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Fallen Angels, the Watchers, and the Origins of Evil
Evil walked the earth when angels fell. Evil stalks us now in disembodied spirits; immortal wraiths once clothed in flesh when angel and women bred; spirits released from their fleshly prisons when their bodies were destroyed for drinking the blood of men. Evil also lives inside of the common man; set free when pride kills reason and eats integrity whole. There is evil that entraps us and evil that tugs from within. But neither have control until we choose to relent. Evil is a choice of action, of thoughts entertained too long, of arrogance pushing aside the last vestiges of compassion. Evil resides within the problem of choice. What is evil? Could it be as simple as pernicious selfishness? Could it be the drive for immediate gratification without regard for others? Man's life is limited; one hundred years or less. But, the souls of angel and watcher are eternal. Consider how much evil can be wrought through the millennia of immediate gratification on an eternal scale. By contrasting and comparing ancient texts such as Enoch, Jasher, Jubilees, the Bible, and various others containing stories of the creation of angels, demons, and man, a full and panoramic history of evil is produced. In this history the startling revelation of the descent of man and angels, and the evolution of evil on earth is clearly revealed.
128 pages, Paperback
First published February 28, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 30, 2014
Good read...more entertainment than fact or even speculation, but good fun for all that. Lots of information about the apocryphal books of Enoch and Jubilee and then these and the bible proper are woven together in an interesting narrative.
Not for those interested in serious biblical studies but if you like fringe religion and fantastic speculation this is the book for you.
4 out of 5 stars.
Not for those interested in serious biblical studies but if you like fringe religion and fantastic speculation this is the book for you.
4 out of 5 stars.
June 20, 2015
A good introductory read with a nice, easy to follow narrative. Nice blending of established biblical sources with myths and fringe sources. Not especially academic in scope, but a decent beginning.
April 14, 2024
I was really disappointed by this book: I love a good schizopost book, like you wouldn't believe, and from the cover and the back I expected this to be a solid, quality Christian schizopost book which, instead of writing Ancient Aliens-themed fanfic about Enki or the Fallen Angels and the Nephilim or whatever (this is its whole genre), would mostly take from that great discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls, to make its delusional argument about how Fallen Angels Real and how they are behind evil. It even starts pretty strong in that respect, with a nice "crazy preacher" type introduction:
It goes on like this, until it tells you the gist of the book: this is a "history of evil", or rather, how evil came about, done by quoting Genesis, The Book of Enoch, The Book of Jubilees, The Book of Jasher, the DSS War Scrolls, and books from the NT concerning the matter of angels, their fall, Satan and Belial, and amusingly, the Lilith tale as found in the Alphabet of Ben-Sirah. Okay, sure, typical delusional Christian stuff.
But the sections where Lumpkin briefly explains each of these books are off.
Per example, Lumpkin is aware of the many traces of polytheism in Genesis, which the Yahwehist sources tried to editorialize out, as well as the question of the sources of Genesis. He is also aware that YHWH was no more than the Canaanite Sky-Father, El, called Elohim in the Bible.
Now, this isn't impressive per se, but it begs the question: how exactly Lumpkin can bold-face affirm that he is telling you the real divine history of evil here, when the matter is that he is somewhat source-critical when Real Reality is in question and he has to explain where these books came from? He calls these "some of the most ancient texts", but if he knows El was a Canaanite god then he must know that no Bible book or its apocrypha and pseudepigrapha are anywhere near as old as the actual Ugaritic texts we have, right? Let alone something like the Sumerian ones. When he brings up the Lilith story, he almost dismisses it, not incorrectly stating that it's for the most part just a medieval folk tale, and thus implicitly not on the same level as the ancient Bible books and the most noted apocrypha and scrolls from Qumran.
This was foreshadowing because "these types" of writers, as a general rule, literally cannot help themselves but to write the most stupid shit about Lilith possible, yet Lumkin just dismisses it, not even for religious reasons but a crude sort of source-criticism. These small intros are not written by a crazy person, which puts the whole project of reading it for the entertainment value of wild Biblical-based narratives in question, is my point.
But none of that matters because it turns out, the actual meat and potatoes of this book boils down to nothing but a goddamn text collage, made up of all of the relevant passages from the mentioned texts (the Lilith tale, amusingly, is in italics), awkwardly stitched together in very unnatural ways as events repeat, repeat with variations, switch narrator rapidly, etc, as it is presented as a single coherent text without telling us when it has shifted to a different source. That's all that the book is.
I'm not fond of this at all, it does have the stink of "scam" around it, and the fact that Lumpkin clearly isn't crazy yet acts, at the beginning and at the sub-one page long afterword, as if he 100% believes this to be basically how things went down, makes me suspect grift. However, it does avoid the single star or Worthless (Belial, teehee) designation for the simple fact that, well, quite honestly, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha are extremely interesting to read.
They show Judaism at a degree of mythological-religious thinking where, perhaps out of shame in the face of the great Hellenistic mythological constructions, which portrayed an internally and logically coherent "mythological history" of the far off past explaining how things came about and why the world is how it is now, the Jewish writers put themselves to the task of doing the same with their oral traditions - and I would say that they succeeded, for the Grand Plan of YHWH/God is in fact no different than the notion of everything being caused by Zeus Euboleus, "of the good counsel", including the Theban and Trojan wars which were explicitly also to exterminate demigods, the exact same motif as YHWH's extermination of the Nephilim in Genesis and related Apocrypha and one that does not quite show up in other Semitic mythos.
Satan - Azazel, Mastema, Belial or who have you - was thus seen, quite simply, as but a demon under the vassalage of YHWH, who is in fact all-powerful, and he does not imprison Satan to not allow him to commit any evil (which he can) because Satan and his demons are his servant no less than the angels are - in the War Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls we read, per example: "You [YHWH] created [as in, destined] Belial for the pit, angel of enmity; his [dom]ain is darkness, his counsel is for evil and wickedness. All the spirits of his lot angels of destruction walk in the laws of darkness; towards them goes his only desire." Belial and co does not have anything over humanity other than counsel, and if one takes it, if he is tempted, then one merely reveals oneself as evil, hence the meanings of both Mastema and Satan, Hebrew words for "adversary" and in the latter case, "Accuser". All that Satan does is to reveal them so that God may punish them, and in that sense, Satan is but a disgraced and debased ally and faithful servant of God.
"God's plan" is a grand world-historical plan for humanity then, just as Zeus' is explicitly in Archaic Greek epic - everything that happens, YHWH sets it up. He sets the Watchers to watch/educate humanity, knowing that they would fall, and knowing that he and humanity would get a scapegoat (rather literally, as Azazel is named after a demon in the Torah to which expiatory goats are sent to lol) for the existence of sin, and likewise as his agent on earth for the moral judgement of humanity.
It is the grand mythic narrative of the creation of free will, and how through it, it was seen that God was both all-powerful and good while still allowing Satan to do what he does: quite simply, it is the seducer who reveals himself as bad, rather than Satan, who's evil because God quite literally meant for that to be his destiny - there can only be "good" if there is a judgement on what "bad" is, and if both exist and we admit the existence of an omnipotent benevolent creator god, then the narrative must explain why "bad" exists also.
It is ultimately a complex mythological story of how human free will came to be, and how it's that which makes evil possible, with Satan and his demonic fallen angels merely revealing to God who will commit evil if seduced and who won't - this no doubt, must be the meaning behind the temptation of Christ.
No doubt this logic is present too in the brutal and humiliating death of Jesus in our Bible proper: people ask why God didn't help Jesus, since if he is all-powerful then he should be able to do the redemptive plan to humanity without the sufferings of Jesus, and the answer quite simply is no, the suffering was needed and was in fact the whole point because only by witnessing the terrible painful death of the son of God, and then seeing him return, could humanity redeem itself, rather than "be redeemed", passively.
As usual the logic is also present in classical myth, and here it is the same as Dionysus: Jesus had to suffer and die because, much like the child Dionysus has to suffer and die, if they didn't die and suffer... how could they prove their immortality?
Of course, I understand this because I am "into this kinda thing" as it is, and that's why I even read this as a joke in-fact, the average reader is unlikely to understand this from the texts here presented as one: a truly good book with this concept would meticulously explain their understanding of the Judeo-Christian mythological narrative of how free will and evil came to be, quoting copiously - indeed quoting everything in this book! - but doing so inbetween the author's own analysis and commentary.
So I did not have a totally joyless time reading it, but it is still bad and grift-adjacent and also it is edited and proofread like absolute shit, so certainly not recommended. The author has a book on the Giants, the Nephilim, and frankly I am curious (in the meme way yes) because the Book of Giants, as anyone who has actually read it can tell you, is basically fucking parchment manuscript scraps, and no way you can stretch that out to 200+ pages; but at the same time I'd bet money most of it is actually about Enoch.
The origins of evil are planted deeply within each of us. Evil is innocent as a child and monstrously vicious. It feeds upon the same flesh and breathes the same air as saint and martyr. Free will and personal choice direct our steps to heaven or hell and mark us as good or evil. Whether we are angel, watcher, nephilim, or man, evil is a choice many give themselves over to, fully and completely.
What is evil? Could it be as simple as pernicious selfishness? Could it be the drive for immediate gratification without regard for others? Man’s life is limited; one hundred years or less. But, the souls of angel and watcher are eternal. Consider how much evil can be wrought through the millennia of immediate gratification on an eternal scale.
It continues to be pride that keeps us from seeing the truth of our own nature. Pride itself blinds us to our own pride. Pride, arrogance, and selfishness are the seeds and flowers arising from the same root of evil. Evil is the manifestation of the same, all too common, human condition; a condition afflicting angels and watchers alike.
“The fear of the Lord is to hate evil: pride, and arrogance, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.” Proverbs 8:13
The root and cause of all evil arise from a self-centered viewpoint that takes no one else into consideration. It is the drive to control, dominate, and consume. The condition comes from tunnel vision so narrow as to include only the person and his desires. This calls into question the nature of evil.
Does evil have a reasoned intent to hurt, kill, and destroy or is there an egomaniacal innocence to evil? Could it be that complete evil is actually a blind selfishness? Does evil not arise from a refusal to consider the life, position, or feelings of others? Evil thoughts, actions, and feelings are based on fulfilling one’s own desires at the expense or destruction of all others. Feelings and welfare of others do not come into play, nor do they cross the mind of an evil being. The nature of evil is a twisted, childish, innocence; a self-centered and myopic view.
How strange and paradoxical; how appropriate Satan should take what was so much a part of his own nature and assist man in finding it so abundantly in himself.
It goes on like this, until it tells you the gist of the book: this is a "history of evil", or rather, how evil came about, done by quoting Genesis, The Book of Enoch, The Book of Jubilees, The Book of Jasher, the DSS War Scrolls, and books from the NT concerning the matter of angels, their fall, Satan and Belial, and amusingly, the Lilith tale as found in the Alphabet of Ben-Sirah. Okay, sure, typical delusional Christian stuff.
But the sections where Lumpkin briefly explains each of these books are off.
Per example, Lumpkin is aware of the many traces of polytheism in Genesis, which the Yahwehist sources tried to editorialize out, as well as the question of the sources of Genesis. He is also aware that YHWH was no more than the Canaanite Sky-Father, El, called Elohim in the Bible.
Now, this isn't impressive per se, but it begs the question: how exactly Lumpkin can bold-face affirm that he is telling you the real divine history of evil here, when the matter is that he is somewhat source-critical when Real Reality is in question and he has to explain where these books came from? He calls these "some of the most ancient texts", but if he knows El was a Canaanite god then he must know that no Bible book or its apocrypha and pseudepigrapha are anywhere near as old as the actual Ugaritic texts we have, right? Let alone something like the Sumerian ones. When he brings up the Lilith story, he almost dismisses it, not incorrectly stating that it's for the most part just a medieval folk tale, and thus implicitly not on the same level as the ancient Bible books and the most noted apocrypha and scrolls from Qumran.
This was foreshadowing because "these types" of writers, as a general rule, literally cannot help themselves but to write the most stupid shit about Lilith possible, yet Lumkin just dismisses it, not even for religious reasons but a crude sort of source-criticism. These small intros are not written by a crazy person, which puts the whole project of reading it for the entertainment value of wild Biblical-based narratives in question, is my point.
But none of that matters because it turns out, the actual meat and potatoes of this book boils down to nothing but a goddamn text collage, made up of all of the relevant passages from the mentioned texts (the Lilith tale, amusingly, is in italics), awkwardly stitched together in very unnatural ways as events repeat, repeat with variations, switch narrator rapidly, etc, as it is presented as a single coherent text without telling us when it has shifted to a different source. That's all that the book is.
I'm not fond of this at all, it does have the stink of "scam" around it, and the fact that Lumpkin clearly isn't crazy yet acts, at the beginning and at the sub-one page long afterword, as if he 100% believes this to be basically how things went down, makes me suspect grift. However, it does avoid the single star or Worthless (Belial, teehee) designation for the simple fact that, well, quite honestly, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha are extremely interesting to read.
They show Judaism at a degree of mythological-religious thinking where, perhaps out of shame in the face of the great Hellenistic mythological constructions, which portrayed an internally and logically coherent "mythological history" of the far off past explaining how things came about and why the world is how it is now, the Jewish writers put themselves to the task of doing the same with their oral traditions - and I would say that they succeeded, for the Grand Plan of YHWH/God is in fact no different than the notion of everything being caused by Zeus Euboleus, "of the good counsel", including the Theban and Trojan wars which were explicitly also to exterminate demigods, the exact same motif as YHWH's extermination of the Nephilim in Genesis and related Apocrypha and one that does not quite show up in other Semitic mythos.
Satan - Azazel, Mastema, Belial or who have you - was thus seen, quite simply, as but a demon under the vassalage of YHWH, who is in fact all-powerful, and he does not imprison Satan to not allow him to commit any evil (which he can) because Satan and his demons are his servant no less than the angels are - in the War Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls we read, per example: "You [YHWH] created [as in, destined] Belial for the pit, angel of enmity; his [dom]ain is darkness, his counsel is for evil and wickedness. All the spirits of his lot angels of destruction walk in the laws of darkness; towards them goes his only desire." Belial and co does not have anything over humanity other than counsel, and if one takes it, if he is tempted, then one merely reveals oneself as evil, hence the meanings of both Mastema and Satan, Hebrew words for "adversary" and in the latter case, "Accuser". All that Satan does is to reveal them so that God may punish them, and in that sense, Satan is but a disgraced and debased ally and faithful servant of God.
"God's plan" is a grand world-historical plan for humanity then, just as Zeus' is explicitly in Archaic Greek epic - everything that happens, YHWH sets it up. He sets the Watchers to watch/educate humanity, knowing that they would fall, and knowing that he and humanity would get a scapegoat (rather literally, as Azazel is named after a demon in the Torah to which expiatory goats are sent to lol) for the existence of sin, and likewise as his agent on earth for the moral judgement of humanity.
It is the grand mythic narrative of the creation of free will, and how through it, it was seen that God was both all-powerful and good while still allowing Satan to do what he does: quite simply, it is the seducer who reveals himself as bad, rather than Satan, who's evil because God quite literally meant for that to be his destiny - there can only be "good" if there is a judgement on what "bad" is, and if both exist and we admit the existence of an omnipotent benevolent creator god, then the narrative must explain why "bad" exists also.
It is ultimately a complex mythological story of how human free will came to be, and how it's that which makes evil possible, with Satan and his demonic fallen angels merely revealing to God who will commit evil if seduced and who won't - this no doubt, must be the meaning behind the temptation of Christ.
No doubt this logic is present too in the brutal and humiliating death of Jesus in our Bible proper: people ask why God didn't help Jesus, since if he is all-powerful then he should be able to do the redemptive plan to humanity without the sufferings of Jesus, and the answer quite simply is no, the suffering was needed and was in fact the whole point because only by witnessing the terrible painful death of the son of God, and then seeing him return, could humanity redeem itself, rather than "be redeemed", passively.
As usual the logic is also present in classical myth, and here it is the same as Dionysus: Jesus had to suffer and die because, much like the child Dionysus has to suffer and die, if they didn't die and suffer... how could they prove their immortality?
Of course, I understand this because I am "into this kinda thing" as it is, and that's why I even read this as a joke in-fact, the average reader is unlikely to understand this from the texts here presented as one: a truly good book with this concept would meticulously explain their understanding of the Judeo-Christian mythological narrative of how free will and evil came to be, quoting copiously - indeed quoting everything in this book! - but doing so inbetween the author's own analysis and commentary.
So I did not have a totally joyless time reading it, but it is still bad and grift-adjacent and also it is edited and proofread like absolute shit, so certainly not recommended. The author has a book on the Giants, the Nephilim, and frankly I am curious (in the meme way yes) because the Book of Giants, as anyone who has actually read it can tell you, is basically fucking parchment manuscript scraps, and no way you can stretch that out to 200+ pages; but at the same time I'd bet money most of it is actually about Enoch.
December 7, 2014
A summarized version of some of the lost books of the Bible, but all in all an enjoyable read. If you're looking for a little entertainment this short book is fine. With just over a hundred pages, it's quick but worth it.
December 22, 2013
Gives the background of all the of God through extra biblical books and some should be in the bible.
April 1, 2023
Fallen Angel's Watchers, and the Origins of Evil by Joseph B. Lumpkin
I like the definition, name, and meaning of Adam's first wife, Lilith. I didn' like when she rebelled against God and Adam' authority becoming demonic, ugly, and hedious. I hated what the angels of the sons of God did to the daughters of men. And the list goes on and on.
I like the definition, name, and meaning of Adam's first wife, Lilith. I didn' like when she rebelled against God and Adam' authority becoming demonic, ugly, and hedious. I hated what the angels of the sons of God did to the daughters of men. And the list goes on and on.
March 3, 2026
As a person who has read all the texts he used this book give no new insight or information. It is good if you have not read anything about these subjects and even then I would add this book either others and not take it as is.
November 22, 2019
The Book of the Watchers and the Origins of Evil
February 1, 2020
More of a briefing on fallen angels. Nothing new. It's info lite.
June 20, 2022
Great book
Really makes you wonder why some aspects were removed from the official texts...
The book is really easy to read and makes you ask for more on the subject
Really makes you wonder why some aspects were removed from the official texts...
The book is really easy to read and makes you ask for more on the subject
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews