Chasing Giants

      "Chasing Giants"
      No. That is not hyperbole worthy a national level politician, that is exactly what the Desk is doing.
      Chasing Giants.

      Or rather, chasing the text that is known as "the Book of Giants", and while we're at it, the various legends and myths that surround those individuals, which includes our old friend Thrax, whom we'll check in with later.

      First off, some introductions. "Book of Giants", these are the Desk's readers, passers by, and a few folk that are simply curious about the title....
      People, this is The Book Of Giants, copies of... , or at least partial copies of which, were found in the Qumran caves as part of the Dead Sea Scroll cache. The language in some of the fragments is ancient even given the rest of that library. In some of the fragments, the Syriac / Aramaic language used was some of the oldest forms of that language ever identified. See the links below for translations of the recompiled fragments and an outside version of the story as reconstructed.

      The text of the most complete versions echoes, or perhaps even foreshadows what is seen in First Enoch, The Book of Jubilees, and even the Book of Genesis. And has more than a passing similarity to parts of The Epic of Gilgamesh, who is even mentioned as having spoke to one of the primary players in the story named Ohya(Ohyah / Ahyah) in some of the fragments recovered at Qumran caves, see link below.
      The story related in Giants appears to be the basis of the statement in Genesis 6 about how the Sons of God checked out the Daughters of Men and... bad things happened.
      The Book of Giants however goes into detail about the boasting of the giants, how they abused all and sundry, and got heavy into whatever debauchery suited them at the time. Apparently, Gilgamesh, a well known giant, was one of those, and the person he spoke to, Ohya, who, as the son of one of the 'angels' was probably a giant himself, went on a trip and spoke to Enoch, who interpreted a dream for him. Unfortunately Enoch has some bad news for them, he tells them that the Archangel Raphael (as mentioned in the Book of Enoch and our study of the Man of God himself, see links below) is coming to bring destruction, and later a great flood will ruin their day. But he also tells them they if they stop being evil, and pray, things may yet work out for them.
      Apparently the giants didn't listen to him. And not long after, most of them came to a bad end. Or at least a wet one. Perhaps that's why the Flood lasted for over a year, because giants can tread water longer than regular people.

      There are other giants associated with the Bible. Such as the Nephilim from Genesis 6, and even Post Flood, such as the Rephaim / Rephaites (see Genesis 14, Joshua 12, and other references), real and rumored, but even Goliath would be small considering some of the others seen around the world that belonged to the Giant's Guild.

      And, as this is a huge topic (all puns at no extra charge), we're going to do a bit of globe hopping just to hit the high points (ignore pun, keep going), and then come to some sort of conclusion.

      Shall we head east to begin?
      China is a well known ancient civilization. But that's something of a misstatement. Yes, while China has been united as a country since about 200 BC under the Qin Imperial Throne, give and take a few local spats and disagreements. Its cultural history goes back much further. Into the mists of prehistoric history as it were, even before the times of small independent kingdoms who were almost constantly at war with each other.
      And there, in that mist, we find giants.
      A giant named Pan Gu had an ax, which he used to help create the world. There was another giant named Kua Fu who ran after the sun to capture it, which didn't work out so well, see link below to the story. Then you have the Yeren, which one may think of as the Chinese version of Sasquatch, who have been seen in the hills for two thousand years. And there are other stories of the giants besides those depending on which ancestral area you're talking about.
      One thing that the Chinese myths make clear is that all of these figures, except the Yeren, were from ancient times. As for the Yeren, some expeditions to find them deep in the forests and hills of the Hubei region and on into the Qinling Mountains still go out once in awhile.

      Similar tales wind their way through Korean and Japanese mythology, again, going back to their creation myths and the events just after.
      As with most of these stories, including some from the New World, the Giants come to a bad end.

      One of those typical bad ends is found in the stories of the Giants from the Indian Subcontinent. The names are somewhat different as you go through the tales from the various areas of India, but the trend is the same. The giants, including the ones known as the Daitas and the Rakshasa (which may be the same), become jealous of the gods, and think they can either supplant the gods, or can steal their power and possessions. In either case, it doesn't work out for the giants as they had hoped.
      In some of the religious tales from India we are told how Indra, one of the primary gods, fought against the Asuras, who we find out were both giants and demons, and how all of that went. See link below for a discussion of that text at Sacred-Texts.com

      Moving southwest of there we arrive on the African Continent, and... you thought the ancient history of China and India was a confused and conflicting muddle of ancient stories, they're amateurs when compared to Africa. Now, where were we? Oh, yes....
      You have a giant from the Hausa people in the western portion of the continent called Dodo that likes baobab trees. And in the central region there was Mbombo who the Kuba say was the Creator, but then did some other things too. And you can run across giants in the tales of Ancient Ethiopia and South Africa that include others.
      There's a giant site below, no, that's not a pun, the MythLok.com site is enormous, and covers myths from around the world. The page linked below is their African index.

      We'll make one quick stop in South America and check in with the Inca's Creator called Viracocha.
      Back in the good old days, Viracocha created a race of giants to live on the earth. They turned against him, doing all sorts of bad things against his expressed wishes. So, Viracocha wiped them out with a massive flood, and then he made humans.
      But we've never seen a story that is something like that before. Right?

      Other giants were just really unpleasant to have as neighbors. Enslaving regular humans, or even hunting them for food. There's links below to resources about Native North American histories involving giants that were more human sized than some of the others we've mentioned.

"Chief Rolling Thunder of the Comanches ... in 1857: 'Innumerable moons ago, a race of white men, 10 feet high, and far more rich and powerful than any white people now living, here inhabited a large range of country, extending from the rising to the setting sun. Their fortifications crowned the summits of the mountains, protecting their populous cities situated in the intervening valleys. ...when this race forgot justice and mercy and became too proud, the Great Spirit wiped it out and all that was left of their society were the mounds still visible on the tablelands.'"
https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/ancient-race-white-giants-described-native-legends-many-tribes-005774 (link below)

      We can sort them down into a couple of types generalized on the overall message. And we'll begin with the most obvious morality play plot. The story about how somebody who is big and strong, say- a giant, thinks that their strength and skill is more powerful than.... perhaps- the gods. And when his hubris overcomes the sage advice from, well, a sage, and he goes out and tries to overpower the gods, he and all who follow him, well... it doesn't work out so good for them. We saw that in the stories from India, and in Genesis.
      The second script for our series of morality plays is how said big strong guy has decided to ignore the advice, probably from the same sage, about how to live. How he uses his size and strength to take whatever he wants from the lesser people around, perhaps even to the point of seeing puny humans as food. And, it turns out badly. Perhaps the gods strike him down, or the villagers band together and destroy him. Again, see Genesis, and in some of the New World legends.
      The last of this batch is the one with either, or both, of the above for a beginning. Such as we see in Gilgamesh. But with the twist that the Giant, in this case King Gilgamesh, by some of the texts who was eleven cubits (over 16 feet) tall, has a series of adventures and has a change of heart and becomes a good guy, and lives happily ever after.

      So, shall we scramble around and ask, and, hopefully, answer a few questions and call that our conclusion?

      Did giants exist? Yes. Without a doubt.
      They are part of the cultural memory of Humanity and certain fossils suggest that, yes. Humans large enough for the other locals to call "a Giant" did live on this planet.

      Let's rephrase that question.
      Did giants who were, by some legends, fifteen meters (nearly fifty feet) tall, live among us?
      So far, the answer there is no. There is something called The Square-Cube Law, first codified by none other than Galileo, about what happens to mass and internal volume as overall size increases. There's a link below to an introductory article about it, and you can do a search to get into the mind-numbing calculations and implications of what happens when you begin to increase the size of the human body in proportion to what passes for normal size.
      What it amounts to is that if a 'normal' human were scaled up to something just over about three meters (ten feet) tall, and were in what is normal Earth gravity, they wouldn't be able to move. Which means that while the Rephaite warriors (see link below), and our old friend Goliath, were big, by the standard we're using, they might be a starting lineman on a Big Ten football team today, or a professional wrestler, but they weren't THAT big.
      And now we have to say this. Over ten feet tall, the giant would have to have some structural differences, different muscles, and other biological factors to not only move around, but to simply live. Their nerves would have to work differently, even their digestive system would have to be new and improved to get enough nutrition into their body to support life, and then there's the problem of dissipating the heat generated by the internal organs.
      Which is why the biology seen in dinosaurs, at least in the really big ones, is totally different than it is for what is seen in modern lizards and alligators. The bones are different, and the REALLY big plant eaters, the long necked / long tailed sauropods, have a second brain in their pelvis to run the back half of the creature, and so on.

A Giant Reptilian Tangent
      And now we come to one of those oddball theories you run across when you go digging into oddball parts of history. In this case: "were the evil giants from Enoch and Genesis six actually dinosaurs that were destroyed by the flood?"
      Let's look at the species of dinosaurs that had the largest brains when compared to their body mass. Those would be the meat-eating Theropods. The most famous of which were the Allosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus. But, they were scarcely the largest of the type, and the larger the critter, the larger the brain, right?
      Animals like Carcharodontosaurus (looks like T-rex but Bigger!) and Spinosaurus ( a nightmare version of a 'love child' of an alligator and a really mean sailfish, and even bigger than the last monster, and also makes the T-rex look like a weak sister) are the largest Theropods so far discovered. And even with them, their brains were about the size of some modern monkeys, see link below. But when you compare the size of the body to the size of the brain, you don't end up with a gibbon or other sort of small primate, or maybe even a baboon, see story at link below, you get a body to brain ratio that is similar to an ostrich.
      Given that, and while both the two legged meat eating dinosaurs, and the four legged plant eaters, may have had 'big brains' when you just look at the mass of that organ, compared to the size of the body that the brain has to keep working; breathing, heart beating, balance, digestion, etc, not to mention chasing food around...
      .... while a Carnotaurus was a Giant, twenty five feet long and weighing over two tons, it probably had the mental acuity of an exceptionally bright turkey. OK, a really big turkey with a meter wide mouth full of razor sharp teeth, but a turkey none the less....
      .... a Really Unpleasant Great Big Turkey, just doesn't give the impression of somebody, or some thing, that would stand in front of the temple in the center of the city and rally an army to try to depose the gods. Right?
      As far as the plant eating dinosaurs, the famous Hadrosaurs, the semi-aquatic "duck billed" dinosaurs may win that contest. But their brain to body size doesn't give them much hope of getting a scholarship. The three ton or so creature probably used its somewhat larger than average brain for its kind to sort out the 'pecking order' in their herd. And to try to avoid things like the meat eaters we just discussed.
end tangent

      So, while it isn't impossible to scale homo-sapiens up to the sizes mentioned in some of the legends, they simply couldn't be larger versions of standard issue humans. Which means, they also probably wouldn't look a lot like the actors hired to play the giant in something you see in the middle of the night special movie on a "what was that channel" on TV.

      And it is in one of those late night movies that you may run across the gentleman we mentioned in the opening... Thrax.
      He has a really odd place in history, but he comes by it in more or less the same fashion as the Biblical King Saul. He just really stood out in a crowd. Stories of his size and strength are both credible, such as that he could pull an ox cart by himself, and incredible, that he was nine or ten feet tall. However that he was 'a giant' is probably total fiction. He, probably like Saul, had a condition that later became famous when a guy named Andre was diagnosed with it.
      Acromegaly is a known medical condition in which the pituitary gland overproduces growth hormone, and in some cases, never stops. Andre the Giant made the condition something of a household term when he was diagnosed with it in 1981. At his peak, Andre was well over seven feet tall and weighed on the order of five hundred pounds. However, he didn't fare well, and by the end of his wrestling career, he could barely perform. See link below for more on him.
      In the links below you can compare a photo of Andre Rene Roussimoff, the wrestling giant of song and story, or at least a movie, and carved busts and depictions on coins of the Roman Emperor Maximinus Thrax. As we said, Thrax was something of a giant in his time. At least seven modern feet tall (the Roman Foot was about half an inch shorter than ours), and just as broad as he was tall, and in those images you can see more than a casual bit of resemblance between the Wrestler and the Emperor. And, like King Saul of old, he was put in charge simply because he was The Big Man.
      It didn't last long. While Thrax was an excellent warrior, his administrative skills didn't exist, and his reign ushered in the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. First with the Year of Six Emperors, which began with Thrax's assassination, and led directly to the Crisis of the Third Century. But that's a subject for another time.

      What it comes down to is that while actual Giants, not just 'big guys', giants as described in the old tales from around the world, may have existed, here, in our reality, "back in the day", they had to have been something besides industrial-sized humans.
      Which means it is also possible that they were something else.
      And that they Were REAL.

First, these two guys:
The Big Man in Rome... no, the Really Big Man, in Rome!:
Gaius Julius Verus Maximinus (173 - 238, also known as: the Emperor Maximinus Thrax, ruled 235 - 238) https://roman-empire.net/decline/maximinus-thrax
And from closer to his time, the translation of an article about the "Barbarian Emperor":
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Maximini_duo*.html

His website: Andre The Giant https://www.andrethegiant.com/

A giant list of other resources:

The CPCC Genesis Study takes a look at Enoch, and a couple of related figures

The Book of Giants http://www.gnosis.org/library/dss/dss_book_of_giants.htm

The reconstruction: http://www.bahaistudies.net/asma/book_of_giants.pdf

The Book of Enoch in: The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament https://www.ccel.org/c/charles/otpseudepig/enoch/ENOCH_1.HTM

The notes that mention something we mentioned:
"The name of Gilgamesh occurs in the fragments of the Book of Giants in Qumran, as g]lgmys (QG9 12), and glgmys (4QEnGib)....
The appearance of Gilgamesh as a character in the Book of Giants suggests that one or more Aramaic versions of the Gilgamesh epic may have circulated among literate circles in the ancient Near East." https://www.jstor.org/stable/40387671

The Book of Jubilees https://sacred-texts.com/bib/jub/index.htm

Other Resources:
The Chinese story as a PDF: "Kuafu Chases the Sun" https://confucius.adelaide.edu.au/system/files/media/documents/2020-07/14kuafu.pdf

Myths and Legends of India CHAPTER IV: Demons and Giants and Fairies https://sacred-texts.com/hin/iml/iml09.htm

African Mythology https://mythlok.com/world-mythologies/african/
The site has stories from all over the world available!

Viracocha https://www.worldhistory.org/Viracocha/

The Native American Stories of Giants:
"The Tribes down in the Southern region all have stories of the White Giants. When many of the tribes in the same area are talking about the same thing, there has got to be truth involved in it."
https://powwowtimes.ca/native-american-story-of-giants/

Ancient Race of White Giants Described in Native Legends From Many Tribes
https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/ancient-race-white-giants-described-native-legends-many-tribes-005774

"A nation of giants who were the Rephaim?" https://www.hebrewversity.com/nation-giants-rephaim/

"The square-cube law states that as an object grows or shrinks in size, its volume grows and shrinks faster than its surface area respectively. This law applies to any animal, since an animal that is twice as tall, compared to a similar animal, will experience the cross sectional area of its leg bones become four times as large, but have its weight become eight times as large."
https://www.scienceworld.ca/stories/what-if-humans-were-giants/

Was Spinosaurus Bigger Than T-Rex? https://www.fossilera.com/pages/is-spinosaurus-bigger-than-t-rex

This article covers the study that started an argument:

"Some dinos may have been as brainy as modern primates, controversial study argues
Experts welcome new neuron-density data, but say findings are premature"
https://www.science.org/content/article/some-dinos-may-have-been-brainy-modern-primates-controversial-study-argues

The Index to our Genesis Study Index Page

NOTE: The Bible Study Lesson presented above is posted as a reference document to begin a conversation of the topic. And that's it. Please accept it at such.

http://centralparkchurchofchrist.org