Where did the giants of Canaan come from?

What the text says

• Numbers 13:33 sits inside a report Scripture condemns The ESV calls it a bad report of the land (Numbers 13:32) — the older versions’ evil report — and the whole chapter exists to condemn what these men said. They were frightened and faithless, and they reached for the most terrifying word they had. Read the sentence closely and it is not sober observation: we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them. They are reporting how they felt, and then guessing at what the Canaanites thought of them. On this reading the Canaanites were formidable and some were tall, but Nephilim in Numbers 13 tells us about the spies’ panic rather than about Canaanite ancestry.
• The parenthesis in that verse is doing work The ESV reads: there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim). The identification of the Anakim with the Nephilim is inside the spies’ own speech. Whether the parenthesis is Moses’ comment or part of what the spies said changes how much weight it carries, and the Hebrew does not settle it.
• Genesis 6 may not describe a bloodline at all Everything depends on who the sons of God in Genesis 6:2 are. Augustine argued they were the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the ungodly line of Cain, and Calvin and most of the Reformers followed him. On that reading the Nephilim are not hybrids of any sort — they are the violent, celebrated strongmen a compromised generation produces. Genesis 6:4 calls them the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown; the Hebrew is gibborim, the same word used later of David’s finest warriors, and it carries no implication of height at all. If Nephilim was always a description of a kind of man rather than a lineage, post-flood giants need no explaining. The word recurs because the reality recurs.
• If both premises stand, the survival answers are thin The most textually anchored appeals to Genesis 6:4 itself, which says the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward — nothing states the event happened only once, so the transgression may simply have recurred. The honest weakness is that no passage after the flood ever narrates such a thing. Other proposals — a carrier aboard the ark, a second incursion — are guesses with no text behind them, and we would not build anything on them.
• Deuteronomy 3:11 measures Og’s bed, not Og Nine cubits was its length, and four cubits its breadth — around thirteen feet by six. That is a striking object, and it is an object: a monument in Rabbah of the Ammonites, of the kind monuments always are. It tells us Og was a big man and that his memory was bigger.
• Goliath’s height varies across the manuscripts The standard Hebrew text reads six cubits and a span (1 Samuel 17:4) — close to nine and a half feet. The ESV’s own footnote at that verse records the older witnesses: Septuagint, Dead Sea Scroll and Josephus four — about six feet nine. That softens nothing. His coat of mail weighed five thousand shekels of bronze, something like 125 pounds, and his spearhead six hundred shekels of iron. The point was never that he was superhuman. It was that a fully armored professional faced an unarmored boy, and the boy’s God won.
• Deuteronomy 2 says God drove out the other nations’ giants Moab and Ammon had already dispossessed giant peoples of their own — the Emim and the Zamzummim, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim (Deuteronomy 2:10-11, 20-21). It is told almost in passing, and no wonder is expressed. But do not miss who Moses says did it: the LORD destroyed them before the Ammonites. Even the giants outside Israel’s story fall by God’s hand, not by anyone’s strength.

How others have answered

Named only where the words were written about this passage. Quoted phrases are theirs; the summary around them is ours.

• Augustine (City of God, XV.23) Takes up this exact question and argues against the angelic reading, holding instead that the sons of God were of Seth’s line. He does not deny that giants existed both before and after the flood — he takes Scripture as plainly saying so — but he declines to build a race of hybrids to explain them.
• John Calvin (Commentary on Genesis) Follows the Sethite reading and has no patience for the alternative, treating the angelic interpretation as a fable that distracts from what Moses is actually describing: the collapse of the godly line by intermarriage, and the violent men that collapse produced.
• The earliest Christian writers Before Augustine the angelic reading was the common one — it is found in Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian, among others. Anyone holding that view today stands in old company, and should be met with argument rather than dismissal.
• 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the rabbinic writings These are not Scripture, and no view above should be believed because they teach it. They are worth knowing for a different reason: they show that ancient readers noticed exactly the gap you noticed, and they tell us what assumptions were in the air when Jude and Peter wrote about angels who did not stay within their own position of authority (Jude 6; 2 Peter 2:4). Read them as history, not as authority.
• A note on quoting The positions above are summarized rather than quoted. Each man wrote directly on Genesis 6 and the readings are well attested; but where we could not verify exact wording against an edition, we describe the argument rather than putting words in his mouth (DOCTRINE.md, the Berean rule).

Where it lands

On this one we take no side, and we would rather say so than manufacture a verdict. Elsewhere on this site we tell you where we stand; here we have weighed it and are not persuaded past the point where we could name a view and mean it.

The honest state of the question is this. The Sethite reading has Augustine, Calvin, and most of the Reformers behind it, and it does not so much solve the puzzle as dissolve it: no bloodline, so nothing to survive. The angelic reading has the earliest Christian writers, the ordinary use of sons of God elsewhere in the Old Testament (Job 1:6; 38:7), and a serious case from Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4. Both are held by people who take Scripture as the word of God and read it closely. The premises are laid out above; the reader has what we have.

That is not a shrug. Saying more than we know is its own kind of unfaithfulness, and this question sits well outside what the Confession calls the things necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation (WCF 1.7). Nothing in the gospel turns on the answer, and anyone who tells you it does has lost the thread. Land where the text takes you; nothing here is designed to stop you.

Because look at what the text is actually for. Scripture raises the giants to tell Israel that fear was unwarranted. Know therefore today that he who goes over before you as a consuming fire is the LORD your God — that is Moses’ whole argument about the Anakim, the same Anakim the spies had panicked over a generation earlier (Deuteronomy 9:1-3). And it is exactly what David says to the giant of Gath: the battle is the LORD’s (1 Samuel 17:47). The giants are in the Bible to be a measure of God, not a subject of their own. A boy with a sling understood that, and the ten spies with their bad report did not.

Questions to sit with

For reading this with someone else — a family, a study, or a friend who asked in the first place.

1. Numbers 13:32 calls the spies’ report bad. What made it bad — the facts they reported, or the conclusion they drew from them?
2. Why might Scripture leave a question like this unanswered? What does that suggest about how tightly we should hold our own conclusions?
3. Deuteronomy 9:1-3 addresses the fear of giants head-on. What is the argument Moses actually makes there, and who does he say wins the battle?