Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Find the answers to all those questions you were too embarrassed to ask in Sunday School. Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. Hosted by Luke Taylor.
The Origin of Demons: Spirits of the Nephilim?
Introduction
When I was in the book of Enoch a couple episodes ago, something caught my attention. I was reading something from the book of Enoch’s chapter 15. I didn’t read the entire chapter on that episode, but I did read through it as I was doing my research, and there was a very interesting passage there about the spirits of the Nephilim.
Enoch chapter 15 basically makes the claim that when a Nephilim dies, its spirit roams the earth, afflicts humans, and will do so until the world ends.
In other words, the spirits of the Nephilim are demons.
The Book of Enoch makes a distinction between fallen angels and demons, saying that the fallen angels are these beings who God originally created, but that the demons were essentially created when those fallen angels mated with human women, as told in Genesis 6.
That goes against what I’ve heard all my life in church, which is that demons and fallen angels are the exact same thing. That the 1/3 of the angels who rebelled against God are the demons we frequently read about in the New Testament. The Book of Enoch has a different perspective on these evil spirits.
But this is not a podcast about Weird Stuff in the Book of Enoch. This is a podcast about Weird Stuff in the Bible. I do not use the Book of Enoch to replace my biblical understanding, but I do wonder whether this idea about the origin of demons is congruent with what Scripture actually teaches.
Because as we’ll see, scripture doesn’t outright state that demons and fallen angels are the exact same thing.
I find this to be weird, and I’d like to explore IF it’s in the Bible.
Turn to Isaiah 26, and let’s get weird.
[theme music]
Enoch 15
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be talking about whether demons and fallen angels are synonyms or if they are distinct categories.
And we’ll come to Isaiah in few minutes, but first let me share the passage from the Book of Enoch that started this all for me.
Enoch 15 has a message for the Watchers, AKA the Sons of God, who had mated with human women and produced these offspring called the Nephilim. God is telling these Watchers that they should have kept their place up in the heavens instead of descending to the earth because they could have been immortal and experienced eternal life. But now they will die like men, which in this case, does not mean non-existence, but means they will be consigned to hell.
And then verse 8 of Enoch 15 says this (again, this is said to be words from God Himself): And now, the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling.
Verse 9 continues: Evil spirits have proceeded from their bodies; because they are born from men, and from the holy Watchers is their beginning and primal origin; they shall be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits shall they be called.
And then I’ll skip down to verse 12 of that chapter and I just want to read that: And these spirits shall rise up against the children of men and against the women, because they have proceeded from them.
So according to the book of Enoch, chapter 15, when the Watchers or Sons of God created offspring with human women, these children were giants. And it says that their spirits will be evil. That these evil spirits will proceed from the bodies of the giants and roam the earth, afflicting humanity.
Now, these evil spirits sound a whole lot like the demons of the New Testament, don’t they? Throughout the New Testament, we see Jesus frequently casting demons out of people. The people who are possessed or oppressed by demons are often mentally unstable. They cut themselves. They behave erratically and self-destructively, attacking people or throwing themselves into fire. They curse God. They seem schizophrenic or bipolar or having split personality. They have mental and physical problems. Sometimes God heals someone from a sickness or physical malady and then says an evil spirit was causing it. I was just reading this week and there was a woman who couldn’t stand up straight for a number of years and Jesus said Satan had bound her. Jesus’ main ministry was deliverance, and when I say deliverance, I mean that it was almost always from demonic spirits.
Now, just because someone has back problems, does that mean we should assume they need a demon cast away from them? No. But if we’re going to take the Bible seriously, then we should be willing to consider whether there could be a spiritual reason behind someone’s physical or mental problems. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are possessed and that they literally have a demon inside them, but they could be oppressed by a demon. There is a difference in demonic possession and demonic oppression, but both situations need deliverance.
Now let me read a verse from Enoch 15 again: And these spirits shall rise up against the children of men and against the women, because they have proceeded from them.
Now, doesn’t that sound like what we see with evil spirits in the New Testament, which the New Testament calls demons, unclean spirits or evil spirits? So if we pair our New Testament with a Book of Enoch understanding, these spirits were not the fallen angels who were part of the 1/3 of angels that rebelled against God. These spirits are the spirits of the Nephilim and were created in Genesis 6, as well as from the Nephilim who came along after the flood.
If you’re not on board with the spiritual view of the Sons of God and Nephilim in Genesis 6, then you probably haven’t listened this far into this episode. But if you’d like more info on the creation of the Nephilim both before and after the flood, I’d recommend that you scroll back to last December on this podcast and look at episodes 5 through 8. I explain it all in those episodes.
Is this Biblical?
So now let’s talk about whether this idea of the demons being the spirits of the Nephilim is supported or rejected by the text of the Bible. So my first question would be: do we have any verses that suggest or claim that Demons and Fallen Angels are the same thing?
Well, if I grabbed the majority of theology books off my shelf right now that speak about this, I am certain that most of them would say, yes, absolutely, demons are just the angels who rebelled against God with Satan. Or if you go to GotQuestions.org- usually a pretty solid, dependable site for answers about Christian theology- it will even say this: “There is no doubt these fallen angels are now known as the demons.”
But do we have a verse that states this supposed fact? And the answer is “no.” We have verses that speak of demons or evil spirits. We have verses that speak of angelic beings who rebelled against God. But we don’t have any verses that say all of these beings are the exact same beings.
If I am wrong, feel free to email it to me or leave a comment if you’re on a platform that takes comments. My email is in the show notes on every episode. So feel free to send me one if you have a verse that suggests that they’re the same beings. I’d be glad to accept that.
But do we have anywhere in the Bible that suggests that the spirits of the Nephilim are what become demons? Well, not directly like we did in Enoch, but we have some consistency with the idea in
Isaiah 26:13-14
O Lord our God,
other lords besides you have ruled over us,
but your name alone we bring to remembrance.
They are dead, they will not live;
they are shades, they will not arise;
to that end you have visited them with destruction
and wiped out all remembrance of them.
I want to especially focus on those words: “they are shades, they will not arise.” In this passage, it’s making a distinction in God’s enemies versus God’s friends. Especially if you look at verse 19 of that chapter, it makes the point that God’s friends go up, but God’s enemies do not. So it compares them in verse 14 there to evil spirits, in verse 14: “they are shades, they will not arise.”
That word for “shades” right there is “rapha.” If that word sounds familiar- well, there’s one place you’ve heard it before lately: in the Gaza Strip right now, where Israel is fighting the Hamas terrorists, which was demonic territory back in biblical times, and right now today the last major city where these terrorists have holed up is called Rafah. I find that kind of interesting. Hamas is also a biblical word, which means violence, as in, God destroyed the world in Genesis 6 because the heart of men was filled with Hamas, or violence.
So it's kinda intriguing to me that we have Hamas retreating back to Gaza’s capitol city, which they named Rafah, and that’s the same word in the Old Testament to describe giants after the flood. They are the descendants of Rapha.
They were originally the Nephilim in Numbers 13, and then they went to a city called Gath, and they were the Gathites, and then in II Samuel 21 you learn that the giants in Gath were descended from someone named Rapha, so they were the Rephaim. And I trace all of this in episode 8 of this podcast, called Nephilim After the Flood.
So the Rephaim is a name for giants by the time of the book of Isaiah. And Isaiah makes the comment that the spirits of the Rephaim will not rise. That’s what this phrase “they are shades, they will not rise.” He doesn’t go into a demonology lesson there, he just makes it as an offhand comment, as if this was just common knowledge. And why would he do that? Because for the ancient Jews, this was common knowledge. This was their worldview.
“They are rapha, they are shades, they will not arise.” Well that sounds a whole lot like what the Book of Enoch said: “And now, the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling. Evil spirits have proceeded from their bodies; because they are born from men, and from the holy Watchers is their beginning and primal origin; they shall be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits shall they be called.”
So if the spirits of the Rapha are constrained to the earth, that would NOT be characteristic with what we learn about the sons of God and the fallen angels throughout the rest of the Bible. For example, Satan and the other fallen angels are able to meet with and converse with God, as we see in Job 1-2. Evil spirits are invited to a seat at the table of God’s divine council meetings, as we see in I Kings 22. Some will say, “but don’t Jude and II Peter speak of the evil angels being chained away in hell?” But that refers specifically to the sons of God who had sexual relations with women in Genesis 6. It does not refer to demons or fallen angels in general.
If we go one verse further in Enoch, to chapter 16:1, it says this, and this is a long sentence: “From the days of the slaughter and destruction and death of the giants, from the souls of whose flesh the spirits, having gone forth, shall destroy without incurring judgment- thus shall they destroy until the day of the consummation, the great judgment in which the age shall be consummated, over the Watchers and the godless, yeah, shall be wholly consummated.”
So what is that saying? It says that when the giants die, their souls will go forth evil spirits, and these spirits will be a destructive force on the earth from then until Judgment Day.
So this is in contrast to what Enoch said earlier about the Sons of God who are locked away for creating those evil spirits. The rebellious sons of God who did that are locked away in hell. The spirits of the Nephilim are what we have to fight here on earth.
And this was the worldview of the ancient Israelites. This was present in the book of Jubilees, chapter 10, which I have not read. I’m just sharing a citation. Also the Testament of Solomon, chapter 5. The Dead Sea Scrolls state this. The Dead Sea Scrolls refers to spirits of the Nephilim as “spirits of impurity.” Sounds like the New Testament’s term that it oftentimes uses for demons: “unclean spirits.”
So we see this idea very commonly in ancient Jewish or Israelite thought. This was their worldview. We just don’t see it explicitly stated within the Bible itself.
The Bible doesn’t contradict it either. It just doesn’t outright state it.
Closing Thoughts
So I want to say two things about this view as I close down today.
1, This doesn’t affect any major doctrine. If you view the demons as the same thing as fallen angels, that’s fine. If you view the fallen angels as a different classification of spirit being from demons, it’s fine. It really doesn’t change anything about our practice of faith as Christians. As flesh and blood humans, this is more academic than practical when it comes to your daily life.
2, I just want to wonder out loud about something. Just a question I have. Demons have been around all throughout history, at least since the days of the flood until today. Mankind has been putting up with demons. And yet we don’t really see them in the Bible until you get to the New Testament. So I guess my question is, what’s up with that? You get to the New Testament and suddenly you have demons and possessed people on just about every page of the Gospels and Acts. And it appears to be an everyday occurrence that there are people in society that are possessed or afflicted by demons. So, if that’s the case, why was it not really mentioned until you get to the New Testament? I’ve just always kind of wondered about that.
If you have any thoughts, send them to my email: weirdstuffinthebible@gmail.com
Next time here on the podcast, I want to step away from the Book of Enoch stuff for a while and talk about some random topics for a few episodes. So I don’t know exactly where I’ll be next week but I’ve got a long list on my computer. Every time I come across something weird in the Bible the past few months, I say, ‘that would make a great podcast episode,’ and I stick it on my list to talk about someday. So I’d say it’s finally time for me to get back to that list.
But someday, I will come back to look at more in the Book of Enoch and hopefully learn more about where it intersects with the Bible. As Jesus said, His return will look like it was in the Days of Noah. Probably in a few months I’m going to have an episode called “The Days of Noah According to the Book of Enoch.”
A mailbag comment or two I want to share real quick: P Hicks said about a recent episode on whether Jesus quoted from Enoch: Weren't the Sagisees and Pharisees Jews? I don't see why they wouldn't have beleived in life after death. And I'm not saying you're wrong or calling you a Liar It simply just doesn't sit right with me
So yes, they were all Jews, but the Sadducees in particular basically created a false religion. They basically believed that God was real and that He created the world, but they didn't believe in angels or an afterlife or miracles or anything else supernatural. But they were absolutely Jews. What’s really interesting about the Sadducees is that they were Levites. They should have been the most spiritual of all the Jews, but instead they had become the least spiritual.
Shoutout to two superfans: my wife and Tim at my church. I decree you both to be official weirdos. And anybody out there who has listen to all 25 episodes of this podcast: by decree you are weirdos as well.
Now, let me go back to why we don’t see a lot of demons or demon-possessed people in the Old Testament. I do have a theory on that. Perhaps two. One, maybe there just wasn’t anything that could be done for someone who was demon-possessed in the Old Testament, so that’s why we don’t see the Bible addressing it. Perhaps it was because Jesus and His power was necessary to cast out demons, so the Bible just didn’t even get into that subject until the New Testament time. That’s one idea.
Another is that if you think about it, the land of Israel was God’s territory for most of the Old Testament, right up until the end of it. At the end of the Old Testament chronologically, the land of Israel gets conquered and overrun but its enemies. Perhaps up until then, demons weren’t much of a problem in Israel because God had supernaturally protected His territory from them, so that’s why you don’t see them until you get to the New Testament and they had lost control of their land and now it’s been infiltrated with all kinds of evil spirits. I am not sure. These are just theories.
What I am sure about, though, is that for ancient Jewish people at the time of the New Testament, their demonology was based on this idea that demons were not the same as fallen angels. Demons were the spirits of the Nephilim that died in the flood and also the Rephaim that died after the flood. So I think I’m going to go with that for myself as well. Unless someone can correct me or give me a good reason to think otherwise.
We see this in the Book of Enoch, and alluded to indirectly in the Bible, and also in many many ancient Jewish books. It was the prevailing thought at that time.
The Bible doesn’t tackle that idea directly. But it does agree that we humans are going to have to put up with them until judgment day comes.
The New Testament gives us some hope though: in the name of Jesus, we can be victorious over the devil, the fallen angels, and any of those evil spirits.
The Bible doesn’t answer every last question we have about how things work in the spiritual realm, but it tells us what we need to know to win spiritual battles. There is no need to be afraid. Pray- and rely on Jesus.
So if you think that fighting demons and doing spiritual warfare sounds weird, I hope you’re a little more weird today, too. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time.