02x10 - The Giants of Genesis

[bunniefuu]

What does it all mean?

This is where the archeology has been found.

Hi, how are you?

Look at that.

I need a planter.

A shrine to a bellybutton.

Look at that!

No one gets into this place?

Whoa! Don't take me too far.

Now that's naked archeology.

[theme music]

[screaming]

[deep rumbling]

[continued screaming]

The Book of Genesis tells the story of man's beginning.

And then in Chapter Six, Verse Four,

it takes a very strange detour.

[SIMCHA] It tells us that

Is this myth or fact?

Was there a time when giants walked

the face of the earth, and can archaeology

help us solve this mystery?

[SIMCHA] Really big people have always been around.

The Guinness Book of World Records has documented

hundreds of men & women

who have reached heights of feet or taller.

The Bible's most famous giant

is a powerful big guy that goes by the name of Goliath.

[ANNOUNCER] Goliath! The bruteish monster

[SIMCHA] Everybody knows the story of David and Goliath.

David hurls a stone from a sling.

Goliath gets cracked in the noggin.

And then before you know it,

David's cutting off Goliath's head.

Was there really a Goliath?

If there was, the Biblical city of Gath is the place to look.

So I'm here, in Gath, the Philistine warrior's home town

to meet with archaeologist Aren Maeir.

I'm wondering whether he found any giant-sized bones here.

We're standing right where the battle would have taken place,

in any event, between David and Goliath.

Well, over looking the area.

The battle would have taken place right behind that hill.

Was everybody really short?

Well, first of all, everybody was really short.

Like, I'm six three.

If you take into account what the average height of a person

during the iron age, he would probably be about a metre sixty.

Who would be, that? The average person?

The average person.

Right.

Now, according to biblical text,

Goliath is three metres, three metres and something.

Three metres?

Yeah, which is, which is large and even by NBA scale.

That's about nine feet.

Nine feet tall?

Yeah, something like that yeah.

Boy, you just feed him the ball and he dunks it, eh?

Yeah, but you can always knock him in the balls.

[SIMCHA] The Bible isn't the only record of Goliath's story.

The Dead Sea Scrolls,

discovered in a desert cave in ,

also tell the story of Goliath.

Except that Goliath's height is described in the scrolls

as two full cubits shorter

than the Bible's cubits and a span.

When you look at the text of Samuel in the Dead Sea Scrolls,

so there he's depicted as four cubits, if I'm not mistaken.

So he's much closer to a normal size.

Four cubits would make him how tall?

About two metres, two metres and something.

Oh, so about six seven or something?

Something of the sort.

You know, that would be you know-

that would be tall even on today's standards but still not-

Well- -Not unbelievably.

It'd be a guard, not a centre.

[SIMCHA] Because the Dead Sea Scrolls

contain the oldest versions of the Biblical texts,

most scholars believe that scribal error

is the cause of the two different heights.

Scholars tend to trust the measurements

listed in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

But either way Maeir never did find any large bones.

And without them, we'll never be able to know for sure

how big Goliath really was.

Without Goliath, I'm starting to wonder

what the bible means by giants in the Holy Land.

In any event I've stumbled across

another really big guy in the bible.

A giant who's even bigger than Goliath,

and who ruled his own biblical Kingdom.

[SIMCHA] My search for giants in the Holy Land

is becoming a bit more difficult

than I thought it would be.

Goliath was a big no-show.

So, I'm going back into the Book of Deuteronomy.

It's here that we learn the story of the Bible's other giant.

a rather tall king named Og,

who fought and lost against the Israelites

in the Battle for the Holy Land.

The Bible tells us that Og is the last remnant

of a clan of giants known as the Rephaim

and that he had a giant bed: feet long and feet wide.

We're in a street in Jerusalem called Emek Refaim,

the valley of the giants.

And we know from the Bible that Og, the king of the Vashon,

was a giant. One of these Rephaim.

Are you one of the giants?

I would say.

Really? -Yeah.

What's your gut feeling on the Giants?

My gut feeling on the Giants is-

I don't know. I know a lot more about the Dodgers.

The fact that the bible tells us he had this giant iron bed,

maybe that just means that he had

what we call today a 'Napoleon complex'.

Either that or he had very big girlfriends.

You know that I'm the Naked Archaeologist, right?

Yes.

We've got to get naked.

It is hot. -It's hot.

Ok, the bible tells us that Og is one of these Rephaim.

Yes.

And he has this giant what?

Uh, I don't know.

A Giant?

So archaeologically, instead of looking for one giant guy,

we should be looking for-

Several large boned women.

What I want to tell you is that Og was a giant,

and if we are going to find evidence of giants

roaming the earth we should go to the biblical Bashan,

which is today in the Golan Heights.

[SIMCHA] The further north I get into the Golan Heights,

things seem to get bigger.

Take these Dolmens for instance.

Mysterious Megalithic markers made from rocks

that weigh over tons.

These dolmens can be found all over the Golan Heights

and even though they're not exactly proof

that giants once roamed this land,

they do make you wonder who could have put them here.

Whoever it was also built something

much more impressive:

a year old megalithic site, known as Rujm el Hiri.

Not only is it considered the Middle East's version

of Stonehenge, it also contains a tomb

that some people say is the final resting place

of King Og himself.

This is the mound itself. This is the outermost wall.

[SIMCHA] So, I'm meeting with Professor Yoni Mizrachi,

the man who first excavated Rujm el Hiri back in the s.

We entered into the tomb and we sat there for two weeks,

But it became clear very early

that somebody was there before us.

Because it seemed to be looted.

There were, you know, stones in there.

It wasn't like, clean and waiting for us. So-

But looted in ancient times.

Looted in ancient times.

And apparently the looters, on their way out, dropped stuff.

We found three beautiful gold earrings,

we found chameleon beads, we found the arrowheads,

I heard that some people speculated

that since we're in the Bashan area,

we know a name has come down to us

of a famous Bashan king Og.

We know that he was huge,

doesn't it make sense that if this was the burial site

of this giant, he would be in this megalithic structure.

This person had to be very important.

And you take mega site and you take mega people

and you put them together it sounds great.

But you haven't found anything that would say,

which indicate who was buried here.

No.

Did you find bones? -No.

Did you find a, you know, a sarcophagus of some sort?

No.

So somebody took it out?

Somebody took it out. And as I said before it was looted.

[SIMCHA] Inside the central mound is the tomb

where Mizrachi found jewellery,

indicating that at one point in time it held a sizeable treasure

which was looted thousands of years ago.

And then we removed some of the stones,

and we got this beautiful entrance, opening.

And then we can get inside.

After you.

I want somebody to test it first.

[SIMCHA] It's a tight squeeze getting into the tomb,

but then it opens into a large hollow.

Leading me to believe that whoever was buried here

might have needed a little extra leg room.

Somebody very, very, very important was buried here.

This was no ordinary burial place.

Whoever it was, he was important.

He rested here for a thousand years,

he was surrounded by gold and all that's left now-

there is no proof, but there is, there is this space.

And it's a very special place.

So we maybe, we don't know, we'll never know,

we may be standing on Og's burial ground.

Ya, we'll never know, we'll never know.

Even though the archaeology I'm finding is fascinating,

it still isn't telling me who the biblical "giants" really were.

Finding the bones of a giant human

is starting to seem more and more unlikely,

especially since there has never been a skeleton

uncovered anywhere in the Middle East

that has reached a height of more than foot .

Has there been a mistake?

So, I'm going to take another look

at the Genesis giants reference, this time in Hebrew,

to see what the passage says in the original.

And to my surprise the word "giant" doesn't actually appear

anywhere in the Book of Genesis.

Another word is used,

and that word doesn't mean giant at all.

[SIMCHA] My search for giants in the Holyland was a bust,

so I decided to go back to the original Hebrew Bible

and look at the reference again.

I was taken by surprised when I learned

that the word giant doesn't appear anywhere

in the Book of Genesis. The word used is "nephilim."

According to Jewish and Christian folklore,

the nephilim were supposed to be the giant offspring

of fallen angels having sex with human women.

But in Hebrew nephilim didn't even mean big, let alone giant.

Translated into English,

nephilim actually means "the fallen ones."

I suddenly realized how it all got mixed up.

You see, when the Greeks translated the Bible,

they were influenced by their own myth

about a giant race of Titans,

instead of staying true to the original nephilim.

And by the time the King James version was written

in the s, the word nephilim had been totally replaced

by giants.

So, it turns out I'm not looking for giants at all.

I'm looking for the nephilim.

But who were these nephilim?

I think Professor Gerry Schroeder

should be able to help me decode this biblical mystery.

Genesis is his thing.

You know you read Genesis and there's nephilim.

There's fallen ones. Who are these guys?

When they fall, Nefal is a Hebrew word

which means fallen or lower down or sub, less than perfect.

The Bible says there existed at the time of Adam,

beings that were completely human in shape

and in intelligence but they weren't humans,

they lacked the neshamah- the soul of humanity.

Before the neshamah, he didn't look like

Before the soul.

Before the soul humanity, if you didn't look like me,

smell like me, and talk like me, I had you for dinner.

Literally. It was a dog eat dog. It was a wild world.

Humans with souls and humans without.

Humans with soul and hominids without.

I keep going back there.

Human looking beings without the neshamah,

without the soul of human life.

What Professor Schroeder just told me is really wild,

because if chapter six of Genesis

is really recording early human history,

then the Nephilim that are mentioned in chapter six

are really referring to another life form

that coexisted with early humans.

[SIMCHA] But what kind of other life form?

I had to look at the passage in Genesis one more time

just to be sure.

With the proper translation, the passage reads:

"there were nephilim in those days,

when the sons of God came unto the daughters of man

and bore children by them-"

From the passage it's starting to become clear

that whoever these nephilim were some kind of hybrid offspring.

The children of both "the sons of god"

and "the daughters of man".

But then, who were these sons of God?

From the fossil record we know of only

one other hominid to ever co-exist with h*m* sapiens.

Neanderthal Man.

Could it be that the nephilim were actually the result

of humans and the Neanderthals having sex?

[SIMCHA] My search for giants in the Holy Land

is taking a series of very unusual turns,

especially now that I've figured out

that there had been a mistranslation.

I'm not looking for giants anymore,

I'm looking for the nephilim.

But, as crazy as it might sound,

the nephilim were turning out to be some kind of

hybrid offspring, a mixture of both humans

and some other kind of hominid.

From the archaeology we know that only

one other hominid ever co-existed with humans.

Neanderthal man.

So, if I'm going to find any skeletons

belonging to the Biblical nephilim,

then my best bet is to look for places

where Neanderthals and humans might have once lived together.

And as it turns out,

one of the best places for this kind of thing

is in Northern Israel.

The Neanderthals have disappeared,

except in Israeli traffic.

There you can see the last of the Neanderthals.

They're still amongst us.

[SIMCHA] You see, according to theories

of human migration, the Neanderthal

came out of Europe and h*m* sapiens, early humans,

came North, out of Africa.

Then, around , years ago,

they both met up at The Carmel Mountain Range.

And I've heard that in one of the caves there,

there's proof that the two groups

might have spent more than a few cold nights together.

Could they have left any archaeological traces?

To answer that question I met up with Baruch Arensberg,

one of the archaeologists who first excavated the cave.

This is the professor who's going to take us

to one of the most important finds in the world.

I think, right? It is, isn't it?

In the prehistory of the world, not in the-

But in prehistory ya.

It's amazing. You're going to lead us to the cave?

Please, let's go.

I brought boots.

[SIMCHA] On the walk up to the cave,

the Professor tells me that it's now completely

covered in bat dung, which I'm not looking forward to.

What can I say: Indiana Jones has a problem with snakes,

the Naked Archaeologist has a problem with bats.

Listen to them. Oh my God. I hate this, I have to say.

I'm not a fan of bats. Where's my stuff?

There's naked archaeology

and there's all-dressed archaeology.

When you go into a bat cave,

I prefer all-dressed archaeology.

[SIMCHA] A quick change into my bat-proof suit

and I'm good to go.

Euwch. It smells here.

Bat.

So it's beautiful or not?

Actually there is some bizarre beauty to this.

I didn't expect it but it's beautiful.

It's really amazing. , years ago,

people were standing here. Cave men.

[SIMCHA] Professor Arensberg

is showing me the dig area

where they uncovered skeletons from both Humans

and Neanderthals at the same layer of stratigraphy.

That's how he knows that they lived at the same time period

in the same cave.

And you can see big differences between the layers

of each period. It is like pages of a book.

You can see how old are each page

according to the stratigraphy.

The archaeology,

does it tell you one way or another

whether they were communicating, cooperating?

Were they very in to their own species?

They had the same culture

because they were doing the same things.

They were living in the same way.

They were eating the same things and they were

burying the people in the same way.

So these people were communicating.

Mating is a form of communication. Did they mate?

We cannot know that.

Did they date?

We cannot know if they were mating or not.

Maybe they just had guilt free sex.

They just sh*t on my face.

Don't worry about the sh*t. It's ok.

What do you mean don't worry about the sh*t?

[SIMCHA] The bats are obviously trying to tell me something.

So, it's time to go.

Besides, I want to see the Professor's lab

and take a close look at one of the skeletons

he found in the cave.

The Professor tells me that he doesn't think it's fully human

or fully Neanderthal.

It's something in the middle,

which sounds a lot like a hybrid to me.

Is it possible that these are the bones

of one of the Biblical nephilim?

This is the cast of the entire skeleton as it was found.

There are people that call him a Neanderthal,

there are others that call him h*m* sapiens,

and there are others that call him an unknown relation.

What do you believe?

I believe that he is not a Neanderthal

in the sense strict of the word.

In the strict sense. -Ya.

Well what are you suggesting?

That Neanderthals and the h*m* Sapiens

were interbreeding?

Most probably.

h*m* sapiens and Neanderthals

were very happy in the holy land.

for thousands and thousands of years.

We have some of them together.

[SIMCHA] If these bones are in fact the remains

of some kind of hybrid hominid,

then they may be the solution to a biblical mystery.

I began my quest with the search

for the bones of biblical Giants,

instead, I may have found the bones of the Biblical nephilim.

The Neanderthals and h*m* Sapiens

might have been happy for a while

but within thirty thousand years of their historic meeting

at Mount Carmel their relationship fell apart.

The h*m* sapiens went on to populate the planet.

The Neanderthals became extinct.

Now in the Bible it mentions a race of giants.

But now we know it was a mistranslation.

There was no race of giants. It's a race of nephilim.

That's the term in the book of Genesis.

And nephilim means fallen ones.

[SIMCHA] And if the nephilim were the fallen ones,

then why did they fall?

Maybe these hybrid descendants of h*m* sapiens

and Neanderthals tried their best,

but just didn't have the social skills, hygiene,

divine spark or soul necessary for moving forward,

populating the world

[screaming]