Giants_in_the_Bible

GIANTS IN THE BIBLE
PROF. M. M. NINAN
account of "their black art, their witchcraft and impure mysteries, by which they contaminated Israel in
the time of the Judges." This refers to the strange story of Kenaz, preserved in the "Chronicle of
Jerahmeel" (Cohn in "Jew. Quart. Rev." 1898, pp. 294 et seq., and translation of Gaster, p. 166),
which relates how the tribes of Israel learned all their wickedness from the Amorites, the masters of
witchcraft, whose books they kept hidden under Mount Abarim, and whose wonder-working
idols—seven holy nymphs—they had concealed beneath Mount Shechem. Each of these idols was
adorned with precious stones, which shone at night like the light of day, and by their power sight was
restored to the blind. Kenaz, the son of Caleb and father of Othniel, when hearing of this, forthwith
destroyed the idolatrous Israelites by fire, but tried in vain to destroy either the magic-books or
thestones. So he buried the books, but in the morning found them transformed into twelve precious
stones, with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel engraved thereon, and later they were used in
Solomon's Temple. Then, with the help of the angel Gabriel, he smote the Amorites with blindness and
destroyed them with his sword.
Indo-European hypothesis
The view that Amorites were fierce, tall nomads led to an anachronistic theory among some racialist
writers in the 19th century that they were a tribe of "Aryan" warriors who at one point dominated the
Israelites. Then, the evidence fitted then-current models of Indo-European migrations. The theory
originated with Felix von Luschan, who later abandoned it.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain claimed that King David and Jesus were both Aryans of Amorite
extraction. The argument was repeated by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.
In reality, however, the Amorites certainly spoke exclusively a Semitic language, followed Semitic
religions of the Near East and had distinctly Semitic personal names. Their origins were believed to
have been the lands immediately to the west of Mesopotamia, in the Levant (modern Syria), and so
they are regarded as one of the Semitic peoples.
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