Christian dinosaur discussion...

[The Dark]

I honestly don't know much about the Nephilim, other than that they're described as the children of the sons of God and the daughters of man (Genesis) and that they made Joshua's spies "seem like grasshoppers," which would suggest they were larger and stronger than the Israelites, though not necessarily "giant" giants. Since the average Israelite was probably just over 5 feet tall, a 6 foot tall person would be a giant to them. It has been suggested to me by people who read ancient Hebrew that Nephilim may mean or be derived from words meaning "fallen ones," while Rephaim may mean "hale ones," perhaps a particular military unit. Egyptian texts of the 19th and 18th centuries BCE note princes of people who may have been the Anakim or Anakites, but other than that I've never heard of them. I haven't read most of Enoch, though, so there may be more in that book than in the canonical books.


And I am not going to those forums. For Pete's sake, the serpent isn't directly associated with Satan until the Book of Revelation, which is early second-century CE, and the church didn't really emphasize identifying the two together commonly until the Medieval period.

[thejester]

This guy's got nothing on a bloke who came and gave a talk to my class in Year 9. He'd built a model replica of the Ark, in which he claimed God shipped not only 'base' animals (ie a dog which turns into every other kind of dog and wolf on the planet) but also dinosaurs. These dinosaurs roamed the Earth until the Middle Ages, and this is where dragons originate from. It gets even better though - St George actually killed one. When I questioned why no-one in the dozens of civilizations before Dark Ages England - Rome, the Hellenic civilizations, Persia, China, etc etc - had not recorded the day-to-day interactions with these monsters, he moved on to his video. What a dick.