Some of you may have heard about the new BYU excavations at the Fag el-Gamous necropolis in Egypt. Because the area is so large (300 acres) and the mummies recovered at buried in mass graves (these are commoners of the Roman era through Late Antiquity), some archaeologists speculate that there could be one million mummies waiting discovery.
One of the mummies discovered was a man who is seven feet tall. I can hardly wait to see how those who sensationalize nephilim tell the world how one 7-foot skeleton translates into a race of giants. A handful of 7-footers in a graveyard of tens of thousands, perhaps a million, mummies would be a percentage (you guessed it) like we have today.
But you know they’re going to say it. (And there will be no word on why it doesn’t have an elongated skull or extra rows of teeth).
While I’m with you on the likely odds of it being a just a very tall man, part of me wonders if you wouldn’t debunk an even taller skeleton with profoundly inhuman features. You have previously made the case that since normal men at the time were 5 feet tall, the nephilim were likely no more than 7 ft. Compared to the average 5’10” man today, this like finding an skeleton that is 8’6″. Not exactly one in a million on that one.
I’m not saying I believe they have found a nephilim, just that while still believing the literal Genesis 6 and giant clans interpretation, you seem quite oppositional to the possibility of any evidence ever turning up. Did nephilim bones evaporate when they died? (I think having to deal with ninnies has left you skeptical about things you actually believe.)
I wouldn’t debunk a demonstrably real skeleton that exceeded unusual height known in modern times (which can top 8 feet). But the reality of the skeleton isn’t the issue. It’s getting an unusually large population group – clustered or scattered.
As I’ve blogged before, we have no skeletal remains for MOST people (of any size) who ever lived in BC antiquity – hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions, long dead. Unless you embalm, there isn’t going to be much left reaching back to that time. The world’s geography and climate largely doesn’t create ideal conditions for preservation.
The strongest case against this specific mummy being anything but human is it being from between the first and seventh century, during Roman control. I’m also thinking the giants were limited to Canaan/the Levant. Had giants been common in Egypt, the spies Moses sent wouldn’t have been so alarmed. If a 7 foot mummy were discovered in Tel Dan or Damascus, and dated between 1000 and 2000 BC, testing it’s DNA might be interesting.
Re: “I can hardly wait to see how those who sensationalize nephilim tell the world how one 7-foot skeleton translates into a race of giants.”
Interestingly, there are 7-footers in today’s population! As an alumnus of UConn, basketballer Hasheem Thabeet leaps to my mind (even if most other Americans won’t recall him). He’s over 7 ft IIRC.
So really, the existence of 7-footers is unremarkable … if not uncommon (because they are).
yep; that’s my point.