Since Dr. Michael Heiser wrote extensively about giants, I sought to discern what he meant by that vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word. We must also discern what the usage of that word is in English Bibles. We must then determine whether those two usages cohere.
Heiser wrote:
1 Enoch…involved divine beings and giant offspring…The offspring of the Watchers (sons of God) in 1 Enoch were giants (1 Enoch 7).
Gilgamesh was considered a giant.
…from the Mesopotamian context that the apkallus were divine, mated with human women, and produced giant offspring.
The word nephilim occurs twice in the Hebrew Bible (Gen 6:4; Num 13:33). In both cases the Septuagint translated the term with gigas (“giant”).
[Endnote:] The plural forms in context are, respectively, gigantes and gigantas.
…it would seem obvious that nephilim ought to be understood as “giants.”
In both the Mesopotamian context and the context of later Second Temple Jewish thought, their fathers are divine and the nephilim (however translated) are still described as giants…Jewish thinkers in the Second Temple period viewed the offspring of Genesis 6:1–4 in the same way—as giants.
[Endnote:] …1 Enoch use gigas (“giant”) when describing the offspring of the Watchers. See 1 Enoch 7:2, 4; 9:9. 17.
I don’t think nephilim means “fallen ones.” Jewish writers and translators habitually think “giants” when they use or translate the term.
[Endnote:] Nephilim and the later giant clans.
…those who argue that nephilim should be translated with one of these expressions rather than “giants” do so to avoid the quasi-divine nature of the Nephilim.
Before jumping to a conclusion that of, “Ergo, giants!” recall the questions with which I began.
Let us review:
“giants (1 Enoch 7)”: that text has Nephilim as having been 3,000 ells which is MILES tall—for the math, see my book In Consideration of the Book(s) of Enoch.
“Gilgamesh was…a giant”: this refers to circa 18 ft.
“apkallus…produced giant offspring”: I featured an appendix about Apkallus in my book, What Does the Bible Say About Giants and Nephilim? A Styled Giantology and Nephilology. One issue about them is that the mythology varies quite a bit. Also, I do not recall any description of their offspring’s size—nor can I find any just now.
“gigas (‘giant’)…gigantes and gigantas”: this is tantamount to defining a word my using that same word. Gi related Greek words, refer to Gaia: the Earth-goddess. Thus, this is informing us that they were earth-born and not anything about their size.
“Second Temple Jewish thought…nephilim…are still described as giants…Jewish thinkers in the Second Temple…viewed the offspring…as giants”: this refers to millennia after the Torah and a time of literature that is infamous for ranging from historical fiction to wild speculation and folklore.
Thus, when Michael Heiser tells us, “nephilim ought to be understood as ‘giants’” and, “Jewish writers and translators habitually think ‘giants’” we can only conclude that his usage of giants is something wildly unspecified about subjectively unusual height. Heiser used giants to mean miles tall but also 18 ft. tall—in his online notes for his book Unseen Realm, he noted, “I don’t think the biblical giants were taller than unusually tall people of modern times (between 7-9 feet).”
That is one of the reasons why employing that term only causes more problems than it solves.
Keep in mind his reference to, “Nephilim and the later giant clans” (miles tall clans or 18 ft. tall clans?) as we progress. As for that, “those who argue that nephilim should be translated with one of these expressions rather than ‘giants’ do so to avoid the quasi-divine nature of the Nephilim”:
1) Another reason is what we have just reviewed, when someone uses the term giants we are forced to ask them to what they are referring so they might as well not use it but just tell us to what they are referring up-front.
2) What does having a quasi-divine nature have to do with being subjectively unusually tall?
Now, since Heiser uses giants to mean miles tall and circa 18 ft. tall then the answer to whether his usage coheres with the English Bibles’ usage is that it does not.
The English Bibles that employ that term render (do not even translate) Nephilim and Rephaim as giants just as the LXX rendered (did not translate) Nephilim and Rephaim and gibborim as gigas/gigantes. The Greek and English words are merely renderings of words, they are not descriptive terms.
For example, since gibborim is a descriptive term for might/mighty then it is describing might, being mighty, and not describing subjectively unusual height of some unknown range.
In some English Bibles, giant(s) merely renders Nephilim in 2 verses or Repha/im in 98% of all others.
In chap. 23, titled Giant Problems, Michael Heiser wrote:
Moses sent twelve spies to reconnoiter the territory (Num 13). The spies returned with confirmation of the abundance and desirability of the land.
Nevertheless, most of them were in despair. The land was occupied by people in walled cities—some of whom were giants descended from the Nephilim:
32 So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that
they had spied out, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to
spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that
we saw in it are of great height.
33 And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come
from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers,
and so we seemed to them” (Num 13:32–33 ESV).
Understanding the trauma of Israel in Numbers 13 is essential to understanding the subsequent conquest accounts. Any Israelite or Jew living after the time of the completion of the Hebrew Bible would have processed the wars for the promised land in terms of this passage, since it connected Israel’s survival as the people of Yahweh with the defeat of the Nephilim descendants.
That was a combination of accuracy and error, let us review:
Indeed, “twelve spies…most of them were in despair” and this distinction is key (most post-flood Nephilologists speak exclusively of, “the spies” as a cohesive unit).
The narrative has an original report presented about the land which is accepted as is. Ten of the spies dissuade doing that which God commanded of them but Caleb (with whom Joshua sides) encourages.
Then we are told that the ten presented a bad/evil report and it is therein where they merely asserted what Heiser has as, “some of whom were giants descended from the Nephilim” and they had as, “we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers.”
This was an embellishment of the original/as is report which listed the people groups who were seen but did not mention Nephilim. The original/as is report also specified where those various peoples lived but the ten are missing that data point (because they were just making up a tall-tale on the spot).
The original/as is report was of a good and abundant land flowing with milk and honey as evidenced by the bountiful fruit they brought back with them.
The bad/evil report contradicted this, asserting instead that, “The land…devours its inhabitants.”
The original/as is report noted the strength of the peoples, and the ten originally touched upon that as well.
The bad/evil report embellishes that with that, “all the people that we saw in it are of great height”—with great height being as uselessly generic as giants.
The narrative earlier in Num 13 had referred to Anakim and where they lived, and they are mentioned various times in the Torah but with no indication that they were related to Nephilim.
The bad/evil report asserts that they were related to Nephilim—note that in the LXX version, the bad/evil report does not reference Anakim at all.
The bad/evil report also asserted that compared to Nephilim, the average Israelite, “seemed…like grasshoppers” but since that is the only biblical physical description of Nephilim we have and it comes from utterly unreliable guys whom God rebuked, there is no reason to accept their contradictory, embellished, fear-mongering scare-tactic tall-tale.
The despair Heiser noted (which he later referred to as trauma) of the prospect of being itinerant tent dwellers having to face multiple strong people groups living in large and well-fortified cities is what led the ten to merely assert the five mere assertions that they merely asserted—FYI: post-flood Nephilology is exclusively premised upon one of their sentence, v. 33.
Heiser notes:
Understanding the trauma of Israel in Numbers 13 is essential to understanding the subsequent conquest accounts. Any Israelite or Jew living after the time of the completion of the Hebrew Bible would have processed the wars for the promised land in terms of this passage, since it connected Israel’s survival as the people of Yahweh with the defeat of the Nephilim descendants.
Now, at one time, Michael Heiser admitted that he only dealt with Num 13:32-33 grudgingly because so many people contacted him about his lack of doing so (see Rebuttal to Dr. Michael Heiser’s “All I Want for Christmas is Another Flawed Nephilim Rebuttal”). There are only two verses in the entire Bible that reference Nephilim and when a scholar who specializes in such issues ignores a full 50% of the available data, then close attention ought to be paid to that scholar’s modus operandi because something is amiss.
So, while, “Understanding the trauma of Israel in Numbers 13 is essential to understanding” the motivations for the bad/evil report, Heiser actually believes the multitudinously fallacious report and incorporates it into his Nephilology. The biblical manner whereby to accurately incorporate it into Nephilology is to understand that centuries after the last of the Nephilim drowned in the flood, some unreliable guys whom God rebuked made up a tall-tale about them.
Yet, Heiser misuses the bad/evil report in the self-same manner as do the pop-researchers, the pop-post-flood Nephiologists: they use v. 33 as the premise and then pull other texts into it like a black hole—that one verse (only in non-LXX versions) becomes their hermeneutic.
There is no indication whatsoever that, “subsequent conquest accounts” have anything to do with Nephilim whatsoever nor, by definition, Nephilim descendants.
Any concept of post-flood Nephilim implies that God failed: He meant to be rid of the via the flood but could not get the job done, He must have missed a loophole, the flood was much of a waste, etc., and then one must invent an un-biblical tall-tale about how they made it past the flood.
What Heiser does is to opt for a local/regional flood yet:
1) That does not change the fact that we are told five times who survived the flood and Nephilim are not on the lists (Genesis 7:7, 23; Hebrews 11:7; 1 Peter 3:20; and 2 Peter 2:5).
2) The scope of the flood is actually irrelevant to Nephilology since they either did not survive it (nor did they return) because the flood was global or because they lived in the flood region—either way, there is no reliable indication that there has ever been any such a thing as post-flood Nephilim and only one single questionable sentence that there has ever been any such a thing as post-flood Nephilim—without elucidation as to how they got past the flood, past God.
Heiser gets into v. 33 as a hermeneutic premise when he goes back to Genesis 6:1-4 and notes that, “the Nephilim were upon the earth at the time of the flood ‘and also afterward.’”
I once asked Heiser about this and he replied much as he did here. Note that he wrote an assertion followed by a fragmentary quotation which gives the appearance of a cohesion between assertion and quotation, “at the time of the flood ‘and also afterward’” yet, the text states no such thing.
He rightly points out, “Nephilim were part of Israel’s supernatural worldview” but continues with a fallacy, “their descendants turn out to be Israel’s primary obstacle for conquering” and since one error follows from another, “the conquest itself must also be understood in supernatural terms.”
Michael Heiser notes that one of the, “approaches to the origin of the Nephilim…is that divine beings came to earth, assumed human flesh…” yet, there is no indication that human flesh was assumed. Rather, divine beings/Angels are described as looking just like human males, performing physical actions, and without any indication whatsoever that such is not their natural state so that they take on, assume, morph, shapeshift or any such thing.
Heiser wrote, “for moderns, it seems impossible that a divine being could assume human flesh and do what this passage describes” but at least not for some of us who deny it, it has nothing to do with moderns, it has to do with utter lack of data.
To Heiser, “this view requires seeing the giant clans encountered in the conquest as physical descendants of the Nephilim (Num 13:32–33).” Note the exclusive appeal to the bad/evil report for support.
The only way that, “this view requires seeing the giant clans encountered in the conquest as physical descendants of the Nephilim (Num 13:32–33)” is if one accepts his assertion, “at the time of the flood ‘and also afterward.’”
He wrote the following in terms of, “that other rival gods produced offspring to oppose Yahweh’s children.” He claims that this was a, “belief on the part of the biblical writers” and it, “became the rationale for the extermination of certain people groups in Canaan” which is something for which there is no data. Yes, the author of Gen could be said to have affirmed that gods/Angels produced offspring to oppose Yahweh’s children but the flood ended that entire affair.
Heiser wrote, “the giant Anakim they had feared back in Num 13:33 had to be dealt with (Deut 9:2). Hendel makes a similar point about the giant clan” in terms of, “Nephilim-Rephaim” who were, “annihilated, generally by Yahweh (Deut 2:12, 20–23); see also Deut 9:1–3; Amos 2:9” (Ronald S. Hendel, “Of Demigods and the Deluge: Toward and Interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4,” Journal of Biblical Literature 106.1 [March 1987]: 21).
God told us many time why He commanded such “extermination” but never said one single word about Nephilim—I wrote an entire chapter about his in my book What Does the Bible Say About Giants and Nephilim?
Now, what Heiser had as, “giant Anakim” Deut 9:2 has as, “tall” and what he had as, “feared back in Num 13:33” with the Nephilimic connotations as, “Anakim…of whom you have heard it said, ‘Who can stand before the sons of Anak?’” is a case of that indeed, they were notorious but there is no reliable indication that it had anything to do with Nephilim relation and only one single non-LXX sentence about that they did.
As for, “Nephilim-Rephaim,” that is a wholly contrived term. The means whereby to contrive it is to 1) exclusively rely on one non-LXX sentence by unreliable men whom God rebuked, 2) actually believe them, 3) and finally jump from that if one Rephaim clan were Nephilim related ergo, all Rephaim were Nephilim related.
As for Hendel’s citations of Nephilim-Rephaim related texts let us review.
Deut 2:12, 20–23:
The Horites also lived in Seir formerly, but the people of Esau dispossessed them and destroyed them from before them and settled in their place, as Israel did to the land of their possession, which the Lord gave to them.)…
(It is also counted as a land of Rephaim. Rephaim formerly lived there—but the Ammonites call them Zamzummim—a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim; but the Lord destroyed them before the Ammonites, and they dispossessed them and settled in their place, as he did for the people of Esau, who live in Seir, when he destroyed the Horites before them and they dispossessed them and settled in their place even to this day. As for the Avvim, who lived in villages as far as Gaza, the Caphtorim, who came from Caphtor, destroyed them and settled in their place.)
Deut 9:1–3:
Hear, O Israel: you are to cross over the Jordan today, to go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you, cities great and fortified up to heaven, a people great and tall, the sons of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you have heard it said, ‘Who can stand before the sons of Anak?’
Know therefore today that he who goes over before you as a consuming fire is the Lord your God. He will destroy them and subdue them before you. So you shall drive them out and make them perish quickly, as the Lord has promised you.
Amos 2:9:
Yet it was I who destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars and who was as strong as the oaks; I destroyed his fruit above and his roots beneath.
Conquering related texts, sure, but they only way to assert they have anything to do with anything Nephilim related it to invent the artificially category Nephilim-Rephaim and Nephilim-Amorite and thereby, pulling irrelevant verse into the bad/evil report’s black hole.
Heiser wrote:
Either the giant clans are the result of literal cohabitation, or the sexual language is merely a vehicle to communicate the idea that, as Yahweh was responsible for the Israelites’ existence, so the giant clans existed because of some sort of supernatural intervention of rival gods.
Both approaches therefore presume that the Nephilim and the subsequent giant clans had a supernatural origin, but they disagree on the means.
We still have to learn to whom, exactly, he is referring to as, “giant clans” but there is no biblical data whatsoever that any post-flood peoples were, “the result of literal cohabitation” with divine beings/Angels—or any non-human.
Biblically, they to whom he is referring by, “giant clans” were all 100% human and mere sexual language does not necessitate they, “had a supernatural origin.”
Keep in mind that Heiser’s usage of giants is not the English Bibles’ usage of giants. Thus, to Heiser, giant clans refers to something unspecified about subjectively unusual height (we will have to wait and see if he comes up with any specifics per clan) but the English Bibles giant clans is merely identifying Rephaim clans, clans of the Rephaim tribe, such as Anakim and Emim.
We saw that Michael Heiser asserted, “the Nephilim were upon the earth at the time of the flood ‘and also afterward’” which he went on to follow up with, “Genesis 6:4 pointedly informs readers that the Nephilim were on earth before the flood ‘and also afterward.’ The phrase looks forward to Numbers 13:33.”
Again, without that one single verse, post-flood Nephilology is done for. Sadly, due to scholars and pop-researchers alike, hoi polloi Nephilologists assert likewise and in doing so, they miss that the text is telling us exactly to what days it is referring and so after what days it is referring—and it has nothing to do with the flood.
Note that the flood is not mentioned for the very first time until a full 13 vss. later: v. 17.
Gen 6:4 (in the ESV) reads, “Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.”
Thus, “those days” were, “when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them” which as per v. 1 was, “When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them.” And so, “afterward” was after “when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.”
Thus, “those days” and, “afterward” both point us backward in time from the time of the flood.
We are being told that, “Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward” as a result of, “when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them” which was, “When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them.”
They began doing it, “in those days” and continued doing is, “afterward” but that was all pre-flood, the flood brought it all to a full and final end—lest God failed: He meant to be rid of the via the flood but couldn’t get the job done, He must have missed a loophole, the flood was much of a waste, etc., and now one has to invent an un-biblical tall-tale about how they made it past the flood—which is how the pop-Nephilology pop-researchers concoct their un-biblical tall-tales.
Heiser goes on to refer to, “the oversized descendants of Anak” and that they, “came from the Nephilim” is some unknown way and only from non-LXX sources.
Of course, with oversized being as uselessly generic as great height and giants. What are we told about their size? They, and all Rephaim in general and on average were, “tall” (various times in Deut 2). Well, that is tall subjective to the average Israelite male who was 5.0-5.3 ft. in those days.
Thus, when Heiser write, “Anakim, were one of the giant clans” we can read that as per his misuse of giants to mean, “Anakim, were one of the taller than 5.0-5.3 ft. clans” or, we can read it (English) biblically as, “Anakim, were one of the Rephaim clans.”
He does on to note, “The text,” the one and only one and with text meaning one single sentence from an unreliable source as recorded in non-LXX versions, “clearly links them to the Nephilim.”
Within an endnote, he wrote:
The Hebrew of the phrase in Num 13:33 literally reads that the sons of (beney) Anak were “from” (min) the Nephilim. The meaning is either that the Anakim were lineal (biological) descendants or were viewed as part of a group that descended from the Nephilim.
Some have argued that the preposition min suggests the Anaqim were only “like” the Nephilim, but there is no clear instance in the Hebrew Bible for this semantic nuance. As Doak notes in his discussion of the phrase, “Whatever the case, the Anaqim here are most certainly thought to be the physical (and thus “moral” or “spiritual”) descendants of the Nephilim” (Last of the Rephaim, 79).
Heiser and Doak (both of whom I covered in my book, The Scholarly Academic Nephilim and Giants: What do Scholarly Academics Say About Nephilim Giants?) are ignoring the hybrid elephant in the room, they are not seeing the forest for the cedar trees. This is reminiscent of when Heiser wrote a long section about how dibâ (bad/evil regarding the report) does not necessarily imply false. He missed that such is irrelevant because what makes the report false is not how it was titled in the narrative, it is false due to its contents.
Likewise, it is irrelevant that it, “reads that the sons of (beney) Anak were ‘from’ (min) the Nephilim…lineal (biological) descendants or…descended from the Nephilim” since it is from a false report. Thus, sure, “Anaqim here are…physical…descendants of the Nephilim” but to what does, “here” refer? A false report.
Heiser then gets into the question of, “how is this possible given the account of the flood?” and reviews tall-tale options:
1) “some Jewish writers,” from millennia after the Torah, “presumed the answer was that Noah himself had been fathered by one of the sons of God and was a Nephilim giant.” Recall that as per Heiser, “Nephilim giant” means, “Nephilim taller than humans as humans are taller than grasshoppers” exclusively based on one sentence form a false report and as per English Bibles, “Nephilim giant” means, “Nephilim Nephilim.”
Of this option, he notes, “Genesis 6:9 clearly wants to distance Noah from the unrighteousness that precipitated the flood, so this explanation doesn’t work.”
2) “the flood of Genesis 6–8 was a regional, not global, catastrophe” with which we already dealt.
3) “the same kind of behavior described in Genesis 6:1–4 happened again (or continued to happen) after the flood, producing other Nephilim, from whom the giant clans descended.”
By definition, all three of these fall into the category of implying that God failed.
Heiser does not argue for this one by appealing to the biblical data for that the same kind of behavior described in Genesis 6:1–4 happened again (or continued to happen), since such data does not exist, rather, he goes back to misreading a verse (misreading it in any language) in asserting that this:
…is a possibility deriving from Hebrew grammar. Genesis 6:4 tells us there were Nephilim on earth before the flood “and also afterward, when the sons of God went into the daughters of humankind.”
The “when” in the verse could be translated “whenever,” thereby suggesting a repetition of these preflood events after the flood. In other words, since Genesis 6:4 points forward to the later giant clans, the phrasing could suggest that other sons of God fathered more Nephilim after the flood.
As a result, there would be no survival of original Nephilim, and so the postflood dilemma would be resolved. A later appearance of other Nephilim occurred by the same means as before the flood. All of this sets the stage for Numbers 13.
Fear of the giant clans results in a spiritual failure that means wandering in the desert outside the land of promise for forty years. The generation who came out of Egypt is sentenced to die off outside of holy ground. The new generation under Joshua will wind up facing the same threat.
Let us grant whenever since the point it the same, biblically speaking—and sadly, Heiser quoted it and missed it—“and also afterward, whenever the sons of God went into the daughters of humankind.” Indeed, whenever beginning with the v. 1 timeline and up until the flood.
See, this has to be about systematic theology, since the flood was God cleaning house, as it were, that would have brought the whole Gen 6 affair to a full and final end.
At one point, Michael Heiser opts to quote the Lexham English Bible which simply bypassed the most important qualifying word of v. 32:
Numbers 13:32–33 And they presented the report of the land that they explored to the Israelites, saying, “The land that we went through to explore is a land that eats its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in its midst are men of great size.33 There we saw the Nephilim (the descendants of Anak came from the Nephilim), and we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their eyes.”
The bad/evil report was there as simply, “the report” which is made all the more incoherent since it was not, “the report” but was the second of two—the bad/evil one.
Heiser argued:
Some try to argue that the report of the spies was a lie or deliberate exaggeration motivated by fear. This is a poorly conceived idea, since it requires either ignoring all the other biblical references to giants (Anakim or otherwise) or considering them to be lies as well.
It also requires removing the term nephilim from its context and ignoring the morphology of the word (see chapters 12–13). There is no sound exegetical support for this idea.
What is poorly conceived are those counter arguments. Denying post-flood Nephilim has nothing to do with, “ignoring all the other biblical references to giants (Anakim or otherwise)” when, after all, giants is rendering Nephilim in two verses and Rephaim in 98% of all others. Denying that Anakim are related to Nephilim exclusively based on one unreliable assertion has nothing to do Heiser’s assertion.
What I noted about the report being false due to its contents and not its title and that that it, “reads that the sons of (beney) Anak were ‘from’ (min) the Nephilim” is irrelevant since it comes from a false report also does away with the literarily linguistic counter that, “It also requires removing the term nephilim” since, “the morphology of the word” matters not in the face of the primary question which is whether the report is true or false.
Thus, the assertions of, “suggesting” and that it, “points forward” are merely subjective assertions.
As for, “later appearance of other Nephilim occurred by the same means as before the flood,” Heiser endnoted, “I say ‘other’ since all ancient Jewish traditions, including 2 Peter and Jude in the New Testament, have the offending sons of God (also called Watchers) imprisoned in the underworld for what they did until the end of days. Both supernaturalist approaches are also workable with this possible translation, as it would suggest a repetition of whatever intervention event one envisions for producing the Nephilim of Gen 6:1–4.”
Except that he missed the point again: since the flood was God cleaning house, as it were, that would have brought the whole Gen 6 affair to a full and final end. Sure, Jude and Peter do not specify when the Angels were incarcerated but since the flood was God cleaning house, that would have brought the whole Gen 6 affair to a full and final end and so that would have been the time.
Indeed, it was the bad/evil report, the motivations for it, the belief in it that, “results in…wandering in the desert outside the land of promise for forty years.” The fascinating and troubling aspect is that the real, “spiritual failure” is the spiritual warfare that has been all but lost since then with post-flood Nephilologists believing a deception and teaching it as factual—to the point of premising their entire Nephilology upon it and, as we have seen, fallacious Nephilology leads to the fallacious theology proper.
In Chap. 24, titled The Place of the Serpent, Michael Heiser circles back, again, to that:
Moses sent twelve spies into Canaan to report on the land and its inhabitants. They came back with the news that what God had said was true—the land was “flowing with milk and honey” (Num 13:27)—but then added, “there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them” (ESV).
By now you should have caught that he specified, “twelve spies” and about those twelve, that, “They came back” but that those twelve, “added” the bad/evil report so that this is too generic.
He also missed that the bad/evil report contradicted the part of the original/as is report that he quoted.
Note that in Deut 1, Moses relates the Num 13 events and states:
…all of you came near me and said, “Let us send men before us, that they may explore the land…” I took twelve men…they took in their hands some of the fruit of the land and brought it down to us, and brought us word again and said, “It is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us.”
Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. And you murmured in your tents and said, “Because the Lord hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us. Where are we going up? Our brothers have made our hearts melt, saying, ‘The people are greater and taller than we. The cities are great and fortified up to heaven. And besides, we have seen the sons of the Anakim there.’” Then I said to you, ‘Do not be in dread or afraid of them.”
This confirms the ten’s contradiction. Also, note that the people were complaining about, “the Amorites,” not Nephilim and they relate that the bad/evil report’s key feature were, “the Anakim” so that Nephilim are not even mentioned. Note that this would seem to validate non-LXX manuscripts for Num 13:33 (but it was still worth mentioning the issue with it). To Moses, the problem was the real danger on the ground which were primarily the notorious Anakim and not some tall-tale about Nephilim, Moses was too practical to bother with such tall-tales.
Yet, the way that post-flood Nephilologist employ their fallacious hermeneutic is to merely assert that Anakim=Nephilim anyhow ergo, any reference to Anakim are references to Nephilim.
This is how they fallaciously attempt to get around the fact that God, Abraham, Moses, et al., make many references to the people in the land and around the land but never once say a single word about Nephilim. Or, how there are many detailed descriptions of wars and even hand-to-hand combat without a single word being said about Nephilim. They are never mentioned in any context wherein they would have been mentioned if they had been around at the time.
Heiser circle back again to that, “The text clearly connects them [Anakim] to the Nephilim, but how exactly were they connected?…The biblical writers deliberately connect the giant clan enemies Israel would face in the conquest back to the ancient apostasies that had Babylon at their root: the sons of God and the Nephilim…the descendants of the Nephilim…”
Continuing to track to whom Michael Heiser refers to as giant clans and how he misreads data about them, he quotes Deut 2 and comments, “These giant clans were known among the Moabites and Ammonites as the Emim and the Zamzummim. Other inhabitants had also been driven out: the Horites, the Avvim, and the Caphtorim. These tribal groups are never themselves referred to as being unusually tall, though they surface in connection with giant clans.”
What the text told us is that Zamzummim is just an aka for Rephaim (Emim, and Anakim, were like clans for that tribe) and with Moabites, Ammonites, Horites, Avvim, and Caphtorim being other people groups. And it is not even the case that all of these are, “referred to as being unusually tall”—with unusually tall being as uselessly generic as oversized, great height, tall,and giants. Yet, we know that it refers to unusual compared to 5.0-5.3 ft.
Yet, Heiser mistakenly generalizes that, “all of these groups seem to also have been referred to as Rephaim.”
Heiser wrote:
These giant clans were related to the Anakim (vv. 10–11), who were, of course, “from the Nephilim” (Num 13:32–33). We aren’t told specifically how the bloodline lineages worked, but we are told a relationship existed. Additionally, all of these groups seem to also have been referred to as Rephaim (vv. 11, 20), a term that will take on more importance as we proceed.
As we just reviewed, that, “These giant clans were related to the Anakim” is not accurate since there is no indication that Moabites, Ammonites, Horites, Avvim, or Caphtorim were related to Anakim and Emim and Zamzummim were only related to Anakim only in as much as, actually and again, Anakim and Emim were clans of the Rephaim tribe.
Note that by this point in the book, Anakim are said to be, “of course, ‘from the Nephilim’ (Num 13:32–33)” since he has no other data to back that assertion.
At this point, he wrote, “We aren’t told specifically how the bloodline lineages worked, but we are told a relationship existed.” But that it much too vague, that Anakim were a clan of Rephaim categorically differs at a fundamental level from that Anakim and Emim were Nephilim.
Michael Heiser tells us, “the last area under the dominion of the Nephilim bloodline in the Transjordan” for which there is no data.
And, “God told Abraham that his descendants…when the iniquity of the Amorites had reached the point when God was ready to judge it” but not Nephilim.
Yet, he argues:
One passage in Scripture specifically connects the Amorites (Canaanites) to the giants that were derivative of the Nephilim.
God says through the prophet Amos:
9 Yet it was I who destroyed the Amorite before them,
whose height was like the height of the cedars
and who was as strong as the oaks;
I destroyed his fruit above
and his roots beneath.
10 Also it was I who brought you up out of the land of Egypt
and led you forty years in the wilderness,
to possess the land of the Amorite (Amos 2:9–10 ESV).
Note that the context for this statement is the exodus and the conquest. That at least some Amorites were unusually tall would have been proof to the Israelites they had descended from the Nephilim—and that case, of course, was made in Num 13:32–33.
For an Israelite, all this meant that the native population of Canaan had a supernaturally sinister point of origin. This wouldn’t be just a battle for land. It was a battle between Yahweh and the other gods—gods who had raised up competing human bloodlines that were opposed to Yahweh’s plan and people.
Now, ask yourself just how it is that Amos, “specifically connects the Amorites (Canaanites) to the giants that were derivative of the Nephilim”?
Well, since, “some Amorites were unusually tall” then that, “would have been proof to the Israelites they had descended from the Nephilim” because of what? Because of the one single sentence to which anyone can point.
It is even questionable whether, “For an Israelite, all this meant that the native population of Canaan had a supernaturally sinister point of origin…gods who had raised up competing human bloodlines” I am unsure how gods raised up competing human bloodline, “that were opposed to Yahweh’s plan and people” considering that the exodus generation had passed away—sans Caleb and Joshua.
In any case, this text is a favorite for Nephilologist suffering from that which I term Gigorexia Nervosa (an obsession with seeing giants and just making them up where they are nowhere to be seen) and yet, they clearly do not take it seriously.
Notice the exclusive focus on, “height was like the height of the cedars.” Now, pop-Nephilologist are not mundane as Heiser was in this case, “some Amorites were unusually tall.” Rather, they research the height of parochial cedars and assert that Amos was implying conducting a one-to-one ratio based mathematical calculation so as to determine their height (circa 40 ft.)—rather than understanding that Amos was telling us that they were big and strong.
Yet, we can discern that neither Heiser nor the pop-researchers actually take this how they claim they do—keep in mind that Heiser said, “unusually tall” but correlated it to the grasshoppers comparison—since they ignore the, “strong as the oaks” part. No one has conducted a one-to-one ratio based mathematical calculation so as to determine the correlation between the Amorites’ strength and the strength of oaks.
Moreover, neither claims that Amorites had fruits and roots sticking out of their bodies and yet, that is just what Amos noted, “his fruit above and his roots beneath.”
Michael Heiser then moves on to, “Og, another king of the Amorites who ruled in the region of Bashan. Og was a giant.” Again, he means Og was subjectively unusually tall, the Bible means Og was a Repha.
He notes:
…Og’s bed (Hebrew: ‘eres). Its dimensions (9 × 4 cubits) are precisely those of the cultic bed in the ziggurat called Etemenanki—which is the ziggurat most archaeologists identify as the Tower of Babel referred to in the Bible.
Ziggurats functioned as temples and divine abodes. The unusually large bed at Etemenanki was housed in “the house of the bed” (bit ershi). It was the place where the god Marduk and his divine wife, Zarpanitu, met annually for ritual lovemaking, the purpose of which was divine blessing upon the land.
Reading the English word bed and that it was, “9 × 4 cubits….roughly six by thirteen feet” leads giant obsessed Nephilologists to assert that Og was roughly 13ft. tall.
Yet, Heiser hit upon that the ‘eres was most likely a ritual object: not a bed upon which Og slept, not a bed via which we can subtract, say, one cubit and derive his personal height, etc.: there are numerous mere assumptions behind the giant Nephilologists’ calculations—see my book, The King, Og of Bashan, is Dead: The Man, the Myth, the Legend—of a Nephilim Giant?
The latest hip trend amongst pop-Nephilologists is to assert that such post-flood mating brought about post-flood Nephilim. Yet, if Marduk and Zarpanitu were anything besides imaginary then they were demons and if they were demons then they were not physically mating, by definition, since demons are disembodied-spirits.
If human priests and temple prostitutes played the role of the gods in the mating then there is also no reason to think that mating between humans results in Nephilim. There is also no indication that demon possessed humans mating would result in Nephilim.
Speaking of demons, Heiser notes, “books like 1 Enoch teach that demons are actually the spirits of dead Nephilim” which was a pretty good folkloric guess yet, please see my article Demons Ex Machina: What are Demons?
Heiser notes, “Sacred marriage rituals…in addition to the giantism element…telegraphed the idea that Og was the inheritor and perpetuator of the Babylonian knowledge and cosmic order from before the flood. This would of course tie him back to Gen 6:1–4 and its apkallu polemic.”
He concludes, “the size of Og’s bed cannot be taken as a precise indication of Og’s own dimensions…the dimensions for Og’s bed are not a reliable indicator of his own size…we cannot know how tall he was from his bed” Yet, he told us, “Og was a giant” and artificially inserted, “the giantism element” and we have no physical description of Og in the Bible and the only physical description we have of him are folkloric tall-tales from millennia after the Torah—which even have him having existed pre-flood, having survived by hanging on to the side of the ark and being fed by Noah, etc.
Michael Heiser had actually written, “While there is no doubt that Deut 3:11 has Og as a Rephaim giant, we cannot know how tall he was from his bed” which is incoherent since biblically, what Deut 3 is telling us is that Og was a Repha, not, “a Rephaim giant” which would mean, “Rephaim Rephaim.”
After working on correlating Og to, “Babylonian knowledge” and mythology, Heiser points out, “Rephaim are mentioned by name in Ugaritic texts. The Rephaim of Ugarit are not described as giants. Rather, they are quasi-divine dead warrior kings who inhabit the underworld.”
As I noted in the article Dead Kings and Rephaim: The Patrons of the Ugaritic Dynasty, recently deceased kings and heroes were referred to as kings and heroes but after they had been dead for some time, they were referred to as Rephaim—rpʾum.
Michael Heiser refers to that, “Og was lord of Bashan, the region that included Mount Hermon” but what does that mount have to do with it? Well, he refers to a, “sinister feature identified in the Deuteronomy 3 passage: Mount Hermon” but why, sinister? Because, “According to 1 Enoch 6:1–6, Mount Hermon was the place where the sons of God of Genesis 6 descended when they came to earth to cohabit with human women.”
He concludes, “Joshua 12:4–5 unites all the threads: ‘Og king of Bashan, one of the remnant of the Rephaim, who lived at Ashtaroth and at Edrei and ruled over Mount Hermon’” and asserts, “the name ‘Hermon’ would have caught the attention of Israelite and Jewish readers.”
Well, one thing is certain, it would be anachronistic to claim that, “‘Hermon’ would have caught the attention of Israelite and Jewish readers” at any time pre-circa 200, or so, BC since that is when the Bible contradicting folkloric text 1 Enoch/Ethiopic Enoch asserted, if not invented, that such is the location where the sinful Angels made landfall.
It seems likely that the author of 1 Enoch pinpointed that mount since a few centuries BC it was revered by Pagans so what better way to sully the location?
Heiser also connects Hermon via how, “In Hebrew it’s pronounced khermon” to, “the same root as a verb…in Deuteronomy 3 and the conquest narratives: kharam, ‘to devote to destruction…holy war…extermination’” which he asserts is, “a meaning explicitly connected to the giant clans God commanded Joshua and his armies to eradicate…the practice of extermination in Israel’s war of conquest…devoting something to destruction” which, “has the Nephilim bloodlines as its focus” which we know is fallacious since there were no Nephilim around to conquer. Again, all of this is premised upon one single unreliable sentence.
He notes, “In the view of the biblical writers, Israel is at war with enemies spawned by rival divine beings. The Nephilim bloodlines were not like the peoples of the disinherited nations…The Nephilim bloodlines had a different pedigree” and that pedigree came to a full and final end with the flood.
Many people appeal to this tall-tale to make excuses for the conquering narratives but, again, God told us many times why He commanded such things but never even hinted at anything to do with Nephilim.
Let us close with Heiser elucidating, “How tall were the biblical giants?”:
The only measurement for a giant that exists in the biblical text is that of Goliath. 16 The traditional (Masoretic) Hebrew text has him at “six cubits and a span” (1 Sam 17:4), roughly 9 feet, 9 inches. The Dead Sea Scroll reading of 1 Sam 17:4 disagrees and has Goliath at four cubits and a span, or 6 feet 6 inches.
Since by giant Heiser means subjectively unusual height, it is not the case that Goliath is the only one for whom we have a measurement since there is record of an Egyptian who was 5 cubits/circa 7.5 ft. (1 Chronicles 11:23).
Also, the cubits and a span/6.6 ft. measurement is found in the Dead Sea Scroll and in the latter Flavius Josephus but also in the earlier LXX—which Heiser put in an endnote, “The smaller size is also the reading of the Septuagint.” That makes three sources that predate the Masoretic text.
Heiser continues:
Archaeological work across the ancient Near East confirms that six and one-half feet tall was, by the standards of the day, a giant.
One scholar of Israelite culture notes that the average height of an ancient Israelite in the patriarchal period was around five feet.
Famed biblical archaeologist G. Ernest Wright notes, “At Gezer were found at least one hundred skeletons from about 3000 B.C. And from various graves and deposits there are many other remains of the third and second millennia, especially from Megiddo, Jericho, and Gezer.… There are no remains of any aborigines of abnormal size.”
This last comment is noteworthy since these are areas where one would expect giant clan settlements. To date, there is no human skeletal evidence from Syria-Palestine (Canaan) that shows extraordinary height.
The same is true of the Mediterranean world of the biblical time period…
…the average height of an Egyptian male was between 5 and 5.5 feet….
To date, there are no human skeletons from Canaan that show bizarre height.
He also notes, “This is not to say that there is no evidence external to the Bible for unusually tall people in Canaan during the biblical period. One Egyptian text from the period of Ramesses II” notes of Bedouin that, “Some of them are of four or five cubits [from] their noses to the heel” which is, “between 7 and 9 feet.”
One of the mere assertions of the ten spies was, “all the people that we saw in it are of great height” about which Michael Heiser notes, “The report of the spies contains the sweeping comment that everyone they saw in the land was unusually tall. There are good textual reasons for not taking this statement as a literally true assessment in terms of its comprehensive nature”—see my article Were “all the people” in Canaan “of great height”?
Thus, even granting the tallest possible height we have reached, which is in reference to 9 ft., how is that an indication of not being fully human, being related to Nephilim? It is not: not logically, nor bio-logically, nor Nephilo-logically, and nor theo-logically.
See my various books here.
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