Giants

The traditions of peoples all over the world are quite unanimous in asserting that an an earlier time a race of giants lived on the earth, that most of the race were destroyed in great catastrophes; that they were of cruel nature and were furiously fighting among themselves; that the last of them were exterminated when after a cataclysm a migration of peoples brought the forebears of the peoples of today to their new homelands.

The Japanese narrate that when their forefathers after a great catastrophe about two and a half or three thousand years ago, came from the continent and invaded the isles, they found there long-legged, furry giants. These giants were called Ainu. The forefathers of the Japanese were defeated in the first encounter, but in the second encounter they were victorious.

Ixtlilxochitl described the wandering of peoples of the western hemisphere in the four ages of the world. The first age came to its end in the Flood. In the second age, called “the sun of the earthquake,” there lived the generation of the giants, which was destroyed in the cataclysm that terminated this age. The third peiord was “the sun of the wind,” called so because at the end of this period terrible hurricanes annihilated everything. The new inhabitants of the new world were Ulme and Xicalauca who came from the east to find a foothold at Potouchan: here they met a number of giants, the last survivors of the second catastrophe. The fourth age was called “the fire sun,” because of the great fire that put an end to this epoch. At that time the Toltecs arrived in the land of Anahuac, put to flight by the catastrophe: they wandered for 104 years before they settled in their new home.

Also F. L. Gomara in his Conquista de Mexico, in the chapter about “cinco soles que son edades,” wrote:

The second sun perished when the sky fell upon the earth; the collapse killed all the people and every living thing; and they say that giants lived in those days, and that to them belong the bones that our Spaniards have found while digging mines and tombs. From their measure and proportion it seems that those men were twenty hands tall—a very great stature, but quite certain.⁽¹⁾

The Hebrew scriptures as preserved in the Old Testament and in the Talmud and Midrashim, narrate that among the races of the world in a previous age were races of giants, “men of great size and tremendous strength and ferocity,” who were destroying other races, but also were turning upon each other and destroying themselves.

The Book of Genesis (6: 4) narrates that in the antediluvial time “there were giants in the earth in those days.” The Greek Book of Baruch narrates that over four hundred thousand of the race of giants were destroyed by the Flood. After the Flood there were only a few districts where some of them remained alive.

When after a number of centuries another catastrophe ruined the world and the Israelites left Egypt and sent a few men to explore Palestine, those reported that the people of the land were generally of tall stature, and that besides “there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which came of the giants, and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so were we in their sight.”

This description clearly differentiates between the people of a tall stature and the giants, and the supposition that the Israelites found in Palestine a normal race only taller than themselves, and thought them to be giants, is not supported by the text.

A similar distinction is made in Deuteronomy (1: 28): “The people is greater and taller than we . . . and moreover we have seen the sons of the Anakim [giants] there.” they—a few families—lived in Hebron (Numbers 13: 22).

At the time when the Israelites approached the fields of Bashan in the Transjordan, “only Og king of Bashan” remained of the remnant of the giants (Joshua 13:12 and Deut. 3:11). The other individuals of monstrous size had been annihilated in the meantime. “Behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits is the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.” The text implies that at the time the book of Deuteronomy was written the bedstead of Og was still in existence and was a wonder for the onlookers.

The giants were the remnant of a race close to extinction. Og was “of the remnant of the giants that dwelt in Ashtaroth and Edrel” (Joshua 12: 4). They were also called Emim, or the furious ones. “The Emim dwelt therein [in Moab of the Transjordan] in times past, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim, which also were accounted giants, as the Anakim; but Moab calls them Emim” ( ). This branch of the giants was already extinct; but two cosmic ages earlier, in the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar, and Abraham the Patriarch, Eimim flourished in the Transjordan (Genesis 14: 5).

References

Historia de la conquista de Mexico, (Mexico City, 1943), Vol. II, p. 261.