Giant People in the bible?

well, this doesn't reflect the ideology of the people who wrote genesis. they tell the story of the flood in terms of man's wickedness, not interference of outside angelic/demonic forces.it certainly is not mainstream, or in accordance with what became mainstream, even though we find similar ideas in modern christianity. (devil made me do it) not sure on this point, actually. this could certainly be the case. but it could also be the case that enoch was written to further explain the genesis story, and is not directly linked to the older mythology.we have lots of similar books that expound on genesis.genesis does everything but reduce conflict. indeed, it's still there. genesis is full of contradictions. i think it's pretty clear the redactors just didn't care to remove them. so i think this point is probably wrong.

sure. the essenes were around from 200 bc to ad 100.translation on the septuagint began (with a finalized tanakh) in 300 bc.qed, genesis was around prior to the dead sea scrolls. just after 600 bc, during babylonian captivity, is the best guess i got. that's about the time the chaldeans lost ur, and bab-el was rebuilt. good question. no, by the time of his writing, the tanakh had been canonized. he wrote about 180 bc, which is after the septuagint had been completed.the answer to it must lay elsewhere. maybe he was of a slightly different set of beliefs that, where enoch was more important? or maybe he had more texts (such as the book of enoch) available to him?genesis certainly existed and was accepted as part of the torah by then.This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 12-20-2004 03:06 AM

(Context: message 166) Yep. The Genesis version seems like a development of theology to me, hence probably after the theology preserved Enoch's Watchers. This is hindsight and need not reflect the mainstream of the era of the development of the theology preserved in the Watchers. I don't think we can use Genesis to dictate what the status quo ante was. If you're not sure then how can you argue from the notion that Genesis represents the status quo at the time of the development of the theology preserved in the Watchers? [qs]it could also be the case that enoch was written to further explain the genesis story, and is not directly linked to the older mythology.[qs] You're not following my logic at all. How can you explain the Watchers' theology if the Genesis theology already existed?? I say, you simply can't. I also say that the Genesis account of the giants is incoherent in that it lacks data for a reader to make sense of the actions. One needs a knowledge of the story (such as evinced in the Watchers) to understand the Genesis version of the giants. You are going beyond the evidence. I could say that they expound on the same material Genesis does, without saying anything less than you have. You have no way of knowing that Watchers, or Jubilees for that matter, has any direct relationship with Genesis. They could all be drawing on a developing Vorlage, where Watchers reflects one strand, Jubilees and the "Genesis Apocryphon" (not a reasonable name for this document) reflect another, and Genesis still another.You are too biased toward the status quo presentation of an ancient reality which has not yet been established.

Your dating is unsupportable rubbish. The best one can do is rely too heavily on interpretations of Josephus to get back before the time of Herod. Again, received stupidity. This is based on an ingenuous reading of the "Letter" of pseudo-Aristeas, a document which claims to be from the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, but is clearly much later, being unaware that Demetrius Phalereus had been exiled and no longer had anything to do with the library at the time of Philadelphus. (Any scholarly editon will give you more background on Aristeas.) You'll have to do a lot better than that. Hope springs eternal. You have the Jews who were deported to Mesopotamia taking their records with them... what as tablets or scrolls? I always laugh at the thought of the nobles among the Jews, who were the ones deported, saying to their deporters, "hold on a second I have to get my records."So far you have fed me the babyfood variety of the situation. Is this some article of faith? You don't know when the tanakh was canonized other than the fact that the canon still wasn't closed until the discussions over Esther and Canticle in rabbincal times.I don't accept your date for the writing of Watchers. I have pointed out that it has a long history as seen in the internal problems in the text, yet its later layers seem to be dealing with priestly conflicts of the time you mention, ie before the Hellenistic crisis. You can see how important Enoch was by its representation in the Dead Sea Scrolls. No-one has been able to show that Enoch was related to a specific sect. The scrolls represent a good cross-section of religous literature, featuring various text traditions of texts which would become canonical, including Hebrew versions of what would become MT, LXX and Samaritan, as well as others. There are many copies of Enoch material from Qumran, so it's hard for anyone to claim on any evidence that it was a non-mainstream text. You have failed dismally with this unsupported claim.At Qumran the pentateuchal books were still mainly disseminated as individual works, so there was no Torah as you perceive it, when they were deposited.We are still stuck at the era of the Dead Sea Scrolls for the earliest evidence for the existence of the book of Genesis.This message has been edited by spin, 01-08-2005 05:35 AM

possibly. actually, i think we can. the sense of jewish tradition is very strong. if it's considered holy, it's included. if it's not, it's not. the contents of the torah are the very definition of mainstream theology, at least at 200 bc.this probably extends backwards for some time before this date, but there's not much way of showing any real dates. because there is a basic arc of jewish theology over the last few thousand years.originally, god was a member of a pantheon. at some point, he becamse the strongest of the group, and eventually the only member of the group. so we can sort of place about when texts would have occurred (or at least their order) by how polytheistic the books are. and enoch is LESS polytheistic than genesis.genesis describes the actions as being conducted by members of the pantheon (sons of gods), where enoch terms them angels. genesis does not imply their actions are wrong, where enoch does. enoch punishes them, genesis does not.in both they appear to be acting out of god's authority. however, in genesis it appears to be a tradition from before god became viewed as omnipotent, whereas with enoch it appears to from the idea of errant angels. the idea of god relegating his dirty tasks to angels is much later than this tradition, and the idea of FALLEN angles is even later.what i'm saying basically is that BOTH stories contain the same tradition, but enoch's take on it has been mucked with much more recently. because the genesis passage is very cryptic. theology does change. it's quite possible that that part of enoch was written to explain the genesis passage. we have lots of examples of this, and some have worked their way into moder traditions. paradise lost, for instance. no one is arguing that the paradise lost tradition is older than genesis, yet it is far more extensive than genesis. except that genesis talks about neither watchers nor giants. it says sons of gods, or other gods, and men of renown: heroes. the stroy of the nephilim (which do not appear to be giants in the text, or in their other mentions in the bible) does not seek to explain why the earth was destroyed. another explanation is offered for that. the nephilim story just talks about the origins of fabled heroes. it's a etyology of legends, not floods or rainbows.but enoch, who confuses them, must have used a source document that placed one next to each other: genesis. except that genesis was a very common book at the time they were written, and was probably considered part of the torah canon at the time. except that the textual evidence in genesis points to the fact that passage were copied whole, without revision for consistency. it's how we know genesis came from multiple documents. so the manuscript the story of the nephilim was copied from probably was exactly the same as genesis -- for all intents and purposes it IS the genesis account. not at all. i just don't think the evidence points to enoch being technically or theologically older than genesis. the story is obviously older than both, but enoch points to much newer take on the subject. trust me, i would be really excited if it appear to be a source document for genesis. when i first heard about it, i thought it might have been, but evidence, in my opinion, points to that not being the case. you can't expect enoch to have been copied exactly from older traditions, and not genesis.

my dating is not unsupportable rubbish. the dead sea scrolls in their earliest date from around the time the septuagint was finished translation. qed, genesis is older than the dead seac scrolls, even thought it is the oldest HEBREW fragment we have of the book. so what are you shooting for, earlier or later? because that 600 bc date was so late it made my hebrew bible prof itch. although he did mention that there was a rather large group of people who agreed with that date, even if he did not.genesis, to me, looks like a document pieced together from various scraps of other documents. any good reading will agree. it looks like the sort of document people would put together in exile. had they taken their libraries, well, we'd probably have the source documents and not genesis. there's discussion over it today. what's your point? the point is that septuagint demonstrates what the jews had as far as books of the bible in 200 bc, and the version of genesis does not differ significantly (to my knowledge) from the masoretic text. ben sirah would have almost the same version of genesis that we have today. it's not an article of faith, it's an article of LOGIC.frankly, it'd make me feel a lot better faith-wise if genesis was written in the dark ages. yes, well. the sources are clearly older. no one's debating that. genesis's sources are significant older as well. latest date of modification -- the earliest date it existed in its current form, is older for genesis. and the signs point to the story being sourced from genesis. the essenes were collectors of texts. they had lots of non-mainstream stuff, and lots of stuff other sects had. that's why the qumran library was such a find. it represented an overview of what existed at the time. but it is not a representation of the mainstream. the septuagint is.the essenes were an extremist sect, obsessed with ritual cleanliness. they isolated themselves from the mainstream. no, i haven't. genesis existed as it does today, as part of the torah, at the time of the translation of the septuagint. enoch's last date of modifaction was after that date. they were also stashed somewhat haphazardly in caves, not on bookshelves in a library. alright, what is your date for the septuagint then?

This is still unsupported (if you don't like "rubbish", use something else that indicates "totally unjustified"). You haven't attempted to face the problems of dating LXX, so come back on it when you want to talk about evidence. Your Hebrew prof probably needs to be put out to pasture. Friedman for me is ultra-conservative. I can see no possibility that anything was written down and survived from the time before or during the exile. Were scribes taken into exile?? They aren't noble and there's no reason to deport them. They didn't have any political clout. Who did the writing? Remember learning to write was a long process in those days. Courts had schools to teach people.I think the exodus story came from the exilic contact of the Jews with the Egyptian from the time of the exile and the Egyptians equated the Jews with the Hyksos, as can be seen in the reports preserved in Josephus' Contra Apion. And when do you propose Deut 28:68 was written (ships back to Egypt, slaves)? And doesn't it sound like vaticinium ex eventu? At least two parts of Genesis have been seen in a Greek context, the table of nations and the Joseph novella.One last Genesis item: the time from when Noah went into the ark till the flood had dried up in Jubilees was exactly a year (=364 days), but in Genesis it was a year and ten days, ie the 364 day year was converted into a 354 day year and had ten days left over. And in an earlier layer of the same story, 5 months from when Noah entered the ark till the rain stopped was five months, which was equalled to 150 days, ie 5 30-day months, which is the Persian calendar. Not only does the Noah story contain two traditions the 40 days v. 150 days of rain, but there are also three calendrical layers starting with the earliest Persian calendar, moving to the 364-day calendar and then changed to accomodate the Pharisaic/rabbinical use of the 354-calendar. Enoch's Astronomical book starts with the 360-day calendar and then is rewritten to accomodate 364 days. On that score that part of Enoch was finished before the relevant part of Genesis. I don't mind the piecemeal idea. It's the conjecture about when which is nothing more than an uneducated guess. You haven't even attempted a serious dating for the LXX and you expect to be taken as making meaningful noises? Remember for example that Josephus in his intro to AJ claims to have translated the histories for his account himself, which suggests that at his time of writing at least those texts hadn't been translated into Greek. If Aristeas is a 1st c. BCE effort then when were the pentateuchal books translated? You can't say. We are still at the time of the DSS. Why are you avoiding the early theology of the Watchers? It is in conflict with Genesis and nothing suggests that the text was sectarian, so when could such a theology have been produced? Before the shift to putting the blame on the weakness of humans. What on earth are you talking about? You know nothing about what books the Essenes had, unless you are joining the idiot brigade which cannot but see Essenes at Qumran. The leaders of the Qumran community were the sons of Zadok, hereditary family in charge of the Jerusalem temple, not elected celibate Essenes. If you think about it a bit, you'd find that the priesthood by necessity separated itself from the general population because they couldn't afford the loss of purity, so you can meaningdfully say that the priesthood was obsessed with ritual cleanliness.So what have the Essenes got to do with anything we are discussing? Put like an article of faith. You need to demonstrate what you are saying. Empty claims are just that, empty. The start, long enough after the sons of Zadok emigrated to Egypt for them to lose the use of Hebrew, say two generations, so circa 120 BCE. Process still in operation when Josephus was writing.

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"There were giants in the earth in those days" Gen. 6:4

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Dinasours.This message has been edited by Guidosoft, 01-08-2005 16:27 AM

Evidence for any of this?? Evidence for this claim? None. Where's the pantheon in Genesis? In the prophets, in the Psalms, even in the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy, but then these texts, including -- as you've noted -- Genesis, were piecemeal. The best you can do are the sons of God in the parallel to the Watchers story -- sons of God, going in to the daughters of men, ie the watchers. Sorry, we already have angels doing things in Genesis, helping Lot, being seen by Jacob on the ladder. And we've got the "fallen ones" (ie nephilim npl = "fall") in Gen 6:4. Enoch actually says what happened, making the cryptic Gen account seem like it has been bowdlerized. But Enoch goes against the Genesis theology by doing so. This non-Genesis theology of a fall through angelic intervention is prior to the Genesis theology about the fall of humanity. You attempt doesn't take into account that Enoch's theology is in conflict with Genesis and therefore needs more than modern parallels with secular literature such as Milton's to justify it. The easiest way to do so is that that theology developed prior to that of Genesis, explaining why Enoch fell by the way in Jewish religious literature. If Enoch had been written after Genesis it would have to be seen as heretical, but its presence among the DSS in high numbers doesn't support that notion. There it seems just like another book. If you actually read the text, you'll see that the nephilim don't actually do anything: they are just mysteriously there for no apparent reason. This is part of the problem I was hinting at. What exactly do you imagine Enoch confuses? A reference or two to illuminate what you are saying might be useful as well. Evidence? None. Having looked at what can be compared of the three texts Gen, Jub & GA, the GA tends to agree more with Jub than with Gen, so I don't believe you. Could you give some evidence to support your claim so I can see what it is you're talking about? Genesis has the most developed form of the table of nations, the other two seem sparse in comparison. The Genesis account of Melkizedek seems like it has been lifted from the GA: while GA is quite happy to use el elyon, it appears nowhere else in Gen except the Melkizedek story. The Melkizedek story is missing in Jubilees. I see nothing obvious about it. Genesis knows a lot more than what it actually says. We find a lot more in Enoch on the subject. What Genesis has left out is what Enoch draws upon. What were the nephilim mentioned for? Who are the sons of God? Who are the mighty which the Greeks call giants? Why are they apparently age-old/eternal [Heb: m:`wlm Grk: aiwnos]? (Edited transcription because the online editor got confused with the notation.) I did not say that. I said that it dealt with material that Genesis left out. And I don't think you are doing justice tyo the problems of the Gen 6 text. I have argued that Genesis shares a source with other literature rather than that it was the source of the other literature. I have said that Genesis omits material in the case of the watchers story. I've also posited it gets its Melkizedek story from GA or from GA's source. (If I remember correctly beside the Genesis story there are only two other examples of el elyon in the Hebrew bible. GA uses el elyon as its normal means of referring to God and suddenly it appears four times in Gen 14:17-22.)And I return to Ben Sira and its evidence about Adam being inserted as an afterthought, while starting with Enoch. How could that have happened? Didn't Adam hold the place of being there first, when Ben Sira wrote? Why start with Enoch?This message has been edited by spin, 01-09-2005 03:39 AM

The Hebrew text doesn't say anything about giants. It says nephilim, ie "fallen ones". Dinosaurs are a fantastication on a translation based on the LXX.

OK then, that would make sense and is in favor of the basic theme of the bible.

it's not unsupported. it's the mainstream academic position. unless you know something you're not saying, every source i have ever heard dates the septuagint between 300 and 100 bc.now, yes, it is possible that the mainstream is wrong, but it's not just me making up stuff. my hebrew prof explained that i was probably right and that he only disagreed for religious reasons. (although, i think my position was less insulting to his faith than his. he held that the patriarchs lived post-moses, which to me just sounds nuts. but this only position he's ever voiced that sounded obviously wrong) if i were kidnapped on my way home from class last semester, even if the kidnappers stole my jewish bible from class, i'd still have scraps here and there of the bible, both in my notes, and in my memory. if this happened to several thousand people, we might even be able to construct a working bible out of our scraps and different memories.and i expect that such a document would look a lot like genesis. they don't seem to have deported only nobility, though. all the prophets that were obviously in exile? they were by definition religious leaders, and SOMEONE had to write their stuff down (even after the fact). what, did people just forget hebrew when they moved? you're being silly. we KNOW other books were partially written or apended during or after the exile. isaiah and kings (or chronicles? i forget) shows evidence of this. people were writing in hebrew during the exile. i'm not following. explain? if kings can be said to be somewhat accurate, during the reign of josiah. although that particular verse could be a later addition. explain? or link? this sounds interesting. the time scales in genesis don't line up, because they come from different sources. the 30-day month checks out. however, i see no evidence that genesis is working of a 354-day calendar. or a 364, 365, or any other day calendar. jubilees is not valid evidence of anything, as the authors of jubiless fixed a lot of their numbers into even amounts to satisfy their 7-year sabbatical doctrine (which is a tradition absent in genesis). it is equally as possible that they lopped ten days of the genesis account to make it fit their scheme as anything else. i'm just pointing to 600 bc as my optimal guess. it's not uneducated though, and educated guess falls anywhere between 900 bc and 200 bc. these two bookend dates satisfy the anachronisms and the existance of the earliest texts.yes, it's conjecture, since we can't narrow the dates down any further. but saying that it was written after the septuagint is just ludicrous. josephus makes stuff up. or is at least subject to intrusive forgeries by later authors.and so what if he translated his sources himself? eddy penngelly makes a lot of noise on here about his translations, but that doesn't negate the fact that earlier (and more accurate) translations exist. not to compare eddy to josephus or vice versa, of course. actually, depending on the reading, it is still the humans that cause the destruction of the world in enoch. god doesn't flood the earth and punish the angels until man makes war on the giants. it is the weapons and strategies that azazel gives to man that gets him and his angels punished, and the earth destroyed.why are you ignoring the earlier theology of the pantheon, and the earlier ideas of how god functions? enoch looks suprizingly modern by comparison. what you have is a guess. also, the fact that it is absent from mainstream judaism and is a recent discovery suggests it is sectarian. why is this a hard concept? recent "lost" texts such as enoch usually weren't mainstream, and if they were at any point were removed from the mainstream, otherwise, they wouldn't have been lost in the first place. the people who collected the library at qumran were isolationists. not just a separate class, separate from jerusalem. it's why we have what have of them today. they went there to preserve their traditions, apart from the mainstream jerusalem temple. alright, is genesis part of the septuagint, or not? if it is, can we reasonably say that it existed at the time the text was translated, or did they just make it up then? that's close to the end date i've heard quoted.

that septuagint represents mainstream theology at the time? it closely matches the masoretic text, plus a few books. were it not for this fact, maybe it wouldn't.as for before that time, well, i don't really know. i think i said that. this is gonna turn into a creationist argument really fast. how do we date the fossils? by the rocks. how can we date the rocks? by the fossils.we have approximate dates for texts, based on textual anachronisms and existing manuscripts, and absence of important modifications. we can date which order the texts were written in, and then if we examine basic theological standpoints we can sort of figure out a gross evolution of hebrew theology.a few books stick out of place, though, and genesis is one of them. it's date is much later than it should be theologically. so it appears that although genesis was mucked with post 900 bc, it's sources might have been older.but you can't just discredit the entire scope of biblical literary studies with "evidence? none!" sons of gods, or other gods, yes. god also speaks in plural, which doesn't happen in too many other books to my knowledge. yes, and i'm willing to bet that some bits are older than others. unless i'm dealing with a mistaken reading, and i imagine i probably am, the watchers in enoch are subordinates -- angels. the sons of gods, or other gods, in genesis do not appear to be subordinates. and god does not punish the offending divine beings in genesis.any place this phrase pops up in hebrew texts, we can figure that the source is earlier than the surrounding document. for instance when it pops up in job, it's in the bookends, which seem to be older than the poetry it surrounds. yes, that's fine. this text is probably later than the text containing the sons of god. but let's get a few textual definitions straight.angels: deliver messages from or represent god. do not appear to act on their own accord. less than gods, and serve god.
sons of god/other gods: they appear to be gods in their own right, just not regarded as powerful as the lord. act on their own accord, and do not serve god, neccessarily. (except in later dogma)
nephilim: neither gods, angels, or men, but somewhere in between. kind of like hercules, half god, half man.the nephilim, the fallen ones, are NOT the sons of the god, or angels. they are the children of the sons of god and human women. i will agree this is a possibility, but far from a certainty. enoch's story and genesis's story have two entirely different motivations. enoch is about the origin of war, and genesis is about the origin of mythic heroes. genesis's account of the nephilim is no more cryptic than any other part of genesis. it is after all a patchwork of stories, a volume of probably abridged and collected fables.i will agree that genesis story has been cut down some, just not from enoch. they might have the same source, or enoch might come from genesis. i suspect the last one. but LENGTH does not dictate order.for instance, if i were to read both the short story and novel version of "ender's game," and apply that logic, i would conclude that the short story was cut down and changed from the novel, when just the opposite is the case. and those are even by the same author. the fall of humanity is a modern dogmatic reading of genesis 3. the point at which mankind seems to have actually "fallen" in the genesis text is not coincidentally in the noah passage. here is the first time humanity is present as wretched and irredeamable. it is the association of this fall, with "the fallen" that leads me believe that enoch is an extrapolation of the two unrelated genesis stories. but i suppose your argument will just be the same in reverse. "they were the heroes of old, the men of renown."the genesis story is an etiology of other stories. the text is clearly refering to other legends which ace absent from genesis, and it is NOT refering to the enoch text. it's not really a problem, it's just that the stories aren't related at all. put a rather large break between genesis 6:4 and 6:5. the gap that you're complaining about is just that -- a gap. it's not a continuous story. when was enoch written? when was genesis written? was one around before the other? was enoch in existing mainstream libraries? what percentage of libraries would you say? was genesis in existing mainstream libraries? what percentage would you say?support your points too. it's not really a matter of evidence, since we don't really have documents olde enough. rather, it's a simple point of logic that the person who compiled genesis must have had some reason for not working the sources into a consistent document. how many animals did noah take? what is the name of god? were man and woman created at the same time? you think it's be nice to have a clear answer on those.rather, the redactor must have been somewhat concerned with preserving the integrity of the source texts. and probably the most number of sources. i don't suspect that's a coincidence. agreed and agreed. ok. but i don't think it's the case that genesis is leaving out stuff from enoch. enoch may have another source earlier than genesis, but mostly it seems to be filling in the gaps. i will agree this is plausible. genesis omits stuff in every story. if it didn't, i expect it would be as long as the bible itself. but i don't think it's omiting material from enoch, i think enoch is trying to make up the material genesis omits. a good question. i don't really know.why does matthew's genealogy of jesus start with abraham? maybe enoch was an important early prophet who got forgotten (as the book of enoch would certainly suggest), maybe it was just a point that everyone could pick up on. maybe it's that the story of adam was so commonly understood it wasn't worth mentioning. who really knows?

I believe giants once existed, there is evidence that similar beings from all around the world existing from 8-36 ft tall are being found.Government hides it due to religion cover up... X.x Who knows, I was captivated by this image, some sources say that the giants ( Nephilim) live "within" the earth.

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some sources say that the giants ( Nephilim) live "within" the earth.

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And who are these “some sources”? How about some references to them.Are you actually saying that the giant from jack and the bean stalk lives below us where the temperature is roughly 2000 degrees F?

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"The point now is how do we work together to achieve important goals. And one such goal is a democracy in Germany." ”George W. Bush, D.C., May 5, 2006