Undergoing review is Rev. Rob Mitchell’s lecture series Angels & Giants which he presented for St. Olave’s Anglican Church in Swansea, Toronto. In particular, the review is of the first segment which is titled, Angels & Giants, Ep. 1 – Biblical Giants: The Nephilim, Rephaim and Others.
Rob Mitchell sets the goal at, “looking at not metaphorically giants but actual giants and there’s quite a few of them in the Bible.” The first point to make is that in typical manner for those who discuss giants: he does not define to what he is referring by the vague, generic, subjective, and multi-usage modern English word giants.
Thus, it is left to the reader to discern what he means by it in any given usage. Typically, such speakers (and writers) employ it to refer to something unspecific about subjectively unusual height yet, that is not in the least bit the usage in English Bibles which do not even imply any such a thing by it.
His first example is, “the Philistine giant…Goliath was a giant and we are told that he was six cubits and a span now this translates to approximately nine feet nine inches tall so, almost ten feet tall.”
Mitchell notes
Just as a point of comparison, a famous giant of our own era, Andre the Giant. Andre the Giant, of course, was a famous wrestler and he was, in fact, a very tall man but Andre the Giant was, depends on what source you look at but, anywhere from about seven feet to seven foot five inches.
So, even at the most optimistic tallest estimate, he still would, in fact, be quite short compared to Goliath. Andre the Giant was said to weigh about 500 pounds: I can only imagine what Goliath might have weighed. The spear head, just the head of his spear, weighed 600 shekels of iron which would be about 15 pounds. And the coat of mail that he was wearing weighed 500 shackles which would be about 125 pounds: imagine carrying that weight around.
Note that the term, “very tall” is as subjective as “giant.” Yet, at least we have data on which to go in this case. Yet, that data is myopically presented and incomplete in scope.
Interestingly, for Andre we get a note about how it, “depends on what source you look” and so an, “estimate.” Yet, he fails to note that he tells us Goliath’s height exclusively from the Masoretic family of manuscripts. Thus, he did not tell us that the earlier Septuagint/LXX and the earlier Dead Sea Scrolls and the earlier Flavius Josephus all have him at four cubits and a span, just why of 7 ft.
He goes on to refer to that some were, “considered to be giants, to be larger than the average person” which speaks to the subjective nature of this issue. Yet, he also didn’t tell us that the average Israelite male ranged from 5.0-5.3 ft. in those days.
Thus, this range would be reflected in his estimated weight. But what of the, “spear head…15 pounds. And the coat of mail…about 125 pounds”? We must consider that at weight-lifting and/or strong-man competitions it is routine to witness guys who are right around 6 ft. lifting 1,000 lbs. And consider that he had a guy accompanying him so as to help him with his equipment.
Rob Mitchell next tells us, “Og, it turns out was a giant, ‘Only Og the king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. Behold his bed was a bed of iron. Is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? Nine cubits was its length and four cubits its breadth’…about 13 feet a little more than 13 feet and four cubits wide, which is about six feet wide that’s a big bed and a very durable bed if it was made of iron. And we can imagine that the person who would sleep in it was a very large and tall man. There is also some thought that this in fact might be a reference not to his bed but to his coffin but it is not entirely clear.”
In other words, he refers to Og as a giant even though we do not have a physical description of him.
He does not seem to realize that, “Only Og the king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim” contextualizes that stating, “Og, it turns out was a giant” reads biblically as, “Og, it turns out was a Repha.”
That we can derive a height estimate from the size of his bed is a non-sequitur based on various assumptions—including that his eres was a bed and that if it was a bed then it was a bed upon which he slept and that if it was the bed on which he (an ancient sovereign) slept that then we can correlate that to the ratio between our modern beds (of an average person, not a king) and our average heights, etc., etc., etc.
Mitchell goes on to relate, “Moses sends out spies…sent them to spy…12 spy sent by Moses to scope out the land of Canaan, they come back and give their report. Two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, have a more aggressive approach and suggest that, in fact, they could take on these people. But the other 10 are much more cautious and they describe a fairly horrifying site of these giants and their viciousness and ferociousness. And so indeed, it does prevent the Israelites from going in at that moment.”
We will have to keep our eyes on the qualifier, “cautious” and I will note that, “their viciousness and ferociousness” seems like hyperbole.
In any case, he goes on to specify:
Well, who did they see there? They saw the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim and we seemed like grasshoppers to ourselves and to them, so they see there, or at least they say that they see there, giants larger than normal, larger than average men, mighty men, mighty warriors, the Anakim. We know from a few places are indeed giants and we know that the Anakim from Deuteronomy are counted as Rephaim.
And remember that Og was of the Rephaim and so it appears that these are related groups of people who have this tendency towards being very large giants. These are the same people that 40 years later, Joshua will defeat the Anakim.
And we hear about this in the book of Joshua and so the 12 spies see living in the land of Canaan, the sons of Anak, the Anakim, and we are told that they are descended from the Nephilim: a group we have yet to discuss.
And we also know that the Anakim are to be counted among the Rephaim, which includes Og, and people of Og, and all of these groups seem to be interrelated the Rephaim. And the Anakim and appear to be descended from this mysterious people called the Nephilim.
Well, cautious is underplayed since the issue is that the narrative of Num 13 has an original report presented which is accepted as is, then 10 of them show themselves to be utterly unreliable, unfaithful, disloyal, contradictory, and embellishers when they presented an evil report and were rebuked by God: they just made up a fear-mongering, scare-tactic tall-tale.
Yet, Rob Mitchell (and all post-flood Nephilim believers) bases his entire all-encompassing theory upon their say, upon one single sentence.
Now, he does not tell us that he is exclusively appealing to non-LXX versions of the key verse since the LXX lacks reference to the Anakim.
Now, let us grant his assertions, he at least ends up defining, “giants larger than normal, larger than average men” even though, again, that is not the Biblical usage and he does not tell us what the average was.
As for, “mighty men, mighty warriors, the Anakim” that is fair enough since that appears to have been the issue with Anakim, not their height.
Indeed, Anakim were a clan of the Rephaim tribe and there is no indication whatsoever that Rephaim have anything to do with Nephilim at all—and no reliable indication whatsoever that Anakim have anything to do with Nephilim at all.
As for, “Rephaim…have this tendency towards being very large giants” there is no indication of what at all. He told us about a Repha who was, most reliably, just shy of 7 ft., another for whom we have no physical description, and Deut 1 refers to Rephaim in general as “tall” but, again, that is subjective to 5.0-5.3 ft.
Indeed, “Joshua will defeat the Anakim” without a single word being stated about Nephilim. Thus, when Mitchell states, “we are told” he is merely uncritically picking up one single sentence, running with it, and building an entire theory upon it.
So now, we come to the Nephilim (since he is speaking anachronistically), “one of the more mysterious episodes of Genesis, this reference to the Nephilim. It’s very cryptic and frankly very difficult to interpret. There is no clear consensus who and what we are talking about when we talk about the Nephilim.”
As for the sons of God who fathered Nephilim, he notes, “a bit of a strange concept, it seems somewhat improbable that Angels and men could have such relations…There’s another theory that the sons of God were
Simply a form of aristocracy…There is another theory that the sons of God are Sethites…and that the daughters of man are Canites” which denotes that the Sethites, “line would be sort of the righteous line and the line of Cain would be seen as the unrighteous line.”
That, “There is no clear consensus” is exaggerated since the Angel view was the original, traditional, and majority view among the earliest Jews and Christian commentators alike for many, many, many centuries—see my book On the Genesis 6 Affair’s Sons of God: Angels or Not?: A Survey of Early Jewish and Christian Commentaries Including Notes on Giants and the Nephilim.
The aristocracy view fails instantly since there is nothing in the entire Bible about there being anything condemnable, much less to the point that it premises the flood, about mixing of societal classes.
The Sethite view only creates more problems than it solves (such as why only exclusively male Sethites and only exclusively female Cainites) and is premised upon a myth about Sethites as a righteous/holy line and Cainites as an unrighteous/unholy line.
Michell notes, “the word Nephilim is in fact translated as fallen ones or those who are made to fall or those who were cast down. Most, well many English translations, will, in fact, translate this word as giants.” Yet, giants would not technically be a translation but a rendering.
Moreover, “when we think back to what we’ve already talked about, this is not at all unrealistic, to think of them as giants because we’ve already learned that the, they are related to the Anakim and the Rephaim which are, as we know, giants. But Genesis actually doesn’t say that they are physically larger than anyone else.”
Thus, he took the utterly unreliable account about them and (mis) used it to (mis) interpret the reliable account we have of them. Indeed, this means we have no reliable physical description of Nephilim at all. Thus, all of this stuff about them being unusually tall—very unusually—is a tall-tale spiked with folklore from millennia after the Torah.
Yet, in Mitchells’ theory, “Genesis actually doesn’t say that they are physically larger than anyone else…Yet, we can we can safely assume, perhaps, that they were–the curious thing though, is who are the Nephilim in relation to the story? Are they the offspring of this somehow unnatural mating between the sons of God and the daughters of men? Or, were they just simply there at the time that this was happening? Or, are they, in fact, the sons of God themselves? It’s not entirely clear.”
He interrupted his thought after the qualifying term, “assume, perhaps.”
Actually, it is quite clear since, “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, “Nephilim were on the earth in those days,” which were, “when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them” “and also afterward” of, “when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them” so that the narrative is about that they were there as a result of, “when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.”
We can know what this was the case due to the narrative which is about the sons of God and daughters of man: their attraction, their marriages, and their offspring. It would be a rather odd narrative if the flow, the focus, was interrupted to merely happenstantially mention peoples whom the narrative’s focused flow does not pertain and about whom nothing more is said.
Rob Mitchell continues, “it would appear that they were certainly mighty men and quite possibly giants, from whom other biblical giants, it would appear, perhaps have descended, are the descendants of—we are faced with a problem though…”
Let us pause to note the qualifiers, “it would appear…quite possibly…it would appear, perhaps.”
He continued directly with, “If, indeed, the Nephilim are the origin of biblical giants” which is a fallacious premise:
…and the Rephaim and the Anakim are somehow descended from the Nephilim, and are therefore also giants, we are faced with a problem which is that, right, after we hear the story of the Nephilim we are led into the story of Noah and, of course, what happens in the story of Noah?
Well, all of the Earth, essentially, is washed out with a flood except for Noah [and his wife] and his children and his children’s wives so one might be justified in suggesting that this is problematic: if the Nephilim were wiped out at the flood how is it that their descendants somehow lived on in these other groups later in history?
One theory that has been proposed, which is pure speculation and just a little bit of fun, is that perhaps the wife of Noah’s son Ham may have had within her some of this Nephilim DNA…
He then trails off into, “we find giants re-emerging…giants are in fact well established, we find Og who is a giant…Goliath who is also said to be a giant…all of these giants…we hear about giants…the descendants of the giants…descended from the giants…battle with giants…giant still continue to exist…,” etc., etc., etc. which are easy things to fast-talk once the gigantic generic ball of giants is rolling downhill.
Some bottom lines are that the scope of the flood, in case anyone is thinking about it, is irrelevant to Nephilology since they either did not survive because the whole planet was flooded or did not survived because they lived in the flooded region.
In any case, indeed, they did not survive and literally inventing tall-tales and artificially inserting them into the Bible, such as the DNA story, are just ways to imply that God failed: He meant to be rid of them but could not get the job done, He must have missed loopholes (such as a genetic one), the flood was much of a waste, etc.
These are the lengths to which post-flood Nephilim believers must go in order to protect their un-, non-, and anti-biblical theory: a theory they premise upon an utter deception from an evil report by guys whom God rebuked.
The segment ends with a preview of the second part which has Mitchell beginning with, “We pick up the story again at the time of Moses when the people were wanting to explore the land of Canaan and they sent those spies and they see their the giants who are descended from the Nephilim” and references, “Og who is, again, a giant” and, “Goliath, yet again, a giant” and so his narrative is based on what ranges from erroneous assertions to vague terminology and partial data.
To review:
Nephilim: no reliable physical description.
Og: no physical description.
Goliath: most reliably just shy of 7 ft.
Tall: a term that is subjective to being taller than 5.0-5.3 ft.
Giants: a term which is used by some English Bibles to render Nephilim or Repha/im and implies nothing about height at all.
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