Visiting mandatory Palestine in 1934, the intrepid British physical anthropologist Dorothea M.A. Bate learned of huge bones discovered when a well was dug in what is now central Bethlehem. After visiting the site and collecting some fragments, she realized that they were the fossilized remains of an elephant—an extinct elephant. These were mammoth remains, tentatively dated to the Late Pliocene or Early Pleistocene era, and nearly three million years old!1 Remains of numerous huge prehistoric animals have been discovered in the Levant, including elephants (mammoths among them) and a giant rhinoceros.
Bate was not the first to discover huge bones in the Judean Hills. Nearly 2,000 years earlier, Flavius Josephus, the famous Jewish historian, noted giant bones uncovered in Hebron, 13 miles from Bethlehem. Josephus gave an account of the story of the conquest of Canaan, specifically Hebron, by the biblical Israelites under the command of Joshua:
So they [the Israelite army] moved their camp to Hebron, took capture of that town and massacred all therein. There remained there a race of giants, who, by reason of their huge frames and figures in no way like the rest of mankind, were an amazing spectacle and a tale of terror to the ear. Their bones are shown to this day, bearing no resemblance to any that have come within men’s ken.
According to the biblical text, the town of Hebron was named for a giant (Hebrew: anak; plural: anakim) who lived in the days before Noah’s flood: “Now the name of Hebron formerly was Kiriath-arba; this Arba was the greatest man among the Anakim” (Joshua 14:15). Joshua 15:13-14 adds that this great man’s son was called the Anak, the giant.b
Imagine you are Josephus, visiting Hebron, the place of the massive Herodian Tomb of the Patriarchs—constructed sometime in the first century to honor Abraham and his family. While there, the locals take you to see huge bones. They don’t look like your average human remains, but you notice some similarities. Your guide identifies these unfortunates as the biblical giants (anakim) who survived Noah’s flood, only to fight against Joshua and be killed. The sight would have been amazing to behold!
For Josephus’s readers, the discovery of the bones of ancient giants wouldn’t have been unusual. Greeks and Romans uncovered huge bones across the Mediterranean world, which they identified with a great mythological war against giants, called the Gigantomachy. Classical authors and even St. Augustine, the early Christian philosopher, wrote of these discoveries with great interest. Historian Adrienne Mayor suggests that ancients interpreted fossil discoveries in light of their own sacred stories.2 Thus, the ancient cyclops, she argues, started out as the reassembled bones of mammoths. Looking at an elephant skull, this is no wonder. With their large jaws and big teeth, elephant skulls can look very human!
A great example is recorded by Josephus’s contemporary, the first-century C.E. Roman historian Pliny the Elder:
When a mountain in Crete was cleft by an earthquake, a skeleton 019020[or “body”] 46 cubits long was found, which some thought to be that of [the giant hunter] Orion and others of [the young giant] Otus. The records attest that the skeleton of Orestes dug up at the command of an oracle measured 7 cubits.
Natural History 7.73–75
Measuring about 6–9 feet long, this huge skeleton was identified with one of two mythological giants: the huntsman Orion (whose belt is a well-known constellation) or Otus, the son of Iphimedia and Poseidon, god of the sea. The dispute was resolved by an oracle, which had the bones exhumed.
Were these actually the bones of a large prehistoric mammal? It seems likely.
Augustine also identified ancient bones with biblical giants:
On the shore of Utica I myself, not alone but with several others, saw a human molar so enormous that, if it were divided up in pieces to the dimensions of our teeth, it would, so it seemed to us, have made a hundred of them. But that molar, I should suppose, belonged to some giant. For not only were bodies in general much larger then than our own, but the giants towered far above the rest.
City of God 15.9
Ancient rabbis remembered bone discoveries as well. In one late antique text (redacted c. 600 C.E.), a huge bone was identified with a biblical giant:
I was burying the dead. Once I ran after a gazelle and I entered into the thigh bone of a corpse and I ran after it three parsangs and I did not reach the gazelle and the thigh bone did not end. When I returned, they said to me: “That was the thigh bone of Og, king of Bashan.”
Babylonian Talmud, Niddah 24b
Like Josephus, the hero of this fantastic tale, an early rabbi named Abba Shaul, was told by local informants that he had found a giant killed in the time of the biblical Gigantomachy, when giants still roamed the land. The bones here were the remains of the last of the biblical anakim: Og, King of Bashan (Joshua 13:12).c
Reading the writings of classical peoples within the physical world in which they lived, we can begin to see what they saw and perceive what they perceived. In Greek and Roman antiquity, huge bones were uncovered, which they saw as evidence of ancient giants killed in primordial battles. Early Jews were no different, looking at huge bones and seeing the remains of biblical giants.3 Finding the giant bones was clearly an event in those days—as it is in our own.
Visiting mandatory Palestine in 1934, the intrepid British physical anthropologist Dorothea M.A. Bate learned of huge bones discovered when a well was dug in what is now central Bethlehem. After visiting the site and collecting some fragments, she realized that they were the fossilized remains of an elephant—an extinct elephant. These were mammoth remains, tentatively dated to the Late Pliocene or Early Pleistocene era, and nearly three million years old!1 Remains of numerous huge prehistoric animals have been discovered in the Levant, including elephants (mammoths among them) and a giant rhinoceros. Bate was not the first to discover huge […]
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1. Dorothea M.A. Bate, “Discovery of a Fossil Elephant in Palestine,” Nature 134 (1934), p. 219; Rivka Rabinovich and Adrian M. Lister, “The Earliest Elephants Out of Africa: Taxonomy and Taphonomy of Proboscidean Remains from Bethlehem,” Quaternary International 445 (July 2017), pp. 23–42.
2. Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).
3. This article is based upon Elisha Fine and Steven Fine, “Rabbinic Paleontology: Jewish Encounters with Fossil Giants in Roman Antiquity,” in Shana S. Schick, ed., Land and Spirit in Rabbinic Thought (Boston: Brill, 2021).
