Giants
- stephenstrent7
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
We are told in Genesis 6:1-17, “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them…And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth…And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.”
There are some very interesting and some very odd statements in those 17 verses, especially about why the Great Flood occurred. There are phrases such as “sons of God,” fair “daughters of men,” “giants in the earth,” and “mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” If those verses are read carefully and pondered deeply, they don’t make a lot of sense, and they certainly don’t flow smoothly from one to another. Why, for example, would God “…not always strive with man, for…he…is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years?” What does that mean? To me, these verses are much more easily understood if they are considered as epic poetry. This is not to say that the Great Flood did not occur or that Noah’s family was not one of the families caught up in that flood. It may be, however, that the whys of the Great Flood are more the stuff of legend than part of the what happened story.
Just as an example, David “Davy” Crockett was very much a real person (1786 – 1836).1 Many people know him best from the Ballad of Davy Crocket, written by Thomas Blackburn in 1954, although Mr. Crockett apparently preferred to be called David, not Davy, and is not known to have ever worn a coon-skin cap. That turns out to be very disappointing to me, as I spent most of my seventh year of life wearing a coon-skin cap. Crockett was born in Green County, in what is now Tennessee, but was part of North Carolina when he was born. However, North Carolina doesn’t have the same poetic ring as Tennessee, and doesn’t rhyme well with “the land of the free” or “knew every tree.” He was not born on a mountain top but in a river valley, with no mountains in sight. He did apparently kill a number of bears in his career but probably didn’t begin at the age of three. It turns out that ten or twelve doesn’t rhyme very well with tree or Tennessee, or even North Carolina, for that matter. Crockett did serve in congress for a spell but did not patch up the crack in the Liberty Bell. So, here is a very good example of a real person, whose life is much different from the popular story.
It is my opinion that Noah was a real person, who went through a real flood, but whose story was greatly embellished through years of retelling. It is also my opinion that many of those strange, poetic phrases in Genesis 6 are part of that embellishment. For example, the phrase “sons of God” has really been batted around over the centuries. Apparently, thousands of people, for hundreds of years have believed that those sons of God were wicked, disobedient angels who were attracted to earthly women. Another idea, also apparently widely accepted is that they were godly descendants of Seth who were attracted to the beautiful but wicked descendants of Cain. Another idea is that they were men who accepted God but were attracted to women who were non-believers. None of these explanations make a lot of sense to me because even the last explanation, which seems the most reasonable, would not account for the majority of people on the earth at the time, but the scripture says, “…for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.” All three explanations also suggest that there was not a single righteous woman on earth, except in Noah’s family and that the men, who were originally good, had gone after the evil women. This sounds like a story made up by some man who didn’t like women very much. It has been my experience that women tend to be more spiritual-minded then men, which doesn’t fit with this account. The traditions built up around the flood story, based on the philosophies of men, in my opinion, have become a major impediment to uncovering the truth.
The next term, “giants in the earth” is even more bizarre. Apparently, the Hebrew word is Naphil, and many translations of the Bible retain the phrase “Nephilim in the earth.” The King James Version of the Bible translates the word to “giants,” but other interpretations are derived from the Hebrew root n-ph-l, “fall” and suggest that the Nephilim were mighty warriors who caused others to fall in battle, or were fallen, or uncircumcised men themselves. These giants, perhaps evil, violent giants, or Nephilim are thought by many people to have been the offspring of matings between the sons of God and the daughters of men—more philosophies of men.
Nephilim, or giants, feature in many other stories from ancient times. For example, the Israelites were required to wander in the wilderness for forty years because the spies they sent to Cannon were afraid of the people there. “And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it. But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we. And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants [Nephilim], the sons of Anak, which come of the giants [Nephilim]: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”2
We read in Ezekiel 32:27, “And they shall not lie with the mighty that are fallen [Nephilim] of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to hell with their weapons of war: and they have laid their swords under their heads, but their iniquities shall be upon their bones, though they were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living.” J.C. Greenfield proposed that the Nephilim of Genesis 6 are very similar to the Sumerian apkallu, seven legendary heroes of human origin but possessing the wisdom of the gods.3
In 1705, Cotton Mather, the very opinionated and influential Colonial Puritan minister, taught that fossilized teeth and leg bones discovered near Albany, New York were the remains of a Nephilim who had died in the Great Flood. He declared, “The Giants that once groaned under the waters, are now under the Earth, and their Dead Bones are lively Proofs of the Mosaic history.”4 Modern paleontologists identified the bones and teeth as those of a mastodon. Near the end of the eighteenth century, one-foot-long three-toed dinosaur tracks discovered on a Connecticut farm were declared by the local pastor to be the footprints of Noah’s raven which had perched on that rock before making its return flight to the ark. The same minister pronounced dinosaur bones found not far away as being the “remains of giant humans.”5 False traditions seem to be easily made but are difficult to unmake.
In 1869, William Newell hired two men, Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, to dig a well on his farm near Cardiff, New York. About three feet below the surface, they unearthed a colossal stone human figure over ten feet tall. Newell was ecstatic over the discovery. He set up a tent over the “grave” site, dubbed the petrified human remains “the Cardiff Giant,” advertised the find, and charged the curious 25ȼ each to visit the astounding relic. Andrew White, the first president of Cornell University, traveled to Cardiff to see this wonder, and described the scene, “The roads were crowded with buggies, carriages, and even omnibuses from the city, and with lumber-wagons from the farms--all laden with passengers.” The business was so brisk that after two days of exhibit, Newell raised the entry fee to 50ȼ. White continued his description, “An air of great solemnity pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper.” He stated that while he was at the site, he overheard, “a very excellent doctor of divinity, pastor of one of the largest churches in Syracuse,” declare, ‘“Is it not strange that any human being, after seeing this wonderfully preserved figure, can deny the evidence of his senses, and refuse to believe, what is so evidently the fact, that we have here a fossilized human being, perhaps one of the giants mentioned in Scripture?” White, however, was not as spiritually moved by the object. He immediately recognized the “corpse” as nothing more than a sculpture, and not a very good one at that.6
It turns out that the “Cardiff Giant” was a hoax perpetrated by Newell and his cousin George Hull, a Binghamton cigar maker, who had hired a German sculptor to create the “petrified giant,” which Newell and Hull then buried on the Newell farm. White concluded, “…in spite of all scientific reasons to the contrary, the work was very generally accepted as a petrified human being of colossal size…” Hull, an atheist, had created the hoax to criticize gullible Christians who were willing to believe anything related to the flood story.7
But that’s not the end of the story. P.T Barnum, the master showman and hoaxster himself, decided to cash in on the Cardiff Giant. When Newell and Hull apparently turned down Barnum’s offer to buy the “mummy” for fifty thousand dollars, he sent a spy to covertly model the giant’s shape in a lump of wax. Then, with measurements from the newspaper, Barnum had a plaster replica made of the statue, which he put on display in a New York museum, drawing crowds of visitors. Newell and Hull, along, it seems, with David Hannum, who was involved in a traveling exhibit of the original Cardiff Giant, tried to sue Barnum, but the judge in the case said he would consider the issue if Newell and Hull would bring the original to court to testify in his own behalf, and he threw out the case.8
The Cardiff Giant was so famous that Mark Twain made him the main character of his “A Ghost Story,” in which a large, clumsy phantom, the ghost of the Cardiff Giant, barges into a hotel room in Manhattan looking for his body so he can be reburied on Newell’s farm. The hotel guest informs the apparition, “Why you poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your troubles for nothing--you have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself--the real Cardiff Giant is in Albany! Confound it, don't you know your own remains?”9 And, apparently, George Hull made another petrified man, this time, allegedly, of the strong man and boxer, William Muldoon, in Beulah, Colorado. Huge crowds lined up to see that phenomenon, at 50ȼ a pop.10 It appears that there is one born every day.
References
1. Michael Wallis, David Crockett: The Lion of the West, Norton & Company, NY, 2011
2. Numbers 13:30-33
3. Arthur Peake, editor, A Commentary on the Bible, Jack, London, 1919
4. Levin, David, Giants in the Earth: Science and the Occult in Cotton Mather's Letters to the Royal Society, The William and Mary Quarterly, 45, No. 4 (Oct., 1988), pp. 751-770
7. Ibid
8. Ibid
9. Sustana, Catherine, A Closer Look at ‘A Ghost Story’ by Mark Twain, thoughtco.com/closer-look-ghost-story-mark-twain-2990449, 2019
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