8
THE RACE OF ANTEDILUVIAN GIANTS
Theirs was the giant race, before the flood.
JOHN DRYDEN, EPISTLE TO CONGREVE
THE WORLD BEFORE ADAM AND EVE
In the Bible, we catch glimpses of an initial “First Creation” or “pre-Adamic” world that preceded the emergence of Adam. Angels and the sons of God ruled this world. According to certain biblical passages, this primordial Earth was a thriving community with vast cities and complex life-forms (Quayle 2002, 51). The following passage from the Book of Jeremiah 4:23–26 briefly demonstrates what this world could have been like:
I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form and void; and the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly. I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities were broken down at the presence of the Lord, and by his fierce anger.
The key phrase “I beheld, and, lo, there was no man” indicates that Jeremiah was referring to a time that predated the emergence of mankind. This was a near-forgotten epoch in which an entirely different population inhabited and ruled the earth. Author Stephen Quayle remarks that the prophet made reference to a world “without form and void.” This phrase is taken directly from Genesis 1. It therefore indicates, in Quayle’s mind, that Jeremiah was referring to a time before Adam arose from the choking dust of the Earth. Such terminology offers a brief glimpse of that alternative world history that overturns the accepted paradigm and forces us to reexamine long-held beliefs.
In this chapter we return to the original sources of human history that modern science has abandoned but that nonetheless bridge the gaps left by often dilatory twenty-first-century historians and archaeologists. Calling upon disparate accounts, we aim to get a clearer view of what antediluvian culture was like the world over and to determine whether there are similar threads in these cultures that can be woven together to posit a consistent, universal story. Part and parcel of this will be to put the strange race known as the Watchers under close scrutiny. In this we will also explore possible links between the Watchers of old and the Nephilim, before launching into a discussion of the anticanonical Book of Enoch and the Book of Giants, which was derived from a fragment of text discovered at Qumran, among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Last we will attempt to identify the true identity of Noah. Was he, in all truth, actually a giant?
THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD IN ANCIENT GREEK ACCOUNTS
Through a study of ancient works and their accounts of the antediluvian monarchs that were integral to their culture, it is possible to glean what the world may have looked like before the Great Flood. Dardanus, as the son of the founder of the city of Dardania, in the Balkans, is a good example of one of these monarchs.
Plato explains that when the Flood engulfed the whole world, the survivors who were living on mountains, now islands, split into two groups. One accepted Dardanus’s son Deimas as king of Dardania, and the other group settled on the island of Samothrace. After the floodwaters subsided, Dardanus participated in the renewal of human society. He wrote in the ancient records that the Earth was once partly ruled by the giants. To the distant ancestors of the Greeks, who came from a lost civilization along the Black Sea, the word “giant” meant a dark and unfathomable being that dated back to the primordial origins of the human race.
However, the Greek culture also included rulers of the undersea kingdom who came forth to impart wisdom and knowledge. The antediluvian lord Cecrops I founded Athens, but was said to have the upper body of a man and the lower half of a fish. He taught the Athenians writing, architecture, science, and law. He also was said to have defied Zeus and had the Greeks offer up sacrifices to him instead.
In addition to these figures in the early Greek accounts were other creatures of great antiquity who would also play a pivotal role in the antediluvian world and the preparation for human conquest of Earth. One of them was Oannes.
OANNES AND THE BABYLONIACA
In 350 BCE, while Alexander the Great was still on the throne of Babylon, a priest and historian of the Babylonian god Marduk was busy compiling what would become the essential historical reference book of his day: the Babyloniaca. This priest was Berossus and his epic work consisted of three volumes. Each was written in Greek, which was the common language of the time. The Babyloniaca is important for many reasons, not the least of which is that it gives us a context for the Great Flood by setting it within a time line that begins with the emergence of human kingship. According to the Babyloniaca, which reflects Mesopotamian belief, 432,000 years elapsed between the crowning of the first earthly king, Aloros I, and the onset of the Great Flood.*11
An important figure of the Babyloniaca is Oannes.†2 It was he who, according to Babylonian mythology, gave the “Tablets of Civilization” to early humans, thereby providing them with written language, after emerging from his kingdom beneath the Persian Gulf. Oannes was a strange man and fish hybrid, and was also the leader of a group of similar creatures, “a brotherhood of semi-divine beings described as half-men, half-fish, who had been sent by the gods to teach the art of civilization to humankind before the flood. The collective name by which these creatures were known was the ‘Seven Sages’ and the name of their leader was Oannes” (Hancock 2002). According to the Babyloniaca, the Seven Sages were instrumental in the early development of the Sumern civilization.
Berossus describes the encounter with Oannes as follows:
In the first year there appeared, from that part of the Erythaean Sea [today’s Persian Gulf], which borders upon Babylonia, an animal endowed with reason, by the name of Oannes. . . . Its voice was articulate and human, and an image of him has been preserved to this day. This creature spent its days among men, but ate no food, and gave them insights into letters and sciences, and arts of every kind. He taught them to build cities and temples, how to draw up laws and measure the land. He showed them how to sow the seeds and how to collect the fruits; he instructed them in everything that could humanize their lives. From that time, nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. Oannes also wrote a book about the genesis of man and the origin of civil states, which he then gave to mankind. (Däniken 2009)
Some sources indicate that Oannes and the Seven Sages did much more than impart sacred technological knowledge to the human race. They also established the five antediluvian cities described in the original Sumern text depicting the Flood and the Sumern version of the Noah story. Indeed, this hints that the engineering giants, the Nephilim, and these half-fish, half-human biological entities were closely related and possibly worked together educating and preparing the first race.
Erich von Däniken equates Oannes with an extraterrestrial visitor. This author would rather keep his origins closer to the Earth. It’s possible that he represents an intelligent race*12 that, like the giants, is all but extinct. It is also possible, even more than likely, that Oannes is one of the legendary Watchers of biblical fame, the sons of God who mated with mortal women and produced the Nephilim, a race of giants.
WHO WERE THE WATCHERS—REALLY?
In his essay “When the Sons of God Cavorted with the Daughters of Men,” well-known biblical scholar Ronald S. Hendel poses the following question: “If someone asked you to name the origin of a story about gods who take human wives and then give birth to a race of semidivine heroes, you might answer: It’s a Greek myth, or perhaps a Norse legend, or maybe a folktale from Africa or India. Surely this story couldn’t come from the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. Or could it?” (1987)
To answer this question he offers up the following passage, Genesis 6:1–4. Here it is in full:
When mankind began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, the Sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they took wives of them, from any whom they chose. And Yahweh said, “My spirit will not be strong in man forever, for indeed he is but flesh. His lifetime will be 120 years. Giants were on the earth in those days, and also afterwards, when the Sons of God mated with the daughters of men and they bore children for them: these were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
According to Hendel, “For thousands of years this story has scandalized readers of the Bible and for good reason. The story appears to go against the grain of our traditional understanding of biblical religion.” As Hendel attests, this story remains one of most enduring controversies of modern biblical scholarship. The term giants is actually a mistranslation of the Hebrew word Nephilim, which is derived from the Hebrew verb nafol, meaning “to fall.” Thus, the Nephilim are often conceived of as a fallen race of giants who ruled the world prior to the Great Flood, the global deluge that engulfed the antediluvian world and finally ended their reign. However, others claim that the Nephilim were actually Greys (aliens), while still others contend that the mysterious figures were the Neanderthals of Ice Age Europe and the Near East.
The descendants of the Nephilim are known as the Emin, who are described in the King James Bible as “a people greater, and many, and tall.” These descendants were also the inheritors of the antediluvian religious practices and rites that were enacted atop Seir, the sacred mountain (Joseph 2005).
While we may know who the descendants of the Nephilim were, there is some controversy as to who exactly their ancestors were. The Bible tells us they were a hybrid race, born of the sons of God and the daughters of men. This does not explain, however, who were the sons of God, sometimes called the Watchers. This author believes they were a superior race that inhabited the Earth since its creation and were seen as gods by our earliest ancestors.
It might even be suggested that the Watchers, rather than being any form of off-world intelligence, were a previously evolved race that originated and lived on Earth prior to the emergence of modern humans and had always been our benefactor. Perhaps tales of these gods are not stories of misinterpreted extraterrestrial visitors, but rather accounts of a now-extinct race whose individuals were at one time so utterly powerful that they were in essence gods.
In the Book of Enoch we read that the Watchers, also known as the sons of God, mated with mortal women, and the ensuing offspring became the Nephilim of myth and legend. The reality of who these ancient giants were, where they came from, and what ultimately happened to them is preserved in many world mythologies. For this reason, mythology can offer clues to a forgotten chapter in human history. As theologian Francis A. Schaeffer points out:
More and more we are finding that mythology in general, though greatly contorted, very often has some historic base. And the interesting thing is that one myth which occurs over and over again in many parts of the world is that somewhere a long time ago supernatural beings had sexual intercourse with natural women and produced a special breed of people. (Thomas 1986, 107)
THE ANUNNAKI AND NEPHILIM SAGA
Here we look to the Babylonian creation story, the Enûma Eliš, for greater insight into these matters. According to late author and independent researcher Zecharia Sitchin, the world was once ruled by a race of giants known in the Enûma Eliš as the Anunnaki. These beings were not earthborn creatures, but rather were extraterrestrial beings who came to Earth to mine for gold and “other precious raw minerals.” In ancient Sumern the name means, literally, “Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came.”
Ancient alien theorists see ancient Sumer as the greatest source of evidence of extraterrestrial intervention in the evolution of the human species and its civilization.*13In 2010, the phenomenal History channel launched a brand new series, Ancient Aliens, that examines evidence of alien contact in the remote human past. It proposes that extraterrestrials visited a backward humanity, barely out of the Stone Age, and imbued it with knowledge of civilization. They impregnated our infant race with technologies and cultural constructs now considered to be foundational to our ancient civilizations, including: megalithic architecture (or what David Hatcher Childress calls “Atlantean construction”); advanced science and medicine; organized religious cults and methods of spiritual healing; and even modes of aerial transportation and weapons of warfare—hundreds of millennia ahead of our own time.
The reign of the Anunnaki marks the beginning of the historic period in the legacy of the ancient giants. The Hebrew rendering of the name Anunnaki is Anakim, meaning “giants,” a name that befits their gigantic stature as well as their technological sophistication. Anakim is another name for the Hebrew Nephilim. “The Nephilim were upon the Earth in those days before the Deluge and thereafter too, when the sons of the Elohim cohabitated with the daughters of the Adam and they bore children unto them” (Sitchin, 152).
THE BOOK OF ENOCH AND THE BOOK OF GIANTS
The story of the Flood in the Bible gives us an inkling of what life here on Earth may have been like before the global deluge. The Book of Genesis gives us only brief glimpses of that alternative world history, and contrasts drastically with the nonbiblical, evolutionary view of history now maintained as the established paradigm. The nonevolutionary world history is explored further and in much greater detail in the apocryphal works known as the Book of Enoch and the Book of Giants, two books only recently rediscovered that were not officially canonized as part of the Bible.
The Book of Enoch was discovered by Scottish adventurer James Bruce in the eighteenth century when, during an expedition to Africa, he came across a number of mysterious scrolls. Ethiopian priests explained they were sacred biblical texts not included in the Hebrew or Christian Bibles. Tantalized by such a possibility, Bruce made efforts to acquire copies and took them back to London to be examined and translated. These Ethiopian documents did not become widely known, however, until German orientalist and Protestant theologian August Dillmann translated the Book of Enoch into German (Däniken 2009).
The Book of Enoch is one of the best sources among the ancient pseudepigrapha texts for accounts of giants, even though it has not been placed within the official canon of either the early Hebrew Bible or the Greek Septuagint, which is the basis of our modern Christian Old Testament.
The Book of Giants is actually a portion of the Book of Enoch that was unknown until the mid-twentieth century, when excavations at the Qumran caves on the Dead Sea counted them among the Dead Sea Scrolls. This rich treasure trove consists of dozens of scrolls and hundreds of fragments. With the aid of the Manichaean religion, the Book of Giants spread throughout the Old World. Versions were translated into Syriac, Greek, Persian, Sogdian, Uighur, and Arabic. Each version took on a life of its own, however, given that every translation incorporated the various regional myths and legends of its host population (Childress 2010). They help provide context for Old Testament writings and the relatively new religion of Christianity—including the enigmatic “fallen angels” or Nephilim, also sometimes called the Watchers—giving further insight into the world as it was before the Flood.
The Book of Giants describes the antediluvian world as follows: “[These fallen angels] knew the secrets of [all things]. [At this time] sin was great on the earth. The wicked angels killed many people and begot giants [with mortal women].”
Biblical scholar John Williams Rogerson writes: “[According to] Genesis 6: 1–6, there the ‘children of God’ have intercourse with women, producing a race of Nephilim, ‘mighty men that were old, men of renown’” (Davies and Rogerson, 204).
Further passages from The Book of Enoch describe the so-called Watchers: “Enoch 6–11 describes how these heavenly beings (all named) teach the women about spells, root cutting and plants, astrology, weapons of war, and cosmetics. The women give birth to giants, who turn to cannibalism and blood-drinking. The Earth cries out for help, and God orders the execution of the giants, the binding of the Watchers beneath the hill until the Day of Judgment, and thereafter in a fiery chasm” (“Christian Mythology” 2013). Such images as giants, blood drinking, astrology, spells, and root cutting have been far more influenced by pagan and Greek sources than by anything Hebrew. But nonetheless, the Book of Enoch fills in the tremendous gaps in biblical history that we have, unfortunately, inherited from Genesis.
These passages are echoed in the remaining portions of the book. Likewise, in Enoch 7:3–6, the daughters of men “became pregnant, and they bore great giants, whose height was three thousand ells [a Germanic form of measurement approximating the length of one man’s arm] who summoned all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink their blood. Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.” According to Enoch at least, it was this course of events that precipitated the Great Flood.
Given all of this, the key question becomes: Who then is Enoch? What relevance does he have to the existence of giants in the Old Testament? Enoch was the son of Jared, the seventh of the antediluvian rulers and one of the ten patriarchs of the pre-Flood Earth. Enoch is described in Jewish legend as “king over all men.” In Genesis 5:21–24 Enoch is described only briefly then disappears from the canonized biblical record: “(21) When Enoch had lived 65 years, he became the father of Methuselah, (22) Enoch walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters. (23) Altogether, Enoch lived 365 years. (24) Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away” (Däniken 2009).
Enoch is also known by different names by many different cultures: Saurid, Hermes, and Idris, among them. He, more than any individual, is responsible for the genesis of human culture and civilization. Some scholars, such as Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn Ali ibn Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhammad al-Maqrizi in his work Khitat, even cite him as the builder of the Great Pyramid (Däniken 2009).
NOAH: HUMAN OR GIANT?
The figure of the biblical Noah is also a tantalizing and puzzling one. In the Journal of Biblical Literature, religious scholar John C. Reeves writes: “One relatively unexplored motif that can be observed in certain strands of early Jewish interpretation of the figure of Noah as ‘Flood-hero’ revolves around the question of his true lineage and identity” (1993, 110). Reeves asks, was Noah fully human, the legitimate seed of Lamech? Or was he in reality born of a bastard race of giants spawned through the miscegenation of the fallen Watchers and mortal women who terrorized and defiled the Earth from the epoch of Jared to the onset of the Great Flood? Though never directly addressed in the Hebrew Bible, it is clear in some extrabiblical sources the latter was most likely the case: that the Flood-hero Noah was, in all probability, a giant.
This fascinating motif is first introduced in the Genesis Apocryphon, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, wherein Lamech is confronted by the suspicion that his newborn boy Noah is not legitimately his son. He suspects that Noah, rather than being a pure human, is in fact the byproduct of a union between his wife, Batenosh, and one of the angelic Watchers: “Then I considered whether the pregnancy was due to the Watchers and Holy Ones . . . and I grew perturbed about this child. Then I, Lamech, became afraid and went to Batenosh [my wife . . . saying,] Everything will you truthfully tell me . . . you will tell me without lies . . . you will speak truthfully to me and not with lies” (1QapGen 2:1–7).
Batenosh then reassures Lamech that Noah is indeed pure of blood: “I swear to you by the Great Holy One, by the Ruler [of Heaven] that this seed is yours, that this pregnancy is from you, that from you is the planting of [this] fruit . . . [and that it is] not from any alien, or from any of the Watchers, or from any heavenly being . . . I tell you this truthfully” (1QapGen 2:14–18).
Lamech, however, doubts Batenosh’s truthfulness. He is therefore compelled to seek counsel from his grandfather Enoch “to learn from him the truth of the whole matter” (Reeves 1993; 1QapGen 2:22).
Lamech consults with his grandfather, who then speaks to his son, Methuselah (Lamech’s father), as we read in 1 Enoch 106:18 and 107:2: “And now make known to your son Lamech that the one who has been born is truly his son. And call his name Noah. . . . And now, my son go make known to your son Lamech that this child who has been born is truly his son, and (this) is no lie” (Reeves 1993).
Why then did Lamech suspect that something was wrong? This was due to the child’s strange and supernatural appearance when he was born. His body was “white like snow and red like the flower of a rose, and the hair of his head (was) white like wool . . . and his eyes (were) beautiful, and when he opened his eyes, he made the whole house bright like the sun so that the whole house was exceptionally bright.” This seems almost extraterrestrial.
It also said upon his entrance into the world, the newborn spoke. Lamech was afraid of the infant and ran to his father, Methuselah, saying, “I have begotten a strange son; he is not like a man, but is like the children of the angels of heaven, of a different type, and not like us” (Reeves 1993). While some attribute his unique countenance to being marked as an agent of God, others, Reeves included, suggest another angle entirely. There is in fact strong evidence to support the conclusion that Noah was a “giant.”
In a third text, from the so-called Pseudo-Eupolemus we read:
Eupolemus in his work On the Jews says that those who were rescued from the Flood first founded the Assyrian city of Babylon. They were giants (and) built the recorded Tower. When it collapsed due to the action of God, the giants dispersed over the whole earth. In some anonymous writings we discover that Abraham traced his lineage to the giants. When these (giants) were living in Babylonia, they were slain by God on account of their impiety. One of them, Belos, escaped death (and) settled in Babylon, and after building a tower lived in it. It was called Belos after its builder Belos.
Given that Abraham was descended from Noah, it is here we see the clear affirmation that Belos was another name for Noah, and that this person was indeed a giant. His postdiluvian descendants settled in Babylon and were responsible for the building of the Tower of Babel. They were then dispersed across the face of the planet after the Lord confounded their language.
Why then was it so important for the Genesis Apocryphon and the Book of Enoch to prove his human lineage? Simply because there had already been a tradition of Belos, or Noah, being a giant that had gone back thousands of years (the Pseudo-Eupolemus), and it was important to establish the new biblical tradition of Noah being simply a human agent of God, and in that, to silence the critics and ultimately terminate any further speculation regarding the matter as to whether or not Noah was of the race of giants. With this accomplished, any knowledge of the actual truth was effectively killed (Reeves 1993; Chouinard 2011).
Throughout this chapter we have sought to provide some sense of what the Earth and its inhabitants may have been like in the ages before the Great Flood. That we have been only partially successful may be due to the fact that the fascinating records of this time contain accounts of strange creatures difficult for the modern mind to fully imagine. One thing is clear, however: The frequency of similar accounts of beings enormous in size might suggest that we should be more apt to accept their common consensus as common truth: giants, whether they were the Nephilim or other races of gigantic beings, did, at one point in the early development of humans, inhabit the Earth. Given this, we can only speculate what wondrous discoveries await us with regard to unearthing and further understanding the fantastic phenomenon of giants through time.
Next we will be taking on a very intriguing aspect of our general discussion: the evidence for giants in the ancient culture of Atlantis and how they may have had a hand in its demise.