The Seven Names of the Giants and the Judge Who Has No Court Above

A woman went out into the marketplace and came home pregnant. She had not lain with her husband. She had only looked up, and what she looked up at was so vast that her body answered it before she chose to, and nine months later she bore a son in the image of the thing she had seen. This was how the giants multiplied now. A glance was enough. The earth filled with their children, and there was no longer anywhere to stand where one of them did not throw its shadow.

The sages who came after counted seven names for them, and each name was less a label than a verdict already spoken.

The Roll of Names That Was Also a Sentence

They called them Emim, because terror went out from them like heat. Whoever saw one felt the dread land on him whole, the way dread lands in a dream the instant before falling. They called them Rephaim, because the heart of anyone who looked grew soft and useless as melting wax, the courage running out of a man before he could decide to run.

They called them Gibborim, the mighty, and Rabbi Yochanan kept the proof in a single bone. The marrow of one giant's thighbone measured twelve cubits, a stretch of dead man longer than the roof of a house. They called them Zamzummim, the masters and chiefs of war, the ones who planned the slaughter and never lost the appetite for it. They called them Anakim, and here the rabbis split. Some said the giants simply heaped giants upon giants until the world ran out of room. Rabbi Acha said no, the name meant their necks reached the orb of the sun, and they tilted their faces up into the burning wheel and gave it orders. "Bring down rain for us," they said to the sun, as though heaven were a servant who had forgotten his place.

They called them Avvim, because they ensnared the world and trapped it and laid it waste, until even the prophets borrowed the word for ruin and said it three times over a doomed thing, a ruin, a ruin, a ruin. And last they called them Nephilim, the fallen, three falls folded into one word. They cast the world down. They fell out of the world themselves. And through their endless lust they filled the world with miscarriages, with the unborn dropped like spoiled fruit, so that even the wombs of the earth were full of their ruin.

The Later Ones Learned Nothing From the Earlier

What should have frightened them did not. The generation of the flood had the drowned generation of Enosh behind them, and looked at that grave and learned nothing. The men of renown the verse calls them, the men of the great name, and Rabbi Acha turned the phrase inside out. Children of churls, another verse calls such men, children of no name at all. So which was it, men of renown or men of no name? Both, and they were the same thing. They made the world a desolation, and the world made a desolation of them, and the only name they left behind was the sound of the place they had emptied.

God watched the wickedness swell. Not wickedness that held steady, but wickedness that grew, great and ever-growing, doubling on itself like the giants themselves. From the hour the sun rose until the hour it set there was no break in it, and the evil inclination renewed itself in every heart each morning the way hunger comes back no matter how a man ate the night before. Even its Maker had given up calling it anything kinder. He called it evil.

So God said the unbearable thing. He said He regretted having made the human being on the earth. And the sages noticed that the same word for regret also means comfort, the word a son uses when he comforts his grieving brothers and speaks to their hearts. God said, in effect, that He had done well to ready a grave for them. The grief and the resolve arrived in one breath.

The Man Who Would Not Let the Verdict Stand

Years on, when the same fire-and-water arithmetic of judgment came round again over the cities of the plain, one man refused to let it pass in silence. Abraham stood before the Judge and did the thing no one before him had dared, with ten generations between Noah and himself and not one of them willing to open his mouth in heaven's court.

"Far be it from You," Abraham said, and Rabbi Yudan heard in that soft word something hard. It is profane for You, he was saying. It is a fabrication. There is a desecration of Your own Name in it. "Will You sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?"

Then Abraham named the trap, and named it to God's face. "If You want a world, there can be no strict judgment. If You want strict judgment, there can be no world. You are holding the rope at both ends. You want the world to stand and You want every account settled, and You cannot have the two at once. Relent a little, or the world cannot bear its own weight."

The King Who Has No One Above Him

He pressed harder, because the cities were already smoking in the future. "A king of flesh and blood has someone over him," Abraham said. "A petition climbs from the duke to the prefect, from the prefect to the general, and there is always a higher court to overturn the lower. You have no court above You. There is no one to appeal to over Your head. And precisely because there is no one to restrain You, will You not restrain Yourself? Will You not do justice?"

God did not strike him for it. God said instead, "You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness." You loved to acquit My creatures and hated to condemn them, and for that, of all the ten generations, I spoke with no one but you. Two men in the world would later say almost the same words. Job said God destroys the blameless and the wicked alike, and Job was punished for it. Abraham said the same accusation and was rewarded, because Abraham said it to save the guilty and Job said it to indict the Judge. The sentence was identical. The heart underneath it was not, and heaven judges the heart.