Eupolemus on Post-Flood Giants, Babylon, and Astral Wisdom

Eupolemus is one of the earliest Jewish writers to retell Israel’s story in Greek, and in a short fragment preserved by later authors he gives a vivid, surprising version of the world after the Flood. In his account, the survivors of the Deluge are giants who found Babylon and build its famous tower; God overthrows the tower and scatters these giants across the earth. The same fragment then turns to Abraham and Enoch, crediting them with the true origins of astronomy and astrology and weaving Babylonian and Greek myths into Israel’s primeval history. None of these details appear in Genesis itself, so they function as later interpretation and expansion rather than part of the biblical narrative.

This little text opens a window into how some Second Temple Jews were thinking about Genesis 6, the Flood, Babel, and Enoch. By seeing who Eupolemus was, why he tells the story this way, and how his Hellenistic context shaped him, we can better recognize the difference between the canonical text and later retellings. The goal here is to describe what this fragment says and how it relates to Genesis, not to endorse or refute its theological claims.

So what did Eupolemus actually say about the giants and the Flood?

In the space of only a few lines, the fragment attributed to Eupolemus (more precisely, to the Samaritan‑colored tradition often called “Pseudo‑Eupolemus”) offers a compact but striking storyline. First, it relocates giants to the far side of the Flood and makes them survivors. We are told that in his book Concerning the Jews of Assyria, Eupolemus said that “Eupolemus in his book Concerning the Jews of Assyria says that the city Babylon was first founded by those who escaped from the Deluge; and that they were giants, and built the tower renowned in history.” at Babylon’s beginning. These are not just large humans; in his telling they are the post‑diluvian founders of one of the world’s great cities.

Second, the fragment links these giants directly to the Tower of Babel. The same sentence continues by saying of the Flood survivors that “Eupolemus in his book Concerning the Jews of Assyria says that the city Babylon was first founded by those who escaped from the Deluge; and that they were giants, and built the tower renowned in history.” Here the tower “renowned in history” is commonly understood as the tower of Genesis 11, but whereas Genesis speaks of the unified “whole earth” building a city and tower, Eupolemus narrows the actors to a group of giant Flood survivors who establish Babylon itself and raise the tower.

Third, he attributes the tower’s fall very simply to God’s direct action and again connects the outcome specifically to the giants: “But when this had been overthrown by the act of God, the giants were dispersed over the whole earth…” Genesis 11 focuses on God confusing human language and scattering the people; Eupolemus keeps the idea of divine overthrow and scattering but has giants as the ones dispersed across the earth. In his short narrative, giants become the movers behind Babylon’s founding, Babel’s construction, and the spread of nations after God’s judgment.

Fourth, the fragment pivots from giants to wisdom. Abraham appears in Egypt as a culture hero: “And Abraham dwelt with the Egyptian priests in Heliopolis and taught them many things; and it was he who introduced astronomy and the other sciences to them…” But Abraham, in this account, does not present astronomy as a purely Babylonian or Egyptian achievement. Instead, we are told he claimed that “…saying that the Babylonians and himself had found these things out, but tracing back the first discovery to Enoch, and saying that he, and not the Egyptians, had first invented astrology.” His opponents may boast of their sciences, but Eupolemus has Abraham insist that a pre‑Flood patriarch—Enoch—is the true first discoverer of astrology.

Finally, the fragment adds a web of genealogies and identifications tying Near Eastern and Greek myths into this story. It reports Babylonian claims that the first man was Belus, equated with Kronos, from whom Belus and Chanaan descend, and from Chanaan come ancestors of Phoenicians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians (Q5–Q6). It also notes that “But the Greeks say that Atlas invented astrology, and that Atlas is the same as Enoch:” and that “and that Enoch had a son Methuselah, who learned all things through angels of God, and thus we gained our knowledge.” In other words, Greek stories about Atlas, and Jewish traditions about Enoch and Methuselah, are all said to converge on the origin of astral lore that humans now possess.

Compared with Genesis, this is a highly embroidered picture. Genesis places the Nephilim before the Flood (Genesis 6:1–4), does not say they survived, and nowhere mentions giants building Babel. It presents Abraham as a man of faith called from Ur and Haran (Genesis 11–12), not as an Egyptian court scholar, and it says nothing about Enoch inventing astrology or Methuselah learning “all things” from angels. Eupolemus is not offering a line‑by‑line exposition of Genesis; he is creating a universal history in which Israel’s ancestors stand at the fountainhead of both nations and knowledge.

To see the differences at a glance, we can set Genesis and this fragment side by side.

The key takeaway is that Eupolemus keeps the broad biblical framework—Flood, Babylon, tower, dispersion—but fills the gaps with giants, genealogies, and astral lore in ways that go well beyond the canonical account.

Who was Eupolemus, and what kind of book are we reading?

The name “Eupolemus” in this fragment reaches us through a long chain. A Jewish historian named Eupolemus wrote in Greek during the Hellenistic period, and later a scholar named Alexander Polyhistor excerpted Jewish authors, including Eupolemus, in a work On the Jews. Still later, the Christian writer Eusebius quoted Polyhistor in his Preparation for the Gospel, which is where this giants‑and‑Babel passage survives. That is already several steps removed from the original pen.

Modern scholarship usually distinguishes between material that likely comes from the historical Eupolemus and this specific giants/Babel/Enoch‑Atlas piece, which is often labeled “Pseudo‑Eupolemus.” The reason is that the fragment we are looking at has a strong Samaritan flavor (for example, in how it treats certain holy places and lineages in its broader context) and a heavy emphasis on blending biblical names with Greek and Babylonian myths. Whatever we call it, we are clearly dealing with a Hellenistic Jewish (or Samaritan‑Jewish) attempt to tell the story of the world’s beginnings in a way a Greek‑speaking audience would understand.

Genre matters here. This is not a verse‑by‑verse commentary on Genesis. It is a piece of ancient historiography and mythography—an effort to write a universal pre‑history that explains where nations and sciences came from, using Scripture as a skeleton and then fleshing it out with contemporary traditions. Biblical characters like Noah, Enoch, Methuselah, and Abraham are recast as founders of cities, teachers of priests, and first inventors of arts. Pagan figures like Belus, Kronos, Atlas, and Asbolus are reinterpreted as distorted memories of those same patriarchs. The giants become the dramatic carriers of both sin and civilization into the post‑Flood world.

Because of that, it is helpful to read this fragment the way we read other Second Temple Jewish expansions: as a window into ancient imagination and debate about origins, not as a missing section of Genesis. It shows one stream of Jewish tradition trying to tie Genesis 6, the Flood, Babel, and the rise of Babylon together and to fold Enoch and Abraham into discussions about who really invented astronomy and astrology. At the same time, its status is that of a fragmentary, second‑hand, non‑canonical text preserved in Christian quotation, distinct from the books that later communities recognized as Scripture.

A Hellenistic Jewish historian with a mission

The historical Eupolemus is generally regarded as one of the earliest Jewish historians to write in Greek, probably in the mid‑second century BC. His larger work seems to have traced Israel’s story from early times down into his own day, and the surviving fragments show him deeply concerned to establish the antiquity and wisdom of Israel’s ancestors over against Greek claims.

In that broader picture, Moses can be presented as the first wise man and originator of writing and law; the alphabet moves from Hebrews to Phoenicians to Greeks. Time is measured from Adam down to Hellenistic rulers, so that Jewish chronology comes to frame world history. Within such a project, it makes sense that another writer in the same orbit—or a later Samaritan adapter—would want to place giants, Babel, Babylon, Enoch, and Abraham into the same kind of universal scheme.

So when this fragment says that giant Flood survivors founded Babylon and built its tower, or that Enoch/Atlas invented astrology, it is not random folklore. It reflects a deliberate mission: to show that the oldest and truest roots of cities, nations, and sciences lie, in this author’s view, with the God of Israel and the patriarchs of Genesis, even if their names appear in other cultures under different guises.

A fragmentary, second‑hand, non‑canonical text

This passage survives only as a small excerpt inside Eusebius, who is himself quoting Alexander Polyhistor, who in turn claimed to be citing Eupolemus. We do not possess the original book Concerning the Jews of Assyria, and we cannot check how faithfully it has been transmitted. That makes it difficult to know how the fragment originally related to its wider context or exactly how much editing it may have undergone.

In addition, neither Jewish nor Christian communities have treated Eupolemus or Pseudo‑Eupolemus as scriptural. It sits alongside other Second Temple writings like 1 Enoch or Jubilees as a historical witness to how some Jews thought about Genesis, rather than as a text used to define doctrine. That canonical distinction is part of the framework within which this article contrasts Eupolemus with Genesis.

Giants after the Deluge: Babylon, Babel, and dispersion

The most eye‑catching move in this fragment is the relocation of giants into the center of post‑Flood history. Genesis 6 places the Nephilim in the days when the sons of God came to the daughters of men and notes that they were “on the earth in those days, and also afterward” (Genesis 6:4). Later, the spies in Numbers 13 speak of seeing Nephilim‑like giants in Canaan. But the biblical text never says that giant beings emerged from the ark or that they built Babel.

Eupolemus, by contrast, makes that connection explicitly. He writes that “Eupolemus in his book Concerning the Jews of Assyria says that the city Babylon was first founded by those who escaped from the Deluge; and that they were giants, and built the tower renowned in history.” In one stroke, the fragment turns anonymous “survivors” of the Flood into giants, links them to the founding of Babylon, and credits them with raising the famous tower. All three moves extend beyond the text of Genesis, but they do so in a way that fits Hellenistic patterns of thinking about city founders and primeval heroes.

In the ancient Near East, cities often claimed divine or semi‑divine founders. Babylon, especially, was surrounded by myths of primordial kings and builders. Greek literature likewise imagined giant or titan‑like figures as culture founders and city builders. By saying that giant Flood survivors founded Babylon and built its tower, Eupolemus is almost certainly engaging those stories, but he is insisting that the giants, the city, and the tower belong inside the biblical story of the Deluge and its aftermath.

Founding Babylon and building the tower

In Genesis, the city and tower appear in Genesis 11, on “a plain in the land of Shinar,” after the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 has sketched out the spread of peoples from Noah’s sons. Nimrod is named as a mighty hunter and ruler whose kingdom begins with Babel, but there is no statement that he or any giants survived the Flood.

Eupolemus compresses and sharpens this. He simply asserts that “Eupolemus in his book Concerning the Jews of Assyria says that the city Babylon was first founded by those who escaped from the Deluge; and that they were giants, and built the tower renowned in history.” The “those” who escaped are giants, and the city they found is Babylon. Then, without pause, he adds that they “built the tower renowned in history.” In his narrative world, the same group of beings both establishes Babylon and constructs its tower.

Several motives likely converge in telling the story this way:

• Babylon—a city with enormous prestige in ancient tradition—is made to owe its origin to figures already embedded in the story of the Flood.
• The famous tower is explicitly located in Babylon and explicitly associated with giants, not just with generic human builders.
• The opaque phrase “and also afterward” in Genesis 6:4 is given concrete content by placing some form of giant presence after the Deluge in a way that explains their later appearance in human memory.

This shows how the fragment functions as interpretive expansion. Genesis does not say that post‑Flood giants founded Babylon; Eupolemus imagines or infers it in order to tie together disparate threads—Flood, giants, and Babel—into a single narrative.

God overthrows the tower and scatters the giants

The fragment’s description of God’s judgment also both echoes and reshapes Genesis 11. After describing the tower’s construction, it continues: “But when this had been overthrown by the act of God, the giants were dispersed over the whole earth…” The overt elements are familiar: God acts directly, the tower does not endure, and the builders are scattered over the earth. That corresponds in broad outline to Genesis 11.

But a few details are different:

• Genesis 11 emphasizes God confusing the language of “all the earth,” so that the people cannot understand one another and abandon the project. The focus falls on language and human pride.
• Eupolemus simply says the tower was “overthrown” by God and that the “giants” were dispersed. Language is not mentioned; the emphasis falls on the giants as the actors and on their being spread across the world.

It is useful to distinguish types of moves here:

• At the level of shared content, both Genesis and Eupolemus affirm divine opposition to the tower‑project and a resulting dispersion of its builders.
• At the level of interpretation, Eupolemus links the builders to the giants hinted at in Genesis 6:4, and describes their dispersion in terms of giant figures shaping later history.
• At the level of speculation, describing the founders of Babylon specifically as giants, and the spread of nations directly as the scattering of those giants, goes beyond anything narrated in Genesis.

From a historical‑literary standpoint, the fragment shows one way a Second Temple author bridged the gap between Genesis 6 and Genesis 11: rebellious giant figures survive the Deluge, participate in another attempt to reach heaven, and are then driven out across the world by divine intervention. As a reading of ancient imagination, this is valuable data. As a reading of Genesis, it is clearly more expansive than the canonical text itself.

Enoch, Abraham, and the origins of the stars’ secrets

The second major theme of the Eupolemus fragment is knowledge—especially knowledge of the stars. Here the story zooms in on Abraham, Enoch, Methuselah, and the rival claims of Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks. Who really invented astronomy and astrology? Who passed down wisdom about the heavens?

In Genesis, Abraham is called by God out of Ur and Haran, promised a land, descendants, and blessing for the nations (Genesis 12:1–3), and tested across his life. Enoch is briefly described as one who “walked with God” and “was not, for God took him” (Genesis 5:24); Methuselah is noted mainly for his long life. Canonical Scripture is silent about any of them founding sciences or studying the stars in a technical sense.

Eupolemus, however, casts them as first astronomers and teachers, and uses that picture to make a strong cultural claim: Israel’s ancestors, not Egypt or Greece, stand at the very beginning of astral lore. To clarify how his story works, it helps to see his key characters and nations in a simple chart.

Eupolemus gathers rival cultural boasts—Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek—and reinterprets them so that they all unknowingly point back to the same antediluvian patriarchs. Enoch is the original sage; Methuselah is the angel‑taught conduit; Abraham is the missionary scientist; the Babylonians preserve knowledge; the Egyptians learn from Abraham; and Greek myths about Atlas are, in this scheme, distorted memories of Enoch.

Abraham the teacher of Egypt and Babylon

The Abraham section begins with a striking image: “And Abraham dwelt with the Egyptian priests in Heliopolis and taught them many things; and it was he who introduced astronomy and the other sciences to them…” In this telling, Abraham is not only a wandering figure and recipient of promises; he is a resident intellectual among Egypt’s priestly elite, bringing them new learning. The passage underlines that “it was he who introduced astronomy and the other sciences to them” so that astronomy becomes emblematic of the sciences Abraham brings.

But Abraham, as Eupolemus presents him, carefully positions himself in relation to other nations. He allegedly says that “the Babylonians and himself had found these things out” That is, he and the Babylonians are the ones who have rediscovered and preserved this knowledge in their time. Yet even that is not the deepest root. The fragment continues that he traced “…saying that the Babylonians and himself had found these things out, but tracing back the first discovery to Enoch, and saying that he, and not the Egyptians, had first invented astrology.” Enoch, therefore, becomes the ultimate patriarch of astral wisdom, and Abraham is his post‑Flood heir and transmitter.

The Bible never places Abraham in Heliopolis, never describes him teaching Egyptian priests, and never attaches astronomy to his calling. Those are later literary moves designed to answer real questions in the ancient world: if Egypt boasts of its temples and priests, and Babylonia of its astrologers and star‑catalogues, where does Israel fit? Eupolemus answers by saying that Egyptians and Babylonians only hold borrowed light; the flame was first kindled with Enoch and carried forward by Abraham.

Enoch as Atlas and Methuselah learning through angels

The fragment’s most explicitly Enochic line comes when it turns to Greek tradition: “But the Greeks say that Atlas invented astrology, and that Atlas is the same as Enoch:” Here we see a classic Hellenistic Jewish strategy at work. Rather than dismiss Greek myths outright, Eupolemus reinterprets them. Atlas, the star‑bearing titan of Greek lore, did not really invent astrology; rather, the Greeks have, in this telling, dimly remembered Enoch under another name.

This move accomplishes two things inside his framework:

• It allows him to acknowledge that Greek culture has some awareness of an ancient inventor of astral science while still insisting that the true identity of this figure is biblical.
• It supports his larger thesis that different cultures’ primeval stories are, at best, reflections of a deeper, older reality associated with Genesis figures.

The fragment then adds one more layer: “and that Enoch had a son Methuselah, who learned all things through angels of God, and thus we gained our knowledge.” Methuselah here is no longer just the man of great age in Genesis 5; he is a student of angels and, in some sense, the human channel through whom heavenly knowledge flows to the rest of us. That dovetails with wider Second Temple traditions in which angels reveal secrets of heaven and earth to chosen patriarchs, sometimes including teachings about astronomy, calendars, and other arts.

The canonical text does not describe Methuselah or Enoch in these terms. Scripture does speak generally of angels as messengers and revealers of divine truth (for example, in parts of Daniel, Luke, and Revelation), and later Jewish literature develops elaborate stories of angelic instruction and forbidden arts. Eupolemus’ mention of Methuselah learning “all things” through angels of God likely reflects that same world of ideas. It gives modern readers a snapshot of how some Jews connected Genesis’ spare genealogies to a much fuller cosmological and scientific mythology.

Why Eupolemus links giants, nations, and mythic ancestors

The last part of the fragment turns from giants and stars to genealogies. It reports that “For the Babylonians say that the first man was Belus, who is Kronos; and that of him was born a son Belus, and Chanaan;” and then continues, “and that this Chanaan begat the father of the Phoenicians, and that his son was Churn, who is called by the Greeks Asbolus, and is father of the Aethiopians, and a brother of Mestraim the father of the Egyptians.” In just these two sentences, Eupolemus gives us a mini‑map of the ancient world as seen through a fusion of Babylonian, Greek, and biblical lenses.

Several patterns emerge:

• He adopts Babylonian claims about Belus and Kronos but integrates them into a larger story in which these figures sit somewhere in relation to biblical ancestry.
• He uses names like Chanaan and Mestraim, which echo the biblical Canaan and Mizraim, to connect Phoenicians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians into a single family tree.
• He notes Greek names like Asbolus for Churn to show that Greek terminology can also be slotted into this genealogy.

The result is a kind of universal ethnographic chart: Phoenicians, Ethiopians, and Egyptians are not simply neighbors; they are cousins, descended through lines that also appear—under slightly different names—in Greek and Babylonian lore. For Eupolemus, that is not just interesting trivia. It supports his conviction that all these nations ultimately find their roots in the same primeval history that Genesis sketches, and that their myths and gods are distorted memories of real human ancestors.

Genesis does indeed present a Table of Nations (Genesis 10) in which peoples like Egypt (Mizraim), Canaan, Cush (linked to Ethiopia), and others descend from Noah’s sons. That is part of the canonical story, and Eupolemus’ fragment echoes some of those names and directions, suggesting he is working within that biblical framework while extending it with extra identifications. The specific links with Belus, Kronos, Asbolus, and related figures, however, belong to a Hellenistic interpretive project often described as “euhemerism”: the re‑reading of gods as exaggerated human figures and the alignment of different cultures’ origin stories.

In the context of Genesis 6 and the giants, Eupolemus’ genealogical interests show one more thing: for him, giants, nations, and myths all belong on the same timeline. Giants survive the Flood, help shape early cities like Babylon, are scattered by God, and then stand behind the later stories nations tell about their origins and their wisdom. That is a powerful way to imagine the world’s beginnings and to integrate multiple traditions into a single scheme. It also illustrates how fluid the boundary could be, for some ancient writers, between biblical genealogy and broader mythic ethnography.

Conclusion: what Eupolemus illuminates, and how it relates to Genesis

In a few dense sentences, the Eupolemus fragment offers an early Jewish attempt to retell the world’s beginnings in Greek dress. Giant survivors of the Flood found Babylon and build its tower; God overthrows the tower and scatters these giants across the earth. Abraham appears as a culture hero who teaches Egyptian priests and claims that he and the Babylonians preserved the stars’ secrets, while insisting that the first discovery really belongs to Enoch. Greek tales about Atlas and Babylonian genealogies about Belus and Kronos are recast as distorted memories of Enoch, Methuselah, and the descendants of Noah.

This illuminates several real currents in Second Temple Judaism. There is a fascination with giants and the aftermath of the Flood, an eagerness to explain how advanced or forbidden knowledge entered human history, and a strong desire to present Israel’s ancestors as the first wise men, the founders of law, writing, and science. There is also a tendency to treat Greek and Near Eastern myths not as entirely alien, but as partial echoes of the same deep past that Genesis describes, reinterpreted through different cultural lenses.

At the same time, the fragment is clearly distinct from the canonical narrative of Genesis. The Bible does not say that giants built Babel or founded Babylon. It does not teach that Enoch invented astrology or that Methuselah learned “all things” from angels. Genesis 6 places the Nephilim in the pre‑Flood world, with a brief “and also afterward,” but does not spell out how or whether they survived into later ages. Genesis 11, for its part, depicts human beings uniting in a project to make a name for themselves, building a city and a tower, and being scattered by God’s intervention in their language.

Eupolemus’ fragment, read against that background, is valuable for what it tells us about one ancient reader’s imagination, questions, and strategies. It shows how a Hellenistic Jewish author (or tradition) brought together giants, Babel, Enoch, Abraham, and the nations into a single, highly interconnected story, and how he used that story to situate Israel’s traditions within the wider world of Babylonian, Egyptian, and Greek claims about origins. For modern readers, it serves both as a rich historical source and as a reminder of how much interpretive creativity surrounded Genesis in the centuries before and after the turn of the era.

The framework used in this article keeps a clear distinction between this fragment and the canonical text of Genesis. Eupolemus helps explain how some Jews during the Second Temple period read and expanded Genesis 6 and Genesis 11, and how they integrated those chapters into broader conversations about nations, science, and myth. The basic boundaries of the Genesis account itself, however, remain defined by the wording, scope, and themes of the canonical narrative.