלִ֞ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 6:4 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5303, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.
Derives from
Shares the same root
- מפל mappâl H4651 refuse
- מפלה mappâlâh H4654 ruin
- מפלת mappeleth H4658 carcass
- נפל nᵉphal H5308 to fall
- נפל nephel H5309 miscarriage
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 Hebrew verses it occurs in. You can read those verses in Greek by switching the Old Testament edition to the Septuagint.
Read these verses in the Septuagint
This is a verse-level parallel only — the same verses exist in both the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments. No word-level Hebrew↔Greek correspondence is claimed: the data carries no such alignment, so no Greek word is shown as this Hebrew word’s translation. Coverage is not total — the Septuagint omits the deuterocanon and renumbers the Psalms, so some Hebrew verses have no direct Greek parallel.
