I said last time that I would take my trailcams back into history and legend to see if I could find any suggestions that creatures similar to Bigfoot were mentioned over the course of the last 5,000 years or so. I told you of Enkidu, the creation of the god Anu, and the companion of Gilgamesh, who was one third human and two thirds beast, very hairy and very wild:
The most obvious place to continue the search, of course, is the Bible. In the Book of Numbers, Moses sends out his Twelve Spies to have a look at the land of Canaan. They return and say that they have seen fearsome giants there. They tell him:
“The land, through which we have gone to search, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”
What I will freely admit though, is that in another version of some of the quotation above, the translation is given as:
“And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”
I don’t know what’s happening here or how it is possible to translate a word as “giant” and then on another occasion as “Nephilim”. What I did find out, though, is that the proper name ‘Anak’ is the Hebrew word for “giant” (ענק). Here’s a picture I found of the Twelve Spies, recounting the size of the giants in Canaan. It looks like the recreation of a Bigfoot sighting in “Finding Bigfoot” when Bobo stretches his hand over his head and Ranae says “But that makes it fifteen feet tall!”:
Because of this idea that there were giants in Canaan, I also looked at the possibility that the famous Goliath was not a human being but some kind of Bigfoot. In actual fact this proved not to have been a very likely thing to have occurred. The general feeling seems to be that successive translators have just added a cubit here and a cubit there and that is why the Big Man is nine feet tall rather than just over six feet, which was not desperately taller than King Saul himself. There are also a great many other details about Goliath known from other sources which prove that he was a human being rather than a member of another species:
According to Wikipedia, the exaggeration of his height is relatively easy to trace:
“the Dead Sea Scrolls text of Samuel, the 1st-century historian Josephus, and the 4th-century Septuagint manuscripts, all give his height as “four cubits and a span” (6 feet 9 inches) whereas the Masoretic Text gives this as “six cubits and a span” (9 feet 9 inches)”.
When I was a little boy around nine or ten years of age, our entire class, forty or so of us, all helped to make a two dimensional Goliath with paper and cardboard. He was actually dressed as a Roman soldier with armour of tinfoil and a red curtain for his little kilt. He was six cubits and a span tall and, trust me, he was extremely large!
Just for comparison, here is Robert Pershing Wadlow, who was almost nine feet tall:
Sadly, I couldn’t find any pictures of Robert with nine or ten year old children. Don’t forget though, that Goliath would have been at least a foot taller than the famous American, allegedly.
John Knifton 
I remember seeing pictures of Mr. Wadlow years ago, but forgot about him. I suppose morphed genes and overactive glands must have caused unusual people throughout history.
I think in Mr.Wadlow’s case he had problems with his thyroid gland. Poor man, he was killed by an ankle brace that was put on, didn’t fit him properly and he got an infection that killed him. At the time, though, he was still growing!
Such a shame. If he lived today, his medical conditions could probably be cured.
We are all getting bigger – except for those of us who are shrinking a bit with age 🙂
You are not wrong! Most of my life I was six feet tall, just, but since retiring I seem to be losing about an inch a year. I’m now down to the same height as my Dad was. It will have its advantages, though. I’ve calculated that if I live to be 103 I can be buried in a Tesco’s “Bag for Life”.
🙂 I was 6’3″ – don’t know what I am now
My daughter’s boyfriend is one inch off being an official ‘giant’. She on the other hand is slightly smaller than me (a mere 5ft 7in) , and to see them together is remarkable – he towers above her. I guess throughout history there have been people who have been extraordinarily tall compared to those around them. Thankfully he’s not all hairy and half beast!
I know what you mean. My wife is 4ft 10ins and years ago when we first met, I was just over six feet. I’ve shrunk since then with old age.
The point I’m trying to make though, is that all of the people in Canaan were, supposedly, the same huge size. One giant step beyond that is the fact that so many cultures have giants in them. Are they all based on one Goliath-type exception to the norm, or do we have dim race memories from centuries long gone by of people lots bigger than we were at the time?
It’s certainly possible I suppose. Maybe a race of giants gradually diminishing in number over the many years.
I remember our building that Goliath and, if I recall correctly, the top of his head only just fitted into the apex of the ceiling. I wonder if there was some exaggeration of Goliath’s height just to make David’s victory all the more remarkable – bit of Old Testament hype? And of course, we do have our very own Little John, reputedly 7 feet tall according to legend.
I don’t remember Big G inside the room but I do remember when he went outside and we laid him over that rather peculiar rockery structure.
Apparently, when Saul was challenged by Goliath, who was little bigger than he was, there were lots of mutterings about Saul being a coward. Gradually the height of Goliath increased every time the story was told.
Presumably Saul wasn’t best pleased when David, a little kid in Year 7, turned up and won the duel.
What a fascinating post, John. Knowing you, your determination to find proof of Bigfoot you will find. Good luck is all I have to say because those of us who THINK know how twisted history is, even the history in the Bible. History is history regardless of where it is found.
Somebody said that history is written by the victors and they are absolutely right. And nowadays, I suppose you can add all the deliberately false news on the internet.
Even true news can seem crazy. On BBC last night we all watched a young Arizona border guard, I think it was, and he was standing at the end of the President’s famous wall, watching illegal immigrants walk round the end of the wall and then set off into America. Mind you, the young man did seem to have realised how that particular section of wall could be improved.
Such a crazy world we live in, John. I’m just so grateful that the majority of my time does not involve this world at all. The instances that I have to deal with the world, believe me, is more then enough.