Who Told Us Giants Existed?

Why is it that when we were little, a dark bedroom could turn a coat hanging on the door into something enormous? The monster under the bed was real enough that you wouldn't dare let an arm hang over the mattress. 

And then there are the monsters we deliberately handed down to our children.

Jack climbs the beanstalk—and finds a giant. King Kong. Godzilla. Goliath. Fairy tales are filled with enormous beings who eat children, destroy villages, and live just beyond the world we know.

What is it about giants that has fascinated us for so long?

Maybe when you're three feet tall, the answer is obvious. Adults tower over you. They can reach what you can't. Go where you can't. Make rules you don't understand. Maybe giants are simply one of childhood's oldest metaphors for power.

I'd accept that explanation... if children were the ones who invented the giants.

They weren't. Adults have been telling stories about them for thousands of years. Why?

Long before Jack and the Beanstalk, ancient civilizations separated by oceans, languages and religions were already telling stories about enormous beings from an earlier world. Different names. Different places. Different descriptions, but a peculiar pattern keeps resurfacing. They were here before us. 

They were larger or more powerful than ordinary humans. And then poof!... they were gone.

A flood. A catastrophe. A war with the gods. One world ending and another beginning. And buried inside the Bible are just a few cryptic sentences about one such group: The Nephilim. Almost as quickly as they appear, they're gone.

The Bible gives remarkably little explanation. It doesn't tell us exactly what they were. It doesn't even give their height or even calls them "giants", which makes something about my childhood particularly strange.

I knew all about them.

I was raised a Jehovah's Witness, where the Nephilim weren't treated like an obscure biblical footnote. They were vividly depicted in the religious stories I was taught as a child. They were enormous. They were violent. And then came the Flood.

Years later, I taught those same stories to my own children from the religion's: My Book of Bible Stories—complete with frightening illustrations of terrified people desperately trying to escape the rising water. Women holding fast on to their screaming babies for fear of them drowning.

The lesson was unmistakable: the giants would die. The wicked would die. Everyone outside the ark would die. Those who wondered about 'rain' when water had never ever fallen from the sky before, would suffer a horrible death.

As a child, I had nightmares. 

Later, my children had nightmares. Today, I look back at that with regret and find it horrifying.

But eventually another question began bothering me even more: Why were we taught so much about something the Bible says so little about? And why did so many other Christians I met later know almost nothing about them?

So I started digging. Mistake? I don't know, but the deeper I went, the stranger it became. The Nephilim don't disappear when Genesis stops talking about them. 

1 Enoch greatly expands the story, describing heavenly Watchers descending to Earth and producing gigantic offspring.

Then there's The Book of Giants. Fragments of it were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And beyond the biblical world? The Greeks had their Giants. Norse traditions had the jötnar. Ancient Mesoamerican traditions also told of giant beings inhabiting an earlier age.

Different continents. Different religions. Different centuries. Yet humanity kept returning to that same extraordinary idea: There were giants before us.

Maybe giants belong entirely to mythology. Probably. But mythology is part of history—not necessarily a record of what physically happened, but a record of what human beings believed, feared and remembered.

Which leaves me with a question I can't shake: 

Who first told us there were giants? The Bible never did. They just called a weird race of people Nephilim which simply means 'fallen ones'. And why have human beings kept telling these terrifying stories for thousands of years? Why, even now, do we pay to be frightened by giants in our movies, television shows and books? We know they're probably mythology. We know they shouldn't exist.

And yet we can't seem to stop imagining that they did.

Why? I don't know. But unanswered questions are where historical fiction becomes irresistible—at least for me. Eventually, this one found its way into Roots of Fear. Because fiction lets me ask the question history can't answer:

What if one of those ancient stories wasn't entirely a story?

Click here and take a peek at the synopsis of Roots of Fear