Angelic DNA, Hybrids, and Calvinball - Episode 099

Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and welcome to another episode that is actually going to connect to my episodes on sexuality that I've been doing, except this one's going to have a little bit of a different twist.

[00:00:29] Instead of talking about human sexuality, We're going to be talking about angelic embodiment, and the Nephilim, and Sons of God, and Genesis 6, and all of that kind of thing, and the giants after the flood. Now, we've talked about things like this before. But I think that in relation to my episodes about sexuality, this is kind of a obvious "we have to get to it" kind of a point and I haven't really talked about this entirely head on. I haven't dedicated a whole episode on it although my episode with TJ Stedman from the Answers to Giant Questions podcast did touch a lot about this.

[00:01:11] So, I can refer you to that episode for a lot more content. And I absolutely and positively will recommend his book, Answers to Giant Questions, which gets into a lot of the same kind of content. And if you are familiar with Dr. Heiser's work, T. J. Stedman's book is going to give you an additional layer of thinking on top of what Dr. Heiser brings out in his book, The Unseen Realm.

[00:01:40] So that's kind of our framework for today. We're going to be talking a lot about that and in part because I did say something about angelic embodiment in relation to sexuality here on earth when we were talking about Matthew 22. In that passage in Matthew 22, Jesus is talking to the Sadducees and they are asking him about the resurrection and Jesus says that in the resurrection, people will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but they will be like angels in heaven. And so that makes us think, well, you know, angels can't have intercourse. They can't have offspring. So what's up with the whole sons of God incident in Genesis 6, if those are spiritual beings? My offhand comment in that episode was that there can be a difference between angels in heaven and angels on earth.

[00:02:37] And that's going to be wrapped up in the concept of angelic embodiment. Now, there's some really interesting things that we can talk about in regards to angelic embodiment because what's going on with an angel who comes to earth and he is embodied? Like we see a situation where Abraham is talking to somebody in bodily form and it's an angel. We see Jacob who is wrestling with the man, right, who turns out to be some sort of spirit being, God, or some might say another deity or another angelic being. We see angels eating, we see angels doing things that humans do, but we don't see angels being incarnated into creation like Jesus. So there's a very big distinction there, right?

[00:03:32] An angel who is embodied is not going to be the same as Jesus, who has come and incarnated himself into creation. Because Jesus had the full range of human experience. On earth, in the incarnation, Jesus was fully human, unlike an angel who is going to present himself in an embodied form. Now, we might say, well, there's going to be limitations with an angel who's presenting himself in bodily form then, right? Because an angel didn't go through the birthing process. He didn't get incarnated in the way that Jesus is.

[00:04:10] But an angel is also eating human food. So that suggests that the angel's body is a human body. Now, that's going to be important to our whole idea here, that an angel being in human form on earth is going to take on a human body. It's not an angelic body that he is presenting.

[00:04:32] But my point here is that an angelic being who has presented himself in a human form is skipping the point of creation of being a human, but that doesn't mean that an angel can't have a human body, right?

[00:04:49] So there's a distinction between an angel as a human and an angel in human form. But there's also a lot of overlap in that because an angel in human form is going to have a human body. He's not gonna have an angelic body, like I said. This is not like the LDS theology where an angel really has a human body in heaven because they lived a human life on a previous planet somewhere.

[00:05:18] Whether or not there's some sort of angelic substance or something, what we have going on in these situations with angelic beings coming to Earth and interacting on a human level is that they just have a human body. And they're doing human things, but they've skipped the part of creation of actually being a human.

[00:05:39] So that's why we have like in Psalm 82, where the Elohim are being judged to die like men. That's not something that normally can happen. Mortality is in the realm of humans and human life. So, if an angel can put on human form, then that means they're going to be skipping a lot of human life. They're not born like humans. They don't have to die like humans, but that doesn't mean that an angel who takes on human form cannot do what a human does.

[00:06:14] I think that just the evidence that people eat. And the angel can eat is an indication that they have functioning human bodies. So the argument that an angel cannot have intercourse and procreate with a human in human form is not really all that coherent when you consider the difference between angels in heaven and angels who are presenting themselves on earth. There's really no reason to think that they're not going to have functioning bodies. But, like I said, they are going to be human bodies, so if an angel comes down to earth, and has intercourse with a human woman, and the angel has a human body, and the woman has a human body, well, what are we going to expect about their children?

[00:07:05] Their children ought to be human as well. And the description that we see of Nephilim and giants is that it does use the word man for them.

[00:07:17] Now we might say, okay, so why then do they have the appelation of giants? Why are they described as being huge, and all of these kinds of things? We have in 2 Samuel, I think it is, with the Giants who have the six fingers. Why do they seem to be different?

[00:07:39] Well, first of all, I think we need to understand that back in the day a giant would be just a really tall human. Because of genetics, because of dietary things, because of other things, and the evidence we have in bones, the average height of a man would be quite short to us today. So if you take a shorter man and a really tall man and you put them side by side, there is quite a vast difference. You can see all kinds of pictures online of those kinds of differences.

[00:08:15] But not only that, we also need to understand that the presentation of people as giants is in the realm of things like war and conquest. And, you know, if you're describing your enemy as being something really scary that you don't want to have any interaction with, well, you're going to describe them in a way that is hyperbolic.

[00:08:41] The people of the land of Canaan very well might have been taller than the Israelites. But it's also very possible that this was hyperbolic language. I mean, let's go ahead and read it ourselves.

[00:08:54] In Numbers 13, starting in verse 25, it says, Quote, When they returned from spying out the land, at the end of forty days, they proceeded to come to Moses and Aaron, and to all the congregation of the sons of Israel in the wilderness of Paran at Kadesh. And they brought back word to them, and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land. Thus they told him, and said, We went into the land where you sent us. And it certainly does flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. Nevertheless, the people who live in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified, and very large. And moreover, we saw descendants of Anak there. Amalek is living in the land of the Negev, and the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Amorites are living in the hill country, and the Canaanites are living by the sea, and by the side of the Jordan. Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, We should by all means go up and take possession of it, for we will surely overcome it. But the men who had gone up with him said, We're not able to go up against the people, for they are too strong for us. So they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, The land through which we have gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size. There also we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim, and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight. End quote.

[00:10:37] Okay, so this is obviously, like, an account that's supposed to be scaring their listeners. They're trying to prevent the going into the land and they're presenting the inhabitants of the land as big scary guys that we can't possibly beat. And they're connecting this with Anak and with this past history, right?

[00:11:00] Now I know it's really a whole lot more interesting and appealing to us to think of them as massive giants. And again, I'm not saying that this isn't a possibility, that they weren't a lot taller and that there wasn't something going on here. But if you want to look at the idea of Nephilim and Giants as being this special kind of DNA that they had, and a bloodline that stems from the Sons of God incident, or maybe another repeat of that, and you really think that genetically, the people in the land had some sort of divine DNA, right? That they had some sort of soul that wasn't human. Well, if you want to look at it from that scientific perspective, then you're going to need to look at DNA and how that actually works out in humans.

[00:11:59] Because if we have a whole society of giants, are we presuming that they are not mating with people outside of their clan? I think that would be ridiculous, right? If they are this big, scary population who are going to conquer other people, they're going to bring other people into their gene pool, right? So, first of all, are we assuming that giant or divine DNA is a dominant form? I think it would kind of have to be in order to populate through the population as strongly as we're suggesting here, where everyone in the tribe is a giant. So they have giant DNA, they have come from a giant clan, and they are going to be massive and big, and that's going to be a dominant trait.

[00:12:50] Okay. So why did that dominant trait not then infiltrate the Israelites when they mixed with the people in the land? Because we know that that happened. Why are the Israelites now not giants?

[00:13:06] Now, and then we have to understand that as we go back in generations, we lose quite a bit of the content of our ancestors DNA because it gets watered down. You have about one and a half percent of each of your four times grandparents. So like that's six generations ago. So we're talking giant clans who have integrated other people into their populations.

[00:13:33] Why are they still giants? Their DNA must be that dominant that... why are the Israelites now not Giants? See, it just, if you're gonna go down the modern DNA route, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It just doesn't. So what's the alternative then? Why do we have giant clans?

[00:13:56] What's the whole point of seeing this narrative in the text? Why do we have Nephilim before the Flood and also after? Like, this is a big question, right? How did the Nephilim survive the Flood? Well, your answer to that is going to depend on how you're seeing this whole thing happen. Like, are we talking about DNA? Are we talking about special angelic souls that are put into people? It's tempting to go that route, especially when you see the narrative of the demons in the New Testament, right, as far as how we see that through the lens of books like First Enoch, which are extra biblical and not included in our Bibles.

[00:14:42] But this was a common way of thinking about what demons were in the time of the New Testament. If you haven't read Unseen Realm, I highly recommend that book. It helps to explain this narrative , connecting what we have in the Old Testament to what we see in the New Testament.

[00:14:59] The idea is that the demons of the New Testament are the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim, the Nephilim being this combination hybrid of human and angelic. And so, well, that means that there is something funky going on, maybe not with DNA, but at least on the soul level, they only have half of a human soul, maybe.

[00:15:27] And there's the other half that's angelic or divine and you combine those and it's an unclean spirit and they don't belong anywhere. They don't belong on the earth. They don't belong in the underworld, and so they're wandering the earth because they have no place to be. That's the narrative we have going on with the unclean .Spirits of the first century. And so if you have that in your head, especially as a modern person, you're going, well, how does that work?

[00:15:57] How do we have that unless there's some sort of special divine DNA- bloodlines kind of thing going on? So if you're thinking that, well, the answer for how Nephilim survived the flood is usually twofold, and these are the two ideas that Dr. Heiser brings out in his book, The Unseen Realm.

[00:16:17] The two ideas are, maybe the flood was regional, and so it didn't kill them all off. Okay. There's a whole big argument about that.

[00:16:27] The other option is that it happened again, but Dr. Heiser doesn't really go into the details of how it happened again. Did it happen exactly the same? That's kind of the presumption is that it happened exactly the same. One reason I highly appreciate T. J. Stedman's book Answers to Giant Questions is that he goes down a bit of a more nuanced path of an explanation for how and why it could have happened again. In short form, it didn't happen exactly the same way multiple times. It only happened one way before the Flood, and it happened a different way after the Flood.

[00:17:08] Or at least that's one way we can look at it here. Another way we can look at it is that maybe it happened the same way, both before the flood and after the flood, but there could be nuance between those two different times, because it does seem like there's an ongoing narrative of the Nephilim and the giant clans and all of these things, but there's also a lessening, right?

[00:17:34] We have the idea of the first Nephilim, and they were the mighty men of old, which means that we don't see those kinds of men around anymore.

[00:17:47] And so the giant clans are the same thing, but maybe a little bit nuanced. Maybe this is the ritualistic explanation, whereas before the flood, the sons of God were having literal intercourse with human women in angelic human form. And then after the flood, maybe they were prevented from doing that because they were chained, as we see in the New Testament in Jude and Peter, the ideas of chains of darkness, maybe that means that they were prevented or hampered in their ability by God, not literally physically chained in some location, but rather the chains are a dampening of their ability.

[00:18:34] And so they could not do the same thing that they were doing before the flood after the flood, so they changed tactics instead. And so the idea is that after the flood, they started having this happen through ritualistic temple prostitution. So the king, who would be the sole son of God or image of God in that pagan culture, would have ritualistic intercourse with a temple prostitute and that's how they would then get the mighty men, the Nephilim, the Giants, that kind of thing.

[00:19:12] Now if you think this is getting real complicated and how are we supposed to like parse this and how are we supposed to determine what's happening? I'm with you on that. It's really complicated because it's talked about in so very many different ways in different places, by different people. You have the same types of ideas, but they're talked about in different ways. They're presented in different ways. They're formulated in different types of narratives. And we even see this from the earliest stories that we have that talk about these things.

[00:19:48] In the literature of Mesopotamia, we don't just have one thing that's going on and it's described in one single way and they've encoded it in their version of scripture and that's how they all talk about it from then on out. That's not how they do it.

[00:20:05] One of the things that Dr. Heiser talks about in the Unseen Realm is the Mesopotamian story of the Apkallu. And this comes in different forms. You see the same kind of general idea repackaged in different ways. Primarily the apkallu, who were the pre-flood sages of Mesopotamia who gave mankind all of this knowledge and civilization and culture, they were presented as culture heroes, usually. It's like, hey, look at us. We are Babylon and we are so great and our culture is amazing. And why are we so great? Because we got our culture and our kingship from the divine Apkallu. The Apkallu being their version of the sons of God.

[00:20:57] But you also have a whole lot of different stories that are a little bit different than that. And sometimes the Apkallu are the source of demonic forces, of evil forces. This is brought out in particular in a great paper that you can find for free online. It's called On the Origin of the Watchers by Amar Annas, and he goes through a lot of this information connecting the Mesopotamian stories with the biblical stories. So you can go and read that and it talks about all of these different traditions that we have. Because the question might be, did the biblical authors take the Mesopotamian stories and use it as a polemic and turn it around entirely so that the Apkallu or the Sons of God are now negative figures? Or did they take a pre existing story that was already negative to the Mesopotamians and then frame the biblical story around that?

[00:22:03] And I know there's a lot of people out there who don't like that kind of talking about scripture like this, like it has some sort of source. But if it helps, you can see all of that as stemming from a really ancient source stemming from the original, original account, and the Bible is presenting the original account, and the Mesopotamians just twisted it along the way.

[00:22:25] But that being said, what we have in the Mesopotamian stories is a different account from time to time. We've talked about Babylonian accounts of the Flood, but one that we haven't talked about is called the Erra Epic. And in the Erra Epic, it's the god Marduk who causes the Flood to happen. In fact, let me go ahead and read part of this. The Flood story in the Erra Epic is narrated by Marduk

[00:22:56] himself, and here's a quote from that. Quote, Once long ago, indeed, I grew angry. Indeed, I left my dwelling and caused the deluge. When I left my dwelling, the regulation of heaven and earth disintegrated. The shaking of heaven meant the positions of the heavenly bodies changed, nor did I restore them. The quaking of netherworld meant the yield of the furrow diminished, being thereafter difficult to exploit. The regulation of heaven and earth disintegrating meant underground water diminished, high water receded. When I looked again, it was a struggle to get enough. End quote.

[00:23:40] So this is presenting Marduk, the prime deity of Babylon, as being the one who caused the flood. And there's quite a few connections between these stories and the older Mesopotamian stories, as well as the biblical flood account. The imagery of a lot of it is very, very similar with water. We have, in some places, fire, which shows up in First Enoch, and in the New Testament with the lake of fire being prepared for the devil and his angels. We also have connections with the tree of life and with gardening and with flourishing. So once you get all of these ideas start percolating in your head and you're like, how do I separate all of this out?

[00:24:26] And it's very difficult and I'm going to propose a metaphor here, but I don't want you to take the metaphor too stringently, okay? Because it's going to break down very quickly. But my metaphor that I'm going to propose here for biblical interpretation of these ideas is that it's like Calvin Ball.

[00:24:50] Now, if you're not familiar with Calvin Ball, it comes from the comic Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin is this six year old boy, and Hobbes is his stuffed tiger, and they go on adventures, and they do things together. When Calvin's around other people, Hobbes is just a stuffed tiger. When he is interacting with Hobbes on a personal level, then Hobbes is like a real tiger. He's like his best friend.

[00:25:18] So they play this game called Calvin Ball. And Calvin Ball has rules, but the rules change mid game. And they change according to whatever Calvin feels like saying they now are. And it's funny because it's kind of like when you're playing with kids and , that's what kids do, right? They want to change the rules to benefit themselves according to what their new perspective is.

[00:25:46] So, my suggestion here is that how we can see the progression and change and ways that this narrative is seen through time, it's a bit like Calvin Ball. In the context of the exile, where people are reading the book of Genesis and it's attaining its final form. Now, of course, Genesis is far older than the exile, but it attained its final form during the exile. And because of that, it's going to have a lot of these Mesopotamian flavors to it, right? So the flood account is going to be a polemic against Mesopotamian ideas. It's going to be a corrective. It's going to be interacting with the ideas of Mesopotamia.

[00:26:33] Well, you get past the exile and now the people aren't in the context of Mesopotamia, but now they have established scripture. They have Genesis in its final form and they're going, well, what do we do with this, with our new ideas that we're having and that we're playing around with? Then we get books like Jubilees, which is kind of a rewriting of the book of Genesis in a new framework.

[00:27:02] They're playing Calvin ball. Now, again, like I said, the metaphor breaks down quickly because I think there's a lot of cohesion and there's a lot of similarity and a lot of continuity. So I'm not saying there's a discontinuity entirely in these stories because there's not. They're very, very similar.

[00:27:23] They're playing on similar themes, but there's also differences and those differences are going to show up because they are in a different culture. They're interacting with different ideas around them, and they're trying to fit scripture into those ideas. So you have the Mesopotamian ideas, you have the new ideas of the second temple period, then you get into the New Testament and things are again being seen through a new lens with the incarnation of God in Jesus, right?

[00:27:57] So all of these things are changing the way that we're seeing things.

[00:28:03] And it's going to be that way within the culture of Mesopotamia, within the ancient Near East itself. And I would suggest you have the same thing going on in scripture because the same kinds of changes to culture and concepts are going to happen throughout scripture because we have the story of the Bible, which goes across thousands of years, right? So the time of the patriarchs is not the same as the time of the exodus, is not the same as the time of the exile, is not the same as the time of the prophets, and so on. So even within scripture itself, we have a kind of reformatting and rethinking going on.

[00:28:48] So, again, I'm not saying that we don't have the continuity in Scripture. I think the benefit and value of understanding books like First Enoch is that it helps to shed light on the fact that we have these same ideas that are tracking through time, but they're going to look different in different eras.

[00:29:09] That's why we have rabbinic understandings that we do. They're trying to understand scripture the way that they could in their own framework. This is why we have the early church fathers who are now studying scripture with a christological lens and going, How do we understand this through that?

[00:29:29] We move on to the Middle Ages, we move on to the Reformation and every time period is going to have its unique challenges, its unique way of thinking, its unique way of trying to interpret scripture to the best of their ability. We have the same thing going on today with dialogue with one another in different forms of Christianity, as well as secular studies.

[00:29:57] And every kind of era is going to approach the same problems in different ways. But like I said in my last episode, talking about how the church has talked about singleness, it's fascinating to me how the church in different eras through time and different geographical places that are kind of separated and they're working through things differently, they come to very similar conclusions through vastly different means.

[00:30:28] And so again, it's like we're playing Calvin ball, but we're still coming to really similar conclusions because we have the arc of Scripture to kind of still bound our rules. We're not totally going to be able to suddenly changed the rules. That goes beyond what I'm saying here, but I'm trying to give a framework to how we can understand that there's both continuity and massive disconnects as well.

[00:30:55] And this is why we can't necessarily take a book like First Enoch that is informing our view of scripture in New Testament era, but not necessarily needing to take every detail that First Enoch is giving because First Enoch has its own context that is not the New Testament And it's not really even the Mesopotamian context either.

[00:31:21] It's its own unique thing. And so, if we can understand things like the Second Temple period in its context, and the Old Testament in its context, and the New Testament in its context, and the early church in its context, and the Reformation in its context, if we can appreciate each of those pieces of things as its own thing, as far as how it's dealing with the world that it is dealing with, plus scripture and trying to take all of those things seriously, then I think that's really helpful because it can kind of dismantle our need to have as much certainty as we kind of want to have.

[00:32:02] understand it's also really frustrating because it means that we can't have as much surety and answers as we want to have. What's absolutely fascinating to me is that we do have so much continuity in this and we have the story showing up again and again, but going back to the idea of DNA and bloodlines and all of this stuff, the way that we're thinking about it today is not the way that they used to think about it, because they didn't understand DNA, they didn't know how human genetics work, and trying to concord our science onto the past understanding of things, it breaks down really quickly as you can demonstrate if you even start talking about how DNA and genes even work.

[00:32:53] So there's an enthusiasm to understand all of this stuff with the Nephilim and the Giants to sort of excuse or justify the conquest. Because the idea is that if the giant clans were genetically corrupt, and they were a danger to mankind in general because of genetic reasons, right?

[00:33:19] That is going to color the way that we understand things, and it's, frankly, a big, big problem when we come to scripture, because we have the Israelites intermarrying with the giant clans.

[00:33:33] And Dr. Heiser never really came down to an idea of whether or not the sons of God were having intercourse, whether this was about DNA or maybe it was some sort of scientific manipulation or maybe it was something else entirely. He never came down on any one particular position on that.

[00:33:56] Several times I saw him say, well, there's different options and they're all on the table, which I think that's fair enough, but from my perspective, they're not all the same. All of the options are not the same and it's obvious that they're not the same and that some of them, especially from the scientific standpoint, just can't work.

[00:34:21] Like if you're going to use science, then you're going to have to apply all of modern science to this problem. And it just doesn't really accord because the giant clans would have to be entirely cut off in themselves in order to maintain the supposed genetic purity to justify the conquest of killing them all.

[00:34:44] Like, if the reason for killing all of the giant clans, every member of the giant clans, is that they were genetically corrupted, then we've got problems because that can't possibly even have worked. Because they would have intermarried with other people and so how are you going to determine who is a giant and who is not?

[00:35:07] Who has giant DNA? Who is human and who isn't a human? When really scripture just presents them all as humans. They're described as men, but they're described as the enemies of God. And so there's this hyperbolic language.

[00:35:24] There's the idea that they are not redeemable. Is that because they are genetically corrupt and that's the justification for killing them all? Well, first of all, they didn't all die, so we know that they failed in wiping out the giant clans. Was that because they didn't kill everyone, or was that because of another reason? Was it because they didn't erase all of their traditions, all of their worship of other gods? Was it because the Israelites did not adequately deal with the situation of wiping out the worship of other gods?

[00:36:07] So when we think of genetics and we think of bloodlines and we think of DNA, we're thinking in this scientific progression, right? We're thinking of biological descent. Is that how somebody in the ancient world would have seen the idea of bloodlines? I've talked quite a bit about inheritance lately, and there's a lot of inheritance wrapped up around this idea of the Nephilim and the Apkallu and the stories involving those things.

[00:36:42] You have pre Flood Apkallu, and you also have post Flood Apkallu, and they're not the same things. Even accounting for the fact that we can have just general change in culture and the way that people see things, as far as Calvin Ball interpretation goes. But not only that, but even if you have some continuity, the Apkallu before the flood are seen as fully divine, whereas the Apkallu after the flood are only partially divine. And again, in our modern scientific thinking, we're like, well, okay, so what do you do then when you have a person who is half human and half divine?

[00:37:22] But look, that's not actually the way they talked about it. They talked about it in thirds, two thirds divine and one third human, or one third divine and two thirds human. How do you get thirds here? Well, this is where the ritualistic explanation makes a little more sense, because in a ritualistic kind of a situation, what you have is supposedly three beings who are involved in the reproduction here. You have the divine being, you have the king, and you have the temple prostitute. So that's three. So somebody who is two thirds divine would have the divine being, the king, and the woman. And whether or not you're seeing the king as divine is how you're going to get two thirds versus one third.

[00:38:13] Okay, so, again, this gets a bit convoluted and confusing, but the reason I bring up the ritualistic ideas is that it helps us to understand how this can be more than just DNA.

[00:38:27] And it can also still help us have this idea of the Nephilim and the giant clans as being a justification for the conquest. Not insofar as killing everyone because everyone was completely wicked and depraved and genetically corrupt. But really more an ancient Near Eastern idea of bloodlines and tribal inheritance.

[00:38:54] Now what do I mean by that? What I don't mean is DNA and genetics. What I do mean is that if you are in a family, and this is something we understand less today because of our individualistic society, but if you're in a society that is tribal and where your identity is going to be wrapped up in your tribe and your patriarch is basically going to dictate everything about your life, then you can kind of understand this idea that a whole tribe is going to be implicated in whatever the patriarch does.

[00:39:34] Whatever decisions the patriarch makes, whatever kind of culture the patriarch is developing is going to impact the way you're living. You don't get an individualistic chance to rebel in that kind of a situation. Not like we see today.

[00:39:52] Today, you have a family and you think, well, I'm raising my children to be good Christians, and so they should continue to be good Christians when they're out of my house. But you see, it's the whole out of the house thing that causes a problem. That wasn't really the way things worked back in the past.

[00:40:13] If you kept your family intact and you had a family unit that was more than just the nuclear family, but was the extended family, and that was your source of identification, then it was a lot harder for you to run off on your own and do your own thing. I'm not saying it wasn't possible. You have the story of the prodigal son. You have Naaman who came into the land, was converted to Yahweh worship and went back into his land and presumably still continued to worship Yahweh. So there's a sense in which people could have a choice. But even with the story of Naaman, he went back to his tribe. He didn't stay with the Israelites.

[00:40:57] Now, we don't know what that means, and maybe we're presuming a little bit too much there. but my point is to draw our minds back to the past and how they would have seen family lines and the family unit. It wasn't just about individual accountability. So why would women and children be included in the extermination order?

[00:41:21] It's because they would have lived lives and been in the same situation as the patriarchs. We also have to admit that this is about war, and every time you have a situation like that, you have a lot of hyperbolic language.

[00:41:37] Was it really the case that God was genuinely telling them to kill all of the wives and children? if that was the case, why are there also laws which allowed the people to bring in wives from their enemies?

[00:41:52] Now, it's entirely possible that what we have is a very different ethical situation, and people just didn't see morality the way that we do, and there's this difference and distinction here, and it's a really hard, perplexing problem. And I think that just saying that the destruction was because of genetic corruption, I don't think that absolves us of the difficultiness of the situation.

[00:42:17] And neither does this idea, but we can see it a little bit better in that ancient light that what a tribe was and what a tribe did and how the culture was perpetuated in a tribe would not just cease to be if that tribe wasn't demolished. And so you can have kind of a both and situation here. You can have the idea that this is going to help us understand the conquest, but it doesn't have to be about DNA corruption.

[00:42:50] That's kind of my point here. What you can see is the same kinds of themes cropping up over and over, and that's why I also think it's misguided to say that the whole Nephilim narrative isn't important in Scripture, because we see it show up in very important ways. And it doesn't have to be rooted in this genetic line because it wasn't about the genetics, it was about the loyalty and the choices made by the patriarchs to follow Yahweh.

[00:43:26] As Dr. Heiser said, it was always about believing loyalty. Somebody from the giant clans wasn't depraved because of their genetics, but because of their choices.

[00:43:40] The people who would be decimated in the conquest weren't decimated because they just happened to belong to the wrong family, but because they belonged to the wrong family, and they were doing the wrong things, and they made the wrong choices, they were worshiping the wrong deities, and they were doing so in extreme ways as well, you know, with child sacrifice and ritualistic sex and other things like drinking blood and all of these ideas that are spoken against very strongly in the Torah.

[00:44:13] So what about the idea though, of like half breeds and hybrids and all of this kind of thing? Isn't that what the Bible is talking about? Well, it is, because that was the culture of the time, that's just how they talked about things like this.

[00:44:31] You go to the Apkallu narratives, and you see hybrids all the time. You see half man, half fish, half divine, half fish, half fish and half goat. You see all of these ideas of hybrids, and maybe again, bringing in our modern ideas of genetics is not the way we should be seeing those things.

[00:44:55] I see the question very often about, well, when does one become not a Nephilim? When is your DNA diluted enough to now have a real human soul rather than a demonic soul? And that question is fair enough in the way that we're looking at the narrative of the demons in the first century, again, through that lens of first Enoch.

[00:45:22] I think that story does make a lot of sense as to how we can understand the demonic in the New Testament. That doesn't mean we can just import that into modern science, though, because it's just not how anything is talked about in the ancient world. We don't have a Nephilim who is 1 32nd Nephilim.

[00:45:48] The only fractions we have are the 1 3rd and the 2 3rds, and that's not talking about dilution. Again, It's talking about that origin of how much divine do you have compared to human. It's talking about that parentage. We don't have anything in the ancient world that describes somebody as one fourth Nephilim. As one fourth giant. That's just not the way they were thinking about it. And because that's not the way they were thinking about it, that's why I tell people that this is the wrong question to be asking.

[00:46:26] It's importing our understanding on the narrative. And again, I understand why you would want to do that and how you're going to try and process this information, especially because of that demonic idea of how does one become a demon? I think the idea was either that you were or you weren't, and probably it was mostly the Apkalu, Sons of God, first generation Nephilim that have that going on.

[00:46:58] And those were the ones who would have been killed in the flood. So there is no possibility of diluted gene pool there. The giants that come after that are not the same as the Nephilim before. That is the case in all of the literature that we can see.

[00:47:16] That is why you can have somebody from the giant clans who is not a quote unquote giant because they're not acting like that. They're not making the choices to be against Yahweh and his people. And that's really the important thing. Who are you worshipping? Are you for or against Yahweh? Are you for or against Yahweh's people? Who are you in relation to God and his people?

[00:47:45] And the idea of this massive corruption on that level of you now become a demon, that is in the primeval past. That is, those situations that are very unique and that are wrapped up in the idea of worship of other gods.

[00:48:03] You don't accidentally become that. Now, can there be a sense that somebody could become corrupt? They can corrupt their own souls to that point? I think there's a possibility there. But again, it's because you have made a choice and you are acting in a certain way to be against God and you are worshiping something other than God to become something that you have corrupted the image of God in you so that you are no longer in that realm. Right? It's not this scientific thing. And it's hard for us to wrap our minds around this and to connect our worlds with the ancient world because we are thinking so very differently.

[00:48:49] I can't blame people for getting a little bit tired of the Nephilim narrative and people talking about the Nephilim agenda because it's very, very common that you get the narrative that goes down that genetic path or maybe saying that they are aliens who are, you know, impregnating women and things like that.

[00:49:11] All of these ideas that really are very steeped in our modern scientific narrative and our modern thinking. And I get that people get tired of hearing about that, and that every time the word Nephilim shows up, they're assuming that you're talking about that, because that is the loud narrative that they hear in many other places.

[00:49:34] You pick up a book on the Nephilim or the Sons of God or Genesis 6 and more often than not, it's going to go down this route of these ideas of corruption and DNA and bloodlines. And again, it's not like you can't talk about bloodlines in relation to this, but you have to talk about them in terms of the way the ancient person thought about it, not in the terms that we think about it.

[00:50:03] So there might be a sense in which you can talk about being adopted into something, or some group, or some ideology that is this twisted idea. And if that's what we're talking about as far as the Nephilim agenda and conspiracies, then I mean, okay, because what we do see throughout history is this pattern of behavior, this pattern of being, this pattern of action, where you might be working against God and working against the people of God, and you have active goals for that.

[00:50:45] So I can give some room and space for those kinds of conspiracies, okay? I'm not saying there aren't any conspiracies in the world, because we know how people act, and we know that people like to work together for their own ends and things. Okay, so, great. That kind of conspiracy, okay, but it becomes dangerous in my mind when we are tying that to genetics and literal bloodlines.

[00:51:14] Like, if you're talking about bloodlines as far as you're following in the footsteps of your father because he taught you that way, okay, or you're following in the footsteps of some other unrelated thing to you because that's how you are going to live your life in pattern of that. Then okay, but it is too easy for us to take that and then presume that if you are in that family, if you are associated at all with this tribe or this group over there or whatever, there's good sides and there's bad sides and you're just born into it.

[00:51:56] That is something that I will absolutely argue against, because it goes down negative paths. When we're talking about ancient bloodlines, we're not talking about dilution of the bloodline, we're talking about inheritance. And so inheritance can happen through adoption, it can happen with you choosing to follow somebody's path.

[00:52:23] But when we decide that some group or some people can't be human, I think that's a problem. And I don't think it's scriptural because Israelites intermarried with the clans.

[00:52:36] And so when we're talking about the conquest, I understand how this is going to play into that, but we still don't want to go down some path that leads to eugenics. It doesn't fit the narrative of the Bible.

[00:52:50] And so if we can understand that not everything has to be literal and not everything has to be genetic and not everything has to relate to modern science, but rather we can look at things through the lens of a pattern of behavior... I think that can be really helpful in all of this. And also understanding the impact of worship on a person, understanding that you are what you worship, kind of a thing, not that the image of God can be taken away from a human, but it can be corrupted, just like in Isaiah, we have the makers of idols who become like idols. There's a sense there in which you become what you worship, and so worshiping Christ, we become more like Him.

[00:53:40] I think it's really great that more and more people are delving into the context of Scripture and trying to understand it. And that includes the concept of the Nephilim, because it does show up as this pattern in Scripture over and over. And we do have a lot of things in the New Testament, in the work of Jesus even, that connects back to all of this.

[00:54:07] And so because of all of that, I think it's actually a really important thing to understand. But I'm also going to just say that a lot of people go too far with it, and that they get way too interested in it.

[00:54:21] I love Dr. Heiser's work, because what it is, is a corrective to a lot of this, because he's giving a biblical viewpoint of things, and he's not going down paths of speculation. I mean, certainly Dr. Heiser was interested in the paranormal. He had a lot of ideas that kind of intersect with a lot of different things that I'm talking about here. But he always had this knack of keeping it biblically grounded. Unfortunately, you go to other sources who talk about the same thing, they don't have that talent that Dr. Heiser had. I'm sorry, but they don't. And so there's still a lot of what Dr. Heiser called Christian Middle Earth out there, where people are getting into these ideas and it's fascinating and it's interesting... now, again, you can go to, like, Dr. Heiser's fiction books and read a lot of interesting ideas there that are connected to aliens and all of these things, and you can say, aha, here's our answer.

[00:55:24] But I don't think that was Dr. Heiser's purpose or intent in writing that fiction. I think he's in this long line of tradition, though, where we see the patterns, and by seeing the patterns and by looking at the world around us, we can understand God a little bit better. We can understand our positions to God better. And we can choose God. And I think that's the point here.

[00:55:52] Not gonna lie, it drives me more than a little batty that people who talk about this stuff seem to lose track of that. That's the real thing that bothers me on a deep level. They lose track of the gospel, they lose track of the fact that Jesus has gained victory and he is enthroned and crowned as king.

[00:56:16] And it feels like when a lot of people are talking about Nephilim and all of these agendas and things, they're forgetting Christ's victory. They're not even mentioning it. And so that's what I would suggest to you, if somebody is talking about the Nephilim agenda and they're not talking about Jesus and his victory and the gospel, that's a big red flag to me.

[00:56:40] That's a problem. That's something I would say, run away from those kinds of situations and those kinds of people talking about it. Because the point is not to delve into the darkness and to nuance it out and to find out what's what and who's who and what people I can demonize and put into this box over here and that box over there, but rather the focus should always be on Christ and His victory and His defeat of all of the problems that we have had.

[00:57:14] More than anything, what I see in the giant clans and the Nephilim and all of these things is the same kind of patterns that we see in humanity, where humans didn't need to have some fall into sin, because that's just what we do. You're human, you sin. We don't need a justification or original way that that happened.

[00:57:39] It's just part of being human. And what we have in Jesus is the fix to that. It's a fix for spiritual evil. It's a fix for death. It's a fix for our sin. And it's a way for us to be sanctified into being conformed to the image of Christ rather than being conformed to the image of something else.

[00:58:03] I think we shouldn't look to these kinds of stories to justify something that we are uncomfortable with, like the conquest, except to see it in light of how God works and this story of redemption. If what we're talking about is sidelining the redemption aspect of things, that's a problem.

[00:58:27] And I get it, it's weird, because how can Israel be a light to the nations and to bring people to Yahweh, but then also be commanded to go into the land and kill off all the inhabitants? Those two things seem awfully opposed, don't they? But you have to see them together. It's not a justification or like a really simple answer to what we have in the conquest, but it's something that we have to meditate on.

[00:58:56] And if you toss out the redemptive aspect of things and the fact that Israel was supposed to be a light to the nations and that Israel leads to the Messiah who is going to rectify it all... If you're missing that, I highly recommend bringing your mind back into focus on Jesus.

[00:59:15] So I didn't get around to doing any quotes from the book, Answers to Giant Questions. But I do have some good news. This is episode 99, which means that episode 100 is next week. And what I have, in addition to some other things, are three copies of the book Answers to Giant Questions to give away. So, If you're interested in those, you either need to be connected with me online, on social media, on Facebook, or Instagram, or X, or you can be signed up to my newsletter.

[00:59:54] I'll be giving the different copies away in different ways, so whether you're following me on social media in some way, or whether you're only following me through my newsletter, either way you can have a chance to get one of these copies of Answers to Giant Questions. I also have some other books to give away, so make sure you're signed up to my newsletter or you're following me on social media to get a chance to get one of the copies of the stack of books that I have to give away I'm so excited about this.

[01:00:29] So a really big thank you to TJ Stedman for these copies for me to give away I'm so excited for you to get these in your hands. And as I said when I interviewed him, I love his emphasis and bringing things back to the gospel. It's not something you see very often when people are talking about the Nephilim and Giants.

[01:00:50] So if you have a concern about whether or not you should read this book, I'm not saying you have to agree with what he's saying in his book, but do know that it has that flavor of the gospel that not all of books about Nephilim have. So highly recommended. Get yourself a copy if you don't win one. And go ahead and start thinking about things from the perspective of gospel and redemption.

[01:01:19] Alright, I hope that this episode was interesting and useful to you. Thank you for everyone who sent in comments and feedback on my episodes about sexuality. For those who are still listening, if you have questions and things you'd like me to address later on, I would be more than happy to do so.

[01:01:42] But I think that this kind of wraps up things, officially and really, on my series of human sexuality, even though we talked more about the angelic side and things like that, I think you can see that it's still all about human sexuality. So this kind of is going to bring us back into the flood stories and things like that. And we're going to be diving pretty deep into the flood narrative pretty soon with also some stops along the way.

[01:02:15] I've got what I hope is going to be an interesting topic for my hundredth episode next week, which I hope you will enjoy as well. Thank you guys for listening. I really appreciate all of my listeners, and a big shout out to those of you who are outside of my own context, who are listening outside of the United States. I know there's a whole bunch of you guys, and I really appreciate it. Thank you for those of you who come into my Facebook discussion group and interact there.

[01:02:47] And thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who support me financially. You guys help me more than you know, and I really want to thank you guys. If you're interested in helping to support me, you can find ways to do that through my website at genesismarksthespot. com, where you can sign up for my newsletter, so you can know what to do for my giveaway. You can find blog posts, guest profiles, my website's pretty highly searchable, so it helps to find topics that I've talked about. And if you look on that episodes tab at the top, some of my episodes are grouped by topic. And sexuality is one of those topics. So you can find all of my episodes on that topic in one place.

[01:03:33] But at any rate, thank you guys for listening, and I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.