My childhood fascination with dinosaurs spilled over mildly
to an interest in pre-historic humans, so I’ve long had a vague awareness of
Neanderthals. But to be honest, the
giant pre-historic reptiles were far more interesting than mammals. So much more
imaginatively exotic!
Sporadic adult inquiries into human origins still bleeped
over Neanderthals. They just didn’t seem
to be part of the main story. “Neanderthal” had connotations of backwardness or
brutishness, of dim lack of success. The
occasional sympathetic view such as Lester Del Rey’s, old science fiction story
“The Day is Done” did not penetrate my dim preconceptions. Besides, Del Rey’s last Neanderthal was incapable
of speech – a common view when it was published in 1939 but now thought
incorrect.
So I was ripe for astonishment when reading David Reich’s
“Who We Are and How We Got Here.”
- · That it is possible to extract genetic material from bones tens of thousands of years old.
- · That we all have a smidgin of Neanderthal in our genome, some interbreeding with modern humans having occurred eons ago.
- · That Neanderthal remains were found in the Near East (Kebara Cave, Mount Carmel, Israel).[i]
That last isn’t news to people who pay attention to such
things but for this Neanderthal ignorer it was a surprise. And intriguing if you don’t let stubborn
facts get in the way.
A near human, but not human race of pre-historic men? In Bible lands? Could some distant, ancestral memory of Neanderthals
sharing the land with modern humans be the source of the “Nephilim” in the
Bible?
When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and
daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they
took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, “My
spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall
be one hundred twenty years.” The
Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons
of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These
were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
— Genesis 6:1–4, New Revised
Standard Version
Just what were the Nephilim is open to debate: “sons of God,”
fallen angels, giants?[ii] That they were giants is borne out by this
account in the Numbers:
The Lord said to Moses, "Send men to spy out
the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites" ... So they went
up and spied out the land ... And they told him: "... Yet the people who
live in the land are strong, and the towns are fortified and very large; and
besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there."
... So they brought to the Israelites an unfavorable report of the land that
they had spied out, saying, "The land that we have gone through as spies
is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people that we saw in it
are of great size. There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakites come from the
Nephilim); and to ourselves we seemed
like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them."
— Numbers 13:1–2; 21; 27–28; 32–33. New Revised Standard Version.
The account from Numbers is that of frightened spies who
were doubtless invoking the most powerful image they could to frighten the
Israelites in turn. The Genesis story
would have been a more primeval source.
While they would not, in fact, have been giants,
Neanderthals – with their longer skulls, broader shoulders, barrel-shaped
chests, larger knees[iii]
– would have stood out from modern humans.
In memory, over time, they may have grown in stature. There is evidence, as noted above, that
Neanderthals did interbreed with modern humans as the Nephilim are said to have
done.
The stubborn fact that opposes my clever idea is that Neanderthals
probably disappeared from the Near East 48,000 years ago. That leaves a mere 43,000 years until the
earliest conjectured date of composition for the book of Genesis. How long can a good story, a striking image
last in an oral culture?
Perhaps a long time.
Semi-nomadic oral cultures described in the “Tribal Religion” chapter of
Robert Bellah’s “Religion and Human Evolution” don’t have the same sense of
“temporal unfolding” that we take for granted and the present and the past can
coexist “without distinction.”[iv]
So perhaps a powerful tale yesterday
might be a powerful tale today and tomorrow and persist for many years.
Which tenuous theory takes another hit when we consider the
many migrations of peoples across the much traveled landscape of Israel and
Syria. That an oral tradition could
persist there through 43,000 years is… unlikely.
But it’s kind of fun to think about.
[i] Pages
28-29 in Reich’s book. See also https://www.thoughtco.com/kebara-cave-israel-171474
[iv] Robert
Bellah, “Religion in Human Evolution,” 2011, Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA, page 142.
