The Anakim: Who Were the Giant Sons of Anak?
The giant clan of Hebron who made Israel's spies feel like grasshoppers, and whose survivors lived on in Goliath's city.
The Anakim, "sons of Anak," were the giant clan around Hebron in the Bible. Numbers 13:33 links them to the Nephilim, and Joshua 11 says survivors remained in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod.
The Anakim, "sons of Anak," were the most feared people in Canaan according to the Bible. The spies sent by Moses report on the land around Hebron: "there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight" (Numbers 13:33). This is the one place outside Genesis 6 where the word Nephilim appears.
Numbers names three of them, Ahiman, Sheshai and Talmai. Deuteronomy uses them as the standard for size and strength: "a people great and tall, the children of the Anakims... Who can stand before the children of Anak!" Hebron's old name, Kirjath-arba, is explained as the city of Arba, "a great man among the Anakims."
Joshua 11 says Joshua "cut off the Anakims" from the hills, but "only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod, there remained." That detail sets up a later story. Gath is the hometown of Goliath, the Philistine champion whose height 1 Samuel gives as "six cubits and a span," and of other giants mentioned in 2 Samuel 21, including a man with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. Some scholars connect the Anakim with a people or place called Iy-anaq in the Egyptian Execration Texts, lists of enemies written on pottery around 1900–1800 BCE. The link is debated but intriguing.
The Bible traces a chain from the Anakim to the Philistine city of Gath, making Goliath and the six-fingered giants a surviving branch of the Nephilim line.
Most historians read the Anakim as a legendary label for earlier inhabitants of the hill country, enlarged in memory; the spies' report is framed in the story itself as a faithless exaggeration.
