The Bible Never Says How Tall Adam and Eve Were

Adam and EveSee all 36 articles in this series

The Bible never tells us how tall Adam and Eve were. It gives no number, not even a rough one, and nothing in the story hints at one. Everything said on the subject comes from somewhere else, and it is worth knowing where.

The creation accounts tell us a good many things about the first man and woman, and nothing about how they looked.

We learn what the man was made of: the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7). We learn how the two of them stand to God, made in his image, male and female (Genesis 1:27). We hear of the charge God gave them, the garden, the tree, the naming of the animals, the rib, and the man’s words, “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23).

Of their height, their build, their colouring or how old they were when they were made, Genesis says nothing at all, because the text is not interested in any of it.

Scripture is just as quiet about nearly everyone else. It describes very few people’s bodies, and when it does, the detail is there because the story needs it. Saul stood a head taller than anyone else, which is why the people wanted him; Zacchaeus was short, which is why he climbed the tree; and Eglon was very fat, in a scene that turns on it.

The giant Adam comes from three places, and Genesis is not one of them.

Islamic tradition. A hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari reports that God created Adam sixty cubits tall, and that people have been growing smaller ever since. Muslim scholars have long disagreed over whether it describes Adam on earth or the stature of the people of Paradise, but either way it is a hadith, and it is not in the Bible.

Later Jewish speculation. Rabbinic aggadah tells its own stories of an Adam of enormous size, made smaller after the fall. They were told as homilies, and no one ever treated them as the plain sense of Genesis.

Modern numbers made up whole. Then there are figures like “Adam was 15 feet tall” or “90 feet tall”, which are passed around with no source at all, sometimes with a made-up reference attached and sometimes with a photograph of a hoax skeleton.

It is a fair thing to ask next, and Scripture does speak of some unusually large people, only not the first ones.

The Nephilim appear in Genesis 6:4, in a passage so brief that no two commentators agree on it. In Numbers 13:33 the spies come back saying there are giants in the land, and the Bible gives us that as a bad report from frightened men.

Goliath is the one we are given a measurement for, six cubits and a span (1 Samuel 17:4), which is roughly nine feet nine inches. Several ancient manuscripts, among them the Greek Septuagint and a fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls, read four cubits and a span instead, about six feet nine. Either way he was very tall for his time, and though the difference matters to translators, it does not change the story.

Then there is Og of Bashan, whose bed Deuteronomy 3:11 measures at about thirteen feet long. The text gives it to us as a curiosity on display rather than as his exact height. These are the Bible’s large people, and Adam is not among them.

Some of it is plain curiosity, and there is nothing wrong with that. Some of it is that a larger, longer-lived first humanity fits a certain way of reading the early chapters. That reading takes the long lifespans of Genesis 5 and the world before the flood as a golden age, with everything after it diminished.

But Genesis 5 gives ages, not heights, and even the ages are debated. We cannot draw a height out of it that the text does not give.

A giant Adam also makes the first people a different kind of creature from us, and Genesis goes the other way. The first man is dust, and we are told so twice, the second time in the last words of God’s sentence on him: for dust you are and to dust you will return (Genesis 3:19).

Scripture keeps back how Adam and Eve looked for the same reason it keeps back how Jesus looked, for the Gospels say nothing at all about it.

Isaiah, writing of the servant, takes care to tell us there was nothing to look at: He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. (Isaiah 53:2)

And when Samuel is choosing a king and is taken with the wrong brother, the Lord tells him: The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7)

If the Bible had told us how tall Adam was, it would be a different book, and a worse one.

How tall were Adam and Eve according to the Bible?

The Bible does not say, and it gives no height, build or appearance for either of them.

Where does the claim that Adam was 60 cubits tall come from?

It comes from a hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari, which belongs to Islamic tradition rather than the Bible, and Muslim scholars dispute whether it describes Adam on earth or in Paradise.

Does the Bible mention giants?

It mentions the Nephilim (Genesis 6:4), a frightened report of giants in Numbers 13:33, Goliath at six cubits and a span (1 Samuel 17:4), and Og’s oversized bed (Deuteronomy 3:11), but Adam is not among them.

How tall was Goliath?

Roughly nine feet nine inches by the Hebrew text, though several older manuscripts, including the Septuagint, read about six feet nine.

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