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Giants of the Bible - The Nephilim and the Secret Hidden by the Church · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: There was a time, the oldest pages of the Bible insist,
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  Speaker 1: when the line between heaven and Earth was not as
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: fixed as we imagine. The world was young and crowded,
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  Speaker 1: The descendants of Adam had spread across the face of
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  Speaker 1: the ground. Generation layered on generation, until the earth was
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: full of voices and labor and the ordinary business of
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: being human. And then, almost in passing, the text reports
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  Speaker 1: that something crossed over, not a flood, not yet not
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  Speaker 1: fire from the sky, something quieter and far stranger, a
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  Speaker 1: boundary breached from the other side. The whole account survives
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  Speaker 1: in four verses four. For an event this large, the
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  Speaker 1: Bible spends fewer words than it gives to a minor genealogy,
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  Speaker 1: and that compression is part of why these lines have
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  Speaker 1: unsettled readers for more than two thousand years. Here is
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  Speaker 1: what Genesis six, verses one through four actually says. When
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  Speaker 1: human beings began to increase in number on the earth
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  Speaker 1: and daughters were born to them, the sons of God
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  Speaker 1: saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they
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  Speaker 1: married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said,
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  Speaker 1: my spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they
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  Speaker 1: are mortal. Their days will be a hundred and twenty years.
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  Speaker 1: The Nephelim were on the earth in those days, and
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  Speaker 1: also afterward, when the sons of God went to the
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  Speaker 1: daughters of humans and had children by them, they were
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  Speaker 1: the heroes of old, men of renown. Read it slowly
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  Speaker 1: and you feel the floor tilt. The passage assumes you
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  Speaker 1: already know who the sons of God are. It assumes
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  Speaker 1: you already know what the Nephelim are. It drops both
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  Speaker 1: terms without explanation, the way a story teller mentions a
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  Speaker 1: name every one in the room recognized, and then it
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  Speaker 1: moves on to the flood, as if nothing extraordinary had
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  Speaker 1: been said. But something extraordinary had been said. A category
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  Speaker 1: of beings called the Sons of God looked upon human women,
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  Speaker 1: chose among them, and father children, and the offspring of
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  Speaker 1: that union were the Nephelim, remembered as the heroes of old,
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  Speaker 1: the men of renown. The Hebrew behind that last word
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  Speaker 1: is where the trouble begins. The name Nephelim has been
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  Speaker 1: argued over for centuries, and the most common derivation traces
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  Speaker 1: it to the route Nephal, meaning to fall, the fallen ones,
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  Speaker 1: the ones who fell, or perhaps the ones who cause
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  Speaker 1: others to fall. Ancient translators reached for something grander. When
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  Speaker 1: Jewish scholars in Alexandria produced the Greek version of the
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew Scriptures, known as the Septuagint, somewhere around the third
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  Speaker 1: and second centuries before the Common Era, they rendered Nephelim
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  Speaker 1: with the Greek word gigantes giants. That single translation choice
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  Speaker 1: echoed down through Latin and into every European Bible that followed,
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  Speaker 1: which is why English readers for centuries simply assumed the
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  Speaker 1: passage was about men of impossible size. The Hebrew is
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  Speaker 1: more reserved than that. It does not, in these four
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  Speaker 1: verses describe their height at all. It describes their origin,
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  Speaker 1: and their origin is the scandal, because the plain sense
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  Speaker 1: of the words is that the Nephelim were the product
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  Speaker 1: of a union between the sons of God and human women,
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  Speaker 1: a crossing of two kinds that the text presents as
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  Speaker 1: the prelude to catastrophe. The very next thing the narrative
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  Speaker 1: tells us is that the Lord looked at the earth,
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  Speaker 1: saw that human wickedness had become great, and to wipe
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  Speaker 1: out what he had made. The flood comes hard on
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  Speaker 1: the heels of Genesis six, verse four. The structure of
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  Speaker 1: the chapter is deliberate. The strange union, then the verdict,
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  Speaker 1: then the waters. Whatever happened when the sons of God
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  Speaker 1: came down, the Bible files it immediately under the heading
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  Speaker 1: of corruption serious enough to undo creation, and that placement
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  Speaker 1: raises the question that has driven readers back to these
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  Speaker 1: verses again and again. What does it mean that the
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  Speaker 1: offspring were the heroes of old men of renown. The
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew word translated heroes is gibborim, the mighty ones, the warriors,
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  Speaker 1: the champions. The phrase men of renown is literally men
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  Speaker 1: of the name, men who had made a name for
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  Speaker 1: themselves in the world that produced this text. To be
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  Speaker 1: a man of the name was to be remembered in
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  Speaker 1: song and inscription, the kind of figure whose deeds outlived
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  Speaker 1: him and whose memory loomed over later generations like a shadow.
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  Speaker 1: The Bible is telling us that the children of this
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  Speaker 1: forbidden crossing were not obscure. They were legendary. They were
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  Speaker 1: the figures whose stories the ancient world already told, the
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  Speaker 1: strong men and demigods and founders whose names filled the
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  Speaker 1: myths of every surrounding nation. That is a remarkable thing
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  Speaker 1: for the Book of Genesis to claim, because it sits
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  Speaker 1: in pointed conversation with the world around it. The peoples
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  Speaker 1: of Mesopotamia and Canaan told their own stories of beings
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  Speaker 1: born from the union of gods and mortals, heroes of
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  Speaker 1: half divine descent, who built cities and waged wars, and
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  Speaker 1: were honored at shrines. The Gilgamesh tradition of Mesopotamia celebrates
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  Speaker 1: exactly such a figure, a king described as two thirds
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  Speaker 1: God and one third man. Genesis knows this kind of story,
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  Speaker 1: but where the surrounding cultures glorified their half divine heroes,
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  Speaker 1: the biblical author does something subversive. He acknowledges that such
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  Speaker 1: beings were remembered the heroes of old men of Renown,
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  Speaker 1: and then framed their existence not as a golden age
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  Speaker 1: to be celebrated, but as evidence that the world had
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  Speaker 1: gone wrong. The men of Renown are not the solution
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  Speaker 1: in Genesis. They are part of the problem. The flood
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  Speaker 1: was sent to erase. Notice two, the small clause tucked
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  Speaker 1: into verse four that has caused more debate than almost
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  Speaker 1: anything else in the chapter. The Nephelim were on the
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  Speaker 1: earth in those days, and also afterward afterward. After What
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  Speaker 1: the natural reading, given that the flood follows immediately is
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  Speaker 1: that the nehel were present both before the deluge and
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  Speaker 1: at some point after it. That single word will become
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  Speaker 1: a threat we have to pull later, because if the
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  Speaker 1: flood was meant to wipe the slate clean, the reappearance
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  Speaker 1: of giants on the far side of it is a
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  Speaker 1: genuine puzzle the Bible itself sets up and never pauses
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  Speaker 1: to explain. For now. Hold on to the strangeness of
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  Speaker 1: the scene as Genesis presents it, a boundary that should
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  Speaker 1: have held did not hold. Beings called the sons of God,
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  Speaker 1: looked at the daughters of men, chose among them, and
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  Speaker 1: crossed over their children were remembered as the mightiest figures
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  Speaker 1: of the ancient world, and the world that produced them
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  Speaker 1: was judged and drowned. The Bible reports all of this
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  Speaker 1: in four spare verses and then fall silent, leaving the
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  Speaker 1: reader holding more questions than answers. Who exactly were the
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  Speaker 1: sons of God, angels, kings, the godly line of a
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  Speaker 1: lost ancestor Why was this union the trigger for the flood,
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  Speaker 1: and why centuries later would an entire body of Jewish
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  Speaker 1: literature grow up around these four verses, claiming to know
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  Speaker 1: in vivid detail what Genesis had deliberately left unsaid. That
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  Speaker 1: literature existed, it was read, copied, and quoted, as we
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  Speaker 1: will see, even inside the New Testament itself, and then
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  Speaker 1: slowly it was set aside. To understand what was hidden,
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  Speaker 1: we first have to understand who these sons of God
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  Speaker 1: were believed to be. That is where the oldest argument
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  Speaker 1: in Biblical interpretation begins. Everything in the story turns on
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  Speaker 1: a single phrase, and the phrase refuses to sit still.
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  Speaker 1: The Sons of God three Hebrews words bene Hailohim, and
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  Speaker 1: on their meaning hangs the entire question of what actually
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  Speaker 1: happened before the flood. For as long as people have
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  Speaker 1: read Genesis, they have divided into camps over those words,
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  Speaker 1: and the camps have never fully reconciled. Broadly. There are
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  Speaker 1: three ways the tradition has answered the question, and each
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  Speaker 1: one carries consequences that ripple through the rest of the Bible.
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  Speaker 1: The first answer is the oldest, and for the first
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  Speaker 1: few centuries it was very nearly the only one. The
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  Speaker 1: sons of God were angelic beings, members of the heavenly Court,
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  Speaker 1: spirits who belonged to God's presence rather than to the
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  Speaker 1: human family. This is what the earliest Jewish interpreters understood
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  Speaker 1: the phrase to mean, and it is not a guess
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  Speaker 1: imposed from outside the text. It is the way The
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  Speaker 1: same expression is used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Open
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  Speaker 1: the book of Job, the Great Poem of Suffering, and
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  Speaker 1: you find the heavenly council assembling before the Lord. Job one,
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  Speaker 1: verse six describes the scene plainly. One day the angels
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  Speaker 1: came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also
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  Speaker 1: came with them. The word translated angels in that sentence
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  Speaker 1: is in the Hebrew the very same phrase, the sons
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  Speaker 1: of God. They are the members of the divine assembly,
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  Speaker 1: the spiritual beings who stand in God's presence. When the
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  Speaker 1: original audience of Genesis heard the sons of God, this
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  Speaker 1: is the world the words pointed to the same poem
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  Speaker 1: reaches back to creation itself and uses the phrase again
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  Speaker 1: in Job thirty eight. When God finally answers Job out
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  Speaker 1: of the storm, he asks where Job was when the
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  Speaker 1: foundations of the earth were laid, and he describes the
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  Speaker 1: witnesses to that founding moment. Job thirty eight. Verse seven
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  Speaker 1: says the morning stars sang together, and all the angels
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  Speaker 1: shouted for joy once more. The angels are literally the
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  Speaker 1: sons of God set in parallel with the morning stars,
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  Speaker 1: rejoicing as the world is built across the oldest poetry
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  Speaker 1: of Israel. Then the sons of God are heavenly beings.
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  Speaker 1: And if that is what the phrase means everywhere else,
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  Speaker 1: the most natural reading of Genesis six is that it
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  Speaker 1: means the same thing there, that the beings who crossed
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  Speaker 1: the boundary were not men at all, but spirits who
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  Speaker 1: left their proper place. This is the reading that the
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  Speaker 1: Jewish world of the Second Temple period embraced and expanded
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  Speaker 1: into something enormous. In the centuries between the close of
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  Speaker 1: the Hebrew Prophets and the time of Jesus, a body
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  Speaker 1: of literature grew up that took the angelic interpretation and
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  Speaker 1: ran with it. The beings who descended were given a name,
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  Speaker 1: the Watchers, and a leader, and a motive, and a
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  Speaker 1: catalog of the forbidden knowledge they brought down to humanity.
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  Speaker 1: We will come to that literature in its place, because
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  Speaker 1: it is the heart of the secret. This whole story
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  Speaker 1: circles around what matters now is simply this. For the
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  Speaker 1: people who lived closest in time to the Hebrew scriptures,
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  Speaker 1: who spoke the language and inherited the tradition, the sons
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  Speaker 1: of God were angels who fell. That was not a
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  Speaker 1: fringe position, It was the mainstream. The second answer arose later,
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  Speaker 1: and it arose precisely because the first one had become uncomfortable.
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  Speaker 1: As Jewish and then Christian thinkers wrestled with the idea
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  Speaker 1: of spiritual beings fathering physical children. Many recoiled angels, they argued,
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  Speaker 1: do not marry and do not reproduce. The categories do
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  Speaker 1: not mix. So a different reading took hold, especially from
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  Speaker 1: the second century of the Common Era onward. On this view,
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  Speaker 1: the sons of God were not angels, but the godly
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  Speaker 1: line of humanity, specifically the descendants of Seth, the son
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  Speaker 1: born to Adam and Eve after the death of Abel.
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  Speaker 1: The daughters of humans, by contrast, were the descendants of Cain,
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  Speaker 1: the murderer, whose line had drifted into wickedness. The sin
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  Speaker 1: of Genesis six, in this reading, was not a crossing
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  Speaker 1: of the boundary between Heaven and Earth, but a crossing
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  Speaker 1: of the boundary between the faithful and the faithless, the
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  Speaker 1: holy line of Seth intermarrying with the corrupt line of
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  Speaker 1: Cain until the distinction that preserved godliness on the earth
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  Speaker 1: was dissolved. This interpretation had obvious appeal. It kept angels
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  Speaker 1: out of the bedroom, It fit a moral lesson about
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  Speaker 1: marrying outside the faith, and it became the dominant Christian
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  Speaker 1: reading for many centuries, championed by influential figures of the
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  Speaker 1: early Church. The third answer is in some ways the
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  Speaker 1: most grounded in the politics of the ancient world. On
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  Speaker 1: this reading, the sons of God were powerful men, kings, rulers, tyrants,
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  Speaker 1: the despots of the early Earth. In the languages and
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  Speaker 1: royal ideologies of the ancient Near East, kings were routinely
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  Speaker 1: called sons of the gods. A pharaoh was the son
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  Speaker 1: of the Sun God. A Mesopotamian monarch could be styled
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  Speaker 1: the offspring of a deity. So when Genesis speaks of
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  Speaker 1: the sons of God taking any women they chose this interpretation,
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  Speaker 1: hears an indictment of royal tyranny, powerful men seizing women
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  Speaker 1: by force, building harems, asserting that their bloodline was divine.
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  Speaker 1: The nephelim on this reading were the warrior aristocracy. These
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  Speaker 1: unions produced the strong men who ruled by terror. The
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  Speaker 1: phrase men of renown becomes an accusation rather than a compliment.
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  Speaker 1: These were the violent dynasts whose names the world feared.
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  Speaker 1: Each of the three readings explains something, and each leaves
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  Speaker 1: something unexplained. The Sethite reading keeps the metaphysics tidy, but
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  Speaker 1: strains the text because Genesis never mentions Seth or Cain
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  Speaker 1: in the passage at all, and it has to work
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  Speaker 1: hard to explain by the union of two human lines
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  Speaker 1: would produce a distinct category of beings remembered as giants.
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  Speaker 1: The Royal tyrant reading captures the note of violence and
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  Speaker 1: the language of kingship, but it too struggles with the
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  Speaker 1: sheer strangeness of the offspring and the angelic reading, which
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  Speaker 1: fits the use of the phrase everywhere else in the
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  Speaker 1: Hebrew Bible and matches what the earliest interpreters believed carries
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  Speaker 1: the very difficulty that drove people away from it, the
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  Speaker 1: scandal of spirits and humans producing children together. The history
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  Speaker 1: of interpretation is, in a sense, the history of people
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  Speaker 1: trying to escape that scandal, and the text quietly resisting
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  Speaker 1: every escape. What deserves emphasis is how the answer you
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  Speaker 1: choose changes the entire shape of the story. If the
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  Speaker 1: Sons of God were merely the line of Seth, then
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  Speaker 1: the Nephelm were just unusually powerful or wicked men, and
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  Speaker 1: the giants who appear later in the Bible are a
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  Speaker 1: separate matter, a question of human genetics and tall peoples.
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  Speaker 1: But if the sons of God were the heavenly watchers,
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  Speaker 1: then the giants are something else, entirely the hybrid residue
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  Speaker 1: of a rebellion in the spiritual world, beings whose very
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  Speaker 1: existence was an offense against the created order. And it
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  Speaker 1: was this second possibility, the dangerous one, that the literature
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  Speaker 1: of the Second Temple seized upon and developed into a
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  Speaker 1: complete account of how evil entered the world. That account
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: named the rebel leaders, described the secrets they taught, and
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  Speaker 1: explained what became of the spirits of the giants after
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  Speaker 1: their bodies died. It was vivid, disturbing, and enormously influential,
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  Speaker 1: influential enough that the writers of the New Testament knew
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  Speaker 1: it and drew on it. Before we can open that book, though,
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  Speaker 1: we have to follow Genesis to its terrible conclusion. The
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  Speaker 1: sons of God had come down. The earth was filling
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  Speaker 1: with their children, and the Lord was about to look
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  Speaker 1: at the world he had made and decide that it
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  Speaker 1: could not be allowed to continue. The verdict comes fast,
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  Speaker 1: and it comes total. Whatever the precise nature of the
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  Speaker 1: union that opened the chapter, the narrative does not linger
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  Speaker 1: over it. It pivots almost at once to the condition
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  Speaker 1: of the earth, and the language it reaches for is
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  Speaker 1: the language of ruin. The same chapter that introduced the
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  Speaker 1: Sons of God and their towering offspring now turns its
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  Speaker 1: gaze on the whole human project and finds it spoiled
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  Speaker 1: beyond repair. Genesis six, beginning at verse five, lays it
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  Speaker 1: out without mercy. The Lord saw how great the wickedness
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  Speaker 1: of the human race had become on the earth, and
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  Speaker 1: that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart
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  Speaker 1: was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that
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  Speaker 1: he had made human beings on the earth, and his
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  Speaker 1: heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, I will
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  Speaker 1: wipe from the face of the earth the human race
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  Speaker 1: I have created, and with them the animals, the birds,
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  Speaker 1: and the creatures that move along the ground. For I
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  Speaker 1: regret that I have made them. Read that and notice
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  Speaker 1: how absolute the indictment is. Not some of the thoughts,
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  Speaker 1: but every inclination, not occasionally, but only evil all the time.
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  Speaker 1: The Hebrew piles up universals until there is no corner
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  Speaker 1: of the human heart left unaccounted for, and the emotional
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  Speaker 1: weight falls strikingly on God himself. The text says he
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  Speaker 1: regretted that his heart was deeply troubled. Language that pictures
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  Speaker 1: not a distant judge issuing a sentence, but a maker
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  Speaker 1: grieving over what his creation has become. The Hebrew word
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  Speaker 1: behind regretted carries the sense of being moved to sorrow,
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  Speaker 1: of a pain that reverses a decision. This is the
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  Speaker 1: Bible's way of insisting that the flood was not causual cruelty.
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  Speaker 1: It was grief hardened into resolve, but grief over what exactly.
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  Speaker 1: The chapter gives the answer a few verses later, and
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  Speaker 1: the answer is a single word that the modern ear
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  Speaker 1: can pass over too quickly. Verse eleven says the earth
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  Speaker 1: was corrupt in God's sight and full of violence. Violence
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  Speaker 1: the Hebrew is hamas, and it does not mean general
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  Speaker 1: naughtiness or private vice. It means brutality, bloodshed, the strong,
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  Speaker 1: devouring the weak, a world in which power has slipped
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  Speaker 1: its restraints and turned predatory. The earth was full of
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  Speaker 1: her maas, and here the connection to what came before
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  Speaker 1: snaps into focus. The chapter opened with beings of overwhelming strength,
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  Speaker 1: the mighty ones, the heroes of old, whose very category
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  Speaker 1: the text linked to the crossing of a forbidden boundary.
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  Speaker 1: It closes with an earth drowning in violence. The structure
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  Speaker 1: invites you to draw the line yourself. A world that
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  Speaker 1: produces a class of beings defined by power, remembered as
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  Speaker 1: warriors and champions is a world primed for exactly the
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  Speaker 1: kind of violence the verdict names. The giants and the
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  Speaker 1: Hamas are not two unrelated facts laid side by side.
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  Speaker 1: The narrative arranges them as cause and consequence, strength without limit,
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  Speaker 1: and then bloodshed without limit. This is why the Second
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  Speaker 1: Temple writers who developed the angelic reading found in these
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: verses such fertile ground to them. The flood was not
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  Speaker 1: a response to ordinary human sinfulness that simply happened to
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  Speaker 1: follow the strange episode of the Sons of God. It
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  Speaker 1: was the direct clean up of a contamination that had
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  Speaker 1: entered the world from above. The boundary had been breached.
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  Speaker 1: The hybrid beings had filled the earth with bloodshed, and
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  Speaker 1: the only remedy radical enough was to wash the whole
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  Speaker 1: surface clean and begin again from a single, uncorrupted family.
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  Speaker 1: Whether or not one accepts that framework, the text of
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  Speaker 1: Genesis itself does place the union and the violence in
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  Speaker 1: the same breath in the same chapter, with the flood
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  Speaker 1: as the answer to both. The author wants the reader
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  Speaker 1: to feel that the world had reached a point of
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  Speaker 1: no return, and yet against that black sky, the chapter
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  Speaker 1: sets a single point of light verse eight. But Noah
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  Speaker 1: found favor in the eyes of the Lord, one man,
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  Speaker 1: one household. The Hebrew word for favor its hen grace,
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  Speaker 1: unearned regard, and it arrives in the narrative like the
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  Speaker 1: first crack of dawn after a long night. Everything that
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  Speaker 1: survives the flood survives because of this one clause. The
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  Speaker 1: text then describes Noah in terms that have themselves become
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  Speaker 1: a battleground of interpretation. It calls him righteous and in
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  Speaker 1: a phrase loaded with meaning, blameless among the people of
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  Speaker 1: his time. The older translations rendered that phrase blameless or
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  Speaker 1: perfect in his generations. That word generations has drawn enormous
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: attention because of the question raised back at the start
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: of this whole story. If the corruption of the world
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: was bound up with the crossing of bloodlines with the
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: hybrid offspring of the sons of God, then to say
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: that Noah was blameless in his generations could be read
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: in two ways. The straightforward reading is more moral Noah
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: was a man of integrity, righteous in a generation that
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: had abandoned righteousness. But a strand of ancient interpretation heard
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: something more specific in the phrase that Noah was blameless
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: in his lineage, his geniality untainted, a man whose ancestry
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: ran clean back to Adam without the corruption that had
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: spread through the rest of humanity. On this reading, the
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: flood was not only a moral reckoning, but a genetic firewall,
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: and Noah was chosen in part because his bloodline was
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: still pure. The text does not settle the matter, and
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: careful readers have always recognized that the primary sense of
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: the word is about the times Noah lived in, rather
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: than the blood in his veins. But the ambiguity is real,
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: and it is the kind of ambiguity that the later
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: literature would seize upon and amp. What the chapter establishes
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: beyond any ambiguity, is the shape of the rescue. The
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: whole world is to be unmade, and a single family
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: is to be carried through it in a wooden vessel.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: God gives Noah the dimensions of the ark, the materials,
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: the cargo of every kind of living creature, and the
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: promise of a covenant on the far side. The instructions
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: are precise and practical, almost startlingly so after the cosmic
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: weight of the verses that preceded them. Gopher wood, pitch
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: inside and out a door in the side three decks.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: The narrative moves from the unmaking of a world to
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: the carpentry of its preservation in the space of a
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: few sentences, and it ends the chapter on a note
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: of obedience. Noah did everything just as God commanded him.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: The man who grace answers it with action. Hold the
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: whole movement of the chapter in view, because it sets
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: the terms for everything that follows. A world overrun by violence,
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: its corruption, tied by the narrative to the crossing of
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: a boundary that should never have been crossed, a maker
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: grieved to the point of undoing his own work. A
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: single family spared by grace and perhaps by the purity
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: of its line and then the waters, which the next
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: chapters will pore over the earth until the mountains themselves disappear.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: By every expectation the story sets up, that flood should
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: be the end of the giants. The contamination is being
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: washed away, the slate is being wiped clean, the hybrid beings,
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: the men of Renown, the towering offspring of that first transgression.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: All of it should vanish beneath the rising water and
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: never trouble the earth again. And that is exactly what
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: makes the next part of the story so strange, Because
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: the Bible, having drowned the world to be rid of
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: the giants, will open the door of the ark, send
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Noah's descendants out across the drying land, and then generations
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: later place the giants right back in the path of
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: God's people, standing in the hills of Canaan, as if
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: the flood had never touched them at all. Here is
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: the puzzle the Bible hands its readers and never pauses
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: to resolve. The flood was supposed to be the end.
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: The waters rose, the world was unmade, and the contamination
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: that had filled the earth with violence was washed beneath
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: the sea. Eight people stepped off the ark onto a
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: scrubbed and silent planet. By every expectation the narrative has built,
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: the giant should be gone, drowned with the world that
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: produced them. A closed chapter, and then generations later they
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: are simply there again, standing in the hills of Canaan,
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: ruling cities east of the Jordan, remembered in the names
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: of valleys and the dimensions of beds. The men of
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: Renown did not stay buried. Somehow, on the far side
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: of the flood, the earth has giants on it once more.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: The text itself flags the problem almost defiantly. Back in
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: the opening lines about the Nephelim, a single clause was
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: tucked into the description that they were on the earth
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: in those days, and also afterward. Afterward the words sat
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: there like a loose thread. And now it begins to unravel.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: When the people of Israel finally reached the edge of
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: the promised land and send spies tout it, those spies
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: will come back babbling about giants, and they will use
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: that very name. They will claim they saw the Nephelim,
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: the descendants of a nak, and that beside them they
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: felt like grasshoppers, the same word that opened the story
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: before the flood surfaces again after it attached now to
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: flesh and blood peoples occupying real territory. The Bible does
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: not explain how. It simply reports that the giants are back,
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: and it expects the reader to feel the strangeness. How
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: the giants survived the flood became one of the great
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: preoccupations of ancient interpreters, precisely because the text leaves a
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: gap and human curiosity abhors a gap. Some proposed that
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: the corruption re entered the world the same way it
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: had the first time, that the boundary was breached again
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: after the waters receded. The Second Temple literature We Will
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: Turn Too later offered its own elaborate answer involving the
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: disembodied spirits of the dead giants. The plainer readers simply
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: noted that the Bible never says the Nephelim were exclusively antediluvian,
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: and pointed to that stubborn word afterward as proof that
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: the author knew exactly what he was doing. Whatever the mechanism,
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: the narrative fact stands. The conquest of Canaan centuries down
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: the line will be framed in part as a war
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: against giants, and these post flood giants are not vague.
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: The Bible names them, and it sorts them into peoples,
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: each with a territory and a reputation. There are the Anachem,
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: the descendants of a nak, clustered around Hebron in the
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: southern hill country, the very giants the spies would report.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: There are the Rephim, a broader and older category, the
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: name that would attached to the last great giant king
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: east of the Jordan. There are the Emim, whom the
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: Moabites encountered in their land, described as a people strong
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: and numerous and tall as the Anarchim. There are the
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: Zamzumim or Zuzim, in the territory the Ammonites would later
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: hold likewise reckoned among the Rephae. The Book of Deuteronomy
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: actually pauses to act as a kind of ethnographer of giants,
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: noting which peoples called them by which names, and which
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: nations had dispossessed them. It is a remarkable detail the
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: Bible treating these towering peoples not as a single myth,
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: but as a scattered set of populations, each remembered by
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: the neighbors who had to live beside them or drive
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: them out. The giants in this telling were a fact
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: of the ancient map. There is one more figure who
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: belongs in this part of the story, standing right at
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: the threshold between the flood and the world that followed.
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: His name is Nimrod, and he appears in the table
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: of nations that catalogs the descendants of Noah's sons after
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: the waters receded. Genesis ten, beginning at verse eight, introduces
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: him with language that deliberately echoes the vocabulary of the
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: pre flood age. Kush was the father of Nimrod, who
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: became a mighty warrior on the earth. He was a
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: mighty hunter before the Lord. That is why it is
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: said like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord. The
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, uruk Akad, and
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: Kalnai in Shinnar. From that land he went to Assyria,
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: where he built Nineveh, Rehobeth, ear Calah, and Resin, which
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: is between Nineveh and Calah, which is the great city.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: Listen to the word that defines him mighty, a mighty warrior,
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: a mighty hunter, and the Hebrew behind mighty as gibber,
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: the singular of the very word used for the heroes
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: of old, the mighty ones produced before the flood. The
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: text is not calling Nimrod a giant outright, but it
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: is reaching pointedly for the same vocabulary of overwhelming power,
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: and it is attaching that vocabulary to the founder of
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: the first great empires. After the flood, Nimrod builds Babylon,
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: he builds Nineveh. He establishes in Shinah, the kingdom whose
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: tower will a few verses later become the symbol of humanity,
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: once again over reaching toward heaven. The man of might
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: stands at the head of the post flood world's first
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: imperial projects, and the narrative wants the res to feel
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: the echo. The spirit of the age that the flood
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: was meant to end has reasserted itself in the founder
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: of cities, the strong man, the conqueror, the builder of empires,
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: whose name became a proverb. What emerges, then is a pattern,
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: rather than a single event. Before the flood, beings of
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: overwhelming power filled the earth with violence. After the flood,
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: the same vocabulary of might attaches to the first empire builder,
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: and the same category of towering peoples spreads back across
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: the land. The Bible has not it turns out, told
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: a story in which the giants are defeated once and
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: for all by the rising water. It has told a
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: story in which they recur, in which the problem the
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: flood addressed proved stubborn enough to surface again and again,
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: demanding to be confronted not by a flood the next time,
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: but by a people, an army, and a conquest. That
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: confrontation is exactly where the narrative is headed. The descendants
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: of Noah will become the descendants of Abraham, and the
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: descendants of Abraham will be led out of Egypt and
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: brought to the border of a land already occupied occupied,
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: among others, by the Anakim in their fortified hilltowns. The
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: god who once drowned the giants now proposes to dispossess them,
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: and he will do it through a frightened band of
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: former slaves, who must be persuaded that the towering peoples
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: in front of them can actually be overcome. The first
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: test of that persuasion comes at a place called Kadesh,
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: when twelve men return from forty days of scouting the
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: land and stand before the whole assembly to deliver their report.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: Ten of them have seen the giants, and ten of
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: them have already they decided the war is lost. The
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: people had come a long way to stand at this border,
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: out of Egypt, through the sea, across the wilderness, to
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: the oasis of Kadesh, on the southern edge of Canaan,
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: the land that had been promised to their ancestors. It
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: was within reach, now close enough to scout, So twelve
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: men were chosen, one from each tribe, and sent north
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: to survey what lay ahead. They were gone forty days.
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: They walked the length of the hill country, saw the
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: towns and the farmland, and at a valley they named Eshkol,
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: they cut down a single cluster of grapes, so heavy
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: it had to be carried on a pole between two men.
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: They brought it back, along with pomegranates and figs, physical
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: proof that the land was everything it had been said
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: to be, fertile, abundant, flowing with milk and honey. And
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: then they opened their mouths, and men of the twelve
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: turned the abundance into terror. Their report began honestly enough,
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: the land was good, the fruit in their hands proved it.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: But then came the word that undid everything. However, the
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: people who live there are powerful, they said. The cities
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: are fortified and very large. And then they named the
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: thing they had really seen, the thing that had drained
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: the courage out of them. As they walked those hills,
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: we saw the descendants of a Nak there, the Anachem,
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: the giants, the same towering people the Bible had been
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: tracking since the strange survival of the Nephelm passed the flood,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: now standing in fortified towns directly across the path of
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: God's people. The spies had gone looking for a route
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: into the promised land and had come back having seen
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: the one thing guaranteed to stop the whole nation in
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: its tracks. The narrative captures the moment the panic curdles
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: into rebellion. The account in numbers thirteen, reaching its climax
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: at verse thirty three, records what the ten spies told
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: the assembled people, we can't attack those people. They are
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: stronger than we are. And then the verses build to
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: the line that would echo through the rest of Israel's
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: wilderness story. All the people we saw there are of
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: great size. We saw the Nephelim there. The descendants of
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: Anak come from the Nephelim. We seemed like grasshoppers in
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: Hold on that last sentence because it is one of
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: the most psychologically precise lines in the Hebrew Bible. We
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes. The spies are
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: not merely reporting the size of their enemies. They are
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: reporting the size of their own fear. They had shrunk
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: in their own estimation until they felt like insects. And
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: this is the devastating addition. They assumed the giants saw
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: them the same way. That second clause is pure projection.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: No giant told them they looked like grasshoppers. The spies
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: put the contempt into the giant's eyes themselves, because that
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: is what terror does. It takes your own sense of
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: smallness and assumes the whole world shares it. The Bible
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: diagnoses the failure of Kadesh not as a military miscalculation,
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: but as a collapse of nerve a people who had
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: measured the obstacle and forgotten entirely the one who had
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: carried them out of Egypt on the back of plagues
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: and aparted sea. And notice what the spies do with
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: the giants in that verse. They reach back across the
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: whole history we have been tracing and connect the dot
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: out loud. The descendants of a nak come from the Nephelim.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: The word that opened the story before the flood is
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: spoken again here on the lips of frightened men, binding
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: the anarchim of Canaan to the men of renown of
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: the ancient world. Whether the spies meant it a sober
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: genealogy or as the wild exaggeration of panic, the text
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: lets the identification stand. The giants the nation now faced
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: were in the people's own telling, the heirs of that
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: original transgression, the survivors, the recurrence the problem that had
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: outlasted the flood and was now blocking the door to
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: the promised land. Two of the twelve refused to join
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: the panic. Caleb of the tribe of Judah silenced the
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: crowd and insisted that the people could take the land,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: that they should go up at once and occupy it.
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: Joshuaste with him. The two of them had walked the
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: same hills, seen the same fortified cities, looked up at
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: the same towering men, and had come back with the
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: opposite conclusion. The difference between the ten and the two
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: was not what they saw it was what they reckoned
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: against it. The ten had weighed the giants against themselves
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: and found themselves wanting The two had weighed the giants
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: against the promise of God and found the giants wanting
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: the same data. Two reckonings, and the entire future of
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: a generation hung on which reckoning the people would believe.
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: They believed the ten. The whole community raised their voices
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: and wept through the night, and by morning the weeping
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: had turned to open revolt, talk of choosing a new
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: leader and marching back to Egypt, back to slavery, because
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: slavery at least had no giants in it. It is
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: one of the bleakest moments in the Wilderness narrative, a
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: people standing at the threshold of everything they had been promised,
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: choosing the remembered safety of bondage over the risk of
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: the gift in front of them, and the cost was severe.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: The generation that had refused to enter would not enter.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: They would turn back into the wilderness and wander there.
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: The text says, for forty years a year for each
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: of the forty days the spies had scouted the land,
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: until that entire generation had died off, and only their
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: children along with the two faithful spies would live to
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: cross over. The memory of that failure burned so deep
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: that it was still being recited a full generation later.
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: When Moses, near the end of his life, rehearsed the
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: nation's history to the children of those who had died
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: in the wilderness, made them relive the moment. In Deuteronomy one,
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: verse twenty eight, he quotes back to them the very
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: words that had broken their parents' courage. Where can we go?
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: Our brothers have made our hearts melt in fear, they say.
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: The people are stronger and taller than we are. The
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: cities are large, with walls up to the sky. We
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: even saw the Anarkites there, walls up to the sky.
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: The Anarkites again. The giants had become shorthand for the
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: whole catastrophe of unbelief, the obstacle that a frightened people
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: had allowed to grow until it blotted out their God.
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: But Moses did not recite that history to leave them
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: in the fear. He recited it as a warning aimed
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: at a generation that was about to face the very
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: same giants and make its own choice. Because the Anarchim
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: had not gone anywhere, they were still in here, still
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: in the hill country, still occupying the towns the spies
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: had scouted. The new generation would cross the Jordan and
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: would have to do what their parents had refused to do,
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: march up into the hills and confront the descendants of
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: anak directly, and before they reached Hebron on the eastern
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: side of the river, they would meet a giant larger
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: than any the spies had described, a king, the last
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: of an ancient line, a man whose bed was made
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: of iron, and whose defeat would become a story Israel
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: told for centuries. Before the new generation ever reached the
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: hill country where the Anakim waited, they ran into a
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: giant on the wrong side of the river. His name
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: was Og, and he was the king of Bashan, a
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: broad and fertile highland east of the Jordan and north
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: of the Dead Sea. The is Ssrilites had not gone
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: looking for him. They were skirting the edges of other nations,
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: moving north along the eastern frontier, when Og came out
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: with his whole army to meet them in battle at
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: a place called Edre. He was the Bible is careful
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: to tell us no ordinary king. He was the last
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: survivor of an ancient people, the final remnant of the
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: refe the broad category of giants. The narrative had been
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: tracking since the giants first reappeared after the flood. Oh
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: was the end of a line. When he fell, an
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: entire race of giants east of the Jordan effectively ended
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: with him. The encounter is recorded in Deuteronomy three, where Moses,
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: recounting the conquest of the eastern territories, lingers Overog in
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: a way he lingers over almost no one else. After
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: describing the victory, the capture of sixty fortified cities with
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: high walls and gates and bars, plus a great many
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: unwalled villages, the text pauses to record a single physical
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: detail that has fascinated readers ever since. Deuteronomy three, verse eleven, O,
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: king of Bashan, was the last of the refets. His
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: bed was decorated with iron and was more than nine
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: cubits long and four cubits wide. It is still in
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: rapper of the Ammonites. The narrator sets it off in
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: a kind of a side, almost a museum label, as
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: if to say, in case you doubt the size of
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: the man we just defeated, here is the evidence, and
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: you can go and see it for yourself. Nine cubits
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: long and four cubits wide. A cubit was the length
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger,
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: roughly eighteen inches by the common reckoning. Do the arithmetic,
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: and OG's bed measured something on the order of thirteen
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: and a half feet long and six feet wide. The bed,
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: not the man, but a bed built to those proportions
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: implies an occupant of staggering size, and that is plainly
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: the impression the text means to leave. This is the
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: single most concrete measurement of a giant anywhere in the Bible,
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: and it has generated centuries of debate. Some have taken
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: it at face value as the literal dimensions of an
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: enormous king. Others have noted the wiggle room. In the language.
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: The Hebrew word translated bed can also mean a resting
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: place or a sarcophagus, which has led some interpreters to
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: suggest the measurement describes a great basalt funerary monument rather
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: than a literal sleeping couch, the kind of oversized burial
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: structure that dotted the ancient landscape east of the Jordan.
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: The word translated iron may point to the dark iron
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: rich basalt stone that is in fact the dominant rock
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: of the Bashan region, rather than to forged metal. On
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: that reading, the verse is describing a massive black stone
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: tomb still on display in the Ammonite capital generations later
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: as a wonder and a relic. Either way, the detail
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: does something specific in the narrative. It anchors the giant.
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: In geography, the bed is not in some lost, Antediluvian world.
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: It is in Rabba of the Ammonites, a real city
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: the original audience could name and locate a place where
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: the relic could supposedly still be viewed. The Bible is
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: reaching for the same kind of verification an ancient traveler
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: would have valued. Go to Rabbah, it says, and the
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: proof of the giant is there. It is the texture
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: of memory attaching itself to a place, the way local
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: tradition fixes a legend to a stone that visitors can touch,
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: and the region itself carried that reputation. Bauschah was not
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: a neutral patch of farmland in the imagination of the
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: ancient Near East. It was a land thick with associations
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: of the old powers and the old dead. Its very
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: name appears in the religious texts recovered from Ugarit, the
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: Canaanite city on the Syrian coast, whose clay tablets unearthed
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: in the twentieth century at a site called Ras Shamra
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: opened a window onto the mythology of Israel's neighbours. In
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: that literature, the region is linked to the realm of
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: the dead and to ancient divinized ancestors, and the word
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: refine itself does double duty in these Canaanite texts, naming
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: both a class of mighty figures and the shades of
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: departed heroes who were thought to li live on in
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: the underworld. So when the Bible calls og the last
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: of the reframe, it is using a term that its
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: neighbours loaded with the weight of the dead. And the
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: divine Bashah was the land where the giants belonged, where
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: the old powers had their seat, and Israel's defeat of
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: its giant king was therefore more than a border skirmish.
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: It was the conquest of a place that the surrounding
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: world regarded as belonging to forces older and darker than
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: any ordinary kingdom. The landscape reinforced the legend in Stone
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: The highlands east of the Jordan are studded with the
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: remains of megalithic structures, dolmens, great slabs of basalt set
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: up by hands and in ages. The later inhabitants no
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: longer remembered. Thousands of these stone monuments scatter across the region,
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: the work of prehistoric builders whose names were lost long
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: before Israel arrived. To a people walking through that country
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: and seeing those colossal stones, the conclusion would have written itself.
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: Who but giants could have moved such rock. The physical
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: environment of Bashan, littered with the megalithic dead, was the
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: kind of place that breeds and confirms stories of a
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: vanished race of Titans. The Bible's tradition of Og the
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: Giant did not float free of the land. It grew,
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: at least in part, out of a real and strange
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: landscape that seemed to demand giants to explain it. What
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: matters for the larger story is that Og fell the
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: last of the rephaim, the giant king with the iron bed,
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: the ruler of the land the old myths reserved for
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: the dead, and the divine defeated, his sixty cities, taken,
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: his kingdom handed over to two and a half tribes
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: of Israel as their inheritance. East of the river, the
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: recurrence of the giants, which had outlasted the flood and
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: frightened a generation into the wilderness, was beginning finally to
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: be reversed, not by water, this time by a people
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: who had at last decided to go up. But og
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: was only the eastern frontier. The giants who had broken
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: the spy's courage, The anarchim of the hill country, fortified
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: in Hebron and de Beer, and the towns of the
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: south were still there across the Jordan, waiting in the
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: very hills that ten frightened men had refused to enter.
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: Defeating a giant king on the way to the promised
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: land was one thing. Driving the giants out of the
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: heart of the land itself would fall to the man
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: who had stood beside Caleb forty years earlier and insisted
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: it could be done. His name was Josh and the
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: war he was about to wage would be remembered in
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: part as the war that finally cleared the giants from
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: the land. Forty years after ten men came back from
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: the hill country shaking with fear. One of the two
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: who had not been afraid, finally led an army up
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: into those same hills. Joshua had waited a long time
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: for this. He had stood beside Caleb at Kadesh and
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: watched a whole generation choose the wilderness over the giants.
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: He had buried that generation in the sand over four
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: decades of wandering, and now, as the commander who led
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: Israel across the Jordan, he turned to the unfinished business
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: that had broken the nation's nerve a lifetime before. The
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: Anakim was still in Hebron, still into beer, still in
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: the fortified towns of the southern Highlands. The giants that
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: the spies had used as their excuse were real, and
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: they were exactly where the spies had said they were.
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: The difference was that this time someone went up. The
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: Book of Joshua records the campaign with a kind of
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: grim satisfaction, and it makes a point of naming the
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: giants specifically, so that no one can miss what has happened.
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: After the long account of the conquest of the land,
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: the narrative pauses to single out the destruction of the
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: Anachim as a thing worth recording on its own. Joshua eleven,
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: beginning at verse twenty one. At that time, Joshua went
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: and destroyed the Anakites from the hill country, from Hebron, Debir,
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: and a Nab, from all the hill country of Judah,
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: and from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua totally
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: destroyed them and their towns. No Anarkites were left in
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: Israelite territory. Only in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod did any survive.
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: Read that against the report of the spies, and you
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: can feel the narrative closing a loop. It opened forty
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: years earlier, the same hill country, the same anarchim, the
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: same Hebron, and its neighboring towns. But where the ten
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: spies had said we can't, the text now says Joshua destroyed,
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: totally destroyed. None were left. The giants that had loomed
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: so large in the imagination of a frightened generation are
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: dispatched in a few brisk sentences. The Bible is making
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: a theological point through the bare reporting of events. The
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: obstacle that had seemed insurmountable to people who measured it
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: against themselves proved entirely surmountable to people who finally went
• 55:47
  Speaker 1: up against it. The size of the giants had never
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: been the real variable. The willingness to face them was.
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: But notice the clause at the very end, because the
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: narrative is too honest to a total victory. No Anakim
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: were left in Israelite territory. Only in Gaza, Gath, and
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: Ashdod did any survive. Three cities, three names that anyone
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: who knows the rest of the story will recognize instantly
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: because they are Philistine cities on the coastal plain to
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: the west. The giants were cleared from the hills, but
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: a remnant slipped through to the lowland cities of the
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: Philistines and took root there. That single surviving clause is
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: one of the most consequential loose ends in the Hebrew Bible.
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: The text is quietly planting a seed. The Anakim were
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: not entirely eradicated. A branch of them survived in Gath
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: and its sister cities, and generations later. Out of Gath,
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: a giant would walk into a valley to challenge the
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: armies of Israel, and the whole nation would once again
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: stand frozen before a man of impossible size, until a
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: shepherd boy stooped to pick up five smooth stones. The
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: Giant of Gath does not come from nowhere. The Book
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: of Joshua tells you in advance exactly where he comes from.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: There is one more threat. The conquest narrative ties off,
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: and it belongs to the other faithful spy. Caleb had
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: stood with Joshua at Kadesh, and Caleb had been given
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: a promise on that day that because he had followed
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: the Lord wholeheartedly, when everyone else lost heart, the land
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: his feet had walked would belong to him and his descendants.
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: He had walked hebron, hebron the stronghold of the Anakim,
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: the heart of giant country. And forty five years later
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: an old man of eighty five came to Joshua to
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: collect on that promise, and he asked for the hardest
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: prize on the map. The account is reserved in Joshua
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: fourteen and fifteen, where Caleb claims his inheritance and then
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: takes it by force. Joshua fifteen, verse thirteen records the
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: grand and what followed. In accordance with the Lord's command
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: to him, Joshua gave to Caleb son of Jafunah a
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: portion in Judah kiriath Arba that is, Hebron Arba was
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: the forefather of Anakh. From Hebron, Caleb drove out the
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: three Anakites, Sheeshai, Ahiman, and Talmai, the descendants of Anak.
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: There is poetry in the arrangement of those names. Hebron
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: was also called kiriath Arba, the city of Arbor, and Arba,
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: the text notes, was the forefather of Anak, the ancestral
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: giant whose descendants the spies had so feared. Caleb does
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: not merely receive Hebron. He drives out the very sons
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: of a Nak by name Seshai and a he Man
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: and Talmai, the giant clans who had given that city
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: its terrifying reputation. The man who had refused to be
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: afraid of the Anachem at the age of forty, walked
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: into their capital at the age of eighty five and
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: dispossessed them himself. The promise made on the day of
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: the nation's failure was kept on the day of its triumph,
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: and it was kept by the one man who had
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: believed it when no one else would. Caleb's whole life
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: had been a wager that the giants could be beaten
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: and he'd lived to drive them out of their own
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: stronghold with his own hands. Stepped back from the conquest,
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: and a clear pattern has resolved. The giants who had
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: outlasted the flood, who had recurred across the land in
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: clan after clan, who had frightened a generation into the desert,
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: were being systematically cleared from the promised land in the east.
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: The Anakim in the hills hebron itself purged by the
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: old soldier who had never doubted the recurrence was being
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: reversed in real time, city by city, name by name.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: By the end of Joshua's career, the land that had
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: once been thick with the descendants of a Naq was
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: within Israel's borders, free of them. And yet the Bible
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: has left that one door open on purpose. On the
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: coastal plain Gadza Gath Ashtod, the remnants survived there beyond
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: Israel's reach, gathering strength among the Philistines. The war against
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: the giants was not over. It had only moved west
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: and gone quiet, waiting for the moment when the last
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: and most famous of them would arm himself, descend into
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: a valley between two hills and offer the armies of
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: the Living God, a challenge that no one in Israel
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: dared to answer. His name was Goliath, and he came
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: from Gath. The remnant that survived in the Philistine cities
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: did not stay quiet forever. Generations after Joshua. In the
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: days when Israel had its first king, the Philistines and
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: the Israelites faced each other across a valley in the
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: western foothills, the Valley of Elah, a broad wadi running
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: between two ridges. The two armies camped on opposite slopes,
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: with the dry stream bed between them. Neither side wanted
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: to charge downhill into the other. And into that standoff,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: out from the Philistine ranks came a single, enormous figure
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: who would settle the matter the old way by single combat.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: He came from Gath, one of the three cities where
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: the Book of Joshua had told us the Anakim survived.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: The Bible has been pointing at this man since that
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: surviving clause was written. His name was Goliath. The description
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: of him is one of the most carefully detailed physical
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: portraits in all of scripture, and it begins with his height.
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: The account in First Samuel seventeen, starting at verse four
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: introduces him with the precision of a quartermaster's inventory. A
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: the Philistine camp. He was over nine feet tall. He
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: On his legs. He wore bronze greaves, and a bronze
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: javelin was slung on his back. His spear shaft was
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: like a weaver's rod, and its iron point weighed six
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: hundred shekels. His shield bearer went ahead of him. Every
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: number is doing work. The Hebrew text gives his height
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: a six cubits and a span, which by the standard reckoning,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: comes out to something over nine feet, the figure most
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: English Bibles carry. There is a genuine textual wrinkle here
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: worth naming. Some of the oldest manuscript witnesses, including the
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: Greek Septuagint and a fragment of Samuel found among the
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: Dead Sea scrolls, give his height instead as four cubits
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: and a span closer to six and a half or
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: seven feet. That would still make him a giant by
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: the standards of the ancient world, where the average man
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: stood well under five and a half feet, but it
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: is a strikingly more sober figure than the towering Nine.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: The discrepancy is one of the small windows the manuscripts
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: open on to how the tradition grew, and careful readers
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: have argued over it for a long time. But whichever
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: number the original carried, the narrative's intent is unmistakable. Goliath
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: was a man of overwhelming size, the living embodiment of
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: the giant remnant of goth armored from head to foot
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: in bronze and carrying a spear whose iron head alone
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: weighs something like fifteen pounds. And the armor matters as
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: much as the height, because it tells you what kind
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: of problem Goliath posed. He was a walking fortress, helmet's
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: scale coat, grieves, javelin spear, and a shield bearer walking
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: in front of him to cover what the armor did not.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: He was built for exactly one thing, to stand in
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: the open and dare any one to come close enough
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: to be killed. For forty days, morning and evening he
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: came out and shouted his challenge across the valley. Choose
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: a man, send him down, Let the two of them
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: decide the war, and for forty days, no one in
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: the army of Israel moved, the text says Saul, and
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: all the i Israelites were dismayed and terrified. The pattern
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: that had frozen the spies at Kadesh was repeating itself
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: with eerie precision. A giant stood in the path of
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: God's people, and the people measured him against themselves and
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: concluded the fight was already lost. Forty days of paralysis,
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: the same number as the forty days the spies had scouted,
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: the same number as the years in the wilderness, A
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: deliberate echo, a nation once again shrinking to the size
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: of grasshoppers in its own eyes. What broke the paralysis
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: was not a soldier. It was a shepherd boy who
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: had come to the camp to bring food to his
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: brothers and could not understand why everyone was so afraid.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: The story of David and Goliath is told often enough
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: that its strangeness wears off, so it is worth recovering
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: what the narrative is actually claiming. Refused the king's armor,
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: refused to fight the giant on the giant's terms, fortress
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: against fortress, and went down into the valley with a staff,
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: a sling, and five smooth stones from the stream bed.
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: The choice of five stones has invited a great deal
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: of speculation, and one ancient line of interpretation connects it
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: to what comes later in the Giant's family, the notion
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: that Goliath was not the only giant of Gath, and
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: that David came prepared for more than one. Whatever the reason,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: he needed only the first. A single stone from the
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: sling struck the Giant in the forehead, in the one
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: patch the bronze did not cover, and the champion of
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: Gath fell face down on the ground. The man who
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: had stood unanswerable for forty days was killed by a
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: weapon that weighed almost nothing, wielded by some on the
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: giant had not even taken seriously enough to fear. But
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: Goliath was not the last Giant of Gath, and the
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: Bible is careful to say so. It would be easy
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: to read the duel in the Valley of Elah as
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: the final chapter in the long war against the Giants,
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: the climactic single combat the giant Feld the curse of
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: Gath ended. The text does not let us off so neatly.
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: Years later, in the Reign of the same David, now
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: grown old and king. The Philistine giants surfaced again, and
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: this time it took David's hardened warriors to put them down.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: The record is preserved in Cel Samuel to twenty one,
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: beginning at verse fifteen, in a passage that reads almost
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: like a catalog of the last of the line. Once again,
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: there was a battle between the Philistines and Israel. David
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: went down with his men to fight against the Philistines,
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: and he became exhausted, and Ishbi Benob, one of the
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: descendants of Raffa, whose bronze spearhead weighed three hundred shekels,
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: and who was armed with a new sword, said he
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: would kill David. The passage goes on to name them
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: one after another, Ishbi Banob, then saf then a giant
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: in a battle at gob, and a huge man on
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: the field at Gath, with six fingers on each hand
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: and six toes on each foot, twenty four in all,
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: who was also descended from Raffah. Four giants, all called
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: descendants of Raffa, the same route as the Raphim, the
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: ancient race whose last eastern king had been og of Bashan.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: The text even records that one of these later giants
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: in some manuscript traditions, was the brother of Goliath, or
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: Goliath himself by another reckoning, the lines of the tradition
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: tangling around the family of giants from Gath. They were
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: struck down one by one by Abereshi, by Sibakai, by
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: El Hannan, by Jonathan, the nephew of David. And the
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: passage ends with a summary line that closes the whole
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: long arc. These four were descendants of Raffa in Gath,
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: and they fell at the hands of David and his men. There.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: It is the end of the giants in the historical
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: narrative of Israel. The race that had appeared before the
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: flood survived. It recurred across the land, frightened a generation,
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: and held the field at the valley of Elah, was
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: finally extinguished in the wars of David, hunted down to
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: the last six fingered champion on the plains of Gath.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: The giants of the Old Testament story end there in
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: a battlefield catalog, four names and the men who killed them.
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: But the giants were never only a matter of military history.
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: Somewhere in the centuries after these battles were fought and remembered.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: A different kind of book was being written, a book
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: that went back behind all of it, behind Goliath and
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: Og and the Anachim, all the way back to those
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: four cryptic verses about the sons of God, and claimed
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: to explain what had really happened. It named the beings
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: who came down, It described the knowledge they brought. It
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: told what became of the spirits of their giant children.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: And for a time it was read as scripture, until
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: the Church decided it should not be. For all the giants.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: The historical book's name, the Bible never circles back to
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: explain the thing it raised at the very beginning, How
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: the sons of God came down, who they were, what
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: exactly they did? Genesis stated it and moved on. But
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: the question did not go away, and in the centuries
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: between the Old and New Testaments, a body of Jewish
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: literature grew up that refused to let it rest. The
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: most important of these writings bore the name of a
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: man who had walked with God and been taken up
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: without dying, a figure from the genealogies before the flood.
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: The book was called Inoch, and it took those four
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: spare verses about the Sons of God and exploded them
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: into a sweeping account of how evil first entered the world.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: The story it tells is vivid and specific, where Genesis
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: was silent. In the book of Enoch, the sons of
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: God are a company of two hundred heavenly beings called
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: the Watchers, who looked down on the daughters of men,
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: and seeing their beauty, made a pact among themselves to descend.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: They had a leader named in the text, and they
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: bound themselves by mutual oath on them the summit of
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: a mountain, so that no one could back out and
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: leave the others to bear the guilt alone. They came down,
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: took human wives, and fathered the giants. And the giants,
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: in Enuch's telling, were monstrous in appetite, consuming everything the
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: people produced, and then turning on humanity itself. But the
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: offspring were only half the crime. The Watchers also taught
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: humanity things it was never meant to know, the forging
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: of weapons and the working of metals, the making of
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: cosmetics and the casting of spells, the reading of the
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: stars and the secrets of the roots and the heavens.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: Knowledge came down with them forbidden knowledge, and the world
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: was corrupted not only by the violence of the giants,
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: but by the dark arts their fathers had taught. It
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: was this, the rebellion of the watchers, the bloodshed of
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: the giants, the spread of forbidden knowledge, that Enoch presents
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: as the true reason the flood was sent, and it
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: tells what became of the rebels, bound imprisoned in darkness,
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: chained beneath the earth to await final judgment, while the
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: spirits that came out of the dead giants were left
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: to wander the world as evil spirits, the demons that
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: trouble human kind. That is an extraordinary expansion of four verses.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: And the question that matters for our story is how
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: seriously it was taken. The answer is very seriously by
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: a great many people. For a very long time. The
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: Book of Enoch was widely read in the Judaism of
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: the Second Temple period. Fragments of it in the original
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: Aramaic were among the scrolls discovered at Cumran by the
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: Dead Sea, which means the commune uity that preserved those
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: scrolls treasured it and copied it alongside the books that
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: would become scripture. And this is the detail that unsettles
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: the neat boundary between canonical and rejected. The New Testament
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: itself knows this literature and draws on it directly. The
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: clearest case is the short letter of Jude near the
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: end of the New Testament. Jude is writing to warn
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: a church against false teachers, and to drive his warning home,
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: he reaches for the example of the rebellious angels. Jude
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: verse six described them in language that comes straight out
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: of the watcher's tradition. And the angels who did not
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling.
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: These he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: for judgment on the Great day. Angels who abandoned their
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: proper dwelling, now bound in chains in darkness, awaiting judgment.
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: That is the story of the Watchers, told in a
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: single sentence, treated by the writer of Jude as established
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: fact his readers would recognize. And then Jude does something
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: even more striking. A few verses later, he quotes the
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: Book of Enoch by name as prophecy Jude verses fourteen
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: and fifteen. Enoch the seventh from Adam prophesied about them.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: See the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: His holy ones, to judge every one, and to convict
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: all of them of all the ungodly acts they have
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: committed in their ungodliness, and of all the defiant words
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 1: ungodly sinners have spoken against him. That passage is a
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: near direct citation of the Book of Enoch, a quotation
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: of the very text that expanded the story of the
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: Giants placed in the New Testament, attributed to Enoch as
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: genuine prophecy, a book that would later be excluded from
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: the Christian canon, is here being quoted inside it. Jude
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: is not alone. The second Letter of Peter carries the
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: same tradition, though without naming the source Tewod. Peter two
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: verse four presses the rebellious angels into service as a warning,
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: exactly as Jude does. For if God did not spare
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: angels when they sinned, but sent them to Hell, putting
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment,
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: once again, angels who sinned, chained in darkness, held for judgment.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: The framework of the watchers, the imprisoned rebels of the
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: Book of Enoch, surfacing in the heart of the New
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: Testament's own warnings. Whatever else, one concludes the writers of
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: the early Church plainly knew this literature and can considered
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: it true enough to argue from. So how did a
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: book quoted as prophecy in the New Testament end up
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: outside the Bible. This is the secret, in the sober
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: sense of the word, not a conspiracy of suppression, but
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 1: a slow and deliberate setting aside. In the earliest centuries,
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: several influential Christian writers held the Book of Enoch in
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: high regard, precisely because Jude had cited it. If an
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: apostle quoted it, they reasoned, it carried weight. But as
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: the Church worked to define its canon over the following centuries,
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: the tide turned against it. There were doctrinal worries. The
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: anochic story of angels mating with women had grown uncomfortable
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: for theologians, who increasingly insisted that spirits could not take
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: physical wives, the same discomfort that had pushed many toward
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: reading the so of God as the line of Seth.
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: There were questions of authorship and antiquity, doubts that a
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: book circulating in their own era could really have been
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: written by a man from before the flood, And there
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: was the simple momentum of canonization, which drew a firmer
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: and firmer line around an agreed list of books and
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: left the rest outside it. Influential figures who at once
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: defended Enoch came to dismiss it. By the time the
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: canon of the Western Church hardened, the Book of Enoch
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: was on the outside, read no longer as scripture, then
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: read less and less, then across most of Christendom, not
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: read at all. The result was a strange silence. The
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: text that offered the fullest answer to the riddle of
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: Genesis six, the book that explained who the sons of
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: God were and what the giants meant and where evil
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: came from. The book that the New Testament itself had quoted,
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 1: dropped almost entirely out of Western Christianity for more than
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: a thousand years. In the churches of Europe, it was
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: effectively lost, known by name from Jude's quotation, but the
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: book itself unavailable, untranslated, unread. A whole tradition about the
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: giants had been written down, treasured, cited as prophecy, and
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: then allowed to fade until even its content was forgotten.
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: That is the secret the Church set aside, not hidden
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: in the sense of locked away by conspirators, but quietly
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: dropped from the canon and left to vanish from memory.
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: Except it had not actually vanished. In one corner of
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: the Christian world, far from the councils that drew the
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: Western canon, the Book of Enoch had never been let go.
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: It had been preserved, copied, and treasured as scripture without interruption,
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: in a language and a church that the rest of
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: Christendom had largely forgotten. And in the modern age, that
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: surviving copy, together with ancient fragments pulled out of the
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: ground near the Dead Sea, would bring the lost book
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: back into the light and force the question the Church
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: had set aside to be asked all over again. The
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: corner of the Christian world that never let go of
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: the book was Ethiopia. While the churches of Europe drew
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: their cannon tighter and let the Book of Enoch slip
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: out of it, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church kept the book
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: inside its Bible, where it remains to this day. It
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: was preserved in gaze, the ancient liturgical language of Ethiopia,
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: copied by hand, and read as scripture. Across the centuries
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: when the rest of Christendom had forgotten it even existed.
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: This is one of the quiet ironies of the whole story.
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: The book that the dominantra dave dition set aside survived
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: complete in a Christian community that the dominant tradition often overlooked.
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: The fullest answer to the riddle of the Giants was
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: never actually lost, It was simply being kept somewhere. The
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: people asking the question had stopped looking. The Western rediscovery,
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: when it came, has the shape of an adventure story.
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: For centuries, European scholars knew the Book of Enoch only
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: as a rumor, a title quoted in Jude mentioned by
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: a handful of ancient writers, but the text itself unavailable,
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: presumed gone. Then in the eighteenth century, a Scottish traveler
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: named James Bruce, journeying in Ethiopia in search of the
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: source of the Nile, learned that the book Europe had
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: been missing for over a thousand years was sitting in
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: plain sight in the Ethiopian Bible. Brought copies back to Europe.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: It took several more decades before the full text was
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: translated into English and the Western world could finally read
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: in its entirety the book. The Church had set aside.
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: After more than a millennium of silence, the expanded story
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: of the Watchers and the Giants was back in circulation,
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: and readers could see for themselves what Jude had been quoting.
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: But the truly decisive confirmation came in the twentieth century,
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: and it came out of the ground. In the late
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: nineteen forties in caves above the western shore of the
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: Dead Sea, near a ruin called Cumran, a collection of
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: ancient Jewish manuscripts came to light. The Dead Sea Scrolls
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: the library of a community that had hidden its sacred
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: writings in clay jars sometime around the first century. Among
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: the thousands of fragments, scholars found pieces of the Book
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: of Enoch in its original Aramaic. This mattered enormously until then,
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: a skeptic could argue that the Book of Enoch was
• 1:23:10
  Speaker 1: a relatively late composition, perhaps even a Christian era invention,
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: its claim to ancient authorship a fiction. The Aramaic fragments
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: from Cumran demolished that argument. They proved that the Anochic
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: literature was genuinely ancient, circulating among Jews well before the
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: time of Jesus, old enough that the writers of the
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: New Testament could indeed have known it and drawn on it,
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: exactly as the Letter of jude appears to. The book
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: that Europe had recovered from Ethiopia was shown by the
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: scrolls from the desert to be far older than its
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: critics had supposed. Two separate streams of preservation, one in
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: an Ethiopian church, one in a Judean cave, converged in
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: the modern age to put the lost book back on
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: the table, authenticated and undeniable. So what, in the end
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: was the secret? It is worth being careful here because
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: the phrase invites the wrong picture. The secret the Church
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: hid was not a buried scroll guarded by conspirators, not
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: a deliberate cover up of a dangerous truth. The reality
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: is at once more ordinary and more interesting. A book
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: that once explained the giants, that named the watchers, described
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: their descent, accounted for the forbidden knowledge and the wandering spirits,
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: and the reason for the flood, was read, treasured, and
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: quoted as prophecy by the early Church, and then gradually
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: set aside as the cannon hardened and theological discomfort grew.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: What got hidden was not a fact, but a framework,
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: an entire way of reading Jeni, that the mainstream tradition
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: slowly stopped telling the angelic interpretation, the watchers, the cosmic
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: rebellion behind the flood. This was the older and more
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: widely held understanding, and it was quietly replaced by the
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: tamer readings that kept spirits out of the human bloodline.
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: The giants were domesticated, the strange verses were smoothed over,
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: and the book that preserved the wild original version was
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: allowed to fall out of memory in most of the
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: Christian world. The recovery of that book does not settle
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: which reading of Genesis six is correct. A careful person
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: can read the whole ark. We have traced the sons
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: of God, the Nephelim, the flood, the recurrence the anakim
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: Og Goliath, the descendants of Rapha, and still conclude that
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: the towering peoples of Canaan were tall human populations, that
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: the language of giants is the language of memory and fear,
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: that the Book of Enoch is a fascinating but legendary
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: expansion of a text that meant something more modest. The
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: evidence does not compel one answer. What it does is
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: restore the conversation for more than a thousand years, Western
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: Christianity carried on without the book that its own scripture
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: had quoted, and so it lost track of the very
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: question that book was written to answer. The rediscovery of
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: Enoch from Ethiopia and from Cumran does not hand down
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: a verdict. It hands back the question and insists that
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 1: it is a real question, anchored in real texts older
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: than the Church that set it aside, and the question
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: is this. The Bible opens its account of the human
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: story with four verses about beings who crossed a boundary
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: they were never meant to cross, and the children of
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: that crossing, the men of renown. It returns to those
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: beings again and again at the edge of the promised Land,
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: in the hills of Hebron, on the plains of Bashan,
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: in a valley called Ellah, as if the giants were
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: not an isolated oddity, but a thread running through the
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 1: whole national epic, a recurring reminder that something had gone
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 1: wrong in the deep past and kept resurfacing. And at
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: the end of the Old Testament era, a book arose
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: that tried to explain it all, was taken seriously enough
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: to be cited as prophecy, and was then quietly let go.
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: The Giants of the Bible are not finally a story
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: about height. They are a story about a boundary, a transgression,
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: and a memory that the tradition could neither fully explain
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: nor entirely forget. The waters of the flood were meant
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: to end them, and did not. The armies of Joshua
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: and David cut them down, and the line was extinguished
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: in the wars of a shepherd king. But the question
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: they raised outlived every giant whoever fell. It was written
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: into the first pages of Scripture, expanded in a book
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: the Church set aside, preserved in an Ethiopian Bible and
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: a dead sea cave, and carried against every effort to
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: forget it all the way down to us, Still open,
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: still strange, still waiting at the very beginning of the story,
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: for anyone willing to read those four verses slowly enough
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: to feel the floor tilt.