The Bride Movement church posted an answer to the question Where Do Demons Come From? Two Rebellions Explained via a, “recreated” article originally by Daniel Duval, founder of Bride Ministries, followed by part 2 which is Are Demons the Spirits of Dead Giants?
Duval and/or the editor began with:
Where do demons come from? Most people carry one simple picture. The devil rebels in heaven, he drags a third of the angels down with him, and that crowd of rebels is what we now call demons. One fall, one event, one explanation for everything dark in the world…
A demon and a fallen angel are not the same kind of being, and they do not answer to the same approach. Telling them apart is part of being equipped for the fight.
We could say that, “A demon and a fallen angel are not the same kind of being” on the surface level but not on a technical level—stand by.
Duval/editor note:
Here is the version a lot of believers carry in their heads. Satan, also called Lucifer, was a high angel in heaven. He was beautiful and wise, the anointed cherub who covered the throne of God.
““You were the anointed cherub who covers; I established you; You were on the holy mountain of God; You walked back and forth in the midst of fiery stones. (Ezekiel 28:14)”
Then pride and corruption took over.
“You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created, Till iniquity was found in you. (Ezekiel 28:15)”
So God threw him out. On the way down, the story goes, Satan pulled a third of heaven’s angels with him, and when they hit the earth they all became demons. People point to Jesus saying, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18), and to the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and the whole thing gets stitched together into one tidy event. Satan falls, his army falls with him, and that army is the demons we read about in the Gospels.
Simple enough. And for most of us, never questioned.
I have questioned it and will do so again since it represents a category error since a goalpost moving jump was made from, “angel,” which is an assertion, to, “cherub” which is biblical.
The claim is that, “That Story Falls Apart Under a Closer Look…it is sloppy. It blends together separate events that the Bible actually keeps apart…they do not go back together”:
What the Lucifer Passages Actually Say
The two famous passages about Lucifer’s fall are Ezekiel 28:12-19 and Isaiah 14:12-17.
““How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How you are cut down to the ground, You who weakened the nations! (Isaiah 14:12)”
Read them closely and you notice something. Neither one mentions a crowd of other angels falling with him at that moment. They describe him. His beauty, his pride, his ruin. He birthed iniquity, and he was cast down. But at least at the start, he seems to be largely on his own.
The Garden of Eden lines up with that. When the tempter shows up in Genesis 3, it is one serpent.
“Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. (Genesis 3:1)”
One serpent. Not a serpent leading an army of helpers. That quiet detail does not fit the “Satan plus a third of heaven crashed into earth all at once” version. The fall of Lucifer is real, but it reads like the opening of a longer story, not the whole story crammed into a single scene.
A Second Rebellion in Genesis 6
After Eden, the Bible goes quiet about Satan for a long stretch. The next time heavenly beings cause real trouble on earth, it is a different group entirely, and the reason is different too. This is Genesis 6.
“Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose. (Genesis 6:1-2)”
“There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. (Genesis 6:4)”
The “sons of God” here are heavenly beings. They looked at human women, wanted them, and crossed a line they were never meant to cross. The children that came from those unions were not normal. They were part human and part angelic, a mixed kind of being, and they grew into giants.
Notice how different this is from Lucifer. Lucifer fell over pride and his own glory. These beings fell over lust. That is two separate rebellions, with two separate causes. It is the first real clue that the kingdom of darkness is not one flat group. It has a history, and that history has chapters.
How We Know This Was a Different Group
There is a strong reason to believe the Genesis 6 rebels acted on their own, with little or nothing to do with Satan. The Bible tells us what happened to them, and it is not what happened to Satan.
“For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment; (2 Peter 2:4)”
“And the angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day; (Jude 1:6)”
These angels are locked up. Chained in darkness, waiting for judgment. But Satan is not chained. He is still moving, still tempting, still loose in the world. If Satan had led the Genesis 6 rebellion, you would expect him to be locked up with them. He is not. That gap is a strong sign that these were two different events with two different sets of rebels.
Jude adds a detail worth sitting with. He says these angels “left their own abode.” In the original language, that word points to their spiritual bodies, the form they were made to live in. They left it behind and took on physical bodies so they could do what they did. That is not as strange as it sounds. Angels in Scripture put on physical bodies more than once. When the Lord and two angels visit Abraham, the visitors have their feet washed and sit down to eat like ordinary men.
“So he took butter and milk and the calf which he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree as they ate. (Genesis 18:8)”
An angel stepping into a body is something the Bible already shows us. So the Genesis 6 picture, strange as it sounds, is built on ground the rest of Scripture already laid.
Indeed, “Neither one mentions a crowd of other angels falling with him at that moment” because they did not fall with him at that moment.
“The fall of Lucifer is real, but it reads like the opening of a longer story” since Ezek, for example, records the rebellious thought the Cherub had and then Gen 3 records the rebellious action that the Cherub took.
That as per what I term the Gen 6 affair denotes, “the reason is different” is because that was about Angels, not the Cherub.
As for, “‘sons of God’ here are heavenly beings” indeed, the original, traditional, and majority view among the earliest Jewish and Christian commentators, starting in BC days, was the Angel view as I proved in my book On the Genesis 6 Affair’s Sons of God: Angels or Not?: A Survey of Early Jewish and Christian Commentaries Including Notes on Giants and the Nephilim.
Biblically contextually, “they grew into giants” would mean, “they grew into Nephilim” so the key questions become what is the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word, “giants” in English Bibles? What is Duval’s/editor’s usage? Do those two usages agree?
Duval/editor noted, “If Satan had led the Genesis 6 rebellion, you would expect him to be locked up with them” in Tartarus as per 2 Peter 2 which is also reflected by Jude yet, “He is not” but, “That is two separate rebellions, with two separate causes” but there is a caveat which is that he, “a great red dragon, with…His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth.”
We can argue about the English word, “led” but he played a part in it while not being physically involved in the affair himself.
We are told:
Jude adds a detail worth sitting with. He says these angels “left their own abode.” In the original language, that word points to their spiritual bodies, the form they were made to live in. They left it behind and took on physical bodies so they could do what they did. That is not as strange as it sounds. Angels in Scripture put on physical bodies more than once. When the Lord and two angels visit Abraham, the visitors have their feet washed and sit down to eat like ordinary men.
Claiming to read into, “the original language” does not result in something that is not biblical such as mere assertions regarding, “took on physical bodies…put on physical bodies.” Rather, Angels are always described as looking like human males, performing physical actions, and without indication that such is not their ontology—see my book What Does the Bible Say About Angels? A Styled Angelology.
Thus, we are told, “An angel stepping into a body is something the Bible already shows us” but it does not. He/they are reading about Angels are always described as looking like physical human males and insert a concept of, “took on…put on” which is not there: their, “first estate” was (the intermediate) heaven.
As for, “So Where Do Demons Fit In?” we are told:
Here is where most people expect the demon question to get answered, and here is where it gets interesting. If the Genesis 6 angels are chained, and Lucifer fell largely alone, then the demons running loose in the Gospels are not simply “the angels who fell with Satan.” That easy answer does not survive a careful read.
So what are they? The Bible ties the answer to this second rebellion and to the strange hybrid offspring it produced. Fallen angels are one thing: heavenly beings who rebelled. Demons, it turns out, are something else, and their origin runs straight through these Genesis 6 giants. That is the case the next part of this series walks through in full, straight from Scripture.
For now, hold onto the foundation: there was more than one rebellion, the rebels did not all meet the same fate, and fallen angels and demons are not the same kind of being. Two origins. Two kinds of enemy.
This is exactly why Bride Ministries does not treat every dark power the same way in prayer. A demon that has latched onto a person is approached one way. A higher, ranking power that operates over regions, what Scripture calls a principality, is approached another way. Knowing the difference can be the difference between a prayer that lands and a long, exhausting session that goes nowhere. You can read more about that higher class of power in Freedom from Principalities: How to Get Free with the Power of God.
Simply stated, that, “Demons…runs straight through these Genesis 6 giants…” is in a way elucidated in part 2 which notes, “Walk through the Scripture, from Genesis 6 to the nephilim, that shows what a demon actually is and why it matters” followed by, “Are Demons the Ghosts of the Nephilim? Here’s the Proof” which is odd since we have to ask, “Proof” of what? That was a question and we do not yet know the answer so what is being proven?
Duval noted, “Ask most people what a demon is, and they will tell you it is a fallen angel. The picture goes like this: a high angel named Lucifer rebelled against God, a third of the angels followed him, they lost the fight, and now that crowd of rebels roams the earth as demons. One fall, one crowd, one tidy answer.”
It is tidy but, again, Lucifer (aka Satan, Devil, serpent, dragon, etc.) is not an Angel, he is a Cherub (Ezek 28).
Reference is made to that, “The angels who sinned this way are chained in darkness, held for judgment. They are not out walking the earth. So when the Gospels show demons running loose” for now, note the jump from, “angels” to, “demons.”
We are told, “After the Flood, the Giants Came Back” due to that, “The giants did not disappear in the flood. After the waters went down, they show up again, especially in the land of Canaan. Scripture names several giant peoples there. One of them is called the Rephaim.”
That is such a confused claim that it is simply not cogent.
1) This is why authors/editors need to define their usage(s) of the word, “giants.”
2) Since a version of Gen 6 was quoted which has Nephilim as, “giants” then the assertion if, “After the Flood, the Nephilim Came Back” even if he/they did not bother telling us just how they got past the flood, past God.
3) We are then, too generically, told that Nephilim, “show up again, especially in the land of Canaan” which can only refer to one single unreliable sentence from one single unreliable evil report spoken by 10 unreliable guys whom God rebuked (Num 13:33).
4) Now we discern that Duval/editor have become inconsistent in their usage since, “Scripture names several giant peoples there. One of them is called the Rephaim” is supposed to mean, “Scripture names several Nephilim peoples” but, by definition, the only Nephilim peoples were Nephilim and that, “One of them is called the Rephaim” is a category error that violates the law of identity: Nephilim were strictly pre-flood hybrids, Rephaim were strictly post-flood humans, and there is zero correlation between them.
Thus, when we are told, “‘In the fourteenth year Chedorlaomer and the kings that were with him came and attacked the Rephaim in Ashteroth Karnaim, the Zuzim in Ham, the Emim in Shaveh Kiriathaim, (Genesis 14:5)’ Hold onto that name, Rephaim, because it is the thread that ties everything together” that is a non-starter based on faulty premises.
The argument runs thusly:
A Word That Means Ghost
There is a closely related Hebrew word, rapha. According to a standard Bible word reference (Strong’s Concordance), it carries the sense of a ghost or a shade, the spirit of someone who has died. The word for that tribe of giants and the word for a ghost of the dead sit right next to each other at the root. Daniel Duval builds his answer on that link. It is worth saying plainly that this is a careful, defensible reading, not a fact every scholar signs off on. But follow where it leads.
That word unlocks a strange verse in Isaiah. The prophet is talking about the resurrection, the day the dead come back to life. And he says something that makes no sense if he is only talking about people.
“They are dead, they will not live; They are deceased, they will not rise. Therefore You have punished and destroyed them, And made all their memory to perish. (Isaiah 26:14)”
The word translated “deceased” there is that same word, rapha, the ghost word. Isaiah is describing a group of the dead who will not rise, whose memory is wiped out. But that cannot be talking about human beings. The Bible is clear that every single person will be raised at some point, some to life and some to judgment.
“The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one according to his works. (Revelation 20:13)”
Every human gets a resurrection. So who are these dead ones who get none? Read the very next breath of Isaiah’s thought, where he turns back to the human dead, who do rise.
“Your dead shall live; Together with my dead body they shall arise. Awake and sing, you who dwell in dust; For your dew is like the dew of herbs, And the earth shall cast out the dead. (Isaiah 26:19)”
Put the two verses side by side and a contrast appears. Human spirits will rise. Another group, tied by that ghost word to the dead giants, will not. The conclusion the teaching draws is this: demons are not angels. They are the disembodied spirits of the dead nephilim, the giants, wandering the earth with no body and no home.
It is too myopic to conclude that the root rapha, “Means Ghost” based on one source since it is a very complex term that ranges in meaning from dead (whence ghost) to healing (such as when God is called a rapha: (Exo 15:26)—see my chapter on Rephaim in my book What Does the Bible Say About Giants and Nephilim? A Styled Giantology and Nephilology and my linguistics book Bible Encyclopedias and Dictionaries on Angels, Demons, Nephilim, and Giants: From 1851 to 2010).
Biblically contextually, “The word for that tribe of giants” would mean, “The word for that tribe of Repha.” And the linguistics point is that myopically asserting it is exclusively, “the word for a ghost of the dead” is misguided.
We are told of an example which is:
“They are dead, they will not live; They are deceased, they will not rise. Therefore You have punished and destroyed them, And made all their memory to perish. (Isaiah 26:14)”
The word translated “deceased” there is that same word, rapha, the ghost word. Isaiah is describing a group of the dead who will not rise, whose memory is wiped out. But that cannot be talking about human beings. The Bible is clear that every single person will be raised at some point, some to life and some to judgment.
There is no indication in, “They are dead, they will not live; They are deceased, they will not rise” that this denotes ghosts—who would be risen by definition even if in a non-physical manner.
Also, Isaiah was not writing about the resurrection but about not rising as a political/military power (vss. 13-15):
O LORD our God, other lords besides you have ruled over us, but your name alone we bring to remembrance.
They are dead, they will not live; they are shades, they will not arise; to that end you have visited them with destruction and wiped out all remembrance of them.
But you have increased the nation, O LORD, you have increased the nation; you are glorified; you have enlarged all the borders of the land.
What Duval/editor conclude is:
Human spirits will rise. Another group, tied by that ghost word to the dead giants, will not. The conclusion the teaching draws is this: demons are not angels. They are the disembodied spirits of the dead nephilim, the giants, wandering the earth with no body and no home.
This conclusion is based on myopically handpicking one usage/definition/meaning of a word over others, misrepresenting Isaiah, applying that to whatever giants means in this case, and arguing in the direction of Rephaim only to move the goalpost and abruptly applying this to dead Nephilim.
Biblically contextually, “dead nephilim, the giants” would mean, “dead nephilim, the nephilim.” That is followed with, “When a giant died, its body died, but the spirit inside it did not move on. It stayed here, earthbound and restless and hungry, looking for a body to occupy” which is a mere assertion.
Beyond those missteps, that demons are the spirits of dead Nephilim is just folklore from centuries, if not millennia, after the Torah. For a biblical view, please see my article Demons Ex Machina: What are Demons?
And this is recognized and admitted:
This is not a brand new idea. There is a very old Jewish book called 1 Enoch. It is not part of the Bible, and Bride Ministries does not treat it as Scripture. But it is worth knowing about for one reason: the Bible itself quotes from it. In the short letter of Jude, the writer cites a prophecy that came from Enoch.
This is also myopic since Jubilees makes the same very, very, very late-dated assertion. 1 Enoch and Jubilees are Bible contradicting folklore from centuries, if not millennia, after the Torah, see my books In Consideration of the Book(s) of Enoch and The Apocryphal Nephilim and Giants: Encountering Nephilim and Giants in Extra-Biblical Texts.
Indeed, they are worth knowing for the historical context of what Rabbinic Jews thought during the Second Temple Era (516 BC-70 AD). Indeed, “the Bible itself quotes from it” just like it quotes Greek poets: what of it? As for Jude quoting a prophecy (one sentence) that came from Enoch: what Jude quotes is, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
That seems to have been paraphrasing Deut 33:2, “The LORD came from Sinai and dawned from Seir upon us; he shone forth from Mount Paran; he came from the ten thousands of holy ones, with flaming fire at his right hand.”
In the article, 1 Enoch is referred to as, “an ancient source” but that is subjective since, sure, it is ancient to us today but it is still from centuries/millennia after the Torah which is much more ancient still.
Appeal is made to, “A respected modern Bible scholar, the late Michael Heiser, landed on the same reading.” Dr. Heiser was credentialed and experienced but his Nephilology was not altogether biblical, and he tended to create more problems than he solved—search online for these articles for examples:
Review of Amy Richter and Michael Heiser on four Enochian Watcher related women in Jesus’ genealogy.
Rebuttal to Dr. Michael Heiser’s “All I Want for Christmas is Another Flawed Nephilim Rebuttal”.
I also included him in my book, The Scholarly Academic Nephilim and Giants: What do Scholarly Academics Say About Nephilim Giants?
Recall that I noted We could say that, “A demon and a fallen angel are not the same kind of being” on the surface level but not on a technical level—stand by. Well, you can stop standing since the article concludes, “A fallen angel and a demon” but they are the disembodied spirits of physically incarcerated Angels: this is the Bible-based view.
Yet, Duval/editor insist that the Second Temple Era view based on Bible contradicting folklore actually effects spiritual warfare, “Treating one like the other is a common reason people pray hard and still stay stuck, swinging at the wrong thing…Knowing what you are facing is the first step to facing it well…”
Thus, just as was the problem with the conclusion about demons, the articles as a whole have the same problem.
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