Warren Nozaki (“work at the Christian Research Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina”) authored the article Are there Giants? Identifying the Nephilim in Genesis 6:4 for the Love Truth Blog.
He notes that the King James Version of the Bible has Gen 6:4 as, “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown” and asks one of the most neglected linguistics questions regarding this issue, “But what does it mean by ‘giants’?” and asks, “Could there really have been giants living among humanity?” which is somewhat of an odd question to ask before answering the first one.
In any case, I’m rather famous and infamous for having asked these key questions to hundreds of people who go on and on and on and on (and on and on [and on and on]) about “giants”:
What’s the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants” in English Bibles?
What’s your usage?
Do those two usages agree?
My experience is that 99.999999% can’t even reply—and couple that did got it wrong.
Nozaki notes, “The Septuagint (LXX), an ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, translates nĕpilîm with gigantes, from which is derived ‘giants.’”
Since we’ve getting into linguistics—and I did write the book on that Bible Encyclopedias and Dictionaries on Angels, Demons, Nephilim, and Giants: From 1851 to 2010—let’s get a bit more technical: the LXX renders, doesn’t technically translate, gigantes for Nephilim. Yet, it does the same for gibborim and Repha/im. And, if we get giants from gigantes that still begs the question: well, gigantes literally means earth-born.
Nozaki notes, “The idea that nĕpilîm refers to ‘giants’ or humans of significant bulk and stature is a common interpretation; however, it is more intelligible to take nĕpilîm to be tyrants.” Of course, that would be a false dichotomy since they could have been tyrants of significant bulk and stature.
Some derive tyrants from understanding the Hebrew root nāpal/naphal to mean, “to fall upon” (Job 1:15; Josh 11:7) and thus, tyrannical Nephilim fell upon those whom they conquered, etc.
Nozaki references, Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament, vol. 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 86–87 who, in turn, quote Martin Luther’s Commentary on Genesis: Volume 2: Luther on Sin and the Flood, “to designate not bulk of body, but tyranny and oppression, inasmuch as they domineered by force, making no account of law and honor, but merely indulging their pleasure and desire. Rightful rulers the Scripture calls shepherds and princes, but those who rule by wrong and violence are rightly called ‘Nephilim,’ because they fall and prey upon those beneath them”—see my books, Nephilim and Giants in Bible Commentaries: From the 1500s to the 2000s and The Scholarly Academic Nephilim and Giants: What do Scholarly Academics Say About Nephilim Giants?
Out of literally nowhere, Nozaki writes of, “The downfall of the sons of God, i.e., the line of Seth” but he’s given us no reason for even imagining that such is whom is referred to by that term—also, apparently there weren’t any attractive Sethite females.
He then notes, “Similar tyrannical Nephilim were presumed to be around even after the flood. Such is intimated in the false report given to Moses and the Israelites by the men who returned from spying out the land of Canaan: ‘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. 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).”
Once we take a view that Nephilim merely means human tyrant then it seems to not matter whether the only post-flood reference to Nephilim is from false report by 10 guys whom God rebuked or not: oh wait, it does matter since if Nephilim merely refers to tyrants then we’d see multitudinous usages of it throughout the Bible and yet, we don’t and that’s a deathblow to that theory.
Recall what I noted about the LXX rendering Nephilim and gibborim and Repha/im all as gigantes: which was a terrible idea—to render three very different words with very different meanings and very different morphologies all with one single word—well, Nozaki notes, “‘Giant’ is occasionally used to translate the Hebrew noun rəpāʾîm [רְפָאִים]…‘Rephaim.” The English Bibles that do that dropped rendering gibborim like they do Nephilim and Rephaim but it’s another terrible idea to render those two very different words with just one—vague, generic, subjective, and multi-usage—word: undiscerning English readers tend to chase that English word around a Hebrew Bible without realizing that Nephilim were strictly pre-flood hybrids, Rephaim were strictly post-flood humans, and there’s zero correlation between them—and that, of course, Nephilim didn’t make it past the flood since, of course, God didn’t fail, didn’t miss a loophole, the flood wasn’t much of a waste, etc., etc., etc.
As I outlined in my book The King, Og of Bashan, is Dead: The Man, the Myth, the Legend—of a Nephilim Giant? Nozaki goes from noting, “Og of Bashan…of the Rephaim…whose ‘bed was…approximately 13 ft. long and 6 ft. wide…was ‘the same size as Marduk’s bed in the temple Esagila in Babylon’ and ‘beds were not just for sleeping but were often used for reclining on during feasts and celebrations.’” Thus, “One can only guess whether Og was a man of extraordinary stature” since we’ve no physical description of him and the only thing we’re contextually told about Rephaim in general is that they were, “tall” (Deut 2) subjective to the average Israelite male who was 5.0-5.3 ft. in those days.
He adds, “Ishbi-benob, Saph or Sippai, Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite, who carried a spear ‘like a weavers beam,’ and a six fingered six toed man of great stature who were identified as ‘giants’ (cf. 2 Sam. 21:15-21; 1 Chron. 20:4-8)” which means identified as Rephaim.
Incidentally, as for the spear: tegular guy Benaiah took a spear like a weaver’s beam, just like Goliath’s, from a 7.5 ft. Egyptian (the tallest guys in the Bible) and successfully wielded it against him in hand-to-hand combat (2 Sam 23).
Keil and Delitzsch are called upon again to tell us of, “Rephaim, an ancient tribe of gigantic stature” but that’s generic and subjective. Nozaki notes, “specified height measurements are never provided for any of the four Philistine warriors” yet, we do get one, in a manner of speaking, for one of the Philistine warriors: Goliath. Yet, I noted the Egyptian is the tallest in the Bible while some were surely shouting, “What about Goliath?!?!?” since the Masoretic text has Goliath at just shy of 10 ft. Yet, the earlier LXX and the earlier Dead Sea Scrolls and the earlier Flavius Josephus all have him at just shy of 7 ft. so that’s the preponderance of the earliest data and Nozaki touches upon this issue.
He also rightly notes, “Scriptures never tell of ‘giants’ reaching fantastical heights like 25 to 30 ft. tall” nor anything even remotely close to any such thing: oops, that alone debunks 100% of pop-Nephilology.
After decades of pop-Nephilologists Gary Wayne asserting Nephilim were giants (by which he means very, very, very big) it just took me asking him one little question, during our debate, to get him to admitting he doesn’t know how big they were, “we don’t know how big Nephilim were…we don’t know how tall that they were” (sic.)—and then, he went on to say he’ll keep asserting they were “giants.” What sense does it make to refer to the height of someone who’s height you don’t know?
Watch it unfold here during our debate.
Overall, this article was very much a cut above what one generally finds being posted on Nephilology as he touched upon most of the underlying issues that pop-Nephilologists never seem to get around to mentioning—out of pure ignorance or fear that their man-made tradition will suffer in the face of facts—so I ended up finding someone who argues much the way I do……….so, he must be right ;o)
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