A Genealogy of Satan, Part 4: Antediluvian Giants

A cryptic passage in Genesis bonded with the idea that Satan is an enemy of God in the world, a fallen angel assisted by legions of demons. As I've discussed earlier, originally disconnected verses combined to make this story: the snake in Eden, the Book of Job, and a satiric song about the king of Babylon. And five verses in Genesis gave rise to an explicit demonology in two apocryphal scriptures. 

GENESIS           

According to Genesis, immediately before Noah's flood, an unspecified group of God's "sons" marry "daughters of humans," causing him to limit human lifespan. A group called Nephilim are ancient mighty heroes "on the earth" at that time:

When people began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, "My spirit shall not abide in humanity forever, since they are flesh, their days shall be one hundred twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward--when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes who were of old, men of renown (Genesis 6:1-5; Kugel, p. 71).

"The sons of God" (ha-elohim bene, literally 'sons of the gods') may refer to angels, as it seems to in Job 1:6, but that reading is rejected by Rabbinic and Christian interpreters. Human-angel is marriage unlikely and rejected by Jesus in Matthew 22:30. The Hebrew term may simply mean "good people" (like "people of God") and or specify descendants of Adam's good son Seth, corrupted by intermarriage with descendants of the bad son Cain. It may be an anachronistic reference to Mesopotamian kings who claimed divine favor, or a garbled interpolation from mythic history referencing demigods. The passage is wildly ambiguous.

ENOCH

The Book of Enoch, an apocryphal Jewish scripture written about 200-300 BCE, elaborates an unambiguous demonology well known to New Testament writers. Its account of the origin of devils (repeated in The Book of Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls) hinges on the Hebrew word Nephilim. It's not clear in the Hebrew if the Nephilim are the sons of God or the sons' sons, but Enoch reads them as monstrous hybrids resulting from sex between angels and mortal women. Traditionally, as we will see, they were regarded as gigantic, giving us the wonderful King James translation of Genesis 6:4: "There were giants in the land."

Enoch describes visions attributed to Noah's great-grandfather who, according to Genesis 5:24 (in a literal translation), "walked with HaElohim [God] and he was not; for Elohim took him." The little word took (laqah) started a tradition that Enoch, like Elijah and Jesus, was bodily "taken" into heaven. The Book of Enoch was familiar to early Christians, but is excluded from both Jewish and Christian scripture except in Ethiopia, where the complete text is preserved. In it, the "Sons of God" are said to be 200 angels called Watchers, assigned to supervise the earth. 

Expanding on Genesis 6:1, Enoch says, "It happened after the sons of men had multiplied in those days, that daughters were born to them, elegant and beautiful" (7:1). The Watchers, "sons of heaven," are so lustful that they decide to take human wives and father children. Their leader (who is Samyaza, not Satan, but will later acquire that name and many others) worries that he alone will be punished for disobeying God, so he makes all the Watchers swear to take as "wives" whatever women they fancy, fathering a race of giants a mile tall, the Nephilim. Even though the Watchers have rebelled against God--an act associated with the fall of Lucifer from heaven (Isaiah 14:12-15)--he punishes them only many years later, after environmental damage they cause leads to complaints relayed to him by loyal angels.

          The damage takes two forms: forbidden knowledge and rapine. Oddly, the number-two Watcher, not Samyaza, is the chief corruptor. Azazyel, an assistant angel, teaches men how to make weapons and women "the use of paint, the beautifying of the eyebrows, the use of stones of every valuable and select kind, and all sorts of dyes, so that the world became altered" (8:1). Not exactly knowledge of good and evil, but demonic in Enoch's terms. After this, "fornication multiplied, and they transgressed and corrupted all their ways" (8:2), apparently as a direct result of makeup, jewelry, and hair dye. Other Watchers taught sorcery, signs, and astronomy, but the Nephilim--typical storybook giants--also began to eat everything in sight, including people. 

Michael and other good angels complained to God that the Watchers had "disclosed to the world all the secret things that are done in the heavens" (9:5), so God decided to send a flood, warning only Noah and his family. He buried Azazyel in a dark hole in the desert. The Nephilim killed each other in fratricidal war, and the Watchers were bound under the earth for seventy generations until Last Judgement, when they will burn in hell and the righteous will prosper. So fallen angels (not Adam, in this myth) are the Pandoras who introduced evil into the world. 

But how does Enoch explain day-to-day temptation? That comes later in his vision. The spirits of the Nephilim, being sons of angels, become disembodied spirits, earthbound demons "like clouds, which shall oppress, corrupt, fall, content, and bruise upon earth" (15:9). The mile-high giants are still all around, tempting and afflicting us, shrunken to the demons of the Christian gospels.

THE BOOK OF JUBILEES

Enoch's story of the Nephilim is expanded in the Book of Jubilees, a rehash of Genesis to explain Jewish festivals. Accepted as inspired by Christians and Jews of the first century, it was later rejected because sex between angels and women was deemed impossible, and the text survives only in Ethiopia. In Jubilees, after the flood, Noah tells his sons that the flood happened because the Watchers "went a whoring after the daughters of men and took themselves wives of all which they chose; and they made the beginning of uncleanness" so that every "desire of men imagined vanity and evil continually." The flood improved the world, but Noah warns his sons that "demons have begun their seductions against you and against your children, and now I fear on your behalf that after my death ye shall shed the blood of men" (Jubilee, chapter 7).

DEMIGODS

These late scriptures ignore the statement in Genesis that the Nephilim were "renown heroes of old." With their elevated parentage, this suggests parallels between them and Greek demigods such as Heracles, Theseus, and Aeneas whom Hesiod glorifies in his myth of the five ages, "a god-like race of hero-men" who live forever in the Isles of the Blessed (Works and Days, ll. 156-169). 

           

THE REPHAIM

A more local parallel with the Nephilim is the Canaanite Rephaim, mentioned several times in the Bible and translated, depending on context, as "the dead" or "giants" or as the name of tribe (of giants perhaps). Og, whose bed (or tomb) is fourteen feet long, is called the last of the Rephaim (Deuteronomy 3:11), but David later kills Philistine giants said to be "of the Rephaim" (1 Chronicles 20). And the Rephaim were listed along with the Kenites and the Hittites as occupants of land promised to Abram (Genesis 15:20). Elsewhere, the Rephaim are synonymous with shades in the underworld, as in Job 26:5 and Isaiah 14:9, where the king of Babylon is sardonically promised that the dead will soon welcome him, specifically rephaim who are ghosts of previous kings.

The triple meaning of Rephaim as a likely gloss of Nephilim makes sense in light of Canaanite mythology, where the term originates. The Rephaim there are spirits of respected ancestors, especially the legendary forefathers of kings, objects of ancestor-worship. We read in a poem from Ugarit celebrating the triumph of the storm god Baal, Yahweh's adversary in Canaan:

Sun rules the Rephaim,

Sun rules the divine ones:

Your company are the gods (Coogan and Smith 152).

The Rephaim are simultaneously giants, founders, heroes of renown, and shades in the underworld. Another Canaanite text celebrates the arrival of "the Rephaim of Baal, the warriors of Baal" to a ritual feast (Coogan and Smith, pp. 57-63). Here they are apparently invisible presences like the spirits of Enoch's giants. These were familiar figures in the religious milieu of Second Temple Judaism, and it makes sense that a rise of monotheism would transform these pagan spirts into demons.

References

Coogan, Michael D., and Mark S. Smith. Stories from Ancient Canaan. 2nd ed. Westminster John Knox, 2012.

Enoch, The Book of, translated by George H. Shodde. Warren F. Dra[er, 1882. https://holybooks-lichtenbergpress.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/The-book-of-Enoch.pdf 

Kugel. James L. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now. Free Press, 2007.

Hesiod. Works and Days, translated by Gregory Nagy. Center for Hellenic Studies, Nov. 2, 2020.  https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/hesiod-works-and-days-sb/ 

Nyland, A., translator. The Book of Jubilees. CreateSpace, 2011.