06 July 2023
According to archaeology, the average height of people in the Old Testament was around 5 feet (1.5m). Someone like Saul would have been about 5'6". I would have been a giant among them, though I'm less than 6' tall.
I am among those who regard the Masoretic Text of the Old Testament as quite suspect. A great many evangelicals consider it the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I'm not convinced. That collection of source documents (from 900 AD, long after the time of Christ), is the source of the notion that Goliath was 9'9". A more accurate text (from the Dead Sea Scrolls) says he was about 6'6". Still a giant by Israeli reckoning, but not a cartoon figure.
Heiser in The Unseen Realm notes that there has not been found in the whole region of Palestine and Syria any skeletal remains more than 5'6" from ancient times. Whatever happened to the "Sons of Anak" or Nephilim (giants), their skeletons weren't preserved. Goliath was one of them. Indeed, there's precious few skeletons that we can be sure were Israeli. Seems they didn't believe in embalming like the Egyptians did. There are lots of Egyptian remains going way back, but these were the elite who had better diets and got bigger. They average less than 6', though.
The whole point is not that the giants were so very large, but that they were dangerous in another sense. They were the products of messing around with demons. I remain convinced that Genesis 6 is not about demons literally having sex with humans, but that it refers to some other form of interaction. There would be no Hebrew phrase for it, so they used a euphemism. There's plenty of precedent for thinking so.
At any rate, the whole point is that some nations of humanity were at times deep into what we today call "Black Magic". It's mentioned in Moses as "detestable" stuff. I've written before that the boundary between fallen reality and the spiritual realm is quite irregular and not that solid. There are plenty of ways to commit what psychologists refer to as "psychic burglary" – poking around in places you have no business. Drug use, even alcohol, and various pagan rituals, etc., can all lead you into places God has forbidden. It's part of that Lust of the Eyes.
The problem is that everything you experience on the other side of that boundary is false without God's direct Presence. Indeed, it's the worst lie of all, just enough truth to be (for some) indistinguishable from what's true. It's rather like Satan's temptation in the Garden in that respect. He left out the part about Adam and Eve being forced into mortality.
The Antediluvian world was messing around in that territory. Humans consistently rejected God's path back to Eden, and kept insisting on trying to find other ways back in without having to confront their sinful natures. But the Flood didn't dampen that much; what we know of various cultures in the Ancient Near East testify of that kind of research into the Dark Arts. Thus, we have all those "giants" popping up again, since at least the time of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, after the Flood.
That kind of giantism seems to have disappeared after King David's time. His adventures are the last mention of giants (AKA Anakim, Rephaim, Nephilim). If you read through the various prophecies and commands God gave to Abraham and the heirs of the Promise, you get the point that God really was insistent on exterminating these vermin. All the cities that Joshua and Caleb destroyed, where they left no one alive, were Anakim cities, as well as cities where the pagan religions were so horribly depraved. The two went hand-in-hand: giants and nasty idolatry. Did you know that both Greeks and Romans considered the Canaanites to be really nasty, by comparison to their own relatively tame vices?
Consider this: Canaan Land was nothing before the Conquest. It was just a sort of "gas station" on the way between Mesopotamia and Egypt. All the Canaanites had to offer was food and pagan shrines; they built nothing of any consequence. Why? Because the demons were determined to keep God's people from conquering that land. The people there were utterly morally depraved; that was their only claim to fame. Their pagan deities provoked them to make it as hard as they could for Israel to take over.
But God gave it all into Israel's hands; He disabled their demonic protections. That is, until Israel got tired of the hard work of clearing out the filth, and then began mixing with the local pagan rituals. Idolatry is like treason and adultery all in one.
The business of poking around in that kind of moral darkness has always been around, but it's rising once again in ways it hasn't since Old Testament times (at least, in the West). So far, the efforts of pagans have been rather goofy, almost comical nonsense. But lately we've seen little hints here and there of a depravity that the Canaanites would recognize.
Giantism is not solely the product of consorting with demons. And I rather doubt we'll see a fresh rise in giantism of the sort that produced whole clans of Anakim. Rather, it's the rise in depravity, stuff that makes the worship of Molech look tame. You could reasonably say that child sexual abuse is just a step away from offering them to Molech, but that's almost tame compared to the stuff that has been seen lately.
I sense in my spirit that some have begun crossing that boundary like they did prior to the Flood. I think some of the transhuman stuff is roughly equivalent to it, seeking to make humans much more than they are naturally – not just bigger, but smarter, prettier, and much longer lived. It's the pursuit of false paradise. More than that, it's the determination to regain the authority to reshape reality.
It represents a fresh effort to slip back into Eden on any terms other than those God established. It's both old and new, a kind of transgression that could not have arisen in the past. Yet, it's not really that different from the original sin of trying to usurp God's throne.
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