Nexus - 0805 - New Times Magazine-pages

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Gath whose height was 6 cubits anda span..." (1 Sam 17:4) The stumbling blocks in these old reports are the different interpretations of the Mediterranean cubit. It was known to vary between 18 and 21 inches. The biblical cubit is conservatively reckoned at 17.5 inches (44.5 centimetres), representing the distance measured from an adult's elbow to the tip of the middle finger, which would make Goliath in his stockinged feet at least 9 feet 5.75 inches (2.9 metres) tall. Another battle produced a captured breast- plate of mail weighing 5,000 shekels (126 pounds or 57 kilograms) as well as a tro- phied spear, which the commentator com- pared to the size of a heavy "weaver's beam". The spearhead, when weighed by itself, tipped the scales at 600 shekels (approx. 15 Ibs or 7 kg). (1 Sam 17:7) According to ancient literature, humans and giants were rarely able to live together in harmony. A manuscript called The Apocalypse of Baruch, a pseudepigraphical work written around AD 100 and preserved only in the sixth-century Syriac Vulgate (and which seems a little unclear in parts) appears to hint at the origin of giants: Men began as giants. These first giants were very highly developed, intellectually, artistically and physi - cally: they had power over birds and animals...they misbehaved and were abolished by God, and ordinary men took their place... The photograph published in Strand Magazine in 1895. H. T. Wilkins, in his book Mysteries of Ancient South America, recalls old Peruvian traditions that tell of a time during their long past when a race of giant men, who came from the Pacific Ocean in ships, invaded the lowlands of old Peru, forcing the Inca high up into their mountain strong - holds in the Andes. These giants, say the Inca, were so huge that "from the knee down, they were as tall as a tall man". According to Wilkins, the Inca say that these giant men "brought no women with them", and because they were too big for the Inca women they became "homosexual", and "one day while they were publicly polluting the marketplace with these practices, a fire from heaven rained down on them and consumed them". Not all the giants perished in this "Sodom and Gomorrah-type holocaust", according to Wilkins. The survivors, apparently totally ticked off by these trau- matic events and out after revenge, ascend- ed the Cordilleras in pursuit of the Inca but were "dispersed" when they met the armies of the Inca king Ayataca Cuso. It is noteworthy that giant-killing humans were somehow able to differentiate between humans with abnormal, excessive growth and bona fide giants. And because many of the giants themselves were of varying sizes, one wonders what criteria were used for determining the difference between a short giant and an abnormally large, well-built human. Perhaps it was the extra fingers and toes that gave them away. In March 1858, Commodore Byron of the French warship La Patrie during a visit to Port St Julien in Patagonia had an inter- esting conversation with the chief of a 500- strong tribe whose men were well over seven feet tall; none of the women was 70 = NEXUS The photograph published in Strand Magazine in 1895. www.nexusmagazine.com AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2001