Giants On Earth?

Critical Thinking: Giants on Earth – ابن حجر

There is a Hadith which says that Adam was 60 cubits tall (29 meters tall) and that his progeny kept shrinking until it reached the current human height.

Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani commented on this 600 years ago:

ويشكل على هذا ما يوجد الآن من آثار الأمم السالفة كديار ثمود
فان مساكنهم تدل على أن قاماتهم لم تكن مفرطة الطول على حسبما يقتضيه الترتيب السابق
ولا شك أن عهدهم قديم وأن الزمان الذي بينهم وبين آدم دون الزمان الذي بينهم وبين أول هذه الأمة
ولم يظهر لي إلى الآن ما يزيل هذا الاشكال
“… And (reconciling this) this with the traces of the ancient civilisations we can see today – like the dwellings of Thamud – is difficult for me.
The (size of their) dwellings indicates that their stature was not as excessive as would be required to match the previous dispositions.
There is no doubt that they lived a very long time ago, and the time-span between them and Adam was shorter than the time-span between them and the first part of this nation.
Even up to this day, it is not clear to me, how to resolve this difficulty/problem.”

[“Fath al-Bari”, 6/260].

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This is to show that classical scholars engaged in critical thinking. This job of Hadith criticism is reserved to qualified scholars, not laymen.

* Other scholars reconciled this by saying that maybe his height was 60 cubits in Paradise, not on earth , Allaahu A’lam