The Giant Kings Who Tried to Plug the Flood

The women of the old world gave birth in litters of six, and the newborns landed on their feet. Before the milk was dry on them they stood, spoke the holy tongue, and leapt in the grass like spring lambs let loose. No cradle held them. No mother nursed them long. They ran from the womb into the open, and the earth was thick with them, an entire race born already running.

This was the world before the water. Fertile past reckoning, fearless past sense. The fields fed everyone and the seasons never failed, and the people who walked those fields grew tall as towers and answered to nothing above them. They danced and they multiplied and they took whatever the ground offered, and the ground offered everything.

The Old Man Who Warned of Rain

Into this world walked Noah, and he begged them to stop. "Turn from your ways and your evil deeds," he said, "or He will bring the waters of the Flood upon you and wipe out every seed of the children of men." He said it in the markets and he said it at the wells. He pointed at the sky.

They laughed at him. Then they did something worse than laugh. They held a council and decided that if the world was to end, no more children would inherit it through them. "We will hold back from multiplying," they said, "so as not to bring more children of men into the world." When they went to their wives they spilled their seed on the ground, deliberately, so nothing would take root. The earth drank what should have become sons and daughters, and the soil itself turned foul with it.

And God looked at the earth, and behold, it was ruined. The very word for their corruption was the word for that wasted seed poured out on the dirt. They had taken the most generative world that ever existed and made it barren on purpose, out of spite, to cheat the Flood of its harvest before it arrived.

The Boast Against the Deep

The giants were not afraid, and they said so. They measured the threat against their own enormous bodies and found it laughable. "If He sends the waters down from heaven," they said, "we stand so tall the flood will not climb past our necks. And if He sends the waters up from the deep below, the soles of our feet are wide enough to seal every spring in the abyss."

It was not an empty boast to them. They believed it. They had never met a force their size could not stop, and the deep, after all, was only water, and water rose from holes in the ground, and they had feet.

The Day Both Skies Opened

The Flood did not come gently, and it did not come from one direction. It came in the six-hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day. The old reckoning began the year at the world's completion, so the second month was the month of rains, and the Holy One chose the month of rain to drown the world He had made.

On that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open at once. The springs the giants had bragged about plugging blew upward like wounds in the earth, and the giants ran to them. With their sons beside them they threw themselves down onto the breaking ground, jamming their wide feet and their massive bodies into the gushing fountains, holding back the deep with sheer weight, exactly as they had said they would.

For a moment, perhaps, it held. Then the windows of heaven opened over their heads, and the rain came down on the backs of the giants who were bent over plugging the springs. Water from below and water from above, and the rebels crushed between them, pressing down on the deep while the sky pressed down on them.

The Water Turned to Fire

Then the Holy One did the thing they had not measured. He heated the deep. The waters they were holding shut grew hot beneath their feet, hotter, until the springs ran like a furnace. The boiling deep rose against them and burned their flesh and peeled the skin off their bodies. Their own strength held them in place over the heat. The harder they pressed to seal the springs, the longer they cooked in them.

When the water grew warm they vanished. When it grew hot they were gone, consumed out of their place, melted off the face of the world they had owned an hour before. The towers of that fertile age came apart in the steam. The race that ran from the womb on its first day stopped running, all at once, in the scalding springs they had sworn to plug.

The Terrors Left Roaming the Plains

The Flood took the world, but it did not take all of them. Some seed of the giants survived past the water and scattered into the land east of the Jordan, and there they bred their terrors back into the world. Generations later, when four kings swept down through Canaan, they cut their way through the leftovers of the drowned age, and the old Aramaic tongue named those peoples by their weight. It called them the Giants who lived at Ashtaroth-Karnaim, the Strong who held Hametha, and the Terrible who filled the plain of Kiriathaim.

They were the remnant, the survivors of the generation that had mingled with the Watchers and the children that union produced. The land between the Flood and the patriarchs was never an empty stage. It was haunted by what the water had failed to finish, and one of them, Og of Bashan, would still be standing tall enough to terrify a wandering people generations on. The water had peeled the skin off their fathers in the boiling springs. The sons it missed kept walking the plains, waiting for smaller men to come and stand where giants stood.