The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments

Introduction

The first thing to get out of the way is why I might want to address this subject at all. Don’t we have bigger fish to fry? Well, yes, we do, and they are all Nephilim fish. That’s why they are bigger. That is why we must fry them.

The long war against God has always been a conflict that boils down to the same thing. Can we somehow have access to the fruit of the tree of life without actually coming to the tree of life? Every faithful Christian says no, and yet the carnal heart always rises at the limits that God has placed on its rebellion. The issues that precipitated the Flood (heh) are still with us. The clash is between God’s plan to restore humanity in and through Christ, over against Satan’s desire to create some kind of an ubermensch in defiance of God and His blessing. I have often said in the past that the ultimate choice is between Christ and chaos. On this subject, it reduces to Christ or a chaos that has delusions of grandeur.

The Flood did not happen because people were going to nightclubs too much. The Flood was brought about through our rebellion as expressed through perverse genetic engineering. The lust that was driving that genetic engineering was a a swollen conceit that thought the autonomous idea of “being as God” was actually not absurd.

But there is a second reason also. The cosmological issues swirling around this topic provide a good case study on how easy it is to get Christians to be embarrassed by certain aspects of Scripture—even if they affirm their belief in technical inerrancy, and even if the text of Scripture is very plain on whatever the embarrassing subject is. And once that process sets in, it is pretty difficult to stop. You started out waffling over whether there was a global flood or not, and first thing you know, your job at Big Corp is on the line because you don’t want to use the preferred pronouns of the carbon-based personage with the Halloween hair at the front desk, the one who reported you to HR.

James tells us that a person who breaks one part of the law is guilty of breaking all of it. The law of God is not like a series of French panes, each distinct. It is more like a plate glass window, and it does not much matter where you put the hole—the entire window is broken. In a similar spirit, we can also say that anyone who is embarrassed by one part of the Word is in principle actually embarrassed by all of it. It is just that different parts of your face turn red at different times.

The Most Obvious Objection

So with that said, I am arguing here that the Nephilim were the gigantic offspring of an unnatural sexual union between celestial beings (bene elohim) and human women (Gen. 6:1-8). Before getting into the details, I should dispense with the one passage that appears to be saying that this is not even a possibility. Doesn’t Jesus say that the angels in Heaven can’t marry?

But Jesus does not say that this cannot be done. He says that it is not done by the angels in Heaven. The reason it is not done by them is that they were not the ones who left their assigned habitation. Those angels that did abandon their habitation incurred a great and grievous judgment because of it.

There is therefore no reason to use this passage to counter a number of other passages that explicitly show how these perverse unions were the reason for the Flood. There is no reason to resort to the contrived idea that the bene elohim were actually descendants of Seth who apostatized by intermarrying with the daughters of Cain. Elsewhere in Scripture, the phrase bene elohim always refers to celestial beings. And if it had been a merger between the lines of Seth and the line of Cain, why is all the masculinity on one side, and all the women on the other? And why on earth would such unions result in giants? And why would the entire ancient world concur with the reading that this was a perverse celestial/earthly connection, from Josephus to Beowulf to the Book of Enoch—from responsible histories to oddball books? The line of Seth argument doesn’t really come into its own until the modern era—which is precisely when some of these ancient tales began to be a tad embarrassing for us big kids.

So What Did Happen Then?

The Lord’s brother Jude explains it for us. The emphases below are mine, and I would ask you to pay special attention to them.

Let me break it out for you. Certain angels abandoned their appropriate habitation, and they were judged for it. In the same way, the cities of Sodom, Gomorrah, and some others, gave themselves over to fornication and the pursuit of strange flesh. Why were the cities of the plain judged? They were judged because they pursued strange flesh in the same way that the angels had done when they they abandoned their assigned role. That’s what it says.

And that word habitation is interesting. It only occurs twice in the New Testament. Jude 6 is one of them. Here is the other location.

Paul is referring to his resurrection body as his “house,” or “habitation.” The angels abandoned their first estate, relinquishing their celestial bodies (or habitations) in order to marry human women. The horrific results of that crime were the Nephilim.

The rebellion at the time of the Flood had been a really big deal. This passage is about angels who had been disobedient in the time of Noah. That episode was so important that after Jesus died, when He descended into Hades, He announced to the disobedient angels and perhaps the spirits of the Nephilim (or perhaps both) that He had finally defeated them for good. The word rendered as preached here is not the word for preaching the gospel, which means that this was not an offer of a second chance. The word means to “herald,” or to “announce.” The Lord was declaring that He was now the final victor, and that He now held the keys to Death and Hades (Rev. 1: 18).

Jesus tells us explicitly where He was going to be during the three days and three nights between His death and His resurrection. He said that He was going to descend to the heart of the earth (Matt. 12:40). The lowest pit of Hades there was called Tartarus, and that is where the angels were locked up—the ones that Jesus preached to.

But even though Jesus had said that He was going to be in the depths of the earth for that time, He had also told the thief on the cross that He was going to be with him, that day, in Paradise (Luke 23:43). There was a chasm between Tartarus on the one side, and Paradise on the other. Elsewhere this Paradise was called Abraham’s Bosom (Luke 16:22). The Greeks called it Elysium.

And So What?

For some sophisticates, this kind of discussion seems like trying to read the minutes of Toad Flats Chapter of the Flat Earth Society, which minutes tried to summarize the heated debate between Elmer Sneezetree and Hobart Snakeworthy, with the argument going way over the secretary’s head, one Cletis J. Smelt, but who was doing what he could, scribbling away like a man, but who made a hash of the minutes anyway. The debate was over whether or not the four corners of the earth were actual sharp corners, or whether they were significantly rounded. Western civilization, Hobart maintained, hung in the balance.

But to take biblical cosmology seriously, as C.S. Lewis did, does not obligate you to a three-decker universe, wobbling precariously on the back of a turtle, the top turtle of a column of turtles that, quite famously, “goes all the way down.” No, it is not necessary to jettison what we have learned through modern cosmology in order accept and believe the biblical teaching on this subject. But it is necessary to believe that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth” (Phil. 2:10). Jesus is Lord there too. We are free, however, to dispense with the superstitions that scientism has made to modern cosmology.

Regardless, it is necessary to believe that a host of stars told the shepherds about the birth of Christ, that the fortune telling girl at Philippi, being a devotee of Apollo, was possessed with the spirit of a python, and that a significant part of human history consisted of warfare with giants. And we should have believed that last one before we had the skull of Dragon Man in hand.

God is the one who created us, and “not we ourselves” (Ps. 100). When we come to realize that the doctrine of creation is absolutely foundational to everything else we believe, then maybe we will start acting like believers. But in order to believe in creation, it is necessary for us to accept the account of it that was given to us by the one who was there. God gave us this world, and we wrecked it by sin. God then took that world, and wrecked it in judgment through the Flood. That was a world that perished. We now live in a postdiluvian environment, but the perennial issue—our rivalry with God—is still the same. We are still going after strange flesh. We are trying out hybrid human/animal splices in our labs. We want to make our own Minotaur. We are full to the back teeth with our various conceits, in the high confidence that God will not see us, and that He will not judge.

He won’t judge with a global flood, that’s true enough, and He gave us the rainbow as a sign of His promise to that effect. As much as to taunt Him, trying to get Him to break His Word, we have made the rainbow into a symbolic flag of our perverted sexual desires. If we thought we could get angels to take some of our women, we would offer them. We are that lost.

But even though there will not be a global flood, we should not make the mistake of thinking that our impudent strivings are somehow beyond the reach of God’s judgments. Christ is the Lord of history.

For Further Ponders