Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and if you have been following along lately, you have seen that I've been doing these readings through Genesis, and I'm up till the end of chapter 4. Although, that's actually not true, because I need to go back and finish chapter 3 that we didn't quite get through. So, You're not going to be too surprised when I jump ahead to Genesis 6, right? Of course you're not, because I don't promise to be that organized.
Now, really, this is a topic that I could have talked about much earlier when I was doing my series on the spiritual realm. But like with my other topics, I don't really want to go over the same ground that you can find easily elsewhere.
However, at the same time, [00:01:00] for those of you who haven't heard any of this stuff in depth, I don't just want to leave you hanging without anything that you can be clinging to for the discussion. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give a very brief summary of what I'm talking about here, and I'm going to kind of set the stage of this context.
And if you have further questions, you can absolutely email me or message me on Facebook or come and talk about it in my Facebook discussion group. Just come join the conversation.
Now, usually when we talk about Genesis 6, we're talking about the sons of God, and we're talking about the Nephilim, and we're talking about giants, and we are going to be doing that. But the focus I actually want to have for this conversation is actually the topic of demons.
And along with that, I also want to talk about why I find it personally problematic [00:02:00] that we tend to delve into this topic, and we want data, and we want to try and correspond that data to our world. And if you've heard me before, you know that I take the spiritual realm seriously. I think that the gods of the nations have a reality behind them. But when you kind of take that and you try and apply that and ask, where does Allah fit into that? Where does this other god over here fit into that? I find that problematic. And I think this topic in particular can really explain why that's problematic. Why I think we cannot and should not try and form a taxonomy of the spiritual realm, especially the dark powers of the spiritual realm.
I see this question a lot. I see people asking. How do we approach this idea that the gods of the nations are real? And who are those [00:03:00] gods today? If the Bible was talking only about the ancient near East and, and it only mentions the gods of the ancient near East, well, what about the gods of South America? What about the gods of China? What about the gods of Antarctica? I, I don't know.
And you see, here I am talking about the gods of the nations, and they're not actually the beings that are in Genesis 6. So, part of my job here today is, I hope, I can help disambiguate some of this for you. I mean, I want to clarify things, but I'm also going to complicate them. Because I want to show you just how complex this data is, and how... Trying to formulate a taxonomy or a theology of the evil powers is maybe a little bit misguided. So on one hand, I think that we should take the spiritual realm seriously. On the other hand, I think that [00:04:00] we can get a little bit too pedantic about that.
So in addition to all of this about Genesis 6, I also want to talk a little bit about how we see demons today and the dark forces of the world because that is obviously the end of the application to looking at all of this, right? So, yeah. For instance, I'm not sure how many of you have watched that recent movie Nefarious, but I'm going to be talking about that in this conversation as well.
But first I do want to set this groundwork for everyone. When we look at Genesis 6, one way of looking at it is to see it within a wider structure of the Book of Genesis, and Genesis one through 11 in particular. So I do once again suggest reading Dr. Heiser's book The Unseen Realm or his light version [00:05:00] of the book, Supernatural, to get a really complete picture of what I'm talking about here.
But to sum it up, When we look at the reason for human depravity and the causes of sin and why we are so deeply embedded in the construct of sin and its consequences, we tend to just think of Genesis 3, right? We have Satan, we have the fall of humanity, there's our explanation right there. But we could broaden our view and say the fall happened with a spiritual being, the serpent, interacting with humankind, Eve. And this instigated what we call the Fall, right? Well there are two other narratives in the early chapters of Genesis that have spiritual beings and humanity interacting. Genesis 6 happens to be the next one after Genesis 3. Genesis 11 is [00:06:00] the third incident of this trifecta, we might say, of the three falls of mankind.
The consequences of Genesis 3 are that we lost sacred space and that direct access to God that we were enjoying in Eden, and also death, and of course there's all of the curses there, right? So, of course, we're all pretty familiar with the story. Humanity does become fruitful, and we multiply, and we also multiply in wickedness, and along comes the flood.
And there's this really complex question of what the first few verses of Genesis 6 is actually talking about. And I'm not going to get into all of the different views and their pros and cons right here. I might do that in a future episode, but if I laid all of that out, it would take our entire time , and that's not really the focus I want for today.
So I hope you can just kind of go along with me , and [00:07:00] assume some of these things as a given. But I think it's pretty clear that in the context of the Bible, we need to be looking at this in a supernatural fashion. All right, and we'll get into some details here, but just to finish up our brief overview of the three falls, the sons of God here in Genesis 6 are spiritual beings who enter into relationships with human women and they produce the Nephilim who are associated with giants.
And again, this is very complex. But there are grammatical reasons to see it this way, and this is connecting to the conquest and the giant clans and all of that narrative that comes up a little bit later. This is also what I'm going to be talking about as far as the source of demons.
But holding off for that for a moment, let's jump over to Genesis 11, where we have the Tower of Babel [00:08:00] incident and the scattering of the nations.
And this is the incident that I have spoken about previously a little bit, about how the nations were allotted lesser spiritual beings that we can call the gods of the nations, even though they're not actually rivals for Yahweh God. But this is where we get the source of the territorial spirits, the gods of the nations.
So the sons of God in Genesis 6, they are a different group from the sons of God who are over the nations or who are in the divine council. So here we have our first source of major confusion in all of this. And it's confusing because the same terminology is used. Genesis 3 is easy to kind of partition off because that's the serpent, or we might call him Satan as he's later connected in the New Testament.
But in Genesis 6 we have beings who are called the [00:09:00] sons of God who come down to earth and apparently have children with women. Then we have sons of God again in the Tower of Babel incident and in the Divine Council. It's using the same terminology, but these are different beings. The sons of God who come down and produce the Nephilim are not the same beings as the sons of God over the nations or the sons of God in the divine council. And even those two groups of the sons of God may or may not have overlap. So you see how confusing this really gets.
Now, I have produced a chart that kind of lays this out, and it's a chart that centers on the word Elohim, which I've talked about before, and how that is a geographical term. Elohim itself does not mean just God or the gods of the nations.
I will be sending out that chart in my newsletter. It will be on my website in a [00:10:00] blog post. It can also be found in my Facebook group. So I'm putting it all these places. It should be easy to find. And I'm probably going to be producing a new version of it that you can also purchase as a print for yourself.
So if you want that, you can look forward. to that whenever I get that accomplished. But I think it's really helpful to see this laid out in a chart because it gets, it gets really confusing. And a lot of times when you say sons of God, well, who are you talking about? And it's not always clear.
Oh, I do want to mention that I said the sons of God show up in Genesis 11, but the terminology isn't there. You actually have to take some other scripture to put the pieces together as to, what's happening in Genesis 11. So the whole picture is not just in that chapter. , but you can listen to my other episodes, you can look at Dr. Heiser's work for some [00:11:00] of that, and you can just ask me questions.
Okay, so a really fair question when you're looking at all of this. And you see, okay, I can see that there's these three falls. You have Satan, you have the sons of God in Genesis 6, you have other sons of God who are put over the nations and who make up God's divine council.
But where do demons come from? And what about Satan? Isn't he supposed to be the head honcho here? How is he connected to Genesis 6 and the gods of the nations? All right, you have a lot of people today who want to say that Satan and Baal are the same, and you know, things like that. They're conflating these things, and well, we gotta connect them somehow, don't we?
But can we? Is it really fair to make those connections? Is it really that straightforward? Well, I hate to break it to you, but the Jews of Jesus time, and [00:12:00] just before that, they didn't think it was that straightforward. Or, at least... They didn't agree on it.
So I have to admit, I hate condensing things and not giving you the full picture right here. But at the same time, nobody really can because it is really complex.
But the fact is, we today tend to have this idea of Satan and his minions. And those minions are demons. And so, this is kind of what I want to look at right now. The fact is, although the Bible does talk a lot about the dark powers, and evil spirits, it really doesn't give us a whole lot of meat to sink our teeth into regarding this figure that we know as Satan. And there's a definite difference between the way the Old Testament talks about things and the way the New Testament talks about things. The Old Testament doesn't give us any information at all about demons, and it might not [00:13:00] give us that much information about the Satan figure. The New Testament, however, here we have demons who are very active. So then the question is, where did they come from? Why do we suddenly have demonic activity happening in the New Testament when we don't see that kind of activity in the Old Testament?
So, where did demons come from? And what's the deal here? To answer this question, what I'm going to do is I'm going to compare and contrast two different stories about how demons came to be.
And along with that, I am going to be suggesting that our current view of the powers of darkness is a bit truncated compared to the view that is presented in the Bible. And part of what I think actually goes on today when people are learning about this is that they go from the truncated view to a more nuanced [00:14:00] view and then they want to try and sort that out in a very scientific way. But just because the Bible's view is more complex, that doesn't mean we can really do that.
All right, so, Satan and his minions, right? We have this idea that we have the arch nemesis of God, who is Satan, the devil, the serpent in Genesis 3. And it all makes sense that we see that there is this opposing force who is against God. And this opposing force is seen quite naturally to be the original spiritual rebel in Genesis 3. And for readers of the New Testament, this makes perfect sense because we get to Revelation and it talks about the dragon. We also have the temptation narrative in the Gospels, where Satan is offering Jesus all of the nations of the Earth. So, he must be the head honcho, [00:15:00] right? And in 2 Corinthians 4 4, we have the designation of the god of this world, who, that's probably Satan as well.
Okay, so all of that makes a whole lot of sense, right? But, we obviously also have demons showing up in the New Testament. And we have various places in the Bible where it's talking about this real seeming battle between forces , if God has an army, who is he fighting with that army, right? He's fighting dark spiritual forces. So it can't just be one being who is opposing humanity. There's gotta be the structure here, right? So we see demons showing up in the Bible in the New Testament. We see this Satan figure who is the god of this world. Those have to be combined into one kind of thing.
And so the demons are naturally kind of under [00:16:00] Satan, right? And the typical description that you hear about this is that Satan fell and he drew away a third of the heavenly host with him. And that third of the heavenly host, those are demons. Where we see this happen is in Revelation 12. We see the dragon, and we see this idea of a third of the host of heaven. So, these ideas are connected here in Revelation 12.
The problem I'll mention here is that Revelation 12's context is the birth of Christ. It's not creation. It's also quite possible that this third of the host of heaven were not rebellious, but they were the good guys who are being swept away in this war.
So, while this story isn't without scriptural basis, this whole imagery of the fall of Satan before or at creation, usually it's seen as happening [00:17:00] before creation, even though we have nothing in the Bible that suggests that. The fact that that idea is wrapped up in, in this whole story, really kind of shows where the story is actually coming from, which is John Milton's Paradise Lost, which was written well after the Bible. But the imagery of that story is so potent and so powerful, and it came along with these really cool illustrations as well, that really captured the hearts and minds of people. So because you have this compelling story that's written really well, and it has beautiful imagery, and it seems really biblical, people kind of take that and insert that into the Bible as if they're one in the same thing, even though Milton made up a whole lot of stuff for his story. But we just kind of take a lot of those details along with us in our own context. I [00:18:00] mean obviously nobody is thinking that John Milton was inspired to write Paradise Lost as scripture, so nobody's like, hey, this is scripture, but they're seeing the same ideas in scripture.
So understanding the way that we are viewing scripture today , in general context, is really helpful to look at the other literature that surrounds those conceptions. This is very similar to how we should be viewing and reading and looking at the ancient Near Eastern literature and Second Temple literature. It's not scripture, it's not inspired, but the ideas that that literature is presenting are wrapped up in the way that we are thinking about the story.
Now, the difference between Paradise Lost and Ancient Near Eastern literature is that Paradise Lost is wrapped up in our interpretation of the inspired scripture, whereas the Ancient Near [00:19:00] Eastern literature is wrapped up in the thought processes of the actual inspired writers.
So, Paradise Lost is going to be helpful in helping us understand how we got to our interpretations, but Ancient Near Eastern Literature and Second Temple Literature is helpful in understanding the thinking of the actual inspired writing. So, the inspired writing is what's inspired, not our interpretations of it, which is why it's a little more important to read Second Temple literature and Ancient Near Eastern literature than it is to read Paradise Lost.
But if you're trying to parse out why we think the way we do today, you need to get into our context and our imagery of that context. And these things are kind of perpetuated over time as we develop our own cultural narratives and stories. And as we do [00:20:00] that more and more, some things kind of get embedded more and more into our cultural and interpretive consciousness.
And so, because I think that is relevant, I am going to dig a bit into the latest form of this kind of thing that I have seen in our current structure. So let's talk about this movie, Nefarious. I'm going to be doing my best to not give you spoilers, but it's not really a complex plot, so I think I can talk a lot about it without giving away the enjoyment of the film.
The first thing you should know is that the movie was actually based on a book. And, I've got the book, and I do not, do not recommend that you read the book. It's not a gory book. It's nothing like that. [00:21:00] It's just incredibly boring, and extremely steeped in politics.
So I actually read the book before I watched the movie, and I was like, how are they going to make a good movie out of this? I really couldn't see it, but what they do in the movie is they take the book and they use the book as a plot device for the movie. So, the book and the movie are not like the same thing. It's not like if you read Little Women and you watch Little Women, it's the same story that's going on.
No, the book that's written is part of the movie. But it's not the same as what's going on in the movie. So this is definitely a case where the movie is way better than the book. So please just don't even bother with the book. It's, it's really not [00:22:00] worth your time.
And some people might accuse me of being anti american about this or something. Look, I'm a patriotic person. I like my country just fine. The book is making some good points, but the book is presenting... Politics as something that is going to save us and that is just so deeply embedded in the spiritual context of the spiritual war. And you know, I'm not going to disagree that the dark forces are going to use economics and politics and policy as a part of what they're doing in the world like that kind of idea is fine, but this book, it goes way overboard with all of that kind of thing. It's, it's just, unless you want to read an echo chamber of certain types of, trajectories in American politics, just don't read the book. That's all I have to say about that.
The [00:23:00] movie is luckily much better than the book. And of course, I can't watch a movie like that without paying attention to all the points of theology that it is presenting in the narrative. Now, of course, anything like this is going to have dominant main points that it's actually claiming, and then it's also going to have an underlying structure of understanding.
And really, I'm quite happy to tell you that the primary points of theology that it is trying to definitively bring up... those are all pretty solid. I was pretty impressed. The main points that I was getting out of it was that there is an actual battle between God and dark forces and the dark forces have a goals and we Humanity are the center of that battleground, right? The basic theme is that God is sovereign but that there's rebellious spirits who see [00:24:00] following God's will as being effectively slavery, and they wanted to go their own way and effectively be their own gods, and all of that kind of thing.
A couple of interesting points. There is a priest, and he's not effective in doing anything, and you might want to pay attention to the colors of his, his outfit, as to clues as to why he is not effective. So, yes, the movie does touch a little bit on some of the themes that are present in the book. I'm not saying that they're totally divergent, but , the movie does a really good job in kind of embedding that and not just throwing it in your face like the book does.
I hope that wasn't too much of a spoiler for you. It's pretty minor, but I wanted to mention it. So, the movie is presenting this demon who has possessed this inmate who had committed murders and was now [00:25:00] facing execution. As far as gruesomeness of the movie and appropriateness in that kind of direction, it's not very overt until the end. It does show you the execution. So be aware of that if you're sensitive to things like that.
I'm giving more spoilers than I wanted, but it's kind of hard to talk about this and not mention those things. , so I'm going to be giving some warnings on the episode page. And I'm sorry if you didn't see those warnings and are bothered by the spoilers.
But this is a movie that is, it's got demons in it, so people are going to be wondering, Is it gruesome? Can I watch it? Is it actually appropriate for me to watch, and so I think it's fair to bring all of these things up if you've not seen it and you're looking for an opinion, so there you go.
I thought that the storyline was actually really well done compared to what they had to work with in the book. And the [00:26:00] themes and what it's trying to convey is very positive and a really good message for us as far as really thinking about how there is a battle, and we are on a side whether we want to acknowledge that or not, and we can choose that side.
Now, of course, it did have some information that you might question. Is this really how a demon works? And all of that. It doesn't give a whole lot of detail into that, but it does suggest a few things, and I think that kind of information, you should just take with a grain of salt and assume that these are storytellers and they're not really trying to give an accurate picture of exactly what happens in situations of possession or something that is akin to possession.
And the other thing I mentioned before is that there are always underlying structures that are assumed and are not [00:27:00] actively being presented as the point of the message necessarily. And it does talk about this fall of Satan before humanity was created. So it's going along with the storyline that Paradise Lost has. This isn't really surprising and I'm not really sure it's really that big of a point of concern as far as having people watch it and you watching it and, oh, I don't want to be sullied by bad theology.
Well, you know what? We're all going to get some bad theology here and there. It's okay. It's not really the biggest deal, and maybe you can use this as a point of discussion for other people of, Hey, where do we actually see that happen? Can we look at that together and talk about it? Let's see what actually the Bible says about these things. I'm a big fan of using these types of things for apologetics and discipleship. [00:28:00]
But you see, it's so evident here how deeply embedded in our thinking this idea of the fall of Satan is. And here's their demons and this is how it all works out, and we've got these nice little neat packages. I mean, to some degree, I can appreciate the simplification so that it's an easy thing to communicate to other people and say, look, there is a reality that we should be aware of so that as we are living as Christians, we understand that there is this kind of good and bad, and there are real forces that impact our world, right?
I mean, that, that's the main message that I would say about the Three Falls as well. It's not that we need to dive in and get super specific. So I'm not really all that concerned about the particularities of how people are viewing this. But at the same [00:29:00] time, you have plenty of people who really get invested in studying the deeper sides of these things in scripture. And then they come up with these things and they go, wait, what's going on here? How do I understand this? And so it, it is really helpful to see that there is a biblical way of viewing this that is more accurate because it's based on the context of the Bible.
And also, if you believe that there really are demons, then for some Christians, they need to deal with those , right? So we need a really accurate view of what that is so we're not just popping off and doing our own thing, trying to figure it out without the proper context. That's not most of us, I think. We aren't, most of us, engaged in exorcisms or dealing with possessed people or anything like that. But at the same time, it might sometimes be more [00:30:00] common than you think.
But anyway, there we have our typical structure of how we think about this. And you can see we have the side where it simplifies things, and then the side where people really want to get into the nitty gritty details and try and decide who is this and what is that, and all of those kinds of things. So let's dive into the biblical side of things, the contextual understanding of where demons came from.
And we'll see it's, it's far too complicated to even really dig that deeply into it. Oh, and by the way, the idea of really digging into it and finding all of the details, that's also kind of wrapped up in the simplified view, as evidenced by the demon in the movie saying that names are very important. And that's a very biblical thing to say, as I've [00:31:00] talked before about the name of God and bearing the name of God, that's a very biblical concept. But the idea as he's presenting it in the movie is that names have literal power. If you know a name, then you have power over something, which again, that's a biblical idea, but there's this tendency in the realm of demonology to say that if you know something's name then you have literal magic power over that. And I don't think that is the structure of Christianity. Like we have power because we are in Christ, not because we know some magical name. I think that there's a very distinct difference between those two ideas. So I don't think it's actually necessary for us to dig into and know these specific ancient names or whatever it is [00:32:00] in order to understand the world and deal with the world as a Christian.
Okay, so are you ready to dig into this entire topic of demons in the Bible, and not just demons, but the whole wider view of dark forces in the Bible, because you gotta look at the whole thing in order to see anything at all. So it gets really hard.
Okay, so as far as the Old Testament goes, there are three or probably four categories that we can put terminology in that are associated with the dark forces of the spiritual realm. Those categories are terms that are associated with the realm of the dead, terms that are associated with geographical dominion, terms that are associated with preternatural creatures, that are also associated with [00:33:00] idolatry and unholy ground, And then you have what might be termed demythologized pseudo demons, like chaos symbols like Leviathan and Rahab and Behemoth, and forces of nature as well that other cultures have used those terms as literal evil beings, or gods, but the Bible uses them and demythologizes it into something a bit more normal and tame.
I am drawing this information out from Dr. Heiser's book on demons, so if you are interested in getting a little bit more into that or looking at the references in the footnotes, go ahead and get that book.
But I'm just going to draw out a few examples of each of these things. As far as the realm of the dead, we have, of course, the realm of Sheol, or the grave. We have terms that are associated with death and the pit. We have the term Rephaim, [00:34:00] which is associated with giants, shades, and the dead. They're residents of the underworld. They're also associated with the giant clans and figures like Og of Bashan. There is terminology for just spirits in general that tend to be more in the underworld as well.
As far as terms involving geographical dominion, we have territorial spirits like shedim in Deuteronomy 32. And we have princes that we see in Daniel 8 through 12. And of course we have the gods of the nations who are allotted to the different nations.
As far as preternatural creatures, we have Azazel, which shows up in Leviticus 16. We have howling creatures and wild beasts, and we have Lilith, who is a Mesopotamian demon goddess. But she's also associated with owls, and there are other creatures that have this [00:35:00] association as well. Ostrich, jackals, snakes, desert dwellers, and he goats. I'm not sure what a he goat is, but basically this category is nocturnal carrion eaters who reside in the wilderness and the wild places.
And then once you have the Old Testament translated into Greek, we start seeing some Greek ideas inserted into the text as well, like sirens and possibly donkey centaurs. So that's kind of interesting.
So most of that was the Hebrew terminology. Once you get the Old Testament translated into Greek, it starts blending some lines that weren't previously blended. For instance, there weren't very many direct connections between beings who were in the realm of the dead and territorial spirits. However, when the [00:36:00] Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, translated shedim, it translated it into a word that we recognize as being the same as the word demon.
And it's really not. It's more of a general term. But we see this word and we think it's demon, and when Paul also uses this Greek term in the New Testament, because he's looking at the Septuagint, and he's using that, he's referencing territorial spirits, who are beings like the gods of the nation. But we see that word and we think he's just talking about demons. And so we're associating what Paul's saying there with the unclean demonic spirits that Jesus is casting out of people. You see, so those are two different things, but they get blended together once , these words start being translated into different languages and you have different cultural [00:37:00] understandings of the world. I mean, that's the kinda thing I'm always talking about.
And then again, moving into the Septuagint, you have the term rephaim in Hebrew and in the Septuagint it's very directly connected to giants, and, to other things like the Titans. So it's bringing Greek culture and ideas into this entire worldview. And so, I bring up Titans because that's going to connect directly into our Genesis 6 narrative, as Peter and Jude are going to be mentioning Genesis 6 in their letters. And the way they mention it also connects into the Greek idea of the Titans.
Okay, I know that I'm throwing out a lot of stuff here, but I told you I was going to complicate matters. And you see, all of these ideas are kind of in this matrix of the conceptual world of the dark forces. But how they relate to one [00:38:00] another, it's really hard to kind of uncover. And it's really because there wasn't just one single overarching structure for all of it. They weren't just thinking about Satan and a fall that happened before creation. They simply weren't. It was much more complex than that. But clearly, they did have connections to things in the storyline of the Bible, right?
So there are some lines that we can draw throughout to kind of fill in this picture. But it's incomplete, and part of the reason that it's incomplete is that, quite frankly, we have to turn to non biblical literature to understand it. We have to. Because if we don't, there's simply not enough data in the Bible to fill out the picture. There just isn't. There's no way we go from the Old Testament to the New Testament and [00:39:00] understand where do these demons, these unclean spirits come from? They just kind of show up. None of the terms that I just talked about map directly over into what an unclean spirit is.
The same could frankly be said for Satan. We have the serpent in the garden. We have , the Hebrew word Satan that shows up several times in the Old Testament, but most of the time it's definitively not talking about that original rebel. Sometimes it might be, but... We can make an argument for it not connecting to that original rebel. And , in the Dead Sea Scrolls, you have the word Satan used potentially as a category for demonic or evil spirits. And then we get to the New Testament, and guess what? The New Testament uses various words for Satan as well. So that's going to add to our confusion.
Okay, so let's now talk about this context of [00:40:00] Genesis 6 in light of Second Temple literature that is shedding light on the story of Genesis 6. And I'm not making this stuff up, because you can just ask Peter and Jude. They are referencing the same material. Now I'm not saying that Peter and Jude are necessarily talking about demons, but you can draw a line of connection from those letters through the Second Temple literature that I'm going to talk about into the Genesis 6 narrative itself. So, this shows that they were reading this, and probably that a lot of the understanding of this extra biblical book was shared by the biblical authors.
Not that the extra biblical books are inspired scripture, but the ideas contained therein are also the same ideas that the biblical authors had. Actually, what I find really interesting is that there are two places to see this context that I'm going to be talking about. [00:41:00] One of those places is embedded in the Old Testament, in Mesopotamia. The other context is situated in the second temple period from material written by Jews themselves. So we have an older witness to this concept and a newer witness to this concept that kind of marry this whole idea together.
So the Mesopotamian backstory is of the Apkallu. The Apkallu were culture heroes or sages. They explained the greatness of Babylon and why Babylon was such a great city and a great culture. So the Apkallu are connected to the Flood. Now remember, Mesopotamia also had a flood narrative that is very similar to the flood narrative in the Bible. The Apkallu were divine beings who granted special secret knowledge to humanity in order to create civilization.[00:42:00]
And interestingly enough, before the Flood, they were said to be fully divine. After the Flood, there were still Apkallu mentioned in stories, but they were now two thirds human. They were divine human hybrids. So, in some versions of these stories, the Apkallu were trying to undermine the gods' ability to destroy humanity.
After the Flood, they wanted to help humanity recover from the Flood. And so that's why Babylon is so great. Because their patrons were the Apkallu who granted them all of these blessings of civilization. But remember, the Apkallu also existed before the Flood. And so they were giving humanity all of these secrets of civilization.
And what were the secrets of civilization? Well, they were things like metallurgy, so they could create weapons and kill each other more efficiently. They also gave [00:43:00] things like drugs and makeup to women so that they could seduce men. So embedded into the story of the Apkallu, even if it's not necessarily drawn out as much as it is in other literature, you have the idea of divine beings who come in and produce children with human women. That's how you're going to get hybrid Apkallu after the flood, right? So in the context of Babylon and the story of the Apkallu, these are good guys. They're doing good things. But from the perspective of the Israelite, who is against Babylon, the Apkallu are not doing good in the sight of God, right? They're crossing boundary lines in a way that they shouldn't be. And so part of what we have in Genesis six is that it is a polemic against the story from Babylon. The Apkallu were not good guys. The sons of God were [00:44:00] not good guys. They were not doing good things for humanity. But rather, they were doing things that would perpetuate and increase the depravity prevalent in society for mankind.
So even though the Flood is a judgment against humanity, it is also a judgment against these gods, or these sons of gods, or these Apkallu, or these spiritual beings who are perpetuating the depravity and wickedness of humankind. So once again, we see this connection of spiritual beings and humanity sliding into a fall of continued and deeper level of sin than they had previously. That's what makes this the second fall narrative of Genesis, , because we have those combined ideas in this narrative.
Okay, so when we read Genesis six, and we read those first four verses, they seem like they're just kind of there out of the [00:45:00] blue. What in the world do they have to do with the flood narrative? If we look at it from , the angle of the Apkallu and how they are perpetuating the evil in the world, this makes a little more sense.
Okay. So, but you thought I was talking about demons, right? Where do demons come in? Who are the Nephilim? What is going on there? In the Apkallu story, you have Apkallu before the flood, who would be the sons of God. You have Apkallu after the flood, who presumably would be the Nephilim, right? So, there's a very direct connection of before and after. These are the same beings, kind of a thing going on. But that doesn't seem to quite correspond to what's going on in the Bible, right? So, the sons of God are the spiritual beings who produce the Nephilim. But who are the Nephilim and what's their whole deal?
Okay, without going into too much [00:46:00] detail about the Nephilim, they are quite clearly in the Bible, in the Old Testament, connected to the giant clans. So you have the question of if the sons of God were doing this before the Flood, then where did the Nephilim come from after the Flood? And there's some various ideas for that. But I think that we're getting too pedantic when we're trying to ask those questions. We are supposed to be making these connections between these beings, these people, and these other people over here, right?
So the giant clans were the threat to the Israelites when they were coming into the land. They were the giants. And so we're supposed to be connecting the giant clans to this act from , the rebellious sons of God in Genesis 6, who are, once again, they are not the sons of God who are over the nations. This is a separate set of beings.
Okay, so then you're like, great. [00:47:00] That's where we get the story of the giants and the conquest and all of that. Okay. Got it. Cool ...what exactly is the connection to the New Testament and the demons because last I checked the giant clans were supposed to have been wiped out, right? Great point to bring up and that's why we need to go into that second temple period literature to further our story and our understanding of what's going on here.
Now, for those who don't understand my term Second Temple here, I'm basically talking about the intertestamental period between the Old Testament and the New Testament, but, you know, it gets a little bit fuzzy. Basically, the Second Temple period is the period of the Second Temple, when the Second Temple was built to the point that it was destroyed in 70 AD.
So, the Second Temple is going from the time before Christ to just after Christ, right? So, Second Temple literature , is a whole [00:48:00] category of literature from Jewish people writing during this time. And it's not canon, it's not scripture, but there was an awful lot of writing that was going on during this time.
And one of those things that was written is the Book of First Enoch. Now, the Book of Enoch is a bit complex , because there are several books and some claim that everything in Enoch is from after Christ, but that's not true because we have Dead Sea Scrolls that are from the Book of 1st Enoch. Not 2nd Enoch, not 3rd Enoch, but sections from the Book of 1st Enoch, so it is clearly not a post New Testament writing.
So the Book of First Enoch is itself separated into separate books as well. And what we're looking at here is the story of the Watchers in First Enoch. And that term Watchers shows up in the Book of Daniel in [00:49:00] Chapter 4. So because they're called Watchers in First Enoch, we tend to think that these are evil beings. But in Daniel, they're not evil beings. They're called holy ones. So not all Watchers are evil. Right? But here's another word that we can put into our bank of words for spiritual beings. So if you hear people talking about Watchers versus Sons of God, this is what they're referring to. This is where the terminology is coming from. The terminology is used in First Enoch for the same beings that are called Sons of God in Genesis 6. And they're also in Daniel. And those beings are clearly part of the Divine Council.
Now, if those beings have anything to do with the gods of the nations, well, I don't know. That's another question. Here's another case of where we want to get it all corresponded and matching appropriately, and we just [00:50:00] can't do that. The terminology isn't clear enough. The different writers , are writing about different points. And we can't say whether or not these are exactly the same beings or not.
And I think in general, whenever you're trying to harmonize scripture to a high degree, you're just going to end up bumping up against these problems again and again and again. And it's, because most of it is not supposed to be harmonized. The writers didn't all get together and work out this chronology, right? The human authors, they don't know what they don't know either. So, one human author is going to have a context that is different than another human author, and who knows if they're talking about the same thing or not, exactly.
What we need to be getting out of these different texts is their theological messaging. And just a side note here, but I would say this about the Divine Council and the gods of the nations as well. Part of the context of the gods of the nations, is that ancient Near Eastern [00:51:00] context where El has his pantheon of gods, right? And this is the polemic and the correct version of that compared to the Canaanite and the Mesopotamian religions. But just because El has a council of gods and Yahweh God has a council of gods, that doesn't mean that , the divine council in Scripture is necessarily exactly mapped on to the gods of the nations.
I think this is another place that we do a lot of conflation where it's not warranted. The divine counsel is probably a much broader thing than just the gods of the nations, but in any case, it's just that we need to be very careful in using this terminology and not over applying it, but also understanding that there is a point to understanding the concept itself, like a theological point to that.[00:52:00]
I mean, that kind of sums up a lot of what I'm even saying overall here. There is a theological message, and that's the point that we need to be getting. It's not all of the esoteric details that actually matter and that we should be clinging to.
And once again, I want to acknowledge that there are people who are dealing directly with these realities. Who are dealing with people who are possessed or under the influence of demons or, you know, whatever that might look like. I mean, there are actually people who go in and deal with dark forces in various places, whether they are territorial spirits in some fashion or whether they're demons or whatever.
So, so I'm not saying this knowledge is useless or pointless and we shouldn't know it and it's not important, because it is, it has that practical use. But let's be honest, most of the time when we're pursuing this knowledge, [00:53:00] it's not to help us deal with those things. And when we are dealing with those things, , you usually see that the people who are doing that are much more focused on God and calling His name rather than trying to figure out the name of this particular demon and how do we use a magical spell to get rid of that. That's just not what we see in Scripture.
All right, so back to our story of the Watchers in 1st Enoch. The first thirty six chapters of the Book of Enoch that we have today are called the Book of the Watchers. And we want to focus especially on chapters six through sixteen. And in actuality, it seems like there's two stories that are embedded into this whole idea.
There are two leaders. The first leader of the fallen angels is Azazel. And his primary sin was improper revelation. Remember the whole story of the [00:54:00] Apkallu? Azazel was giving people knowledge that they shouldn't have had. And you might also notice that I mentioned this name earlier in the context of the terminology of the Old Testament.
Azazel shows up in Leviticus 16 on the day of the Lord. The goat that is sent out into the wilderness is for Azazel. That combined with Azazel in 1st Enoch suggests to some people that Azazel and Satan are the same being just by a different name. But it is kind of hard to connect that directly to the serpent in Genesis 3. I mean, in a way you could say he was offering them improper knowledge from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So there is a bit of a connection but it definitely connects much more into the Genesis 6 narrative. Or perhaps I should say the Apakalu version of the narrative from Genesis 6. [00:55:00] At any rate, I said that there were two stories within the Book of the Watchers that relate to here.
So, we have Azazel, who is giving the improper revelation, and we have another main leader, who is called Shemaihaza, and his primary sin was marriage connected to the giants. It's explained that this is where evil spirits leading humanity away come from. And in the book, the crisis is resolved with a flood.
So in the Book of Enoch, we have both the Apkallu idea as well as the idea of the Nephilim. They're combined together in one book, but they're two separate leaders who do this.
But finally, we come to the actual origin of demons, who are also called bastard spirits or unclean spirits. They are half breeds. They are the sons of the watchers. So, they're the [00:56:00] equivalent of the Nephilim, but there's a catch there, because it's talking about the evil spirits. So, it's not just that they're the Nephilim, they're the Nephilim who have died, and now their spirits are wandering the earth. They have been consigned to the earth, because as half breeds, they don't belong either in the heavens or on the earth, and so, they're kind of in this limbo on earth.
This also helps to explain the term unclean spirit in the New Testament. Why are they unclean? Why would they be called that? Well, it's because something that was an improper mixture in the Old Testament, that was something that was unclean. You had unclean fabrics because they were a mixture of two different fabrics that weren't supposed to be mixed together.
And so in the Nephilim, we have the boundary crossing mixture that wasn't meant [00:57:00] to be. You had the sons of God and the daughters of men, and they combined to form the Nephilim. So there we go. Unclean spirits. This also makes sense of why they are possessing people, why , they seem to be wandering around on Earth, not in the underworld, not in heaven, . And Jesus is in the business of casting these beings out and consigning them to places that they're supposed to be, like when he's sending them into the pigs and off the cliff into the wilderness. Those are the places they are supposed to be. They are not supposed to be residing in and with humans, because that's not their rightful place.
This is also why casting out demons is part of the work of the Messiah, because he is undoing this rebellion of the Sons of God in Genesis 6. The only proper place for these beings is in the chaotic places of the wilderness and the deep water.[00:58:00]
So you can kind of see now why this has been simplified, because it's really complex. And it's kind of hard to make this consistent narrative. Like, if we were making the movie Nefarious with all of this background... That would be much more complex than just there is a master and minions and kind of a straightforward battle, right?
So I can't really blame people for simplifying it, but at the same time, this is more interesting. Like there's more data here that you can really look at and more stories that are involved. And the fact that we have the different falls and the different rebellions, and they're all... increasing and embedding sin into the world in a bigger way. It's, it's like there's this flood that's happening of the wickedness and then God counters it with his own flood of [00:59:00] recreation.
And I think the church is also part of this as we are discipling, as we are evangelizing, as we are taking over the territorial spirits grounds, all of these things that we're doing. They are all part of the work of the Messiah as well in a practical way in the world. This is why it's us being the image of Christ, acting in the way that the Messiah would act as the church forwards its mission.
And although we don't need to get too pedantic about all of the details, it's really the storylines that we should be looking at. Because the storylines are what leads us to understanding why, why do we evangelize? Why do we disciple? Why do we baptize? Why are we going into other nations? Why do we do house cleansings? Why do we do exorcisms? All of these things are involved in what the church does in the world. And if [01:00:00] we have these stories to anchor these things that we do in, then this is how we assign meaning to our world and how we structure our worlds.
It's through story. And the question isn't whether or not it's made up or it's fiction, like, all of us have narrative stories in our world. That's just how we structure our meaning. And so, it's less about all of these details, and it's more about understanding the flow of the narrative.
So I hope you can kind of see what I mean there. Because I think it's important that we know these stories. I think it's important that we incorporate them into the way and the whys of what we're doing. But it's not important to delve into all of the particular details, because then we're moving into science and history rather than narrative and structure of meaning and purpose.
All right, to sum it up, what we have are three [01:01:00] different falls. We have the serpent in Genesis 3. We have the Sons of God in Genesis 6, and we have the gods of the nations of Genesis 11. And looking at it like this, it gives us a more complete picture. It explains the data a whole lot more.
And in each of these falls, we see the work of the Messiah. I mean, I think it's pretty obvious to see the work of the Messiah from Genesis 3. In Genesis 6, this is reversed through the casting out of demons. And in Genesis 11 and Deuteronomy 32 and Psalm 82, we have the delegitimization of the power and the authority of the gods of the nations.
And that's also seen in Acts 2 with the sending out of the Spirit to the nations. So not only is it the work of the Messiah, but it is also the work of the church.
I in the end, we're still left with some questions. [01:02:00] How did Satan get to be the god of this world? And why don't we see demon possession in the Old Testament? we have some fair questions here, and unfortunately, they aren't always going to be answered. But what we can do is look at these broad narratives and see the trajectory of them and incorporate those into our own history and our own understanding of the purposes that we have in life as Christians and as the church.
I do think that the story of the movie Nefarious is a very good one to be taking in, that there is a battle, and that we have a choice, and that we are participants, and we can be participants on the side of God doing good things.
But we've come to the end of this episode, and I hope you have all enjoyed it. I appreciate you all listening. Thank you so much to my patrons who donate through Patreon and through Paypal. [01:03:00] If you are interested in getting my newsletter, please do sign up at GenesisMarksTheSpot.com. If you have done that and you are not receiving the newsletter, check your spam folders because I know that it is going into some spam folders for some people.
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