Anak

Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East (Canaan, around Hebron)
Mythos: Jewish Mythology, Christian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Giant patriarch; eponymous forefather of the Anakim
Mythical Attributes: He stands at the head of a lineage of giants whose great stature defined the people who carried his name.
Role in Mythos: Anak is the ancestral root of the Anakim, the towering inhabitants of southern Canaan whom Israel had to dispossess to take the land.
Relation to Humans: To the Israelites who came to claim Canaan, the descendants of Anak were the living measure of the land’s danger, the obstacle that turned a scouting trip into a panic. They were also mortal enough to be driven out, and in the end they were.

The grapes of Eshcol grew so heavy that two men carried a single cluster slung from a pole between their shoulders, and even then the fruit swung low enough to graze the dust. The men who cut it were not small themselves. They had been sent into Canaan to walk it unseen and come back with the truth of the place, and the truth they carried out on that pole was sweet and ripe and beside the point. What stayed with them was what they had seen in the hills above the vineyard. The sons of Anak lived up there, in the high town, and standing in their shadow the scouts had felt their own size drain out of them.

Anak himself is less a character than a root. The Hebrew Bible remembers him as the figure from whom an entire people took their name, the Anakim, the tall ones, who held the southern reaches of Canaan and kept the high ground around Hebron. The city was old enough to have worn another name first. It had been Kiriath-arba, called after Arba, whom the text names as the greatest man among the Anakim and the father of Anak. So the line runs from Arba to Anak to three sons, and it is at the three sons that the giants step out of genealogy and into a room with a door.

Their names were Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai, and they kept Hebron the way a large man keeps a doorway, by filling it. They held a walled town in dry hill country where the terebinths threw hard shade and the wells were worth fighting for, and for generations no one came to take it from them. That was the normal shape of their lives: high stone walls, deep cisterns, fields worked in the heat below a town that looked down on everyone who approached it. People knew the names. People stayed away.

What Anak and his sons actually looked like, the stories are oddly quiet about. The Anakim are tall, men of great stature, and that is very nearly the whole of the description. No source measures them. No one gives them a face, a number of fingers, a particular ugliness or beauty. The one figure that survives is not a height but a comparison. When the scouts looked up at them they saw themselves as grasshoppers, and they assumed, with the flat certainty of frightened men, that the giants looked down and saw the same thing.

Where the Anakim came from depends on which line of the text you follow. In one account the ten fearful spies tie them to the Nephilim, the half-divine giants from before the flood, which would make Anak’s people a surviving fragment of a drowned world. Another book files the Anakim among the Rephaim, the old race of giants scattered across the land east and west of the Jordan, kin to the Emim and the Zamzummim. The name itself resists a clean reading. In Hebrew it shadows a word for a long neck or a necklace, which has led to the old gloss of Anak as the long-necked one, though nothing in the stories says his people had long necks. Others have reached further afield, hearing in Anak the Greek word for a ruler, or linking the Anakim to a giant king out of Greek legend whose people may have come east with the sea raiders. Even older than any of this, Egyptian curse texts from the Middle Kingdom list a people of Anaq among the enemies of Canaan, ruled by three lords with names now half lost. Whatever else is uncertain, something tall and troublesome stood in those hills a long time before the Bible wrote it down.

The myth that fixes Anak in memory is the failure he caused without lifting a hand. Moses sent twelve men into Canaan, and they came to the brook of Eshcol near Hebron and saw the sons of Anak, and ten of them came home and talked the whole nation out of its courage. The land devours its inhabitants, they said. The people there are giants and we are grasshoppers. Only Caleb and Joshua argued otherwise, and they were shouted down, and Israel turned back into the desert for forty years on the strength of a report about three large men in a doorway. The giants had not needed to do anything. Their reputation did the work.

The reckoning came later, and it was plain. When Israel returned, Caleb asked for the hill country he had once been afraid of, and he took Hebron and drove out Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai, the three names that had frozen a generation. Joshua cut the Anakim out of the highlands so thoroughly that the text says none were left in the land of Israel. A remnant survived only by slipping west into the Philistine cities, Gaza and Gath and Ashdod, and it was out of Gath, generations on, that the most famous giant of all would come walking with a spear like a weaver’s beam. The strength of the Anakim was never subtle. It was height, mass, fortified towns, and a name that arrived in a place before they did. Their weakness was the other side of the same coin. Their power lived in the fear of people who had not yet tested them, and once Caleb walked up the hill and tested it, the giants of Hebron turned out to be men who could be beaten and made to run. They were big. In the end that was not enough.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Anak in the Bible?

Anak was a figure in the Hebrew Bible remembered as the forefather of the Anakim, a people of giants who lived in southern Canaan around the city of Hebron. He was the son of Arba, said to be the greatest man among the Anakim, and the father of three sons, Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai.

What were the Anakim?

The Anakim were a race of unusually tall, powerful people descended from Anak who held the high country around Hebron before the Israelite conquest of Canaan. The Bible groups them with the Rephaim, an old tradition of giant peoples, and remembers them chiefly for their great stature and the fear they inspired.

Why did the Israelite spies fear the sons of Anak?

When Moses sent twelve spies into Canaan, ten of them returned terrified after seeing the sons of Anak near Hebron, reporting that the inhabitants were giants beside whom the Israelites felt like grasshoppers. Their report frightened the people out of entering the land, and Israel wandered the desert for forty years as a result. Only Caleb and Joshua disagreed with the fearful account.

Who defeated the Anakim?

Caleb drove Anak’s three sons, Sheshai, Ahiman, and Talmai, out of Hebron, and Joshua cleared the Anakim from the hill country of Israel. A small remnant survived only by fleeing to the Philistine cities of Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod, which is why later giants such as Goliath of Gath are sometimes connected to them.

Were the Anakim related to the Nephilim?

In the report of the ten fearful spies, the Anakim are said to descend from the Nephilim, the giants of Genesis, which is the only place Scripture directly links the two. Elsewhere the Anakim are counted among the Rephaim rather than the Nephilim, so the exact relationship is not consistent across the text.