This episode takes listeners on a journey through time, analyzing archaeological evidence of giants and exploring the fascinating narratives found in the Book of Enoch. We discuss the societal implications and historical contexts that surround the stories of giants in various cultures, from ancient Israel to the Mississippian mound builders in America. Challenge your understanding of history as we question historical records and reflect on how these discoveries can alter our perception of the past.
Welcome back to Real Science Radio for part two of our series on giants in the Bible. We’re continuing right where we left off, looking at the 10-foot giant Goliath and more about the giant clans. Dino Dave Wetzel is back to present the evidence and lead us forward. Let’s get started.
SPEAKER 04 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune in to Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 04 :
Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 03 :
All right, it’s time. We got to talk about the most famous giant of all time, right? Here is a reconstruction of the ancient city of Gath. And of course, you can see the Mediterranean Sea there in the distant horizon. But it would be in these low hills called the Shwela there in what’s today Israel. And in the area of Gath, Gaza area today, you would have this city and it’s giving refuge to Anakim. And Goliath is a descendant of those Anakim. And we know how tall Goliath is because it specifically gives us his measurements. And he’s 10 feet tall. So he’s… Just huge. She’s, you know, it’s kind of like a Robert Wadlow, but not with giantism. This guy is a stud. He is a champion. He’s a fighter. Saul would tell David, this guy’s been a fighter since his youth. He’s trained warrior. 1 Samuel 17, 4, there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines named Goliath of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span. 10 foot tall, monster guy. And it’s not just that he’s tall. He is strong. He is a stud. It says the staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam. The spearhead weighed 600 shekels of iron. Now that’s about 16 pounds. And you might say, well, Big deal. I could pick up 16 pounds. That’s like nothing, right? Okay. Yeah. But put that out on the end of a long spear and try holding it up. In fact, try fighting with it all day long.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, that’s on the spear’s head. That’s not just a spear. Then try throwing that thing.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Yeah. And so recently I had to demolish a cast iron bathtub out of a bathroom and I purchased a 12 pound sledgehammer, which at the civilian hardware store, that’s the biggest sledgehammer you can get. And I pounded on that for about 90 seconds and I had to stop and take that’s a 12 pound sledgehammer.
SPEAKER 03 :
I mean, that’s nowhere near as long as this spear. I mean, people make mock-ups of this spear. But guys, this is where it gets really fun. We have archaeological evidence of this. This was not that long ago, some decades ago, an Israeli farmer’s out there. He’s working his field. All of a sudden, his plow hits something, bang! He’s like, what on earth is that? Brings up the plow, goes down there, and he begins to unearth these metal spearheads. Now, these are bronze, okay? Goliath was probably iron, but there was some mix. They were using some bronze, using some iron, kind of mix between bronze and Iron Age going on there. But this would be the area of Philistia. It’s over toward the sea coast. It’s an Israeli farmer, and he uncovers this trove of ancient spear points. These are giant spear points. And this is a picture of them from the Israeli Museum. And the journal that actually published this find says these spears were too big to wield. So they must have just been used for decoration. So somebody made this enormous spear just to put on the wall because it’s so big that nobody could possibly use it. Now, guys, look at the spear points. The spear points have nicks in them. These are not used for decoration, man. These were used for thumping somebody’s head. These are real. These are giant spear points, and they’re actually in the Israeli Museum today.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, these secular archaeologists should read the Bible. Then they’d actually maybe realize they weren’t too big to wield for these giants talked about in the Bible. They must have just been used for decoration. Oh, my goodness.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, those two on the right are just flat out huge. And people make replicas. You can go out there and people make replicas of Goliath’s spear. So here’s Dino Dave, right? And it’s all I can do just to lift this thing up and hold it for the photo shoot and then drop it again. This guy is… expected to wield this through the course of a whole day maybe we read about these battles going a whole day and even into the night and so this guy is not just tall this guy is enormously strong so is that here to scale there so yeah in your audience so that’s yeah that spear is really it looks like almost twice the length of your body that you’re holding up did you actually have the correct weight for the spearhead i’m not sure i’m not even certain well you’re supposed to know it was heavier Yeah. So I worked out all day long and I managed to lift that up. But hey, guys, now you understand nobody wanted to fight this guy. Right. Yeah. He’s given his speech day after day after day for a month and nobody wants to fight him until finally David’s like, look. We got God on our side. Come on, give me a break. And so he goes for it. And of course, the story of David triumphing over Goliath has become this inspiration all down through the generations. And by God’s grace, giants can be defeated. This guy doesn’t intimidate the God who made the cosmos. This guy doesn’t intimidate the God who built the earth and laid its foundations. But he sure does intimidate us. The idea of going to hand-to-hand combat with him is just intimidating because he is so, so big. Okay, that’s Goliath. Now, understand Goliath is not the only Anakim. Altogether, there were four descendants of the giants at Gath who were killed by David and his men. So again, Anakim is this race. It’s this tribe, a whole bunch of kins, okay? Not some genetic anomaly. We read in 2 Samuel 21 20, this is some years after that, there was another battle at Gath, and there was a giant who loved to fight, and he had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. So these guys are just nasty, okay? It’s not like they fight because, you know, well, David was a fighter, right? But he was also a king and a shepherd, and he was a songwriter. No, no, these guys love to fight. You look at these guys sideways and they just say, hey, you want a piece of me? You know, I just start throwing stuff. They’re just violent guys.
SPEAKER 05 :
Wow. So, Dave, I don’t know if you’re going to get to, I wanted to ask you about the book of Enoch, because I have Christian brothers who I think take that book too far. Can you talk about, doesn’t the book of Enoch, and I’ve never read it, I’ve only read excerpts, but it talks about giants that are like 100 feet tall. As far as I know, that’s probably physically impossible, right?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, that is. I mean, there’s no way you’re going to have a heart that’s going to beat blood up that high, and you’re going to have issues with gravity. Look, these guys would be slow, really slow. Remember, everything scales up. Okay, yeah, you’re 12 feet tall if you’re Og, and everything is bigger. You’re much wider. These guys would be weighing over half a ton. These guys are just enormous. They’d eat a lot and they’d just be just slow. They’re not going to be the first guy down the court, but if they get under the hoop, watch out. Don’t try to block them and get in their way, right? They’re just massive human tanks. But the Book of Enoch, yes, it certainly exaggerates them. They’re called the Watchers and I have read the Book of Enoch. There’s also a lot of astronomical features there that are clearly fabulous. They’re mythical. They’re the science of the ancient world. but even though it’s not a biblical book, it’s not inspired, and you have to be careful with it, we know some of it’s true. How do we know some of it’s true? Because it’s quoted in the book of Jude, literally word for word, straight out of the book of Enoch. And so the saying that is in the book of Enoch is actually ascribed in the book of Jude to Enoch. So this is legitimate quotes that are preserved in the book of Enoch, and the Bible affirms that they are. this godly man enoch so some at least of the book of enoch is the words of enoch who was this great prophet this great man of god who walked with god and is held up in the hebrews is this great you know man of faith but then also we have a lot of fabulous stuff somebody subscribes or some other people added some things in there so it’s apocryphal we got to take it with a grain of salt And people gone crazy with it and think, okay, this is absolute, all kinds of ancient wisdom that we can glean that, you know, be careful with it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, yes. And so I would also be very careful about saying that the Bible quotes the book of Enoch. I would be very careful about saying that because as I read the passage in Jude, “…and Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these things, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints to execute judgment upon all.” and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds, which they have ungodly committed, and all their hard speeches, which ungodly sinners have spoken against them. So whoever wrote the book of Enoch could have looked at the book of Jude, since there’s a pretty good chance that the book of Enoch was written sometime later. Anyway, I would just be careful about that. Anyway, bottom line, it’s apocryphal. We all agree on that.
SPEAKER 03 :
So Jude would have been written after Christ. We do have Enoch amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book of Enoch is earlier. It is ancient literature, as is much of the Apocrypha.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, I did not know that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. So legitimately, Jude is under inspiration of the Bible, taking this quotation from the book of Enoch. I mean, unless God just reveals it, but he would have been familiar. We would think he would have been familiar with the Book of Enoch. But so I guess I’m comfortable saying that this is a quotation from the Book of Enoch, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that any of the rest of the Book of Enoch is valid. It’s just that is because God put a stamp of approval on it. But there could be historical facts there in the Book of Enoch that were legitimate. but then it could also be exaggerated. So the giants, the watchers are real. We know this is the Nephilim. This is Genesis six, but the size that’s given could be certainly exaggerated. And so we just got to be careful. Anything outside the Bible is, Yes, it’s interesting. It’s historical. It’s just like as if you were to read the Epic of Gilgamesh or some of these ancient Babylonian accounts or Greek accounts of their gods that went off to these great battles and did this stuff and Odysseus and all this stuff. Just be careful. It’s apocryphal.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, and this is why I wanted to have you on the show, Dave. Number one, I always want to learn from people who’ve studied things a lot more than I have. And so I’ve learned something here that I didn’t know, which is awesome. But also having had the opportunity to look at some of your presentations, you really do walk the line with the Bible. And especially when it comes to topics like this, we really appreciate that because we As you’ve noticed, everybody has an interest in topics like this, but we don’t want to go too far. We want to be careful, and we want to hear the rest because this is so fascinating.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, that’s a nice segue into this third piece. And the question that you might have is, okay, so we have the biblical account. Obviously, there were giants. The Bible says that we can believe that. We actually have some archaeological evidence of some of these post-flood giant races. But do we have bones? Do we actually have giant bones? And the surprising answer is yes. And I want to talk about the American mound builders. So the American mound builders is a civilization that’s called the Mississippian civilization. Now, here’s the crazy part. Most people I talk to in the United States of America have never even heard of the mound builders. But this was a culture that predated the arrival of the European settlers. It flourished from about 300 B.C. to about 1600 A.D. And most secular scholars will say, well, it’s one and the same as the Native Americans, the tribal Native Americans. Maybe, maybe. Could be. Could be we have some different groups that are coexisting here. But we do know that the tribal Americans, at least at the time of the European settlers, didn’t build these large cities. And they didn’t have extensive mining operations. The mound builders… They had large earthen mounds they built and these enormous cities that are with stockades around them, and they did extensive mining of copper for jewelry and for armor. So could it be that these are some different group, maybe even that intermingled, intermarried, perhaps ruled over some Native American peoples? No. don’t know for sure, but there’s some fascinating stories even by the Native Americans that we’ll talk about as we go along. So here’s a picture of the extent of this Mississippian culture. It seems like it started in the Gulf region and worked its way up along the major rivers. The rivers are kind of Mecca for the Mississippian mountain builders. Now understand, These are all abandoned by the time the Western settlers come in. De Soto comes through and you have others that are conquistadors and they have records of some of this stuff. These guys, they’ve abandoned this. These cities are abandoned. We really don’t know a lot about how they lived, but we find their remains in these large earthen mounds. And there are thousands of these mounds. literally thousands of them, mostly through the Mid-South, through the Gulf region, and up into the Midwest, Appalachia and up into over to the Great Plains. That’s really, and especially along the rivers, we’re talking the Mississippi, Missouri, other rivers. So in the 1800s, settlers are moving west and And they run into these mounds, and they’re curious. They start digging in them. They start excavating, and they find skeletons that are 8 to 10 feet tall buried in these mounds. And they’re documented in, for example, in this book, The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America, The Missing Skeletons, and The Great Smithsonian Cover-Up. As people find these, they make the newspapers of the time. And, of course, you’ve got to be a little careful with newspapers, especially in the 1800s. You know, the 19th century was given a sensationalism, and you want to sell copies, and you want to have, like, the most significant thing ever found in your backyard, in your town, right? And so, okay, yeah, we got to treat some of this stuff with a little bit of a grain of salt. But this was commonly known. They’re not just one or two. There’s hundreds of newspaper reports to people digging up these mounds, finding metallic objects, especially armor, and finding giants. Now, the Smithsonian would get involved many, many times, more often than not. And the bones would get taken to the Smithsonian. What happened to them? They disappeared. Now, guys, I’m not one that’s normally given to conspiracy theories. I’m very dubious that conspiracies can be held together without somebody ratting it out. But this is one that, yeah, something weird happened because the Smithsonian showed up at all these digs and all of a sudden it’s like they’re gone. The skeletons are gone.
SPEAKER 05 :
There’s probably some room in the Smithsonian that you have to have special key access to, and it’s called the Giants and the Polixie Footprints. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, so understand, okay, we’re talking the late 1800s, early 1900s. This is the time when, of course, you know, Darwin’s theory is gaining popularity, right? 1870s, 1880s is not just Darwin, but there’s lots of theories of evolution that are kind of going on. Darwin published in 1859, but evolution’s all the rage, right? And so we want to think in terms that, oh, we’re the pinnacle of civilization. This is the Victorian era. We are the pinnacle. A lot of racism going on. And some of these Africans and some of these Asians, even, you know, Australian indigenous groups, these guys are less evolved. We’re the pinnacle of civilization. And then all of a sudden you start digging in some of these mounds and And you find people that are 8 to 10 feet tall. This is problematic. This runs against the intelligentsia, the academia of the time, which is, hey, we’re the pinnacle of civilization. And so, well, what are we going to do with these guys? This is embarrassment. It sounds way too biblical.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, and Dave, just stop right there, by the way. So this is a time in America when people actually took the Bible seriously. Most people don’t really understand that today. But there was a time in America when most people believed the Bible. They believed the creation story. They took it all very seriously. So to the Smithsonian, just real quick, we have a certain connection to the Smithsonian here at Real Science Radio because our founder, Bob Enyart, took our church and my little kids on a tour of the Denver Museum of Natural History back 10, 15 years ago. where there was an active conspiracy going on, by the way, to teach children that they evolved from monkeys. The whole museum is organized around a conspiracy. One of the biggest conspiracies in history is to teach children that they evolved from nothing. And the head of the museum was a guy that we call Captain Kirk, which Dr. Kirk Johnson was the head of the museum there in Denver. He has now failed upward. He’s the assistant secretary of, I forget exactly what it is, but he’s in Washington, D.C. at the actual Smithsonian. Just in case anyone wondered if the Smithsonian has ever been involved in any conspiracy, we just want to make clear that, yes, they have been. So there.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, guys, the Smithsonian admits, okay, this is what they admit, that they hold the remains of more than 30,000. 30,000 individuals. This collection includes a variety of remains such as whole or partial skeletons. American Museum of Natural History, which is in New York City, holds skeletal remains of another 12,000 people. These collections include remains from a variety of sources with a significant portion being of Native American descent. Wow. That’s a lot of skeletons. They’re admitting this. I mean, that’s a good-sized city, and who has access to it? Who knows what there is there? Now, some of this stuff has been given back to Native Americans. It’s been repatriated. They’ve reburied a lot of this stuff. Even artifacts have been lost to our museum collections because we want to respect the Native’s beliefs that those need to be in association with the owners in their afterlife. And so, you know, a lot of this stuff we’re repatriating, but the point is that they admit they’ve got 30,000 and a lot of it is native American. So are there giants? I can tell you this. It was so common. that everybody talked about it. And Abraham Lincoln in 1848 gave a speech at Niagara Falls, and he talked about the giants. This is a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s speech. He says, Niagara Falls, by what mysterious power is it that millions and millions are drawn from all parts of the world to gaze upon Niagara Falls, the eyes of that species of extinct giants whose bones fill the mounds of America forever. have gazed on Niagara as ours do now.
SPEAKER 02 :
Whoa. Dave, how have I never heard this? I consider myself a history buff.
SPEAKER 03 :
Guys, I had never heard of this until I started reading and studying this thing out. And all of a sudden, it’s like, wait a minute. In the 1800s, everybody knows about this. It’s not a big deal. It’s just giants that have been found in this mouth. It’s like everyday conversation. Yes. We have found giants. What’s the big deal about it? We all know about this. And now they disappeared and it’s been, you know, swept under the carpet. And nobody knows about this. Nobody has even heard of the mound builder civilization, even though they have structures the size of the pyramids of Giza. And they’re right here in this country.
SPEAKER 05 :
Fascinating. Wow. Yeah, I’d never heard of this before in all the years of doing Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 03 :
So let’s talk about some pretty trustworthy. Again, I’m a scientist. I got a master’s in biology, and I want to be careful about just, quote, newspapers. But after digging through a lot of the records, I’ve got some things that… Well, here’s the 12th annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Secretary of the Smithsonian, okay? This is pretty… Pretty reliable, especially because, if anything, the Smithsonian is looking to cover this stuff up. But here it is in their annual report, okay, that’s going back to the 1800s, and it says, while at work on a huge mound near Chillicothe, Ohio, archaeologists found the massive skeleton of a man. His mouth was stuffed with pearls. His whole body was encased in copper armor. Wow. Now, the pioneers, the cowboys, are fighting the Indians. They don’t have copper armor. So, what’s going on? We got something a little bit interesting going on, and they may not have been smelting ores. Maybe they were just pounding cold copper, but They had a metallurgy that was going on. It seemed like they were mining this up in the Great Lakes region. And so this is a pretty reliable report here of one of these. Now, here’s the Arkansas archaeologist, okay? And again, this is a fairly trustworthy—in fact, this is a modern journal— The skeletons are very large, 7 to 10 feet tall. One femur bone was unearthed that measured 29 inches in length. The skulls are extremely large. The jaw of one is such size it would slip over my own and have considerable space to spare. Now, not everybody’s giants, okay? They’re digging in the mounds. They find this big dude in the center. Maybe around him they would find a number of his attendants that were executed and buried with him to take care of him in the afterlife, but they’re normal size. But it would seem that there were these giants, at least some of them, some of these ancient peoples. And we don’t have historical records. They were gone. They were gone by the time of the settlers. But the biggest… community of the mississippian people is cahokia which as i mentioned is near the present-day city of st louis there’s numerous mounds there they’re preserved it’s a unesco world heritage site the largest of the mounds is monk’s mound this is the size of a football field it goes a hundred feet up into the air and you’ve got you know all these tons of earth that’s moved one basket full at a time To make the mound. Here’s some mounds at Cahokia. If you ever have the chance, it’s well worth seeing. It’s a fascinating sight to go and see there at Cahokia. And you can see where they dug it up. And here is an aerial. I’ll show you the aerial in it. This is me, actually. I saw that monk’s mound there. But you can see there’s a lower level and then upper level. Here’s your aerial. So you can see. And you can go up there. You can hike up there. Of course, it’s right where the Mississippi and the Missouri come together, which is why it’s kind of Mecca for this Mississippian culture.
SPEAKER 05 :
Are these burial grounds? What do they know about them?
SPEAKER 03 :
You can’t dig in these today. You can’t dig in any mounds. In fact, you can own the land and there can be a mound out back and you cannot dig in it because, well, we just want to respect these burial sites. There’s three types of mounds. To answer your question, there seem to be mounds where people, either they had priests that lived up there or the local ruler lived up there, but up at the top would be kind of like the big dude. And then there’d be smaller mounds around it where maybe some of the noblemen and some of the smaller, lesser rulers would be on a mound. So there are people living on these mounds. And sometimes there’d be over multiple generations. So the mound gets built to a level and somebody gets buried in there and the next guy, his son, build the mound even higher. He lives up there and then maybe he gets buried and his grandson. So over generations that maybe these got taller, it seems there’s multiple layers to a lot of these mounds. And yes, there are people… people buried at different layers in the mound. There’s a second type of mound, which seems to have, you know, some astronomical significance, where they would come occasionally, maybe at equinox or solstice or something, and they would, you know, perform some rituals there, kind of like a stonehenge almost. And then there’s a third kind of a mound, which is artistic in nature. So, for example, you’ve got some very famous, the serpent mound. I haven’t been to that one. I think it’s in Ohio or New York, somewhere there. But it’s this long, skinny, and you can’t even appreciate it on the ground. You’ve got to get up in a drone to really see it’s that big, the effigy mounds. And they’ll take on a certain shape or something like this. So there’s different types of mounds around. that they have, and some of them have artifacts that have been taken out of these mounds. But this is the biggest. This is Cahokia.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. Well, let’s try to fit this into the biblical reference that we’ve talked before about. It makes really good sense. It’s very plausible that the giants in Canaan you know there to as part of satan’s plan so dave how does this fit these american mound builders how does this fit into that narrative is there a connection do you have opinions are there theories on this how does this all tie in it it’s going to be conjecture it’s the fact it’s going to be really far out conjecture i’m not convinced that these are not native americans
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape, stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That’s Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 04 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune in to Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real. That’s what I’m talking about.
