Giants in Ancient Texts begin with four verses of Genesis and a word nobody has fully explained. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, the text says. The sons of God had taken the daughters of men. They were the mighty men of old, the men of renown, and then Genesis says nothing more about them.
Everything that came after grew from that silence. Jewish writers of the third and second centuries before Christ filled the gap. They gave the giants a whole history: their fathers, their crimes, their dreams and their end. One of those books survives only in scraps from the Dead Sea caves, and it gave the giants names.
This post follows the giants from Genesis through the Book of Enoch to the Book of Giants. Then it looks out at the wider ancient world. The aim is to see what each text added and why. The last section deals briefly with the modern claims. They have less to do with ancient texts than their supporters think.
Giants in Ancient Texts: What the Bible Itself Says
The Hebrew Bible knows several kinds of giants and never quite sorts them out. The Nephilim of Genesis 6 return in Numbers 13, where the spies in Canaan report seeing them. Beside them, the spies say, they felt like grasshoppers. Deuteronomy 2 adds the Rephaim, the Anakim, the Emim and the Zamzummim. All of them are tall peoples who once held the land.
Og of Bashan is the one giant the Bible measures, and even then it measures his furniture rather than the man. His iron bedstead was nine cubits long and four wide, Deuteronomy 3 says, which is about four meters by two. This blog has a full post on King Og of Bashan and the traditions that grew around him.
Goliath is the other famous case, but his height depends on which manuscript you read. In the Hebrew text he stands six cubits and a span, close to three meters. The Greek Septuagint and the oldest Hebrew copy from Qumran give four cubits and a span, about two meters. On that reading he was merely very tall.
The word giant itself is a translation choice, and it matters. When the Septuagint translators put Genesis into Greek, they rendered Nephilim as gigantes. That was the name of the earth-born enemies of the Olympian gods. Every later reader in Greek and Latin met the Nephilim through that word, and the Greek myth came with it.
The Book of Enoch Gives the Giants Fathers
The Book of the Watchers, the oldest part of 1 Enoch, was written in the third century BCE. It takes the sons of God of Genesis 6 and makes them two hundred angels. They descend on Mount Hermon under a leader named Shemihazah. They swear an oath, take wives and teach humanity metalwork, cosmetics, sorcery and the reading of the stars.
Their children are the giants, and Enoch describes them at length where Genesis said nothing at all. They grow to three thousand cubits in the Ethiopic text, a figure meant to sound absurd. First they eat everything people produce, then the people, and finally each other, drinking the blood.
Then the earth cries out, and four archangels carry the complaint to heaven. God sends the flood and binds the Watchers under the hills until the judgment, and he sets the giants against each other in war. This blog has a post on the Watchers that follows the story through the whole book.
Two later chapters also explain what happened to the giants after they died. Their bodies perished in the flood, but their spirits, born of angels and women, belonged to neither world. So they remain on earth as evil spirits, Enoch says, and afflict humanity until the end.
That idea had a long future, and the Book of Jubilees repeats it. Noah prays there for relief from the spirits that lead his grandchildren astray. God allows a tenth of them to remain under Mastema. In this tradition the demons that the gospels cast out are the ghosts of the giants.
The Book of Giants: The Giants Get Names and Dreams
The Book of Giants tells the same story from the other side, and it was lost for sixteen centuries. Fragments in Aramaic turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of them in Cave 4, which Bedouin found in 1952. Smaller pieces came from Caves 1, 2 and 6, and the whole collection amounts to a few hundred words. It fills perhaps a dozen scraps.
For decades nobody knew what those scraps were, until Józef Milik matched them in 1971 against a Manichaean text from central Asia. Mani had adopted the Book of Giants as scripture in the third century CE. Pieces of his version survived at Turfan in Middle Persian and Sogdian. This blog has a post on the Manichaean Book of Giants and one that compares the two versions in detail.
The Qumran copies date from the first century BCE and the first century CE, and the book itself is probably a century older. Anyone can see the fragments online at the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library. Loren Stuckenbruck’s 1997 edition remains the standard study. What survives is enough to see the shape of the story, but not to read it straight through.
Names, Dreams and a Flight to Enoch
Here the giants have names, and two of them have nightmares. Ohyah and Hahyah are the sons of Shemihazah. Hahyah dreams of a garden where two hundred trees fall to the axe until three roots remain. Ohyah dreams of a tablet being washed clean, or of the ruler of heaven descending to judge. This blog has read the dreams of the Nephilim on their own.
Because the giants cannot interpret their own dreams, they send Mahaway, the son of the Watcher Baraqel, to find Enoch. He flies across the desert to the scribe at the ends of the earth, and Enoch sends back a tablet. It says that the flood is coming and the Watchers will be bound, and it offers the giants nothing.
The most surprising name in the text is Gilgamesh. He appears as one of the giants, alongside Hobabish, who is the monster Humbaba from the Mesopotamian epic. This is the only place in ancient Jewish literature that names Gilgamesh. This blog has a post on what he is doing there.
Why the giants deserve a book of their own is a fair question, and the fragments answer it. Until then Enoch had shown the giants only from the outside, as monsters. The Book of Giants lets them fear the judgment they cannot escape, and that fear is the book’s whole point.
The Giants in the Apocrypha
The books of the Apocrypha remember the giants too, and they remember them the way Enoch did. Sirach, writing around 180 BCE, says that God did not forgive the ancient giants who revolted in their might. The line comes in a list of the proud whom God brought low. Sirach 16 sets them beside Sodom and the generation of the wilderness.
Baruch 3 says that the giants were born in the land, famous of old, great in stature and expert in war. God did not choose them, the text goes on, or give them the way of knowledge, so they perished through their folly. The Wisdom of Solomon adds that while the arrogant giants were perishing, the hope of the world took refuge on a raft, meaning Noah.
Third Maccabees uses the giants as a precedent for God’s judgment on the arrogant, in the company of the people of Sodom. In short, in all four books the giants stand for one thing, which is strength without wisdom. That was the moral the second-century readers took from Genesis 6, and it is the one the Apocrypha passed on.
The Giants of Other Peoples
The Jewish giants had neighbors, and the writers knew it. Mesopotamia had the apkallu, the seven sages from before the flood who taught humanity the arts of civilization. That story looks like the Watchers’ teaching turned upside down. It also had Gilgamesh, two-thirds divine and a builder of walls, whom the Book of Giants later recruited as a villain.
Greece had the Gigantes, born from the earth when the blood of Ouranos fell on it, who fought the gods and lost. Hesiod tells that story in the Theogony, and the Pergamon altar carved it in marble in the second century BCE. The Septuagint’s choice of gigantes for the Nephilim invited every Greek reader to see the two rebellions as one.
Later traditions kept adding, and the Qur’an knows Harut and Marut, two angels in Babylon who taught sorcery. Islamic writers connected them to the Watchers. Medieval Christian readers put Og, Goliath and the Nephilim into a single line of monstrous ancestors. Augustine, in The City of God, took the giants to be real. The sons of God who fathered them, he argued, were men of the line of Seth rather than angels.
What every version shares is the reading Enoch fixed. Giants are what happens when a boundary breaks, between heaven and earth or between gods and mortals. Their defeat is the boundary restored.
What Modern Claims Get Wrong
Giants in Ancient Texts have a modern afterlife that has little to do with the texts. Photographs of giant skeletons circulate online every year. Every one traces back to a photo-editing contest or an old hoax. The Cardiff Giant of 1869 was a block of gypsum sold as a petrified man, and it still draws visitors as a fraud.
The bones that fooled earlier ages were real, however, even if they were not human. Augustine himself describes a molar tooth he saw on the shore at Utica, large enough to make a hundred of his own. It almost certainly came from an elephant or a mammoth. In fact fossils of large animals lay behind most ancient reports of giant bones.
The alien theory, popular since the 1970s, reads the Watchers as visitors from space. It rests on the text no more than the skeletons do. First Enoch is explicit that the Watchers are angels who left heaven. Turning them into astronauts removes the one thing the ancient author cared about, which was their sin.
Still, none of this means the texts are worthless as history. They record what Jews of the second century believed about the world before the flood. They also explain why those Jews found evil so hard to root out. That is a real subject, and above all it needs no skeletons.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Book of Giants? A Jewish text from around the second century BCE that retells Genesis 6 from the giants’ side. It survives in Aramaic fragments from Qumran and in a Manichaean version from central Asia. It gives the giants names, dreams and a mission to Enoch.
Are the Nephilim the same as the giants? In the Greek and Latin Bibles they are, because the translators used the word for giants. The Hebrew word Nephilim has an uncertain meaning, though most scholars connect it with falling.
How tall does the Bible say the giants were? It gives figures only for Og’s bed, which was nine cubits long, and for Goliath. He stands six cubits and a span in the Hebrew text, four in the Greek. The three thousand cubits of 1 Enoch are deliberate exaggeration.
Why is Gilgamesh in the Book of Giants? The author knew the Mesopotamian epic, probably through Aramaic versions. He used its hero and his enemy Humbaba as two of the giants. It is the only mention of Gilgamesh in ancient Jewish writing.
Giants in Ancient Texts: Why They Lasted
Giants in Ancient Texts outlived every civilization that wrote about them, and the reason is not their size. Genesis gave them four verses, Enoch gave them a crime and a punishment, and the Book of Giants gave them fear. By the time Sirach wrote, a giant meant a proud man whom God had already judged.
That is the meaning that reached the Apocrypha, the church fathers and the medieval bestiaries. It is still the one that makes the texts worth reading. The skeletons were never there, but the warning always was.
Check out the author’s book here: The Book of Giants.
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