What Were the Elioud? The Giant Race Behind Goliath

What Were the Elioud? The Giant Race Behind Goliath

Meta description: The Elioud were the third generation of giant hybrids described in the Book of Jubilees and the Book of Enoch, the grandchildren of the Watchers, and the tier of giant that best matches how the Bible describes Goliath's kin at Gath.

Term: Elioud (also spelled Eljo in the Ethiopic Book of Jubilees) — the third generation of giant hybrids described in Second Temple Jewish literature, born to the Naphil, who were themselves born to the great giants fathered by the Watchers.

What Were the Elioud? The Giant Race Behind Goliath

The Elioud were the third generation in a giant genealogy laid out in Jubilees 7:21-25. The Watchers fathered the first generation, called great giants. The great giants fathered a second generation, the Naphil. The Naphil fathered a third, the Eljo, rendered Elioud in a Greek fragment of 1 Enoch preserved by the chronicler Syncellus. Each generation moved one step further from its angelic origin and one step closer to ordinary humanity.

I first laid out this connection in a 2011 piece called "The Elioud Race." Fifteen years and a great deal more research later, the case for it is stronger, not weaker.

The Three Races Described in Jubilees 7

Jubilees 7:21-22 gives Noah's account of why the flood came. The Watchers took human wives against the law of heaven, and that union produced three distinct tiers rather than one uniform race of giants. The Greek 1 Enoch fragment states it directly: the women bore the Watchers three races, first the great giants, and the giants brought forth the Naphelim, and the Naphelim brought forth the Elioud. Jubilees uses its own terms for the same chain: the Giants slew the Naphil, and the Naphil slew the Eljo, and the Eljo mankind.

Read together, this is a genealogy. First generation, great giants. Second, the Naphil. Third, the Elioud. The Elioud sit furthest from the Watchers and closest to human, which is likely why this tier could pass among people and continue to reproduce.

Were the Elioud Wiped Out in the Flood?

Every ancient source treats the Elioud as an antediluvian phenomenon, ending with Noah's flood. But Jubilees 10 complicates that ending. It has God permitting ten percent of the disembodied spirits of these giants to remain on earth after the flood specifically to continue corrupting mankind. Genesis 6:4 carries the same tension in one line: the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also after that. The text itself signals that giants did not disappear cleanly with the flood.

Was Goliath One of the Elioud?

2 Samuel 21:22 describes four giants at Gath, close relatives of Goliath, as born to the giant. The Septuagint expands this to the offspring of the giants in Gath, whose family was Repha. That is filial language: not a giant by direct angelic descent, but a son of one. That position in the family line matches the Elioud almost exactly, a generation removed from the source, still unusually tall and strong, but human enough to be born, to fight, and to die the way Goliath does at the hand of a sling and a stone.

Goliath is never called Nephilim in the biblical text. He is described as a man of Gath, identified through his brothers as one of several born to the giant Rapha. If the Nephilim and the Naphil represent earlier tiers in the Jubilees chain, a be ing several generations down that same line, diminished but not erased, fits Goliath's description better than any earlier tier does.

About the Author

CK Quarterman is a U.S. Air Force veteran and author under the CKQbooks imprint (ckqbooks.com), writing on UAP phenomena, biblical prophecy, and the Watchers tradition. He coined the term malaterrestrials to describe non-human intelligences operating covertly throughout history. Now you know the name of the Unknown.