Recapping Wednesday

I went too long on this week’s episode, talking about “Goliath’s Brothers and Other Giants of the Bible.”

In that episode, I started with an explanation of how we see Nephilim descendants long after the flood of Noah (such as Goliath), despite the fact that the Nephilim seemingly perished in the waters of the flood. There are a few theories on this, and good strong Christian scholars on all sides, and you can hear my view on the first part of that episode.

After that, I started cataloguing the various specific Nephilim we see throughout the rest of the Bible. These include:

• Anak (mentioned in Numbers 13)

• Og, King of Bashan (defeated by Israel in Numbers 21)

• Sihon, King of the Amorites (possibly a Nephilim, also defeated in Numbers 21)

• Goliath (I Samuel 17)

And the four relatives of Goliath said to be killed by David’s mighty men in II Samuel 21:

• Ishi-Benob

• Saph

• Lahmi (or “Goliath II”)

• an unnamed six-fingered man

I am embarrassed to say this, but I missed a reference to Anak before recorded this past week’s episode. It sheds a little light on his identity:

Joshua 15:13-14 - ¹³ According to the commandment of the Lord to Joshua, he gave to Caleb the son of Jephunneh a portion among the people of Judah, Kiriath-arba, that is, Hebron (Arba was the father of Anak). ¹⁴ And Caleb drove out from there the three sons of Anak, Sheshai and Ahiman and Talmai, the descendants of Anak.

So there we have three more Nephilim named in Scripture: Sheshai, Ahiman and Talmai, though we don’t know much about them. We are also given another potential Nephilim in Arba.

Rabbit Trail: The 5 Giant Tribes

Now let’s take a minute and chat about the 5 giant tribes, which I didn’t have time to get to in the episode itself (which already ran 2.5 minutes too long).

I’ll first note that not every people group said to have giants is itself a Nephilim race. For example, the Philistines often had giants living among them, but most of the Philistines themselves were not giants. The same with the Canaanites, which referred to a variety of types of people, including giants. I would say the same with the Amorites. God says in:

Amos 2:9 - Yet it was I who destroyed the Amorite before them,
 whose height was like the height of the cedars
 and who was as strong as the oaks;
I destroyed his fruit above
 and his roots beneath.

Because the Amorites lived in such close proximity to the Rephaim and Og, King of Bashan- and because their height is described in this way- and because they’re repeatedly mentioned in scripture alongside Bashan- it seems probable that they had some giants among them and that their king, Sihon, was a giant himself. However, the Bible never explicitly says this, and not every Amorite was a giant.

There are 5 clans of the giants mentioned in the scriptures, three of which were already mentioned in the episode.

#1 - Nephilim

These are the immediate offspring of a Watcher/woman union. As I discussed in this week’s episode, I believe there were two waves of Nephilim: those before the flood, and those after the flood. The second-wave Nephilim produced the following tribes we’ll discuss.

#2 - Anakim

The Anakim descended from Anak and come up in Numbers 13.

Numbers 13:33 - And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.

This was a clan of giants who lived among the Canaanites.

#3 - Rephaim

These are the people of Og and lived in Bashan, the location of the first transgression of the Watchers (before the flood), a region of spiritual darkness throughout the rest of the Bible. This is close to the same area where Jesus healed the demoniac, and also the same area known in Jesus’ day as the “Gates of Hell” (Caesarea Philippi).

Deuteronomy 3:11 -  (For only Og the king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. Behold, his bed was a bed of iron. Is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? Nine cubits was its length, and four cubits its breadth, according to the common cubit.)

In the book of Joshua, as he and Israel defeat the Canaanites and slaughter or drive them away, it seems that the Anakim and Rephaim merged together and fled to the Philistine cities in the Gaza Strip area.

Joshua 11:21-22 - ²¹ And Joshua came at that time and cut off the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua devoted them to destruction with their cities. ²² There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain.

#4 - Emim

Also in Deuteronomy 2-3, as Moses is recounting the history of the Israelites and their wilderness wanderings, he mentions another tribe of giants who had already been wiped out by other people.

Deuteronomy 2:10-12 - ¹⁰ (The Emim formerly lived there, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim. ¹¹ Like the Anakim they are also counted as Rephaim, but the Moabites call them Emim. ¹² The Horites also lived in Seir formerly, but the people of Esau dispossessed them and destroyed them from before them and settled in their place, as Israel did to the land of their possession, which the Lord gave to them.)

Emim means “the terrifying ones.” The Emim broke off the Rephaim and lived in the territory of the Moabites. However, they had already been wiped out prior to Moses and crew arriving on the scene. In fact, we’ll get a clue about when that was in just a minute.

#5 - Zamzummim

Moses also mentions another giant group from those days: the Zamzummim, which means “buzzers.” Yeah, I got nothing on that one.

Deuteronomy 2:17-22 - ¹⁷ the Lord said to me, ¹⁸ ‘Today you are to cross the border of Moab at Ar. ¹⁹ And when you approach the territory of the people of Ammon, do not harass them or contend with them, for I will not give you any of the land of the people of Ammon as a possession, because I have given it to the sons of Lot for a possession.’ ²⁰ (It is also counted as a land of Rephaim. Rephaim formerly lived there—but the Ammonites call them Zamzummim— ²¹ a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim; but the Lord destroyed them before the Ammonites, and they dispossessed them and settled in their place, ²² as he did for the people of Esau, who live in Seir, when he destroyed the Horites before them and they dispossessed them and settled in their place even to this day…)

These “buzzers” also broke off the Rephaim, like the Emim did, and they lived in the land of the Ammonites.

I’ve mentioned before that we don’t quite know how far back the second-wave Nephilim originated, but it must have been pretty early after Noah’s flood, because the Rephaim, Emim and Zuzim/Zamzummim are already present in a story of Abraham’s nephew Lot getting kidnapped early in the book of Genesis.

Genesis 14:5-6 - ⁵ In the fourteenth year Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him came and defeated the Rephaim in Ashteroth-karnaim, the Zuzim in Ham, the Emim in Shaveh-kiriathaim, ⁶ and the Horites in their hill country of Seir as far as El-paran on the border of the wilderness.

The Number 5

One aspect of this I find interesting is how the No. 5 keeps coming up repeatedly in conjunction with the Philistines and Nephilim.

• 5 Nephilim tribes

• 5 cities of the Philistines: Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron and Gath

• Joshua 13 says they have 5 rulers

• If you recall from a recent rabbit trail email on “emerods in the secret parts,” the Philistines had to craft 5 golden emerods and 5 golden mice. (if you missed that rabbit trail, you can read all about it here, though I encourage you not to. Some mysteries are better left unsolved.)

• 5 giants at the time of David

• So David took 5 stones from the brook

In fact, I have a theory that 5 is the devil’s number.

We all know that 7 is God’s number. One might think that 6 would be Satan’s, considering that the mark of the Antichrist is 666. However, Revelation 13:18 tells us that it is the number of man. I think 5 is Satan’s number.

This correlates with Satan’s famous 5 “I Will” declarations in Isaiah 14:13-14, which we’ll probably be looking at in an episode soon.

That’s enough for today. Until next time, have a great week, and a Weird Wednesday!

-Luke