The Torah speaks of giants, but did they exist?

On that first day, it was free. Thousands of people from all around came to see the petrified giant who had been pulled from the earth of a farm in upstate New York. By the next day, William C. “Stub” Newell had put up a tent over the 10-foot-tall giant and began charging the 300-400 daily spectators 50 cents each to see the wonderous sight. The hotels and restaurants in the sleepy hamlet of Cardiff had never been so busy.

Newell discovered the giant on October 16, 1869, after he hired two local workers to dig a well for him on his farm. Shortly after they began work, their shovels hit something unexpected. As they dug further, they were shocked to discover an ancient man who had turned to stone. The rock had turned a dark color, attesting to its ancient provenance, yet one could still see the pores and hair follicles on the body.

This discovery was more than an archaeological curiosity. It appeared to validate the Bible (Genesis 6:4), which said that giants once roamed the earth, “Mighty men of renown.” Here was proof that the Bible was true. Somehow, the body of this giant had been preserved in rock, and now attested the literal truth of Genesis. It was only 10 years after Charles Darwin had published his theory of evolution in “On the Origin of Species,” yet here was evidence that it was not the scientists, but the preachers who had been right all along.

The Cardiff Giant quickly became a national sensation. Measuring over three meters (10 feet 4½ inches) from head to toe and weighing almost one and a half tons (2990 pounds), the colossus was hard to ignore. Newspapers across the country reported on the discovery, and scientists, theologians, and laypeople all weighed in with their opinions.

The Cardiff Giant being exhumed during October 1869. (Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)

One local pastor declared:

Is it not strange that any human being, after seeing this wonderfully preserved figure, can deny the evidence of his senses? And refuse to believe, what is so evidently the fact, that we have here a fossilized human being, perhaps one of the giants mentioned in Scripture?

Ralph Waldo Emerson called the giant ‘astonishing’ and ‘undoubtedly ancient.”

In contrast, Andrew D. White, the first president of Cornell University, made the journey to see the giant for himself. Afterwards, he declared confidently that the giant was a fake, based both on the evidence in the stone, and in its discovery.

Being asked my opinion, my answer was that the whole matter was undoubtedly a hoax; that there was no reason why the farmer should dig a well in the spot where the figure was found; that it was convenient neither to the house nor to the barn; that there was already a good spring and a stream of water running conveniently to both; that, as to the figure itself, it certainly could not have been carved by any prehistoric race, since no part of it showed the characteristics of any such early work; that, rude as it was, it betrayed the qualities of a modern performance of a low order.

Similarly, Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh said that gypsum, which was water soluble, could not possibly have lasted in such good shape in the wet New York earth and remain in such good condition. He called the giant “a most decided humbug.”

Despite the skepticism of some experts, people continued to flock to see this archaeological wonder. The Syracuse Standard ran the headline, “A New Wonder: Petrified Giant, Ten Feet Two and a Half Inches Tall, and Well Proportioned.” The paper described the stone man:

The form of a man, lying on his back, head and shoulders naturally flat; at hip a trifle over on right side; the right hand spread on the lower part of the abdomen with fingers apart; the left arm half behind, and its hand against the back opposite the other; the left leg and foot thrown of the right, the feet and toes projecting at a natural angle. The figure was of apparently lime stone, a mixture of the gray and blue, common in most part of the country and seemed perfect in every particular… The general impression is that it is a petrification of one of those large human beings of which all of us have heard so much in our youthful days.

Prof. Boynton, from a hasty examination, is of the opinion that it is a work of art – a sculpture from stone. If this theory be correct, it would be scarcely less interesting that if a petrification. IN the one case arises the speculation as to a gigantic race of beings that may have inhabited portions of this “new world” hundreds of years before Columbus discovered it; the other as to how long the artist did the work.

Newell and his cousin George Hull quickly sold their stake in the giant for $23,000 to a five-man team of investors. They exhibited the giant in Syracuse where it continued to draw large crowds. The greatest showman of the day, P. T. Barnum, offered to buy the stone man from the consortium for $50,000.

When his offer was rejected, Barnum hired a team to secretly create a plaster copy of the giant, which he began displaying in New York City. When so many people went to see the fake giant, rather than the original, the head of the Syracuse consortium, David Hannum, exclaimed, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” – a line that later became attributed to Barnum himself. Barnum claimed his replica was the original, leading to a legal battle over which giant was real.

However, just two months after it was dug up, Hull confessed that the giant was a fake, and that the entire story had been a scam.

Hull was a tobacconist from New York. He admitted that his inspiration came from a debate he once had with a Methodist preacher named Reverend Turk, who insisted that Genesis must be understood literally and that giants once roamed the earth. After Hull failed to convince the minister and his congregation that such giants were surely impossible, he decided to create a giant to prove how easily people could be fooled.

In 1868, Hull traveled to Fort Dodge, Iowa, where he purchased a 10-foot-long block of gypsum, claiming it was for a monument to Abraham Lincoln. He then shipped the block to Chicago, where in great secret, it was carved into the likeness of a man by sculptors Henry Salle and Fred Mohrmann. Hull himself posed as the model for the statute. Hull then made the giant appear ancient, using various techniques to simulate weathering and age.

Once the giant was complete, Hull transported it by train to Newell’s farm. There, they buried the giant and waited. Nearly a year later, on October 16, 1869, Newell hired workers to dig a well on his property.

However, Hull’s confession that the Cardiff Giant was a hoax, did little to dampen public interest, and the giant continued to be a popular attraction. Both the original fake and the copy remain on display to this day. The original giant is housed at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York, while Barnum’s replica can be seen at Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Michigan.

Mark Twain featured the Cardiff Giant in his 1870 “Ghost Story.”

I am the spirit of the Petrified Man that lies across the street there in the museum. I am the ghost of the Cardiff Giant. I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor body burial again.

In true Twain comedic style, it turns out that the ghost of the giant was haunting the Barnum forgery, rather than the original hoax in upstate New York.

Why you poor blundering old fossil, you have had all your trouble for nothing– you have been haunting a plaster cast of yourself–the real Cardiff Giant is in Albany! Confound it, don’t you know your own remains?”

Hull had spent $2,600 and years working on the project, but it paid off handsomely when he and Newell sold their share and banked the profits. The next time around, he was not so lucky. In 1876, Hull helped create another stone giant, nicknamed Solid Muldoon, which he buried and “discovered” in Colorado. Once again, Barnum’s offer to buy the statue was rebutted, and eventually the giant disappeared.

But there were still more giants to be “discovered” and displayed to a gullible public. In 1877, a “petrified man” was conveniently discovered by workmen expanding the Taughannock House hotel on Cayuga Lake, New York. In 1892, Jefferson “Soapy” Smith of Creede, Colorado, bought a “petrified man” and charged spectators only 10 cents a ticket to see it. Five years later, the “petrified corpse” of Civil War general Thomas Francis Meagher was “found” near Fort Benton, Montana. The general had drowned 30 years earlier in the Missouri River.

Eventually, though, the stone giant market crashed. A “petrified man” found in Wind Cave, South Dakota sold for only $2,000.

We can perhaps understand the belief in such forgeries. This was an era when real fossils were being discovered all over North America, and dinosaur fever was at its height.

In this week’s Torah reading, Devarim, Moses speaks about slaying the very last giant (Deuteronomy 3:1-3).

Og, king of Bashan came out against us, him and all his people, to Edrei. And God said to me, ‘Do not fear him, for I have given him into your hand’… And the Lord, our God, gave him into our hands, Both Og, King of Bashan, and all his nation.

Almost as an aside, the Torah also adds (Deuteronomy 3:11)

For only Og, King of Bashan, remained from all the giants. His bed is an iron bed. It is in Rabah of the Children of Ammon. Its length is nine amot and its width four amot, according to the amot of a man

Why does the Torah tell us that Og was the last of his kind? And why does it mention his bed?

The dimensions of Og’s bed fail to impress us with their dimensions. An amah is about 45 centimeters (17.5 inches) so the bed would have been about four meters long and 1.8 meters wide (13 feet long and 6 feet wide). Sure, this is big, but not enough to terrify anyone.

Maimonides (Guide for the Perplexed 2:47) agrees that Og was big, but not impossibly big:

Scripture thus tells us that Og was double as long as an ordinary person, or a little less. This is undoubtedly an exceptional height among men, but not quite impossible.

The Talmud (Berachot 54b) describes Og as impossibly gigantic, and Rashi has to explain that the measurements of his bed are not the regular amot but according to Og’s own dimensions.

The Talmudology blog cites Professor Allan R. Millard, who says that iron would have been a rare commodity in the Late Bronze Age when the Israelites defeated Og. He explains that it is unlikely people would have had the ability to fashion iron into a bed at that time; it is more likely that the bed would have been decorated with iron. Its size and decorations pointed to Og’s great wealth.

I wonder if there is another reason that the Torah includes this parenthetical remark. Perhaps it comes to tell us that even though Og was a sworn enemy of the Israelites, and came out to destroy the nation, he was still a person. As Moses described the death of Og, he also mentioned his humanity.

Og was the last of his kind. According to the Talmud (Nidda 61a), Og was the only survivor of the great flood, apart from Noah and his family. He was the “remnant” who ran to tell Abraham that his nephew had been taken hostage (Genesis 14:13).

Furthermore, Rashbam explains that the reason his bed is described with only slightly larger dimensions than a regular bed was that it was his crib when he was a baby. Even as a small child, he was so big that a regular wooden crib of normal dimensions could not hold him.

I believe there are two important messages here.

The first is that even our enemies are human. The Torah stresses that Og was the last of his kind. Even though he had to be killed in battle, the Israelites acknowledged who he was and what he had done. Furthermore, by mentioning the size of his crib, the Israelites were reminded that even a giant was once a baby. Who knows how difficult it was for him as a small child, who was too big to live in a home with regular furniture? What kind of psychological trauma had he grappled with throughout his life?

If this is true for an enemy like Og, how much more true is it for our friends. As we approach Tisha B’Av and the destruction brought about by hate, we should remember the humanity of those who disagree with us. We can never fully understand another person. Perhaps it is not us they are really fighting with, but their own demons that they have lived with their entire lives.

And another, equally important message, as we wait for a possible attack from Iran or elsewhere. Even though Og was fearsome, God stressed to Moses, “Do not fear him.” And in his final speech to the nation, Moses reminded them that they should not be afraid of their enemies, no matter how terrifying they appear. They are, after all, not giant but only human.