From what I know Akhenaten's one god Ra was around 1200BC so it seems this was a trend around those times and also that the canaan etc area had lots of tribes with their own one god which gradually morphed into the one God of the Hebrews. I don't claim to be an expert, just what I've heard.
You heard wrong, he lived more than a hundred years earlier than that and
he wasn't into Ra so much as he was Amun-Re, which he abolished in favour of his new idol the "Aten", hence his name which means "Effective spirit of Aten", before he changed it to that he was called "Amenhotep IV", which means "Amun is satisfied"
also
wiki said:
Before much of the archaeological evidence from Thebes and from Tell el-Amarna became available, wishful thinking sometimes turned Akhenaten into a humane teacher of the true God, a mentor of Moses, a Christlike figure, a philosopher before his time. But these imaginary creatures are now fading away one by one as the historical reality gradually emerges. There is little or no evidence to support the notion that Akhenaten was a progenitor of the full-blown monotheism that we find in the Bible. The monotheism of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament had its own separate development—one that began more than half a millenium after the pharaoh's death
a proto form of monotheism was being practiced 600 years earlier than Akhs reign in Babylonian with Bel Marduk. So its more likely that monotheism was a result of theological thinking across the ANE in the 2nd millenium period than something which can be traced back to a single source
Any idea who they werre then ??
Theres two groups worthy of note here, the sons of God and the men of renown, originally they were the descendants of seth and the descendants of Cain respectively, their identity changes from the source via midrash and then again in christianity as one political group after another uses the bible for its own ends. But they weren't an extinct race, thats the one thing that can be said for sure
So, it's possible that giant = very large or tall person.
absolutely, but you also have to take into account the fact that the average male height for the people of the time in that area was between 5'1 and 5'4
wiki said:
One of the most interesting of these relates to Goliath’s height: 4QSam(a), the Dead Sea Scrolls text of Samuel, gives the height of Goliath as “Four cubits and a span” (approximately 200 cm or 6 feet 7 inches), and this is what the first-century A.D. historian Josephus and the fourth century A.D. Septuagint manuscripts also record.
so anyone above 6 would be giant, and anyone killed by one of the righteous people who is over 6 feet is liable to have the claim that he was descended from a giant wether thats true or not. personally I don't believe that there was one continuous family of tall people in Canaan and everyone else was average, thats not how genetics works
In all these verses the word translated as "giants" is rephaim.
Who are not described as Giant in the original, just as tall, and as a tribe living in canaan, its later versions that start translating that differently, I suspect myth making personally, the same type that translates river in Atrahasis to Sea in Gilgamesh, the more amazing the story the more glory to God.
so giant for them isn't giant for us, Goliath at his shortest was only 2 inches taller than me, and I know Karate. That'd be a better story I think
"49 And Marduk put his hand in his bag, and took thence an empty fist, and slung it, and smote the Philistine in his solar plexus; and the fist sank into his belly, and he fell upon his face to the earth."
then all we need is some Ninjas and dancing girls and we got a best seller on our hands
no seriously, think about it for a minute, the assault on Jericho, with Ninjas going in first to take out the archers and a mass attack of elephants that bring the walls down. How cool would that be
