Joshua, an old testament type for Jesus, finished the work of Moses and brought the children of Israel into the Promised Land. His book details the overview of their deliverance, and at the end of his book, it records his final instructions to God’s people. Joshua reminded the people that their ancestors had lived beyond the Euphrates and he calls Abraham’s family out by name: Terah, his dad, and Nahor, his uncle and said, “They served other gods.” A bit later in his discourse he says this well known piece:
“Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell….”1
Most every Christian can quote the next part: “But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
The “gods” their fathers served were the sons of God (and later their offspring) of Genesis 6 who intermarried with human women to create Nephilim who corrupted the earth. They were spiritual beings of a higher order than man. They took a physical form, just like God did when He walked in the Garden.
It’s a really, really old story that only changes in nuances as the centuries turn into millennia. The Supreme God created other gods to co-reign with Him, and then He created man. His co-reigning entities rebelled and altered the created order. I know it’s popular to blame the perpetual failures of humanity on Adam and Eve, but they had help.
It’s really a fascinating story that would leave any movie or novel in the dust. But we’ve sanitized it over the centuries, and taken turns both marginalizing and fantasizing it, and turned it into myths and legends, and done all but really learn from it.
Basically the fallen Watchers taught humans knowledge that corrupted humanity and were then imprisoned until the final judgment (Enoch 10:11-12, also Jude and Peter make reference to such). Before they were imprisoned in the dark underworld, they intermarried with human women and produced offspring called the Nephilim. (Don’t scorn me please, it’s in Genesis 6.)
The Nephilim
The Nephilim were giants. When the Nephilim were finally killed off (the Flood finished the last of them), they were cursed in that their bodies died but their spirits were left on earth. Enoch says plainly (En. 5:28) they are the source of demons on the earth, they roam around for things to inhabit because they can’t have their original bodies. (Usually they inhabit people, but they can inhabit animals and objects as well.)
The late Dr. Michael Heiser brought the hardcore Scriptural breakdown of the story to the forefront. I studied under his teaching for awhile before I said anything to anyone. I wanted to be able to follow up on the extensive bibliography and resources he provides. But I’ll never forget when I met my young adult son for lunch one day. We finished our burgers and caught up on details of life, and he said casually, “What’s new with you? What are you working on?”
I paused. Oh well, I thought, let’s see where this goes. I said, “Look up Psalm 82 and read the first verse to me. Tell me what you think.” He pulled out his phone and pulled up the Bible app. He began reading the first verse and just looked quizzical at me. “It’s the wrong version,” I said. “Look at it in the English Standard.”
He began reading aloud, “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.” He stopped. I’ll never forget his face or what he said next, “Mom! This changes everything! This makes everything make sense.”
Yes. Yes it does.
Before I could get home (an hour and a half drive), he had called me to tell me of additional passages he had found that helped him. I hadn’t seen my son excited about things of God and faith in a long time. He was disillusioned with a lot of religious aspects of western Christianity. But this resonated with him, with his observations of the world, with his own experiences….
What are the rules for the gods?
I don’t know what the rules were for the sons of God. There had to be some that we’re not necessarily privy to. I was always stumped by the covenant God made with Abraham when He tells Abraham about his progeny being enslaved for four hundred years, but the fourth generation they will be released. Then He says this curious thing, “…for the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete.”
We can know the Amorites were giants because Amos 2:9 tells us God said, “Yet it was I who destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars and who was as strong as the oaks.” The Amorites lived in the known region of the giants in the region west of Sumer and ancient Babylon, and in fact were giants. (Remember, when you see “giants” think Nephilim, offspring of the fallen watchers and women.) Nephilim existed post-Flood too.
So basically God called Abraham and set him aside to establish a people group that would be faithful to Him in the face of a world of people groups serving other gods. But He did so with a future date in mind: four hundred years! Why not just wait four hundred years to do it? Why speak it four hundred years in advance? There must be some rules or protocols if He was unwilling to move Abraham and his seed into an established territory because the occupants’ iniquity was not “yet complete”.
We know the nations were divided according to the sons of God (Deut. 32:8-9), and God later judged them (in Psalm 82) as not ruling mankind justly. Hesier says it like this, “Recall that in Deuteronomy 32:8-9, the ‘Most High’ had disinherited the nations of the world, assigned them to the dominion of supernatural sons of God, and then created Israel from nothing. Those sons of God rebelled and became corrupt (Psalm 32:1-4), throwing God’s order into chaos (Psalm 82:1-5).” 2
So there must be some sort of rules in the council of the gods for being able to upend boundaries and people groups, otherwise wouldn’t God just be able to move them when and as He pleased? I’m just thinking we don’t know all the rules the gods are playing by. What’s the measurement for a collective iniquity to be complete? We’re talking about the Amorites — godless, ruthless giants. Why was there a waiting time before they could be removed? What constitutes completing the iniquity?? God was clearly keeping some standard or some set of rules there.
What was in the mind of God that He made a plan to interfere in the affairs of man and overthrow another god’s territory to establish one for Himself? He had already reset the world twice: at the flood and at the tower of Babel. Were there other purposes involved?
The Timing of God
Now think of this: if Christ was the solution to the sin problem that separates humanity from God set in motion by the first man and woman, why did God wait four thousand years to bring the solution? Why wasn’t it at some other point? Why then?? He reset the world twice in two thousand years (that we know of). What was going on, what had been put in motion or already established, that caused the remedy in Noah’s day to be a flood, and in Nimrod’s day to be confounding people languages, but wait another two thousand years to bring the perpetual, perfect and permanent solution?
Why does Paul write (in Galatians 4:5) that God sent Christ “when the fullness of time had come”? And in 1 Timothy 2:6 he said that Christ’s ransom for man was given “at the proper time”…. It’s almost as if there’s a timetable God is working on… a time for the nation of Israel to be formed… a time for the Nephilim to be eradicated… a time for the redemption of humanity to be unveiled…
Mesopotamian History is Important
Mesopotamia is the region the giants inhabited and that this drama is set against. Mesopotamia has numerous ancient documents and histories and legends passed down in written script. Dr. Heiser wisely argues that such script gives context to those blocks of history, and ignoring them makes one blind to seeing the bigger picture. The western institutional church strongly discourages (and worse in some cases) studying and reading such for a multitude of reasons. History is still history, and leaving context out hinders understanding. (to put it mildly) “My people perish for lack of knowledge” is certainly applicable here. Moreover, convincing argument and evidence is provided that indicate the disciples and children of God in Christ’s day and the early church history would have this same knowledge and understanding of ancient Mesopotamia.
Heiser explains that Mesopotamian history teaches that there were divine beings pre-flood called the “apkallu” who functioned as a go-between between heaven and earth, teaching humans things like “wisdom [including omens, magic, etc.], social forms and craftsmanship”. There were seven of these apkallu that were considered some form of “culture heroes who brought the arts of civilization to the land. During the time that follows this period, nothing new is invented, the original revelation is only transmitted and unfolded.”4
In fact, Heiser underscores the relevance of this with Genesis. He said, “It is difficult to do justice to the importance of the idea that the knowledge that made Mesopotamian civilization great – particularly in the case of Babylon – came from a divine source. It is a subject with immediate ties to Genesis.”5
Whether these are benign or malevolent beings is open to debate. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia thought they were good, and they developed their culture and society with instruction and learning from these. The ancient scripts depict a scenario of people gaining instruction and knowledge from divine beings, and establishing their civilizations according to such instruction.
Remember, this is pre-flood. The Bible says very little about pre-flood (comparatively to post). As followers of the Supreme God, we can assume the knowledge and instruction being given was NOT good because it led to the destruction of life on earth. This would also be in that time Enoch speaks quite thoroughly of regarding its wickedness and the pronouncement of God’s judgment on the (original 200) Watchers. God said, “You were in heaven, and no mystery was revealed to you; but a stolen mystery you learned; and this you made known to the women in your hardness of heart, and through this mystery the women and men are multiplying evils upon the earth.” (En. 16:3)
Seriously, read the book of Enoch. The foundation for the courses of history on earth are better understood when you evaluate as much of the history available that you can.
Understanding the premise of the early history on earth and the players involved will help understand current events and the players involved. Historical documents indicate the seven apkallu pre-flood were divine (not human), but the four apkallu recorded post-flood were “of human descent”, with the fourth (Gilgamesh) described as two-thirds apkallu. This presents a hybrid of people on the earth even post-flood, a mixture of divine with flesh.
These hybrid post-flood apkallu were known as giants. Those giants were later exterminated from the land God promised Abraham’s seed. God knew when He called Abraham to that land that the giants, (hybrids of the apkallu), lived on the land. For some reason, there was a timeline for when the land could be conquered for God’s people and it would have to wait for four hundred years.
The rest of the Bible gives plenty of opportunities to examine the continued presence of giants (Nephilim).
What happened to the sons of god with dominion over the other nations?
What I’m more interested in is the gods that created these giants and what happened to them. Pre-Christ we know they were given dominion over the nations and the nations served these other gods. Then Israel got ensnared with them, from Baal to Ashteroth, to Chemosh, Molech, etc. These gods existed and humanity was paying homage to them. Israel and Judah were both divorced from God for their unfaithfulness to Him in serving other gods.
These gods are consistent through all historical and archaeological records. Their names change with their locations but their functions and titles remain much the same.
When Christ came as the “son of God” – a title that competes with the rebellious fallen gods – He basically waged a war on not only the consequences of sin, but also the staked claim of the fallen gods. Christ was transfigured on Mount Hermon, the entry point for the Watchers when they descended from Heaven to earth. Mount Hermon is considered the mountain of the gods (not God). Christ was revealed for who He is on Mount Hermon, on enemy territory, in fact the enemy’s base camp!
Heiser reveals a subtle difference in Jesus’s encounter with the demon-possessed between Mark 1:24 and Mark 5:7. In Mark 1:24, they were in Capernaum (Jewish territory) when the demons (remember demons are fallen Nephilim spirits inhabiting humans) addressed Him as “Jesus of Nazareth”. But in the region of Bashan, when Jesus came into Gerasenes, the demons addressed Him as “son of the Most High God”. (Territorial spirits are also known as principalities.) These spirits in Gerasenes rightly identified Christ’s dominion even in their territory. The game was changing.
As Heiser said, “Bashan and Hermon were ground zero for spiritual evil, and in particular, the Watchers of 1 Enoch. The spiritual corruption of humanity would be healed by the atonement of the cross. His resurrection meant that no member of the kingdom of God would share living space with the Watchers in the underworld Abyss, the realm of the dead. Even an army of Watchers was overmatched by the Son of the Most High. They would be lords of nothing.”2
So the gods of old were defeated at Calvary and His resurrection from the grave. Jonathan Cahn in Return of the Gods does an excellent and careful exposition of this very topic. He lays out how the ancient gods of Rome and Greece and Babylon, etc. (they’re all the same gods with different names according to the language spoken) waged war against the early Christians as they turned the world upside down, liberating people from empty and vile worship of malevolent beings and showing them the benevolence of the true God in His son Christ, and the freedom Christ gives.
The ancient gods were silenced and eventually all but forgotten, relegated to underground sects and cults. Their temples and altars are now ancient ruins in what used to be hotbeds of parades and sacrifices and orgies to the gods. But these gods emerged in America in the last fifty-plus years, specifically Baal, Ishtar and Molech. In fact, they’ve resurfaced in many places in the last century or so. Cahn and Heiser have their own theories on the how and why, and while I see and understand and agree with them both (different angles), I have my own theories with another slant. But I’m out of space for today.
Resources for better learning:
The Unseen Realm, by Dr. Michael Heiser
Reversing Hermon, by Dr. Michael Heiser
Return of the Gods, by Jonathan Cahn
1Joshua 24
2Reversing Hermon, by Dr. Michael S. Heiser, pg 101
3Ibid. Pg 102
4Ibid. Pp 38-39
5Ibid.