What are we supposed to make of the Bible’s accounts of giants? Some readers explain them away, while others chase every strange claim, but I want to stay with Scripture and follow these people, lands, and battles from Noah’s day through David’s reign. The details of Genesis 6 receive fuller treatment in A Complete Bible Study on the Nephilim, while our focus here will be the God whose covenant promises the giants could not stop.
The Nephilim and the Rebellion of Genesis 6
The first major passage is Genesis 6:4. The NKJV uses the word “giants,” and the Hebrew word behind it is Nephilim. Genesis places them on the earth before the Flood and then adds that they were there “also afterward.” It connects their appearance with the sons of God taking the daughters of men and with the mighty men of renown who came from those unions.
The way I understand this passage, the sons of God were heavenly beings who crossed a boundary God had established. This was not a description of ordinary marriages between men from the line of Seth and women from the line of Cain. Job uses the phrase “sons of God” for heavenly beings. Jude and 2 Peter then warn about angels who sinned and left the place God gave them, placing their judgment beside God’s judgment of the ancient world.
And the angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day.
For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but saved Noah, one of eight people, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood on the world of the ungodly.
This conclusion does not come from mythology. It comes from comparing the biblical passages with one another. Genesis describes a serious corruption of the created order, while Jude and Peter tell us that angels sinned and left the place God had given them. The giants therefore belong to a biblical world in which supernatural rebellion was real. That rebellion fed the violence of the ancient world. God answered it with judgment, yet He preserved Noah through the Flood.
At the same time, I think we need to stop where the text stops. Scripture says that the Nephilim were present before the Flood and also appeared afterward, including in the spies’ report from Canaan. It does not give us a complete biological or historical explanation for every post-Flood appearance. We can affirm what God revealed without filling the silence with folklore or speculation.
There is another language distinction worth keeping clear. Nephilim is the Hebrew term rendered “giants” in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33 in the NKJV. The Hebrew word gibbor means a mighty or dominant person. It may describe someone known for unusual strength, but it does not prove that everyone called mighty was a giant. We still have to look at the passage to understand whom the word describes.
Giant Peoples in Lands God Named
As the Old Testament moves toward Israel’s entry into Canaan, it names several peoples associated with giants. Scripture does not gather them into a single definition, so we have to follow how Moses, Joshua, and the later writers use the names. The Anakim were descendants of Anak and became the group Israel feared most at the border. Moses described them as great and tall, and their fearsome reputation had produced the saying, “Who can stand before the descendants of Anak?”
A people great and tall, the descendants of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you heard it said, "Who can stand before the descendants of Anak?"
The Rephaim appear to be a broader classification connected with giants. Deuteronomy explains that neighboring nations used different regional names. The Emim had once lived in the land later associated with Moab, and the Zamzummim had lived in the region associated with Ammon. Both peoples were compared with the Anakim.
The Emim had dwelt there in times past, a people as great and numerous and tall as the Anakim. They were also regarded as giants, like the Anakim, but the Moabites call them Emim.
That was also regarded as a land of giants; giants formerly dwelt there. But the Ammonites call them Zamzummim, a people as great and numerous and tall as the Anakim.
I do not think we should flatten all these names into one loose category. Scripture identifies whole peoples, traces family lines, and places them in regions known to the surrounding nations. It is recording concrete history. Different nations could use different names for people of the same general kind, but the details keep these people connected to real places and events rather than to fairy tales.
Amos also describes the Amorite with the imagery of remarkable height and strength. This does not require us to call every Amorite a giant in the same sense as the Anakim or Rephaim. It does show how overwhelming some Amorite power appeared to Israel, and God points to His own work in destroying it.
Yet it was I who destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was as strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit above and his roots beneath.
Og king of Bashan is one of the clearest named examples. Scripture says that he remained from the remnant of the giants, then gives the dimensions of his iron bedstead. A bed nine cubits long and four cubits wide was a known object in Rabbah, not a vague symbol of fear.
For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of the giants. Indeed his bedstead was an iron bedstead. Is it not in Rabbah of the people of Ammon? Nine cubits is its length and four cubits its width, according to the standard cubit.
Og was physically formidable and ruled a strong kingdom, but neither fact made him sovereign. His defeat belonged to Israel’s reception of the land God had promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Lord did not ask His people to pretend their enemy was small. He showed them that a real enemy was still subject to His word.
Names such as Anakim, Rephaim, Emim, and Zamzummim can seem like catalog details at first, but they keep the account tied to ordinary history. These peoples occupied lands and were remembered by the nations around them. Their kings ruled actual territory. Israel met their armies in battle, and the record even tells us where remnants remained. Scripture gives enough detail for us to see God’s promise holding firm in events that happened in real places.
Fear at the Border and Obedience in the Land
Numbers 13 brings the problem into sharp focus. The spies saw the descendants of Anak in Canaan, used the name Nephilim in their report, and said that they felt like grasshoppers beside them. They were not wrong to see danger. They sinned when they allowed the danger to outweigh the promise of God, then spread their fear through the congregation until Israel refused to enter the land.
The spies’ words reveal how fear had already reshaped their thinking. They first described how small they felt in their own sight, then assumed that the giants must have seen them the same way. Their report moved from observation into a conclusion God had never given them. The enemy’s size became the standard by which they judged both themselves and the Lord’s ability to keep His oath.
That generation had already seen the Lord judge Egypt and open the sea. God had fed His people in the wilderness and promised them the land, yet the fortified cities and tall enemies seemed more reliable to them than His word. Fear became unbelief because it changed how they judged what God had said.
Joshua later faced the Anakim and obeyed the Lord. The enemy had not become less real, but Joshua viewed the danger in light of God’s promise. His campaign reached named places in the mountains of Judah and Israel, including Hebron, Debir, and Anab.
And at that time Joshua came and 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.
This detail connects Joshua’s campaign directly to the later history of David. Joshua removed the Anakim from Israel’s land, but remnants remained in several Philistine cities.
None of the Anakim were left in the land of the children of Israel; they remained only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod.
Goliath came from Gath. His appearance in 1 Samuel 17 is therefore not a detached adventure placed in David’s story. It continues a conflict Scripture had already traced through Moses and Joshua. Once again, an enemy whose strength terrified Israel stood against the promise and honor of the living God.
The contrast between the wilderness generation and Joshua was not a change in the size of the enemy. Both faced people who were great and tall. Joshua obeyed because he believed the Lord who had spoken, and his campaign became evidence that the earlier generation’s unbelief had never been justified. What they called impossible was accomplished under God’s command.
David and the Giant Warriors of Gath
Goliath is the best-known giant in the Bible. Scripture calls him a champion and gives his height as six cubits and a span. Saul and the army heard his challenge and trembled. David heard the same words and wanted to know why an uncircumcised Philistine was being allowed to defy the armies of the living God.
What holds my attention is the way David understood the battle. He did not deny Goliath’s size, armor, or experience. He simply refused to interpret those facts as though God were absent. This was not a contest between David’s hidden inner strength and Goliath’s visible strength. David came in the name of the Lord and treated Goliath’s challenge as an attack on God’s covenant honor.
Goliath was not the last warrior tied to the giant line in Gath. Later, Ishbi-Benob tried to kill David, but Abishai struck him down. Saph, called Sippai in 1 Chronicles 20:4, fell to Sibbechai. According to 1 Chronicles 20:5, Elhanan killed Lahmi, the brother of Goliath. Another man of great stature had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. Jonathan the son of Shimea killed him after he defied Israel.
These four were born to the giant in Gath, and fell by the hand of David and by the hand of his servants.
David’s first victory began a larger conflict that his servants continued. God preserved His people through the king He had anointed and through men who remained loyal to him. The account also reaches beyond those battles. David stood in the royal line through which the Messiah would come, so the defeat of Goliath belonged to God’s preservation of the promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the true Son of David.
This keeps us from turning David and Goliath into a lesson about believing in ourselves. David’s confidence did not rest in his youth, skill, or courage as personal qualities. He remembered how the Lord had delivered him before, recognized that Goliath had defied God, and acted in faith. The victory magnified the Lord and protected the people through whom the Davidic promise would continue.
What Scripture Lets Us Say—and Where We Must Stop
Some people in the Bible are associated with unusual might, great stature, or a giant family without being explicitly called giants. Nimrod is called a mighty one and a mighty hunter before the Lord. His kingdom began with Babel, so Scripture places his strength in a setting marked by human domination and rebellion. Still, the Bible never directly calls him a Nephilim or a giant, so I would not present that as settled fact.
Arba, Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai have stronger ties to the family and territory of Anak. Benaiah’s Egyptian opponent is also described as a man of great height. These details deserve notice, but careful categories help us say exactly what Scripture says without making every unusually strong or tall man part of the same bloodline.
As I work through these passages, I see two opposite errors that can easily take over. One is embarrassment, which softens the accounts into symbols or exaggerations even though Scripture gives measurements and identifies actual people and places. The other is sensationalism. It accepts the accounts but then lets folklore, noncanonical writings, online claims, or modern rumors govern the subject. Neither approach submits to the Bible.
The biblical record gives us enough to know that the giants were real and formidable. It also gives us enough to see why their history was preserved. They often stood where God’s covenant promises seemed impossible to fulfill. From the corruption of Noah’s day to Israel’s fear at Canaan, and from Joshua’s campaigns to David’s battles, visible power kept rising against the word God had spoken.
The accounts were not written to make God’s people fascinated with size or bloodlines. Even the striking details serve a larger purpose. Og’s bedstead shows that the king was no imagined threat. The remnant in Gath explains why giant warriors later confronted David. The record becomes a chain of evidence that the Lord ruled over every part of the conflict.
Yet that power never escaped His authority. God judged the rebellious angels and the ancient world while saving Noah. Generations later, He brought Israel through peoples greater and mightier than they were. The Anakim lost their hold on the land, and Og’s kingdom fell. When Goliath defied the Lord’s name, God raised up David. The many historical details serve this larger testimony to His rule.
That changes how we should read frightening history. Faith does not erase facts or ask us to imagine that an enemy is harmless. The wilderness generation failed because it treated danger as more certain than God’s oath. Joshua and David faced real danger, but they obeyed because the Lord’s word governed how they understood it.
The answer is not self-confidence. David did not discover a greater power hidden inside himself, and Joshua did not win because Israel was naturally superior. Their confidence rested in the Lord. We need the same sober courage when we encounter strange claims or frightening opposition. Scripture must govern how we judge what we hear, so that fear does not pull us away from trusting the King whom God has promised.
For connected studies, see A Complete Bible Study on the Nephilim, A Complete Bible Study on the Canaanites, A Complete Bible Study on Nimrod, and A Complete Bible Study on Goliath.
My Final Thoughts
After following these accounts, I believe the Bible leaves us with confidence rather than fascination or fear. The giants were real, and some of them were stronger than God’s people could overcome by their own power, but none stood outside His judgment or stopped His covenant purpose. Jesus Christ came through the line God preserved and shed His blood for sinners. He rose bodily and will reign as King over every enemy. When something in front of us looks overwhelming, we do not need to deny the danger or invent strength within ourselves. We need to judge what we see in light of the Lord who always keeps His word.