Tall and Powerful People

TLB  Deuteronomy 1:28

What are we getting into? Our brothers who spied out the land have frightened us with their report. They say that the people of the land are tall and powerful, and that the walls of their cities rise high into the sky! They have even seen giants there—the descendants of the Anakim!’

Why is this ponderable?

 Tall and powerful people--they could be giants--pop up in multiple places in the Old Testament but this is the first reference to giants as the descendants of Anakim. Here's the scoop:  Joshua fought several battles with the Anakim and the Amorites. Eventually, he cut off the Anakim from the mountains: from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, from all the mountains of Judah, and from all the mountains of Israel; Joshua utterly destroyed them with their cities. None of the Anakim were left in the land of Israel; they remained only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdo (Joshua 11:21–22). These actions set the stage for the famous account of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel.

But the ponderable part about giants is not which tribes they ascended from but how they became giants. The earliest mention of giants in the Bible comes just prior to the Flood. Genesis 6:4 tells us:

There were giants [nephilim] on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

Books have been written on the meaning of this short passage. Who were these sons of God? Were they themselves giant humans or were they angelic beings who were given the power to procreate life. Perhaps God used them to jump-start the expansion of the human race beyond the immediate family of Adam. Cain and Able were the only sons of Adam mentioned by name in the Bible, but most readers assume that Adam and Eve had many more children--both male and female. Yet we must ponder how the grandchildren of Adam and Eve came about. If there were no other families living at the same time as Adam and Eve, then incest would have been the only route to grandchildren. This seems questionable given the many prohibitions against any form of incest in the Old Testament.

But if the Nephilim were agents of God's expansion of the human race, then their intercourse with the daughters of Adam and Eve would have resulted in grandchildren without the taint of incest. Since the prodigy of the grandchildren would have come from many Nephilim, each new family would have had enough genetic difference to intermarry with other families. Some would have inherited the height and strength of their giant forefathers. Others might have inherited the more normal size and strength of their mothers.  We don't know the answer but as we begin to understand the human genetic code and variants of DNA, we may conclude that God has been the alpha and will be the omega of human creation. It was not some random accident or grand coincidence.

One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.--J J Zavada