Banner Church posted a video of one of their Sunday services titled Giants, Fallen Angels, and the Nephilim: The Bible’s Darkest Mystery.
This is the comment I posted:
This was preached by a pastor during a service at a church service to Christians?
God help us!
The pastor noted, “So they were on the earth in the days of Noah and afterwards: after what? When Israel comes into the promised land. So, Genesis says they were on the earth. And then when we begin to read scripture, we see they were actually on the earth again when Israel comes into the promised land.”
So to the question, “afterwards: after what?” the pastor’s answer is, “When Israel comes into the promised land.”
But what did God inspire as the answer to “after what”?
“Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them.”
But when was that? Well, v 1 told us, “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.”
So, the pastor is pointing us forward in time but God pointed us backward.
So it was, “When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them” and continuing on, ending at the flood since, obviously, Nephilim didn’t make it past the flood since God didn’t fail, didn’t miss a loophole, the flood wasn’t much of a waste, etc., etc., etc.
But the pastor ignored that theological point and jumps to one single sentence from Numbers 13, “Moses…sends a spy into the land and they come back and they say” and quotes the first report in that chapter, the one that’s accepted as is.
But he then waters down the text and generalizes by mashing two reports into one (and he’s very loosely paraphrasing), “the promised land, the land that God promised to Abraham when He made a covenant with him, that land is amazing. God had a great promise. He made a, He gave us a great promise. He said, ‘There’s a really big problem. There are giants there. where God has placed a promise, there are now giants who live there.”
He went from, “a” singular spy to the plural, “they” and then back to the singular, “He” but that may just be sloppy grammar due to talking fast (and fast-talking).
So, the first report doesn’t say anything about, “There are giants there” and some key questions are: What’s the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants” in English Bibles? What’s the pastor’s usage? Do those two usages agree?
He then actually quotes the first report, “they told him, these are the
spies who came out” and that reliable report specifies, “we saw the descendants of Anak…Amalekites…Hittites…Jebusites…Amorites…and the Canaanites” so, no mention of Nephilim.
So that was, “they” and in summary, the pastor says, “he,” whoever that is, “said, ‘We can’t go in’” but that refers to the 10 unreliable spies whom God rebuked.
He then quotes the narrator, “they” those 10 (since Caleb and Joshua sided together with God) “brought the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they’d spied out, saying” with the key portion being, “we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim. And we seem to ourselves like grasshoppers.”
For some odd reason, he seems to have missed that the, “bad report” was bad because it consists of five mere assertions unbacked by even one other single sentence in the whole Bible.
He also oddly didn’t note that the LXX doesn’t even mention Anakim in that verse.
The pastor then comments, “Nephilim are before, but they’re also after. They go into the land. God has promised this promised them this land. But when they go to get there, these descendants of demonic rebellion are occupying the land and they are giants.”
So, he bypassed the whole point of the narrative which is that the 10 just made up a logically, bio-logically, and theo-logically impossible tall-tale.
Also, it wasn’t a, “demonic rebellion” but an Angelic one.
Note that the, “bad report” also embellished the original and reliable one since it artificially inserts Nephilim into who was seen in the land—as if the first report would, oopsy, miss Nephilim who were supposedly THE MOST awe inspiring beings on the planet.
Based on strictly non-LXX versions, he also concludes, “Says they’re the sons of Anak. Also that’s called Anakim because, ‘im’ is, ‘son of.’”
He doesn’t know that the, “im” ending on Hebrew words makes them male plural, it has nothing to do with, “son of.”
He continued, “They’re also called the Rephites or the Repaim. There’s lots of names for the same people because you have different languages, right?” no, not right: Rephaim were the tribe, Anakim (and Emmim) were like clans of that tribe.
Interestingly, he notes, “When Moses in Deuteronomy when they’re coming into the land, he recalls their journey and he begins to point out these different places” and when Moses related that event in Deut 1, he mentions Anakim but doesn’t say a single word about Nephilim—again, ignoring the supposedly THE MOST awe inspiring beings on the planet.
He was practical, he was concerned about the real danger on the ground, such as Anakim, and not about some incoherently impossible tall-tale.
Eventually, he gets to the point of stating, “Rephites that I’ve been
talking about, these Nephilim” and by doing that, he can then arbitrarily slap the term, “Nephilim” on anyone he doesn’t like.
So, he committed a category error and what I term expandio ad absurdum based on linguistics errors (and many other fallacies besides).
He took one single utterly unreliable sentence (see my post, “Chapter sample: On the Post Flood Nephilim Proposal”) exclusively from non-LXX versions of one unreliable report by unreliable guys whom God rebuked which refers only to the clan of Anakim, he then took it upon himself to expand that to the entire Rephaim tribe and so that allows him to play the name-swap game of turning only some Rephaim into all Rephaim—and beyond since he just waters everything down and so he mashes any and all tribes he doesn’t like into the, “Nephilim” category.
Thus, even just these few points show that the pastor committed hermeneutical fallacies, linguistics fallacies, historical fallacies, theological fallacies, cultural fallacies, etc.
And, again, these amount to that the implication that God failed, missed a loophole, the flood was much of a waste, etc., etc., etc.
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