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Japanese No, that is average. In the CDC’s latest measurements, American men aged 20 and older average 68.9 inches, just under 5 feet 9 inches. Scripture sets no height for a husband or a wife. When Samuel took Eliab for the next king, God told him not to look “on the height of his stature” (1 Samuel 16:7).
The Bible has a word for anyone who worries about his height. Israel’s first king stood taller than any of the people, and God rejected him. The youngest son, out keeping the sheep, was never measured at all, and the small man up a sycamore tree was the one Jesus called by name. “The Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7), and we can learn to look there too.
How tall is the average man?
The National Center for Health Statistics, part of the CDC, measures the height of a national sample of Americans rather than asking people how tall they are. In its survey for August 2021 to August 2023, men aged 20 and older averaged 68.9 inches (about 175 centimeters) and women 63.5 inches, or 5 feet 3.5 inches (about 161 centimeters). A man of 5 feet 9 inches is of average height in the United States and about 5.5 inches taller than the average woman.
The previous survey, for 2015 to 2018, shows the spread. The median man was 69.1 inches tall, so about half of adult men were shorter than 5 feet 9 inches. Among adult women, 95 percent measured 67.9 inches or less, which makes a man of 5 feet 9 inches taller than at least 19 of every 20 American women.
Do women prefer taller men?
Many do, and the preference they state is usually for a man taller than themselves. The sociologists George Yancey and Michael Emerson studied Yahoo! Personals dating profiles from 455 men and 470 women across the United States and published the results in the Journal of Family Issues in 2014. Of the women, 48.9 percent wanted to date only men taller than themselves. Of the men, 13.5 percent wanted to date only women shorter than themselves. In a second survey of 131 women and 54 men at a U.S. university, 55 percent of the women wanted only taller men, and 37 percent of the men wanted only shorter women.
A preference for a man taller than oneself rules out a man of 5 feet 9 inches only for the tallest women, since nearly all American women are shorter than he is. The preference is also not universal. A 2009 study of the Hadza, a community of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, found that couples paired up without regard to height: husbands were no more often taller than their wives than chance pairing would produce, and a person’s height had no link to how many times that person married.
What does the Bible say about height?
Very little, and nothing that makes height a measure of a person. Saul, Israel’s first king, is described as a handsome young man who “from his shoulders upward… was taller than any of the people” (1 Samuel 9:2). When he stood before the people, Samuel said, “Do you see him whom the Lord has chosen? There is none like him among all the people” (1 Samuel 10:24). Saul later disobeyed God’s command, and Samuel told him, “Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you from being king” (1 Samuel 15:23).
When Samuel went to Bethlehem to anoint the next king, he saw Jesse’s son Eliab and thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is before him.” God answered: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:6–7). The son chosen was the youngest, David, who was out keeping the sheep (16:11). The text calls David “ruddy” and “handsome” (16:12) and says nothing about his height.
In the Gospels, Zacchaeus, a rich chief tax collector in Jericho, “was small in stature” and climbed a sycamore tree to see Jesus over the crowd. Jesus stopped under the tree, called him by name and said, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today” (Luke 19:3–5).
Jesus also used height as an example of what worry cannot change. The King James Version renders Matthew 6:27, “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?” The Greek word can mean either stature or length of life. The English Standard Version reads “add a single hour to his span of life” and gives “a single cubit to his stature” as an alternative in a footnote.
What should a Christian look for in a spouse?
Scripture does not treat physical attraction as a fault. The Song of Songs is a book of love poetry in which the lovers praise each other’s bodies, and the man tells the woman, “Your stature is like a palm tree” (Song of Solomon 7:7). Other passages rank appearance below character. Proverbs ends its portrait of a good wife with “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised” (Proverbs 31:30). Peter tells Christian wives that their adorning should be “the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:3–4). When Boaz promised to do what Ruth asked of him, the reason he gave was her reputation: “all my fellow townsmen know that you are a worthy woman” (Ruth 3:11).
No passage calls a preference about height a sin, and none makes height a condition for marriage. What Boaz praised in Ruth was the thing the Lord looked for in David: “man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
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