Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and with me is my co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, in Lafayette, Louisiana. Normally, our shows are live and we take phone calls, but this episode is pre-recorded. So, despite what you’ll hear from The Voice of Steve in the voice-overs in this one, if you try to call you won’t get anywhere. That said, we will be incorporating messages and emails that you sent us in anticipation of this episode—and, wow! there were a lot!

Tonight we’re talking about giants, also known as the nephilim. This may be among the most-anticipated episodes of this podcast. So what is it about giants? We probably all remember the story of David and Goliath from Sunday school, but after you grow up are you supposed to take that seriously? And if you read deeper in the Bible, you start to see that Goliath is not the only giant in the Bible. And, what’s more, the existence of giants is a practical problem for people in the Bible, such as in Numbers 30, where the Israelite spies who go into the land of Canaan see giants there, and they feel like they are grasshoppers by comparison, so they don’t want to go in and fight them. And if you read the Bible even more deeply, you discover that the biblical origin of giants is truly, truly bizarre. Can modern people believe in giants? Can modern Christians believe in giants? Could there still be giants around today? Buckle up, because this is the giants episode.

Parents, please note, there are some very adult themes in this episode, and while we won’t be graphic, you will want to listen to this one before you decide whether you share it with your kids.

We’re going to start our discussion with the origin of giants, in Genesis 6, since that’s the earliest reference in the Bible. So here we go. Are you ready, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen De Young: I am prepared!

Fr. Andrew: That’s right. You were born ready! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I could pretty much talk about giants at a moment’s notice. And then people get excited when I talk about giants.

Fr. Andrew: There it is. That’s the catch-phrase! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: A fun time is had by all.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed! Well, so let’s start with that most enigmatic passage from Genesis 6. It starts with verse one. I’m going to read this one for us.

When man began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive, and they took to themselves 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 in to the daughters of man, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

And there it is, and many conspiracy theories and careers were lost! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Indeed, yes.

Fr. Andrew: There’s a lot of crazy stuff out there about these four verses.

Fr. Stephen: Trying to do actual research on this topic, you can’t just go and type “nephilim” into Google and get good and helpful and productive things on the first, say, 133 pages.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right. I mean, you just think about the problem of just trying to research it. If you were to type in some common, common, common word into Google, you wouldn’t get very far, because there would be so much about that thing. Like if you just type in “sports,” there would just be too much. If you would start to say, “The Oakland Raiders in this decade,” you would start to find a little bit more or whatever, but what’s interesting is that this topic, even though it is about something that you would think would be a really sort of obscure bit of biblical research, it’s actually super-interesting to people. So there’s a lot of crackpot stuff out there, and I think this, more than anything else, where you and I get: “Have you read so-and-so? Have you read so-and-so? What about so-and-so? Have you read so-and-so?” We’ve had novel recommendations, popular theology, weird science…

Fr. Stephen: Self-published books of various kinds, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s even, as we were just discussing in the prep time, this even shows up in some Hollywood films. We’ll get to that, I guess, a little bit later. So we’re going to attempt to make some clear depictions of what this is based on what’s in Scripture, based on research into the ancient world, based on what’s in some of the books that are sort of near Scripture, like Enoch and that kind of stuff.

All right. So we start out with those four verses from Genesis and a kind of, I don’t know, obvious reading to them is that there are these people called the “sons of God” who are having relations with human women and that’s why there are these giants. I mean, that’s what it says; “nephilim” is just the word for giants, right? And they’re these mighty men of old, the heroes. So what do we do with that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we have to start with the word “nephilim,” just as a brief note, because there are some people who try really hard to get this to not mean “giants.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: And they’re trying to do some chicanery with Hebrew, because there is a Hebrew root, nephal, that means “to fall,” so you could say they’re trying to get it to mean “the fallen ones,” which has certain resonances. You think, “Oh, that sounds good”—except that based on the form of the Hebrew word, it would be passive.

Fr. Andrew: So “fallen upon.”

Fr. Stephen: It would mean “the fallen upon.” So there’s some people who aren’t deterred by that, and they try to argue, as we’re going to see later in Joshua, the giant clans are going to be attacked in battles—they say, “Oh, it means fallen upon in battle.” Except there’s no battle in Genesis 6.

The much easier way to go about this is… With Hebrew, the Hebrew Scriptures are the only documents in biblical Hebrew that we have, really. Almost everything else, even if you’re talking about Second Temple Jewish literature and that kind of thing, most of it’s in Aramaic or Greek or a later form of Hebrew. We don’t have any other samples of Hebrew as old as the Torah other than the Torah, for example. What we have to do a lot in reading the Hebrew of the Bible, is you have to look at what are called cognate languages: other Semitic languages, languages that are like cousins to Hebrew. It would be like, if you didn’t know what a Spanish word meant, but you found an Italian word and a French word that were similar and had the same derivation from Latin, you could say, “Oh, well, the Spanish word probably means something like this.” And you do the same thing with Hebrew. There were words… There’s a lot of weird readings in the Old Testament of the King James Version, especially the original King James Version.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, the real King James. No! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That’s considered our literally dozens and dozens and dozens of words that only occur once in the Hebrew Bible. So there’s no context clue of what it means; they literally didn’t know. We’ve only discovered what they mean through the discovery of the Ugaritic language in the middle of the 20th century.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s another Semitic language, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so in this case, the place where we go to understand what “nephilim” means is “nephilin”—it ends with an -n instead of an -m—in Aramaic, which means “giants.” It’s very simple.

Fr. Andrew: And of course, it’s telling that when ancient Judeans were translating the Old Testament into Greek, the word that they chose to translate this word was gigantes, which is literally the origin of the English word “giant.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s derived from it. So they translated it as “giants.” As a note—and we’ll come back to this in the third half of the show, I think—when they translated this passage originally, what is properly called the Septuagint—the 70 scribes in Alexandria, around 250 BC—when they translated this passage, they translated “the sons of God” as “the angels of God,” and they translated “nephilim” as “giants.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so those third-century BC Jews, Judeans—that’s probably a conversation for another podcast—they understood the Hebrew Scriptures that they were reading as talking about angels and as talking about giants, because those were the words that they used to translate. And Greek at that period is not anywhere near as mysterious as the Hebrew of Genesis.

Fr. Stephen: Biblical Hebrew.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, biblical Hebrew. I mean, there’s… Like you said, reading biblical Hebrew, the Bible is the only texts we have in that period of that language, whereas with Greek there’s lots of texts from pretty early on.

Fr. Stephen: Piles and piles!

Fr. Andrew: And that’s why, for instance, New Testament scholarship, at least linguistically speaking, is a lot easier, because there’s just so much more context available. You can say, “Well, it may not be clear here in the Bible as to what this means, but look at the way that pretty much everyone else in this period used this word.” So it’s interesting. It’s great that you bring up the Septuagint translators, because it shows that this was their understanding of this passage: it’s talking about angels and that a product of these unions is giants.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so you have angels and human women cohabiting in some way…

Fr. Andrew: Which, we’ll talk about that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and then they produce these progeny who are giants. So that’s what it says. Then we have to get into what in the world that means. [Laughter] Which is a second question, once we’ve determined what it says; then what does it mean?

In terms of what it means, we actually have a lot of context, not in terms of grammar and vocabulary, but in terms of other stories from the ancient world, parallel stories. Most people, I think, know that the flood story in Genesis 6-9 is not sort of a unique story, that pretty much—

Fr. Andrew: Right, that pretty much every ancient culture has a flood story.

Fr. Stephen: Right, has some story of a previous advanced civilization that was destroyed in a flood, and there were some small group of survivors who were brought through it. So that’s fairly well known, that everywhere in the world you find that, and that the flood story in Genesis is not even the oldest version that we still have of that story. The epic of Gilgamesh is from a good—minimally—500 years earlier, maybe a thousand years earlier in terms of just the copies we have.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow.

Fr. Stephen: So people are aware of that. They’re less aware of the fact that there are other parts of this historical story that are also just about universal, that you also find paralleled in all of these ancient cultures.

Fr. Andrew: And I think that one of the things that’s really important to note… You know, growing up as a Christian in Sunday school, and you get the story of Noah and the flood—I think it could be easy not to think about exactly what that event means. Certainly, it’s this sense of there’s a lot of wickedness out there and God is wiping it out by sending this flood, and he saves Noah and his family. But if you think about it, this is… There is civilization all over the world, and it’s just ended in one action from God. Everything is wiped away. We have this word, of course, “antediluvian,” which means “before the flood.”

And then later there’s this—and we’re going to talk about this later, I know—this fascination with the idea of lost wisdom that didn’t survive the flood, and how do you get these secrets. There’s this massive sort of line in history that’s drawn by the flood. There’s everything that happens before it and there’s everything that happens after it. I mean, now, of course, there’s the notion of BC and AD: before Christ, and then anno Domini, the year of the Lord, with the advent of Christ. And that is sort of, for Christians, the massive demarcating line in history. But before this, the flood is kind of it, and it’s worldwide, that there was this whole flourishing—from their point of view—human civilization. From God’s point of view, it was not flourishing in the right way! And then it’s gone. It’s all gone.

So I think we have to take a second and realize how cataclysmic this is. It is like the end of the world—but not quite. The world is ended, but almost ended, but not quite. This group of people is spared. I just want to emphasize that, because like I said, it’s a cool story and everyone loves putting Noah’s Ark on their kids’ walls in their bedrooms. But think about it: that is a huge, dangerous story we’re talking about. That’s sort of what we’re all caught up in now with this discussion of giants.

So, yeah, you said there was another aspect that was also universal in ancient cultures’ stories.

Fr. Stephen: Well, also another product of that is that when ancient readers read the Torah and read the story of Noah in the flood, they weren’t receiving new information. Like, “Oh, really? There was this ancient civilization and it was wiped out by a flood?” This is something they already knew about, and the biblical story is speaking into that. To give a modern example, if I write a book about the American Civil War, most of the people who see that book and pick it up are not going to think, “What!? America had a civil war in the 19th century?” That’s not new information to them. But I’m going to be writing it to say, “Well, I have some information about the Civil War that you may not have yet,” or “I need to correct some misconceptions you have about the Civil War.” So that’s why I’m writing this, not just to give you new information you don’t already have.

So the story in Genesis, including the flood and the other stories we’re about to talk about, are not there—and that’s why the mention here of the nephilim is so brief and sort of in-passing. You say, “Why doesn’t Genesis go into the detail that you and I are about to go into?” Well, because Genesis didn’t have to. It’s commenting on things they already know, things that they already conceive of as part of their history. It’s commenting on them, not laying them all out and explaining them.

But another aspect of this has to do with that advanced civilization, the antediluvian advanced civilization. And that part, that it’s an advanced civilization, is another part of the story that’s sort of ubiquitous, that’s everywhere. So the Babylonian form of this is what’s called the story of the seven sages, a lot of times, in English translation. The word that’s translated “sages” there is the Babylonian word apkallu, and these apkallu are sort of divine beings. The first one is sort of half-fish, half-man, and the way you see a lot of divine beings in the ancient world being conceived of as sort of composites of human and animal forms, sort of theriomorph.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, especially like the Egyptian deities are almost always depicted as human bodies with some kind of animal head, although of course the Sphinx is the notable opposite. But it’s usually human bodies with animal heads.

Fr. Stephen: And that was universal. That was true also in, for example, when you look at the earliest phase of Greek religion. And later they were changed into sort of human forms and patterned after the image of Greek kings who wanted… You know: Make a statue of Zeus who looks a lot like me, because I’m a lot like him. But before that, you see little bits of that creeping out, like in Homer, for example, where he talks about cow-eyed Hera. Having eyes like a cow is usually not conceived of as a compliment. I wouldn’t try to use that as a pick-up line, to any of the single guys who might be listening. “You have eyes like a cow!” No, that’s not going to be…

Fr. Andrew: I think “doe-eyed,” d-o-e, that would… That’s the nice modern English way, although I think most people probably wouldn’t even know that phrase; that’s a little archaic.

Fr. Stephen: But that goes back to a period when Hera, as sort of a fertility goddess, was depicted as a heifer, was depicted as sort of this cow-form. And the Scriptures have that, too. You look at the descriptions of cherubim and seraphim and angelic beings, and a lot of times you’ve got these composites of human and animal parts.

Fr. Andrew: We talked about that in our episode on the ranks of angels. The seraphim are kind of serpentine. The cherubim are a little like lions, I guess.

Fr. Stephen: A little bit sphinxy, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Sphinxish.

Fr. Stephen: But you have the four heads, and that kind of thing: the ox and the eagle…

But so the first of the seven sages is described in that way. He comes up out of the river, meaning the Euphrates, because we’re talking about Babylonian story. But then what you find is these seven sages become advisors to the Babylonian kings and Sumerian kings before the flood. This is laid out, for example, the Sumerian Kings List: you have each of these kings listed before the flood, and the apkallu, who was sort of their advisor, and what he taught them. He taught them the mysteries of astrology or magic or some kind of technology involving metallurgy, that kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: This pattern continues long, long, long after the flood. So for instance you’ve got in Roman imperial religion the genius of the emperor.

Fr. Stephen: Right, an advisor.

Fr. Andrew: And genius is a word that’s wonderfully cognate with “genie.” Or of course Socrates talking about the daemon that speaks to him and gives him wisdom. This idea of a spirit that accompanies someone and gives them knowledge. Or even in later Western European folklore, you get witches who have a familiar spirit, which often is even depicted as a small animal that teaches them things and gives them knowledge that they otherwise wouldn’t have. So this is the earliest depiction of that kind of thing that we’re aware of, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s the earliest one we have, but there’s obvious parallels. Right, in Greece, the story of Prometheus, who comes and gives fire to man, and Pandora and her jar—it was a jar, not a box. I just ruined everyone’s childhood image.

Fr. Andrew: Aw, man! I thought it was an online music service, which I… When Pandora, when that service first came out online, I was like, well, that’s an interesting thing to name your music service… [Laughter] Like, what are they?

Fr. Stephen: Well, the last thing that comes out is hope.

Fr. Andrew: Indeed. But of course her name means “all gifts,” so from the point of view of… And it’s funny, because it’s depicted ironically in Greek myth. It’s “all gifts,” but what is most of what comes out? Disease and war and all this kind of horrible stuff, and then hope remains at the very end. So even in Greek myth, you’ve got this irony of here’s this great gift from the gods, but, haha, we got you! Which, that’s interesting, because it begins this kind of critique of the gods, which gradually flowers more and more as time goes by. They’re not just depicted as being benevolent spirits, giving all these wonderful things to man like fire.

Fr. Stephen: There’s sort of an ambivalence about it, because the figures who do this—that includes the apkallu—so the apkallu, the other gods get mad at them for revealing this stuff to humans, and imprison them in the abyss, which is in the depths of the waters at the bottom of the rivers in Babylonian thought. And Prometheus, of course, gets his liver pecked out by a vulture…

Fr. Andrew: Over and over.

Fr. Stephen: ...for the rest of eternity. And these kind of things. So the other gods kind of punish them. So it’s looked at as… The other gods look at it as bad, but humans looked at it as good. So what you find is later generations of kings claiming that they’re the ones who have maintained this secret, divine knowledge from before the flood, as part of their claim to supremacy. Probably the most well-known group to do that were the Martu, who are the Amorites in the Old Testament. The most famous one of them is probably Hammurabi. The Babylonian king around 2500 BC was one of the Martu.

Fr. Andrew: The “Code” guy! [Laughter] Right, a lot of people have probably heard of Hammurabi’s Code as being kind of an example, the earliest example of written law. But he’s also claiming to have antediluvian knowledge by means of spirits talking to him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so we see this same thing, this same story, in the genealogy of Cain in particular, in Genesis 4, at the end of Genesis 4, where Cain goes and—the first part of this is often mistranslated, where they have him naming the first city after his son, Enosh. It’s not that. He names his city after Enosh’s son, Irad. That’s the city of Eridu, which ancient people—the Sumerian city which ancient people thought was the first city ever. So Cain goes and founds the first city. We see his later descendants invent metallurgy and music and all these cultural—they’ve sort of become the culture heroes of the world, of this pre-flood civilization.

Fr. Andrew: Whoa whoa whoa wait—maybe define that term, “culture hero,” because it actually has a specific meaning.

Fr. Stephen: Well, after the flood, the figures who are referred to as “culture heroes” are going to be the flood survivors who have this knowledge.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay.

Fr. Stephen: And they sort of become the instituters of culture as it rebuilds after the destruction, after the collapse, and after the fall. But so these figures in Scripture are not the good guys. Cain’s line are not the good guys.

Fr. Andrew: This is the mighty men who are of old, the men of renown, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So the Bible is saying, “No, these are people bringing wickedness into the world.” The demonic powers—we would call the demonic powers—the beings who are giving this knowledge to humanity are not doing it to help humanity or aid humanity; they’re doing it to further mankind’s destruction. “I’m going to give you the ability to forge weapons of war so that you can be more efficient at killing each other.”

Fr. Andrew: It’s like giving a knife to a baby.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. “Here’s a fork; go put it in the plug socket.” So it’s giving this knowledge. That should be familiar from a chapter previous, from Genesis 3, where what does the serpent, what does the devil do? He comes to bring knowledge.

Fr. Andrew: He says, “You eat this, you’re going to become like God. You’re going to know good and evil.” So there’s this theme then that forbidden knowledge is being offered to mankind by spirits who have no business doing that. Of course, this raises this question. Cain’s line doesn’t just come up with weapons of war; they also come up with music and architecture. It’s kind of easy to say, “Well, yeah, weapons are bad, but what’s wrong with music? What’s wrong with architecture? What’s wrong with agriculture?”

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s not really agriculture; it’s herding. There’s a distinction there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s herding.

Fr. Stephen: Cain can’t do agriculture because of his curse.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly. But what’s sort of wrong with those things? My sense is—correct me if I’m wrong—there’s nothing sort of inherently wrong with them. It’s just that mankind wasn’t ready for them yet. Just like your kid…

Fr. Stephen: Mankind wasn’t in a position to use it responsibly.

Fr. Andrew: Like, my three-year-old should not be handed a knife, but my 13-year-old is pretty responsible with it; she cooks dinner.

Fr. Stephen: And can use it to do good, can use it to do good things. And this is… Well, the same thing with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It wasn’t evil in and of itself. It just… There would have been a time when God allowed man to eat from it, but that time wasn’t yet.

Fr. Andrew: Jumped the gun.

Fr. Stephen: It could have brought about his destruction. So notice how the pagan versions of this story have recast this. Who’s the bad guy in the pagan versions—all of them—of the story? The other gods who punished Prometheus or the apkallu. They’re the bad guys; they’re the ones who don’t want humans to have this knowledge. And the “good guys” are these spirits who want to reveal the knowledge. So that’s why—we may have said it on the show already—some of these pagan myths, if you understand the biblical version of this story, you can see how they’re kind of pro-devil propaganda. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, depicting them as benevolent, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Unjustly persecuted.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, it’s interesting just thinking about Prometheus, which is probably the story that’s most familiar to our listeners. He does… He’s sneaky about it, so he has to defy the divine order in order to bring fire to man. So that’s interesting, because even though… Especially as Americans, we kind of love the underdog, we love the whistle-blower—we love that kind of story.

Fr. Stephen: The rebel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the rebel. But in the ancient world, rebellion is super bad, because the order that exists is a divine order. So it’s interesting that even in the story there’s still this element of truth, that Prometheus is engaging in an act of rebellion. Of course, from the context of our previous episodes that we talk about that there is this angelic rebellion that occurs, you read these stories from a biblical point of view and you can say, “Oh, yes, well, the other gods who punish these knowledge-giving gods are actually the Lord of hosts and his angels, like the Archangel Michael, who drive out these evil spirits from the presence of the Lord and send them to the abyss.” That this is situated within this ongoing spiritual war, that one of the ways that these spirits rebel—and we talked about this in “The Five(ish) Falls of Angels.” One of the ways that these spirits fall and rebel is by giving forbidden knowledge to mankind, specifically for the purpose of man destroying himself.

It’s interesting. I think humanity understands this on some level, but we’re just so tempted, we’re just so addicted to knowing stuff that, for instance, when nuclear weapons were invented—I’m not saying that they were revealed by an apkallu, but who knows?—but there’s this concern, and it’s a valid concern: if mankind knows how to do this, aren’t we just going to wipe out everything on the planet? And that’s been a question that’s been being asked for the last couple of decades, and not entirely an unreasonable outcome.

Fr. Stephen: Oppenheimer did quote the Bhagavad Gita.

Fr. Andrew: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Right.

Fr. Stephen: We find sort of a more full version of these traditions written down in sort of later literature like 1 Enoch, the book of Enoch; the book of Giants at Qumran; some of this other Enochic and epochic literature. The reason we find it written down that late is you write things down when you’re worried about losing them. At the time the Torah’s composed, this is sort of stuff that everybody knew.

Fr. Andrew: So they could just sketch it out.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so by the time you get to the late Persian Empire, some of this stuff is less secure, and that’s when sort of the fuller forms of this tradition get put down in writing, to make sure they get preserved. In the ancient world, something being written down turned it into a kind of monument. This is the subtext behind—it doesn’t always strike us when we read the Bible—“It is written.” That’s why that carries so much weight. People didn’t have Bibles and a concept of canon yet, but “It is written”: this was written down. That means it’s important. This is like a monument left for us by our fathers.

When we find the more full version of this written down, that’s made more explicit what these secrets were, and that includes things from means of seduction to things involving witchcraft and sorcery and divination, different ritual things, in addition to your technological metallurgy and those kind of things. So you can see how these are all things that are going to help lead humans deeper and deeper into sin.

Fr. Andrew: So how…? We would draw a sharp distinction between a manual of metallurgy and a manual of potion-making, right? But would ancient people draw that distinction?

Fr. Stephen: No, because they don’t have the materialistic view of the world that we do.

Fr. Andrew: So metallurgy is just as spiritual an activity as making a love potion.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s knowledge about how the cosmos works.

Fr. Andrew: That’s such a hard thing, I think, for us. Like, I believe that, that these things are all inherently spiritual acts and so forth, but it’s really hard just to wrap your mind around it, even if you consciously believe it. I still think a manual in metallurgy to me is possibly one of the most dull things that could exist. I mean, I have friends who are in material science who are like, “Why are you saying that?” But to me it’s a dull technical kind of thing. Even though I mentally can say to myself, “No, no, no, this is about elemental forces of the universe!” still, that looks different from a book of spells, and yet, for ancient people, they’re the same thing. And of course, if you understand this idea of this spiritual origin of technological knowledge, then it starts to make a lot more sense, and of course you’re going to call upon Hephaestus or Vulcan or whoever your metallurgy god is to assist you in this work, because he’s probably the one who gave you that knowledge to begin with, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right. In the ancient world there’s no difference between chemistry and alchemy, or astronomy and astrology. These are separate things the way we’ve separated them out.

Fr. Andrew: I’ve heard it said that astronomy is just the bookkeeping of astrology, basically.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] In a way, yeah, because we’ve kind of severed off this stuff and decided it’s superstition.

So that sort of culminates in something. All of this forbidden knowledge, all of this ritual knowledge, this knowledge of wickedness culminates in sort of the two great paradigmatic sins of the Israelite and Jewish and Christian traditions are idolatry and sexual immorality. If you smash those things together, there’s your sort of apex of human sin. So that culmination takes the form of sexual immorality in the context of idolatrous pagan rituals. The same way that, in a literary sense, Genesis 6:1-4, that we’re talking about, are sort of the culmination of the material in Genesis 4 and 5 in those genealogies—this is sort of the culmination point of that human sinfulness before the flood—leads to what’s being described by the generation of the nephilim.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that’s a really important point, because—we just read those verses out of context, but there’s a reason that they appear at that point in Genesis where they do, and it has a lot to do with what came before it. As you said, it’s this culmination point. It’s funny, because I’ve heard these people treat these verses like, “Oh, there’s this weird little detour about giants… Okay, now back to the main story.” But that’s not…

Fr. Stephen: And who wants to read genealogies? I mean, come on. We’ll get back to that topic later.

Fr. Andrew: Right, unless you’re a hobbit…

Fr. Stephen: Nobody reads genealogies.

Fr. Andrew: Hobbits love genealogies.

Fr. Stephen: And Mormons.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and Mormons.

Fr. Stephen: Because Mormons love genealogies.

Fr. Andrew: This is just proof for the one guy who wrote to us in our group that Lord of Spirits and Amon Sûl are really the same one podcast! [Laughter] So I’m going to just throw him a bone every so often.

Fr. Stephen: And we managed to get through the whole thing about the pre-flood civilization without mentioning Númenor, and you had to do it.

Fr. Andrew: There we go: the Akallabêth.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So we talked about this a little in the “Five(ish) Falls” episode, the idea that what’s being described here is sort of ritual that actually took place. We talked about Og’s bed which now has its own meme as a life verse in our Lord of Spirits group on Facebook. Og is one of the giant kings, and we’re going to talk more about him in a little bit, but his bed is described in sort of this random verse in Deuteronomy. Why do we care about his bed and how big it is? The reason for that, we now know, archaeologically, is we found a bed of exactly those dimensions and of the same metallic construction in the ziggurat of Etemenanki, which is the great ziggurat of Babylon, that was used for ritual purposes, for these sexual rituals.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so let’s talk about the dimensions. If I recall correctly, it would be a bed for someone who’s about 15 feet tall.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: And as we talked about this in previous episodes… It’s funny: in earliest episodes, a lot of our commentary was like, “We’re going to get to that in a future episode,” and now we’re kind of saying, “Well, ‘last time on Lord of Spirits...’ ”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] “Show the clips.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, because there were a lot of people who wanted us to talk about this subject right off, because they’re just really excited about it, but it really kind of does need a lot of this prior background. Listener, if you haven’t listened to our previous episodes yet, I’m not going to tell you that you must pause right here and go back and listen to all that stuff, but it will make more sense.

So why is this bed 15 tall? Well, that particular measurement is the way that ancient peoples said they saw spiritual beings appearing to them, that when a god shows up, that they’re about 15 feet tall.

Fr. Stephen: Now I’m going to flip it: We’ll talk more about bodies, divine bodies, in a future episode.

Fr. Andrew: There you go!

Fr. Stephen: But, yes, one of the bodies that a god had in the ancient world was what’s now called his liturgical body, and that’s 15 feet tall, pretty much uniformly across pagan cultures.

Fr. Andrew: All over the world.

Fr. Stephen: But if you’re talking about what a video camera would see, if you had a Tardis and you went back and took a video camera into Etemenanki and snuck in and videoed what was happening—

Fr. Andrew: On the bed.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] ...on the bed is that part of the festal cycle of these cultures, the king, as the high priest of the religion, would ritually embody the god whom they were worshiping…

Fr. Andrew: How does that happen? I mean, do they say prayers over him? What do they do? How do you get…?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Sacrifices, probably blood-drinking and -anointing, likely the wearing of a mask. And then would go in and ritually have intercourse with a temple slave or a temple prostitute on this bed. That would be part of bringing about fertility for the crops and fields, consummating the relationship between the god they were worshiping and the people, the demonic spirit they were worshiping and the people. If a child was conceived to said king out of this ritual, that child would essentially have two fathers, the king who was regarded as divine himself [and] the god, and then one human mother, the temple slave who actually gave birth to him.

Fr. Andrew: And doesn’t this just put a weird pall now on that sitcom—was that in the ‘90s?—called My Two Dads, which probably was not about… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: There’s a very dark Sumerian version of that show.

Fr. Andrew: Whew! Sorry, needed a little comic relief! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So what you find in the Babylonian sources in particular is, for example, on that same Sumerian Kings List we mentioned that lists the apkallu for each king before the flood, after the flood each of the kings is two-thirds apkallu, one-third human. And you say, “How can you be two-thirds, one-third?” Well, if you have three parents, then you can. And Gilgamesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, one-third human. Sometimes in some cultures, by the way, just so you know, this was reversed, where it would actually be the temple slave or prostitute or priestess who would embody a goddess, and the king would— in which case you would sort of have two mothers and one father. So you get that with Gilgamesh being an example of that. That happened there. But this is the kind of ritual activity. So this is idolatry, sexual immorality in the extreme, so it’s sort of saying: this is how bad it got before the flood.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and then this is the ritual that produces giants. I think it’s important to emphasize this, because the passage from Genesis 6 doesn’t give any of this kind of detail. It just has this idea of angelic beings and human women and you know. A lot of times people read that without the historical context, and they say, “How can a demon hybridize with a human being? Like they can’t… mate.” But that is a misunderstanding of the way that the nephilim ritual works. I know we’re going to talk a little bit more about that, but I think it’s just important to underline that what the whole thing with Og and his bed—who is just one example of this ritual activity; it’s happening all over the world—what that is actually there are two human beings involved and one divine being, although ancient peoples would have said that one of those human beings was effectively being divine during the activity.

Fr. Stephen: Well, the king was divine all the time, but doubly so when he’s embodying… yeah. The reason that Genesis doesn’t have to go into detail on this is because the original readers knew about this. Abraham lived most of his life, because he was old when he left, in Ur, where there was a ziggurat that had just been rebuilt to enormous size during his lifetime. The great ziggurat of Ur was literally built while he was there and alive, where these kind of rituals were taking place continuously. He had members of his own family—we’re told in Scripture and it’s reiterated at the beginning of Joshua—who were involved in that idolatrous worship. So this isn’t something Abraham didn’t know about; it wasn’t something people didn’t know about. There were versions of this going out: The pharaoh is divine in Egypt; he’s married, usually to his sister. The same kind of thing is going on. They’re aware of this.

Fr. Andrew: So which ancient texts are describing this ritual? Where are we getting this from, exactly? It’s not in the Bible explicitly; where is this being described?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I mean, it’s all over the place. You have to read a bunch of Egyptian ritual texts and Ugaritic ritual texts from Canaan and Sumerian ritual texts, but as I mentioned to you, and you repeated a bunch of people doubted you until they looked into it, but basically this ritual still goes on in Japan with the Japanese emperor at his accession, every time, even to the present day, though, since World War II it has been largely desexualized. Largely.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and that’s especially interesting, because that is not an Indo-European culture over there. I make that point because one could say: okay, well, this particular ritual idea existed in this one culture, and then it just spread as that culture spread itself across Europe and Asia and so forth. But the thing is that we find this ritual activity happening all over the world, and as we have seen still happening in places where Christianity never really took hold.

Fr. Stephen: And Mesoamerica: the Aztecs, the Toltecs…

Fr. Andrew: You’re right. Again, not connected! That kind of is a big problem for the hypothesis that it just sort of spread with human culture. If you believe in the things that we’ve been talking about all this time, then it’s actually much more reasonable to conclude that the reason why this ritual exists all over the world is because demonic beings came to human beings and taught them how to do it, just like they were teaching them all this other stuff.

Before we go to break, then, let’s raise the question of why would a demon want to do this. What is the point? What is the goal of this?

Fr. Stephen: Other than just being perverse in general.

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly, which, I mean, that’s kind of a goal that they have. [Laughter] Why would they want to do that?

Fr. Stephen: What we have set up for us—in Scripture we have to go back again to the beginning of Genesis: God creates man in his own image, and we tend to think of that, or discussions of it, at least, modern American Christians discussions of it, at least, tend to focus on that the image of God is some quality that humans possess, like it’s their intellect or their language or this or that.

Fr. Andrew: A particular attribute.

Fr. Stephen: What separates a human from an animal, all of this kind of thing. But the concept in Scripture is more of a verbal idea. You image someone’s something. You image God. Adam and Eve are called to fill the earth and subdue it, to go and fill the earth with life and put it in order, and that’s exactly what God did in creation leading up to his creation of them and the giving of that commandment. So they’re created to go and do what do what God does.

Fr. Andrew: Sub-creation, basically. There you go. Bringing a Tolkienian term again. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: To bring the works of God and the will of God into creation as his image, as his icon; to serve in that way. This goes all the way through the Scriptures. When David is king of Israel, his duty as king is to bring about God’s justice in his rule. That’s the idea. Doing that is transformative to humanity. Being that agent of God transforms humanity. This is why the Fathers taught, even though the words for “image” and “likeness” are basically synonyms, but the Fathers used those words to describe how image is this capacity to do this and likeness is the fruit of doing it. We become more like God by being the means by which God acts in the world. By participating in his will and in his works and in his actions in the world, we become more like him.

This is, of course, the stuff of theosis that we talked about, in terms of becoming sons of God, because this is what it means to be a son, biblically. The son is the image of the father. Adam had a son in his own image, after his own likeness.

Fr. Andrew: A chip off the old block, as it were.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So we see that the devil, as the Fathers tell us, falls through envy. The reason the devil wants to destroy Adam and Eve is because he’s jealous, because he was not created for that destiny. The eternal Son of God was not going to become an angel; he was going to become incarnate, to become man, to give man this destiny. And out of jealous he decides to destroy humanity.

So these demonic powers we see, following in his footsteps to try to destroy man by revealing these secrets, ultimately in this culmination, they’re trying to create their own image. They’re trying to create human beings after their image and likeness, who will bring their will and desires into the world and who will become like them. And they can’t create from the dust of the earth the way God did. All they can do is take the human beings whom God has created and corrupt them and twist them and lure them into, through evil, becoming like themselves. So it’s sort of an anti-theosis, where these people become like demons.

The giants… To be a giant is to be one of these fully demonized people. It’s like the opposite of a saint. It’s the opposite of someone who’s achieved theosis and become like Christ. It’s someone who’s become like a demon, with all of their lusts and fury and violence and destructive capacity and spite.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Okay, well, we are going to go to break, and when we come back, we’re going to answer a couple of your questions. So we’ll be right back.

Fr. Andrew: And we’re back! Welcome back! As I said before, this is a pre-recorded episode of Lord of Spirits, so even though the voice of Steve just told you to call, if you call that number right now, you’re not going to connect to us. We’re not there.

But anyway, we wanted to talk about some of the questions that you sent that are related to everything we just discussed. This first one is an email from Deborah. Deborah wrote this.

As I was listening to your most recent podcast, when you talked about Og’s ritual bed and the pagan king coming to commit fornication with a temple prostitute and thereby conceiving the next king, I thought about comparing and contrasting this with the conception of Christ.

So she makes several contrasts. There’s a temple prostitute versus the Temple virgin. There’s two fathers in the nephilim ritual versus one Father with Christ. The future king is conceived, that’s a parallel in both. In the nephilim ritual, the person is two-thirds apkallu and one-third human; and then in the incarnation of Christ he is 100% divine and 100% human. She goes on to say:

I’m wondering if the way the Gospel story is written would have been immediately recognizable as a sort of version, if you will, of the pagan practices of the day.

My immediate reaction to that is I wouldn’t say that the Gospel story is a subversion, but actually it kind of reveals that the nephilim ritual is the subversion, that these demons are engaging in the thing that they’re not kind of authorized to do. Of course, they fail. They succeeded in making demonized people, but they don’t actually succeed in kind of having their own actual offspring in any real sense, like demons cannot reproduce. They’re sort of commandeering human beings in order to make this thing happen. Do you have any comments on that, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Obviously, there’s a definite direct contrast there. I’ll throw in another one. In our salvation, in the incarnation, God saves and transforms us by becoming like us, by taking our humanity upon himself; whereas in all of pagan religion—and any ancient pagan would agree with this—the goal is by worshiping these beings and performing these rituals, to become like them. They would have absolutely agreed with that, and that’s the goal. Caesar or someone, one of these kings who experiences apotheosis, that’s it. When they die, they go and become like the gods they’ve been worshiping.

Fr. Andrew: And it kind of underlines, too, the giants, who—we didn’t really emphasize this yet, but they have what we might be describe as sort of super-human power, influence, maybe size, depending on how you read it—they are not, from the biblical point of view, nice, just, good, virtuous people. They are domineering, destructive conquerors who are able to control lots of people. The thing is, outside of the people of God, in the ancient world, that was seen as positive! If you had control over a lot of people and were able to dominate them, that was because you were in tight with the gods, and that was a good thing—for you, anyway; not for the peasants that you had under your boot.

But it just shows, again, what a difference Christ [is] who comes in the humblest of circumstances, and he comes in peace; he comes in humility. He does not come with the sword. His weapons are truth and meekness and righteousness. It just underlines again the morality of the ancient world was so utterly different from ours that if you could control other people and you had domination over other people, that was an indication that the gods smiled upon you and were one with you. You had succeeded. You were it.

Fr. Stephen: Julius Caesar was first celebrated as being godlike because he had killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. That was his slogan; that’s what they were celebrating, about how great he was.

Fr. Andrew: And so by contrast, now, in the 20th and 21st century, when we say someone is like Hitler, we mean exactly the opposite. But if Hitler had lived in the ancient world, he would have been regarded as a success, as a big hero.

Fr. Stephen: Well, he would have been kind of a trifler by ancient standards; they killed a lot more.

Fr. Andrew: By comparison!

Fr. Stephen: They killed a lot more people. But the point stands. We look at him; we say, “This is a demonic person,” and that’s because we’ve taken on board what the Scriptures say about giants as opposed to how the ancient worldview sees giants. And the word “giant” itself, both in the Greek and the Aramaic, we should say—and this has been memed, too, since I’ve said it apparently a couple too many times—but the word… They don’t call someone a giant to tell you he’s a big guy; they tell you he’s a big guy to indicate to you that he’s a giant. And the word “giant” means more like tyrant or thug or bully. It’s kind of the way we in the modern world—this is the part that got memed—use the word strongman, when we’re talking about a dictator. So they’ll talk about “Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.” They don’t mean he had an awesome bench and was just ripped; they mean he’s a tyrant, he’s a strongman, he’s a bully, he’s a thug. That’s the kind of reputation he has. That’s what the Scriptures are saying about these people, these kings and these rulers and these leaders, that they’re this demonically evil type of person.

Fr. Andrew: We also got a recorded message from Adam, who had something relevant to ask as well. I’m going to play that then for us.

Adam: Hello, Lord of Spirits. My question is: do we know of any literature that details how Noah built the ark? Meaning, did Noah build the ark by himself or did Noah have help from angels or did Noah have help from giants? Thanks, guys! Appreciate the show.

Fr. Andrew: This is where you said something about that Russell Crowe movie earlier when we were talking.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, yes, which he adapted from his graphic novel, actually, about Noah.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting, and I have to admit, I have not seen it.

Fr. Stephen: I highly recommend it—but not for historical accuracy! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So is Adam onto something here? I mean, you said you think you’re pretty sure that Adam watched this movie.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. [Laughter] In the movie, “the watchers” of Enoch—and I’m sure we’ll do a future episode just talking about 1 Enoch—but “the watchers” are the term that’s used to refer to the angelic beings, the sinful, rebellious angelic beings. As their punishment, they get turned into these sort of giant rock guys.

Fr. Andrew: Right, I’ve heard about that.

Fr. Stephen: In the movie. [Laughter] And they kind of repent and decide to help Noah and sort of help him build the ark and fight off the people who are trying to besiege the ark, because… If you take all the Noah traditions from Second Temple literature and from the Bible, and then you smash that together with Gladiator, that’s what this movie is.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I have to see it now! “Are you not entertained?”

Fr. Stephen: Including Russell Crowe and his presence. So I think that maybe—but maybe not—what his question comes from. But there are in those traditions—not that the rebellious angels helped Noah—but there are sort of bits and pieces and scraps of Noah traditions and some of those things that, yes, he was assisted by some of those angelic beings. A lot of that is related to trying to present Noah as this prophet. He’s presented sometimes as an almost supernatural being himself in a lot of these traditions. He sort of knows angels and hangs out with them, because he has this sort of prophetic life and special capacity. So there are stories where he’s interacting and they’re helping him build things, that sort of thing.

Fr. Andrew: And isn’t there this tradition that Noah himself was one of the nephilim?

Fr. Stephen: There are, yeah. There are bits of that, on both sides. There are some traditions that he was, and then other traditions that seem very clear to try to indicate that he wasn’t, which means that it was something that it was being discussed, because you wouldn’t make a protracted argument that he wasn’t one unless somebody thought he was. [Laughter] But, yeah, there are these stories that when he was born he sort of came out glowing and talking and all these other things to indicate his special status. In Genesis 5, in another one of those genealogies nobody reads, Noah’s father, Lamech, actually makes this prophecy about him that frames the whole story of the flood. So that’s been sort of elaborated on, that the reason Lamech makes this prophecy is that he’s got this glowing baby who talks.

Fr. Andrew: You guys are never going to read the story of Noah and the ark the same way ever again, are you!? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But so, then, based on that, there are these whole stories where Lamech sort of has these doubts, like, “Am I really Noah’s father?” because he’s glowing and talking and stuff, or is he one of the nephilim? Sometimes it’s an angelic revelation to him; sometimes Enoch actually shows up. He comes back from heaven and says, “Listen, Lamech. Don’t worry about it; it’s really your kid.”

Fr. Andrew: And of course Enoch is really important to all of this stuff, because he’s antediluvian himself.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and is taken up into heaven and sort of joins the divine council beforehand. But the really interesting thing about those stories is that St. Matthew draws on them a little bit. St. Matthew’s gospel actually has a lot of the Enochic literature, themes and language, woven into it.

Fr. Andrew: Oh boy.

Fr. Stephen: But one place where he plays on that is when he tells the whole story of St. Joseph the Betrothed doubting what’s going on with the Theotokos when she becomes pregnant, and sort of being worried about what’s going on. And he gets the exact opposite message, right? [Laughter] Lamech gets sort of reassured: No, this is your child. Don’t worry about it; he’s just special. Joseph gets told: Well, no, this isn’t your child, but also doesn’t have a human father. St. Matthew kind of inverts that, since we’re talking about biblical inversions.

Fr. Andrew: And now you’ll never read Matthew the same way ever again!

Fr. Stephen: A flood-related story…

Fr. Andrew: Oh man. All right. We’ve got one more question before we continue on, and this one comes from Fr. Steven, who is an Anglican military chaplain. Fr. Stephen writes this:

Genesis 6 teaches that the nephilim are giants, are the offspring of the sons of God entering the daughters of men. This unholy offspring should all have been destroyed in the flood, yet we see giants appearing later in the Scriptures. If the giants are the result of demons mating with humans, and they were destroyed in the flood, how did they come back? Did the demons mate with humans again after the flood? If so, could that happen again today?

And to that, we’ll simply respond: welcome to part two of this week’s episode! All right, well, he makes the point that there’s giants after the flood. The point of the flood is to rid the world of giant culture, and yet there are giants after the flood. Let’s start talking about giants after the flood.

Fr. Stephen: And even Genesis 6:1-4 alludes to that, because it says, “At this time and after…”

Fr. Andrew: “And after.”

Fr. Stephen: “...the nephilim were in the earth.” So, yes, it even alludes to the fact that there are going to be some later, and since that’s right before the flood, it doesn’t mean before the flood. That would be “at this time.”

What we see when we see the giants again later, starting in Genesis and then especially when we get into Numbers and Deuteronomy and Joshua, is it’s not just sort of these isolated people, but there are whole sort of giant clans. There are clans, tribes, sort of these social units that are described as being sort of made up of giants. It’s not just there’s a bunch of poor, oppressed people who have this tyrant for their king, but they’re sort of all engaging in something, that they all get categorized this way. So this is related to sort of how identity worked in the ancient world.

This is something that we now, as modern people, understand DNA; we understand genetics. We have these ideas of ethnicity and race and these kind of things in our head. And we read those back into the Scriptures and into other ancient texts, and it really sort of distorts what we’re reading. This really makes hash of—we won’t go into this today, but this really makes hash of everything St. Paul has to say about Jews and Gentiles, if you think that’s a racial or ethnic thing.

But when we go back into the ancient, ancient world, you are a member of a social unit. Whether it be a tribe, a clan, a city, there is some social unit you belong to.

Fr. Andrew: It’s the people you live and work and eat and worship with. All of those.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s all-encompassing. And that is primarily manifested and made real by ritual in the ancient world, and it still is today to a large extent, though we’re less aware of it, and we have sort of secularized rituals. I don’t know if we go so far as to say, “This is what makes you American,” but there are definite American rituals: celebrating the fourth of July, voting…

Fr. Andrew: And if you want to become an American, you have to go through a ritual; you have to go through naturalization, which not only includes taking a test, which is one of our wonderful American rituals, but also you have to take an oath. You have to take an oath to become an American. I mean, what is the point of that? Does that do something? It’s words that are understood to have a power over you. It’s a very spiritual act, frankly.

Fr. Stephen: And whatever you were before, however you identified before—now you’re an American, because you’ve gone through that initiation and now you’re going to celebrate the rituals. We just went through this election and had people say, “Oh, the vote is sacred. The ballot box is sacred,” right? It’s like, well, wait, what is that? Well, that’s this idea intruding, despite secularism! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Can’t escape it.

Fr. Stephen: So in the case of ancient Israel, if you were an Israelite, if you were circumcised or the wife or daughter of a circumcised male, and you ate the Passover, that was sort of the basics.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s an important point because—and this is something I’ve learned from reading stuff that you’ve written—when Israel engages in the exodus from Egypt, there are people who are not what we would regard as ethnically descendants from Abraham—there are Egyptians, there are Canaanites—that participate in the Passover, eat the Passover, and make the exodus. Some of them even become leaders of Israel, like they’re so much a part of Israel that they’re leading Israel. And it’s not an ethnic thing at all. It has nothing to do with DNA; it has to do with ritual participation, especially in the Passover, which is so important in that particular account in Scripture that before the event happens, you get instructions on how to commemorate it. Fascinating, that you become part of this people by engaging in these participatory acts.

Fr. Stephen: And two big examples are Caleb, who, when he first shows up, is a Kenizzite, which is one of the Canaanite tribes, and ends up being an elder of the tribe of Judah; and Phineas, Aaron’s grandson Phineas, who was ethnically a black African who became the high priest of Israel. Yeah, the ethnic idea is right out. They were—Caleb and Phineas—no less a son of Abraham than anybody else.

Fr. Andrew: And this is underlined in the Church now, where you see all this language in liturgical texts about belonging to a new nation. This phrase is even used: “the race of Christians.” And what makes us all Christian together? It’s that we’ve been initiated through baptism, that we partake in the Eucharist together, that we live as have been commanded us by God through Christ—in Christ and through the apostles and prophets. It’s what we do that makes us Christians. It’s not genetic at all. It’s this ritual participation that makes us Christians—an ongoing ritual participation, which keeps us being Christians.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is where, in Orthodox canon law… The bare minimum to be an Israelite is you’re circumcised and you celebrate Pascha. If you look at Orthodox canon law, what makes you an Orthodox Christian is that you’ve been baptized and, at least on Pascha, you receive the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: Yep.

Fr. Stephen: If you don’t do that, you’re lapsed; you’re now outside the social unit and have to be brought back in, ritually.

So the same thing was true for these giant clans and tribes. They weren’t members of these giant clans and tribes just because they happened to be born into it, ethnically. They went through initiation rituals and they participated in the ritual life of this clan. And the ritual life of this clan not only involved sort of the sexually immoral rituals we’ve already discussed, but we get some clues again in the sources—I won’t read the full text in this, but if anyone wants to look up 1 Enoch 7:4-6, in describing the wickedness in the lifestyle of the giants, it talks about not only sort of the mass slaying of animals in sacrifice but cannibalism in human sacrifices. Sacrifices—we’ll do an episode on sacrifices eventually; I know people love when we do that—in the ancient world are not killing something; sacrifices are meals. So when we’re talking about human sacrifice, in most cases, it’s involving cannibalism, minimally in the form of blood-drinking, sometimes worse.

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know—maybe you know this off the top of your head—when the Catholic conquistadors came to South America and they encountered the Aztecs who were doing human sacrifice, was there cannibalism involved with that?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yep.

Fr. Stephen: And that was one of the motivations for: this has to be wiped out.

Fr. Andrew: Wiped out.

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is going to be important when we get to talking about Joshua, which people today want to present as genocide. They say, “Oh, well, this is going and murdering people because of their race or ethnicity,” and, no, there’s not a concept of race or ethnicity. This is not a popular thing in the modern world either, but this is the idea of wiping out these ritual and cultural practices. This is what has to stop.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not the way we tend to think of ritual and culture now. Again, we’re talking about people who are in communion with demons and are engaging in demonic fornication rituals in order to produce demonized human beings who have supernatural abilities. That’s what’s going on. That’s what’s being wiped out.

Fr. Stephen: And mass enslaving people, murdering those people, sacrificing them to these demons.

Fr. Andrew: Eating them.

Fr. Stephen: Drinking their blood and potentially more. This is what the Old Testament is describing as abominations that need to be put an end to. You can do that in a couple of ways. If someone won’t stop doing these things in the ancient world, the Scripture is saying, that person, if they won’t stop doing this, has to be put to death. But if someone is ritually brought into another tribe, into another clan, abandons these things, they’re no longer part of that clan. So if everyone from a giant clan is either dead or assimilated into another group that is not practicing those things, the clan has been eradicated. That’s really—you can’t underestimate the importance of that to understand a lot of the Old Testament history we’re about to talk about.

Talking about gigantomachy in this war against the giants, this is really directed at these specific clans. When Israel is sent to war against these specific clans, the commandments and the guidelines and the rules of warfare are different for these clans than they are for the other residents of the land.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I think that’s a really, really important detail, because the book of Joshua, I think, can get kind of a bad rap in the modern world. There are even Orthodox people who will say, “Well… Could God really have commanded people to go and wipe out whole civilizations?” I think that that reveals that the detail that you just mentioned, that the rule for engaging a giant clan is different than the rule for engaging in combat with sort of an ordinary pagan group that’s somewhere else there in Canaan, because everybody there is some kind of pagan except for the Israelites. There’s a conquest going on, but it’s not just: Okay, God has decided to give you this land; go ahead and just wipe out everybody. It’s way more complex than that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and you see this in stark relief in Deuteronomy 20, where it’s giving you the commandments for warfare in general, and it talks about how basically they aren’t allowed to engage in aggressive warfare to take territory and spoils.

Fr. Andrew: That’s super different in the ancient world. [Laughter] Like, nobody believes in that.

Fr. Stephen: Even when they do engage in war, before they go into a city, they have to offer the city peace. It’s only if they refuse all offers of peace that Israel is allowed to make war against the city.

Fr. Andrew: Does that count with the giant clans as well?

Fr. Stephen: Well, that’s it. There’s… And in the midst of all that, in Deuteronomy 20, there’s this except the Hivites, the Jebusites—it lists the particular clans, the particular tribes and groups.

Fr. Andrew: Which, if you don’t know that those are giant clans, it might just look like God decided to single out these people for…

Fr. Stephen: He just doesn’t like them for some reason. But it’s very explicit that whenever those groups are all listed, Yahweh says, number one, he’s the one who’s judging them; he’s the one who’s going to defeat them; he’s the one who’s going to destroy them. Israel is sort of the instrument for that. He says that it’s because of their idolatry and their abominations; it’s because of these things that we’ve been talking about. The rituals that make them who they are, that constitute that tribe, are rituals of enslavement, tyranny, human sacrifice, idolatry, sexual immorality. So there’s not a difference between those things stopping and the tribe ceasing to exist as a tribe, because those are the things that constitute the tribe as a social unit. They’re sort of excepted from those general rules, which were amazing for the ancient world as you mentioned. Drop out of nowhere.

Fr. Andrew: Why wouldn’t you engage in wars of conquest as often as you possibly could manage it? Now we have this idea: That’s immoral; you shouldn’t do that. But no one at that time had that idea—except this one people that God had chosen for himself, had created this nation for himself.

Fr. Stephen: And the total warfare that Israel is supposed to make against these tribes is the kind of warfare that all of Israel’s neighbors waged against everyone, all the time. So that’s not the exceptional part; that’s the more normal part. The excepting everyone else in the world from that is the strange part about the Torah. These are just to be treated the way you would normally treat enemies, with one exception even there, and that’s that, to reinforce the fact that it wasn’t them defeating them, that it was Yahweh, their God, defeating them, and that this was an act of his judgment not just their military might and expansionist tendencies, they weren’t allowed to take any of the spoils.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s interesting, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The physical objects, the gold, the silver, the livestock—all of the wealth of these tribes was considered to be tainted by what they had done. So it was all dedicated and considered accursed and put under a ban and had to be destroyed.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there was that incident about someone who took some gold, and I’m trying to remember who that was now.

Fr. Stephen: Achan, in Joshua, who tried to keep some of it, and a curse came upon the camp because of it.

The word, the Hebrew word charam there, is actually from the same root as haram and Mount Herman as we’ve talked about before.

Fr. Andrew: Forbidden, cursed, sinful—all those things.

Fr. Stephen: But the word is used both for things that are set apart because they’re accursed and things that are set apart because they’re holy or because they’re going to be offered as a sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So the idea is that it’s sort of—sometimes the word “dedicated” is used there, to kind of try to cover both meanings: these things are dedicated for destruction; they belong to Yahweh as his spoils, and he’s destroying them, because they’re…

Fr. Andrew: Right, which I think that that, as you said, kind of underlines also, just from the point of view of people who think, “Okay, God is commanding genocide,” if that’s just sort of the bare understanding of what’s happening there, then why would God put these things off-limits? It just underlines that the whole point is to blot out these practices from the face of the earth, and Israel is his instrument. If it was just: Okay, God is giving them permission to wipe out these certain peoples and take all their stuff, then that would be a different ballgame. But they’re not allowed. They’re not allowed. The point is that they’re going in and enacting God’s justice, which is to set things right. Yeah. A really important interesting detail.

Fr. Stephen: And through these tribes and their practices, these demonic entities that stand behind them, who are the fathers of their chieftains, are subjecting the land, their neighboring peoples to this demonic tyranny and injustice. They’re enslaving their neighbors and sacrificing them to their gods, literally.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So, I mean, what about the problem of… Okay, Israel moves in, they take one of these cities, they kill everybody in it. What about—I mean, are there some innocents there? There’ve got to be kids, babies. I mean, you know? What do we do with that?

Fr. Stephen: If a one-year-old or a two-year-old Horite in one of these giant clans perishes without having participated in these rituals, we look at that and say, “Oh, that’s a horrible thing! That’s the worst thing that could have happened to him. This little two-year-old never got to live his life in this world.” What would his life in this world have been like if God hadn’t done anything about the Horites? He would have grown up to be initiated into these things, all these things. So, to be blunt, we have to remember that the Last Judgment and eternal life and eternal condemnation exist when we’re reading the Bible. I know that sounds bizarre, but the perspective of Scripture, like you read in the book of Wisdom, that someone who lives a short time in innocence and then God takes them to himself, that’s a blessed person.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so it’s basically… We should look at it as an infant who dies maybe before birth or shortly after birth, and not by any human sin, but let’s say they’re born with some kind of birth defect and they die. A lot of times people look at that, and they’ll say, “Why, God? Why?” because it seems— I mean, it’s such a difficult thing to endure, especially if it’s your child, but from a Christian point of view, that person, their entire earthly existence was in innocence, and they are in the hands of God. From an earthly point of view, it’s the worst thing ever. Here’s someone who had their whole life snatched from them. Yet from a Christian point of view, what is this life but preparation for the next.

Fr. Stephen: The purpose of this life is repentance, and it ends when that’s either complete or when we’ve rejected repentance so many times and so thoroughly that our chances have run out and God’s patience has run out.

Fr. Andrew: I recall there was a kind of a hard saying I remember reading, and I think this was in the writings of St. Paisios, the relatively newly canonized saint, the elder from Greece. He was talking to someone about children who die, people who die young. He essentially said the reason why God took them is because he knew that if they continued in life, that they would probably become very sinful, so he took them earlier out of mercy. I remember reading that, and I thought to myself, “Okay, this does make sense to me, but I imagine that would be hard to hear.” Like: “Oh! How dare you say that my kid was going to turn out bad!” You know? But here’s St. Paisios who talks to angels, who has clairvoyant insight from God, saying this. And while not every single thing every single saint says should be… is right, like all their opinions about everything, based on what we’ve just been talking about, if you understand the providence of God, it does make sense. There’s the sense that God protects people from sin sometimes by making their lifetime shorter than we think it should be. So children in a nephilim city who, by the hand of God working through Israel, are removed from this life early, it’s actually a blessing because it’s preventing them from becoming involved in idolatry. And they’ll be judged much, much, much more mercifully, because they never were involved in this.

Fr. Stephen: And in our Orthodox funeral service, over and over again, we refer to the person who’s passed away as the one whom God has chosen and taken.

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s a deliberate action.

Fr. Stephen: God has chosen and taken to himself. So they haven’t suffered a misadventure; they haven’t lost a battle with an illness; they’ve won a battle against sin, hopefully. They haven’t… It’s not that something bad has happened to them. There’s something to grieve there. Something bad has happened to us in terms of our loss and that kind of thing, but the person, from the perspective of the Christian faith, has been chosen by God and taken to himself. That’s not a bad thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. It’s hard. I mean, it’s a hard saying, but that’s because we’re materialist minded, because we function as though this life is all there is. That’s why it’s hard, and/or we don’t believe that God is really using the Israelites here.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we de-mythologize the text. We say what’s really going on is one tribe is killing its neighboring tribes and calling them demons to justify it. But that’s not what the text says.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, you could just simply say, “I don’t believe the text,” but that, of course… Then why be Christian?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Or why is it important? “It’s all a bunch of nonsense; who cares?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, why take the Bible seriously if you’re not going to take it seriously? Why is this book important if we’re not actually going to take it seriously. I think that that’s one of the most valuable things about what we’re trying to do with this show, to say: Okay, look. There is some hard, weird, difficult stuff in there, and we could either just say: Ehh, well, you know, people in the ancient world thought all kinds of things; or we can say: Well, this is in the text. They were all taking it seriously at the time. If I can stop assuming for a second that I’m just smarter and better informed than everyone who lived before me for thousands of years, then maybe there’s something there that we can come away with. Of course, this episode is sort of the par excellence with dealing with the weird and the difficult in the Bible.

I appreciate the conversation about that difficult thing, because it is hard. It is hard, yet nevertheless I think if we’re going to work on purging materialist thinking from our thoughts, then we really need to be willing to go all the way in terms of trusting in the providence of God and trusting that what he says that he intends and is going to do is true. That when he takes, for instance, a child to himself, that that actually is good for that child, and not just say, “Well, he’s pulling a fast one.”

All right. Let’s talk about some of these various specific groups, then.

Fr. Stephen: The book of Joshua, and all of these texts in Numbers and Deuteronomy that present this kind of gigantomachy, and even some of the later historical books in the Old Testament are presenting this picture of spiritual warfare. That’s not an allegorization of what they’re presenting; that’s what they’re presenting.

Fr. Andrew: Spiritual warfare.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there’s this war of Yahweh, the God of Israel, against these demonic forces who are enacting their will through these specific groups. So when we look at these specific groups, we see that kind of reinforced with each group. We talked about already a little bit the Amorites, as they’re called in the Old Testament, who are the Martu in most other ancient texts, as this group. “Martu” literally means Westerners.

Fr. Andrew: Interesting! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Because they came from the west to take over Achad and Sumer. But, yeah, they aren’t “West” from our perspective.

Fr. Andrew: And that’s the bunch that Hammurabi is from.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Hammurabi is the most famous one of them. And they, of course, claimed to have access to this wisdom from before the flood that had come through these spiritual beings, and that’s what made them powerful.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, by the way, you’ve said the word “gigantomachy” several times, and I’m not sure we actually defined it. I mean, if you know a little bit of Greek, you know basically it means war against giants. That’s what it is. It’s war against giants. I just wanted to put that out there.

Fr. Stephen: Right. The most famous… Hammurabi would be the most famous Amorite outside the Bible; probably the most well-known one inside the Bible, if any of them are well-known, would be Sihon, king of the Amorites, who, along with the guy we’re about to talk about… Israel makes war against him in the Transjordan under Moses before entering into the land of Canaan. That brings us to the second guy, Og. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Og.

Fr. Stephen: Og, king of Bashan, or Bashán.

Fr. Andrew: Og and Sihon—Síhon; I’m not sure how to pronounce it—are both… Those defeats are both commemorated in the psalms we use in the polyeleos that we sing. Like this morning: we’re recording this on November 25, which is the feast of St. Catherine on our calendar. This morning I sang the polyeleos, and in that is this, “We’ve defeated Og and Sihon.” It’s sung. It’s such an important victory that it gets sung about in the psalms.

Fr. Stephen: It gets mentioned again and again and again in the Old Testament, not just in those two psalms, but it gets mentioned again and again in Joshua, again and again in 2 Kings. It’s sort of: Why is this such a major event? We already talked about Og’s bed. Because these are these giant kings; these are these tyrant-kings, these demonically powerful kings, who were unstoppable, and this image of spiritual and worldly evil. And this rag-tag group that had just wandered around in the desert for years, with sort of makeshift farming implements turned into weapons, defeated them through the power of Yahweh, their God. So that victory is symbolic of so much. That’s why it’s repeated again and again and again and again.

And Og is the last of the Rephaim. The Rephaim are mentioned several times in this context. We’re going to see they’re mentioned in terms of being giants who were removed from the land in another place. They’re also, however, mentioned going forward in the book of Isaiah, when it’s talking about the underworld, the spirits of these dead kings, the shades of these dead kings. This is hidden, a lot of times, in English translations, where they translate it as “shades” or just “the dead.”

Fr. Andrew: “Will the dead arise and praise thee?” Right? That’s in the Six Psalms.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s Psalm 88 (or 87 in the Greek numbering), verse 10. That’s talking about: “Are the Rephaim going to praise…?” Well, obviously not. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: So Rephaim are… Does that term refer to them only after they’re dead? Or was it used for nephilim as they’re still on earth?

Fr. Stephen: It’s used for them still on earth, so when they come to Bashán (or Bashan), Og is the last of the Rephaim; the other ones have already been killed, but he’s still a Rephaim while he’s alive—who are these fully demonized kings. They’re sort of Exhibit A. So they become these sort of… Even once they die they become these sort of demonic spirits in the underworld.

Fr. Andrew: So does the word “Rephaim” and the word “nephilim,” are those essentially synonyms, or is there a distinction in how they’re used?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: No, they’re not synonyms?

Fr. Stephen: The Rephaim is a particular group of kings.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, all right.

Fr. Stephen: A particular group of giant kings. The term isn’t original to the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: The term is what they were called by everybody.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So when you look at Ugaritic, Ugarit was a city in what’s now Lebanon, that’s Ras Shamra. There that particular dialect of Old Canaanite is called Ugaritic. So the Baal cycle and other things are in Ugaritic. We have ritual texts, Ugaritic ritual texts, that, for example, when their king would die, whom they viewed as a god, there were a whole series of sacrifices and rites that were performed to try to appease the spirits of the dead Rephaim of these ancient kings, because they were going to meet the now-departed king on his way to Sheol, to try to appease them so they’d let him pass and not tear him… They were sort of these princes of the underworld now that they were dead.

Their tombs were these stone tombs called dolmen that are in what was Bashan, what’s now the Golan Heights. You can go there and see them, the remains of these tombs of these dead kings. That’s part of why Bashan, that whole area there in the north was considered haram; it’s right next to Mount Hermon. This was sort of a center of this evil and corruption. These show up there. Isaiah sort of uses, refers to that same idea that we see in the Ugaritic ritual texts; he’s actually talking in Isaiah 14 about the devil being cast down into the underworld. And it talks about the Rephaim rising up to meet him and greet him. So these are… Yeah, Og is the last one still alive. That, again, is why he’s such a major figure.

In the Greek Old Testament tradition, a lot of the places where the Hebrew text has “Gog,” as in “Gog and Magog”—

Fr. Andrew: Right. Which so excited Hal Lindsey in his Late Great Planet Earth back in the ‘70s or ‘80s if I remember correctly. Gog and Magog, the kings of the north.

Fr. Stephen: —the Greek actually has “Og.”

Fr. Andrew: Ohh, wow.

Fr. Stephen: It’s talking about the spirit of Og, this demonic spirit of Og as a dead Rephaim, coming back as a leader of the forces of evil.

Fr. Andrew: Yikes.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, Og’s a bad dude, and that’s why his defeat is such a major thing.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like defeating… It’s like, in The Lord of the Rings, defeating Sauron. We just defeated basically a demon guy! Yeah, it’s a major historical event.

Fr. Stephen: But this isn’t isolated. These are these two kings whom Israel meets on the way into the land. Before that they’d already had their run-in with the Amalekites.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, and if I remember correctly, the Amalekites—aren’t they the ones that attack them while they’re at Sinai; is that right?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, in an attempt to obliterate Israel sort of before Israel could even fully be formed and come of age.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so at Sinai they’re offering sacrifices to Yahweh. Moses is meeting God face to face. He’s being given the Law. And this giant clan comes up and interferes with this.

Fr. Stephen: And attacks Israel, and in the text the way it’s described is that they lay siege to the mountain, which had become the mountain of God.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s war on heaven.

Fr. Stephen: It refers to them trying to lay a hand on the throne of Yahweh. God’s saying, “They’re attacking me, in addition to you.” So again there’s this spiritual warfare element.

So why do we say that the Amalekites are a giant clan? It’s because Amalek, if you want a figure who is very clearly a giant, Amalek is your guy. [Laughter] Again, for some reason, people don’t spend a lot of time studying the genealogies of Esau. I don’t know why. [Laughter] But in Genesis 36:12, which is part of that genealogy of Esau, it talks about Esau’s grandson, who has wives and has children, and then it also says he has this son Amalek, and it says that he has this son Amalek with a concubine, a sexual slave, named Timna, who’s a Horite. The Horites are identified as nephilim in Deuteronomy. So this is someone from a giant clan who is a concubine, who is in a kind of ritual sexual slavery, and who is described as being literally the sister of Leviathan.

Fr. Andrew: Yikes! Where is that that’s she’s described as the sister of Leviathan?

Fr. Stephen: Right there in Genesis 36:12.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man.

Fr. Stephen: She’s identified as the sister of Lotan. That’s how it’s rendered in English, but “Lotan” in English, “Lotan” is a literal rendering of what we otherwise translate as “Leviathan.” It ended up being “Leviathan” in the early English translations for the same reason we got “Jehovah.” They kind of plugged in vowels around the Hebrew consonants.

Fr. Andrew: I’m just looking in Genesis 36 now, and the identification of Timna as Lotan’s sister is verse 22. Yeah, these parts that no one reads, right? [Laughter] But it’s a little bit earlier, in verse 12, where it says that she’s the one who becomes the concubine of Esau’s son, Eliphaz.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Or, well, the original text doesn’t say it’s his concubine. It just says she’s a a concubine.

Fr. Andrew: A concubine. Oh, oh, oh. I’m looking at the New King James here.

Fr. Stephen: Potentially a temple prostitute.

Fr. Andrew: Man. Careful whom you sleep with…

Fr. Stephen: Who’s a Horite. Who’s a Horite: who’s a member of one of these giant clans.

Fr. Andrew: Yikes!

Fr. Stephen: And we’re going to see that giant clan was destroyed by Esau’s descendants, the Horites. That was their part of the gigantomachy, of the war against the giants, was defeating the Horites. But Esau’s grandson went over and participated with the enemy. And Amalek was produced out of that.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, is there any indication that this union was—and again, parents, that is why we gave you this warning at the beginning of this episode!—is there any indication that this union was him—Eliphaz, just met some girl and, you know? Or is there any indication that he went over and participated in some kind of ritual act when he fornicated with her?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it doesn’t describe it in detail, but we’ve got these two pieces: she’s a Horite and a concubine.

Fr. Andrew: Right, why would you mention that?

Fr. Stephen: She’s a Horite concubine and the sister of Lotan, of Leviathan.

Now there’s a place where a Lotan is listed as a chief of the Horites, but it’s unclear if that’s saying they worshiped Lotan, if there was a giant chieftain named Lotan after Leviathan, this chaos monster, but you get the idea either way of what the text was indicating.

Fr. Andrew: Yikes. Right, that she’s bound up with demonic ritual sexual activity. She’s from a people who do that. She’s one of the people engaged in that. And this guy goes and lies with her. And you get Amalek.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and his other children, his legitimate children, are all Edomites. They’re the line of the Edomites. Amalek is this other thing who starts this other tribe and this other clan.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Yikes. Man, it does get weird when you get down deep. Read those genealogies! Although the thing is, of course, if I were… Like, I’ve read the whole Bible several times, so I’ve read this passage. There was never any point—never any point in the past—where I’ve read it and: oh, he’s… fornicating with this demon person. It’s just… You have to have some guide to know that that’s what’s going on here. Of course, ancient people reading things, hearing this, largely, for the first time, they would know all this context.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: Which we don’t.

Fr. Stephen: And when we’re reading it in English, too, not only do the genealogies… bunch of names I can’t pronounce—and you just sort of run through them. But also all of these -ites in the Old Testament start to just all blur together. Remembering that, oh, the Horites are a giant clan; oh, okay. And connecting a genealogy in Genesis to a passage we’re about to talk about in Deuteronomy! Which, if you get to Deuteronomy, if you don’t bail out of reading through the Bible somewhere in Leviticus or Numbers…

Fr. Andrew: Which a lot of people do.

Fr. Stephen: ...you’ve probably forgotten Esau’s genealogy by the time you get to Deuteronomy. Like, that’s not the piece you’ve held onto in your mind.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Wow. Oh, man. So I remember that the Amalekites, his tribe, eventually does get finally defeated by Israel, right?

Fr. Stephen: By David.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, by David in particular. So that’s the final defeat, but there was an earlier victory with Joshua at Refidim, with Moses. That’s where Moses holds up his hands.

Fr. Stephen: That’s when they attacked Israel at Sinai. That was self-defense not to get wiped out by the Amalekites.

Fr. Andrew: Got you.

Fr. Stephen: But then, because they had declared war on Yahweh and his people, that’s where, after that battle, after Israel wins that battle, that’s where Yahweh vows: this is it for them. They’ve declared war on me, so there aren’t going to be Amalekites.

Saul’s big sin that loses him the throne of Israel is not obeying God about the Amalekites. God tells him to go and wipe out the Amalekites as a giant clan, and instead he takes a bunch of their livestock and their treasure for his own treasure.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! You don’t do that!

Fr. Stephen: He takes their king captive to parade him around—

Fr. Andrew: No!

Fr. Stephen: —and brag about how Saul defeated him.

Fr. Andrew: Don’t do it, Saul!

Fr. Stephen: There’s this amazing moment where Yahweh sends the Prophet Samuel to confront Saul about it, and he sort of says, “Oh, did you do what God said with the Amalekites?” and Saul’s like, “Oh, yeah, yeah!” And Samuel says, “You know, I’m hearing a lot of sheep and goats bleating off in the distance. Could it be…?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Man.

Fr. Stephen: And Saul tries to just…

Fr. Andrew: That’s really interesting, because, again, if you have a kind of Sunday school level knowledge of the whole Saul and David story in all this, you just kind of get this idea that Samuel picks Saul at God’s command, and then God sort of changes his mind and decides that David’s the guy. But it’s really about his failure to engage in gigantomachy, his failure to do the thing that he was supposed to do. I mean, it’s just mind-blowing when you realize that major parts of the Old Testament story are about making war on giants.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! It’s a central aspect.

Fr. Andrew: Major parts! David, Samuel, I mean, this is… Yeah. Welcome, everybody. You’ve just taken your first step into a larger world.

Fr. Stephen: And this is described in sort of larger terms, or programmatic terms in Deuteronomy 2. Because the whole book of Deuteronomy, really, almost all of the book of Deuteronomy—parts of it are historical—but most of it is about as Israel is now coming to prepare to enter the land of Canaan, Moses gives sort of his parting, his farewell address, his last sermon. And that’s why there’s so much recapitulation of things from the rest of the Torah, where he’s reminding them and putting these things together and theologically tying these things together. Part of this is, as they’re approaching, they’re traveling through not just lands that belong to these Og and Sihon, but also sort of the lands of their cousins, their fellow Abrahamites—the Edomites, the Ammonites, the Moabites. Moab and Ammon were the sons of Lot, Abraham’s nephew. So they’re part of this larger Abrahamite family to whom God had promised this whole area of land. It wasn’t just to Israel. He promises this huge sweep of land; it’s to Abraham and his descendants, so there are these pieces that he’s already given at that point. Israel is kind of latecomers to the gigantomachy; the war’s already going on. He’s already given portions of this promised land to the Edomites, Esau’s descendants, and to the Ammonites and to the Moabites, Lot’s descendants.

When this is described, it describes how, when they came to that land, God brought them there, gave them that land, so Israel is not to take a single foot of it. That’s literally what it says. Not to take the breadth or length of a foot of that land from them, because God gave it to them. But they come there, God gives it to them, and they have to drive out the giants. And God drives the giants out before them.

So these clans are named who have already been destroyed. Sort of the headers for them are the Anakim, the sons of Anak, who cover several of these tribes; or the Rephaim, whom we already mentioned. Og is the last one; the reason Og is the last one is that the rest of them are already gone from these other groups descended from Abraham. So the Moabites have dispossessed the Emim to take Moab. Esau has dispossessed the Horites, the tribe that concubine was from. So this gives us another part of that picture, that Esau’s descendants were brought to the land of Edom to take it from the Horites, and his grandson sort of switches sides to the enemy and engages in this, and that’s where the Amalekites come from. But the Horites as a whole had been removed. The Zamzummim, which is probably the best tribe name.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right?

Fr. Stephen: Who are said to have been part of the Rephaim, were dispossessed by the Ammonites. And then the really interesting one, whom people gloss over: it says that the Avim were dispossessed by the Caphtorim, the people of Caphtor.

Fr. Andrew: Who were they?

Fr. Stephen: Caphtor is the ancient name for the island of Crete.

Fr. Andrew: Okay…

Fr. Stephen: And the people who were from Crete, whom this is talking about, are the Philistines.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, but aren’t… So are these one of the sea-peoples from the ancient world who do engage in this massive attack on…

Fr. Stephen: Yes. The invasion, as the Bronze Age collapsed. Human civilization collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, in the 11th century BC, and part of that was this invasion, this mass migration from Crete, the end of the Minoan civilization, this exodus, and one of those people were the Philistines. They were actually the Purasati, originally, but Egyptians apparently turned their Rs into Ls, so they ended up becoming the Pulasati. They tried to invade Egypt, they got repelled, and they settled along the coast.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and of course that’s where we get the word “Palestine” from as well. It’s interesting to think that there are giant clans living in what is now Palestine and Lebanon, and the ancient Palestinians, ancient Philistines, show up from Crete and wipe them out and settle those areas.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they found these cities: Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gaza, Gat (which usually pronounced Gath). So the thing here, though, that’s interesting is that we’ve got a bunch of Abrahamites, people descended from Abraham, and then we’ve got these Greeks who have shown up.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and they defeat giants.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so the question is: Well, wait, what are they doing here? It actually creates this interesting and weird thread in the Old Testament, the Christian Old Testament, that somehow the Greeks are descended from Abraham.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay…

Fr. Stephen: Which is bizarre, right? as an idea. And I’m not saying it’s genetically true.

Fr. Andrew: But if we think about descent and about being someone’s son, and as you said imaging the Father, these people, when they engage in gigantomachy, are acting like Israel.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s reflected. There’s this weird little thing. Again, 1 Maccabees, that I know not a lot of people have read in depth, but after the Maccabee brothers have successfully staged their revolution and gained independence for Judea from the Seleucid Greek empire, they are this small little independent kingdom surrounded by much more powerful kingdoms. In fact, they’re kind of on the border of the Seleucid Empire and the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt. So to try to not immediately be overtaken again, they sign these treaties. One of them is with Rome, which ends up going very badly; that’s how the Romans got into Judea and annexed it by the time you get to the New Testament. They were kind of invited.

The other one is with Sparta, with the Spartans. Part of the text of the treaty with Sparta is preserved in 1 Maccabees, and in it the Spartans say that Jewish envoys to them, Judean envoys to them, had shown them in the Jewish sacred texts that the Spartans were descended from Abraham and had a common cause with Judea, and that was the…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m looking at that verse now, and it’s like: We’re related; with both of our nations descended from Abraham. Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And the only text in the Torah that you can get that from is this one in Deuteronomy.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. That’s amazing.

Fr. Stephen: So at least that tradition, that idea, that “Hey, we had this common cause once, so we should have it again, many centuries later” is there later on in the Scriptures.

Once Joshua leads the people into the land, that’s his goal. The book of Joshua expressly says that that’s his goal. The end of the book of Joshua says, in Joshua 11:21-22: Okay, conquest is done because we’ve wiped out all the Anakim; we’ve taken care of the giants.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not: It’s done because we’ve grabbed the piece of real estate that God has set aside for us.

Fr. Stephen: Right, because they hadn’t actually taken all of the real estate that they were supposed to, but they had dispossessed the giants clans. There’s some stragglers at the end of the book of Joshua who it says escaped into the Philistine cities—and this is where things go bad with the Philistines. The Philistines become a problem then in the book of Judges and then for Saul and David and the early Israelite monarchy because they flip from being part of the gigantomachy to sort of giving aid and comfort to the enemy by receiving these giants and allowing them to continue their ways.

Fr. Andrew: So does that mean that the Philistines, then, did they begin to adopt the nephilim ritual or at least sort of let people in their midst who were doing it?

Fr. Stephen: They let people in their midst who were doing it.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Because, even when you get to Saul and David, they’re still commanded to take out these last members of the giant clans. They have to be removed. But God never tells them they have to obliterate the Philistines completely.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, I see. So the Philistines were obviously not doing that stuff themselves.

Fr. Stephen: Not wholesale. I mean, they were pagans. They were worshiping pagan gods. But there’s still this difference, where what these giant clans were doing is sort of over the line. Their cup of iniquity is full. This can’t be allowed to go on any more, because of its consequences, anywhere.

And then it’s David who ends up finishing up the gigantomachy. It’s David who ends up… Goliath being the most obvious example, who comes from Gat, from one of the cities where they took refuge; he’s portrayed as one of these refugees, or the descendants of these refugees.

Fr. Andrew: It’s interesting: he’s described as a Philistine, but he’s not actually a Philistine Philistine. He’s from a sort of immigrant community, so to speak.

Fr. Stephen: Right. He’s one of the Anakim, and they’re using him as sort of this special forces troop. There’s lots of stuff about the way Goliath is described. It’s significant that all of his armor and weaponry is described as being made of bronze, because bronze technology had been largely lost at that point; we’re at the beginning of the Iron Age.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, so he’s kind of this ancient warrior.

Fr. Stephen: His armor and weaponry is this throwback to the age when the Amorites were in power.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, wow.

Fr. Stephen: Sort of the height of Bronze Age civilization. He’s portrayed as the last of one of these ancient men of renown, one of the last of these nephilim, one of the last of these giants.

Fr. Andrew: And if I recall, he’s described as being—the number I grew up with was that he was nine feet tall. I remember hearing stories about that.

Fr. Stephen: Numbers are tricky in all ancient texts, because they didn’t have numerals. They did numbers with letters. Sometimes it gets confusing. Sometimes you can’t tell if something’s a number or a word, because the consonants just happen to make up a word, or they could be using it as a number. So that’s why, when you compare the Greek Old Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament, the numbers are all weird.

Fr. Andrew: They don’t match.

Fr. Stephen: They don’t match because it’s a translation issue. So depending, if you go by the Hebrew text he was 9’9”; if you go by the Greek text he was 6’6”. But since the average person at that time in Palestine was about five feet tall, the average adult male, he’s still bigger than everybody else.

Fr. Andrew: Either way, he’s huge. He’s like Shaquille O’Neal, even compared to tall people like you and me.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Either way, he’s big. But again, making the point of his height is another clue to you, along with the bronze armor and weaponry, all these things, to give you this picture of who he is, that he’s one of these, that he’s one of the last of these.

And David goes out and defeats him. This is part of what’s going on: Saul did go to war against the Amalekites, but he did it… His sin was doing it for his own glory and his own honor, as a battle-leader, rather than being the agent of God. That’s why David, when he goes to face Goliath, is so explicit about the fact. He says, “You come to me with your spear and your sword; I come to you in the name of Yahweh.” That it’s Yahweh who’s going to defeat him, and David’s just playing his small part, of being the way that God does it. That’s a deliberate…

Fr. Andrew: Right, and you get this sort of underdog kind of story: David and Goliath. There’s tiny little David and there’s big ol’ Goliath, and the only way that David’s able to defeat him is because of God’s help.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that’s really a misread is my point here, because it’s not about David the underdog beating the bigger guy. Yahweh is a lot bigger than Goliath. Goliath is the actual underdog, and he gets squished. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And David is the instrument of God.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Wow.

Fr. Stephen: So, yeah, David is the actual mighty man in this scheme. But then he goes on, and it’s narrated in 2 Samuel how David and his Gibborim, his mighty men, his commanders, take out the rest of basically Goliath’s clan, those last stragglers, and his defeat of the Amalekites is narrated, and this is what establishes David as king.

But this is important because, remember, David is our paradigm; David is our icon of who the Messiah, who the Christ is going to be.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right, so David is the king of Israel, David defeats the giants completely, totally, and then when Jesus shows up and says he’s the Son of David, and everyone calls him that, he’s doing battle directly with spirits. He’s doing exorcisms, he’s sending them into the abyss…

Fr. Stephen: The same beings. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Okay, so let’s… I mean, this is a super deep-dive episode. So when we were doing prep, we talked about, for instance, the exorcism of Legion, where the spirits are sent from Legion into the pigs, and they go down the embankment and are drowned in the water—at their request; they request to go into the pigs.

Fr. Stephen: Rather than the abyss, but they end up in the abyss anyway.

Fr. Andrew: Jesus kind of pulls a fast one on them, because drowning in the water is understood as a descent into the abyss.

I remember we talked about this, and I realized I was unclear on what exactly was happening. The way that I understood, which now I understand is incorrect—the way I understood the nephilim ritual and then these spirits that go into the pigs is that you get this demonized person who comes as the fruit of the nephilim ritual, and they’ve got a demon hanging around in them, with them, and then they die, and then eventually some of those demons end up in Legion and then get sent into the pigs. But that’s a little bit wrong, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s not how people at the time of Christ understood it.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. All right. Let’s take the deep dive and talk about exactly what we’re looking at with those spirits.

Fr. Stephen: This is an extension of what we were talking about in terms of that anti-theosis. This is that come to fruition.

Fr. Andrew: Demonosis. [Laughter] I don’t know that there’s a good word for this, but that’s the word I’ve picked.

Fr. Stephen: We have one of these nephilim, one of these giants, one of these leaders, chiefs, members of this giant clan who’s participating in these rituals. That means they have this relationship of fatherhood and sonship with this demonic spirit who is a fallen angelic being.

Fr. Andrew: So they’re imaging their father.

Fr. Stephen: They’re imaging them, they’re bringing their works… St. John uses this language in 1 John. It talks about, not just the sonship starting with Cain and his line in 1 John, but also the idea that Christ came to destroy the works of the devil, that these works are brought into the world through these people who are in this relationship with these beings. But just as, in theosis, when we become sons of God, that means our transformation to become like God—we talk about that as being divinized: we become by grace what Christ is by nature—the same thing happens to such an unrepentant person who has this kind of relationship with the demonic, where they become demonized. So the understanding was that the Rephaim, whom we were talking about, these other nephilim, they, through their actions and their ritual practices and their worship, are changed and transformed and become like the demons in every way.

Fr. Andrew: Although there’s one exception as to the way they become like them, right? Which is that they don’t have demon bodies.

Fr. Stephen: Right. When their soul or spirit is separated from their human body, they are an evil spirit; they are a demonic spirit. So the way it was understood in the first century AD, and for at least a few centuries before that, minimally a few centuries before that, is that these unclean spirits, the spirits we see in the synoptic gospels, who are the subject of Christ’s exorcism, are the spirits of these dead nephilim who have become demonic and demonized. 90% of them are in the abyss according to the book of Jubilees; the other 10% are still roaming around, and that’s why they’re unclean spirits, because they’re a mixture.

Fr. Andrew: So we could call them demons, but that’s actually only relatively true about them, because they’re not fallen angels. These are fallen humans.

Fr. Stephen: Right.

Fr. Andrew: But they become so fallen they are essentially demons. It’s interesting: sometimes in the Orthodox Church we talk about monastics living the angelic life. And, boy, doesn’t that sort of throw all of this into stark relief when you think about what exactly that means! They functionally become angels. They don’t become angels in kind of a terms of a species change…

Fr. Stephen: Ontologically, right, in terms of changing species. That’s what we were talking about with the saints and theosis. This is the flip-side; this is the dark side of theosis. This is demonization as opposed to divinization.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Man…

Fr. Stephen: In the same way that the saints in heaven are like the angels and fulfilling this angelic role and functioning in the role that the angelic powers had functioned in and have functioned in, these demonic spirits of these fully demonized people are like the demons and are functioning in this demonic role.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Man. Before we go to break, we had a question that came over the speakpipe, but before we talk about that, I just wanted to underline that this notion of gigantomachy is not just an Ancient Near Eastern thing, right? There are other cultures that talk about wars with giants?

Fr. Stephen: Pretty much all of them have some version.

Fr. Andrew: So pretty much like the flood is everywhere, everybody’s got wars with giants. The ones that I think of right off the top of my head is Ragnarok, the Norse story, where you’ve got gods versus giants. Now, mind you, obviously it starts getting mixed up when you try to make it into an allegory of the real war…

Fr. Stephen: It’s not an allegory.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you can’t say, for instance, that Odin and Thor, for instance, on the “good side” of that Norse war are actually angelic beings fighting against the giants, because, as you said, it’s a kind of pagan propaganda, like: “Yeah, we defeated the giants.” Ah, actually, no, you were on their side… [Laughter] But, yeah, so what other cultures have this kind of giant story, this giant-war story?

Fr. Stephen: In Celtic stories, you’ve got the Fomorians, who are sort of these misshapen giants, because they’re part-human, part-fairy.

Fr. Andrew: Yup! Yup! Part-human, part-fairy! Yep.

Fr. Stephen: That kind of makes sense. And they’re tyrants, they’re cannibalistic… [Laughter] And they had to be defeated in order to take possession of the area.

Possibly the most famous… I mean, if you look up “gigantomachy” on the internet, you’re probably going to find the Greek form of the story. Gaia, who is the mother of the Titans—we already talked about how the Titans in a lot of ways are parallel to these rebellious angels who were responsible for the nephilim in the first place, who get imprisoned in Tartarus. In fact, St. Peter in 2 Peter talks about the angels who sinned in the time, in the past, having been confined to Tartarus: he uses the word “Tartarus” to make that parallel. So Gaia’s mad that the Titans have been imprisoned, so to get revenge for the Titans, she sends the giants out of the earth to go and sort of counter-attack. These figures play out a lot in the visions of Daniel and then the visions of Revelation, through that; the giant Typhon, who’s another sort of monstrous creature that Gaia sends to get revenge for the Titans. A lot of the depictions about the antichrist that you find in Daniel and Revelation are based on that, are based on this story. There’s this figure who’s coming to get “revenge” for the Titans, for these angels who produced the nephilim and who were imprisoned. That continues into the patristic period. St. Irenaeus, one of his proposed readings for what 666 represents is the name “Titan.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh wow. Man.

Fr. Stephen: So these stories are sort of… It’s not just that these are versions of the same story in different cultures; it’s that the ancient Israelites, the people of the Second Temple period and the early Christians saw a connection between those Greek and Roman stories, and as they played out in the actual ritual religion and worship of the Greeks and the Romans, and the truth which they saw as preserved in their Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Okay. So we got a question from Christopher who left us a message, and I’m going to play that now and we’re going to try to answer it briefly before we go to break. Here’s what Christopher had for us.

Christopher: Good morning. This is Christopher from Tucson, and I was wondering if the depictions of St. Christopher as a giant in the West or as a dog-headed person in the East had any connection with the giants in the Bible. Thank you so much, and have a very good day.

Fr. Andrew: Fr. Stephen and I talked about this before, when we were preparing for the show. Both of us kind of concluded we didn’t have much to say about this, but I thought it would be kind of cool to put it out on this episode just to kind of get it out there. The one thing… I don’t know, I mean, I can’t comment on how accurate it is, but I just recommend that you check out: there’s an article by Jonathan Pageau called “Understanding the Dog-Headed Icon of St. Christopher,” and he does actually talk about the fact that St. Christopher is depicted in Western iconography as a giant, and he relates that to stuff that’s in the Scripture about giants. It’s a really interesting article. Like I said, I can’t comment on its accuracy or whatever; I do like a lot of the stuff that Jonathan Pageau does, so I do recommend you check that. Did you want to add anything to that, Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: No, that punt suffices for me, too.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, well, let’s go to break!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back for the third half of our show. Just as a reminder, this is a pre-recorded episode, so even though the soothing voice of Steve just suggested you call in, please don’t call. There won’t be anybody to take your call. But this is, like I said, a pre-recorded episode, and we did take some of your questions and comments and stuff, and we’re incorporating them into this particular episode.

All right, well, now we’re going to talk about the way that these biblical texts and traditions and understandings of what’s going on in those biblical texts were received in the Church, in especially the early years and we’ll look at some of the later stuff as well. And this is probably some of the points where we’re going to have a little bit of controversy that we’re going to actually highlight a little bit. But it doesn’t have to be controversial, I think, and honestly I believe that the way that we’ve read it makes sense of the biblical text, and, as you’re about to discover, this is the way that almost all of the earliest Church Fathers read it as well. Isn’t that right?

Fr. Stephen: Absolutely. We’re also going to talk about why those later Fathers who didn’t, didn’t.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so we’re going to underline the fact that there is a discrepancy between the way that the earlier Church Fathers read these texts and the way that some later Church Fathers read these texts. Just to kind of help frame that, we should say that the fact that some Fathers read it one way and other Fathers read it another way does not mean that the patristic tradition is bunk. [Laughter] It doesn’t mean that! It means that this is one of those areas where they actually do disagree, and it’s a real disagreement. You can’t kind of hold both positions at the same time. And it’s okay to disagree with some Fathers about certain things. [Laughter] Not about everything.

Fr. Stephen: When they disagree with each other, you kind of have to. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right! What else can you do? So I’ll just also say that even if you’ve listened to this point in this episode and you’re like, “I do not agree with the way those two priests just read all that stuff; that’s not what’s happening” or whatever—fine. That’s okay. But at the same time, there is space within the Church to have these conversations and not to anathematize each other because we’re reading “giants” differently. I think that the reading that we’ve taken makes the most sense of the biblical text and that the other one kind of doesn’t. So anyways, let’s look at a sampling of what’s going on in the Church Fathers.

Fr. Stephen: Just to set out, even before we do that, there’s a methodological thing here, of: How do we approach an issue like this, where there’s disagreement in the Church Fathers and there’s different traditions and there’s different understandings? How do we interact with that? Because one very negative thing I’ve seen—this may be especially prominent in internet Orthodoxy, which…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Interdoxy.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, which I was about to say isn’t really Orthodoxy, but that’s not totally fair. —is this idea that, well, okay, if one Father says one thing and another Father says another thing, or it looks like that, then I just pick the one I like better.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. We’re not saying that.

Fr. Stephen: Right? “If I can find a Father who says something I want to believe, I’m okay to hold that as an Orthodox Christian because some Father did. I think, or I have a proof-text that would indicate that.”

So the methodology that we’re about to use and that I think is correct and the way to approach this is, with an issue like this we’ve got the witness of the Old Testament, we’ve got the witness of the New Testament, we’ve got the witness of the Fathers. So if you’re going to take a position on an issue like this, any issue that’s like this where there’s disagreement, you need to present how your position takes into account all of the Old Testament data, all of the New Testament data, the patristic data that agrees with you, and explains the patristic data that doesn’t agree with you, meaning that explains these Fathers, who know Christ better than I do—whatever position you take on this one, for example, you’re going to have to say that some Fathers who know Christ far better than I do—know the Scriptures far better than I do, are more spiritual and more holy than I am, somehow got it wrong. If your view can’t explain that, then your view doesn’t work.

If you take the view, some view in some obscure writing of one Church Father, and say, “Okay, this is the one I agree with,” you’ve got to explain to me how every other Church Father got it wrong, for two thousand years: that’s why that’s not a good approach.

In terms of Church Fathers who talk about what we were just talking about… Well, before we get into the Church Fathers, let’s talk about the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, which we haven’t really, talked much about the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: We already mentioned the fact that even before the New Testament, in the Septuagint proper, the translation by the Seventy of the Torah, they translated in Genesis 6:1-4 this as being angels of God, human women, and giants. So there’s that before we even get to… And of course, this is the primary way in which not necessarily all of the apostles were reading the Scriptures, because St. Paul was certainly plenty fluent in Hebrew, but it’s the way they interact. Because the New Testament is in Greek, that’s the text that they’re quoting and that they’re interacting with in the New Testament text.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so our first witness, our first sort of canonical, if we want to put it that way, witness to interpreting the Hebrew Old Testament, reasonably, we could say, is the Septuagint, because it’s a translation, and it interprets that passage from Genesis 6, as we said when we first started this, as talking about angels having relations in some way and giants being produced as a result of that. Those are the words that are actually used in the Septuagint Greek.

Fr. Stephen: When we get into the New Testament in particular, we find the stories we’ve just been talking about, about the angels who revealed things to humanity and then rebelled and were imprisoned and produced the giant “offspring” as their sons is referred to several times in what are called the general epistles, 1 and 2 Peter and Jude. The one in 1 Peter a lot of people take in a different way. I don’t want to… We could spend two hours just talking about this. [Laughter] I’ll put it to you this way…

Fr. Andrew: Restrain yourself, Fr. Stephen! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: 1 Peter 3:19-20 talks about Christ’s proclamation in his descent into Hades to the spirits who were imprisoned there who sinned in the days of Noah. That reference to “in the days of Noah” is kind of clear and unavoidable. If you want really solid evidence of that, St. Augustine, who was one of the first Church Fathers to take a view different from the one we’re talking about of who the giants were and whether there were fallen angels involved, when he comes to this text, admits he doesn’t know what it means. He says, “I don’t know why it says ‘in the days of Noah’,” because he wants to read the text as talking about Christ preaching the Gospel in terms of giving certain people in Hades a second chance at repentance? And then he’s like: Well, I don’t know why Noah: Why them? Why not anybody else?

Fr. Andrew: So he’s basically admitting that he doesn’t have this frame of reference.

Fr. Stephen: Right, he doesn’t know what to do… Because he’s rejected, consciously rejected what we’ve been explaining, he doesn’t know what to do with that reference to spirits who sinned in the days of Noah. He can’t fit it in.

2 Peter 2:4-9 talks about angels who sinned and who are imprisoned in chains of gloomy darkness. That “chains of gloomy darkness” phrase is essentially a phrase from 1 Enoch, talking about the imprisonment of the angels who created the nephilim. And I would also add that if you want to say this isn’t talking about that, that this isn’t talking about Genesis 6, you’re going to have to show me somewhere else in the Old Testament where angels are said to have sinned, angels plural.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and it’s also kind of interesting… I’m looking at some of the translation notes for 2 Peter 2:4. The translation I’m reading says, “If God did not spare the angels who sinned but threw them into hell, locked them up in chains in utter darkness,” what’s interesting is that the phrase that gets translated as “threw them into hell” sometimes is translated as “casting them into Tartarus,” but it’s actually a verb tartaröo, which I would translate as sort of Tartar-ized, became Tartar-ized. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Which doesn’t mean they had tartar sauce poured upon them.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they became Tartar-ized, so that’s this reference to imprisoning these spirits in this place where you put Titans.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s very clear what St. Peter’s talking about. You could try and argue he’s using it as an analogy or something, but there’s no clear other thing that he could be speaking about.

Fr. Andrew: And in verse 5 it mentions specifically Noah. There it is. And then the flood. Right.

Fr. Stephen: And you see the same thing: the text of 2 Peter, the text of Jude’s epistle are very close. Again, I’m not going to spend hours going into the different ideas of the relationship between the two, but you find the same kind of thing in Jude; verses 6-7 were also referring to this event. Just to hammer on it one more time, they speak about angels, plural, sinning. I know there are some folks who disagree with us about what we presented about there not having been this sort of fall of the devil and a whole bunch of angels before the world was created. I won’t go into that again. But even if you hypothesize that that’s the case, that’s not talked about anywhere in the Old Testament. So then you’re saying: Okay, St. Peter and St. Jude are referring to something that’s not in the Old Testament, so then I’ll say: Okay, show me that in Jewish literature from the Second Temple period—and it’s not there. The only thing that’s there in terms of an angelic rebellion where the rebels are imprisoned is this tradition that you see recorded in the book of Enoch, that you see alluded to in Genesis 4 and 6, and the origin of the giants.

We’ve already got… We’ve at least shown that the view we’re talking about… We went through the Old Testament in some detail. We’ve now talked about the New Testament. So when you get to, for example, St. Irenaeus, in his On the Apostolic Preaching… On the Apostolic Preaching, St. Irenaeus is summarizing the preaching of the apostles, what they taught. Yes, go ahead and read this quote.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, we’ve got a quote here. This is from chapter 18 of On the Apostolic Preaching, St. Irenaeus.

And for a very long while, wickedness extended and spread and reached and laid hold upon the whole race of mankind until a very small seed of righteousness remained among them. And illicit unions took place upon the earth, since angels were united with the daughters of the race of mankind, and they bore to them sons who for their exceeding greatness were called giants. And the angels brought as presents to their wives teachings of wickedness, and that they brought the virtues of roots and herbs, dyeing and herbs and cosmetics, the discovery of rare substances, love potions, aversions, amours, concupiscents, constraints of love, spells of bewitchment, and all sorcery and idolatry hateful to God, by the entry of which things into the world evil extended and spread while righteousness was diminished and enfeebled.

Pretty clearly St. Ireneaus taking exactly the view that we just described.

Fr. Stephen: And he’s not just saying he personally holds this view; he’s saying this is what the apostles taught. And he is the spiritual grandson of St. John the Evangelist.

Fr. Andrew: Because his teacher, as he says, was Polycarp, and Polycarp was the disciple of John.

Fr. Stephen: He was in a position to know, at least to know better than me!

Fr. Andrew: And this is, what, mid second century, early second century?

Fr. Stephen: Mid second century.

Fr. Andrew: So he’s within 60 years of the death of the last apostle.

Fr. Stephen: And this isn’t isolated. St. Justin Martyr in the second century, same thing. Even into the third century we see the same thing. In the third century we’re primarily talking about Origen and Tertullian, yes, who aren’t saints, and so that’s why I’m not quoting them at length about it. Tertullian actually thought the book of Enoch was canonical, and Origen did at the beginning of his career and then said, “Well, things are kind of swinging against it.” This interesting thing happened in early Church history where, in the second and first half of the third centuries, a lot of people weren’t sure if St. Jude’s epistle was canonical.

People may know: St. Jude’s epistle actually quotes the book of Enoch as prophecy, says that Enoch is a prophet and said this. So people actually argued from the book of Enoch for the canonicity of St. Jude’s epistle, and then about halfway through the second century—and Origen talks about this, because it was happening during his lifetime—that flipped, and by that time almost everyone had accepted St. Jude’s epistle, and from there on people start arguing for the book of Enoch based on St. Jude’s having quoted it!

Fr. Andrew: That’s cool! And just so people can look up where this is, this is in verse 14 of Jude; that’s where he begins quoting Enoch.

Fr. Stephen: That he quotes, right. And these things are referenced other places. Obviously the book of Enoch does not end up being part of the canon—unless you’re Ethiopian—and the reason for that is that Ethiopian Christianity, at its earliest stage… Sometimes when I mention the Ethiopian canon, people will say, “Well, they’re non-Chalcedonian, so they don’t count.” But they didn’t change the contents of their Bible after the Council of Chalcedon; this is what they always had. Because the Ethiopian Jews considered it authoritative. Their Old Testament canon is the canon of Ethiopian Jews, that they adopted, so they have this continuous line of it.

And so that continues, though, in the Church, all the way up until, in the ninth century, you have George Synkellos. So we’re in the Byzantine period, and he describes 1 Enoch—what we call 1 Enoch, the book of Enoch—as being an apostolic apocryphon, “apocryphon” meaning hidden. It’s hidden in that we don’t read it publicly in the church.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not hidden in the sense “we keep this locked away in a vault because no one’s supposed to read this.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right; we don’t read it publicly. It’s a book to be read in the home, not in the churches. But “apostolic” because he believed it preserves part of the apostolic preaching, as St. Irenaeus had said centuries beforehand. And George Synkellos, when he writes his chronicle of world history, talks about the exact same thing that St. Irenaeus talked about, with the angels and the humans. So he still holds this position, in addition to still seeing the value of the book of Enoch and its apostolic connection.

We’re about to talk about the view that sort of comes to predominance among the Church Fathers, but I wanted to make it clear that the view we’ve been describing, that’s the universal view of the first three centuries, almost four centuries, of the Church, doesn’t just go away; it isn’t that everyone rejects it.

Fr. Andrew: So what do we do with this idea that some people have who say, “Well, you know, they were chiliasts in the early Church, but eventually the Church kind of ruled against that, and we don’t believe in chiliasm.” Could we say that the Church has rejected the depiction of giants and so forth as given in the Enochic literature that we’ve been talking about? Has the Church rejected it and settled on something else?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s why it’s so important to point out that this view still stays around in the Byzantine period. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And there’s not… So there is conciliar rejection of chiliasm by virtue of the way that the creeds are written and so forth. There is no conciliar rejection of this reading of the giants story.

Fr. Stephen: The Orthodox Church has very few dogmas. The idea that one of them is a particular interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4 is kind of silly on the face.

Fr. Andrew: And honestly, every Pascha there’s that canon that’s sung. It’s actually the Canon of Holy Saturday, but it gets then repeated during the Midnight Office or the Nocturns of Pascha, in which it talks about the Passover and the Exodus, and it describes Pharaoh as being this persecuting giant of old. It’s interesting that this language is in our liturgical texts. It’s there.

Fr. Stephen: And references to watchers, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: I have seen—I did see a translation of that text which actually refers to the persecuting Pharaoh of old. I get why they used that, but it actually—the word is “giant.” The word is “giant.” That’s what’s in there.

Fr. Stephen: There are some recensions of it that say “tyrant,” but as we were saying, that’s a synonym.

The other view that comes to predominance is actually the Rabbinic Jewish view. That’s where it originates. It originates in Rabbinic Judaism, because… And I know we’ve mentioned this on the show before, but there’s this huge problem in Western theology caused by the assumption that the “Jews” of any given period of history are identical to the Rabbinic Jews in your local synagogue, and that’s just not the [case]. Rabbinic Judaism is really something that comes into existence between the second and fifth centuries and is only codified in the fifth and sixth centuries with the Talmud. It’s a reaction. The Talmud, any Talmudic scholar—go ask an Orthodox Jewish Talmudic scholar; they’ll tell you that a lot of the Talmud is a reaction to the Christian tradition that had emerged.

Fr. Andrew: So the particular Rabbinic interpretation of this that we’re going to talk about briefly now is that the so-called “sons of God” in Genesis 6 are not angels, are not angelic beings, contrary to what the Septuagint says about them, contrary to all this other stuff that we’ve been mentioning, but are actually the descendants of Seth, Seth the son of Adam and Eve. So then the notion of him being a son of God is more metaphorical than an angelic reference. And then that’s what happens, that there’s an intermarrying between descendants of Seth and descendants of Cain, and then that’s what this is about, so it’s not about… And often this interpretation is put forward because: Well, how could demons interbreed with human beings?

That essentially just shows ignorance of what the nephilim ritual actually involved, which is that there’s, from a material point of you, like if you were to sort of videotape the thing—again, this is why we give this trigger warning for parents at the beginning—if you were to videotape the ritual, you would see two human beings engaging in fornication. You wouldn’t necessarily visibly see a demon involved in this. But saying, “Well, demons can’t hybridize with human beings,” is a misunderstanding of what that ritual actually involves, because it just suggests that there are two human beings involved: a human woman and a fallen angel. That’s because of a reading of Genesis 6 where these other details, which are not mentioned there, are not taken into account, but as we’ve mentioned there’s all kinds of evidence that this is what was going on. Again, that these are regarded as being two-thirds divine; that means that there’s three beings involved in their conception.

Well, let’s talk about that a little bit.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The non-Christian Jewish communities ended up rejecting all of the Enochic literature, all of the literature from their own tradition that recorded this part of the tradition. They did this in the second and third centuries, and we have second- and third-century Church Fathers who talk about how the Jews had rejected, for example, the book of Enoch, because it was too Christian. That’s literally how they phrased it. So this is a repudi- This is how Christians were taking it, pretty much universally, as we’ve just said, and so the Jewish community repudiated that and came up with what’s called the Sethite hypothesis sometimes in the literature, that it’s the line of Seth and the line of Cain.

This gets adopted by Church Fathers. The first, very first sort of Church Father… I mean, Julius Africanus is not famous; we’ll put it that way. I think he’s a Church Father, but he’s the first Christian to sort of adopt this, and then we see it show up in St. Ephraim the Syrian in the East, and then St. Augustine in the West. We’re talking about the very late, very end of the fourth century, very beginning of the fifth century where this first appears in Christian writings of the Sethite hypothesis…

Fr. Andrew: Just to help people date: Sextus Julius Africanus—not to be confused with Julius Africanus, who was an earlier person; so this is a Christian; the earlier one was not a Christian—he was born the year 160 and dies in 240, so he writing relative relatively late second century, early third century. He’s the earliest data point we have for this view. He’s a Libyan.

Fr. Stephen: When it starts, when you get prominent people—St. Ephraim and St. Augustine: St. Ephraim’s at the end of the fourth, and St. Augustine is writing at the beginning of the fifth—then that’s when the view kind of goes mainstream.

Fr. Andrew: Because of their influence.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and comes to become the predominant view among the Church Fathers. Now, that said, St. Augustine, as we already mentioned, like he doesn’t know what to do with that reference to the days of Noah. He also has this weird ambivalent discussion of the book of Enoch, because he says: Well, okay, St. Jude says Enoch is a prophet and he wrote this and it’s a quote from the book of Enoch, so… Enoch wrote something, and at least some of what’s in the book of Enoch must be that. So he tries to argue: Well, the book of Enoch is so old, it comes from before the flood. And you get people like St. Jerome, who’s St. Augustine’s contemporary, giving protracted arguments of how the book of Enoch would have survived the flood, like: Noah must have had a copy on the ark, and we just copied from there! [Laughter] Which to us seems like extreme special pleading, but for the Fathers this was… you know.

St. Augustine was saying this text we have now must represent Enoch’s work, but he says: Look, that makes it so old. We can’t verify what in this text we have now actually comes from Enoch and what doesn’t. And then he makes this circular argument where he says you can’t trust this story about the watchers, about these sinful angels, in the book of Enoch, because not everything in the book of Enoch is true and goes back to Enoch. So you say to him: Well, what’s an example of something that’s not true and doesn’t go back to Enoch? And he says: Well, the watchers story.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] “It’s untrustworthy because it has stuff like this story in it, so you can’t believe this story.” This is circular argument. So he has some problems even getting this view forward.

But there are more basic problems with this view. For example, it doesn’t make sense of the Old Testament data, because, okay, before the flood the line of Seth and the line of Cain intermingle, somehow that makes giants. We’re just going to…

Fr. Andrew: Who are impressive enough in some way that when the people of Israel show up to Canaan that the spies…

Fr. Stephen: We’re not even there yet! We’re before the flood still. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, exactly, before the flood. But I mean, the point is that when people see giants in the Old Testament, they’re freaked out by them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This has some kind of impressive element. I don’t know why marrying your sort of distant cousin from a different child of Adam would do anything like that.

Fr. Andrew: Why would it make heroes?

Fr. Stephen: You have the problem after the flood of: Did the line of Cain and the line of Seth survive the flood independently somehow, and then mingle again—

Fr. Andrew: So you get more giants.

Fr. Stephen: —to make the nephilim after the flood? Then how does that work? Old Testament-wise, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Fr. Andrew: I remember reading that there is some passage—and I think we should spend a moment or two on this, because I know you did some research about this—there is some passage in St. John Chrysostom where he takes the Sethite view. Is that actually his view?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, there’s… It’s hard to know for sure.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, why? Why is it hard to know that for sure?

Fr. Stephen: If he does take that view, he’s taking that view around 412, 413.

Fr. Andrew: So relatively late compared to…

Fr. Stephen: This is after. This is post-St. Ephraim, post-St. Augustine.

Fr. Andrew: It’s reasonable that he would have taken that view.

Fr. Stephen: That he would have taken that view, right. The place where he really takes that view and spells it out is in a set of homilies where there are a lot of theories, because he’s got two sets of homilies on Genesis, essentially, and scholars disagree about how those relate to each other. A lot of people argue that he gave both, and try to make one the earlier set and one the later set so it’s sort of a revision. Or they’ll say one represents notes taken by a different person on the same homilies.

The dating in the early fifth century is secure, but there are also a significant number of people—and these people include St. Photius the Great, his notes on the library at Constantinople—who think that what are now considered to be the later homilies weren’t St. John Chrysostom, or at least reflect another hand. That someone else came and revised them. It’s very possible St. John Chrysostom held this view; I’m not arguing that he didn’t. It’s also very possible that we don’t know what view he held, and this was sort of expanded upon by a later editor of his homilies. Certainly you go later in the fifth century, sixth century, there are plenty of people who held the Sethite hypothesis, who would have, could have done that.

Fr. Andrew: So the point being: it’s not a slam-dunk to use this text from Chrysostom and say: Well, that’s what Chrysostom’s view was and that’s it, period.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and therefore that’s right. Yeah, absolutely, against all the other… That’s a methodological problem. [Inaudible] So in addition to this view not working with the Old Testament, the view doesn’t work with the New Testament. Those passages that we just read in 1 and 2 Peter and Jude as we already talked about a little: Who are these angels, then? Why were they after strange flesh, which he talked about? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Right, it just kind of creates these sort of dangling bits that then aren’t integrated into the rest of the Old Testament narrative, then as commented on in the New Testament.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Then the last piece, as we talked about: Okay, so then either side has to explain why the other group of Fathers got it wrong.

Fr. Andrew: In other words, why, if they did get it wrong, then at least let’s understand how they possibly could have gotten it wrong, because you can’t just sort of leave it there.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We’re not going to say any of the Fathers didn’t know what they were talking about; we’re not going to say that any of the Fathers were dumb. We’re not going to say that.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: I will leave it to someone who holds to the Sethite hypothesis to explain to me how all of the earliest Church Fathers most closely connected to the apostles got it wrong; that’s up to them. I don’t know how you would do that, but I won’t straw-man them by making an argument and defeating it. I’ll let them put that forward.

But I will put forward that it’s very clear how the later Fathers, beginning at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century and onward, would have not understood what was going on, because what we find, first of all, is the Fathers who start moving to the Sethite hypothesis are all approaching the other view as being: an angel appears to a human woman, has intercourse with her, she gets pregnant and has a baby that’s half-angel, half-human.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and they’re saying that’s not possible because angels don’t have bodies that could reproduce with human bodies.

Fr. Stephen: That could reproduce, right.

Fr. Andrew: So in other words, the thing that they’re rejecting is not even what the ancient tradition is.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They’re rightly rejecting that.

Fr. Andrew: They’re rejecting a misunderstanding.

Fr. Stephen: If someone proposed that… And we did the child-warning, so I’ll go ahead and say it. Their issue was not about the sexuality; their issue was about the reproduction, because St. Augustine, for example, demonstrably believed in incubi and succubi. So that wasn’t the part that they thought was impossible; it was the reproduction part. So that’s not what the tradition was claiming. So first of all, they’re rejecting that.

Now why wouldn’t they know what the tradition was actually claiming? St. John Cassian, who’s one of the people in the fifth century who takes the Sethite hypothesis, gives us a really good clue. St. John Cassian, who’s a saint who’s very important to me and whom I respect a great deal but disagree with about this, when he’s talking about how you know the Sethite hypothesis is right and the other isn’t—because he’s writing in the early fifth century; there’s this… The predominant view is the one he’s not taking at the time he’s writing.

He says, well, if this is what happened, why isn’t it still happening now? That’s his question. And we’ve gotten a lot of questions when we talk about this, like: Could this happen now? [Laughter] So he’s asking the same question, but he says: Look, that doesn’t seem to be happening now. If that’s what happened before, why isn’t it? The answer to St. John is: Yeah, it wasn’t happening in the Provence.

Fr. Andrew: Where he lived.

Fr. Stephen: It wasn’t happening in Marseilles, where his monastery of St. Victor was. It was happening in Mesoamerica and in China and Japan and the Khmer Empire and…

Fr. Andrew: So he didn’t see it happening. He was looking at a fundamentally different set of data than what the earliest Church Fathers were, because they were living in different times. And John Cassian lives in a time in which Christianity has conquered a lot of the world, whereas the earliest Fathers are living in times… For instance, Justin Martyr writes these apologies to the emperor to try to explain Christianity, at least partly to convince the emperor not to kill so many Christians, because that’s his world. He’s living in a pagan world in which Christianity is a little minority. So he’s surrounded by pagans doing pagan things, including probably the nephilim ritual.

Fr. Stephen: Right, these rituals, mystery cults, they’re offering sacrifices to the emperor as a god-king… This is very real to him; he sees this all happening. He has an understanding what this is talking about. St. John Cassian had never seen an animal sacrifice take place. So that changes your perspective.

Paganism really started dying at the beginning of the second century AD, or the beginning of the third century; I’m sorry. The beginning of the third century, the beginning of the 200s AD. That was for two reasons. Number one, Christianity was just clearly ascendant in the Roman Empire, and the old pagan rites weren’t fulfilling. So what you see is paganism start trying to Christianize itself to compete. You see this in Neoplatonism; it’s just trying to Christianize Platonism.

Fr. Andrew: Or Julian the Apostate wishing that pagans were basically moral in the way that Christians are moral.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, in the fourth century. He’s the last gasp of trying to turn the clock back. But you see this in all these Gnostic sects that arise; [they’re] just attempts to Christianize mystery religions and different cultic ritual aspects of pagan religion, sort of put a Christian veneer on them to try to get that audience. Someone in our Facebook group posted some quotes from Hermes Trismegistus, from the Hermetic literature from the third century, from the third period, which is very clearly adopting all this Christian language and Christian ideas, and it is a kind of quasi-Gnostic framework. They’re trying to compete!

Part of that was, by the middle of about the third century, animal sacrifice starts dropping off. St. Constantine apparently, even before converting to Christianity, was not a big fan of animal sacrifice. He just thought it was kind of gross and repugnant and sort of sub-moral. So when he became Christian, he sort of instantly did away with it in terms of the military and the imperial part of the religion so that he wouldn’t have to do it any more.

Fr. Andrew: And we should emphasize that it’s these rituals that make paganism go. Like, this is the engine that drives it, and not just in a sense of “this is social bonds” or whatever, although it’s that, too, but when people stop interacting with demons in the way that is the most effective, then it weakens the demons’ influence over them.

Fr. Stephen: Right. They’re not worshiping them any more. Now they’re sort of opining or trying to draw moral lessons that are more along the line of Christian morality than pagan morality from Homer, for example, which is a fundamentally different thing than classical paganism.

So in the fourth century, paganism is fighting its last gasps. St. John Chrysostom’s rhetoric teacher was literally a member of the last pagan generation in the Roman Empire. They’d basically given up hope. They were just kind of sticking to their guns and being contrarians about not wanting to embrace Christianity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s this parallel development. On the one hand you have the death of paganism going on, and pretty much in parallel with that, then, this rise of misunderstanding where nephilim come from and therefore rejecting that misunderstanding that we see reflected in some of the Church Fathers.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and they’re trying to address it on a metaphysical level, of how could you have inter-species reproduction rather than in this ritual and religious context.

Fr. Andrew: All right. We just want, before we finish—and I know this has been a mondo-long episode, but you love it, all of you listeners—

Fr. Stephen: Supersize!

Fr. Andrew: This has been the one you’ve been waiting for, I know. But before we close, I just wanted to take a couple of questions that were sent to us. This first one is a message that was left for us by Fr. Photius, so I’m going to go ahead and play this one now.

Fr. Photius: Hi, this is Fr. Photius Avant from St. Sava Orthodox Church in Allen, Texas, and I have a few questions. Are giants recognizable only by their size or is it more by their violent and terrible deeds? Also, are giants by virtue of their demonic parentage and/or intimate influence beyond the scope of redemption? And finally, are there giants among us today, and if so how do we deal with them?

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, we’ve kind of addressed most of what Fr. Photius says, but the two maybe that are kind of left dangling a little bit are: Can giants repent? And then also are they potentially around today; what do we do about that if so? [Laughter] Let’s take them in that order: Can giants repent? Is that possible?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we talked about how, if you leave the giant clan, you’re no longer a member of the giant clan.

Fr. Andrew: So it’s a kind of a citizenship almost.

Fr. Stephen: If you’re ritually admitted to another community that’s constituted by another ritual… So the short answer is yes. If there’s a giant clan somewhere right now that’s doing these rituals, someone who’s a person of that is not irredeemable. They’re still alive and they’re still human, no matter how far gone, how far down that road they may be. They could be baptized into Christ, they could come and receive the Eucharist, they can be Christian and experience theosis.

In terms of: Are there giants today and how should we deal with them?—if we take that seriously in terms of what we’ve been talking about, we’d be talking about a human being who’s not just demonically possessed, but a human being who has become demonic, who has become demonized, like, fully. And so we’d be talking about—I don’t want to be graphic. I’ve met someone like this in a prison setting. Someone who is not even really human any more, who has committed acts, the kinds of things we’re talking about, involving the killing of children, the torture of… cannibalism. So if we’re talking about someone like this, and this is a person who has no interest in anything related to the Gospel, then as controversial as what I’m about to say may be, this is why civilizations still have the death penalty.

And when someone like that receives the death penalty… When the Orthodox Church talks about the death penalty, if you read, for example, the social statement of the Russian Church… It is a good thing to not make use of the death penalty in that it can sometimes give a longer opportunity for repentance for someone, so that makes that element a good thing, but the Orthodox Church has never declared the death penalty, as such, unjust, because to allow that kind of person to continue with that kind of evil is unjust in and of itself, to produce more victims and bring more horror into the world.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. So we got a question over email from Ian in Charleston, West Virginia, and Ian wrote this:

Presupposing the existence of giants based on the literary evidence in holy Scriptures, is there likewise physical evidence to further prove their existence beyond the Scriptures. I remember in a previous episode that you mentioned the archaeological find of a large metal bed used in pagan rituals that was used by a giant king, but do fossil records, or even more interestingly DNA evidence, exist? Furthermore, do giants constitute a different species from mankind, or, from a very materialistic point of view, are still human but are the result of a variant allele to a gene, like in the case of achondroplasia (I’m going to have to look that up!) through the interaction of demons?

I think Ian works in the medical field, if I remember correctly.

We actually got a number of questions that are like this, and I recall that in one of our earliest episodes we actually had someone call in that unfortunately did not get through, who wanted to ask about gigantic fossils being found. So this is kind of related to that as well. I mean, we talked about how giants are not necessarily large human beings, so that kind of answers some of this. Are they… Do they have a different DNA?

Fr. Stephen: Let me first say, before I answer that briefly, that I want to heartily endorse Ian from Charleston, West Virginia.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right, great!

Fr. Stephen: He is a great guy. So, shout-out to Ian.

Fr. Andrew: Awesome. There you go. You know, Fr. Stephen and I both served at that church there in Charleston, West Virginia, although, Ian, I think you were still a kid when I was there, but it’s been a long time since I left.

Fr. Stephen: But, yeah, the answer… We wouldn’t expect to see a DNA difference, necessarily.

Fr. Andrew: Because it’s two human beings involved.

Fr. Stephen: Now, if we’re talking about giant clans, with any social unit of people who are primarily marrying and reproducing with each other, there would be common genetic factors, but those genetic factors, as we’ve said, aren’t the basis for who’s in and who’s out of the clan. It’s just something that would naturally happen over time. To give that as full an answer as possible.

Fr. Andrew: So if you’re looking for fossils, that’s kind of looking in the wrong place.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, you’re digging in the wrong place.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Literally, yeah. I would say I don’t have an explanation for giant fossils other than maybe they had Marfan syndrome or, I don’t know, something like that.

Fr. Stephen: We don’t really have fossilized remains from the period we’re talking [about]. Human skeletal remains don’t last that long.

Fr. Andrew: Well, there we go. I hope that helps Ian and everyone. Thank you very much, everyone who sent in questions and comments, whether you emailed it to us or sent it in via our speakpipe recording service. I hope that this has been an interesting—I know that it’s definitely been interesting for me—discussion. So let’s just give some closing remarks. I think I’ll go first.

I entered into this discussion of giants—I mean, not today necessarily, but when I first started trying to understand it—kind of along the lines of what Fr. Stephen said: “People get excited when I talk about giants!” Because it is kind of exciting. It’s really just a fascinating element in Scripture, especially when you actually decide to take it seriously.

But on the other hand, I think that the personal journey that I went through in trying to understand this subject… I went from starting out thinking, “Here’s a really weird, obscure thing; let’s figure out what it means so at least I can make an account for it,” to understanding, gradually, that we’re actually talking about a major overarching theme of the Scriptures that actually had to do with David and the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s huge! It’s just… It’s a big, big arc within Scripture. That alone should make it something that we try to understand.

The other thing that’s been very valuable for me was dealing with the fact that Church Fathers didn’t have the same views on this, and understanding what that means and how to account for that and what to do about it, which, just as kind of a meta-issue, helps us to understand the way to read the Church Fathers. We can’t treat them as a kind of set of proof-texts or a closed canon in and of themselves, and I find that to be very valuable as well, because there’s some times some Orthodox people would treat the Church Fathers the way that sola scriptura Protestants treat the Bible, and that’s not the correct way to read the Church Fathers.

I just wanted to say that, for me personally, this discussion—not just in this episode, but the discussion that I’ve been having now for a few years trying to understand this—has been a really valuable one for me, of personal growth and understanding the holy Scriptures and in understanding the rest of Orthodox tradition. I’m just very, very grateful for it on a personal level. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: I think, nerdery aside—I clearly am one, because I consider reading Ugaritic ritual texts and picking through Esau’s genealogy to be fun and exciting ways to spend an afternoon—but beyond that nerdery, why is this important at all? Why is this important to the Orthodox faith or theology, other than just: Hey, it’s interesting and fun and neat?

I think this actually goes to the core of what we’ve been talking about today, goes to the core of what salvation is. Here’s how I think that is. My father used to tell me about my grandfather, that at one point my father was watching the Nuremberg trials on television, which were the trials of Nazi war criminals. So sort of the most demonically evil humans of our era. And my father asked my grandfather what he thought about what had happened and these trials, and my grandfather’s response was: “There but for the grace of God go I.”

And usually when we say that, we say that about some misfortune someone has suffered—someone has ended up homeless, someone has ended up bankrupt, someone has died at a young age, and we say, “Oh, there for the grace of God go I. It’s God’s grace that I have the things I have,” and that’s not untrue. But my grandfather was saying that about becoming a Nazi war criminal. He was saying that about becoming this sort of immoral monster who would murder other people en masse and do these other things. And this is how the Scriptures present the demonic and our sin as participation in the demonic. After Adam and Eve have disobeyed, God says it’s not good that man should live forever, because if we had, if we’d live forever in that state, we’d live just like the demons: immortal and immoral, immortal and evil. So God gives us this life in this world and our mortality and our repentance to prevent us from suffering that fate.

A lot of times our Western Christian friends present salvation as: Well, God has these laws, we’ve broken those laws, so he’s angry at us or he’s compelled by his attribute of justice—he has to punish those violations of the Law—so Christ comes to save us from that; so God has to save us from himself or save us from one of his attributes, save us from his own justice. But that’s not what the Scriptures say; the Scriptures say that Christ came to save us from our sins, because our sins are destroying us, our sins are turning us into this demonic monsters if we keep going down that path.

So the truth we have here when we look at these giants, who are the far end of where that road leads, who represent someone not become like God but become like the demons, dehumanized and inhuman, we see where the path of sin leads, and it shows us that in reality Christ came to save us from ourselves. And it gives us a clarity of exactly what that means.

So I think this is important, beyond all the history and the tying things together in the Old Testament and understanding some of the hymns of the Church—that’s the core. That’s the core, that despite our sin and wickedness which is deliberate, despite our throwing in our lot with these demonic spirits who rebel against and hate God, Christ still loved us enough to come and die and rescue us, redeem us, and buy us back so that we could become sons of God, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes. This shows us the other side. We talked about past episodes—what we’re saved to, what we’re saved for—this is what we’re saved from.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for tonight. Thank you for listening. If you didn’t get a chance to call in during one of our live broadcasts, we’d still love to hear from you either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com or you can message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page or you can leave a message for us at our speakpipe page. We read everything, listen to everything, but can’t respond to everything; I’m sorry about that. But we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for our live broadcast on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. And don’t forget to like our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page while you’re at it, join our Facebook discussion group, leave a recommendation, and invite all your friends.

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Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much, and God bless.