The giants
A thread · Nephilim, Rephaim and Anakim, Og, Goliath, and the retellings
The Bible does not describe one race of giants. It uses several words, and the height comes mostly from frightened spies and from later retellings. The one named bed, one named hero and the “found” skeletons each look different when you check them.
- Earliest texts
- Genesis 6, Numbers 13, Deuteronomy 2 to 3
- Words for them
- Nephilim, Rephaim, Anakim, Emim
- Verified giant skeleton
- none found
- Type of connection
- later readings documented; Ugarit link debated
- Open questions
- 3 logged
Four words, not one race
The Bible has no single word for giants. It has several, used in different books, and they do not all mean the same thing. That is the first thing the retellings lose.
| Word | Where | What the text says | What is uncertain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nephilim | Genesis 6:4; Numbers 13:33 | On the earth “in those days and afterward”. In Numbers the spies say the Anakites belong to them | The meaning of the word. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon calls the proposed roots “all very precarious”. The Septuagint, in the 3rd to 2nd century BCE, translated it gigantes |
| Rephaim | Deuteronomy 2:11 and 3:11, Genesis 14:5; Isaiah 14:9, Psalm 88:10 | A people living in the land, of whom Og was the last. In the prophets and Psalms the same word seems to mean the dead in Sheol | At Ugarit, rpum are dead, semi-divine ancestors (KTU 1:20 to 1:22). Whether the biblical Rephaim are giants, the dead, or both is disputed |
| Anakim | Numbers 13:33; Deuteronomy 2:10 to 2:11; Joshua 11:21 to 11:22 | Counted among the Rephaim. Joshua wipes them out of the hill country, but some remain in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod | Gath is Goliath’s city, which is why the two are linked |
| Emim, Zamzummim | Deuteronomy 2:10 to 2:21 | Names that Moabites and Ammonites gave to Rephaim. A large, numerous people, as tall as the Anakites | They appear only in Deuteronomy’s own notes on who lived where before |
| Gibborim | Genesis 6:4 | “The heroes of old, the men of renown” | The word means mighty men or warriors. It does not say tall |
Texts paraphrased from the Revised JPS Tanakh (Gender-Sensitive Edition, 2023) as shown on Sefaria, plus Wikipedia on Nephilim and Rephaim. I have not read the Hebrew. Deuteronomy is dated by most scholars to the 7th to 5th century BCE.
What Genesis 6 actually says
Genesis 6:1 to 6:4 is four verses. Divine beings notice that human women are attractive and take wives. God says the divine breath will not stay in humans forever and sets their lifespan at 120 years. Then comes the sentence that started all this: the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and afterward, when the divine beings had children with human women. These are “the heroes of old, the men of renown”.
The passage never gives a height. It is also ambiguous about who the Nephilim are. Richard Hess and P. W. Coxon read them as the offspring of that union, but the sentence can be read as saying only that they were around at the time.
Height enters the Bible somewhere else: in the mouths of frightened spies.
In Numbers 13, ten of the twelve scouts return with a bad report. They say the people are strong, that the land devours its settlers, and that they saw the Nephilim, that the Anakites belong to them, and that they felt like grasshoppers in their own eyes. The narrator marks all of this as a calumny spread by the scouts. The grasshopper line is a self-assessment and a guess about how the locals saw them. Deuteronomy 2 adds that the Emim were tall, as the Anakites were, and Amos 2:9 says the Amorites “towered like cedars”, which is poetry.
Og
Og, king of Bashan, is the one named individual, and he gets the most attention online because of his bed. I checked that claim separately. Deuteronomy 3:11 calls him the last of the Rephaim and gives the bed as nine cubits long and four wide, by the “cubit of a man”, which Wikipedia converts to about 13.5 by 6 feet.
Three things are less sure than the retelling says. The “iron” may be black basalt, which a 19th-century commentary notes is still called iron in the region, or the word may mean a sarcophagus or bier. Gustav Dalman reported a dolmen near Amman in 1918 with matching dimensions. Michael Heiser has linked the bed to the sacred marriage bed of Marduk, which would make the numbers symbolic. And a bed does not tell you how tall the person was. The verse says the bed “is now” in Rabbah, which is not a museum label.
The sixty fortified cities (Deuteronomy 3:4 to 3:5) are in the text. Two of his cities, Ashtaroth and Edrei, appear in a Ugaritic tablet of the 13th century BCE. That fits the setting. It does not show that Og existed. Bashan also has hundreds of dolmens from the 5th to 3rd millennium BCE, much older than any king of Bashan.
Goliath: three heights
Goliath is the standard picture of a giant, and the text does not agree with itself about him. The Masoretic Hebrew text, which is the basis for most Bibles, says six cubits and a span, about 2.97 metres. The Septuagint, a Dead Sea Scrolls copy of Samuel from the late 1st century BCE, and Josephus say four cubits and a span, about 2.06 metres. Many scholars think the smaller number is original and the larger one grew in copying, possibly because a scribe’s eye landed on the six in verse 7. Only a few argue the reverse. The 2023 JPS version I read gives six cubits and a span with no note on the variant.
Gath has been excavated. It is Tell es-Safi, and Bar-Ilan University has worked there for years. A potsherd dated to the 10th to mid-9th century BCE carries two names, ALWT and WLT, which are not Goliath but are etymologically related. Aren Maeir publicised it in 2005 and published it in 2008. It shows that a name like Goliath fits Philistine Gath at that time. It does not confirm the story.
One more oddity. 2 Samuel 21:19 says Elhanan of Bethlehem killed Goliath of Gath. Most scholars treat that as the older tradition, and 1 Chronicles 20:5 as a later fix that makes the victim Goliath’s brother.
After the Bible: the giants get bigger
The giants grow after the Hebrew Bible. The Book of the Watchers in 1 Enoch, composed in the 4th or 3rd century BCE, says 200 angels led by Shemihazah descended on Mount Hermon and took human wives. Their children are giants who devour the people’s resources and then the people. The oldest copies at Qumran date to about 200 to 150 BCE. The height of 300 cubits in the Ethiopic text is, according to Wikipedia, probably a translation error, and the Greek seems to list races of giants instead. Jubilees 7:21 to 7:25 names three races of giants and says the Flood was partly meant to remove them. Jude 14 to 15 quotes 1 Enoch.
Two ancient readings of “sons of God” compete. The angelic reading is older, and the Sethite reading, in which they are the line of Seth marrying into the line of Cain, appears from the 2nd century CE and was standard from the 4th century, with Augustine, Chrysostom and later Calvin. Orthodox Judaism rejects the angelic reading, and Shimon bar Yochai is said to have cursed those who taught it.
The link between Og and the Watchers on Hermon is the retelling’s own. Deuteronomy says Og was the last of the Rephaim. It does not mention Watchers, and Enoch is centuries younger.
The skeletons
The giant bones that circulate online have a documented history, and so far every case I checked ended the same way.
| Case | Claimed | What was found |
|---|---|---|
| Cardiff Giant, 1869 | A petrified man, possibly a giant of Genesis 6:4, 10 feet 4.5 inches long | Carved from gypsum by sculptors in Chicago for George Hull, who paid $2,600. He confessed on 10 December 1869 and a court declared it fake on 2 February 1870. P. T. Barnum then showed a copy as “the real one” |
| Williamson County, Tennessee, 1845 | A giant skeleton | Identified by Dr William Carpenter as a young mastodon |
| Reid Collection, Nevada | A skeleton of 9 feet 6 inches | Sheilagh Brooks examined it in 1984 and found nothing over 5 feet 11 inches. Reid had estimated height from long bones |
| The Smithsonian “destroyed thousands of giant skeletons” | A cover-up, recently revived in a July 2022 Facebook post | The 2014 version began on the satire site World News Daily Report. Reuters and the Associated Press debunked it. A Smithsonian representative told Lead Stories in 2022 that it is untrue. Cyrus Thomas’s 1894 report concluded that the mounds were built by Native peoples |
| Viral photos of giant skeletons | Real finds | National Geographic reported in 2007 that the internet version began with a doctored photo from 2002 |
From Wikipedia’s article on giant human skeletons, its Cardiff Giant article, and a Lead Stories fact check. I have not read the original reports. Aleš Hrdlička, the Smithsonian’s anthropology curator, wrote in 1934 that amateurs were often fooled by femur length.
The claims, checked
| The claim | What the sources say | Status |
|---|---|---|
| The Bible says giants existed | It says there were Nephilim and Rephaim, and that some peoples were tall (Numbers 13, Deuteronomy 2). A number is given only for Goliath, and Og’s bed has measurements | Partly right |
| The Nephilim were giants | Genesis 6:4 gives no height. The Septuagint called them gigantes centuries later | Partly right |
| Og’s bed proves a giant | A bed does not give a body length. “Iron” may be basalt, and the measurements may be symbolic | Not supported |
| Goliath was nearly 10 feet tall | That is the Masoretic text only. The Septuagint, Qumran and Josephus say about 6 feet 9 inches | Partly right |
| Fallen angels fathered them | One ancient reading, in Enoch and Jubilees. A rival ancient reading says the line of Seth. Neither is in Genesis itself as an explicit statement | Partly right |
| Og belongs to the Watchers of Hermon | Deuteronomy calls him the last of the Rephaim. The Watchers are in 1 Enoch, centuries later | Not supported |
| Giant skeletons have been found | The cases I checked were hoaxes, a mastodon, or lengths estimated from long bones | Not supported |
| The Smithsonian destroyed them | The story began on a satire site and was debunked | Not supported |
Status as of 21 October 2026. “Not supported” means I found no source for it, not that nothing is left to say. Everything here rests on one English translation and secondary sources.
What if the giants are a way a people remembers whoever was there before them? Not necessarily tall people, but the earlier inhabitants and their huge stone monuments, made larger in the telling.
I am speculating about a pattern, not about any person. Why it is worth asking: Deuteronomy gives the same earlier people different names depending on who tells it (Emim to the Moabites, Zamzummim to the Ammonites), and it does so in short notes about who lived where before. What supports it: the hundreds of older dolmens in Bashan, and the fact that the tallest claims come from the scouts, who had a reason to exaggerate. What speaks against it: it does not explain Genesis 6, which is not about land, and a Ugaritic cult of dead ancestors called rpum may be a different thing entirely. Suriano and Schmidt have argued that Israelite texts played that ancestor tradition down. What would tell the readings apart: an excavated site in Bashan or Gath that shows a break in the population, and texts from neighbours that describe the same peoples. What stays unknown is whether any of these people were unusually tall.
What is still open
What does “Nephilim” mean?
Nobody knows. The proposals include “fallen ones”, “those who make others fall” and “fallen in battle”. In Ezekiel 32:27 the phrase may mean “fallen warriors” or “the Nephilim warriors”. The word means something different in the Septuagint, which translated it as giants.
Were the Rephaim giants, the dead, or both?
The texts use the word for a people of the land and for the dead in Sheol. At Ugarit it means dead ancestors who were fed and asked for blessings. Suriano and Schmidt argue that biblical authors turned an ancestor cult into a people of the past, and Yogev (2021) argues that the Rephaim were systematically edited out. I read both only through Wikipedia’s summary of them.
Which Goliath is the original?
If four cubits and a span is original, the Masoretic six cubits is a scribal growth, and a giant appears to have grown with the retelling. A smaller figure of about 2.06 metres would be a tall man, not a giant. The scholarly majority leans that way, and it cannot be proved from the manuscripts alone.
Sources
- Genesis 6:1 to 6:4, Numbers 13:30 to 13:33, Deuteronomy 2:10 to 2:11 and 3:1 to 3:11, Joshua 11:21 to 11:22, 1 Samuel 17:4 to 17:7 and Amos 2:9, Revised JPS Tanakh (Gender-Sensitive Edition, 2023), via Sefaria. Read in paraphrase through a text-fetching tool; I have not read the Hebrew.
- Wikipedia: Nephilim, Rephaim, Og, Goliath, Book of the Watchers, Deuteronomy, Giant human skeletons and Cardiff Giant. Secondary: the Hess, Coxon, Suriano, Schmidt, Yogev, Brooks and Hrdlička references are as Wikipedia reports them.
- Barnes’ Notes on Deuteronomy 3, a 19th-century commentary, on the basalt reading: sacred-texts.com. Old, and I have not checked what modern commentaries say.
- Lead Stories, “Fact Check: Smithsonian Did NOT Destroy Giant Skeletons”, August 2022.
A thread, not a place. Page opened and last reviewed 21 October 2026. Written from one English translation and secondary sources; I have not read the Hebrew or Greek. If something here is wrong, tell me and it gets corrected on the page with a note saying what changed.