#5 Biblical Giants–Giants ch. 1

Show Notes

This episode addresses the biblical giants. It is the first in a series about ancient Giants that will culminate with an episode on 'Bigger Giants,' which addresses in greater detail how we should think about giants today. In this episode, we survey the most significant biblical data and analyze it in light of Christ.

Music: The Epic Trailer by Alex MakeMusic

Podcast Transcript

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This light momentary affliction is preparing an eternal weight of glory for us. Beyond all comparison, as we look, not to the things that are seen but to the unseen Second Corinthians 4, 17 and 18, in a post materialistic world filled with immense spiritual noise.

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We're here to uncover the ancient near eastern context of the Bible to recover the truly mystical faith of our spiritual forefathers. Welcome to the Biblical re enchantment podcast where we bridge the gap between the Ancient Hebrew story and modern insights.

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I'm Anthony Delgado, your host for this journey into the often overlooked mystical dimensions of the Bible. This is episode number five titled Biblical Giants and the Son of God. In this episode, in the first part, we're gonna look at biblical giants just kind of what they are.

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Look at some of the, the text in the Old Testament specifically to see what, what the Bible even says about Giants.And then in the second part, we are going to jump into some stories of specific giants as we look at implications of the giant narrative for how we see the world and the biblical storyline. OK.Part one, the Bible uh in the Bible, we see really in the Old Testament, most of the narratives regarding giants, although the giant narrative is going to bleed over and touch a lot of New Testament texts as we'll see, not just in this episode but in episodes to come, but what even is a giant?

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Well, the first giant word that we see show up in the scripture shows up in Genesis six where we get a narrative about uh the nephele and the Lexam Bible dictionary describes uh nephele or giants as giants or semi divine beings, which you could read demigods there who appeared during the pre flood era, Genesis 64 and prior to the conquest period of Israel numbers 1333 notice that it says either giants or semi divine beings, uh it can be one or the other.

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And that's important because in some mythologies as we go, especially outside the Bible, we get giants that don't necessarily have a divine origin.And then within sort of Christendom, a lot of people want to take the divine part of the giants out and uh sort of give genetic explanations, genetic mutation and things like that for the existence of giants within the biblical text.And so they wanna separate the divine aspect from the giants themselves. I don't know that I would see it that way.I think that as we look at the scriptures, we're gonna see that the narrative unfold in a particular way and we're probably going to iden, identify them as semi divine beings or demigods. Well, let's look at these nephele or giants and see where they come from.

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The text starts in Genesis six. And we're gonna read through one verse one through five.It says this when man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive and they took as their wives, any they chose.Then the Lord said, my spirit shall not abide in man forever for he is flesh. His days shall be 100 and 20 years. The nephele were on the earth in those days.And also afterwards, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man and they bore Children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

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The Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thought of his heart was only evil continually genesis 61 through five.Now, as we look at this text, I I'll recognize that in the English, there's some clunkiness that leads some scholars to think that some of these statements, maybe the division, verse verses one through three and then also four, maybe being inserted and then five showing up later.

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There's some text critical ways to look at this as far as we can tell, at least for a very long time, potentially all the way back to Moses. Uh This is how the passage has been constructed.And so I'm not a big fan of trying to separate out statements that would change the way that we see the nephling.So as long as we take the text as it is in most of our English translations, I think there's three explanations for what's happening here in the text between the Sons of God and the daughters of man. So I'm gonna put these three exclamations or explanations and categories.

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I'm gonna call them unnatural unions, supernatural unions and natural unions, so unnatural, supernatural and natural unions. And in this case, I see it happening in this way.So if we want to talk about first unnatural unions, we could read this and say that divine beings called Sons of God, physically had sex with human women and therefore they had offspring and these offspring were demigods that were half divine and half physical.

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So that's, that's one thing that could be going on here in the text. Now, uh I haven't gone into depth on who the Sons of God are and I'm gonna leave that for another cast in another time.But I'm going to interpret Sons of God uh the way that it has been done. So historically as divine beings, we could even say if you want to use some of the generalized terminology that we see in the New Testament, we could call them fallen angels. OK.

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So those who left their proper abode in heaven, jude will say. And so divine beings called sons of God physically had sex with human women.We would call that an unnatural union because a divine being is not de designed to have physical intercourse with a physical human woman in the same way that you might call an unnatural union like between an animal and a human, not to be gross.But that would be an unnatural union. To think of divine beings who are spiritual, they are not physical uh entering into a sexual relationship with a physical human would be considered unnatural. The second would be a supernatural union.Now, a supernatural union might mean mean something like this, that something like magic was used to bind a supernatural being that is a spirit into a human man. So that in the sex act, the divine being is having sex with the human woman through the, the human host.

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That that's the man in the relationship. And that might sound really weird. And you might want to say, look, no, it's obviously just this unnatural union thing. It's just the fallen angel with the human woman, except that this accords better believe it or not with the historic tradition.

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In a lot of the other ancient mythologies, this idea that they were performing some sort of ritualistic, they were act, they were doing, performing some sort of magical spell to summon the spirit into the man in an intentional effort to actually create um kind of a giant or some sort of demigod.

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Now notice the text reads, the sons of God came into the daughters of man and they were born to them. Ok.So many people have noted that that seems to very clearly say, although I would say clearly through euphemistic means that it clearly seems to say that they had sex, but it doesn't actually need to mean that the spirit himself or herself or itself had sex with the physical woman.

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There's no reason to not read that as though through some other means, the sons of God, the spirits entered into the women to impregnate them.Now, if we want to tease that out a little bit, I and, and I'm just gonna put a pin in this, I'm gonna say this and then you're gonna have to chew on it until we get to this part of the podcast.But is there somewhere in the New Testament where a spirit impregnates a woman without having sex with her? And that orthodox Bible believing Christians are adamant that it was absolutely a spirit impregnating the woman and also that there was no physical physical union involved.

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And so I'll put a pin in that out there and say, is there a way for the spirits to interface with the physical that doesn't require um the physical, to the spirit to take on physical form itself in order to interact with the woman, right?And so I'll just put a pin in out there out there. That would be the supernatural union. The idea that they've actually summoned the spirit into the man. And it was the man and the woman who were involved in sexual relations.The third explanation would be a natural union. And this is often called the Seth view or the Seth position on Genesis six.And it claims that the sons of God actually were not even divine beings, but that they were Godly men from the line of Seth and who were enticed by the daughters of men who are the canaanite women, ungodly women from the line of cane.

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I think there's a lot of problems with this view and the primary one I'm gonna set out there is that it's not in the Bible, but that would be the union.The natural union view, unnatural union would mean divine beings physically had sex with human women, whatever that means for a spiritual being to do something physical.The second view, supernatural union that there was a, that, that the, the man in the relationship was the host for the supernatural being. And then third natural union, there's nothing supernatural going on here at all.It's just the good people having sex with the bad people and producing evil on the earth. All right. So here's, here's the problem.

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So let's talk about some problems with each of these So with the unnatural union view, we have to ask like, what even is a divine being? Can spiritual things touch physical things? How, how do we experience the spiritual world today?Think, I mean, think about it, like, what do you, what do you, when you're having a spiritual experience of some kind, what do you actually think is happening? Let's just say you are at a church meeting, right?And their worship band is just in a zone and the lyrics are profound and your heart is moved to, to worship Christ and to adore him and you lift your hands high and you have that kind of spiritual experience and you feel the presence of the Holy Spirit around you.

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Did you see something? Did you touch something? Did you, did you have an experience of something physical? Did you taste something for that matter? Right? And the answer is usually no, usually no.And I think there's some explanations for times when we see and hear things that can be also spiritual.But I think generally when we talk about spiritual experiences, we're actually talking about things that are not tactile um that, that they, they don't interact with our senses, but rather that we interact with them through some sort of in tang tangible cognitive means.

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And the reason for that is because of what it actually means to be spiritual.I think in the modern church, sometimes we overly materialize spiritual things, we talk about demons, for example, as things that we can see and touch and we're afraid that a demon might, you know, attack us in a dark alley or something like that.Well, that's a problem because spiritual beings don't interact with the physical world in precisely that way. At least not normative. And so I don't know if that's so, I think that's a big problem.I think that's a big problem with the unnatural union view that if we take the most natural reading of the text that somehow a spirit had physical intercourse with a woman, I'm not sure exactly how we're supposed to believe that that happened.

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The second view um has some problems too if we talk about supernatural unions, like there is plenty in the records of the ancient near eastern world regarding magic and possession rights that so we know that kings would do this, that they would have these different rights where they would try to summon into themselves, the spirit of their God in order to impregnate their wife with a son, that would be a demigod, a divine human hybrid of sorts.

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And this is part of the reason that a lot, most agent kings considered themselves to be divine or at least to be partly divine or underling divine beings because they, they believed that they were having some kind of interaction with the gods that was made them special, made them different, made them divine.

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And so then we see them being buried in ways that highlight their divine inheritance in the afterlife and things like that. And so there's plenty in the ancient near eastern records to prove that this sort of thing was happening.So I think we have that's probably a strength of this view, perhaps at the time, it was not necessary to differentiate between the phys, physical and spiritual world.And because the boundaries were understood, so we could speculate about the text and say, well, maybe, maybe they understood the boundaries in the ancient world better than we do today.And so they could just say that the sons of God came into the daughters of man and that was sufficient for them to understand that that meant that some sort of magical right was happening to some in the spirit. That's possible. I think the weakness though.

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And the problem with this view is that uh even if those boundaries are understood, the wording of the text does not naturally give us that impression.The most natural reading of the text really is the first view that a divine being, some somehow did have literal physical interaction with a, a physical human woman. And so that is the most natural view, even though it suffers from other problems.The second view, we can make it fit the text, but it does not uh it is not the most natural reading. Now, speaking of natural readings, the major problem with the third view the Seth view is that this doesn't come from the text anywhere.You can't even make the Seth view fit the text.

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In fact, if you try to make the Seth view fit the text and you say there that the Sons of God are human, Sons of God, that they're humans, you then have to rewrite Deuteronomy 32 psalm 82 and any number of other texts, job one and two.Like there's just too many problems with interpreting the presence of spiritual beings and the rest of the Bible. If you take the Seth view, you also, if you take the Seth view have to do away with giants as any kind of supernatural being.And you now have to argue that either that there were races and we're gonna talk about tribes and things like that. Tribes of giants in a minute.So now you're having to, now you're gonna sound like a little bit of a racist because now you're trying to say that there, there's tribes of people that God hates strictly because of who they are not because of how they were conceived or created or how they choose to be.

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And that, and that's a problem that frankly rises up every now and then throughout uh the history of the church where we see that type of thing happening where entire people groups become alienated.We call that racism and they become alienated and discriminated and sometimes hunted because they're different from the rest of everybody else. And so we need to be careful with that, right?So if we're gonna call large people giants and say that those are the same giants that were the Nephilim in Genesis six, then what are we supposed to do with the church?For example, trying to evangelize Norseman, for example, you know, hundreds, several 100 years ago, like, what are we supposed to do with that? Like, wouldn't they have been considered giants that they should have pushed away as not being able to be saved?

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Well, I think that's the big problem with the Seth like view is that it actually can be used to breed a lot of ra racist ideology.And then more so, and for me, just one who wants to read the biblical text as it is and not be afraid of supernatural things happening in the text.I think for me, the biggest problem is just how much you have to rewrite the interpretation of The Old Testament in order to make it fit this view that Genesis six is just about humans and humans, not about divine beings in any sort of way.And so those are the problems now, I think there are strengths to all three views. So the natural, the unnatural union, which is just, it's a divine being that somehow had sex with a physical being. That view is very closely tied to the biblical material.

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It, it really is, it's very closely tied. And even as you look to second temple literature, like the book of Enoch, the book of jubilees, you look to some of that stuff. I and honestly, it works really well to understand it in those ways.They those texts are have been developed to explain the mythology of this phenomena. And honestly, if you want to take the, the, the number one view, the Unnatural Union view, it does fit the text very well.And I actually find that most people who are willing, most people who don't take the set that view, they actually take that view.So they're gonna go well, it's not humans and they're gonna adopt the, the the unnatural union and just say, somehow a spirit had sex with a physical woman and just leave it there and just say, look, I don't know, it's not my job to understand how this stuff happens.

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And so I respect that view. I think that's actually strength of that view is that it does fit the text very well. OK, let's talk about the strength of the supernatural union view.This is the idea that the human man summons a divine spirit into him, that he becomes possessed by it. So it helps create a healthy division of the physical and spiritual realities so that we understand how they interface with each other.I actually think it's important for understanding biblical metaphysics, which if you remember the term metaphysics from previous podcasts, it means the what this above the physical world.And the reason that we have metaphysics is not to say that the meta the beyond is completely other than and unrelated to the physical, we have metaphysics because we understand that the metaphysical what stands above physics interacts with the physical, that there is always an interplay between the spiritual and physical worlds.

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And so it can help us to understand biblical metaphysics if we have a view that understands the way the spirit interacts with the human man in order to impregnate the human woman. And so I think it's helpful.I think that's the strength of the second view, the supernatural union. And as a side note, that's actually my view at the moment, I've toggled back and forth between the 1st and 2nd views.Um And that's my view at the moment is, is the second view, but I think it's safe to teach the first view because again, I think it supports the narrative. So I think you can go over uh go either way.Like I said, I've, I've jumped back and forth many times. And so I do think the Seth view needs to go away. That's my opinion. The only strength of the Seth view is this and this is important and this changes the way that you read the Bible.

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But the Seth view, it is pragmatic. OK. Here's what I mean by that. It has no literary or theological strength.But if you are hung up on the idea of giants and not just giants, but let's say dragons and all kinds of other supernatural things, demons and, and angels delivering messages and things like that.If you get hung up on the supernatural stuff in the scripture and you want to have explanations for how those things work. Well, then I guess you, the Seth view is pragmatic in that way and it helps you understand that.But frankly, it just reminds me of like the field of Christian science that's trying to figure out scientifically how supernatural things occurred in the scriptures. And I've, I know I'm, I'll just speak plainly. I don't have any respect for that field of pseudoscience because it's not really science.

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I don't, I don't see anything of value there. Let the story speak as the story. That's, that's what I want you to, to do and, and to see before you even start to extrapolate, how could any of this be? Let the story be the story?And I think only the first two views, the unnatural view that divine beings called Sons of God physically had sex with human women.And the supernatural view that magic was used to bind the spiritual being so that in that sexual union between the humans, that there was a spiritual or supernatural interaction, either of those views match the text very well.I think the Seth view really just largely needs to go away, especially in a world that's becoming increasingly spiritual. Like nobody's nobody today is like, oh, I can't believe you believe in giants and spirits and things like that.

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Like we don't even, we really don't need the Seth view, not in or out of the church anymore. OK.So this is how the nephele came about somehow between an interaction between a divine and a divine being either through a human host or on its own with a human woman. We get these demigods, right? They are called the nephele. Now, what are they? Ok.So the word now some have said that there's absolutely no tie here. But the word that's nephele means can mean something like fallen ones. And again, many people will object to that, that translation of nephele as fallen ones.But there does seem to be at least as far as I've, I can see some type of tie to the idea that they are fallen.

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And I actually think that there's something interesting in there because if the, if the sons of God are fallen angels in a sense, we're actually told that they left heaven. So they didn't really fall so much as went.But anyway, if we're gonna consider them sons of God, the sons of God to be fallen angels in some sort, some to some degree, then I think to call their offspring fallen ones, there might be something there and there is a lot of mystery regarding the words meaning.

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It's the problem of having an ancient Hebrew language that wasn't spoken largely for a long time. I mean, Hebrew is spoken today in, you know, certain circles, but it's not precisely the Hebrew of the Bible.And so certain words like Nephilim that don't have any modern purpose or usage, really, we don't know what, we don't always know what they mean. There's a lot of mystery there.Now, Nephilim, it is actually one of many words translated as Gigante in the Greek text, the Greek Septuagint text. So in the second temple period, there were Hebrew scribes.So like in like 300 ish BC give or take, there were Hebrew scribes who translated the Old Testament Hebrew texts into Greek so that they could be used by the hellenistic Jews who who needed to have the text in a language that was be had become more familiar to them.

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They weren't as familiar with Hebrew anymore. They were speaking Greek as a common language. And so they translated it from Hebrew into Greek. And Nephilim is again one of many words that is normative, translated as Gigante.And so we actually know that, you know, 2300 years ago, plus give or take, you know that the Jews of those days believed they were talking about actual giants because there's not really a lot of conjecture about what the Greek word Gigante means.So Genesis 64 refers to them, not just as nephele, but it goes on to refer to them as the mighty men. Um And this, this means that they were violent warrior people.And that's really interesting because if you go to the book of Enoch, you find out that the giants are violent, they're, they're horribly violent and in Enoch, they become supernaturally hyperbolically large where they're eating people and, you know, consuming entire fields of sheep and things like that, but they're horribly violent warrior people and, and they're chaotic, they don't even get along with each each other.

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It doesn't seem. And so that's so the, so, so that's kind of what's happening there in Enoch.And this idea of the, of the Mighty Men kind of encapsulates that Mighty Men in Genesis 64 is a translation of the Hebrew word Gibe, which is also commonly translated into giants in the Greek text.So for example, Ezekiel 3212, if you go look that up in the Greek text in the Septuagint, you'll find that it speaks of giants that were known to be violent warriors there, not as gem which could be used to explain or as a term to just say valiant human warriors.

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So very interesting and telling that when GM shows up in the text, the Greek, the Greek scholars, the Hebrew Greek scholars of the ancient world, they said, you know what I think these are the giants too.Now, we don't necessarily think that they were right about everything just because something exists a translation exists a certain way in the Greek text that doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it right. It doesn't make it the original.It doesn't mean that they couldn't have had some half baked ideas about how things worked that, you know, today we're, you know, just not privy to. And so then we take the Greek text and we end up believing all kinds of weird things.No, that's not necessarily uh how it worked. It could be, it could not be. The Greek text is not inspired Hebrew scripture as the originals were. So we don't really know.

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But if you could read a commentator, you know, from thousands of years ago and figure out, hey, what did they believe about the text? Right?Like I pick up commentaries all the time and I don't necessarily agree with everything the commentator says, but I still read the commentary because I wanna grow and learn from both.What I do agree with what I am convinced by as well as what I'm not convinced by, right? So if you could get a commentary on Genesis, that was 2300 years old, wouldn't you want to read that? Right.And that's why we read the Septuagint, you know, to, to kind of get the feel from people who are closer to the actual events.

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And so, Gire also, at least a long time ago, they were thinking giants when they read that and to be a giant or to be a gimme meant to be like I said, a ferocious warrior. I like first Maccabees. This is part of the apocrypha 33.It reads, he put on his breastplate like a giant, right? And so they're thinking of now this is the breastplate of a righteous warrior putting on this breastplate like our giant. But they're saying that he's gonna go out and he's gonna fight valiantly like the giants do.

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And so giants in this text give a means ready for war like the giants are war creatures, right? And that's sort of the idea behind that in first Maccabees 33.And so we get this tie and I think it's a loose tie, but we do get a tie in the Greek text between give mighty men and, and between the giants there as well. And I think we're gonna see that show up in a number of other places.Now, all of a sudden not remembering what I put all in my notes, but you see it in a number of other places in the Old Testament.Now, most notably, when we talk about like what a nephele is when the Israelites were scouting out the land of Caleb, a Canaan Caleb reported there, we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Ani who come from the Nephilim and we seem to ourselves like grasshoppers.

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And so we seem to them numbers 1333. Now, first, this cannot mean anything except that they were bigger than the Israelites who were scouting out the land, they had to be bigger.And so, even if this idea of, you know, we seem to ourselves like grasshoppers, even if they weren't 1000 ft tall giants who could stomp out the Israel lights. This could be hyperbole. Right.And I think it probably is hyperbole, but they're big enough whoever these guys are, we, you don't refer to yourself as a grasshopper in front of somebody else if they are not bigger, right? So they're obviously bigger then how big they are? That is terrifying to the Israelites.

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OK. That's terrifying to the Israel. And so he also calls ties the Nephilim. You'll see in the text to the sons of Anak. He says we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak who came from the Nephilim and we seem to ourselves like grasshoppers.So the Nephilim and the sons of Anak have a relationship there that there's a descendancy from the Nephilim that reaches to these sons of Anak or also called Anak or synonymously the annoys, which would refer to their tribe. OK.So Ani, he's the son of Arba according to the Bible and the father of three sons, Ahiman, Shesha and Tma. Now their descendants became known as the Anak.So these three sons, as they grew their three tribes, they made up the greater tribe under the chieftain Anni, who's the father, OK. The Anak, they were known for their unusual height. Look at Deuteronomy 92 where they're called a people. Great and tall. The sons of the Anak.

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OK. So they're at least great and tall, whatever they are, they're taller than everybody else in a way that makes them great. Insert there. I would say great warriors given the context. Now, notably, Caleb drove the Anna team out of Hebron during the conquest of Canaan.

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That's Joshua 1513. And so Caleb who previously was scared of these guys is the one who actually gets to drive them out. And so he knows their size and the terror that he had before them.But you'll remember from the story in Deuteronomy that Caleb was the one who was like, no, I'm, I'm, we're doing this thing, God's God's in it and all the other people, you know, Caleb and Joshua were in it and everybody else was scared.But like, so Caleb's uh you know, willing to go and he's willing to fight the giants. And I like that about Caleb, the Anna came could also be considered a giant clan and there were other giant clans as well.So when we see the, the term Anakin, we don't need to just think Anne's family, we can think about those who married in and become a part of their little cities and their, you know, their tribes and their, their community.

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And the point for now is that the Anak were giants who came out of the Nephilim.And the text seems to support the idea that their divine ancestry to the Nephilim and then to the sons of God puts them into what we might call lower tiers of the giants.And you may have just thought about like nephele giants, like the, there's giants and there's normal people, but I would, and I, I'm gonna put in a little plug here.If you read my book, The Watchers and the Holy Ones, there's a helpful chart there on page 17 that demonstrates the relationship of the various giant terms and compares them to their usage in the book of Enoch.

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And there's one character, one sort of tier of giants that's missing in the Enoch text that uh from the biblical text.So the biblical text is missing one tier, but they actually follow even though different terms are used because the Enoch text that I used was translated primarily from the Ethiopic text.So not all the terminology like lines up, but when you line them up, ideologically, you get four tiers of giants in Enoch and you actually get three tiers of geno of Giants in the Bible, you get uh the from the sons of God all the way down to the sons of Anick or the annoys.

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And so you can go check that out Amazon Barnes and Noble, Anthony delgado.net for more info and how to purchase, you can get that in ebook paperback hardback. So, so that's there.And So that's for you to, to go and see if you want to know a little bit more about Nephilim and, and Giants in the book of Enoch. So that's the Nephilim, that's what they are sons of Anick tribe that comes out.Now, we need to talk about another term used for Giants. It is the ref iim and the REFA have three usage. So first refa as Giants, you can see that usage in first chronicles 24 that it can just be a loose term that means giant.But Refaie can also mean tribe of giants. So if you look at Genesis 14 5, you actually get this situation where they're looking at the at several different tribes of people and the REFA are one of those tribes.

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And so it's hard to say that the REFA, the word refa just means giant because it can also mean tribe of giants or tribe with giants. So Genesis 14 5 could easily translate Ralli as REFA as Giants.But then it wouldn't fit the, the convention when it talks about the other tribes, namely the Anak, the IIM, the REFA and the Zam Zam who are also clans of giants. And so why not have the REFA as a clan of Giants?It's sort of the argument now, Amos refers to the height of the Amorites and many consider them to have giant lineage as well. That's an Amos 29 to 10. And I don't know about that. Exactly. Some, some people groups are just very tall.So maybe they weren't giants, maybe they were just very tall people. That's possible. And some even will see the Nephilim as having a clan usage at points in history. The word Nephilim only shows in the Bible twice clearly. Anyway.

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Um, but maybe in other ways that the Nephilim are a clan of some kind in some people's minds.I don't think that's the case, but certainly there are clans, there are the Anak, the IIM, the Zam Zume, potentially the REFA, I will say that the REFA could just be a loose term used for a clan of giants since they didn't know what the group was called.

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That's a possibility or they could be a clan of giants, but they, these giants, they formed into tribes. And what's not clear is whether these were tribes of giants or if they were tribes with giants in their midst and here and, and here's what?And that's actually what I think because if you look at the Philistines, the Philistines were known to have giants among them, probably the most famous are the giants of Gaff mentioned both in Samuel and chronicles, one of those giants being the Giant Goliath and he was a Philistine warrior, um and potentially a Philistine chieftain.

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And so we see that in Samuels and chronicles that there are giants in the Philistine tribes. And that would be my guess that when it came to these giant clans that they were just among the people, among the people.It's also possible that Moses, um oh, I actually already said that that he didn't know the name of the tri tribe of Giants in Astare Carne and merely referred to them using the common word for Giants.I think that might be likely, it's also likely when we talk about the refa as a giant clan. Uh it's also likely that the common word for giants came from this earlier giant tribe, which would be like a chicken in the egg issue.In other words, there was a tribe of people called the ref aim and they started to call giant people refa referring to the tribe of the REFA chicken and egg type of issue. I think that's also likely we don't really know how these words came.

00:36:58 - 0

But there's again, three uses. Refa can just mean a giant or it can mean a tribe of giants.And then my favorite is refa can mean spirits of dead giants, which can be translated shades or demons into English and so, or disembodied spirits of dead giants more on that at another time. All right. So lots of fun stuff about Giants. Welcome to part two.

00:37:43 - 0

Why are Giants even in the Bible? What does it contribute to the biblical storyline? How are we supposed to think about this stuff? So first reason it's in the Bible is I think that this narrative about giants gives us an explanation for widespread human wickedness.

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That's Genesis 65, right after the introduction of the giants as the offspring of the divine and human. The Lord saw that the wickedness was man of man, was great in the earth and that every intention and thought of his heart was only evil.Continually really interesting that Moses when he recorded Genesis six thought, well, how did the earth get so bad?Oh, well, because of the giants and that's kind of the explanation he gives or because the sons of God, because the fallen angels came down and they made it with human women creating these violent chaotic giants.Interestingly, in the book of Enoch, you get an additional explanation for human wickedness.

00:38:42 - 0

Not only did the sons of God come down and create giant offspring with human women, but then they taught the human women to do all sorts of immoral things, arts of war and arts of seduction and things of that.And so people began to create weapons and shields and towers and walls around cities and to defend themselves and to seduce and to deceive and to lie. And then it created war between tribes and all of that, right? So that's kind of the ideas there as well.

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I think there's a conversation to be had about human responsibility.And I think that if we're going to say that there's an e that the giants are an explanation for whitehead, widespread human wickedness there's always gonna be somebody who says, well, so then our sin isn't our own fault.Like it's the same people who wanna say that e it wasn't Eve's fault. She was deceived by the serpent. How come all of humankind is cursed because Eve, you know, was deceived by the serpent.And I've talked about that serpent narrative a number of times and as I read it, I don't think that Eve was manipulated or gas lighted. I think the serpent made some arguments from things that were actually somewhat true or at least in a way true.

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And Eve believed them. And she went astray, she chose, she made a conscious decision to sin to deny God and she chose her path. And then in a sense, God gave her what she wanted. Go ahead, go out into the wilderness and be your own person without God.

00:40:24 - 0

And so I don't actually think that what the serpent did. There was some kind of like manipulation that forced her to do something that was sinful. I think she made a choice. And so I think we're talking about the same thing.If we're gonna say that giants are an explanation for widespread human wickedness. I don't, I don't think it matters if giants taught men how to kill other men.I don't think that matters when a man picks up a sword and drives it into another man's stomach or into his chest or slices his neck or whatever ferocious things that we're doing in these battles.I think he knows that he's taking human life that is precious, that he knows he doesn't want somebody to take his life. And therefore he knows that he's doing something harmful to another person. And so I don't, I don't think that posing the giants as an explanation.

00:41:18 - 0

Nation for whitehead spread human wickedness actually causes us a problem. Tho those who adhere to the Seth view will use that as an argument and say, well, you're just saying that giants and fallen angels are responsible for sin. And you're just trying to say that humans aren't responsible.

00:41:32 - 0

And it's, it's like, no, absolutely not, absolutely not.I'm trying to show that there is a physical and spiritual side of all things and that if metaphysics actually does exist in the sense that there is a spiritual reality that overlays all physical things that it actually makes sense that there is a spiritual explanation for every sinful thought and decision that we make.

00:41:56 - 0

And so that's what I think is happening here that he's tying human sin to a spiritual reality in, in Genesis 61 through five. So that's one of the reasons it's in the Bible.It answers the question, why is there so much sin in the world that also gives us an explanation for the wickedness of King. Um So let's look at some particular giants for this, for this. So, you know, the story of David and Goliath that's in First Samuel 17.

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And I don't have any big aha to show you in the text and say you haven't been reading it, right your whole life. I think, you know the story, then you see it there. So I'm not gonna read the whole thing.It's rather long and this podcast is probably already getting a little lengthy.So, what we have here is a Philistine giant from Gaff and he's there with, with like an army and he's described in the text as a champion, but often seen as like a chieftain of the tribe.Now, I'll explain that because it doesn't call him uh a king or a chieftain. But usually in, in this type of setting, the largest or most successful warrior was usually the leader. He was usually the chief.

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And so because Goliath seems to be their greatest champion, he's frequently depicted. Now, I can't be dogmatic about this, but he's frequently depicted as sort of being the, the chieftain or the, the head of that tribe. Now, some, this is an interesting conversation to be had.

00:43:13 - 0

How big was Goliath? Because this is a question that we've talked about the giants thus far, we haven't really answered this question. How big do you have to be to be considered a giant?So the Hebrew Masoretic text of the Old Testament says that Goliath is six cubits and a span. Now, if a cubit and a Span are what we think they are and, and probably, I think the scholarships decent on that then that puts Goliath at about 9.5 ft tall.

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And that's from the Hebrew majority text, the Mastic text. Now the Greek text, the translation of far more ancient Hebrew texts, the Greek text will translate the Hebrew as four cubits and a span and two full less cubits.And so assi assuming the size of a cubit in a span didn't change over time. That means that far before the Mastic texts, they were considering in the Greek text, Goliath to only be 6.5 ft tall. Now, that's a conundrum because the older texts say he's 6.5.

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But the older texts are a translation of the Hebrew. And if the Hebrew was copied precisely, then even later Hebrew texts should be more accurate. Or you might say the older is more accurate, accurate.And so this is an issue of what we call textual criticism where a certain amount of discernment is needed. And I don't think that there's any perfect way to settle an argument like this.But the person who wants to go with the older text will say Goliath was only 6.5 ft tall.The person who wants to go with the Hebrew text assume assuming that even though it's a later trend, uh a later scribal um not editorial, it's a later, it's a later copy from the scribes will say, well, it's more accurate because the Hebrew, they'll say 9.5.

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Um, so I'm only 5, 10, 59. Really? If I'm, if I'm not lying or if I'm standing up straight, I'm a little closer to 5, 10, but 6.5 ft tall is tall. To me, it's very tall to me.And so it is possible that, that if you, if you think of the average Israelite man, he was about 5.5 ft tall.And so if the average Israelite man was significantly shorter than me by several inches, a 6.5 ft tall warrior, you know, with giant muscles and his shield and his sword would probably seem like a giant. And so I'm OK with thinking the giants are 6.5 ft tall.

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One of the things I actually like about a 6.5 ft tall giant is it is, it fits better with the archaeological record when we look at ancient skeletons, sometimes we find big skeletons or big bones that probably belongs to a big skeleton might be more accurate.

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What we don't usually find are 9.5 ft skeletons. And so I don't need science, especially not archaeology to explain what the Bible says. So I'm good with either, you know, I'm, I'm totally good with either 9.5 6.5 anywhere in between.I'm good with saying that six cubits and a span just means really big. I'm, I'm ok with that too because rarely are numbers literal in the Bible anyway. And so, you know, I'm fine with that anyway, saying that all this really means is really big.I think going back to some of the other texts we've talked about that, the real point of Giants, you know, thinking about like the conquest narratives, the real point of Giants is that they were big enough to be scary. They were big enough to be scary.

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And so regardless of how big he was, um Goliath would have stood much taller than the average Hebrew man, 5.5 ft. And so one of the things that I find interesting is actually the first king of Israel.So pe I don't know if you've ever heard this before, but sometimes Saul, the first king of Israel people argue that he was a giant.And then when the Israelites said, hey, we want a king like all the other nations, what they were saying is, hey, we want a giant king too. We want a king who is both a divine and human hybrid.Also, I don't, I don't know that I buy into that, but Paul, part of Saul's rise to his kingship was definitely his size for Samuel 92 from his shoulders upward. He was taller than any of the people and I'll tell you what.

00:47:35 - 0

But if you wanna go from the, the bottom of my shoulder right under that shoulder bone to the top of my head, it's a good foot. And so I don't know if you think that a giant was 6.5 and you like that idea.And the average Hebrew man is 5.5. And that puts Saul a good foot taller than everybody else. And uh to a lot of people, I think they might have been thinking, hey, we got our warrior king, we got our giant king.And so Saul was comparable in hype to at least the smaller sizing of a giant. And I think that's something interesting to note at the very least. So um Saul Saul may have seemed to a giant uh as a giant to many of the Israelites.And so that's kind of interesting there. Let's talk about another giant king. So potentially King Saul or I think not King Saul. But you know, may maybe people thought that in that day uh definitely Goliath as sort of a, some sort of influence or ruler of some kind.

00:48:35 - 0

And then we get this other guy Og of Bashan, he's a Amor, right king and his territory was conquered by Moses and the Israelites immediately after the conquest of Sihan, who is another Amor king that doesn't seem to have been a giant.And traditionally, OG is considered the last of the Old Testament giants just based on how things roll out in the text. So uh Deuteronomy 311 for only OG the king of Bashan was left of the rev remnant of the refa.So again, does that refa mean tribe or does it mean of all the giants if we take it to mean all the giants in OG king of Bishan is the last giant. Behold, his bed was a bed of iron.Is it not in R Reba of the Amorites or I'm sorry, Reba of the Ammonites? Nine cubits was its length and four cubits its breadth according to the common cubit. Moses is like you can go see it if you want. Isn't it still there?

00:49:31 - 0

Like, you know, like if in case, like almost like people were starting to dismiss this idea of giants by the time he's writing this and he there, he's like, hey, it's still there. It's still there hundreds of years since the conquest. It's still there.

00:49:46 - 0

Go check it out, you know. So Ogg's height is demonstrated by the dimensions of his bed. And I don't know that that's necessarily helpful in the ancient world.It wasn't uncommon for kings to have gigantic beds in order to sort of maybe it was sized, not so much to their body but size to their ego, but at any rate, we're assuming that a nine by four cubit bed, which would be like 13.5 by 6 ft, you know, that's a big bed.

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You know, we're assuming that there's something about his size, him being called a giant, a refa that means, hey, this was a big dude. This was a big dude and so hard to say for sure how big he was.I don't think we can say that if his bed was 13.5 ft long, then he must have been a good 13 or something like that.I don't think we can make that argument, but I do think that there's enough evidence to say that Og of Ban was a giant warrior king. And so that seem definitely seems to be the case in the biblical text. Let's look at another one.So King David himself does not appear to be a giant in, in any way, shape or form. No, no, no real like divine birth story that comes with David. But David had this like team of guys, right?

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He had like his hi his like secret army that he called his mighty men. And that's kind of interesting. It's, that's that word again, Gire that is translated usually in the Se Seo and is Giants, Gant.And so that's kind of interesting because, you know, if we're gonna play that forward to its logical extent, like David had an a, a small, you know, secret ops Corp of Giants, it seems.And so I don't, I don't know, I don't know again that they all had like any kind of divine lineage or any kind of giant line lineage, but check this narrative out. So one of David's mighty men. His name was Beni.Uh He defeated a large Egyptian man that appears to have been have been a giant. So look at first chronicles 1123 and he killed the Egyptian, a man, great a man of great height, five cubits tall in the Egyptian's hand.

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There was a spear like a weaver's beam and he went down to him with a staff, wrestled the spear out of the Egyptians hand and killed him with his own spear. Ok. OK. Don't miss what's happening here.You've got an Egyptian giant that's fighting Beni, one of David's gibe, which could mean giants. And Bena goes down there and he grabs this spear out of, of the Egyptian Giants hand. He wrestles it out of his hand and then he kills him with his own spear.

00:52:37 - 0

Does kind of remind me of David beheading Goliath with his own sword. So there's something of a literary tie there. But I would like to know how Beni wrestled a spear out of a giant's hand, especially if we're gonna be traditional and go with 9.5 ft giants.

00:52:56 - 0

I'd like to know how he did that. How did he, how did he get this out, out of the Egyptian Giants hands and then wheeled it to kill him with it, right. That's a good question.So maybe he was just really sneaky and fast and also strong and, and just a great warrior or maybe there is something to this idea that GRE uh means giant just as much as Nephilim or Refa. And so there's something, there, there's something there.So what we see is that, that, that there is something about kings and kings warriors that is equated with giants. And I think so we get this explanation.If there's something about kings and their warriors being equated with giants, then we get an explanation for the wickedness of kings.

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Because if giants are like these violent chaos, chaos beings on the earth, then if you can harness their power, then you can actually use that to rise to power yourself. And so we get wicked kings because they're using these chaos monsters to rise to power.

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And that certainly seems to be the case to me, regardless of, of, you know, regardless of whether every one of these was precisely a giant that we just went through and there's actually a half a dozen more that we could go through. I'm just not gonna do that.

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So, so those are reasons that it's in the Bible. These are reasons that we care. Here's another one. Giants represent an unnatural union between the physical and metaphysical worlds that are an abomination to God because of their violence, their chaos, their death bringing.

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And so let's revisit these ideas of natural, unnatural and supernatural union. Natural union would mean a union between a man and a woman. Unnatural union would mean a would mean a union between a human and something that's not human.Supernatural un union would mean a physical union between humans. But if that is supernaturally influenced by another being, and so giants represent like an unnatural union between the physical and metaphysical worlds because it's the fallen beings. It's the fallen angels.

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It's the, it's the ones who have defied God that produce these giants that wreak havoc on the world that they're sort of metaphorical beings that represent the chaos in the world that represent the idea of death and destruction in the world. Now, I don't think they're metaphors.

00:55:35 - 0

Don't hear me to be saying that. But in the sense that their mythological beings, we need to be able to interpret the, their existence, regardless of their physical reality. And we need to be able to interpret their existence as to their purpose within the narrative.

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And I think that's why giants show up giants show up to create explanation for human wickedness, human violence, for chaos on the earth, for death destruction. So if they're an unnatural union, then I now want to talk about Jesus because Jesus has a supernatural union.

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Remember I told you to put a pin in this idea. Was there was there was there ever a time when a spirit in, you know, in some way impregnated a human woman, Jesus represents a supernatural union.Uh by the way, if you would like to go and get lost on Reddit rabbit trails you can go Google or just go on reddit and look for it is Jesus a nephele.And you'll find out that there's a lot of people out there on the internet who actually believe Jesus is a giant and that's uh kind of an interesting stand to take. Uh I don't, I don't think Jesus is depicted as a giant giant in the Bible now.Certainly people who think Jesus is a giant, they wanna call him the jolly green giant. They wanna call him the good giant. He's the BFG or whatever. He's the, he's the, he's the, he's the fun loving uh good giant if he's a giant.

00:57:09 - 0

And so they're trying to say he's still the son of God, but they're trying to portray him as a giant. A lot of people are. I think it's silly if we're gonna think that there was something about their size that spoke into their chaos and destruction.I think it's silly to call Jesus a Nephilim. And, and mostly for this reason that the giants are an unnatural union. There's something that goes against God's design for reality. But we know that Jesus was always the plan that all the way back in Genesis three.

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Jesus was always the plan that he was the one who though he, you know, he was the one who was going to conquer the serpent that though he would be injured in its midst that he was going to die, that he would rise, conquering the devil and the devil's angels, all of the evil powers, right?

00:57:56 - 0

That, that's what Jesus was supposed to do. And so Jesus is the supernatural union. Um But the virgin conception means that there is no human uncleanness involved.Remember the apostles creed, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.These two realities um have been so gripped by the church throughout history and, and modern day, I don't think most people, most average day Christians, they don't understand why it is so important that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit.We have a theory, it's been declared heresy, but we have a theory of Jesus be that Jesus became the son of God through adoption that Jesus was just a human and he lived a very righteous life. And so God chose him to become the messiah.

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He adopted him as the Son of God. And that's heresy. It's ancient heresy. It pokes its head up in various traditions throughout time. But that's, that's absolutely wrong. Jesus was not adopted as the son of God. He was actually conceived by the Holy Spirit.

00:59:06 - 0

Uh and he was born to Mary who was a virgin. She had not been with a man. And every and, and that's important because it demonstrates that there was no human uncleanness involved. You remember sexual union and sexual fluids. They make someone unclean under the law of Moses.

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And so there's no human uncleanness that's involved in the conception of Jesus. And that's really what's going on here and why we're so, it's one of many reasons I should say why we're so adamant that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit born of the Virgin Mary.

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That detail of being conceived by the Holy Spirit is really important because if the chaos monsters, the giants were conceived by unholy spirits, then Je and you know, the the sons of God who were unholy spirits, then Jesus, the son of God was conceived by none other than the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

01:00:01 - 0

And then he was born, not in human uncleanness, like all humans are, but he was actually born in cleanness.And so I as a pastor every now and then I talk to somebody and they think that they're the cleverest person in the world because they go, they come up with something like the adoption theory thinking that it explains all of like, explains away all the supernatural stuff that we weirds people out in the Bible.

01:00:26 - 0

And it's like, no, it's exactly the opposite that we cannot believe that.Because when you try to use things like adoption theory, you try to use things like the Seth view of the giants of the sons of God of Genesis six psalm 82 you try to do that and you try to explain away those narratives using these very materialistic human thoughts.

01:00:44 - 0

All you're doing is extracting the gospel itself from the scriptures. You're never, you're not, you're not gonna have any need again for Jesus death. You're certainly not gonna have any need for his descent into, into Hades or his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the father.

01:01:03 - 0

You're, you're gonna lose all of the supernatural beauty of the scriptures. You're gonna dematerialize it, you're gonna cut, you're gonna cut half your Bible out and reduce it to a set of loose rules for living as a decent person.We already have loose rules for living as a decent person. It's called your conscience and the Bible is about so much more.And so the Holy think this conception by the Holy Spirit and the virginity of Mary are critical to our understanding of Jesus as sort of a polemic against the chaos, monsters. So giants are produced when spiritual union occurs through sin.And uncleanness giants represent death, violence, chaos on the earth. They create hell on earth. Jesus represents life, shalom, peace and order on the earth.

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He creates heaven on earth is actually as I read the story and you read the, read the, read the book to the end, you get to the book of revelation chapter 21 and 22. Jesus literally creates heaven on earth.He represents all of that in the future hope of it. Jesus is the truest, the right, the unique son of God, remember if Sons of God in the Old Testament means not divine beings, not human sons, but divine beings.Like when we say we are Children of God, we mean that we're God's human offspring in a sense. But Sons of God in the Old Testament means divine.Now, there is some cleverness tied up in this idea that we are Children of God because it means that we have been in spirited, that we've been filled with the Holy Spirit so that we are now human and divine then.

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So we are sons of God that in a sense. And this is for another podcast. But we, we get to step in to the role that the, the fallen sons of God had.But then there is the, the first born son that is Jesus, the highest son who in every way is the son of God who came down in obedience to undo the chaos produced by the fallen sons of God, the rebellious spirits that came down. Ok.Well, what does all this mean? Well, it means and, and some of this, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to hold in your imagination for a minute. But this means that there are giants among us. Now, how do I know that?How do I know that there are giants among us? Well, because chaos, violence and death are still in the world, we, we're not without chaos, violence and death that hasn't been done away. With it. This also means that part of Jesus mission in the world.

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Why he came in the first place. And, and by extension through his church is to order chaos, to bring peace. And I, and I don't think that means just peace with God. It means peace among men.You know, just a little, a little, you know, hint at this idea of peace among men coming from Jesus, the Messiah's birth, the Emmanuel God with us. It produces peace on earth and not just ordering chaos, bringing peace, but also eternal life.God love the world in this way that he said his only unique son that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. It's Jesus core purpose is to bring us into his eternal king kingdom to live forever with him.And so people have issues with the conquest narratives because Yahweh commands Israel to go cleanse the land by essentially committing genocide. And there's entire books written on that subject.

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So I'm not gonna say much here, except that part of that command was to rid the land of its chaos. It was to get rid of the line, the tribal line of chaos, monsters in the world to get rid of the giants to, to do away with that.It wasn't about ethnic cleansing, it was about undoing the work of the sons of God who fell and then Jesus steps into to, to perfectly correct that so Yahweh is still against the work of the Giants as much today as he was in those days.And that is why the Gospel is a message of order. It's order under Christ's kingship. It's peace among God's people even when there is ethnic cultural diff differences. That's Ephesians 2, 11 and 12.That even though there is differences among us, there is peace among us that there is no dividing wall of hostility any longer. Now, it means it means life eternal under Christ's reign.

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This is a core understanding of what the Gospel produces in our lives, order and peace in life in place of chaos and unrest and destruction and death. And so that's maybe probably the first time you've ever heard that the Giants are tied to the gospel message.

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We're gonna continue unpacking it uh in the next couple of podcasts right here before I sign off. Little bonus for you. I very casually mentioned that demons are the disembodied spirits of the dead giants. Did you miss that?At the end of the first part, exactly like giants, the demons and the gospel narratives also represent death, violence and chaos. Demons and giants create hell on earth. That is their goal and their purpose where God's whole intent and creation was to create heaven on earth.

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They are trying to undo God's purpose. And so I'm gonna leave you with a reading from chapter three in my book, The Watcher of the Holy Ones.It's a theological paraphrase of first enoch 16 that demonstrates the connection between demons and giants that was common in the second temple period. And if you pick up my book, you'll see that this was actually that this actually is a belief that comes from the scriptures itself.

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But I'll leave that for you to go discover. Here's the reading. I gave humans wives to impregnate and have Children with so that they would not need anything on earth. But you were formerly spiritual living, the eternal life and eternally immortal.Therefore, I did not appoint wives for you. Your propping dwelling is in heaven because you are the spiritual ones of heaven. But now the giants produced from the spirits and flesh will be called demons on the earth because the earth will be their home.

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Demons proceed from their bodies because they are born from men and the Holy Watchers as their beginning and primal origin, since they will be demons, they will be called demons on the earth. As for the spirits of heaven, heaven is their home.But for the spirits of the earth which were born on it, the earth is their home. The spirits of the giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, battle and destroy on the earth. They will only cause trouble. They take no food but hunger and thirst causing violent offenses.

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These demons will rise up against the Children of men and women because they came from them from the days of the slaughter, destruction and death of the giants from the souls whose flesh the demons will destroy without incurring judgment. They will cause destruction.

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Until the day of the great judgment. In the day when the age is Consummated over the watchers and the godless, everything will come to its end.