The article in question, Wes Huff on Enoch, Nephilim, and Demons is an Anthony reacts to Wes Huff’s comments article to I figure that I’ll follow up with Ken reacts to Anthony’s reaction to Wes Huff’s comments ;o)
His bio is:
Anthony Delgado is a pastor, author, and Bible teacher based in Southern California, with nearly two decades of experience in Christian leadership and biblical education. He studied Christian Reason at Sterling College and earned his MABTS from Knox Theological Seminary. Anthony approaches Scripture as one cohesive story of God’s redemption, weaving themes from Genesis to Revelation into a unified narrative of hope and renewal.
See my previous post Pastor Anthony Delgado on Giant Nephilim Clowns.
Wes Huff
…holds a BA in sociology from York University, a Masters of Theological Studies from Tyndale University, and is currently doing a PhD in New Testament at the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College…is currently the Vice President for Apologetics Canada.
This pertains to, “Wes Huff’s comments from The Shawn Ryan Show”: since I’m reviewing a review I’m only really interested in adding some elucidating points.
One issue was, “ethics of technology and Watcher ‘secret knowledge’ (connecting modern tech questions to 1 Enoch 8 and Azazel’s teaching of warfare and seduction)” about which Delgado begins by noting:
…there’s more to first Enoch than I think Wes lets on…I think the evidence leads us to a greater confidence in some of this narrative…this Second Temple text.
Let’s start there since bottom line is that 1 Enoch is Bible contradicting folklore from centuries, if not millennia, after the Torah, see my book In Consideration of the Book(s) of Enoch.
There’s no indication that it contains any hitherto unknown facts nor newly revealed ones.
Yet, it’s being employed as a springboard wherefrom to discuss ethics of technology since it contains an elaborately detailed breakdown of which fallen Angel taught which bit of secret knowledge to humanity—apparently, demonically occult stuff such as, “taught women to beautify their eyes with colored makeup” and, “make swords, knives, shields, and breastplates to make war…about the metals of the earth and the art of metallurgy to make silver bracelets and ornaments…wear all kinds of costly stones.”
One of the funniest moments in all pseudepigrapha—perhaps the only funny one—is when 1 Enoch’s version of God tells the fallen Angels, “You have been in heaven, but all the mysteries had not yet been revealed to you, and you knew worthless ones” (4Q530 Frag. 2).
Delgado wrote, “In Genesis 6 you have the giants enter in, and they’re these mighty men, these mighty warriors, the gibborim.” Biblically contextually that would read as, “In Genesis 6 you have the Nephilim enter in, and they’re these mighty men, these mighty warriors, which is to what the Hebrew used of them, gibborim, refers.”
Key questions are: what’s the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants” in English Bibles? What’s his usage? Do those two usages agree?
These questions are key since, for example, he wrote of, “the Nephilim and the Giants” which is also a case of jumping from the specific ancient Hebrew word Nephilim to the modern generically subjective English word giants.
Now, Wes Huff referenced that which I term the Gen 6 affair and noted, “The Greek translation of the Old Testament translates Nephilim as gigas, which is giants” yet, that only begs the questions: what’s his usage?
The related word gigas, gigantes, gigantos all refer to the Greek mythological Earth false goddess Gaia so that, for example, gigantes means earth-born/born of Gaia. And I’m granting that there’s a linguistic difference between meanings/definitions and usages—for more, see my book Bible Encyclopedias and Dictionaries on Angels, Demons, Nephilim, and Giants: From 1851 to 2010.
Huff notes, “there’s both a kind of naturalistic explanation that the sons of God weren’t necessarily angels” yet, the original, traditional, and majority view among the earliest Jewish and Christians 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.
Job 38:7, as one example, shows us that, “sons of God” can refer to non-human beings (which the LXX has as Angeloi: plural of Angelos) since they, at the very least, witnessed the creation of the Earth.
Jude and 2 Peter 2 combined refer to a sin of Angels, place that sin to pre-flood days and correlate it to sexual sin which occurred after the Angels, “left their first estate,” after which they were incarcerated, and there’s only a one-time fall/sin of Angels in the Bible.
So, if they’re not referring to the Gen 6 affair, we’ve no idea to what sin they’re referring.
Anthony Delgado notes, “what’s very common in the West, it’s sometimes called the Sethite view” which is a late-comer of a view based on myth and prejudice.
He notes, “Now what I do like that Wes says is he says that Nephilim comes from the Hebrew naphil which means fallen ones. Now, some of you guys, if you’re Michael Heiser fans or something like that, which I am by the way as well, he was pretty adamant that there is not a relationship between naphil and Nephilim because he doesn’t want to make that about fallen humans.”
That Hebrew root is typically transliterated as naphal but what Heiser argued is that the root is actually the Aramaic naphiyla which, or so he claimed, means giant which, of course, begs the question: what’s his usage?
Well, he at least left us with this, “I don’t think the biblical giants were taller than unusually tall people of modern times (between 7-9 feet).”
Now, the J. Edward Wright Endowed Professor of Judaic Studies, who is J. Edward Wright, Ph.D. himself, and who is the Director of the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona notes, “The term traditionally translated as ‘giants’ in both the Greek Septuagint (γιγαντες) and now in English is נפילים nephilim, a term based on the root נפל npl meaning ‘fall.’ It has nothing to do with size” and specifies that this goes for both Hebrew and Aramaic as “The root npl in Aramaic also means fall and not giants” (private communique, July 2019).
Dr. Heiser was credentialed and experienced but not infallible, his Nephilology wasn’t 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?
Let’s face it, the common parlance usage of giant is something vaguely generic about subjectively unusual height of some unknown level above the parochial average (and yes, that is how useless the common parlance usage of that modern English word is).
Moreover, “The translators of the Greek text took it to mean giants. We see that again as early as like 300 BC that the Greek speaking Jews were translating this giants where it said Nephilim.” That’s too fast for my taste: it’s actually impossible that, “the Greek speaking Jews were translating this giants where it said Nephilim” and it’s also uber-myopic.
The Greek speaking Jews could not have translated giants since English didn’t exist yet, and they were writing in Greek—likewise with when he wrote, “(Genesis 6; LXX “giants”).” Rather, the Greek speaking Jews were rendered (didn’t even translate) this gigantes where it said Nephilim but that’s only a tiny fraction (literally speaking statistically) of the story—stand by for more on this.
The usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word giants in English Bibles is that it merely renders Nephilim in 2 verses or Repha/im in 98% of all others and so never even hints at anything to do with any sort of height whatsoever. That is because those English versions follow what those Greek speaking Jews did with gigantes. Ergo, gigantes where it said Nephilim in only two verses.
Delgado wrote, “I don’t think First Enoch just appeared as some sort of bizarre fan fiction. No, it certainly had to have come out of a tradition of understanding.” That may very well be but, then again, a tradition of understanding still begins somewhere at some time so why not with 1 Enoch? In any case, it has Nephilim as being MILES tall which is great folklore but poor reality. Meanwhile, biblically, the dirty little secret is that since we’ve no reliable physical description of Nephilim then their height is a non-issue and that alone debunks 99% of un-biblical Nephilology—the modern branch of which is just un-biblical neo-theo sci-fi tall-tales.
There’s also the issue of:
Demons as the Spirits of the Nephalim
Wes Huff: This goes into like a long history of leading up to the New Testament where there’s a, you know, the demons kind of show up in the New Testament.
There really isn’t all that much said in the Old Testament about demons, but in some of this ancient Jewish literature that’s incorporated and found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have some of these discussions of things like, what are the demons?
Bottom line is that the claim 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?
Next up is:
…demons as disembodied spirits of the Nephilim/giants (a major Second Temple thread) with biblical touchpoints in the Rephaim passages (Job 26:5–6; Psalm 88:10; Isaiah 14:9)….
And so consider, for example, Job 26:5–6. Here it says the departed spirits tremble beneath the waters and all that inhabit them. Sheol is naked before God and Abaddon has no covering. Now that word departed spirits. There is the Hebrew word rephaim is the common Hebrew word for giant, it’s translated almost universally in the Greek text as gigantes, which is giant in English. And so it doesn’t make sense though, to read this, that the giants tremble beneath the waters because beneath the waters is speaking of like death, a place of death.
And so as they are dead, what are these rephaim here? Well, they’re the dead rephaim as really the history and how these are interpreted. So many people have said these are human ghosts. So again, what do you think giants and Nephilim are?
Well, if they’re just humans, then these are some kind of human ghosts or something like that, which I think isn’t too far off. Like no matter how you take the Sethite or the other view, you’re actually gonna come to a certain understanding of departed spirits as being demonic. But anyway, that’s another conversation. But you just have to see that there. And it’s not only the one place.
Psalm 88:10. Do you work wonders for the dead? Do giants, rephaim, departed spirits rise up to praise you?
This is actually a very complicated simple issue, or so it seems to me since there’s a madness to my method.
This comes down to that the root word rapha ranges in meaning from healing/healer to dead/death. Ergo, people read it—even if in the plural form of raphaim or the Rephaim—referring to the dead and apply it to the 100% human people group, the Rephaim tribe.
Recall that I noted to stand by regarding the 98% usage: earlier, it was, “Genesis 6 you have the giants…the Nephilim and the Giants…(Genesis 6; LXX ‘giants’)…Nephilim/giants,” etc. but now it’s, “rephaim is the common Hebrew word for giant” even though, “it’s translated almost universally in the Greek text as gigantes, which is giant in English” which is just a watered down vicious circular cycle of question begging.
So, it’s not, “giants tremble beneath the waters” but, “the dead tremble beneath the waters.”
As for, “what do you think giants and Nephilim are?” well, we can’t know until we’re told what they mean by giants.
But note that what many do is, again, to take the root rapha, apply it to the Rephaim tribe, actually incorporate Pagan mythology to it, and that results in the Rephaim having been some sort of living dead.
In Ugaritic texts, for example, recently deceased kings and heroes were referred to as kings and heroes yet, after they had been dead for some time, they were called rpʾum (a version of rephaim) and could be summoned to attend rituals, etc.—see my post Dead Kings and Rephaim The Patrons of the Ugaritic Dynasty.
And that’s all for my reaction to Delgado’s reaction to Huff—what’s your reaction to my reaction to his reaction to him?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A plea: I have to pay for server usage and have made all content on this website free and always will. I support my family on one income and do research, writing, videos, etc. as a hobby.
If you can even spare $1.00 as a donation, please do so: it may not seem like much but if each person reading this would do so, even every now and then, it would add up and really, really help out.
Here is my donate/paypal page.
You can comment here and/or on my Twitter/X page, on my Facebook page, or any of my other social network sites all which are available here.
Leave a Reply