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How Tall Were Adam and Eve in the Bible?

The Bible never gives Adam’s or Eve’s height. Giant-Adam claims come from the Talmud and hadith, not Genesis. Here is what Scripture does say about size.

BIBLE INSIGHTS

6/28/20243 min read

a statue of a woman holding a man's head

The Bible does not say

The Bible never states how tall Adam and Eve were. Genesis gives no measurement for either of them, and no other book of Scripture does either. The popular claim that Adam was a giant comes from later Jewish and Islamic tradition, not from the Bible. What Genesis does tell us is far more important than their height: what they were made of, whose image they bore, and how they were made for each other.

What Genesis actually records

“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7, KJV)

The Hebrew plays on words here: the man, adam, is formed from the ground, adamah. The verb “formed” is a potter’s word; the Hebrew for “potter” in Jeremiah 18:4 is built from it. Genesis is interested in Adam’s frailty and his breath from God, not his size.

“And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.” (Genesis 2:22, KJV)

Eve is taken from Adam’s side and brought to him as a partner of the same kind. Genesis 1:27 says both were created “in the image of God.” That is the one physical-and-spiritual fact Scripture insists on: they were human, as we are.

Genesis 2:7 — formed of the dust

Where the Bible does mention giants

“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” (Genesis 6:4, KJV)

The Hebrew word is nephilim. The KJV’s “giants” follows the Greek Septuagint, which rendered it gigantes. This verse sits in Noah’s day, generations after Adam, and says nothing about the first couple. Who the “sons of God” were is debated: many early writers read them as angels, while Augustine and many later interpreters read them as the godly line of Seth.

“For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.” (Deuteronomy 3:11, KJV)

an open book sitting on top of a wooden table

Genesis 6:4 — the giants

Goliath, measured

“And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span.” (1 Samuel 17:4, KJV)

At about 18 inches a cubit, that is roughly 9 feet 9 inches. The Greek Septuagint and a Dead Sea Scroll of Samuel read “four cubits and a span,” about 6 feet 9 inches. Og’s bed, about 13 by 6 feet, tells us his bed size, not his height.

1 Samuel 17:4 — Goliath of Gath

Where the giant-Adam idea comes from

The Babylonian Talmud (Chagigah 12a) says Adam first stretched from the earth to the sky and that God made him smaller after he sinned. An Islamic hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari says God created Adam sixty cubits tall and that people have been getting smaller ever since. Both are later traditions; neither is found in Genesis.

Some writers point to giant fossil insects as support. Insect fossils tell us nothing about human height, and ancient human skeletons fall within the ordinary human range. Scripture’s own giants are notable precisely because they were unusual.

What matters more than their height

Adam was dust with God’s breath in him, and so are you. Next time you read Genesis 2, ask what it says about your own frailty and dignity, and thank God for both.