Aris Manus (“Independent researcher & investigative writer. Obsessed with how power conceals itself. No fixed address, no alma mater – only loyalty to the record. Reads everything, forgets nothing. The most dangerous truths hide in plain sight. He finds them all”) wrote two guest posts for the Ancient Origins Unleashed site but I can only partially review them since I’m not about to subscribe to a site that promulgates faulty info so I can only see portions of the articles—plus, they don’t provide contact info so I can’t even reach out to them to offer a direct critique.
One is titled The Watchers, the Nephilim, and the True Reason for the Great Flood: The Forbidden History of Fallen Angels.
Note the premise in that they were not only, “the…Reason” but were, “the True Reason.”
The employment of the term Watchers alerts us to reliance on 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 since that term is a mere aka for Malakim/Angels from the Second Temple Era (516 BC-70 AD).
Manus asserts, “There is a passage” referring to that which I term the Gen 6 affair, “so profoundly unsettling, that for centuries theologians have quietly glossed over it” even though there’s literally millennia’s worth of focus on it and literally every expositional teacher, preacher, commentator deals with it—for example, see my book Nephilim and Giants in Bible Commentaries: From the 1500s to the 2000s.
He abruptly tells us that the affair resulted in, “a forbidden transfer of celestial technology” which is from the 1 Enoch tall-tale and, “and the birth of a monstrous, bloodthirsty race of giants.” I say abruptly since Manus jumped from the specific ancient Hebrew word “Nephilim” to the modern generically subjective English word “giants” so they key questions are what’s the usage of the vague, generic, subjective, multi-usage and modern English word “giants” in English Bibles? What’s Manus’ usage? Do those two usages agree?
Having jumped from Nephilim to giants he then jumps back to Nephilim due to quoting the affair thusly:
“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 any they chose… The 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. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.” (Genesis 6:1-4)
He then asks, “who were the Nephilim, the towering ‘men of renown’” about whom he inserted the vague term towering, “whose existence demanded a global apocalypse to wipe them out?”
Well, “To uncover the truth, we must look beyond the sanitized modern Bible” which I can tell means that the Bible isn’t neo-theo-sci-fi-tall-tales enough for him so, “We need to delve into the ancient apocryphal texts that the early Church Fathers read, debated, and ultimately excluded from the canon. This includes the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Book of Enoch, and the disturbing account of the fallen angels known as the Watchers, a forbidden history that bears an alarming relevance to the world situation today.”
Thus, rely on anything written by anyone for any reason in any genre at any level of reliability from centuries and millennia after the Torah.
Yet, note the emphasis, “the True Reason for the Great Flood” and, “whose existence demanded a global apocalypse to wipe them out.”
That’s the end of the preview so we’ll move onto the follow-up article preview for If the Flood Destroyed the Nephilim, Why Did Giants Return? Note that asking, “Why Did Giants Return?” (now jumping languages in a single sentence) is the wrong primary question ask, the primary question is, “Did [Nephilim] Return?”
I wrote, “Did [Nephilim] Return?” since pop-Nephilology (which is currently ruled by people who make a living by selling un-biblical tall-tales to Christians) love chasing the vague, generic, subjective, and multi-usage word giants around an ancient and specific Hebrew Bible.
Again, “the True Reason for the Great Flood” and, “whose existence demanded a global apocalypse to wipe them out” and now, “the Flood was meant to wipe out that corruption.”
To show just how unqualified Aris Manus is to have his work featured on this issue anywhere on the WORLD WIDE web, mind you, he wrote, “one question becomes impossible to ignore: why do giants appear again after the Flood? Why do the Anakim, Og of Bashan, and later Goliath still stand in the biblical story like shadows of a world that was supposed to have been buried beneath the waters?”
1. We need to know his usage of giants or else we can’t answer that question.
2. We get a hint at his usage since he swaps it with Nephilim so his usage seems to be a mere aka for Nephilim—why not just be a consistent communicator that than swapping languages even within one sentence?
3. Yet, his reference to, “Anakim, Og of Bashan, and later Goliath” is to Rephaim, not to Nephilim—Anakim were like a clan of the Rephaim tribe.
Thus, he not only swaps languages but committed a category error that violates the law of identity. That seems to hint at why he swaps languages: he can refer to Nephilim and Rephaim as giants but couldn’t correlate them if he was dealing with the original language.
He added, “if the Nephilim were part of the reason the old world was destroyed, then their story should have ended in Genesis 6” which is where it ended—with two exceptions:
1. centuries post-flood we have a sentence recorded in Num 13:33 about which one must always be aware that it’s:
1. One single unreliable sentence
2. From strictly non-LXX versions (since that version’s version of that verse doesn’t even mention Anakim)
3. Of an unreliable “evil report”
4. By 10 unreliable guys
5. Whom God rebuked—to death
6. Who made five mere assertions unbacked by even one single other verse in the whole Bible
7. Who contradicted Moses, Cable, Joshua, God, and the rest of the whole entire Bible
8. Then post-flood Nephilologists have to invent un-biblical fantasy tall-tales about how Nephilim got past the flood, past God.
I could go on but see my post Chapter sample: On the Post Flood Nephilim Proposal.
2. centuries and millennia post-flood, post-Torah, all sort of folkloric tall-tales were told about Nephilim, see my article How Nephilim Absconded from the Tanakh and Invaded Folkloric Territory.
Referring to, “the biblical record” Aris Manus asserts, “The Judgement and the Flood came, and yet, giant traditions returned” which, again, he’s basing on a bottomless pit of mere unreliable assertions and unreliable assumptions.
He speculates, “Either something of the old corruption survived” which contradicts the Bible five times (Genesis 7:7, 23; Hebrews 11:7; 1 Peter 3:20; and 2 Peter 2:5) and implies that God failed, missed a loophole, the flood was much of a waste, etc., etc., etc. or, “the same kind of rebellion happened again” which implies that God failed, missed a loophole, the flood was much of a waste, etc., etc., etc. or, “later giant traditions preserve the memory of that earlier horror in ways most readers have never fully considered” which is quite possible.
Pre-Tower of Babel, humanity lived in relative proximity but thereafter we spread abroad taking with us what was then commonly known and shared history which, with time and telling (and aggrandized augmentation) became myth and legend.
Thus, based on what I could see, Aris Manus made a lot of missteps and relies on the unreliable since he’s not a fan of the un-exciting, “sanitized modern Bible.”
Fallacious Nephilology damages theology proper.
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