Church Hopping

Melchizedek is one of those people in the Bible that is shrouded in mystery. His story is found very briefly in Genesis 14:18-20. The story starts out with a battle between a group of kings led by Chedorlaomer versus the Kings of Sodom and Gomorrah. When the Kings of Sodom and Gomorrah flee, Lot is captured by Chedorlaomer. Abraham, the ever-protective uncle, was obviously unhappy with this turn of events, so he sends out 318 of his trained men to free Lot. Many people think that Abraham was just some nomad wandering the desert, but he goes out and defeats Chedorlaomer’s men, who had just defeated the Rephaim and the Emim (read about these races of giants here). So Abraham’s guys beat the guys that beat, not one but two races of giants. That is some nomad.

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The story goes that the champion of the Philistines, Goliath from Gath, stood just shy of 10 feet and he challenged Israel, only to be defeated by a young man named David. Goliath, though the best known, is not the only giant found in the Old Testament. The groups of giants we come across are the Nephilim, the Rephaim, the Emim and the Anakim.

The Nephilim are generally seen as the oldest and possibly the founding race of the other three groups of giants. We run into the Nephilim first in Genesis 6:1-4 which proves to be a very difficult passage to understand…

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At the end of part one, the Nephilim were wiped out in the flood, but their legacy goes on through the Rephaim, the Emim and the Anakim. Unfortunately, that legacy does not go on in very great detail. We have only a few verses about each of them and they were all driven out or killed eventually by Moses and Joshua.

It would seem, a la Deuteronomy 2:11, that the Rephaim were the common ancestor of the Anakim and Emim. Except that we see very early in Genesis 14:5 that the Raphaim were defeated alongside the Emim, so maybe Rephaim became a generic term for all giants. The only specific Rephaim that we know about is Og the king of Bashan, who was the last of the Rephaim. The Israelites captured all sixty of his cities and for some reason Moses seemed in Deuteronomy 3:11 to be amazed by his bed which was made of iron and 13.5 feet long by 6 feet wide.

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This post contains all of the Old Testament References to giants. Check out Part One and Part Two for more about the giants of the Old Testament.
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Have you ever looked at the table of contents in your Bible and just thought, now why in the world is it ordered like that? Many people think that since Genesis is creation and Revelation is the end, then the Bible must be laid out chronologically, but I’m afraid that you couldn’t be more wrong. The books of the Bible are not chronological and at sometimes the chapters in a book don’t tell the story chronologically. The books of the Bible are primarily organized by the content or type of book.

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