9 July 2008
Biblical Giants and Dinosaur Bones
Posted by MSH under: Giants; Uncategorized .
Aeneas asked a question in a comment to an earlier post about the faked giant human skeleton:
I’d like you to comment on the dinosaur bones angle as well. It is certainly not an unreasonable theory for all the stories of giants in the past, including the Bible. I lean towards believing your theories on Gen. 6, but I think this one should at least be considered.
Aeneas (and others) may not be familiar with all my views of Genesis 6, namely the giant issue, so I thought I’d answer this question with a post.
I don’t think for a minute that the biblical giants were 10-20-30 feet tall. I think they were (like today) 6-8 feet tall. The giants of the Bible were not unusually tall BY OUR STANDARDS. Based on human skeletal remains that have been recovered from the biblical period (and there aren’t many - they didn’t embalm, and less than 10% of the Holy Land has been excavated by any standard of thoroughness), the average male height was a few inches over five feet tall, with women shorter. This is typical around the world for ancient times. Great height was unusual. The average height in modern times on into today is greater because of better nutrition, longer life spans, medical advances, etc. I personally don’t believe that the biblical giants were much over seven feet tall, which would have been HUGE compared to the norm (imagine walking into a settlement where 6-7 feet was the norm when everyone you knew was a foot shorter!). According to the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew OT, which has as a slightly different text than the one Jews have used since the first century AD) and Dead Sea Scroll readings for the Goliath story, Goliath was actually 6 feet 6 inches (and for those who wonder, it is Og of Bashan’s COFFIN that measures around 12 feet, not Og - read Deut 3:11 - so we really don’t know how tall he actually was — I’d guess he’s within my proposed range). That is the best reading for the original text based on the cumulative text-critical issues in 1 Sam 17-18 and the broader book of Samuel itself (i.e., textual critics have long known that the Masoretic text of 1 Samuel is in poor shape in many places, compared to the Septuagint, which is frequently agreed to by the Dead Sea scroll text of Samuel). If yo u know Hebrew and might enjoy reading about the textual mess of 1 samuel, I’d recommend P. Kyle McCarter’s 1 Samuel commentary in the Anchor Bible series. There are more thorough and technical discussions of the text of 1 Samuel, but this one is more readable (still, it won’t be easy for those uninitiated in academic biblical studies and textual criticism).
Consequently, there is no need to appeal to dinosaur bones for the biblical giants. Dinosaur bones as the explanation for purported giants in non-biblical writings like Josephus are a good explanation. That issue was the subject of Adrienne Mayor’s Princeton dissertation (or maybe it was a thesis - can’t recall just now) which was published:
The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times.
Mayor now has a second volume, devoted to the same issue in Native American legends:
Fossil Legends of the First Americans
Good question, Aeneas!
8 Comments so far...
mayor Says:
9 July 2008 at 2:52 pm.
I agree–I think the “giants” reported in the Old Testament and other ancient texts were people who were a foot or so taller than the observers. On the topic of biblical giants such as Goliath, Anakim, Philistines, and other giants in antiquity, you might be interested in my article:
A. Mayor. “Giants in Ancient Warfare” MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History 11,2 (1999): 99-105.
Note: First Fossil Hunters was not a Princeton dissertation, nonfiction book published by Princeto University Press
I enjoy reading PaleoBabble!
Adrienne Mayor
MSH Says:
9 July 2008 at 10:40 pm.
mayor: Wow - Adrienne, I’m honored to have you as a reader! If you didn’t get some sort of degree for your work behind First Fossil Hunters, you should have. One of the coolest books in ancient studies I’ve seen in a long time.
I looked for the article in the databases for which I have access from home, but none of them could get me to a full text version. I’ll look it up at the local university. I did find some other full-text goodies you’ve produced, one of which I’ll post about.
Thanks!
Matt... Says:
10 July 2008 at 8:14 am.
Just wondering how you get “coffin” from Deut 3:11. I’ve always seen it translated as “bed” and checking half a dozen translations on Biblegateway.com translates it as “bed” or “bedstead”. Do you think the triple emphasis on great size (he was a nephilim from the nephilim and his bed was 6′x13′) is a matter of exaggeration by the author?
Then there’s the well-known Num 13:33 “we felt like grasshoppers next to them” that suggests to me a greater size difference than a foot or so. I suppose that could also be a matter of exaggeration as well but that explanation seems to make the text say less than it actually says.
aeneas Says:
10 July 2008 at 10:06 am.
Thanks for the insightful answer and also the great references. What about how Gen. 6 fits into a historical timeline, and how does what we know (or at least think we know) about primitive man fit with the nephilim? Although I was brought up going to church, my education was from a strict scientific perspective. Now I’m trying to reconcile that with this new paradigm. How does the history of dinosaurs, Neanderthals, primitive man etc. fit in with what we learn from Gen.–in your opinion?
MSH Says:
10 July 2008 at 10:46 am.
Matt: the word for “bed” here is refers to a piece of furniture on which one reclined. Many scholars consider it a sarcophagus. Even if it was a bed, we still don’t know how tall he was - taller than most others, for sure.
I don’t think Num 13.33 requires that the Anakim be any larger than a foot or so taller than any Israelite - the simile used would still apply. Sort of like a junior high school football team’s offensive line lining up against the NY Giants defensive front four. No comparison.
MSH Says:
10 July 2008 at 11:20 am.
aeneas: Dating anything pre-Flood is a fairly hopeless proposition. There are no external chronological correlations (unless you opt for a local flood - but that means you have to guess which flood sediment layer in a given ANE site is the biblical flood - hazardous). The only way to approach chronology here is do to the old Bishop Ussher thing - take the years of the lifespans of the people so described by the OT and count backward. The problem with that is that (a) the textual traditions don’t agree; (b) the genealogies may be artificial (i.e., selective for some literary purpose, like the one in Matthew is).
I don’t see dinosaurs in the Bible at all (Leviathan, Rahab, and Behemoth are not dinosaurs - they are mytho-poetic chaos monsters that are also found in other ancient texts, like that of Ugarit). I also don’t see any evidence for Neanderthal in the biblical text.
aeneas Says:
10 July 2008 at 11:55 am.
Ok, let me try and ask this more clearly. In your opinion, does the sequence of events laid out by evolutionists–besides God’s interaction with people– sit well with you? That is, do you think that when early man first appeared on the scene, God decided to round up a couple of them as his representatives? If so, would Neanderthals, or any other simian related creatures, be creatures that simply did not get chosen as imagers of God? I know we can’t say for sure, but I simply would like your view of it because I can’t quite sort it all out.
MSH Says:
11 July 2008 at 10:32 am.
aeneas: No. I believe the jury is still out on a lot of this stuff. It still remains to be seen whether Neanderthal was not human; are there transitional forms ? (the transitional fossils (like Lucy) were reconstructed with fragments of a skull and a femur that was found dozens of yards away - it was just assumed that they belonged together). That sort of thing. I’m willing to consider the idea that God used such beings as a starting point for humans, or that humans evolved as part of a divine plan, but I need to see more evidence (and better evidence) than what is offered. I say this because the text of Genesis has some language in it that lends to evolutionary ideas. I think genetics will at some point be helpful one way or the other, but I also think that Darwinists are so radicalized by this time (note the reaction to EXPELLED and intelligent design in general) that any discipline that shows the science of human evolution as accepted in their camp today is wrong, it would be censored (until, presumably, they could cook something up that would be “more proof”). Science is historically VERY intolerant of any ideas that challenge accepted paradigms - it usually takes generations to die off before attitudes change.
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