The Bible starts out in the Old Testament with an account of God’s creation of the world. As part of that creation work, we see Him creating Adam and Eve, the first human couple. Some have tried to say that these were merely symbolic “people” as evolution slowly ground its way towards what we know as modern man. Yet that viewpoint clearly disagrees with the Bible, as the Bible, specifically the biblical account of creation, doesn’t support evolutionary theory.
Setting that aside, there has always been a natural curiosity about Adam and Eve, our common ancestors. Who were these people and what did they look like? If you look at biblical art, they are shown as “perfect” people, beautiful in every regard, not having been corrupted by sin or by the genetic problems associated with inbreeding.
The truth is, we know very little about Adam and Eve’s appearance, as the Bible tells us little, none of us were there and there definitely weren’t any cameras available to take their picture. The little we do know is largely supposition, mostly based upon the idea that if God created them, He would have created them perfect. So, we create an image of what we think the perfect couple would have looked like. Not surprisingly, that image has changed through time and through different cultures.
Yet the curiosity persists, with people asking many questions about the Bible’s first couple. Amongst those questions is the question of just how tall Adam was?
One of the things that is probably driving this question is that the Bible makes reference to giants in several places, starting in Genesis, chapter six and going all the way to the book of Joshua, chapter 18.
There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the might men who were of old, men of renown. – Genesis 6:4
They were also regarded as giants, like the Anakim, but the Moabites call them Emim. – Deuteronomy 2:11
All the kingdom of Og in Bashan, who reigned in Ashtaroth and in Edrei, who remained of the remnant of the giants; for Moses had defeated and cast out these. – Joshua 13:12
With 11 different verses making reference to giants, we can’t just dismiss them out of hand. It is clear that giants of some sort or another lived in olden times, at least up until the time of Joshua. But just what were those giants?
In more recent mythology, giants can refer to anyone who is taller than others. In different times and cultures, that could have been someone who was more than six feet tall. Today, people taller than 6’ 11” tall are technically considered to be giants. Yet in much of literature, giants are depicted as much taller.
It is significant that there are so many legends and myths of giants, scattered across a wide range of ancient cultures. In most cases, those myths and legends have some basis in objective fact. While there’s always a place for embellishment of the facts in any such story, the basis of the story has to be real. In other words, while the height of the giant might be exaggerated, the existence of it probably wasn’t.
Looking for a more scientific answer, Georges Vacher de Lapouge discovered a partial skeleton in 1890, which has been dubbed the name, the “Giant of Castelnau.” While an incomplete skeleton, Lapounge, a French anthropologist, has estimated the height of the individual to be about 11’ 6” tall. No peer review studies have apparently been published supporting or denying his conclusion.
While an 11’ tall man may not fit the description that our minds conjure up when the word “giant” is used, I’m sure that if we were standing in front of them (not to say “face to face” as it would be more like face to belt buckle), they would certainly appear as giants in our eyes; and ourselves as mere grasshoppers, as the spies that Moses had sent into Canaan said of themselves (Numbers 13:33).
But Laponge’s find wasn’t the only finding of human fossils that indicated the existence of giants; there are a number of others, scattered across the globe. While some of those fossilized bones may have been mis-identified and actually belong to some other species, there are enough of them that like the Bible verses above, they can’t just be ignored. There is some reason for there to be fossilized skeletons of giants, even if those giants only existed because of some disease like acromegaly.
Back to the Bible
While we’ve seen that the existence of giants was talked about in the Bible, do we know anything about just how tall they were? The most famous giant in the Bible was Goliath, who was a warrior champion for the Philistines:
And a champion went out from the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, from Gath (one of the five Philistine royal cities), whose height was six cubits and a span. – 1 Samuel 17:4
The biblical unit of measure known as the cubit was the distance from a man’s elbow to his fingertips. Obviously, like many other units of measure of the time, the absolute length of a cubit would be affected by the height of a person. The most common length that biblical scholars use is the Egyptian common cubit, which was 18.24 inches.
Likewise, the span was a unit of measure that came from the human body, specifically the distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger, when the hand is fully spread. It is largely considered to be half a cubit. So, a span can be considered to be 9.12 inches.
Based on these measurements, a little quick math tells us that Goliath was about 9’ 10” tall. That’s shorter than the Giant of Castelnau, but clearly taller than most people, even the tallest of today’s basketball players.
Yet Goliath may not have been the biggest giant mentioned in the Bible. The third chapter of the book of Deuteronomy details a fight between the people of Israel and Og, the king of Bashan. According to the biblical account, King Og had 60 cities under his rule, as well as rural towns, which Israel conquered.
But Og was an interesting character, as the Bible refers to him as a giant; not only that, but the last of the giants. As this was before the time when David killed Goliath, that reference may be to just those giants that were known about at that time. Even though the bible doesn’t tell us his height, it seems that Og was a man of amazing stature, much more so than Goliath.
For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of the giants. Indeed his bedstead was an iron bedstead. (Is it not in Rabbah of the people of Ammon?) Nine cubits is its length and four cubits is width, according to the standard cubit. – Deuteronomy 3:11
Nine cubits, using the same measure for the cubit that we used earlier, works out to 13’ 8”. While Og may not have actually been that tall, the length of that bed seems to indicate that he was at least 12’ tall, if not more. The four cubits work out to roughly six feet, the width of a modern queen-sized bed.
But What About Adam?
There are those who claim that Adam was a giant, with most claiming that he was 90 feet tall. Yet this is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. So, just where does this come from?
This mention of Adam’s height originates from “The Hadith” collected by Sahih al-Bukhari. But just what is this volume? It presents itself to be a collection of the writings of Mohammad, the same who wrote the Qu ‘ran, the holy book of Islam. However, there are some serious problems with this claim. To start with, The Hadith wasn’t written until 846 AD, over 200 years after Mohammad died. It is also said to be a collection of almost 600,000 separate narrations. The name itself makes reference to tradition which is seen as a narrative. In other words, it is not a historic document, but a collection of oral history.
Islam accepts much of Old Testament history, with some modifications. Hence, the reference to Adam in these writings. That shouldn’t surprise us; but that doesn’t mean that we can accept what those writings say about Adam, Moses, Jesus or any other figure mentioned in the Bible. It should also be noted that most Muslims and even Muslim scholars do not accept The Hadith as being authoritative or even authentic. Nevertheless, The Hadith states that Adam was 60 feet tall. How that information has been spread around is anyone’s guess.
Looking at it from another viewpoint, there have been ancient rabbinic writings, discovered as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which state that Adam was “diminished in stature” when he was expelled from the Garden of Eden. No specifics were given as to just how much he might have been diminished or even whether this refers to his physical stature or his spiritual stature. Once again, this doesn’t carry the authority of scripture and could easily be nothing more than an opinion shared by a small faction amongst ancient Jews.
Another supposed argument which is brought up to supposedly support Adam being 90 feet tall is the combination of his long life and the size of dinosaurs. According to scripture, Adam had the third longest life of any man, at 930 years. He was only beaten out by Methusaleh and Noah. Actually, if you add up all the dates, Adam lived long enough to know Noah’s father, Lamech.
One of the reasons that has been given by creation scientists for the size of the dinosaurs is the long life that all creatures enjoyed before the time of the flood. While we have no specific data, other than the ages that Adam and his descendants lived, the average age that men lived to, before the flood, was 912 years. That is attributed to the different environment they lived in. Based on that, it is logical to think that all species of animals lived longer, just as men did.
The word dinosaur means “thunder lizard,” as it is believed that they are all reptiles. Reptiles are unique in nature in that they continue growing throughout their life. So, if you take a lizard, such as an iguana, which lives for an average of 12 to 15 years, and grows to an overall size of 3.9 to 5.6 feet from snout to the tip of its tail, just how big would that iguana get if it lived ten times as long? At a rough guess, it would be something like 30 to 50 feet long; and iguanas aren’t the biggest lizards out there.
There’s just one problem with using this bit of information, when talking about Adam. While reptiles continue growing throughout their lifespan, humans don’t. Once a person reaches full maturity, they stop getting taller. They may get wider, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
Ultimately, we have no authoritative information to provide any conclusion other than that which the Bible provides. That is, that Adam was created by God as the first man. As such, he was probably close to the same height that the average man is today. Even if we think that he should have been tall, because that is “more perfect,” there is historic evidence to show that people have gradually become taller through the centuries; but by no more than a few inches. So, if he was tall for his time, that probably would have equated to the average height for men today.
What’s Wrong with Believing He was 90 Feet Tall?
With the scanty evidence to fall back on, there’s really no reason to believe that Adam was 90 feet tall. But is there anything wrong with believing it? I would have to say “Yes.” There are two predominant views of the origins of the world today, as well as the origin of man; evolution and creationism.
Accepting the idea that Adam was roughly 15 times taller than we grow today must include the idea that something has happened to make mankind shorter. Other than the idea that God shrunk him, while expelling him from the Garden of Eden, the only other possible answer is evolution. Mankind has somehow evolved to be shorter than we once were. Accepting that premise means accepting the whole concept of evolution and rejecting the biblical account of God creating the world and creating man.
Of course, such a viewpoint goes against one of the most basic premises of the theory of evolution; that species evolve in order to improve, becoming more complex species. How can anyone say that a six-foot-tall man is an evolutionary improvement over a 90-foot tall one?
But there’s something even more important in rejecting this claim; that is, accepting evolution as truth, undermines the veracity of the Bible. In other words, it is saying that scripture is untrue. Once started down that road, when and where does it end? It literally throws open the door to reject anything the Bible teaches, while still claiming to believe the Bible and be a Christian. Scripture itself denies that possibility.