Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Hello, Lord of Spirits listeners; this is Fr. Andrew. This program is recorded and streamed live, so sometimes the unexpected happens. In this episode, you’ll hear that we had technical problems with Fr. Stephen’s audio connection. Despite this, we felt that the content was good and still accessible, so please bear with us on this one. A solution is already in place for next time.

Fr. Andrew: Good evening and welcome to The Lord of Spirits podcast. I’m Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and with me is Fr. Stephen De Young in Lafayette, Louisiana. If you’re listening to us live, you can call in at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and we will get to your calls in the second part of today’s show. As always, this is a very content-heavy show, so we try to balance it out with your calls. If for some reason you don’t get through today, don’t feel bad, and just wait until next time. Of course, you can still contact us in lots of other ways.

We’ve been talking a lot about demons over the last couple episodes, and you know that it’s going to be a perennial topic on this show, but we haven’t discussed too much yet about their actual origins. Most Christians know that demons are angelic beings who rebelled against God and chose to do evil instead of good, but when did that happen and how did that happen? Tonight we’re going to be talking about that, and you may especially be surprised to learn that the holy Scriptures don’t present just one angelic fall. It turns out that there may well be around five: five falls of angels. Let’s get started talking about the misconception that most people seem to have about the fall of demons, the fall of these angelic beings and their becoming demons. So, Fr. Stephen, what exactly is this idea, this misconception that people have, and where does it come from?

Fr. Stephen De Young: I think we had mentioned at least briefly last time it comes from our Puritan friend, John Milton, and Paradise Lost. The idea that we’re talking about is the idea that at some point before the creation of the earth, at some point before Genesis 1:1, God created the angels separately from the rest of creation, and then at some point between then and the creation of the world, the devil led this rebellion, got a bunch of his guys together, and they were cast down out of heaven. I’m not sure to where. I mean, the underworld wasn’t there yet, since it’s before creation. [Laughter] But they literally fall, like fall out of the sky, and all of the different kinds of evil we encounter in the Scriptures and Tradition and the lives of the saints, all these angels who fell back then who are still around. There’s not usually a good idea of what [they do] and the way they act—for an example, where that comes from.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and in Milton… So in Paradise Lost, which, by the way, is a wonderful poem—I love it, but we have to remember that it’s fiction—in Paradise Lost, almost the hero, the anti-hero, is the devil. He falls down to, as you said, where exactly, but he talks about how he’d rather rule there than serve in heaven. I think that that’s the sense that we have. I think also the reason why people have this misconception is that it seems to fit with what they read in the book of Genesis, because in the book of Genesis you get this tale of the creation of the world and then there’s Adam, and Adam and Eve, and they’re tempted and they fall into sin. So while they’re tempted by some kind of demonic creature, where does that creature come from? Well, we didn’t see the creation of the demons in those first few chapters, so all that stuff must have happened kind of off camera, before “Let there be light.” [Laughter] You know, we sort of fill in the blanks with that. Then we proceed forward in having made this assumption that that’s the origin of demons, then we end up misreading stuff that’s in the Scripture that actually talks about other moments when there are these falls. Let’s start talking about that. We’ve talked about five. We titled this episode “The Five(ish) Falls of Angels,” so there’s about five. Let’s talk about the first one.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Well, one thing I want to go through is, in most cases— There is a narrative or a story— The angels are surrounding the world, that represents in some ways a parallel to the fall that we’re going to be talking about. We kind of approach this in two ways. You can approach this as “This is the Israelite version origin story that is sort of correcting the record”: “You all believe this, but here’s what really happened,” or, alternatively—these aren’t actually opposed to each other—but alternatively you can look at it from the other perspective, that if we take seriously the idea that all the gods of the nations are demons, the religious beliefs of the nations who are worshiping these demons can be seen to represent sort of demonic propaganda. So it’s actually they who are— and are making themselves the winners, the heroes, even more directly than Paradise Lost did, with the light on sort of the love of anti-heroes in Western culture.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Just a kind of a technical note: Fr. Stephen, you’re kind of cutting in and out, so there our engineer who is Matushka Trudi—hello, Trudi—is going to be sending you a new link. But I just wanted to talk while we’re working on that a little bit of what you’re discussing just from my own experience. When I was a kid, I read a lot of what we would call mythology literature. We’ve talked about this a little bit in the past on the show, but this idea that these are just sort of stories, and that modern people often have this sense that ancient mythology is ancient people who saw stuff that they couldn’t explain and so they came up with the idea of gods who did things—lightning and thunder or storms or the ocean moving or whatever—and they looked at that and they said, “There must be some kind of force behind that that’s making that happen.”

The problem, of course, with that outlook is, number one, it doesn’t take ancient people seriously, and, number two, it doesn’t account for the complexity of the stories, and especially the similarity of them across different cultures. We’re going to be talking about, like you said, that there’s this kind of propaganda from a Christian and ancient Israel point of view, that mythology, that the stories of these ancient gods is not actually the true story of what really occurs, that it’s an attempt to co-opt what really happened in order to bring people under their subjection, to make them think that they’re kind of on the right team, so to speak, in worshiping these fallen beings.

It’s interesting, and one of the things you note if you read the Scriptures closely, you’ll note that some of these stories from ancient peoples and the worship that they engage in intersect at various points with the Scripture. Of course, the one that you see the most often is Baal, probably, especially in the Old Testament. Baal is mentioned over and over again, but have you ever thought about who Baal is exactly? And why is Baal mentioned so often in the Old Testament? It’s not just that there’s this other worship that’s going on somewhere, but that this is a being that they’re actually dealing with.

Fr. Stephen, do we have you back here yet?

Fr. Stephen: I believe so.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, great! All right. Yes, listeners, I was just filling in a bit, but hopefully that was good content. [Laughter] So let’s talk about some of this propaganda, right?

Fr. Stephen: The first of these probably is what’s referred to, generally by scholars, in all of these stories together, is you find in pretty much every ancient culture some version of what’s called the succession myth, which is, bare bones, the idea that there was a—we talked before about how there was the idea of a council of gods and sort of a divine father-type god, and then a divine son who was the head of the council. We talked about how in Israel that was Yahweh in both cases, so you already have [this binary] built into ancient Israel religion. But the idea in most of the other cultures of the ancient world, pretty much universally, is that there was an original most high god, who was overthrown at least once by a later god who rose up from among the council, by one of his sons in the council, who overthrew him and took his place, that of the most high god.

So the most common—you mentioned Baal already—this happens with Baal. The Baal cycle is primarily the tale of Baal’s insurrection. This happens twice in Babylonian mythology. It happens twice in Greek mythology, as people may be aware, when Chronos castrates his father, Uranos or Uranus, and becomes most high god, and then Zeus later kills his father Chronos and takes his place. So there are actually two successions there, as well as in Babylonian mythology.

So you have this story of a rebellion, but in every case in these other nations, that rebellion was successful, and of course the version that we are going to see in the Old Testament in the Hebrew Scriptures is going to be inverted in that this insurrection is going to have failed. Now this is the basis for what Milton does in Paradise Lost, but here’s the key difference: By casting it before the creation of the world, there’s a basic logical problem. In the same way an angel is— So let’s say tomorrow you decide you’re going to overthrow God and become God. What’s your first step?

Fr. Andrew: You’ve got to get an army together.

Fr. Stephen: What’s the army going to do?

Fr. Andrew: Um, I don’t know, attack some other gods.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right? I mean, you literally can’t attack God, right, as a creature? You can’t throw things at him. There’s not…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, what do you…?

Fr. Stephen: There’s not a way to do that, right? The key to this is that Gregory said, in the quote that we read last episode, what he said: “Where is God enthroned? God is enthroned in the minds, the hearts of his creatures.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. He’s everywhere.

Fr. Stephen: So if you’re going to dethrone the Most High God, the true God, the only way to do that—you can’t dethrone him in reality, but you can try to dethrone him in the hearts and minds of his creatures, but that requires there to be other creatures.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So if creation hasn’t happened yet, then, uh, yeah… And it’s interesting, just as a point, that what did it mean for them to rebel? When we’re talking about the true story, what does it mean for them to rebel? It’s in some sense an internal process, casting him out, so to speak, from their own hearts and minds. Obviously, God is everywhere, so it’s not a question of actually creating a space that God can’t be in, because that’s not a thing, but rather a space that you’re not receiving him. That’s exactly how human beings do it, too, right? That we dethrone him in our hearts, not in a way that makes it so he’s no longer present, because he’s everywhere present, but in a way that we’re no longer accepting him and receiving him and cooperating with him, and to use New Testament [terminology], synergizing with him. Instead, we’re resisting him. So that’s what this means, to cast him out from the throne of their hearts.

Fr. Stephen: And you can’t attack him, but you can attack your fellow creatures. You can’t destroy him, but you can try to destroy your fellow creatures, and that love of God and love of neighbor and hatred of God and hatred of neighbor are always linked together in the Scriptures all the way through, because if you have wrath against God or anger against God or rebellion against God, you’re going to express that by taking it out on his creatures, and that’s exactly what the devil ends up doing. That’s the storyline that’s going on in terms of the devil in Genesis 3. So much focus in Western religion is on Adam and Eve and what happens with them and what they did, and in a later episode I’m sure we’ll be talking about the three falls of humanity in Genesis 1-11.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because there’s three falls, people. There are three falls of humanity.

Fr. Stephen: Post-St. Augustine, everything gets kind of pushed into Adam, but there’s something that happens to Eve, but there’s also something here that happens to the devil, to the serpent. There are sometimes people who want to read Genesis 3 a little overly literally and turn him into a talking snake and say, “This is like a Rudyard Kipling ‘Just-So Story,’ ‘How the Snake Lost Its Legs,’ ” Like that’s what happened: snakes had legs, but then, oh, this one was bad, so now they don’t have legs. But that obviously is not right, what the Scriptures are spending their time talking about.

The word that’s used here that’s translated “serpent,” in Hebrew, nakash, there’s actually a little bit of a play on words here, because of course in Hebrew you only write the consonants; the vowel points, if you read modern Hebrew or read a modern printing of the Hebrew Bible, it has vowel points added, and those were added in the Medieval period, so, thousands of years after it was written. But if you take the vowel points out, words become much more ambiguous, because you just have three consonants. The word nakash in this case, it can be a noun; an adjective being used substantively, being used like a noun; or—

Fr. Andrew: Okay, a snake.

Fr. Stephen: —or it could be a verb, or a verbal noun, like a participle.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Like a snakey… [Laughter] Snaking…

Fr. Stephen: Well, if it’s a noun, it means “serpent.” If it’s an adjective, it means “the shining one.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh, interesting!

Fr. Stephen: If it’s a verbal participle, it means “the cunning one” or “the deceptive one, the deceiver.”

Fr. Andrew: Aha.

Fr. Stephen: All three of those ideas, if you don’t have vowel points, it makes it very easy to do a wordplay where it can mean all three of those things.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: This is a feature of Hebrew prose and poetry, to use a word in this kind of multivalent way, to convey all of these things. In terms of the snake part, remember that serpents are a class of angel. We talked about the seraphim last time, that seraph is the Egyptian word for a serpent. In just a moment, I’m going to talk a little bit about Ezekiel 28, where the story is told from another perspective, and in there the devil, before he fell, is referred to as a “guardian cherub.” Cherubs had a similar kind of role as a guardian of the divine throne in the ancient world. In Genesis 3, particularly in verses 14 and 15, the serpent himself is cursed by Yahweh. That curse is important in terms of understanding what’s going on here with the devil. What Yahweh says to him in Genesis 3:14-15 is:

Because you have done this, curséd are you beyond all beasts, all creatures, and beyond all of the animals of the field. On your belly you shall go and dust shall you eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman and your seed and her seed; he will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.

Verse 15 is meditated on a lot as being a sort of initial statement of the Gospel, but the part about “going on your belly and eating dust all the days of your life” is the part that gets turned into, “Oh, well, he lost his legs.” Ancient people weren’t stupid.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not like snakes were eating dirt.

Fr. Stephen: They knew that snakes did not eat dirt; they saw them eat mice, just like we’ve seen them eat mice. They followed that. And so the “dust” that this is talking about, it’s the same word, because this is in the context also of Adam and Eve receiving the curse, that “dust they are and to dust they shall return.” So the imagery here is of the serpent, the devil, becoming the eater of the dead. We see in iconography Hades depicted this way, as sort of the serpent with a big, wide-open mouth, devouring people, devouring the dead. What’s happening here is not just about snakes; it’s about the devil. This is where he falls; this is where he is cast down.

Fr. Andrew: And he becomes…

Fr. Stephen: ...but to crawl on the earth.

Fr. Andrew: And he becomes the lord of death, right? He becomes associated with death.

Fr. Stephen: He’s cast down, and the word here for “ground,” translated “ground”: cast down to the ground or the earth, is erets in Hebrew, which is also a word that’s commonly used to refer to the [underworld].

Fr. Andrew: The underworld, right.

Fr. Stephen: So this is the devil being made… He’s made the prince of the underworld; he’s made the lord of death. And we see this referenced in the New Testament. One big example is Hebrews 2:14, which refers to “the one who holds the power of death, that is, the devil.”

Fr. Andrew: Oh, that’s right! Right, which is interesting to put it that way, like it doesn’t mean… It’s not like… Correct me if I’m wrong or getting this wrong: We’re not saying that he’s the one who gets to decide when people die, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, yeah. That’s not [saying] he has the power to go around and kill whoever he wants. [Laughter] But the idea in the curse that’s put on Adam and Eve—“dust you are; to dust you will return”—it’s sort of God brought them out of nothing and they’re going to back to being nothing. Essentially the devil here is being made the lord of nothing. He has this kingdom of dust and ashes, which is what he will seize. This whole idea that, of course, in a lot of our hymnography at Pascha, that Christ invades the underworld and takes even that away from him, so he doesn’t even have that left to him, when all is said and done.

And this story, this same story, gets retold again by the Prophet Isaiah and the Prophet Ezekiel, about the devil, but they both tell it in terms of the stories being told in surrounding nations, surrounding Israel.

Fr. Andrew: So they’re co-opting what we would call pagan mythology, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, or correcting it, saying, “Here’s your story; here’s the truth.” For the Prophet Isaiah, speaking to Babylon—that takes place in Isaiah 14. Do you want to read that section, verses 3-21?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, sure. It’s kind of longish, but let’s go ahead and roll through it. I’m looking at the King James Version here, so if there’s any translation problems, let me know.

And it shall come to pass in the day that the Lord shall give thee rest from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve, that thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon and say: How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased! The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked and the scepter of the rulers. He who smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke, he that ruled the nations in anger, is persecuted, and none hindereth.

The whole earth is at rest and is quiet; they break forth into singing. Yea, the fir trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying: Since thou art laid down, no feller is come up against us. Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming. It stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations.

All they shall speak and say unto thee: Art thou also become as weak as we? Art thou become like unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols; the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart: I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.

Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying: Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms, that made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof, that opened not the house of his prisoners? All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house. But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to the stones of the pit, as a carcass trodden under feet. Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land and slain thy people. The seed of evildoers shall never be renowned. Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers, that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities.

It’s kind of a long passage, but I think it’s worth rolling through it, actually. I mean, it’s interesting just to read it. If you didn’t know essentially that this is a repeat of the Genesis 3 story, then you kind of wonder what is going on here, what it’s talking about.

Fr. Stephen: But you have this repeated language of being brought down to maggots and worms, which are of course representative of death, that he’s brought down on a bed of maggots and worms in verse 11. This idea of this fall… Of course, probably the most famous part of this is—since you read the King James, it had the name Lucifer inserted into it. It’s interesting to me how many modern Orthodox authors have adopted the idea that the devil [who] fell was Lucifer, because this is actually something St. Jerome came up with.

Fr. Andrew: Oh!

Fr. Stephen: In the fifth century, indeed. Now, he’s not wrong. What is actually there in the Hebrew is the name of this person is Helel ben Shakhar. Shakhar is son of the morning star, which is where that sort of son of the morning comes from. But Helel in the Hebrew is most likely a Hebraization of the name Enlil, who was the primary god of old Babylon.

Fr. Andrew: Oh-ho-ho!

Fr. Stephen: So the Babylonian empire who shows up and takes Judah into captivity with Nebuchadnezzar, the one we’re familiar with in the Old Testament, is actually the neo-Babylonian empire. Old Babylon, Enlil was the chief of the gods and had been overthrown by Marduk. Marduk was at this time the chief god. But Enlil had also been the subject of the succession myth. So Enlil had taken this place as the most high god by force and then was unseated by Marduk. So Isaiah is deliberately playing with this story and correcting it to say that, no, you tried to overthrow Yahweh the true God, but you failed and were cast down to Sheol.

When St. Jerome comes to this and is looking for a name, he actually gets “Lucifer” from 1 Enoch.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, interesting! So this is an importation from 1 Enoch that makes its way into the King James Version of the Bible.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. St. Jerome was a fair fan of 1 Enoch, to the point of apologizing for it to the point of coming up with an elaborate explanation of Noah taking a copy on the ark with him to explain its provenance.

Fr. Andrew: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: In 1 Enoch, the name of Azazel, before he fell, was Ramiel, which means the light-bearer of God, who carries light for God. “Lucifer” is pretty much a direct Latin translation of that, so he translates it “Lucifer, son of the morning,” to bring in the “ben Shakhar,” but “Helel” is not really the basis for “Lucifer”; he’s going through Enochic tradition to get that.

Fr. Andrew: That’s interesting.

Fr. Stephen: And then we won’t read the whole story, but Ezekiel in chapter 28 tells it again. In verse 1-10 of that chapter, he gives a prophecy against the prince of Tyre, and if you read it, it’s very clear he’s talking about the human king. And then he gives a prophecy about the king of Tyre, who would outrank him, and it’s about the king of Tyre that he says— that he stood among the blazing stones, and then he talks about him being cast down to the underworld, which is, again, this same story of a failed insurrection, attached to Eden, which helps us with the connection to Genesis 3, but this is also formed around the story of Baal. Baal, likewise, as we mentioned, had this succession myth, where he overthrew the most high god. And then in the Baal cycle, after doing that, he decides to go down to the underworld and build his palace there, just of his own accord. [Laughter] Whereas in Ezekiel’s version, in the correct version, he fails and is cast down into the underworld, and that is sort of the last little he is allowed to have.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. So, all right. Well, we’ve gone about a half an hour, so we’re going to go ahead and take a break. When we come back, we are going to talk about the next fall of angels that we want to discuss. So let’s go ahead and go to break.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Welcome back. This is the second part of the show, and it’s where we begin to take your calls. You can reach us at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346, and you can also send questions to our chat room, but we would especially love to hear your voices.

Just to recap a little bit, we talked about the fall of the devil, becoming the lord of the dead. It’s interesting to me that when you look at the biblical narratives, while you do get occasionally this language of being cast down, the thing that—and I think we’ll see this as we proceed through these five different events—is that what’s really happening is that it’s really five rebellions or five apostasies, even. There is this language of being cast down, but it’s not necessarily just a moral fall, in the sense of, “Oh, well, I guess that angel sinned; he’s a demon now.” That’s not what we’re talking about, is it?

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s not that all the feathers fell out of their wings and they turned into bat-wings and grew hooves and a tail. [Laughter] As we talked about, there are different types of angels, and when those angels rebel against their Creator, they turned into different types of evil spirits. I mean, there are certain commonalities, as we said, that they’re going to attack God’s creation, chiefly humanity, and try to destroy God’s creation, chiefly humanity, out of their anger and rebellion toward their Creator, but they’re not all going to do it the same way.

I’ll go ahead and mention here—I think we’ve mentioned it before—there’s not like a hierarchy. Like we just talked about the devil; it’s not like the devil’s the boss of all the other demons and they all work for him, and they have some kind of authority structure. We tend to, at least in popular culture, turn the demons in hell into whatever we think is bad. So if you’re John Milton and you’re a Puritan, it’s a kingdom for sure, and the devil is the king and he has all his courtiers and everything in this rag structure in this hierarchy. In C.S. Lewis’s day, the worst that you can think of is bureaucracy, so hell becomes this bureaucracy full of middle managers and interoffice memos—that’s got to be what hell is.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Stephen: But they are spirits of chaos and lawlessness and destruction, and hierarchy is good thing, so they don’t have one. They’re trying to destroy hierarchy and creation.

Fr. Andrew: Before we get to this next apostasy that we’re going to talk about, we actually have Bob from North Carolina calling in. Bob, are you there? Can you hear us?

Bob: Yes. Yes, I’m here.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome, Bob. What is your question for us this evening?

Bob: I’ve always wondered what gave Lucifer, Satan, the idea that he would actually be able to conquer the supreme, omnipotent Being? Where did he get that idea?

Fr. Andrew: All right, that’s a good question. Fr. Stephen, how does the devil think that he can actually win this fight?

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, that’s part of what we were saying before in terms of the sense that, if this is a fistfight, obviously he doesn’t have a chance. [Laughter] There’s not a… There’s too much of a power disparity here for him to do that, but in terms of leading humans, who are God’s creation, leading them to their destruction, that he can do. So it’s not a war of conquest; it’s a war of attrition and anger. We didn’t really mention this in terms of the devil, but what the Fathers tell us, for example—I know I’ve quoted St. Andrew of Caesarea on this before, but he said that after the devil fell through envy, and that’s envy of humanity, because humanity was created for this destiny in Christ, that angels don’t have, that the devil didn’t have, and so that anger and resentment led him to try to destroy humanity. So for him, there’s no way in terms of unseating God or taking over the universe or avoiding his fate at the last judgment— do as much damage as he can in that time span. That’s why St. Peter says the devil prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. He knows his time is short, and so he’s trying to do all the damage and destruction that he can to hurt his Creator.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you know the thing that I would add is that this idea that a demon could overthrow the Most High God is pure propaganda. Like, he knows that that’s not actually possible. This appears in these other myths, but it’s not actually a thing that the demons think that they can accomplish. As Fr. Stephen was saying, instead they attack us in particular. I think that that’s a really important point to make, not just in terms of what does the devil actually think he can accomplish by doing this, but rather understanding where we fit into the story.

As Fr. Stephen said, we often look at Genesis and we see it as being a story about mankind—and that is true—but the truth is that there is another story going on, and that is the story of these angelic rebellions and what happens with mankind falling into sin—and we’re going to talk about this a lot more obviously when we talk about the various falls of mankind—what happens is that man is joining in an existing rebellion, and that’s the rebellion of these demonic powers. To think that the fall of everything hinges entirely on what Adam and Eve do is not to see the whole story, and not even to realize that it’s not even chapter 1 of the story of rebellion, that there’s an ongoing rebellion and mankind is joining in with it, and that explains, of course, why it is, when we act like demons and we rebel against God, then we become more and more like them. We’re joining their side.

Just to wrap up what I’m saying here, at the beginning of the Orthodox baptismal service, there is what is called in Greek the apotaxis and syntaxis, which means basically the desertion and the pledging of allegiance, I guess, the alignment. It’s where the person says that they’re repudiating Satan and everything that he does and saying, “Now I align myself with Christ.” So the idea is that you’re leaving that rebellion and you’re joining yourself now with the One who created you, with the One who loves you, with the One who wants to make you like himself. Does that make sense, Bob?

Bob: Yes, it does. Seems like basically Satan is just pure spite.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and envy. Absolutely.

Bob: Envy and spite. All right. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you very much for that call, Bob. Great. I’m glad that answered your question.

All right, so, Fr. Stephen, let’s talk about the next apostasy or fall of angelic beings. What do we got next; what else, as we’re taking this litany of bad stuff? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Horrible things. This one also has a corresponding pagan narrative in the surrounding cultures.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, right.

Fr. Stephen: This is a narrative that we find in things like the Sumeran Kings List and the story of the Apkallu or the story of the seven sages. In the Sumerian Kings List—and this is true in early Sumerian and early Akkadian religion—they believed that this story that I will tell you, that when humanity was first created, they lived in the cities of the gods, but then at a certain point the gods became angry at them and expelled them from those cities. So humanity had to go and build their own cities. We sort of see this in what happens with Cain, right? Cain goes and builds the first city, and even the name of this city, from these other stories, we’re told that Cain names the city after the son of his son, after his grandson, Irad, and the Mesopotamian belief was that the first city was Eridu. It’s linguistically the same name.

And then in the pagan version of the story, the gods then give kingship as a gift to the other gods, not the most high god who threw them out of the cities. The way it says it is that the kingship comes and is given to them. You may notice with both this and the one we talked about that [the old gods] at the beginning is always cast as wicked and evil, over against the new gods who have shown up.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right.

Fr. Stephen: Who are enemies back and are now going to do something to favor them. This narrative, as a side note— When you take the pagan narrative and apply the Scriptures to it, rather than seeing the Scriptures as correcting the pagan narrative, but you fit the— you end up with: Well, there’s this Old Testament “most high god” who’s bad, and then there’s this “new god” who shows up in the New Testament and takes over. So they’ve sort of wedged it in there. But in this case, it comes down from heaven. There’s a narrative before the flood and then after the flood. Before the flood, that’s the time of the seven sages, the Apkallu, the first of which comes out of the sea, and as an Apkallu has one of these lesser gods who is advising him. Because of this advisor, the king is able to create astrology, magic, technology, all of these things, based on this knowledge that he’s given from these spirits.

After the flood, the kings who are listed are said to be two-thirds Apkallu and one-third human. So after the flood, they’re said to be hybridized. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah… I mean, how do you make two-thirds of something? That doesn’t work out in terms of, you know.

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll get to that in a second. [Laughter] There is a way it works out.

Fr. Andrew: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: And then based on these stories, it was very common for various cultures to claim, as part of their rite of kingship, when they had established an empire or conquered territory, to claim that they had access to these lost secrets from before the flood, that were imparted by these beings. The most famous one of those groups is probably the Amurru, and the most famous Amurru—they came from the west and conquered Mesopotamia; Amurru actually means “Westerners”; they came from what’s now Syria and conquered Mesopotamia—the most famous one of those is probably Hammurabi.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, yeah, the code guy. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. These are the same folks who are called Amorites in the Torah.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Oh, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: The Amorites whom they’re facing, the Amorite kings who are among the ones whom they’re told to wipe out, these are the same people who claim to have this knowledge. So we get a version of this story in Genesis 4-6, a correcting of the record or defeating of propaganda, where you see Cain’s line laid out. Cain founds the first city. The major figures in Cain’s line who are named, it talks about the technological innovations that they produced, which are weapons of war, all of these things. So this idea is, yes, these spirits gave technology to man, but it was not to benefit man; they were giving man technology that humanity wasn’t ready for, but for destroying themselves.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and this same story is played out in multiple other ancient mythologies. The one that probably most of our listeners are familiar with is Greek mythology, and you’ve got the story of Prometheus, who gives fire from the gods to mankind. But of course in that story, it’s depicted as Prometheus… It’s correct in the sense that Prometheus is sort of rebelling, he’s doing something he’s not supposed to be doing, but it’s presented as positive, like: look at this wonderful gift that he gave mankind.

But the problem, of course, is that, again, it’s propaganda. This is these demons saying, “Look at all these good things that we gave you. Why don’t you just go ahead and bow down and worship us?” If you think about that, isn’t that the same thing that’s happening when Christ is tempted by the devil, that the devil offers him stuff? “Look what I’ll do for you if you just bow down and worship me!” Even in our own lives, right? There’s this promise of being great, being smart, being beautiful, being popular, being wealthy, being prestigious—if only you would serve whatever it is that you are asked to serve. It’s a trick. As you said, it’s for their destruction. Notice whom this technology is given to; it’s given to Cain, the first murderer, and to his descendants.

But the problem, of course, is like, you look at this stuff, and you’re like: What’s so wrong with iron-working and with music? What’s wrong with that stuff?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and it gets expanded firstly in the book of Jubilees, to include all kinds of things in terms of pharmaceuticals and sorcery and means of seduction of the opposite sex. But even if we’re just talking about raw technology, again, it’s not that it’s evil any more than the tree of knowledge of good and evil is evil in and of itself, but it was wisdom for which humanity wasn’t ready to use it appropriately. So it comes to these men as: “I’m giving you this knowledge so that you can use it to gain power and to conquer your neighbors, to set yourself up as a king, to seduce members of the opposite sex, so you will have this power and wealth and authority,” and that’s what humanity uses it for.

From the pagan perspective, kingship and these kings are these glorious beings; from the perspective of Scripture, they are these wicked beings who are destroying themselves and each other and the world around them. That culminates, in Genesis 6:1-4 with this story of the sons of God going into the daughters of men and having these children who are described as Nephilim, as giants. We’ll undoubtedly do a whole episode just talking about giants, but…

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, there’s definitely going to be a giants episode. I know a lot of people are so ready for that, and well you should be, but it’s such a big topic! It’s such a big topic. We actually had one person who emailed us and said, “Stop saying you’re going to cover something in a future episode!” [Laughter] But the problem is the stuff we’re talking about branches so much that we have to constantly limit it and say, “We’re not going to go there—yet. Eventually we will.”

Fr. Stephen: We have to keep teasing. We have to tease future concepts.

Fr. Andrew: That’s right, because we want people to come back.

Fr. Stephen: Come back for more.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So for our purposes tonight, we get a hint into what this means. We have angelic beings procreating with humans, and of course in the pagan stories we have people who are two-thirds divine being, one-third human.

Fr. Andrew: Or demi-gods, right?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we see that in the Greek traditions, Hercules being a prime example.

Fr. Andrew: Hercules, yep.

Fr. Stephen: These Nephilim, these men of renown. Gilgamesh is another one of them. We get a clue into what is actually going on in Deuteronomy 3:11, in a verse that no one has cross-stitched above their door, I guarantee it.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] This is not anybody’s life verse?

Fr. Stephen: No! No one has made this a theme for a retreat, I don’t think. Even I have not yet, although now I take it as a challenge.

Fr. Andrew: “Yet.” There we go.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll take it as a challenge now. But Deuteronomy 3:11 describes Og’s bed. Og is the king of Bashan, which we’ll talk about more; he’s the last of the Raphaim, which we’ll also talk about when we talk about giants. [Laughter] But it gives this description of this bronze bed of unusual size. It gives the measurements in cubits, and it’s basically [built] for a 15-foot-tall person.

Fr. Andrew: Do you mind if I read this one? I’m looking again, of course, at the King James, which, for all of its problems is still probably my favorite Bible. Deuteronomy 3:11:

For only Og, king of Bashan, remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron. Is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? Nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.

As you said, about 15 feet, right? Nine cubits is about 15 feet. I mean, nobody’s got a cubit ruler in their house.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, yeah. And the size of a cubit varied, the same way the size of a foot used to, because it was the measurement from the end of your middle finger to your elbow.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay.

Fr. Stephen: But that varies a lot on different size humans. It was usually the king’s cubit, but it’s hard to tell sometimes in the text exactly how big, but roughly. So basically this verse tells us about this giant bed, this giant metal bed. And then it’s on display somewhere where you can go look at it!

Fr. Andrew: Right, right. “Is it not there?” Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And people kind of skim over it and go, “Okay, he had a big bed…?” But here’s where this becomes important. When the ziggurat of Etemenanki was excavated in Babylon, they found a bed with exactly these dimensions, a metal bed with exactly these dimensions in the temple. This bed was a ritual bed that was used for pagan ritual. There was a time of the year, there was a festival, where the king would go into the temple, he would be indwelt by the spirit of the god of the temple, and he would fornicate with one of the temple prostitutes in a ritual act, a pagan ritual act that would ensure fertility and prosperity for the city in the future.

But the future king was often conceived in this manner. The idea behind pointing out that this is Og’s bed is telling us something about his origin and the origin of giants in general. A future king conceived in this way would have two fathers—the king and the god who the king was embodying—and one mother, who was the woman in the temple. So the king was considered to be a god, the god they were worshiping was considered to be a god, and the woman was a human. So you end up with two-thirds, one-third.

Fr. Andrew: Two-thirds. Man.

Fr. Stephen: And that’s how that works.

Fr. Andrew: You know, I’m suddenly thinking of that—what was that movie? Was it Twins? Was that the film that had two fathers? No. I don’t know. I’m blanking about that. Clearly not about Nephilim. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s the TV show.

Fr. Andrew: My Two Dads, Three Men and a Baby, not about Nephilim! [Laughter] But now, listeners, you have lots of great jokes to make that your friends are not going to get at all. So, enjoy! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So this is what we’re talking about. It’s this demonic ritual origin, to involve evil spiritual powers and human kings, that is producing these “heroes” of old. That’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about giants and Nephilim in short form. But the spiritual beings involved in this, then, are spiritual beings who by doing this are entering into rebellion and who are then punished (1 and 2 Peter and in Jude’s second epistle). But you’re picking up on things that are already there in Jewish literature, preserving these traditions.

Fr. Andrew: So that’s the apostasy, is leading mankind astray by giving him knowledge that he’s not ready for that’s going to lead him into destruction.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that culminates in this sort of sexual immorality and wickedness that humans are led into by these spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Okay. All right, well, let’s talk about the third fall or apostasy of demons. And this one, boy, I’m going to look into the notes here. [Laughter] It’s just an amazing list. So let’s talk about that. You know, we’ve got this list of what they call the origin of demons, although why would we say that? Haven’t we been talking about demons the whole time? What makes this distinct?

Fr. Stephen: The origin of the demons that we read about in the synoptic gospels.

Fr. Andrew: All right. So the demons that we meet at, for instance, the exorcism that happens with Legion and to the pigs. Or what about the spirit that’s in the fortune-telling woman that St. Paul gets so annoyed at the spirit? Is that one of those people?

Fr. Stephen: In Acts?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in the book of Acts.

Fr. Stephen: In the book of Acts, same kind of thing that we see in Saul, the unclean spirit who comes to trouble King Saul. The demonic spirit in the book of Tobit who appears. There are these… We’ve been talking about sort of fallen angelic beings, and even though there’s at least one person who hates when we say this, we’ll talk about these bodies later. We mentioned this last week, that angels do have a sort of body; it’s just very different [from] ours. But there are these demonic spirits and unclean, who are bodiless, because they come in— or they go into idols and use idols as bodies, these bodiless beings. So the short version of where they come from is, the guys that we were just talking about, the Nephilim, die, and their spirits leave their bodies, and a portion of them become these spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so in this case we’re talking about spiritual beings who have… They fell when they led men astray, but there’s another event that involves these same beings, right? Is that what you’re saying?

Fr. Stephen: These are the spawn, the spiritual spawn, of those beings.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, gotcha, which, okay. So are we talking about actual reproduction or…? What do you mean?

Fr. Stephen: We’re talking about the product of this ritual. We aren’t told how it all works, because there isn’t DNA or at least knowledge of DNA in the ancient world. [Laughter] We have to sort of take what we have. This is sort of put in narrative form, for example, in the book of Jubilees, where, when these spirits—you know, the flood wipes out a lot, and we read in Scripture that the descendants of Abraham, leading up to David, wipe out the rest of the Nephilim, these giants. [The chief of the spirits] named Mastema in the book of Jubilees goes to God to cut a deal, and says, sort of similar to what we saw St. Gregory talking about again; he says, “Well, if you allow some of us to remain in the world and don’t throw all of us into the abyss,” which is where the previous spirits were imprisoned; it says, “If you don’t throw us in the abyss, if you let us remain in the world until the last judgment, we will afflict the wicked, sort of on your behalf. We’ll go and afflict the wicked, and you can use that to bring them to repentance.” They’re kind of cutting this deal: “We’ll only hurt bad people.”

So in the book of Jubilees, God sort of agrees that he will use the evil spirits the way St. Gregory talked about. Even though they meant it for evil, God uses it for good. But this idea, even though we don’t see it explicitly laid out in the Scriptures, is sort of resident all the way through. Why are they unclean spirits? What makes them unclean? Not evil, but unclean.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, why would they be described that way?

Fr. Stephen: In the Torah, when something is unclean, the easiest way to get it unclean is for it to be mixed. You mix two types of cloth. You plant two types of thing in the same field. You mix meat and dairy products. I won’t use the word that the Dead Sea Scrolls used for these demons, but it refers to them being illegitimate in birth.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! Interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So that idea of their uncleanness, that’s how they’re identified in the Old Testament. And then when they speak in the New Testament, we see them saying to Christ, “Have you come to trouble us before the time? We still have some time left. Why are you coming here to throw us into the abyss now?”

Fr. Andrew: Right, when is the time?

Fr. Stephen: So this is reflected, it [lies] underneath, it’s part of the tradition that [lies] underneath the Scriptures.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and I think that it’s really important to underline at this point what exactly this has to do with us, because this I think is one of the sort of apostasies that we should pay attention to the most, because the truth is that we do still have demons in the world. They are still functioning in the world, and they are here with God’s permission, obviously, because if they didn’t have his permission, they wouldn’t be here. As you said, there was this deal struck, that they said they would only afflict the wicked, and God permits them to stay and afflict.

But one of the questions that some people might ask then is, “Wait a minute. I’m not one of the wicked, and yet I’m having these problems. I’m being afflicted by a demon.” I think that the way to understand that is that God of course knows full well, because he created all of us, that human repentance does not happen when are comfortable. It just doesn’t. We kind of have no reason to repent if we are comfortable. There has to be a struggle. One of the ways that the struggle comes to us is through demonic affliction.

Now, the demons have their own agenda. They are in this because they want to draw us away from God, and certainly sometimes when you see people afflicted by demons they do, of their own accord, they are drawn away from God. They enter into that rebellion; they join into that rebellion. But temptation also is actually valuable to the saint. So even the righteous person, because there’s still some part of his will that isn’t totally aligned with God, he can use that as an opportunity to repent even more. Demonic affliction is an opportunity to repent, and it’s not only people that we think of as bad sinners, but it’s all of us. All of us have this opportunity to repent.

You and I were talking about this a little bit, a few months ago when we were on Fr. Thomas Soroka’s show, Ancient Faith Today, where he asked the question, “Is the coronavirus a judgment from God?” Which a lot of people are saying that. Actually, we just saw survey results today—I think it was from the Pew Research people—saying that something like a third of Americans believe that there’s a lesson from God in the virus. I think probably a lot of them think, “God is doing this to us,” like he’s afflicting us with this suffering because we did something bad. And that’s only kind of partly right. We do need to repent of our evil, but it’s not God who sends out plagues in the sense of he’s directly afflicting us. Wherever you see especially mass suffering like this, there’s demonic activity going on.

And we do have an opportunity to repent. We see it over and over again in Scripture where a disaster befalls the people of God—whether it’s disease or invasion or calamity, earthquakes or whatever—and it becomes an opportunity for them to repent, to turn back to God. This is one of the ways that we understand evil in the world. If we do not remember that there are demonic powers out there, then we can think that all the evil in the world is either mankind doing it—and why doesn’t God just stop them?—or even worse it’s God doing this to us. But we forget that there is this other force out there that is functioning with God’s permission, but he’s not attacking us; he’s allowing them, so that we can repent, because he knows that we need it.

I don’t know. I just wanted to kind of add that as a way of really connecting this directly to our own lives. I’ll be… I’ll say this. As I came to understand this better, I came to see it as being liberating, actually, because a lot of times when bad things happen to good people—because it’s a big question of theodicy: why do bad things happen to good people?—people say, “Why? Is God mad at me or whatever? But no! That’s probably not what’s going on. There are spiritual forces at work, there are evil spiritual forces at work, but we have to use them as an opportunity. Suffering is an opportunity, actually. It doesn’t mean we like suffering or seek it out, but it is an opportunity. It is absolutely an opportunity. I just wanted to kind of underline that as something that’s really directly pertinent to all of us and not just trying to understand demonology or whatever.

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul can say, of an unrepentant sinner, that he needs to be handed over to Satan, “for the destruction of his body and the salvation of his soul.”

Fr. Andrew: Right. Yep. I mean, that means something, you know? All right, well, why don’t we go ahead and go to our second break, and we will be back in just a moment.

***

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the third half of our show. Like you heard the voice of Steve right there, you can reach us at 855-AF-RADIO; that’s 855-237-2346. Before we get to the last two falls or apostasies of angelic beings, I just wanted to let you guys know that, normally, of course, we are on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 Eastern, 4:00 Pacific, so you’re hearing us tonight and you’ll hear us again in two weeks, on the 22nd of October. But we have a special, bonus episode on October 29. It is our Halloween special. Tune in for that. You’re going to find it really fascinating. It’s titled “The Real Demons of Halloween.” As you know, we talk about demons a lot, but we are doing a special, bonus episode on October 29, for Halloween. I’m not going to give too many spoilers for that, but just wanted to make sure you put that on your calendars, because it’s a little bit outside of our normal schedule.

Let’s move on to our next apostasy or fall of demons. This has to do with one of my favorite accounts in the Old Testament, and that is the tower of Babel, which is one of the most wonderfully depicted things in Christian art. You see these massive, massive towers, and it’s depicted in lots of different ways. Sometimes you get something that looks kind of like the leaning tower of Pisa. Other times you see something that looks more like a pyramid. So what’s going on in this one?

Fr. Stephen: This one also we have again a pagan narrative, a narrative of the other nations, that’s being corrected by Genesis 11. I won’t read these, but if you really want to nerd out, it’s in the public domain; it’s online. That’s Plato, actually, [who] gives an account of this, in two places: in the Critias, b-d, and in his On the Laws 7:13, c-e. What Plato calls the age of Chronos, which is this earlier age, when Chronos was the most high god, and of course his son, Zeus, was over the council of gods, before things went badly between them, and in this time Chronos apportioned the world and the cities of the world to the various gods who were members of the council of gods, and assigned them to their places. Plato says that at first they guided them like good and faithful shepherds, and then things changed. They started to demand sacrifice and appeasement.

This is not just a Greek thing. Greece was sort of the last Ancient Near Eastern civilization. We’re used to thinking of them as the first Western civilization, but in reality they’re the last Ancient Near Eastern one. This is paralleled everywhere, where El, Baal’s father, appointed the 70 sons of El to rule over the 70 nations. This is a commonplace. Even sociologists will talk about this, and anthropologists of religion, that there’s this period of time after the end of the Neolithic era, where the idea of a most high god becomes very distant, and there are these sort of lesser gods who then become the object of worship and magic and ritual and all of these things. This is observable all over the world, really.

So it’s this story and this narrative that the story of the tower of Babel is really intending to correct. This is another one where we have sort of a “just-so story” attached to it, where we think these ancient humans were so dumb that they thought if they built a tall enough tower they could get to where God was in heaven. The biggest problem with that is that God then comes down and stops them, so that makes it sound like maybe they could have. [Laughter] Like if God hadn’t stopped them, they would have built one that tall, which of course is kind of silly.

But the reality is that the tower we’re talking about— which was a ziggurat, like a pyramid, was a man-made mountain. You were crafting the mountain of God yourself. The name Babel, of course, is related to Babylon, but the name for the city and the name Babel comes from bavili in Babylonian, which means the gate of the gods.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, interesting!

Fr. Stephen: This wasn’t the gate for humans to get to the gods; this was the gate through which the gods came.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, man. That’s so… Wow.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, suddenly I think about that movie, Stargate. Oh, man. Yeah, where you build a gate, and…

Fr. Stephen: Except this isn’t aliens. It’s not aliens, I promise.

Fr. Andrew: Not aliens. [Laughter] “I’m not saying it was aliens… But it was demons.” [Laughter] This is not the History Channel, people.

Fr. Stephen: The idea is that you would build this mountain and gate that would bring the god down to dwell on your artificial mountain. So once you had him there, dwelling particularly in the idol, you were responsible to care for him, but that also gave you the leverage to manipulate him and get him to do what you wanted.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, which is the whole point of idolatry.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And we see this, too… They say that they want to “ascend to heaven,” but what does St. Paul say? He says, “Do not ask who will ascend? That is to bring God down.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah!

Fr. Stephen: This is the idea.

Fr. Andrew: So he glosses the idea of ascending to heaven as actually attempting to kind of trap God via idolatry.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the human level. So it is with Yahweh, the Most High God, the true God, the Creator of the entire— and it’s not that they would have succeeded, it’s just that this is really wicked.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s the worst.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] This is a massive rebellion, to attempt to try to control him. So what we see is that God says, “Let us,” he speaks to them and says, “Let us go down.” He says, “You want me to come down? I’ll come down.” And when he comes down, he confuses the languages; he separates out the nations, and they go their separate ways from that one place.

But this story is returned to in the book of Deuteronomy, in Deuteronomy 32; it comes back to this story of the tower of Babel. Probably the most famous place is Deuteronomy 32:8, which [says]:

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided humanity, he fixed the borders of the peoples, according to the number of the sons of God.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s an interesting phrase!

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that phrase will be different depending on what English translation you’re looking at, because what’s called the Masoretic text, the Medieval Hebrew text, that’s the basis for, like, the King James Version and most English Bibles, has “sons of Israel” there.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like in the King James, it says “children of Israel.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, which sort of makes no sense, because there’s [twelve] tribes of Israel, and there’s more than twelve nations.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because this is the nations.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there’s 70 nations. And there happened to be 70 sons of El in the divine council in the ancient world.

Now, the Greek tradition understood what this meant, because it says when he did it, he did it according to the number of his angels. So they had the idea that the sons of God—they disambiguated it here, that the sons of God wasn’t talking about people; it was talking about angelic beings.

When we recovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1960s, the Deuteronomy scrolls among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are of course a thousand years older than our previous Hebrew texts, they have “sons of God.” It was revealed to be correct, and that that had been kind of covered over by later rabbinic Judaism that was less comfortable with the phrase.

There is a certain school within our more liberal [Old] Testament studies that wants to see this not as a variation on the ancient story, but as the ancient story. They want to say that this is just taking the Baal version of the story, and they want to interpret it as saying, “Well, Israel believed that Yahweh, the God of Israel, was just the one who was given Israel.” Like he was just a lesser member of the council, and they must have had some version of the succession myth. No record of it, of course. [Laughter] But it got hypothesized.

The key to understanding that this is not true is if you flip back a little bit to Deuteronomy 4:19-20.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which I have in front of me here.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, why don’t you go ahead and read it, then?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, okay. Deuteronomy 4:19-20.

And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven. But the Lord hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of inheritance, as ye are this day.

Fr. Stephen: So we see here very clearly that it’s Yahweh, the God of Israel, who allotted the hosts of heaven to all the nations, and it’s also Yahweh, the God of Israel, who took Israel for himself. It was not assigned by someone else. So that’s just within the pages of Deuteronomy that idea is refuted. But the idea stands that this was done by Yahweh the Most High God in terms of the nations. So this is a punishment in that it’s not that the most high god, who was Chronos, sent these other gods, these other places, so it was right for them to worship them; this was because they tried to drag him down to the human level and manipulate him, God responds in punishment by stepping back away from humanity, withdrawing from humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Which actually is a merciful act, right? Because to be sinful and be in the presence of God is to have that sin burned, or as you actually had a recent blog post called “Death by Holiness,” which is this exact comment. So God is stepping back from humanity to give them a chance to repent, to reform, because if he stays in contact with them, if he does come down and stays with them, that’s going to be bad because they’re sinful, so he allots them to these angelic beings.

So how does that constitute an apostasy or a fall on the part of these “sons of God,” these angels?

Fr. Stephen: It’s important, though, to emphasize what you just said, that the purpose was both to protect them and the idea was that these angelic beings would serve the same way as the angelic beings whom we talked about [who were assigned to] the sun and the moon and the other things of nature: they’re just assigned to these nations. St. Paul says in Acts 17, when St. Paul’s speaking to pagans, this is what he talks about; he talks to them about the Most High God who assigned everyone their place of life and their time of living, and that he did all this so that they would seek after him. So the intent was not that he did not want any of the nations except for Israel, but that they were put away for their own good with the intent that they would return, that they would come and return to him.

But what happens is described in Deuteronomy 32, the same chapter, in verse 17. There are different English translations, but a lot of them obscure what’s going on here. It’s usually translated:

They sacrificed to demons that were not gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded.

There’s obvious problems in that translation because it’s contradictory. “They sacrificed to demons who were not gods, to gods they had never known, to gods who are not.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in the King James it renders it: “They sacrificed unto devils, not to God, to gods whom they knew not,” so that’s consistent.

Fr. Stephen: That’s better, because it says “Elohim,” so the God part is right. The word for “demons” here is also interesting, because it’s a word that occurs nowhere else in the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: Hmm!

Fr. Stephen: It’s the word shedim, and it doesn’t occur anywhere else in the Bible because it’s not actually a Hebrew word. They’ve put a Hebrew ending, a plural ending on it. But shedu is a Babylonian word, and a shedu in Babylonian religion was the [god] of the territory, a territorial god or a territorial spirit.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, interesting.

Fr. Stephen: So this is really saying they sacrificed to the territorial spirits, to the spirit assigned to that piece of territory, to their land, not to God, to the Most High God.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and so the apostasy, then, on the part of these beings is that they received that worship, that they say, “That’s okay. We’ll take that,” whereas if you meet an angel of God and you see a person attempt to bow down to them, they say, “No! Hey, whoa! No, no, get up!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, time out.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. “We do not do this.” And clearly human beings are tempted to do that. You see a divine being, you’re like: “Oh, better worship him.” And that’s one of the reasons that the Fathers, especially some of the monastic Fathers, they basically say that the good default thing to do, if you see some kind of divine being, is to make the sign of the cross and tell them to get out, because an angel would be cool with that. [Laughter] And if it’s a demon, that’s what you should be doing! Don’t do the thing that you’re tempted to do, which is to fall down before them.

Fr. Stephen: And so then these spirits, the demons that St. Paul talks about when he talks about demons, when he says when the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, when he talks about powers and principalities and the princes, that’s these beings.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, did you want to say anything else, before we take another call, on this particular apostasy?

Fr. Stephen: That’s four out of five.

Fr. Andrew: That’s four out of five! We’re almost done!

We have a call, and I think this is coming from someone whom I know, in fact. We have Mihai calling in. Mihai, are you in North Carolina?

Mihai: Yes, Fr. Andrew, I’m in Raleigh, North Carolina, and you definitely know me.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Well, it is great to hear from you and to hear your voice. Folks, this is my wife’s godfather. I am really glad to hear from you, Mihai. It’s been a long time. So what is your comment or your question for us this evening?

Mihai: My question is very simple. If the evil spirits could interact directly with the physical world, of course they could interact with humanity via the mind, they could influence people, but there are some indications they could also interact directly, like for the evil spirit to speak with Eve, he must have created acoustic waves, or maybe the pigs that went over the cliff when the devils went into them. So if that is so, in what measure and could you please say how disease or a storm could be controlled by an evil spirit? That’s pretty much my question.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, that’s a good question. Fr. Stephen, I have some ideas about that, but, Father, why don’t you comment on that first?

Fr. Stephen: We have biblical examples of them doing that, so, for example, with Job, whom we’re going to talk about some more here in a minute, of course anything demonic spirits could do, they’re only doing within God permitting them to do it, but they’re permitted to… Demonic attacks on Job includes the collapse of a building on top of his family, and it includes him getting boils and disease; it includes these things. That seems to make it clear that, yes, that can happen. Of course, there are plenty of stories in our tradition and in the lives of the saints of demonic spirits interacting. The demon in Tobit kills several people. Again, within God’s restraining power, there are examples of that happening.

Fr. Andrew: And even stuff that might be a little bit more subtle to us. We talked about demons being involved with plague, and certainly in the Apocalypse, not to steal some of our thunder from maybe a later episode, somebody, but the four horsemen of the Apocalypse definitely release very physical experiences upon mankind: pestilence and war and death. So there is this direct interaction, and certainly people experience these things sometimes in their own homes, things being thrown around or shoved, things that make it into horror films. I mean, that’s not unreal; those things are real. Now, that doesn’t mean that every single bump that you hear in your house is a demon that’s closing a drawer or something like that, but it is a thing for sure. They can interact directly with the material world. Does that answer your question, Mihai?

Mihai: Yes, thank you very much. You just mentioned some new examples, and that makes it more clear. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: Thank God. Well, again, good to hear from you, and I hope I see you again soon.

All right, so, we’ve got one more fall or apostasy of demonic beings to discuss today, and this is one that probably a lot of us know about, because I think it is mentioned in Scripture by Christ himself, but maybe we didn’t think twice about it and think that this is another event. So, Fr. Stephen, take us on into this one. This is the fifth and final fall of our five(ish) falls of angels.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is the “-ish.”

Fr. Andrew: Not to be confused with the Hebrew word, ish. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Which is Eve’s original name.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: So this depends, the reason there’s an “-ish,” this depends on whether the devil and Satan are the same.

Fr. Andrew: Whether they’re the same person, okay.

Fr. Stephen: Which many of us may have taken for granted for much of our lives. [Laughter] Right? That these are the same person. And they may be the same person. [But according to] both Second Temple Jewish tradition and Orthodox tradition, they are not the same person. In fact, this is alluded to by St. Andrew of Caesarea, which I’ve mentioned before in terms of understanding… The Fathers saw what we’re about to talk about as a sort of a problem, or an issue at least, that needed an explanation, and there are two possible explanations.

There’s this figure whom we encounter in the book of Job, who is referred to in the book of Job as “the Satan.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, the Satan.

Fr. Stephen: And the “the” is important, because in some languages like Greek, you could put a definite article before some[one’s name]. We don’t usually do that in English: “the” Father Stephen. But in Hebrew, you also— If something has ha, which is the definite article, in front of a name, that means it’s a title. So the person in Job is not named “Satan” in the book of Job; he is the Satan.

Fr. Andrew: So what does that mean?

Fr. Stephen: The Adversary.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, the Adversary or the Enemy.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or the Opponent, yeah, who comes into the divine council and presents this case against Job. And this figure, people have probably— in Jewish, even later Jewish Rabbinic tradition, they don’t see “the Satan” as necessarily an evil or, pardon the pun, diabolical figure necessarily. He’s sort of a prosecuting attorney for sin, and wins points for sins, right?

Fr. Andrew: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so there is already in Second Temple Jewish tradition, in the tradition between 500 BC and the writing of the New Testament, in that Judaism— sometimes he’s given an angelic form of the name, like Satanael, or Samael, sometimes considered one of the seven archangels. [Inaudible] —for his fall. And so you have this figure, usually seen as being in contest with St. Michael the Archangel, that St. Michael the Archangel is sort of defending Israel and the righteous of God, and Satanael or Samael is accusing the righteous of God in this sort of continual back-and-forth. Of course, St. Michael is said to have been the archangel or the guardian angel of Jacob, and Samael was the guardian angel of Esau, so this contest has sort of being going on for a long time.

Samael, his name means the venom of God or the poison of God, and he’s usually identified as like the angel of death at the Passover, the one who brings the plagues in response to sin. So you can see how that dynamic sort of plays out, and that dynamic is referred to by St. Jude in Jude. —you might say, in contesting over the body of Moses, and that’s a play on this dynamic. So you can easily see how someone might say, “Okay, well, this is basically another name for the devil, right?” Like, this is the same person.

Fr. Andrew: Right, right.

Fr. Stephen: What causes the issue is largely Luke 10:17-20.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m going to pull it up here right now. Luke 10:17-20:

And the seventy (the seventy apostles that Christ sent out) returned again with joy, saying, “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name.” And he said unto them, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven. Behold, I give unto you power to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt you. Notwithstanding in this, rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.”

So “I saw…” or as I have often heard it, “I saw Satan fall like lightning.”

Fr. Stephen: It’s very clear from the account that something has changed here, during the ministry of Christ. Something has happened vis-a-vis Satan, that he’s lost a role, he’s no longer given access to the divine council, or something has happened here to Satan.

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: And we find the same thing in Revelation [12:]1-9, where we read about Satan being cast down after Christ’s birth. Christ’s birth is described and then the fall of Satan. — Right?

Fr. Andrew: You kind of broke up there a little bit, but I think a really important point to make here is… I remember reading that, “I saw Satan fall like lightning,” and my first thought, what I kind of recall from when I was a kid, is thinking, “Okay, he’s talking about things he saw before the creation of the world.” But, like you said, in Revelation, it talks about this fall that happens after the birth of Christ, so it’s something current to when he’s speaking.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Christ says that because of that, he’s giving them this authority over demons, in Luke. When St. Andrew looks at this, he says, “Wait a second. The Fathers all say that after the creation of the world, the devil fell through envy, but now we have this fall in the ministry of Christ.” If you read Revelation 12:9 in Greek, it says that the dragon-who-is-the devil and Satan are cast out or is cast out. So is it the dragon, who is both the devil and Satan? Or is it, the dragon-who-is-the-devil, one guy, and Satan, who’s this other guy? It’s ambiguous, and so the question is: Are these two different figures who both fall, or is this one figure, one person, who falls two different times in two different ways? And St. Andrew thinks it’s one figure who falls in two different ways.

But there are other places… For example, some of the icons of Theophany will show, instead of the little river gods what looks like a man with wings, like a fallen angel down there, and then a dragon, as two separate beings.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that!

Fr. Stephen: So there are these elements of tradition where these are separate demonic powers, and there are elements of tradition where they’re put together into one. It’s not uncommon for all we’ve talked about tonight to be kind of mixed and matched in different texts. That’s part of the order/chaos llying spirits…

Fr. Andrew: Right. We shouldn’t be surprised, as you said, that lying spirits are hard to pin down, that they’re going to fool us. They’re spiritual beings. They have great powers, abilities. They’re extremely experienced with tempting mankind. They’re going to appear in the way that makes sense to them to attempt to tempt us. They’re going to function in a way that tries to bring us into their rebellion. They’re not going to show up and say, “Here’s my demonic ID.” [Laughter] You know, “Here’s my picture on it.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “Demon, third class, assigned to—”

Fr. Andrew: Right, which is an interesting contrast to the way that a lot of people kind of want to have this all sorted out. And there are whole spiritual systems, religious systems that lay all these things out, and they try to codify them and so forth, but they’re just not. These traditions that we have are people who are encountering these beings and trying to make sense of what it is they’re actually experiencing. This is not speculation. This is actual, direct experience of human beings over time saying, “I saw this. I encountered this. This happened.” These are testimonies.

Fr. Stephen: These are demonic spirits. These are different ways in which demonic spirits are encountered, by false pagan idolatrous worship, in temptation to commit evil through knowledge that they’re not prepared for, through an attempt to displace God in their heart and mind and soul. These are all actual experiences that we have, human beings, since the beginning of human beings, of spirits of evil who are bent on the destruction of humanity.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. All right, well, having said that, we’re going to wrap up for tonight, but before we do that I just wanted to give you a little bit of preview of what we’re going to be talking about next time. Two weeks from today, on the 22nd of October, we’re going to be talking about exactly the opposite of what we’ve been discussing this evening. We’ll be talking about the sons of God, what that title means, what it means to become sons of God—human beings become sons of God—and of course that word that every Orthodox Christian probably should know, which is “theosis.” You may wonder exactly what that all has to do with all these things we’ve been discussing. So tune in again, two weeks from tonight, for that.

Fr. Stephen, did you have any final comments you wanted to make before we wrap up tonight?

Fr. Stephen: Just that, in relation to our second call, and this is important as a theme we’re going to come back to again and again and again, the chain of cause and effect moves back and forth between the material and the spiritual worlds. They’re not separate; there’s not a divider, there’s not a partition. But everything moves back and forth, because it is all one creation and one world that includes demons, demigods, and staplers.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And staplers! All right, well, don’t forget on the 29th of October we have a bonus Halloween special episode. That is our show for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. If you did not get a chance to call in during the live broadcast, we would love to hear from you, either via email at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com [or] you can contact us through the chat room which we had going tonight. You can also message us at our Lord of Spirits podcast Facebook page, and there is also, by the way, a Facebook group called The Divine Council. We read everything. We do—we really do read everything—but we can’t respond to everything, and we do save what you send for possible use in future episodes.

Fr. Stephen: Join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. Don’t forget to like our Lord of Spirits Facebook page while you’re at it, and join the aforementioned group. Leave a recommendation and then invite your friends.

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Fr. Stephen: Finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you, and God bless you!