The AZ Animals site published an article titled Discover 8 Fantastic Beasts and Creatures Featured in the Bible by Andrew Wood (May 20, 2023).
First on the list are Nephilim, the section for which begins, “Does the Bible teach that real, human giants once walked the Earth?”
Since Wood instantly jumped from the specific ancient Hebrew word “Nephilim” to the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants,” that begs the questions:
What’s the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants” in English Bibles?
What’s Wood’s usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants”?
Do those usages agree?
Likewise, Wood jumps from, “‘Sons of God’ are fallen angels” to “These demons.” Such jumpy writing is actually very common in pop-research circles so I’m not surprised that Wood employed it since he like is reading the pop-stuff.
Pop-researchers tend to write as per the modus operandi since it makes it easier to water everything down, fast-talk, and appear to cohere things that don’t really correlate.
Please see my book “Nephilim and Giants as per Pop-Researchers: A Comprehensive Consideration of the claims of I.D.E. Thomas, Chuck Missler, Dante Fortson, Derek Gilbert, Brian Godawa, Patrick Heron, Thomas Horn, Ken Johnson, L.A. Marzulli, Josh Peck, CK Quarterman, Steve Quayle, Rob Skiba, Gary Wayne, Jim Wilhelmsen, et al.”
Also, see the article, Demons Ex Machina: What are Demons?
Wood tells us that sons of God/Angels/demons, “intermarried with people and produced giants.”
I discern that he’s meaning something about subjectively unusual height by giants, which is not the biblical usage, due to the next thing he wrote which is, “The Nephilim appear again in Numbers 13:33, when Israelite spies go into the land of Canaan. They report that the Nephilim were there, and went on to say, ‘We seemed like grasshoppers’ compared to them. What’s the verdict? Were they giants? Nobody knows. But they aren’t described in more detail. It seems they were not an important part of the story the writer was trying to tell.”
That “The Nephilim appear” in a verse does not mean that they were alive, on the ground, at the time: if I mention POTUS George Washington right now, that does not mean he’s alive.
Any concept of post-flood Nephilim implies that God failed: He meant to be rid of the via the flood but couldn’t get the job done, He must have missed a loophole, the flood was much of a waste, etc., and then, one has to invent an un-biblical tall-tale about how they made it past the flood.
It’s sloppy writing to assert, “Israelite spies…They report” since 12 went but only the 10 unreliable ones whom God rebuked merely asserted that “the Nephilim were there” with an evil report.
Thus, “Were they” subjectively unusually tall? It’s a non-issue since it’s not an issue that “they aren’t described in more detail” but that they just made up a tall-tale so since there is the only physical description we have of them, however generic, that means that we’ve no reliable physical description of them at all.
The next section is about Angles—and we already encountered his jump from Angel to demon.
He writes, “Angels…appear and disappear from our world” which is fair enough. Wood asserts, “They can have different appearances, titles, and areas of responsibility and perform different kinds of services. Sometimes they looked just like ordinary people, and sometimes their appearance was bright, powerful, and frightening. In fact, angels usually said, ‘Don’t be afraid!’ to the people they appeared to.”
The only differing “appearances” I’m aware of Angles having is the regular human-guy look and their hey, I’m an Angel in all of their glory look.
The only differing “titles” I’m aware of them having are: Angel of the LORD, Archangel, and regular Angel.
As for differing “responsibility and perform different kinds of services” well, their titled gives us the basics: their Hebrew tiled Malakim refers to being messengers.
As for the supposed “fact” that “angels usually said, ‘Don’t be afraid!’” I believe that’s a grand total of four instance. And, it has nothing to do with “bright, powerful, and frightening” since those instances are when people thought they were alone but there was suddenly someone else right there.
We get an idea whence Wood got some of his ideas when he writes of “Roles Angels Performed in the Bible” including “Guardians: God placed an angel with a shining sword at the entrance to the Garden of Eden.” Yet, that’s a category error since that was not one Angel, it was two Cherubim. Thus, Wood committed a category (and mathematical) error that violates he law of identity.
The next subsection is about demons and Wood claims “Demons in the Bible are ‘fallen angels’” which is accurate, as per my article, in a roundabout manner.
Wood note “an angel known as Lucifer, Satan, or ‘the Devil’” but he too is a Cherub and thus, not an Angel, by definition.
He claims that Lucifer/Satan/Devil “rebelled against God and led a large number of other angels to do the same (Revelation 12:7). The Archangel Michael led an army of faithful angels to fight against them” yet, he’s mashing together two wholly different timelines.
The “large number of other angels…(Revelation 12:7)” refers to the Gen 6 affair timeline but the “fight against them” is a post-Jesus’ ascension event.
Wood rightly notes “Demons in the Bible do not take a human form independently, but instead, they possess people or animals and cause them to act in destructive ways.”
Wood has a section on Cherubim “Ezekiel describes the cherubim as each having four wings and four faces: of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. Beside each was a strange contraption: two intersecting wheels spinning within each other and moving alongside each of the cherubim. Scholars say these were the cherubim’s spirits.”
The only point of correction is that the Cherubim’s spirits were in the wheels, the Ophanim.
Wood notes, “The Bible describes a similar description of four living creatures around the throne of God, in Revelation 4:6-8…Instead of wheels, the creatures themselves are covered with eyes” but they also are in Ezekiel chap 10.
The last section we will consider is on Leviathan wherein Wood notes, “it is not clear whether this is a literal creature that actually lived, or a fictional animal used for symbolism…Isaiah 27:1…says that God would one day kill it with a great sword.
Again, the issues are “Some people think Leviathan was an actual extinct species, perhaps a prehistoric reptile…Another possibility is that the writers of the Bible used a common mythological creature as a poetic example that God is stronger than the strongest creatures.”
As I concluded in my book What Does the Bible Say About Various Paranormal Entities? A Styled Paranormology, I think that the horn splitting third way is that this is a case of both: it was a real-life animal but once it became extinct (or whilst still living) it became the stuff of myth and legend and/or, the stuff of symbolic metaphor.
Another section focuses on the “red dragon with seven heads wearing crowns and 10 horns. He is identified as an ‘ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan” so we know that Dragon is a symbolic metaphor so that not much more need be said.
I’m leaving two sections of Wood’s article without a comment since they are even more so wholly about symbolic metaphors since they deal with “Daniel’s Prophetic Creatures” and “The Beasts of the Sea and the Earth” as per “The author of Revelation.”
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