It has been argued that the portion of v. 4 that mentions the Nephilim should stand on its own, apart from the rest of this passage (cf. Westermann, p. 366). Be that as it may, it is difficult to understand who the Nephilim are, exactly, without some sort of context, even if we must put them in a context that is fraught with its own problems of interpretation.

Given that most scholars today consider Deuteronomy to be a later document than the rest of the Pentateuch, it is worth noting that the original account of Og's defeat in Numbers 21:33-35 makes no mention of his size; the Deuteronomist may have merged the account of Og's defeat with another legend based on the "iron bed" that one could still see in Rabbah. Also, given that the Israelites still had the Anakim to defeat, one might doubt whether Og was truly the "only" member of the Rephaim left. Joshua 12:4 and 13:12 modify this somewhat by saying that Og was "one of the last" of the Rephaim.

There is also an interesting reference in Joshua 17:15 to the tribe of Manasseh migrating to "the land of the Perizzites and Rephaites"; all the previous references to Og placed him in the Transjordan vicinity of Ashtaroth. Genesis 14:5 places the Rephaim in Ashteroth Karnaim, possibly the same Karnaim that is several kilometers north of Og's Ashtaroth (Suggs, map 1). An Ugaritic text also names Ashtaroth and Edrei (Og's other city; cf. Deuteronomy 3:10, Joshua 13:31) as the cities of one Rapa'u, whose name seems linked to that of the Rephaim (Smith, ABD 5.675). The Perizzites, however, are typically placed on the west side of the Jordan in the land of Canaan (Barker, p. 315; cf. Joshua 3:10, 12:8); if the Rephaim were their neighbours, it would seem that the Rephaim were spread out over a much wider area. (The Rephaim are listed immediately after the Perizzites in Genesis 15:18-21, but as one of many races in the land that God promises to Abram, a land that stretches "from the river [Nile] of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates". The Rephaim need not have been neighbours of the Perizzites in that catalogue.) The "remnant" of which Og was a part is therefore probably a sub-group within the larger group of Rephaim, and might be better translated "kinsmen" (cf. Talmon, p. 237); Og would then be the last of his local clan, but not the end of the Rephaim per se.

Indeed, the "descendants of Rapha" are mentioned once more in II Samuel 21:15-22, though they are not identified explicitly as "Rephaim" here. This term is used in I Chronicles 20:4-8, a later passage that picks up and modifies the account in Samuel somewhat. (Interestingly, Chronicles places its version of this passage immediately after David's capture of Rabbah (20:1-3), the same Ammonite city where Og's "iron bed" is said to have been; is the Chronicler trying to associate the two? The capture of Rabbah occurs considerably earlier in II Samuel (11:1, 12:26-31) and serves as a framing device for the narrative of David's aforementioned encounter with Bathsheba.) All the references to the Rephaim here associate them with the Philistines, who had probably either conquered them and forced them into military service, or else hired them as a mercenary force similar to David's personal guard of Kerethites (who in turn appear to have been captured or mercenary Philistines; cf. II Samuel 15:18, 20:7; Zephaniah 2:5; Talmon, pp. 239-240). Of the four fighting men who defeat these Rephaim, all are from the tribe of Judah; one is from David's hometown or a nearby community, and two others are David's nephews! Judging from David's "exhaustion" (II Samuel 21:15), these encounters may have occurred fairly late in David's reign; they certainly herald the end of his career on the battlefield.

The first "descendant of Rapha", mentioned in II Samuel 21:15-17 but missing from Chronicles, is named Ishbi-Benob. (This is disputed by Josephus, who says in Antiquities 7.299 that he was "Achmon, the son of Araph, he was one of the sons of the giants.") There are no exact references to his stature; instead he is said to have used a new sword and a bronze spearhead that weighed 7.5 pounds. Ishbi-Benob was killed by Abishai, the brother of David's general Joab and the son of David's sister Zeruiah (cf. I Chronicles 2:16). Saph, the second "descendant of Rapha", was killed by Sibbecai the Hushathite (II Samuel 21:18; I Chronicles 20:4), a member of the tribe of Judah through Zerah and a division leader in David's army (II Samuel 27:11). The fourth "descendant of Rapha" was an unnamed giant (Josephus gives his height as six cubits, i.e. over nine feet; Antiquities 7.303) who had an extra finger or toe on each of his hands and feet. This giant was killed by David's nephew Jonathan for "taunting Israel" (II Samuel 21:20-21).

One is instantly reminded of the first military encounter that David of Bethlehem had with the Philistines:

A champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of the Philistine camp. ... His spear shaft was like a weaver's rod, and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels [about 15 pounds]. (I Samuel 17:4a,7)

Goliath is not specifically called a Rephaite, or an Anakite, or any other particular sort of giant; this is simply inferred from his height in I Samuel 17:4b (more on that below). While the account of David's Goliath offers much more physical detail, the similarities in name, hometown, and weaponry ("spear shaft like a weaver's rod") were apparently too similar for at least one ancient writer, the Chronicler, who sought to separate the two by changing the description of Elhanan "the Bethlehemite [bët hallahmï]" into a description of the giant as "Lahmi the brother" of Goliath (Hertzberg, p. 387). Most scholars now believe, however, that one tradition has borrowed from the other.

The proposed form of this borrowing has taken many forms. It is highly unlikely that any scribe would have taken the victory of the legendary King David and transferred it to one of a handful of David's mighty warriors. Any details that might have been borrowed, then, would have passed from Elhanan to David.

One theory advanced to harmonize the stories holds that Elhanan was the real name of the champion who, on becoming monarch, assumed "David" as his throne title; this theory was bouyed partly by the discovery that dawidum was a term for "commander" in the Mari texts. This view is not held by the majority of scholars, though, partly because it fails to explain why Elhanan would be counted as one of his own heroes in a passage which seems to have been compiled at an early date, yet uses the name David six times in the space of eight verses without once implying that David and Elhanan were remotely identical (Hertzberg, p. 387). A similar view, which holds that Elhanan's story was transferred in toto to David at a later stage (as implied in Suggs, p. 335), seems unnecessary, since much of the story of David and his Goliath is actually a story about David and "the Philistine", who is named "Goliath" in verses that suggest later editing of the narrative. The consensus now is that details of the Elhanan story "attached themselves artificially to an unrelated duel of David's own" (McCarter, p. 291).

But can any of these details be traced decisively from Elhanan to David? The only details that these accounts share are the name "Goliath", the fact that the giant came from Gath, and his spear "with a shaft like a weaver's rod". The location of Goliath's home is not entirely persuasive, since all of the "descendants of Rapha" slain by David's men came from Gath (II Samuel 21:22). Goliath is the only one singled out as a "Gittite", true, but the "huge man" with the extra digits is also singled out for being slain at the city of Gath itself. Even in the passage in which the Elhanan anecdote is preserved, Goliath's residency is not unique. One could even suggest that a race of tall people, if such existed, would naturally have concentrated on a relatively small geographic location, just as ethnic groups are "ghetto-ized" today. If the giant stories are purely legendary, it also stands to reason that the Elhanan and David narratives could spring from a common story about Gittite giants and Hebrew (or Bethlehemite, for that matter) warriors. The other terms may also not be so unique. Hertzberg has suggested that the name "Goliath" had already "come to designate a type" (p. 387); the same might be true of the "weaver's rod" analogy, which I Chronicles 11:23 adds to the otherwise completely unrelated story (originally found in I Samuel 23:20-21) about an Egyptian giant killed with his own spear by Benaiah son of Jehoida.

At any rate, it is commonly accepted that the story of David and Goliath stood on its own originally, even if Goliath was not so named in the earliest versions of the story. The narrative's emphasis on Goliath's weapons and armour has been interpreted by Hertzberg and others to suggest that the Davidic account was first preserved independently at the site of the Tabernacle, where Goliath's weapons were left for David to retrieve them later (Hertzberg, p. 154; McCarter, pp. 294-295; cf. I Samuel 21:9, in which Goliath's name could be omitted without any mistake as to which giant is referred to). Indeed, much is made of Goliath's accoutrements in I Samuel 17:5-7 that is not found in the Elhanan account, and the manner in which his battle gear is described suggests that David's Goliath is a composite of the various foes that Israel had to contend with:

That David's opponent is no "Mycenaean hoplite" has been shown clearly by K. Galling ... who finds the armor to be a diverse collection of offensive and defensive weapons combined by the narrator from a variety of places and styles to emphasize the formidability of the Philistine champion. (McCarter, p. 292)

Thus, the "Goliath" we are told about in I Samuel may borrow some elements from giants of various other traditions, including that of Elhanan's encounter with what appears to have been one of the last of the Rephaim. At the same time, it appears that at least one similar story (McCarter argues for two that were edited together) existed independently for David, whose foe might or might not have come from a known race of giants. The connection between the Philistine champion and Gath suggests that he was of the same racial stock as the "descendants of Rapha" killed by David's warriors, possibly even the Anakim.

In summary, then, the Rephaim in Israelite historiography were a quasi-national Syro-Palestinian race of unusually tall people that were displaced by the Israelites, Moabites, and Ammonites towards the end of the Bronze Age. They are the only giants for whom we have any names or physical height statistics, and they appear to have been absorbed into the Philistine culture, particularly its military, where they became the catalyst for a number of legends about the victorious Israelites.

This is an intriguing interpretation, but one cannot help but find it a little over-elaborate. For one thing, the "orgies and premarital prostitution" are not necessitated by Genesis 6:1-4, which simply states that the "sons of God ... married" -- i.e., took legitimate wives from among (Westermann, p. 372) -- "the daughters of men". While later interpretations of the union between heavenly beings and humans saw it in a thoroughly wicked light, this is barely even suggested in the text of Genesis 6:1-4 itself. The rest of this particular modern historical aetiology must remain speculation.

Graves & Patai also advance the view, supported by others, that giant stories may have been inspired by the larger-than-life effigies left behind by previous civilizations (p. 106; cf. Vawter, p. 110). This is not implausible; in fact, even today, such monuments continue to inspire much mythmaking, though storytellers now speak not of gods but of extraterrestrials and the like. One can also detect this process at work in the story of Og, whose claim to gianthood was his "iron bed"; the word "sarcophagus" is sometimes suggested for Og's "bed", with "basalt" taking the place of "iron" (McMillion, ABD 5.9). If other remains of this sort existed in ancient Canaan, they could very well have prompted the imagination of ancient storytellers. If not, then tales of giants may have passed into Canaan through the oral traditions of passing tribes.

The more obscure tribes of giants, the Emim and Zamzummim of Deuteronomy 2, have equally obscure historical backgrounds. The Emim are not attested in any text outside of the Bible, and their name is Hebrew for either "terrible ones" or "frightful ones" (Mattingly, ABD 2.497). The Zamzummim may be related to the Zuzim of Genesis 14:5, who are mentioned in conjunction with the Rephaim and Emim. The name might derive from zamzama, Aramaic for "murmuring" or "muttering", but in light of their association with the giants, it seems more likely that their name may be related to zumzum-, a prefix denoting "the best, the select (of men or camels)" (Astour, ABD 6.1176).

Another tribe, the Horim, are mentioned in two biblical passages (Genesis 14:6 and Deuteronomy 2:12,22), and they are associated on both occasions with the races of giants. However, there is nothing in the text or in their name to suggest that they were giants themselves; they simply occupied the land of Seir before they were driven out by the Edomites, though it appears from Genesis 26 that the Edomites had lived relatively peacefully with them at first. In any case, while the Horim lived in the region and would appear to be guilty of giantism by association, there is no evidence that they were ever actually seen in this light.

The word hëmitheoi is used here to describe the demigods, and Hendel notes that use of this word is "rare in Hesiod"; the other main occurence is in The Works and Days 160, where the "half-gods" were limited to the fourth age of mankind, the one immediately preceding the iron age, before they were separated "far from the immortals" (Works and Days 168) on islands at the edge of the world. The only occurence of this word in Homer occurs in a passage that describes a sort of miniature flood which the gods sent to destroy a rampart built by the Achaeans:

But once the best of the Trojan captains fell,
and many Achaeans died as well while some survived,
and Priam's high walls were stormed in the tenth year
and the Argives set sail for the native land they loved --
then, at last, Poseidon and Lord Apollo launched their plan
to smash the rampart, flinging into it all the rivers' fury.
All that flow from the crests of Ida down to breaking surf...
... where tons of oxhide shields
and horned helmets tumbled deep in the river silt
and a race of man who seemed half god, half mortal.
(Homer, Iliad, 12.16-22,25-27)

Hendel supports Scodel's argument that this is a "vestige of an older flood tradition which the Trojan War has largely displaced" by noting that Poseidon here takes part in the destruction of the rampart when, elsewhere in The Iliad, he had been "decidedly pro-Achaean" (Hendel, pp. 19-20).

This argument is not entirely persuasive, of course. The favour of the gods could never be taken for granted, and shortly after the Trojan War ended, a prominent Achaean named Odysseus lost favour with Poseidon for mistreating his son the Cyclops (Homer, The Odyssey, 9.574-589). Bernard Knox sees no grand theme in this passage but, rather, interprets it to mean that even the seemingly greatest of human conflicts "will not even be allowed to leave a mark on the landscape"; Knox compares the rampart to the "great artificial harbours" of the 1944 landing at Normandy, where little if any sign of that "gigantic enterprise" remains today (Knox, in Homer, Iliad, p. 38). In fairness to Hendel, though, it should be noted that a desire to keep the gods and humans separate exists on Zeus' part in Hesiod's works (Hendel, p. 19), and that Knox interprets the overarching theme of The Iliad to be the humanization of Achilles: where Achilles begins the poem full of unchecked rage, pursuing it as single-mindedly as the Greek deities do, Book 24 finds Achilles finally learning how to empathize with another human being:

The Iliad shows us the origin, course and consequences of his [Achilles'] rage, his imprisonment in a godlike, lonely, heroic fury from which all the rest of the world is excluded, and also his return to human stature. (Knox, in Homer, Iliad, p. 46)

Knox then goes on to describe the Greek view that man must occupy a middle ground between gods and beasts, a belief that was compromised for as long as these half-gods continued to exist (cf. pp. 57-58).

This brings us back to the biblical text and its wider context within the primeval cycle in Genesis. As odd as the Nephilim passage in Genesis 6:1-4 is, it fits with the recurring theme in the cycle that God -- or the gods -- are separate from man and must be kept separate (cf. Hendel, pp. 24-25). Man can not live forever and know good from evil (Genesis 3:22), man can not prolong his life through a divine parentage (Genesis 6:3), and man can not reach for heaven and hope to remain as united as the deities that already live there (Genesis 11:6-7). (Cf. Hendel, p. 23, who cites Mary Douglas' observation that "purity laws" serve to keep "distinct the categories of creation"; the mixing of human and divine blood -- if the gods have blood -- worked against the "purity" of "distinct categories".)

The Rephaim are also used this way in the poetic and prophetic literature of the Hebrew Bible. In a "taunt" against the king of Babylon, Isaiah 14:9-11 preserves most clearly a macabre sense of the royalty that the Rephaim once had:

The grave [Sheol] below is all astir
to meet you at your coming;
it rouses the spirits of the departed to greet you --
all those who were leaders in the world;
it makes them rise from their thrones --
all those who were kings over the nations
They will all respond,
they will say to you,
"You also have become weak, as we are;
you have become like us."
All your pomp has been brought down to the grave,
along with the noise of your harps;
maggots are spread out beneath you
and worms cover you.

Isaiah also makes use of the Rephaim in 26:14, where he speaks to Yahweh about the Rephaim:

They are now dead, they live no more;
those departed spirits do not rise.
You punished them and brought them to ruin;
you wiped out all memory of them.

Job 26:5 also speaks of the dead who are "in deep anguish". Psalm 88:5 speaks of the "slain" who are "cut off" from God's care. Proverbs 2:18 warns that the adulteress' paths lead "to the spirits of the dead." In Proverbs 9:18, the dead are guests of "the woman Folly" in Sheol. Proverbs 21:16 says that "a man who strays from the path of understanding / comes to rest in the company of the dead." All these canonical references are further attested to by texts such as the apocryphal book of Baruch:

Israel, how great is God's dwelling-place,
how vast the extent of his domain!
Great and boundless it is, lofty and immeasurable,
There of old the giants were born,
a famous race, mighty in stature, skilled in war.
But those were not chosen by God
or shown the way of knowledge.
Their race perished for lack of insight;
they perished in their folly.
(Baruch 3:24-28, REB)

This tradition developed and spread to territories far from that of the Israelites. Phoenician inscriptions have also been discovered which list the Rephaim as those who are joined by those who cease to live (Smith, ABD 5.674). One can detect parallels between the Hebrew underworld and the shadowy Hades where Odysseus visits the dead Greek heroes (The Odyssey, Book 11). In some places, the Septuagint translates the word "Rephaim" not as giganton (e.g. I Chronicles 11:15) but as Titanon (II Samuel 5:18), thus alluding to the Greek deities who were bound in Tartaros, a place far beneath the earth that was feared even by the gods (Hesiod, Theogony 713-725, 743-744).