A new claim ties Plato’s Atlantis story to the Nephilim and an ancient stone circle called Rujm el-Hiri.
For more than two millennia, Atlantis has survived in the public imagination on the strength of a single ancient source: Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias. In those texts, Plato describes a powerful island realm beyond the “pillars of Heracles,” and says it was eventually destroyed. That story has inspired an industry of proposed locations, from the Aegean to the Atlantic, despite the lack of independent ancient testimony naming Atlantis as a real place.
Now a writer who focuses on biblical interpretation is putting forward a different location: not an island in the ocean, but fragments of a lost kingdom embedded in the landscape of the Holy Land. Ryan Pitterson, author of Judgment of the Nephilim, argues that Plato’s account overlaps with biblical material about primordial beings called the Nephilim, and that a large megalithic site in the Golan Heights provides a physical anchor for the idea.
The proposal does not supply archaeological evidence for Atlantis as Plato described it. Instead, it tries to reframe Atlantis as a mythic memory of events and figures that also appear in biblical tradition, then connects that framework to a specific ancient stone monument in the region.
Plato’s Atlantis, in Plato’s words
Plato introduces Atlantis in Timaeus through a long quotation attributed to Egyptian priests recounting a war between Athens and an overseas power. The passage most often cited by Atlantis writers appears in essentially the same form across translations, including this version preserved in online classical text editions:
“For it is related in our records how once upon a time your State stayed the course of a mighty host, which, starting from a distant point in the Atlantic Ocean, was insolently advancing to attack the whole of Europe and Asia to boot. The ocean was navigable at that time; for in front of the mouth, which you Greeks call, as you say, ‘the pillars of Heracles,’ there lay an island larger than Libya and Asia. It was possible for the travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands and from the islands to the whole continent against them, encompassing that veritable ocean. For all that we have here, lying within the mouth of which we speak, is evidently a haven having a narrow entrance; but that yonder is a real ocean, and the land surrounding it may most rightly be called, in the fullest and truest sense, a continent. Now in this island of Atlantis, there existed a confederation of kings, of marvelous power, which held sway over all the island and many other islands and parts of the continent.”
The scale is one reason Atlantis debates rarely converge: Plato does not describe a small coastal city, but an immense island with imperial reach. He also embeds the story in a philosophical dialogue, which complicates any straightforward reading of it as history. Classicists generally treat Atlantis as part of Plato’s wider use of narrative to explore political and moral ideas, rather than a report from a chain of archives. The broader context of Timaeus is a cosmological and ethical argument, not a travelogue, as outlined in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Timaeus.
Still, the text itself remains the starting point for every modern Atlantis claim, including the one that places it in or near Israel.
The Bible, the Nephilim, and a proposed overlap
Pitterson’s argument centers on the Nephilim, a term that appears in Genesis 6:1–4 in a difficult and heavily debated passage that refers to “sons of God” and “daughters of men.” Interpretations vary sharply across Jewish and Christian traditions and across academic scholarship, including disagreement about what the word “Nephilim” means and whether it implies giants, warriors, or a broader category of legendary figures. A survey of those debates appears in Biblical Archaeology Review’s discussion of the Nephilim, which notes that the identity of the figures in Genesis remains ambiguous.
A similar Hebrew term appears in Ezekiel 32:27, where translators and commentators dispute whether the word should be read as “fallen” in a general sense or as a reference that echoes the Nephilim tradition. Encyclopedias also describe this ambiguity, noting that the passage can be read as an indirect reference to the Nephilim rather than a clear repeat of the Genesis wording, as summarized by Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Within that interpretive space, Pitterson argues that the biblical tradition of extraordinary beings is structurally similar to Plato’s depiction of a god-like figure fathering a ruling line in Atlantis, particularly the part of the Atlantis story that attributes the island’s royal lineage to Poseidon. The point, as he presents it, is not that Plato copied Genesis, but that both traditions preserve versions of a comparable narrative pattern: divine or semi-divine beings, extraordinary offspring, and a kingdom that rises and falls.
In an interview excerpt circulating online, Pitterson framed the overlap this way:
“One example that stood out for me is Plato’s description of Atlantis. It’s almost remarkable how similar it is to Ezekiel 31, which describes the rise of this fallen angel spawning many children and having a kingdom with an abundance of resources and rivers as well as a military power and then having it crumble. In Plato’s account, the Greek god Poseidon fell in love with a human woman and impregnated her.”
The reference to Ezekiel 31 is notable because that chapter is widely understood as an extended metaphor comparing a great empire to a towering cedar, using imagery of watercourses and power. It is not a passage that names Atlantis or describes an island civilization. Pitterson’s approach depends on treating the imagery as more literal, and on linking it to other biblical material about primordial beings.
He also points to Genesis’ description of rivers and resources around Eden, including a line that mentions the land of Havilah and its gold, as a possible parallel to Plato’s description of a wealthy realm.
A real place: Rujm el-Hiri
The physical site Pitterson associates with the idea is Rujm el-Hiri, also known as Gilgal Refaim, a large concentric stone monument in the Golan Heights. The structure is made from basalt and consists of multiple rings around a central cairn. Descriptions of the site commonly emphasize its scale: more than 42,000 stones arranged in circles, with an outer diameter around 160 meters, and a central mound about 4.6 meters tall.
Those measurements are broadly consistent across accounts, including summaries in major Israeli reporting and academic literature. A peer-reviewed overview describes the monument as one of the largest megalithic complexes in the region and notes that its dating and function remain contested in the research record, with proposals ranging from the Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age horizons and differing interpretations of its purpose in the ancient landscape. One such analysis appears in research by scholars affiliated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
That uncertainty matters because the monument, whatever its purpose, does not sit naturally inside Plato’s Atlantis description. Plato’s story is of an island, a naval power, and a vast realm larger than “Libya and Asia together,” positioned beyond the Mediterranean gateway known in Greek tradition as the “pillars of Heracles.” The Golan Heights are inland, and Rujm el-Hiri is a stone-built ring complex, not a drowned coastal city.
Pitterson’s connection relies less on geography than on pattern matching: Plato describes a concentric layout, Rujm el-Hiri is concentric, and biblical tradition speaks of giants or mighty beings associated in later lore with the region. From there, he treats the site as a surviving architectural fragment tied to the larger Atlantis story.
The problem is scale and category. Rujm el-Hiri is a monumental structure, but it is not a city, much less a “city-continent.” Archaeologists generally describe it as a megalithic monument whose builders stacked basalt in rings and constructed a cairn at the center. Even writers sympathetic to unusual interpretations typically stop short of describing it as evidence of a lost empire on Plato’s scale.
What the claim does, and does not, establish
The case being made is essentially interpretive: it proposes that Plato’s Atlantis narrative and biblical texts about the Nephilim and related imagery refer, obliquely, to the same underlying tradition, and that Rujm el-Hiri is a physical survival connected to that tradition.
But the same texts that make Atlantis vivid also make the identification difficult. Plato’s description sets Atlantis beyond the pillars of Heracles and emphasizes an island setting and maritime reach. The key line is repeated in shorter form elsewhere in the dialogue tradition and is often treated as the clearest geographic signal in the entire Atlantis story:
According to Plato, “There lay an island which was larger than Libya and Asia together; and it was possible for the travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands, and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses that veritable ocean.”
Rujm el-Hiri, by contrast, sits on a plateau in the Golan Heights and is built from local basalt. Academic work continues to debate its date and function, but not in a way that points toward a submerged island empire. Even the nickname sometimes applied to it, a regional “Stonehenge,” is a shorthand for its ringed layout rather than an argument that it played the same role as Britain’s famous monument.
Pitterson’s argument also depends on reading biblical passages in a particular way, including treating the Nephilim tradition as a coherent account of semi-divine beings and tying that tradition to later mythic genealogies, including Poseidon’s role in Plato. Those are interpretive moves, not archaeological findings.
In the most direct statement of his proposed overlap, he returned to the idea of parallel origin stories and resource imagery:
“So right from the onset, it was a god coming to an Earthly realm and conceiving a child with a human woman in the same fashion as Genesis 6. Atlantis is described as having all sorts of great minerals — gold, precious minerals — and in a biblical account in Genesis 2, we’re told the rivers that ran out of the Garden of Eden encompassed the whole line of Avila”, Pitterson explained.
Evidence of Atlantis? I think not.
