Mortal · c. 600 BCE
The Anakim
Also called Sons of Anak, The Anakites
A people of Hebron whom the scouts of the Hebrew Bible report as impossibly tall and identify with the Nephilim — inside the very report the text goes on to call false.
Narrow source base
The Anakim are a people, named for an ancestor, living at Hebron and in the hill country, and the texts treat them as a military problem rather than a metaphysical one. Deuteronomy says they are great and tall and that Israel has heard the saying about them; Joshua records their towns taken, with a remnant left at Gaza, Gath and Ashdod. They can be fought, and they are.
The connection to the Nephilim is one clause in one verse, and its framing matters. Numbers 13:33 sits inside the scouts' report — the report the book immediately calls an evil report and punishes the nation for believing. A comparison made by frightened men in an account the text presents as false is a thin basis on which to reclassify a people, so the corpus files them as mortal and records the verse rather than resolving it.
Three of them are named, which is more than the Nephilim ever get: Ahiman, Sheshai and Talmai, the sons of Anak at Hebron, reported by the scouts at Numbers 13:22 and driven out by Caleb at Joshua 15:14 and Judges 1:10. The remnant left at Gaza, Gath and Ashdod is the detail that connects this entry to the next two: Gath is where the champions of 2 Samuel 21 come from.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
Hebrew *anaqim*, filed by BDB (1906) under a word for neck, where the epithet *bene ha-anaq* is glossed as long-necked, that is tall, men — an early giant people about Hebron and in Philistia. A second BDB entry gives *anaq* as a necklace or neck-pendant, marked as an Aramaism on Lagarde's authority, and Klein (1987) derives the verb from that noun. So the height is in BDB's gloss of the epithet rather than in a derivation of the people's name, and the corpus keeps the distinction rather than turning a description into an etymology.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE
- Rank
- A People of Great Stature
- Era
- c. 600 BCE
- Traditions
- Jewish
Stats
Known connections
Identified with
1 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 1 offices attributed to The Anakim, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial1
1 texts
Which texts say so?
A people of Hebron and the hill country, called great and tall at Deuteronomy 2:10-11 and 9:2, their towns taken at Joshua 11:21-22 with a remnant left in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod. The scouts of Numbers 13:33 identify them with the Nephilim, inside the report the text calls evil.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention The Anakim?
Is The Anakim the same as The Nephilim?
What rank is The Anakim?
How else is The Anakim spelled?
What is The Anakim said to do?
How old is The Anakim?
Nearest in the corpus
If The Anakim is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
The Rephaim
A People, and the Dead
One word doing two jobs: a people east of the Jordan, and the shades of the dead — a double sense the Ugaritic texts already carry centuries before the Hebrew ones.
Goliath
Champion of Gath
The Philistine champion of 1 Samuel 17, and the best-known giant in any of these texts — whose height the manuscripts do not agree on, and whose death the Hebrew Bible reports twice with two different killers.
Jezebel
Queen of Israel · Canaanite
A Phoenician princess married to Ahab, who backed Baal and Asherah against the prophets of Israel. Revelation later borrows her name for a rival teacher, and it has been a label rather than a person ever since.
Nimrod
The First Mighty One
The first man the Bible calls mighty on the earth, founder of Babel, Erech and Akkad — a king in Genesis and nothing worse, who becomes a tyrant everywhere afterwards.
Og of Bashan
The Last of the Rephaim
A king east of the Jordan, described as the last remnant of the Rephaim, and evidenced in his own text by a piece of furniture — an iron bedstead nine cubits long, on display at Rabbah.
Enkidu
The Wild Man · Mesopotamian
Formed from clay to be Gilgamesh's match and made human by a week with a woman, he is the corpus's clearest statement that civilisation is a loss as well as a gain.
The book behind The Anakim
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. It is public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.