HistoricalChristian.Faith

Are the post-Flood "giants" a warrior category rather than a surviving lineage?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — as a solution to the post-Flood problem specifically. The conquest-era "giants" are named the way peoples are named, are dispossessed the way peoples are dispossessed, and are described in comparatives ("great, and many, and tall") rather than in measurements; the one verse that makes them descendants of the Nephilim sits inside a report the narrative itself labels false; and the reading needs no unnarrated incursion and no stowaway. What it does not do — and should not be made to do — is show that Genesis 6:1–4 is non-supernatural, or that there were no unusually tall clans in Canaan. It dissolves the continuity problem, not the giants.

Related arguments: the post-Flood Nephilim problem — see also a second angelic incursion after the Flood · the giant lineage surviving aboard the ark · Og surviving on the ark's roof

The claim

The problem the other two readings solve by mechanism, this one dissolves by lexicon. On the deflationary reading, "Nephilim" and gibborim are not the name of a bloodline that must be got from one side of the Flood to the other. They are category words — the fallen ones, the mighty men, the warriors, the outsized enemy — that a later writer or speaker can apply to any formidable population without asserting descent. The conquest-era clans are then simply Canaanite peoples, some of them genuinely tall, described in the idiom the tradition had for formidable predecessors; and the spies' claim in Numbers 13:33 that the sons of Anak "come of the giants" is their rhetoric, not the narrator's genealogy. On this account nothing had to survive the Flood, because nothing is claimed to have survived it.

Who advances it

This is the reading of most academic Old Testament scholarship and of a substantial part of evangelical commentary, and it has a long tail behind it. John Walton states the modern form directly: the reference to Nephilim afterward "may not mean the same creatures survived, but that the Israelites saw later formidable peoples through the lens of the earlier story." Brian Doak's The Last of the Rephaim (2012) treats the whole roster — Nephilim, Anakim, Rephaim, Emim, Zamzummim, Goliath — as a generative literary and political category in which physical excess marks a link to primeval chaos and a barrier to right rule, rather than as a genealogical dossier. Ki-Eun Jang's 2025 reassessment in Religions argues that Genesis 6:1–4 does not presuppose the flood narrative at all, and that its literary function is to introduce the Nephilim in anticipation of the conquest — which, if right, removes the premise the post-Flood problem depends on.¹ In Jewish tradition Ramban reads the spies as having at first reported only the children of Anak and then, at the second telling, exaggerating and calling them nephilim — "they invented a false report in order to frustrate their [intention of] going up by all possible means" — and Rashi's gloss on "and also after that" keeps the whole notice inside the pre-Flood era.²

The evidence for

The verse that creates the problem is inside a speech the narrative brands as false. This is the single strongest datum and it is often passed over. Numbers 13:32 introduces what follows as an "evil report" — dibbat ha-aretz, a slander of the land — and the content it introduces is demonstrably rhetorical: the land "eateth up the inhabitants thereof," and "we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight." The second clause is a claim about what the Anakim thought of the spies' appearance, which the spies were in no position to know; it is a self-declared figure of speech. The claim "which come of the giants" arrives in the same breath, from the same speakers, in a report the text immediately treats as the offence for which the generation is condemned. Reading one clause of a slander as sober genealogy while reading the clause beside it as hyperbole is a choice that needs defending.³

The giant clans behave like nations, and the text handles them as nations. Deuteronomy 2 is the fullest catalogue and its whole idiom is ethnographic. The Emim "dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims… but the Moabites call them Emims"; the Zamzummim were "a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; but the LORD destroyed them before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead"; the Horim in Seir were dispossessed by Esau's children exactly "as Israel did unto the land of his possession." These are peoples with territories, neighbours, and alternative names in neighbouring languages, displaced in the ordinary way by other peoples. The passage's own measure of size is instructive: it is a comparative — tall as the Anakim — not a measurement, and the identical formula, "a people great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims," is applied verbatim to two different nations in the space of ten verses. That is a stock ethnographic phrase for a formidable predecessor population, of the same order as Amos's Amorite "whose height was like the height of the cedars."⁴

The Fathers who read these texts most closely take the giants this way. Bede glosses the word plainly — giants are "men with immense bodies and excessive power, of which there were also many after the flood, that is, in the times of Moses or David" — and he assigns them no post-Flood mechanism at all, because on his reading none is needed. Augustine's summary is the same: "they were not all giants, even though there were more giants before the flood than in all subsequent ages," and their significance is moral — they "reveal to anyone who is wise that mere bodily magnitude and might have no more value than bodily beauty." Even Philo, who affirms the angelic parentage in Genesis 6, holds that Moses "uses this appellation improperly, and he uses it too very often merely to denote the vast personal size of the principal men" — that is, "giant" is for him a loose descriptive label, not a technical term for a hybrid stock.⁵

The Anakim have a plausible ordinary footprint. The Middle Kingdom Egyptian Execration Texts, from roughly the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries BC, curse the rulers of a Canaanite entity written Iy-ʿanaq, named in the standard formula "the Ruler of Iy-ʿanaq, [name], and all the retainers who are with him." The identification with the biblical Anakim is proposed rather than established, and it should be held loosely. But it is the kind of thing the deflationary reading predicts and the lineage readings do not: a Canaanite polity with rulers bearing ordinary Semitic names, appearing in an Egyptian administrative curse list alongside its neighbours.⁶

And the measured record is the record this reading predicts. On a page asking what the ground holds, the deflationary reading is the only one of the three whose prediction has been checked and met. Prehistoric skeletal stature across the Near East and Europe resolves to an ordinary human surface with no outlier population, and at the roster's most locatable claim — the Anakim remnant confined by Joshua 11:22 to Gaza, Gath and Ashdod — the Ashkelon cemetery gives a mean male stature of 154.6 cm.⁷

Adversarial assessment

What the reading has to concede, and does. Numbers 13:33 does say "which come of the giants," and a reading that treats every awkward clause as rhetoric is not doing exegesis. The honest form of the concession is narrower: the clause is attributed to speakers the text is in the act of discrediting, which is a textual ground for discounting it rather than a convenience. Michael Heiser — arguing from the other side of this dispute — reaches a converging conclusion on independent text-critical grounds, taking the clause as an exilic scribal gloss added to explain the giants' presence, which if right makes it a later reader's harmonisation rather than a datum about descent.⁸

The strongest objection: the deflation can be run too far. If "giant" is only a category word, why does the tradition keep producing measurable detail — Og's bed at nine cubits by four, Goliath's armour weighed out in shekels, the six-fingered champion of Gath? The answer available to this reading is that specificity of that kind is what heroic narrative does, and that the specific numbers behave like literary and cultic figures rather than anatomical ones: Og's bed matches the dimensions of the cultic bed at Babylon, and Goliath's height is transmitted at two different values in the manuscript tradition, four cubits and a span in the older witnesses against six in the Masoretic Text.⁹ That answer works, but it is a further argument rather than a corollary, and each case has to be made on its own evidence.

A second objection: it does not explain why Genesis 6:4 was written. If the conquest-era clans are simply large Canaanites, the notice that the Nephilim were on the earth "and also after that" is still doing something in its sentence. Jang's answer — that Genesis 6:1–4 is oriented forward to the land promise and the conquest from the start, and does not presuppose the flood at all — is a genuine answer, but it is a recent minority proposal, not the field's settled result, and the reading is stronger where it rests on Deuteronomy 2 and Numbers 13 than where it rests on a reconstruction of Genesis 6's compositional purpose.

What this reading does not license. Three limits, stated so the finding is not overdrawn. It does not show that Genesis 6:1–4 is non-supernatural: one can hold the sons of God to be divine beings and their offspring real, and still hold that the conquest-era clans are not their descendants — the readings are independent. It does not show there were no tall clans; that some Canaanite groups were notably tall is exactly what Deuteronomy 2 reports, and the deflationary reading affirms it. And it is not a refutation of the supernatural on principle; it wins here on the ordinary grounds that it explains the same text with fewer unnarrated events.

Assessment

Sound — as an account of the post-Flood problem. The reading is where the weight of scholarship sits, and it earns that position on the text rather than on authority. The clause that generates the problem is spoken by men the narrative is condemning for speaking it, and it stands beside a self-declared figure of speech in the same sentence. The catalogue of giant peoples in Deuteronomy 2 is ethnographic throughout — territories, neighbours, alternative names in Moabite and Ammonite, ordinary dispossession — and its measure of size is a comparative that the same book turns on Israel. The Fathers who handled these verses closely, Augustine and Bede, take post-Flood giants as ordinary large men and feel no need of a mechanism; even Philo, a supernaturalist about Genesis 6, calls the word a loose label for size. And the reading is the only one of the three that predicted the skeletal record correctly.

Its costs are real and are not hidden: it must discount one clause of Numbers 13:33, and it leaves the compositional purpose of Genesis 6:4's "and also after that" resting on a proposal that is not yet consensus. Both are cheaper than an unnarrated second descent of the heavenly host or a stowaway the passenger list excludes. The finding is that the post-Flood problem is largely a problem of reading a category word as a pedigree — and that dissolving it costs the supernatural reading of Genesis 6:1–4 nothing, since the two questions come apart.

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