After you’ve encountered some of the weirder things in the Bible—Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels, Elisha’s floating axe head, Balaam’s talking donkey, a fire-breathing Leviathan—finding giants in Genesis feels practically normal. But they’re still giants, and they’re important. Let’s talk about them.
Giants show up in Scripture very nearly at the beginning. Right after we learn about the wicked descendants of Cain (Genesis 4) and the godly descendants of Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth (Genesis 5), Genesis 6 drops the Nephilim into the story.
These offspring of the “sons of God” and “daughters of men”1 appear as mythical heroes—“the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown”—and then vanish into the Flood narrative. No explanation is offered for their appearance or their fate, though we may presume they perished in the waters with everything else not on the ark.
Imagine being an Israelite on the way out of Egypt, hearing these words for the first time. “Mighty men of renown” must have sounded like tall tales, the way we might think of John Henry or Paul Bunyan2—except these stories weren’t folklore. They were Scripture.
And Scripture doesn’t waste words. Second Timothy 3:16 reminds us that every verse is God-breathed and useful. So why mention the Nephilim at all? They arrive with a confusing origin, no backstory, and somehow still lurk centuries later in Canaan. Where did they come from? Were they really children of angels? And—strangest of all—how do they appear before Noah’s Flood and then show up again all the way into David’s time?
It’s as if the author of Genesis nodded toward stories everyone knew—giants in the land of Canaan—but knew little more than the readers about their true origin. Even the language is vague: who exactly are these “sons of God”? And then, before they can develop into characters of their own, they are swept away in the Flood. The effect is to emphasize a fantastical world of long ago. If Noah and his fathers lived for centuries, why not men who stood twice as tall?
However they got there, the timing of their appearance is significant. The Nephilim surface during the downfall of humanity, as the line of Seth—the ancestors of Noah, Moses, David, Jesus, and us—slides into corruption alongside the godless descendants of Cain. “Mythical heroes” are not exactly models of humility or servant leadership.
For now, let’s leave the Nephilim in Noah’s floodwaters and pick up the story when giants reappear. Because, unbelievably, they do.
Giants Reappear: Fear at the Border of Canaan
Fast-forward to Abraham. God promises to make of Abraham a great nation with an uncountable population. Yet Abraham fathers only two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, and so the waiting begins. Isaac bears Jacob, and Jacob sires Joseph, and Joseph leads Jacob’s family of seventy-two—hardly uncountable—into Egypt to escape famine. Four centuries later, Moses delivers Israel, now a vast multitude, out of Egypt and into the wilderness, heading north toward the land promised to their fathers. And right as Israel prepares to enter it, the Nephilim reappear.
Here’s the scene: Israel has been camped around Sinai. Moses has received God’s laws and the tablets of the covenant. At last, the pillar of cloud and fire guides the massive camp—six hundred thousand men, plus women and children—into the wilderness of Paran. There God commands Moses to send twelve men, one from each tribe, to spy out Canaan, the Promised Land. Are the people there strong or weak, many or few, fortified or vulnerable?
The spies return after forty days. “The land flows with milk and honey,” they report, “but its people are strong, its cities fortified—and we saw the descendants of Anak there. … all the people we saw in it are of great height” (Numbers 13:27, 33). The Anakim, said to descend from the Nephilim, were shorthand for terror: the map’s edge marked “here be monsters.”
“We seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers,” the spies confess, “and so we seemed to them.” And who can blame them? They’d grown up in Egypt’s countryside, tending flocks in Goshen, not storming fortresses. Now they faced crowded cities, entrenched armies, and giants. They were freaked out. I completely identify with them. I feel small before my challenges, wondering who I am compared to my heroes, and how I can possibly measure up.
But not all the spies waver. Caleb of Judah urges, “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it” (Numbers 13:30). Joshua of Ephraim insists even more strongly, confident that it is the Lord, not their strength, who will bring them in. Refusal would be rebellion. “Do not fear the people of the land… their protection is removed from them, and the Lord is with us. If the Lord delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us” (Numbers 14:8–9).
Those fortresses? Nothing before God. Those giants? Tiny compared to Him.
Consider their tribes! Caleb descends from Judah, the leader of Jacob’s sons and ancestor of David and Jesus. Joshua descends from Ephraim, Jacob’s beloved grandson. No wonder their heirs trust God against impossible odds.
Here lies the heart of the giant stories. They terrify us, make us feel small, even in our own eyes. Giants reveal whether we live by fear or by faith. On our own, we may be grasshoppers. But God is with us. His promises are bigger than giants.
What Faith Looks Like in the Face of Giants
Joshua and Caleb were not just willing but eager to enter Canaan. They saw the same giants as everyone else, but from a different perspective. Bravery is not fearlessness; it is right action in the face of fear. Faith is the same: not absence of fear, but absence of doubt, hesitation, and uncertainty.
Which raises some questions. Did the other ten spies not see the miracles in Egypt? The hail and darkness, the Passover, the Red Sea? Did they not eat manna and quail? Did they not watch the earth swallow Korah? Did they somehow miss the cloud of God’s presence hovering over the tabernacle?
Our God is a God who promises His promises. He gives a small miracle to guarantee a larger one. Abraham knew it. God promised him descendants “as numerous as the stars” (Genesis 15:5), and as a pledge gave him Isaac, “a son in his old age” (Genesis 21:2). One miracle pointing to another. So the person of faith sees manna on the ground and trusts that milk and honey are coming. They see thunder on Sinai and know what awaits their enemies.
Joshua and Caleb understood this. They saw the same wilderness hardships, but where others only grumbled—“We remember the fish… the cucumbers, the melons” (Numbers 11:5)—they saw a God who was for them. They didn’t need endless signs. They trusted the One behind the signs. Jesus pegged their doubting descendants: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign” (Matthew 16:4).
This pattern repeats: God makes a huge promise and gives a small promise as a pledge. He fulfills the small promise to prove He will keep the larger one. Every sunrise, every meal, every breath is one more proof that “‘tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”
And in the end, God defeats the giants. Moses told Israel, “You are to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you… a people great and tall, the sons of the Anakim” (Deuteronomy 9:1–2). And Joshua fulfilled it: “There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel” (Joshua 11:22).
The faithless die in the wilderness, but the faithful inherit the land.
From Ancient Stories to Personal Struggles
The giants are stories. True stories, yes—but still stories. And the power of a story is in how people respond. The ten spies said, “We seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers”: small, weak, unable to move on. Look at their response, and then look for the same in your own life. What giants make you feel small?
For some, it’s injustice. It towers everywhere: the poor imprisoned while the corrupt walk free, systems rigged against the powerless. What can one person do against such a monster? Yet David picked up his sling and faced Goliath: “The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will deliver me” (1 Samuel 17:37). The God of justice will, in the end, put all things right, and we will dwell in the city where “the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).
For others, it’s grief. Loss feels like a giant no one can fight. Death is the final enemy, undefeated and undefeatable. Who dares charge that breach? Jesus does. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). By dying, He destroyed death’s power, and by rising, He invites us into eternal life.
For me, the giant is fear of failure. It’s not an enemy out there but the worst parts of myself: self-doubt, insignificance, the haunting question, “What if I’m not enough?” But Scripture whispers otherwise: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). I don’t serve a God who asks me to be impressive; I serve a God who does not fail.
None of this is easy. Standing in front of inhuman fear never is. But the good news is this: it isn’t you who fights the battle. You just have to show up. As Paul said, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31).
And so, somehow, we’ve come from mythical giants to injustice, grief, fear, and death itself. The Bible does that—it tells stories on the edge of belief, forces you to look inward, and then erupts in victory before you’ve even tied your shoes. Giants are real, whether they look like Anakim in Canaan or doubts in your own heart. But God is real, too. And every giant story in Scripture is an invitation to trust Him more deeply—the God who slays giants, who keeps His promises, and who leads His people home.
So that’s where the story of giants begins. A strange footnote in Genesis, a terrifying sight in Canaan, and a lesson about faith that still echoes today. But this is only the prologue. The real giant fights are still to come.
Because the Nephilim don’t stay buried in Noah’s floodwaters, and they don’t vanish after Israel’s first stumble at the border of Canaan. They keep showing up. A towering king named Og rules over Bashan. A shepherd boy named David squares off with a Philistine champion named Goliath. And each time, the question is the same: Will God’s people freeze in fear, or will they trust the God who slays giants?
Pull up your chair again next time. We’ve got more stories to tell.
-
What on earth could that lineage possibly mean? Two prominent theories have been suggested. First, the “sons of God” might be the godly line of Seth, who married outside the tribe with the Cainite women (“daughters of men”). This corruption echoes later prohibitions against intermarriage (Numbers 25). It doesn’t explain why they were heroic giants, however. A second option is that the “sons of God” were angels (Job 1:6), who fathered offspring with human women. In that case, their children would be demigod-like, naturally “mighty men of renown.” Second Peter 2:4 seems to lean this way, referring to angels who sinned before the Flood. Either way, the result was corruption spreading through humanity. ↩
-
Ancient readers might hear echoes of their Mesopotamian neighbors’ legends. Gilgamesh, for example, is an epic story about an ancient hero and a great flood. Hercules is another epic ancient demigod-turned-hero from around the Mediterranean. Genesis nods to such figures—but gives them no glory, only a footnote before judgment. ↩
