Carey Griffel: 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 I have an interesting question for you. Do you think that there were female Nephilim?
[00:00:25] I bet a lot of you are thinking, well, why wouldn't there be? Because you have male and female children that come from any kind of a union of two people. Right? And why would that be any different between the Sons of God and the daughters of men? Of course they're gonna produce both male and female children, right? That's how these things work, even if you have an angelic being.
[00:00:52] Well, that's what we're gonna be thinking about when we're thinking in terms of the way that we think. It is perfectly understandable that that is the answer that we would give considering our views of human sexuality and reproduction. But I'm going to go ahead and challenge that.
[00:01:11] We're gonna get into this question of female Nephilim in Scripture. We're gonna look at the evidence, and I'm going to bring you some things that maybe you didn't know about the ancient world.
[00:01:25] And as a bonus, we're gonna be looping in both frame semantics as well as the Walton's idea of referent and affirmation that I talked about last week.
[00:01:37] In this episode, we're going to presuppose the angelic or supernatural view of the Sons of God here. And this actually might help us to kind of distinguish what's going on as well, because we might think, hey, well angels don't conceive. The gospels tell us that. Now of course there's some answers we could go down for that, but I will also say that this is why understanding the Sons of God as not being simply a diminished status of angelic beings of lower rank, but rather they were high deity status is pretty crucial to the time and the argument.
[00:02:20] Now, I want to clarify that in this conversation, we're not talking about female deities or goddesses. We're really talking about female Nephilim, female giants, maybe female demigods.
[00:02:35] And personally, I am pretty convinced that female Nephilim just don't make sense in the logic of the story and the logic of the ancient world, and I'm going to explain why that is. This is not just a matter of an argument from silence, either, simply because we don't have texts that mention any female Nephilim or female giants, we might think, well, that doesn't mean that there weren't any!
[00:03:04] But I don't think I'm making an argument from silence, even though that might sound like what I'm doing. I am arguing from a positive stance of real evidence of ancient thought. The evidence I'm going to bring up is contextually meaningful to the story. We know an awful lot about at least how some people understood conception and sexual gender.
[00:03:29] I'm also going to put forth the fact that this pattern is literary and cultural. And I'm going to suggest if we go down the female Nephilim route of, well of course there were females, then we are framing the question in our modern framework. and that is something you can certainly do. Just be aware that that is what you're doing.
[00:03:56] Alright, so to give us a little bit of a reminder of what Walton's affirmation and referent is. The Waltons, are saying that the Bible doesn't seek to explain the world in modern scientific terms, but rather in terms understood by its original audience. But further, the Bible affirms theological truth, and it does not necessarily affirm everything that is referred to or described in the text.
[00:04:28] In this case, what we might say that the Bible is affirming in the story of Genesis six and the Sons of God is that divine rebellion leads to human and cosmic corruption. It's referring to the ancient world's cultural and symbolic frameworks, including their conceptions of gender, violence, and divine beings.
[00:04:54] In other words, if Genesis six affirms that something is gone cosmically wrong, that doesn't mean it is affirming a genetic science of hybrid giants. That would be our framework, not the framework of the ancient world.
[00:05:11] So if we're trying to use the Bible as a scientific taxonomy of hybrids and demonology, well that's what Walton is pushing against, that right there.
[00:05:23] Now, of course, I understand that many people want to read the account here as a literal historical account. But literal historical account, again, is our view of what that means. We want it to be our literal historical account and how we see that. We want the affirmation of the text to fit into our framework of meaning. We get the same thing with the flood narrative. And to be fair, a lot of people do say that, of course it's an ancient historical account that we should read it in context, but sometimes, by that we mean that we'll read Gilgamesh and Atrahasis and we'll see those comparisons and we'll look at those things that these comparative things can teach us.
[00:06:13] But we still want it to be a real flood. Right? Right?? We don't really want reading in context, to not involve reading like a historical documentary sometimes. And again, that's something you can do with your interpretation if that's what you wanna do. I'm just pointing out the hermeneutic when you do that.
[00:06:39] Even when we loop in a canonical approach and we understand the Old Testament and the New Testament, we still can't presume that the New Testament is giving a more modern framework for understanding things because it is still set in an ancient world.
[00:06:56] Okay. Now I'm going to loop in that favorite thing of mine. Frame semantics. Again, if you're not familiar with that, you can go onto my website at genesis marks the spot.com. You can go find resources there about frame semantics. At this point I've had several episodes where I've gone into a lot of examples of frame semantics and things like that.
[00:07:21] What we have is an ancient frame of Genesis six and here we should be reading it as symbolic and covenantal. Symbolic doesn't mean non-literal or non-real, but symbolic means the figurative ideas and concepts that the ancient person would have in their heads. They're not thinking modern science, modern geology, modern biology.
[00:07:48] But symbolic can mean something like figurative or metaphorical. And I will say that ancient people were just as capable of thinking symbolically and metaphorically as we are. And it's not a bad thing to think that way.
[00:08:05] Once a symbol or a metaphor or a figurative idea is attached to something, that tends to propagate through time, right? Like for instance, we see Mount Hermon. Mount Hermon was and is a really tall mountain in the area. That means it's going to be a focus of symbolic metaphor. It is where people would think of as a prime example of the meeting of heaven and earth. Now we can argue and discuss on how literal that was, and was that really the spot that this happened in Genesis six and all of that.
[00:08:44] What matters the most, to be honest, is that people thought this was the symbol of that. And people treated it like that. We have cultic ruins on the mountain, even though we don't quite know what they're from exactly a lot of times, or who built them or what they were used for. But we do know that it was a sacred place. And some people today might call it a thin spot in reality maybe.
[00:09:11] But really, genre matters. And in the story of Genesis six, we don't have anyone at the time writing the story from their perspective. It's just a story that somebody's telling. That doesn't mean that it can't come from ancient records, of course, but it does mean that there is a particular genre here. There is a distinction between an experience that happened in the far past. And an experience that people are writing down right now or writing from people that you know who the author is, or some potential author, right?
[00:09:48] We don't have any potential authors in the book of Genesis. Nobody is said to be recording this account, and you could go to Second Temple literature and say, well, we have all of this information over here, but the book of Genesis itself tells us nothing about its authorship and who wrote it down. It doesn't tell us that it was a vision from Moses. It doesn't tell us that Noah wrote anything or anything like that. So this is clearly a particular genre.
[00:10:21] For those who still want to go to a literalist interpretation and say that this really did happen and it happened on this mountain, well, what does that mean for today? Does that mean we're not actually safe if we're around Mount Hermon? Does that mean that everybody who goes there to ski, that they're in danger?
[00:10:42] Let's presuppose for a moment that there are evil, modern rituals that currently happen there, as some people do suggest. Well, why would those things be taking place there? It's not because there's some like divining rod that has drawn people there in a mystical way. It's because they know the legends and the stories. I don't think we have to chalk it up to unique, magical juju that this place has, that other places don't. If evil things are happening there, evil things happen other places as well.
[00:11:21] My point here is that everyone throughout time today and in the past has used symbolism and memory, and it is that which we are attaching meaning to.
[00:11:36] Okay, so going back to this ancient frame of Genesis six, we're thinking in terms of ancient cosmology, right? The three-tiered universe we might say, where we have heaven, we have earth, we have the underworld. We have a context that is very male dominated in both cosmology and genealogy. In the story here in Genesis six, we have violence as a defining mark of spiritual corruption.
[00:12:07] And again, we're presupposing that these are supernatural beings who are interacting with humanity. This is, as I have argued many times, the most ancient view of the text, and thus the one we should be preferring. So in this ancient frame, the story of the Nephilim is not about genetics. It's about moral and cosmic catastrophe.
[00:12:34] We have the gibborim. And who are the gibborim? They are the mighty men of old.
[00:12:42] It's not just that they were tall, even though we have descriptions later on of them being giants. These mighty men were warriors who represent chaotic boundary breaking violence. They help to explain the escalating corruption that necessitates the flood.
[00:13:02] So this is the whole moral landscape that justifies the flood to begin with. So the Nephilim serve as cosmic symbols of spiritual rebellion rather than how we might see them in a modern frame as a hybrid race that involves spiritual and human DNA. The ancient frame of Genesis six is focused on chaos, corruption, divine justice.
[00:13:29] What we're talking about here in the chapter of Genesis six in particular, we're not talking about lineage. We're not talking about genetics. We're not thinking in terms of just normal operations, right?
[00:13:44] When we get to understand how ancient cultures understood conception and how that worked, I think you'll see why this story naturally ends up with mighty men and not mighty men, and also women. And I really don't think anyone in that world would expect a detailed gender breakdown of Nephilim offspring. I think they would have reasons for that.
[00:14:11] Now, our modern frame tends to be literalism and genetics. We default to scientific categories of biology, genetics, fertility, and our literalist assumptions say something like, if the story says this, then it must be describing real world events in a way that we can chart out or describe in a biological, scientific, or historical way.
[00:14:41] So then we might say that if Nephilim really existed, then surely of course there were female Nephilim because that's how biology works. I'm suggesting to you that this is a different modern frame to view the story from. Now, we might be taking our new interpretive lens and layering it onto the ancient one, but it should be admitted that this is a different frame.
[00:15:09] All right, let's go ahead and read the first four verses of Genesis six.
[00:15:14] From the ESV: quote, "When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive and they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, my spirit shall not abide in man forever. For he is flesh, his days shall be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward when the Sons of God came into the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old the men of renown." End quote.
[00:15:54] In this interpretation, we have Nephilim and mighty men and those are parallel. In the second Naked Bible Conference, Tim Mackie actually did a nice little breakdown of this verse and showed how it's a little bit of a chiasm. And that is actually what convinced Tim Mackie of Dr. Heiser's proposal about this chapter. You can actually see it in the Hebrew. So if the Nephilim are described as mighty men, well there's a reason for that.
[00:16:27] What we have here in these verses is some very masculine coded language. The Sons of God and the daughters of men. Don't forget that. Women are seen as daughters of men, not just women on their own, right? So the daughters of men seem to be passive recipients here. The offspring are described as Nephilim, gibborim, men of renown.
[00:16:56] So the story is presenting a gendered narrative on both ends. We have the divine Sons of God with human females who are daughters of men, and this results in male offspring, Nephilim, gibborim, the men of the name. This whole story is the explanation of why the pre-flood world spiraled into disorder.
[00:17:22] Let's go ahead and look at this term, gibborim, in the Hebrew. One of the uses is with David's mighty men. We see this in two Samuel 23 and one Chronicles 11. These are the elite warriors in David's army. They're celebrated for their valor, for slaying Philistines, and for protecting the king. Some of them are known for single-handedly killing hundreds in battle. So even righteous warriors can be described as gibborim, but it's clearly a term that's linked to violence and warfare here.
[00:18:00] Of course, we have Nimrod in Genesis 10. He is the first named gibbor. And so people think, oh, well that must mean he was a giant. But again, in the context of Genesis six where we don't have any description of height, remember that. I know that we're gonna go the giant route. We're gonna talk about height and all of that kinda thing, and there's reasons for that, right? That we have the Septuagint version of Genesis six, and it puts the word giant in.
[00:18:34] And when we are thinking of giant, we're thinking of height, aren't we? But keeping to the text of Genesis itself, we should be thinking about powerful mighty warriors. So Nimrod becomes the prototype here of a powerful ruler, possibly tyrannical. He builds major cities. We have connections with Babel, Nineveh. There's associations of empire and control. Jewish tradition links Nimrod to rebellion against God with the Tower of Babel incident.
[00:19:11] Okay, so clearly we have the context of warrior. So just from what we have in Genesis with the Nephilim and Nimrod, we have the idea of conquest here, right? and perhaps political power. You're really not getting an empire without military conquest, okay? That's just part and parcel of all of that.
[00:19:37] Now, gibborim shows up in other places in the Old Testament, we have it in military and apocalyptic contexts.
[00:19:46] You can go to Jeremiah 46, 5. This is in the context of the Egyptian army, their mighty men, the gibborim.
[00:19:55] We have it in Ezekiel 32, verse 27. We have fallen warriors in Sheol.
[00:20:02] In Joel three verse nine. Again, a military context.
[00:20:08] There's a lot of emphasis here on warfare, even downfall and eschatological judgment. The gibbor seems to be a warrior archetype.
[00:20:20] Proverbs 24 5 uses the word geber. In the ESV, proverbs 24 5 says, quote, "A wise man is full of strength and a man of knowledge enhances his might." End quote,
[00:20:36] You go on to verse six, and it says, quote, "For by wise guidance, you can wage your war. And in abundance of counselors, there is victory." End quote.
[00:20:48] This term is even applied to God In Isaiah nine verse six. And that is, of course, a prophecy for Jesus.
[00:20:58] Now, there's certainly an undercurrent of the idea of the giants here as well. The gibborim and the giants have a really strong connection, but that doesn't mean they're the same exact thing.
[00:21:12] And what we don't have in Genesis six is a description of really tall people. We have a description of mighty warriors. That is kind of the focus we should be thinking about here. Strong men who are going to achieve victory because they are so powerful.
[00:21:32] So really, what does the term gibborim signal to us in all of these contexts? There's primarily the idea of military strength and heroic status. We have great physical prowess, violence, possibly even leadership. And of course it could be morally ambiguous. Just because you're a gibbor doesn't mean that you are evil.
[00:21:58] But in Genesis six, obviously this is tied to the chaos and destruction before the flood.
[00:22:05] So no, we don't just go from gibborim to mean giant.
[00:22:10] It is even used in the book of Job. In Job 16 verse 14. The term is used for warrior or champion, like the picture is somebody is charging into battle.
[00:22:23] We have a related word used in Job three. This is geber. It's the same root as gibbor, but it's a different word form, and it does mean male human, and it emphasizes the masculinity. Perhaps not the warrior aspect here, but definitely the idea of a strong male.
[00:22:44] So, again, not to beat the point, but really we need to be attuning to the idea of strength here and power. Now that is easily seen or thought of when we think of a really tall man, right, or a tall warrior. They're gonna be a little bit scarier in battle because if you're not that tall, you have a disadvantage.
[00:23:07] Again, we have no female counterpart in Genesis six, nor do we have any female counterparts in any stories that are similar in the ancient world, at least until you get to Greek mythology. There you do get some female demigods, but they are not in the context of war. The female demigods are usually seductive, right? They're tied to sexuality in some way.
[00:23:35] The females that we have in Genesis six are the daughters of men. Now, they're going to play their part in here, and it's a really interesting part as we get going, but there's a very big difference between the Sons of God and the daughters of men and the Nephilim who were born from that union. I know a lot of people conflate those things, but they're not the same.
[00:24:00] Okay, so let's get into the context of ancient frames of gender and biology. This was a very different world to our day today. Women were defined by their roles, either daughter or wife or mother.
[00:24:19] Cultural power, on the other hand, was very male. Kingship, warfare, divine judgment. There are a few stories about female goddesses and war and power and things like that, but it's very rare. And when it shows up, it would be a little bit of a different context from a male deity and warfare.
[00:24:45] Women were socially defined by fertility. A lot of times they had modesty and loyalty attached to the idea of being a good female. Women were not supposed to be independent. They weren't usually supposed to be creative.
[00:25:02] And even in the Hebrew Bible, women are often named in relation to men. Genealogies almost universally trace male lines. And when women are named, it's often because their story directly intersects with God's covenantal plan, usually through childbirth. Now, that doesn't like dismantle a woman's power or say that women are necessarily powerless or that they couldn't do anything.
[00:25:33] I do think that the Hebrew Bible presents women in a different light than the majority of the ancient world. But it remains the case that women's roles and women's power are presented in different ways than men, almost universally. Now, there are some exceptions, of course, but the exceptions are really prominent because they are exceptions.
[00:25:59] The Bible presents women as being very essential and powerful in their own way, but they just don't have that centrality in public narratives of power and violence and chaos. And those are the domains where the Nephilim function. Now, that's not entirely the case. Women do have some chaotic power, and we'll talk about that. But again, it's not in the same framework as what we have with the Nephilim.
[00:26:29] The major center of power and idea of dominance is generally military and often associated with empire or kingship or tyranny, things like that, right? For ancient Near Eastern people, kings were the image bearers of the gods. Of course in the Bible we have that turned on its head. We have all of humanity as the image bearer of God, but outside of the Hebrew Bible, it was only the king, and that's why we have Egyptian Pharaohs the way they are. That's why Mesopotamian kings talk about themselves as they do. And even the religious cults in pagan worship really centered around kingship as well as the priesthood.
[00:27:18] Rulership was basically masculine, and there were almost no female rulers in Israel's narrative. Although, again, there are exceptions and some of those are not good exceptions.
[00:27:32] Okay, but where do women come in with power and dominance and kingship? Because it wasn't the king and his wife, the queen, who ruled together. Instead, rather than a king and a queen, we have a king and a queen mother. While women were usually not rulers, they could wield powerful influence through motherhood, especially as the mothers of kings.
[00:28:01] Even though kingship was symbolically tied to male strength and divine appointments and public power and the image of the deity. But we do have the concept of the queen mother. And this is quite a powerful image in the Hebrew Bible. And interestingly, what is the word that is associated with the queen mother?
[00:28:25] Again, she's not the wife of the king, she's the mother of the reigning king. Her role was to influence and not rule. She could advocate, advise, intervene, but she was not the one with the crown. And interestingly, the word that is associated with the queen mother? The word in Hebrew is geborah. It is the female version of gibbor. So this is how a woman would be a gibbor. Not by being a warrior or a ruler in her own right, but by being the mother of them.
[00:29:06] So even here in royal structures, a woman's power was most legitimized through motherhood, not kingship and sovereignty. And this fits the larger pattern that we see in Scripture as well as the ancient world in general. A woman's greatest cultural and theological significance was often as the conduit of legacy, especially as a mother of covenantal or royal sons.
[00:29:35] Generally, they are not chaos agents. Now, even if we have an evil queen mother, we might say that she is acting as a chaos agent, but she's not acting as a warrior or as an architect of the empire. She's acting as the bearer of the chosen line.
[00:29:56] So when I suggest there's no female Nephilim, I'm saying that there's no mighty women, but that's not exactly right. There were, but they were the daughters of men who were bearing the Nephilim. And remember, we should not conflate the Sons of God and the daughters of men with the Nephilim because they are different. They're separate, they're related, obviously, but they're different thematically.
[00:30:26] So why does this matter in the symbolism of the story? Well, the gibbor wields power through violence, war, or divine judgment, and that would fit even David's mighty men, right? The geborah wields influence through motherhood, dynasty, and covenantal lineage. So while you can have strong and exalted women, the way that their strength is expressed is simply very different. Men will go out and conquer and be violent, and women will conceive, give a birth and preserve the legacy of the conqueror.
[00:31:07] I don't think it's a coincidence that the Hebrew word for queen mother comes from the same root as gibbor because both of them are pictures of strength. The gibbor shows up on the battlefield and the geborah shows up in the throne room. Not to rule, but to bring forth and possibly influence the one who does.
[00:31:31] So basically I think what we can see here are two different paths of power, we might say. Two different ways of demonstrating strength. The way that a man will demonstrate strength is going to be different than the way that a woman does. I think this might actually be a little bit helpful to understand the ancient world in its context.
[00:31:53] Not that I'm trying to excuse the patriarchy of the time or the fact that women really were seen as lesser a lot of times, but in the Bible especially, we have powerful women. We have women who are presented as being just as much influence of what's going on as men, but they're just doing it in a different way. And both of them are very important, and both of them are centered on kingship and sovereignty and rulership and all of these ideas, right? You don't have an empire in the ancient world without military might, but you also don't have it last through time without some dynastic authority and maternal influence.
[00:32:41] And I would further suggest that there's a really strong emphasis on what we have going on with the corruption here, right? Because if the daughters of men are connected to the dynastic line, we might say, and the perpetuation of covenant, even though we don't quite have the idea of covenant here, there's still kind of those ideas percolating in the background, right? The idea of being in alignment or not.
[00:33:09] The boundary crossing happened because the daughters of men were corrupted and they bore illegitimate children. That leads to judgment and it leads to a corruption of the line. Now this is about bloodlines and biology only in the sense of the ancient world, not our modern one. This is not about corrupting DNA, it's about corrupting descendants. That's a different thing really. Once you corrupt the maternal line, then you no longer have offspring who are going to be in line with God and covenant and the right thing, right?
[00:33:50] When we have strength and military power and violence that is not channeled correctly, then it leads to destructive judgment. If the daughters of men were able to have good unions and produce strong sons in a better positive way, then presumably they could have influenced things and there would be less violence, but the fact that the line was corrupted, again, not because of DNA, but because of boundary crossing and creating warriors who were only about violence and depravity. That's where we get the judgment of the flood.
[00:34:32] We might wanna still say that there is a corruption of the line of the Messiah not in the sense of DNA and the Messiah is no longer gonna be human, but rather the line of the Messiah must come through covenant . If judgment is happening, then things are going askew. Right?
[00:34:52] Okay, so I hope you can kind of see where I'm coming from here. We actually have the theme of the queen mother, who is either corrupt or not corrupt in the Hebrew Bible. Corrupt queen mothers are going to lead the people into idolatry. They're gonna be condemned for false worship.
[00:35:12] The closest thing that we have to a female Nephilim would be a corrupt queen mother. And the queen mother is not going to be tracking in the same patterns of the Nephilim. She's going to be tracking in the patterns of the corrupted daughters of men. Okay, so you see there's a distinctive difference there.
[00:35:33] And perhaps the biggest example we have here is in Two Kings, chapter 11. This is the story of Queen Athaliah, the mother of Ahaziah. Two Kings 11 tells us that her son dies. She rises up and destroys the royal family. She kills her own grandchildren. She seizes the throne herself, and she rules for six years until she's finally overthrown by a priestly rebellion that restores the Davidic line.
[00:36:03] So this is an image of a queen mother gone full chaos agent. She blends royal legitimacy with a bloodlust and apostasy both.
[00:36:15] So my point here is if the gibborim or the Nephilim of Genesis six were men of rebellion and a power grabbing, Athaliah is the female mirror of that. She doesn't uphold the covenant and she tries to annihilate it. But she is the image of the daughter of men rather than a female Nephilim.
[00:36:39] Now of course you might think that I'm just splitting hairs here, but remember our question. We're asking if there's female Nephilim and if the closest female match to a gibbor from Genesis six is a queen mother, well that is more in line with the pattern of the daughters of men rather than the Nephilim.
[00:37:01] There are some other examples, but I will just encourage you to go yourself into Scripture and look at this theme of the queen mother. I think that is something that a lot of Protestants especially have not looked very carefully at.
[00:37:16] All right, I actually don't want to end this episode without talking about ancient theories of conception because this is really interesting. There is a lot of information I can give you, but I'm just going to hit on a few highlights.
[00:37:31] Now, here's the point I want to make with this. We tend to see reproduction as this biological process, right? As of course, it really is. When we think of boys and girls being conceived and born, we have very definitive ideas about how that happens. It's a biological process that generally we don't control, but this is not how the ancient world thought of it. They had explanations as to why you had either a boy or a girl too. Those explanations seem very strange to us, to say the least.
[00:38:12] In fact, you might have heard that it is really strange that Genesis talks about the seed of the woman, because generally in the ancient world, women were not seen to even have seed. That was something that men had. Now, that's not across the board. We have a lot of variance and a lot of different ideas of conception in how these things worked for people. But the Hebrew Bible generally seems to suggest this idea that was very prevalent in the ancient world, that the male carried the seed and he was just depositing it in the female. The female acted as the fertile field that accepted the seed and so nourished it to life, but she wasn't contributing to the seed herself.
[00:39:03] Now, here's a really interesting idea that they had: the rite of circumcision. A lot of people wonder why that's such a big deal and why it is a sign of the covenant with Abraham. Well, the ancient person saw circumcision as connected to human fertility itself in the same way as agriculture. Just as trees are pruned to produce fruit, so circumcision would increase fertility.
[00:39:35] That's interesting, isn't it? There was an ancient analogy between the uncircumcised male organ and immature fruit trees. And so to circumcise a male would be to ready the stem for producing fruit. They even described the foreskin as a type of first fruits or it's a fruitful cut.
[00:39:59] So there's this argument that circumcision for Abraham acted as a sign to remind God of the covenantal promise of fruitfulness, and also to influence God's decision to enact the promise.
[00:40:14] There's also a suggestion that circumcision differentiated the male child from the female birth giver and connected the male child to the male community and the male deity through the right of covenant.
[00:40:30] The connection with circumcision, infertility also associates all of that with male virility. We actually don't see male infertility talked directly about in the Hebrew Bible. There are some places it might be implied though, where we have the idea of the leverite marriage where the husband was unable to give the wife a child, and so she was given to a close relative to provide children for him.
[00:40:58] There also seems to be a connection to fertility and old age. And that kind of relates also to this idea of seed, right? Like you think of a fruit tree. A fruit tree in the first few years is not really good for producing fruit yet. Then it will be very fertile and productive and eventually it will be too old to produce fruit. That would generally be how they would understand fertility for men.
[00:41:25] Some scholars have actually suggested that Sarah laughs about having children, not just because of her age, but because of Abraham's age. Like, oh, that's funny. Not only can I not produce children, but neither can Abraham.
[00:41:43] Now for a lot of ancient people, once the seed leaves the man's body, then things are kind of in the realm of the goddesses who kind of oversee the women. But in the Hebrew Bible, of course, we have Yahweh who's described as a male, and he's the one who controls gestation. The father is still the one providing the seed as we see in Genesis 38, Leviticus 15, and some other places as well. But God forms the child in the womb. That's what we see in Job 10. Psalm 1 39, Jeremiah one, and other places.
[00:42:23] Now that seems very different and it was, but there's definitely a lot of symbolism for men aligned with God and women being symbolically aligned with what God creates, namely the Earth.
[00:42:39] Okay, So in the ancient world, generally we're thinking in terms of them wanting to perpetuate the male line, right? So a son would be more valued than a daughter. But we do have to keep in mind that this isn't just a blanket statement that applied through all time. There were times, and there are texts and descriptions where daughters are wished for at different times in different cultures. But it's unquestionably and sadly the case that abortion and exposure of an infant to the elements of whatever that's going to get them out there without care. That happened far more often to daughters than it did to sons.
[00:43:25] So because of that, there was a great interest in trying to produce either a boy or a girl, depending on what you wanted. Usually you'd want a boy, of course. Aristotle said that males contribute the form and females would contribute the matter. In other words, it would be the man who would determine whether it was a boy or a girl, and the sex of the child would be determined by the heat and the strength of the seed.
[00:43:55] So if a man is contributing weak seed, it would end up as a daughter. If a man was contributing strong seed, it would end up as a male child. Now of course this is Aristotle and we can't know for a fact that the author of Genesis was thinking in the exact same terms as Aristotle.
[00:44:17] But let's suppose that the author of Genesis did think something like that. When you have Sons of God providing seed, do you think that they're going to provide weak seed? I don't think so, right? They're gonna be able to always have male children, at least if we're thinking in terms of the way that Aristotle put it. And Aristotle was not the only one who said this.
[00:44:43] Now, Hippocrates is the first one that we know of who talks about a dual seed theory where both the mother and the father contribute seed. But again, the idea there is that the stronger seed is going to determine the sex of the child. So even when we go into the idea of men and women both contributing, there's still this idea of the strength of the seed. And so the daughters of men and the Sons of God would be very unequal in their contribution of seed.
[00:45:18] Now, of course, all of that is Greek thought, but that was very influential for Jewish thought as well. We have writing from Philo who draws upon Greek thought to explain the role of male form and female matter. If we go back into the ancient Near East, we have birth incantations.
[00:45:39] So we have the idea that the gods are going to determine the sex of the child. Now, who are the Sons of God? Well, they have the status of the gods, do they not? So the Sons of God in this circumstance would be able to determine the sex of their children. They wouldn't have daughters if they didn't want daughters.
[00:46:03] And I know that we are kind of importing the later conquest narratives into the story of Genesis six. I know we tend to do that, and you might have some reason to do that. But keep in mind what's going on here. The situation in Genesis six is not seen as one where we're forming tribes. The idea is increasing violence.
[00:46:29] Alright, there is a whole lot more I could go into about ancient ideas of conception. If you guys are interested in that, there is a whole lot of material online. You can go and chase that rabbit all you want, but I trust you can understand how I'm getting at my conclusion here. Female Nephilim or giantess would be an irrelevant disruption to the narrative.
[00:46:56] The story is presenting violent men not balanced reproductive charts. If males were seen as contributing the active seed in conception and females were the passive vessel, then again, there's no reason for us to import our biology into the story. What we have here in Genesis six is a story of destruction, violence, military conquest. The earth was filled with violence.
[00:47:26] Now, again, we do have female chaos agents that come later in the text, but they are in the pattern of the daughters of men rather than female Nephilim. So what we can see here is that women are a turning point of dynastic and cosmic disruption. This also echoes the later fear in Deuteronomy and Ezra Nehemiah of foreign wives leading Israel astray. It's a theological concern that is rooted in motherhood, so we can still see the daughters of men playing their part here.
[00:48:05] They're kind of liminal figures in and of themselves because they stand at the intersection of divine and human order and chaos, covenant and rebellion. And we see queen mothers occupy the same liminal space between generations, between influence and authority, between preserving lineage and disrupting it.
[00:48:32] So then it becomes a really interesting question. If the Sons of God crossed boundaries to take human wives, then who are the women in the story's symbolic world? Are they victims of rebellion or are they the mirror of the queen mother as gateways to a legacy that is corrupt and not in covenant?
[00:48:56] Again, I'm not trying to shove the idea of covenant in here necessarily as this formal thing, But remember that covenant is associated very strongly with lineage bloodlines in an ancient world, not a modern one, right? Like bloodlines for them was about tribal inclusion and being accepted into the group rather than excluded and exiled out of the group or out of the land we might say.
[00:49:27] So it seems to me that the daughters of men are queen mothers of a different kind. They're not the ones who are preserving the Davidic line or the messianic line even, but they're ones who give birth to the line of ruin. So in that sense, they carry a sense of power and strength, but it's more borrowed and reactive than the active role of the Nephilim and violence in the land.
[00:49:55] So let's bring that all back into the ancient frame and the modern frame and Walton's ideas of referen Again, people are going to go to town to put on scientific frames into the story. They're gonna do that all the time, but we really ought to be careful not to replace the ancient frame with our modern one. And so I think that Walton's idea of referent and affirmation can be really helpful here.
[00:50:25] It really highlights the idea of divine judgment, disorder, and we have the theme that really amps up here of military power and destruction and how that comes as a result of crossing the boundaries of covenant by taking improper wives, right? This whole story fits together like that.
[00:50:50] If we're just looking at the DNA patterns, we're not seeing the covenantal line and things like that. I mean, I would go so far as to say that we're not seeing what's actually important in the text, and that is what the value of the affirmation of the text comes from. What is it actually teaching us? If it's not teaching us about DNA and biological bloodlines, then that is probably not what we should be taking away here.
[00:51:21] I think we can firmly say that Genesis six affirms the reality of divine rebellion, but also the weight of human corruption, right? Like saying that the Sons of God were spiritual beings, does not in any way remove the culpability of humans. We have judgment from God that arises from all of that. The mighty men are the ones who are breaking creation and requiring the cleansing of the flood.
[00:51:52] Now, we can certainly ask about female Nephilim, but we're asking that from a different world, from entirely different categories. The ancient world just wasn't thinking in terms of that.
[00:52:07] All right. I think you get my point. I don't think the absence of female Nephilim in the text is a flaw or an oversight or that we could just argue it from silence because we have a whole lot of information about how the ancient world thought about the point of the text and the point of these figures in the text. The lack of female Nephilim is actually part of the story.
[00:52:35] Now, of course, we are absolutely still allowed to ask modern questions of an ancient text. And I'm trying to get to the point where we can really use biblical theology and the understanding of the ancient world and move it into our world. We need to be able to do that. What we shouldn't do is just ignore that ancient context, though.
[00:52:59] What it gives us are the literary echoes, the second temple expansions, these amazing deep dives into ancient science. And when we do that, we see that their world is so very different from ours.
[00:53:16] And again, I just think that Walton's ideas of referent and affirmation can be very helpful in our search for that. We can still use words like bloodlines. It just doesn't carry the same meaning in the ancient world as it does today.
[00:53:32] We need to let the ancient frame speak, even if that's disturbing and unsettling and frankly, very weird to us. Our modern questions may not get answered in the ways that we want, and we have to kind of be okay with that. The flood didn't come because genetics got weird. It came because the world got violent.
[00:53:58] Alright, I will end here for now. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Actually, it was only going to be a blog post until I started researching it and realized just how much there was, and I said, well, guess we're doing a whole episode about this instead of just a measly little blog post.
[00:54:18] I'll still probably write the blog post though. You can go onto my website at genesis marks the spot.com, where I do have a section for my blog there. And unfortunately it's not like another kind of blog where you can sign up for it and get like daily updates when I post there. But what you can do is you can sign up for my newsletter. So on my homepage or most every page, you'll see a little part there that gives you the option to put your name and your email address in.
[00:54:52] You can sign up there, and I do send out a weekly newsletter, and I include links to my blog posts there. So that's one way you can keep track of all of that if you're not on Facebook and things like that. Also the last few weeks I've been talking about my biblical theology community that I've just started, and I would really love to have you join me there.
[00:55:16] We are trying to take biblical theology and understanding all of these crazy things about the Bible and we're trying to get into practical application, whatever that means for us. And I'm hoping to create a community that is free of the normal Facebook distractions of things like ads and all of the things that go on with Facebook.
[00:55:40] So come on into my community. I'm just starting a new monthly theme that I hope everybody will be enjoying. If you've ever wondered how I read as much as I do and get through all of the content that I do to produce the stuff that I do, this month's theme should actually help you out with that.
[00:55:59] So come and check that out, if you want. You can find
[email protected], but you have to hyphenate between all of the words. So it's on this rock with hyphens between the words.com.
[00:56:16] Come sign up and say, hi. I'd love to see you there. Let me know what you guys think of this episode. Let me know if I didn't convince you that there are no female Nephilim.
[00:56:28] I know I really didn't get into the giant clans and how are you supposed to have giant clans without females? Well, the easy answer there is as much as those can be connected to the Nephilim before the flood, they don't have to be connected genetically. And again, the ancient world simply didn't have the same kind of idea about conception that we do.
[00:56:52] Even in the conquest narratives, it's the soldiers and the military force that they are afraid of and that they are describing as giants, even though they are going to have females in their giant clans. And of course the women and children are not spared in the conquest, but the women have a different threat from the men. The threat from the women is that they are going to marry into the Israelite tribes. And they're going to corrupt them in that way. Again, we have two different modes of corruption and two different problems there. I think it matches what I'm talking about directly.
[00:57:33] You know what? I was going to leave it at that, but I guess it's a little bit cruel to leave you hanging like that when it comes to the Nephilim and their association with the giant clans and the conquest. Here's an interesting point. The term gibbor is not used for the giant clans.
[00:57:52] Now, of course, Genesis is probably a different author, and maybe we shouldn't read too much into that, but you know, if you're familiar with all of this Nephilim mythology in the Old Testament, we have the Rephaim. They're associated with height, legendary status, and also dead warriors. We have Og, the last of the Rephaim, of course, he has that massive bed, and we could talk about what that means.
[00:58:18] But neither the Rephaim nor Og are called a gibbor. We have Nimrod, we have David's warriors, we have God and we have some other people and perhaps spiritual beings even that are called gibbor. But I think part of the point I'm trying to make here is that the Nephilim of the flood really are distinct from post flood giant clans. They're related. They're connected in the text, but they're different things. And in the book of first Enoch, if we're thinking about the origins of demons and all of that kind of thing, the only giants we have associated with that creation of demons are the Nephilim who died in the flood.
[00:59:02] If you wanna go on and say that the giant clans of the Old Testament are another source for demons, you're basically doing that from silence. We don't have any description of that actually being the case. So the question of is Goliath now a demon? Nothing tells us that he would be.
[00:59:24] We have the term Nephilim in Genesis six. We also have it in Numbers 13. This story in Numbers 13 is about the entry into the land and the spies go into the land to check everything out. They come back with this bad report. The bad report is that there's really scary people and they are the sons of Anak. They come from the Nephilim. Are they trying to tell everybody that there is a genetic link here?
[00:59:55] Remember what we have in the story of the Nephilim and the flood is that there is violence. They are warriors. They're really scary, okay? You don't wanna meet these guys on the battlefield. That's what the spies are saying. It's not really about their height, it's about the fact that these guys are going to take us down in military battle.
[01:00:21] That's what we're worried about. Numbers 13 is an Israelite perception through the mythic lens of Genesis six. That doesn't take away from the supernatural view of Genesis six, okay. In fact, I think it actually adds a little bit to it, and it protects the integrity of the supernatural reading because there's a reason that they are calling back to that. They're projecting these ancient fears onto what they're seeing right there in front of them.
[01:00:50] And I would go on to say that they are thematically connecting all of what's going on in the land with the two dangers that I've laid out in this episode. Both the warriors as well as women who will corrupt the people to violence and false worship. Those are the problems.
[01:01:10] Those are the reasons they get exiled by the way. Eventually they're kicked outta the land because of those things precisely.
[01:01:19] So we don't have the word Nephilim a whole lot of times in Scripture. We do have quite a few references to the Anakin, the Rephaim, et cetera. So in the Old Testament, we suddenly get a switch over. Instead of the Nephilim from Genesis six and prehistory, they're calling back to the conquest narratives as the thing that they're really projecting all of their fears onto, right?
[01:01:49] Like they're connecting these stories in theological ways to their time periods. That's what's going on. I realize that that's less exciting than saying that there are monsters and giants, okay. I get it. I know that it's not so interesting that way, but we have to keep in mind that the whole picture here. It's not just height and it's not genetics. It's violence, it's false worship, it's evil, and all of those things are connected in one picture.
[01:02:23] The scare tactics are not about corrupting genes. They wouldn't have even known what those are. That doesn't mean there's not a threat here though.
[01:02:32] Like if we can think about this in terms of chronological salvation history that happens, right? The people are entering the land . And they encounter these really scary guys. We don't wanna have to fight these guys. So how are we going to describe them? What is the scariest thing that we know about in our history that we can compare these guys too?
[01:02:56] And it really thematically maps exactly with the violence, the military conquest, the destruction, the danger of judgment that's going to happen if you go down those paths, right? And it means that both the men as well as the women, are going to be a danger to you, but they're gonna pose different dangers.
[01:03:20] It's not the same thing. Right. It's not that you're gonna be scared of the giantesses of the land who are really evil. The problem with the women is that they are going to bring you into false worship of their gods. And when false worship happens, then what you end up with is a violent people because you're not in relationship with the loving God. You're in relationship to other deities who are violent and who will only want to get their way through power hungry means.
[01:03:52] I think this is a very powerful image of the contrast between what Yahweh can give you and what false worship can give you.
[01:04:00] So I don't think that's lessening the story in any way. It's certainly not lessening the threat. And again, I understand that it's a little more comfortable actually to think about monsters and cryptids and giants and magical things and all of these kinds of ideas versus thinking about real world military threats and violence. But that's really what we have, and it's that real world threat that genuinely we have to face all the time here in the world.
[01:04:34] At any rate, there you go. There's my bonus material for this episode. If you guys have any questions about it, you can come over to on this rock.com. Remember hyphenating those words, and you can come and ask me questions. I actually wanna start doing a little bit of live streaming over there in the community, and if you give me a question, I might answer it live.
[01:04:58] But at any rate, I will wrap it up and I will wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.
