The giant clans of Canaan (the Anakim, the Rephaim, Og of Bashan with his nine-cubit iron bed, and Goliath's kin at Gath) prove the Nephilim survived the Flood as a hybrid super-race Israel had to hunt down, or, on the opposite extreme, they are dismissed as pure legend invented to make ordinary rival peoples sound scarier.

The relevant texts are specific and repeated, not a single stray verse. Numbers 13:33 has the spies report Anakim in the land, adding "we seemed like grasshoppers" in our own sight. Deuteronomy 2:10-11 notes that Moab's earlier inhabitants, the Emim, were "a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim," and "like the Anakim, they are also counted as Rephaim." Deuteronomy 2:20-21 gives the Ammonite equivalent, the Zamzummim. Deuteronomy 3:11 singles out Og of Bashan as "the last of the remnant of the Rephaim," whose iron bedstead measured nine cubits by four (roughly thirteen by six feet) and was still on display in Rabbah of the Ammonites when the text was written. And 2 Samuel 21:15-22 names four descendants of "the giant" at Gath, including Goliath's brother Lahmi, killed one by one by David's men. These are presented as real, geographically located peoples encountered across the conquest and monarchy periods, not folklore asides.

The plainer historical-critical reading treats "giant" language here as a common ancient Near Eastern rhetorical convention: naming a rival people as unusually large signals how formidable they were, and the spies' own self-description as grasshoppers in Numbers 13:33 reads as intentional hyperbole rather than clinical reporting. Deuteronomy 3:11's iron "bedstead" is itself debated by scholars; the Hebrew word can mean either bed or sarcophagus, and some point to a large black basalt monument or coffin at Rabbah as the more plausible referent, with the note possibly functioning etiologically: explaining an oversized ancient artifact by attributing it, after the fact, to a giant king. On this reading, the giant-clan material is a literary device for scale, not a claim about a distinct biological population.

Michael Heiser's documented argument, laid out in The Unseen Realm and in his article "The Giant Clans and the Conquest" (drmsh.com), takes the material more literally without inflating it into anything like a hybrid super-race narrative. His claim is specific: the herem ("devote to destruction") command in Deuteronomy and Joshua concentrates on cities and regions associated with Anakim and Rephaim remnants (the hill country around Hebron and Debir, and Og's kingdom in Bashan), and Joshua 11:21-22 defines the conquest's success specifically as "cutting off the Anakim," not as blanket ethnic conquest. Heiser reads this as continued, theologically framed conflict against clans he connects, by lineage, to the corrupted offspring described in Genesis 6:1-4: unfinished business from the earlier rebellion, in his phrase, rather than ordinary warfare against Canaanite city-states generally.

The popular, fringe version of this material overshoots Heiser's own argument by a wide margin: it treats Rephaim and Anakim as proof of an ongoing secret hybrid bloodline or an ancient-astronaut super-race, sometimes attaching claims of giant skeletal remains that belong to a separate and well-documented set of nineteenth-century newspaper hoaxes rather than to these texts at all. Deuteronomy 3:11's roughly thirteen-foot bed and 2 Samuel 21's note of a Gath warrior with six fingers and six toes on each hand and foot (a real, still-occurring human condition, polydactyly) describe unusual stature and physical anomaly, not a different species or extraterrestrial biology. Where the purely skeptical reading is too thin, on the other hand, is in explaining why these particular clans, not Canaanites generally, receive concentrated herem language and sustained attention across Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and 2 Samuel, and why "Rephaim" elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible does double duty as a term for the shades of the dead in the underworld (Isaiah 14:9, Proverbs 21:16, Job 26:5, Psalm 88:10): a theological resonance that only makes sense if Israelite readers understood the giant clans as carrying more freight than simply "tall foreigners."