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FILE 022 · VOL III · Older Than Scripture
The Giants Were Real. The Bones Are in a Basement.
History is not what happened. It is what survived being seen.
Based on: Smithsonian Giant Skeletons
Intake record
| Recovered from | Federal collections warehouse, sublevel B, crate stenciled MOUND 11 / OHIO / 1912 |
|---|---|
| Contents | Curator's letter (1912), field photographs, one deleted social media post (cached), technician's notes |
| Finder | C. Burke, contract digitization technician |
| Status | Warehouse address now returns a parking lot. Technician's account does not exist. |
Recovered file
The Bible mentions giants more than a dozen times, and it is never vague about them.
Genesis 6:4: there were giants on the earth in those days, the Nephilim, born when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men. [1] Numbers 13:33: the spies Moses sent into Canaan came back terrified, saying they had seen the giants there, and that next to them they had felt like grasshoppers. Deuteronomy 3:11 records that Og, king of Bashan, was the last of the giants, and that his iron bed could still be seen in the city of Rabbah, nine cubits long. Roughly thirteen feet. The writer mentions it the way you would mention a landmark: go look for yourself. [1]
Then there is Goliath, and here the record does something strange. The standard Hebrew text of 1 Samuel says he was six cubits and a span tall, about nine feet nine inches. But the oldest copy of that passage ever found, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the ancient Greek translation both say four cubits and a span. About six feet nine. One of them was edited. Nobody knows which. [2] Then there are the Rephaim, the Anakim, the Emim. The giants are not a single strange verse. They are a population.
And they are not only in the Bible. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves near Qumran in 1947, there is a fragmentary text scholars call the Book of Giants. In it, two giants named Ohyah and Hahyah have terrible dreams, of a tablet being washed clean by water, of a garden being uprooted. They ask for their dreams to be interpreted. The answer is the flood. [3]
Calla Burke knew none of this when she took the job. She was a digitization tech. She photographed objects for a living.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 022 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
Built on real, cited records. The stories are dramatized. Disclaimer · If you are in crisis in the U.S., call or text 988.