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February 3 - April 18, 2023
Genesis 6:1–4, too, has deep Mesopotamian roots that, until very recently, have not been fully recognized or appreciated.2 Jewish literature like 1 Enoch that retold the story shows a keen awareness of that Mesopotamian context. This awareness shows us that Jewish thinkers of the Second Temple period understood, correctly, that the story involved divine beings and giant offspring.3 That understanding is essential to grasping what the biblical writers were trying to communicate.
Some fragments of 1 Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls give names for some of the giants. Other texts that retell the story and are thus related to 1 Enoch do the same. The most startling of these is known today by scholars as The Book of Giants. It exists only in fragments, but names of several giants, offspring of the Watchers, have survived. One of the names is Gilgamesh, the main character of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.12
In both the Mesopotamian context and the context of later Second Temple Jewish thought, their fathers are divine and the nephilim (however translated) are still described as giants.
The Jews, followers of Yahweh, were in Babylon, deported against their will by the greatest empire in their known world. Though captives, prophets like Ezekiel (and Jeremiah before him) had told the people that their situation was temporary—that the God of Israel remained the real sovereign. He was fully in control and was the true God. They would be set free and Babylon would crumble. For Jewish scribes, their work during the exile was an opportunity to set the record straight for posterity. And that they did.
The biblical writers took what Babylonians thought was proof of their own divine heritage and told a different story. Yes, there were giants, renowned men, both before and after the flood (Gen 6:4). But those offspring and their knowledge were not of the true God—they were the result of rebellion against Yahweh by lesser divine beings. Genesis 6:1–4, along with 2 Peter and Jude, portrays Babylon’s boast as a horrific transgression and, even worse, the catalyst that spread corruption throughout humankind. Genesis 6:5 is essentially a summary of the effect of the transgression.
Most English Bibles do not read “according to the number of the sons of God” in Deuteronomy 32:8. Rather, they read “according to the number of the sons of Israel.” The difference derives from disagreements between manuscripts of the Old Testament. “Sons of God” is the correct reading, as is now known from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Deuteronomy 32:8–9 harks back to events at the Tower of Babel, an event that occurred before the call of Abraham, the father of the nation of Israel. This means that the nations of the earth were divided at Babel before Israel even existed as a people. It would make no sense for God to divide up the nations of the earth “according to the number of the sons of Israel” if there was no Israel. This point is also brought home in another way, namely by the fact that Israel is not listed in the Table of Nations.
the rest of the nations were placed under the authority of members of Yahweh’s divine council.7 The other nations were assigned to lesser elohim as a judgment from the Most High, Yahweh.
Since the Word is clearly equated with and identified as Yahweh in Genesis 12 and 15, when the New Testament has Jesus saying “that was me,” he is claiming to be the Word of the Old Testament, who was the visible Yahweh.
20 “ ‘Look, I am about to send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. 21 Be attentive to him and listen to his voice; do not rebel against him, because he will not forgive your transgression, for my name is in him. 22 But if you listen attentively to his voice and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes” (Exod 23:20–22). There’s something strange about God’s description to Moses that tells us that this is no ordinary angel. This angel has the authority to pardon sins or not, a status that belongs to
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The Bible tells us the plagues were aimed at Egypt’s gods (Exod 12:12; Num 33:4), the elohim who had been given their authority by Yahweh and who were supposed to govern Egypt on his behalf. The idea is not that each plague neatly corresponds to an Egyptian deity, only that the powerful acts of Yahweh went beyond the power of the gods of Egypt and their divine representative-son, Pharaoh.
In other words, legalism was not intrinsic to a biblical theology of the law. The heart of salvation in biblical theology—across both testaments—is believing loyalty to Yahweh. That orientation extends from Eden and has deep roots in what happened at Sinai. It is no coincidence that when Israel, Yahweh’s portion, met with him at Sinai, the result was a second covenant involving laws binding Israel and Yahweh in faithfulness, witnessed by the members of Yahweh’s divine council.
Salvation in the Old Testament meant love for Yahweh alone. One had to believe that Yahweh was the God of all gods, trusting that this Most High God had chosen covenant relationship with Israel to the detriment of all other nations. The law was how one demonstrated that love—that loyalty. Salvation was not merited. Yahweh alone had initiated the relationship.
The history of Israel’s kings illustrates the point. King David was guilty of the worst of crimes against humanity in the incident with Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite (2 Sam 11). He was clearly in violation of the law and deserving of death. Nevertheless, his belief in who Yahweh was among all gods never wavered. God was merciful to him, sparing him from death, though his sin had consequences the rest of his life. But there was no doubt that David was ever a believer in Yahweh and never worshiped another.
Our believing loyalty is demonstrated by our obedience to “the law of Christ” (1 Cor 9:21; Gal 6:2). We cannot worship another. Salvation means believing loyalty to Christ, who was and is the visible Yahweh. There is no salvation in any other name (Acts 4:12), and faith must remain intact (Rom 11:17–24; Heb 3:19; 10:22, 38–39). Personal failure is not the same as trading Jesus for another god—and God knows that.
The Hebrew vocabulary for holiness means to be set apart or to be distinct. While the idea has a moral dimension related to conduct, it is not intrinsically about morality. It is about distinction.
The word “Azazel” in the Hebrew text can be translated “the goat that goes away.” This is the justification for the common “scapegoat” translation in some English versions (NIV, NASB, KJV). The scapegoat, so the translator has it, symbolically carries the sins of the people away from the camp of Israel into the wilderness. Seems simple enough. However, “Azazel” is really a proper name. In Lev 16:8 one goat is “for Yahweh,” while the other goat is “for Azazel.” Since Yahweh is a proper name and the goats are described in the same way, Hebrew parallelism informs us that Azazel is also a proper
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The point of the goat for Azazel was not that something was owed to the demonic realm, as though a ransom was being paid.21 The goat for Azazel banished the sins of the Israelites to the realm outside Israel. Why? Because the ground on which Yahweh had his dwelling was holy. Sin had to be “transported” to where evil belonged—the territory outside Israel, under the control of gods set over the pagan nations. The high priest was not sacrificing to Azazel. Rather, Azazel was getting what belonged to him: sin.
The truth is that Christians affirm the incarnation because they have to—it defines Christianity. Genesis 6:1–4 is set aside as peripheral. But belief in a personal God as the Bible describes means embracing the supernatural. For the Christian, the high point of the supernatural story of Scripture—its most dramatic and unthinkable expression—is the incarnation of God in Christ. The notion that the sons of God came to earth in fleshly form ought to be more palatable than the incarnation, since it is less supernaturally spectacular.
Genesis 6:4 pointedly informs readers that the Nephilim were on earth before the flood “and also afterward.” The phrase looks forward to Numbers 13:33, which says with equal clarity that the oversized descendants of Anak “came from the Nephilim.”12 The sons of Anak, the Anakim, were one of the giant clans described in the conquest narratives (e.g., Deut 2:10–11, 21; Josh 11:21–22; 14:12, 15).
And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete (Gen 15:13–16 ESV). God told Abraham that his descendants (the people of Edom, Ammon, Moab, and, of course, Israel) would live in bondage but would one day return to the land of promise—at a time when the iniquity of the Amorites had reached the point when God was ready to judge it.
The use of “Amorite” in the Old Testament is indiscriminate.4 In some passages it’s a label for the entire population of Canaan (Josh 7:7).5 In that sense, “Amorites” and “Canaanites” are interchangeable, both denoting non-Israelite in the land of Canaan.6 In other passages its use is more specific to one people group among several within Canaan (Gen 15:19–21).7 “Canaanites” and “Amorites” were therefore generic terms used to describe the enemies of Israel. Of the two, “Amorites” takes on a more sinister tone in the context of the Babylonian polemic that precedes this point in Israel’s story.
Israel’s battles in the Transjordan bring us face-to-face with an issue that has troubled Bible students and scholars for centuries: the practice of extermination in Israel’s war of conquest.
In the view of the biblical writers, Israel is at war with enemies spawned by rival divine beings. The Nephilim bloodlines were not like the peoples of the disinherited nations. Genesis 10 clearly casts the human inhabitants of those nations as owing their existence to Yahweh, as they descended from Noah’s sons and, therefore, Noah—all the way back to Adam, Yahweh’s first human son. The Nephilim bloodlines had a different pedigree. They were produced by other divine beings. They did not belong to Yahweh, and he therefore had no interest in claiming them. Coexistence was not possible with the
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As if this were not enough of an indication to draw the reader’s attention to the Nephilim bloodlines, the writer adds in verse 22, “Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod” did some of the Anakim remain. Why add that note? Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod were Philistine cities. One needs only to recall Goliath of Gath and his brothers to understand that the writer of Joshua is setting the stage for the fact that annihilation of these bloodlines would continue into David’s era.
The point is that the rationale for kherem annihilation was the specific elimination of the descendants of the Nephilim. Ridding the land of these bloodlines was the motivation.
How tall were the biblical giants? The only measurement for a giant that exists in the biblical text is that of Goliath.16 The traditional (Masoretic) Hebrew text has him at “six cubits and a span” (1 Sam 17:4), roughly 9 feet, 9 inches. The Dead Sea Scroll reading of 1 Sam 17:4 disagrees and has Goliath at four cubits and a span, or 6 feet 6 inches. Virtually all scholars consider the Dead Sea Scrolls reading superior and authentic.17 Archaeological work across the ancient Near East confirms that six and one-half feet tall was, by the standards of the day, a giant.18 One scholar of Israelite
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The ancient Israelites, like other peoples of Canaan at the time, did not embalm their dead. Consequently, human skeletal remains from the first two millennia BC are not common. Of the millions of people that lived in ancient Syria-Palestine during that two-thousand-year span, a few thousand skeletons have survived. The situation in ancient Egypt is proportionally better due to embalming.
The wars of conquest under Moses and Joshua were supposed to cleanse the land of a competing divine bloodline and install Yahweh’s own children, his inheritance, into the place he had allotted for them. Yahweh’s rule on earth was to be reconstituted in Canaan.
Israel would be a kingdom of priests, a conduit through which the disinherited nations of the earth would see Israel’s prosperity. The surrounding peoples would hear of Israel’s God, see his unmatched power, and seek his covenantal love. The nations would be reclaimed, not by force, but by free imagers choosing to turn toward the true God—the creator and Lord of all.
We know that Israel ultimately failed. The seeds of that failure were sown in the events of the conquest. For whatever reasons—lack of faith or lack of effort, or both—Israel failed to drive out their enemies. They allowed vestiges of the targeted bloodlines to remain in the land in the Philistine cities.
This passage is among the most controversial in the Bible, as it is a focal point of debate between Roman Catholics, who reference it to argue that the passage makes Peter the leader of the original church (and thus the first pope) and those who oppose that idea. There’s actually something much more cosmic going on here. The location of the incident—Caesarea Philippi—and the reference to the “gates of hell” provide the context for the “rock” of which Jesus is speaking.
Caesarea Philippi was located in the northern part of the Old Testament region of Bashan, the “place of the serpent,” at the foot of Mount Hermon.
The early church historian Eusebius notes: “Until today the mount in front of Panias and Lebanon is known as Hermon and it is respected by nations as a sanctuary.”11
I would suggest there is also an important double entendre: the “rock” refers to the mountain location where Jesus makes the statement. When viewed from this perspective, Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God, at “this rock” (this mountain—Mount Hermon). Why? This place was considered the “gates of hell,” the gateway to the realm of the dead, in Old Testament times.
The theological messaging couldn’t be more dramatic. Jesus says he will build his church—and the “gates of hell” will not prevail against it.
Gates are defensive structures, not offensive weapons. The kingdom of God is the aggressor.16 Jesus begins at ground zero in the cosmic geography of both testaments to announce the great reversal. It is the gates of hell that are under assault—and they will not hold up against the Church. Hell will one day be Satan’s tomb.
Caesarea Philippi to Mount Hermon and the symbolic-religious associations that relationship entails make Mount Hermon the logical choice for the transfiguration.21
We’ve seen already that the Jewish tradition about the descent of the Watchers, the sons of God of Genesis 6:1–4, informed the writings of Peter and Jude. Now we see that the transfiguration of Jesus takes place on the same location identified by that tradition. Jesus picks Mount Hermon to reveal to Peter, James, and John exactly who he is—the embodied glory-essence of God, the divine Name made visible by incarnation.
The enemy knows who Jesus is, but, as noted earlier, the forces of darkness do not know the plan.23 Jesus has baited them into action, and act they will. He has given them the rope, and they will eagerly hang themselves with it. Jesus will go to Jerusalem to drink from the cup that the Father has planned for him. But the instrument of death will be the catalyst that launches the kingdom of God in its full force.
In addition to the clear textual links between Matthew and Psalm 22, scholars have long noticed that elements of Psalm 22 appear to describe injuries and conditions congruent with crucifixion: •I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint (v. 14). •My strength is dry like a potsherd, and my tongue is sticking to my jaws (v. 15).1
So the worship of other gods—gods besides Yahweh who were called demons (shedim)—was part of the identity of Bashan.
Bashan is that it has secure associations with demonic powers. Although Psalm 22 wasn’t originally messianic in focus, Matthew’s use of it fixes that association.4 The implication is that Jesus, at the moment of agony and death, was surrounded by the “bulls of Bashan”—demonic elohim who had been the foes of Yahweh and his children for millennia.5
the two mountains in the passage—Bashan and Sinai—are rivals at the beginning of the psalm. The mountain of the gods (Bashan) “looks with hatred” at Yahweh’s mountain, Mount Sinai. God desired Sinai for his abode, and the psalmist asks Bashan, “Why the envy?” This would make little sense if Bashan was already under Yahweh’s authority.
Paul’s words identify Jesus with Yahweh. In Psalm 68:18 it was Yahweh who is described as the conqueror of the demonic stronghold. For Paul it is Jesus, the incarnate second Yahweh, surrounded by the demonic elohim, “bulls of Bashan,” fulfilling the imagery of Psalm 68. Jesus puts the evil gods “to an open shame” (ESV) by “triumphing over them by [the cross]” (LEB) (Col 2:15). Psalm 68:18 and Ephesians 4:8 are in agreement if one sees conquest, not liberation.
Christ’s conquest results in the dispensing of gifts to his people after ascending (in conquest) in verse 8. But that ascent was accompanied by a descent (“into the lower regions”).
The answer, as we’ve seen in previous chapters, is that Jesus is the second Yahweh, the embodied Yahweh of the Old Testament. But Jesus is not the “Father” Yahweh. He therefore is but isn’t Yahweh. It’s the same with the Spirit. The Spirit is Yahweh, and so he is Jesus as well, but not incarnate or embodied. The Spirit is but isn’t Jesus, just as Jesus is but isn’t Yahweh the Father. The same sort of “two Yahwehs” idea from the Old Testament is found in the New Testament with respect to Jesus and the Spirit.
The first two points of the description that deserve attention are the “violent rushing wind” and the “divided tongues like fire.” Both are images in the Old Testament associated with God’s presence—the
The whirlwind is familiar from divine encounters of Elijah (2 Kgs 2:1, 11) and Job (Job 38:1; 40:6). Ezekiel’s divine commissioning likewise has the enthroned Yahweh coming with great wind (Ezek 1:4). The whirlwind motif is often accompanied by storm imagery, which can also include fire (Isa 30:30).1 Having “wind” as an element in describing God’s presence makes sense given that the Hebrew word translated “wind” can also be rendered “spirit/Spirit” (ruach).
Burning fire is a familiar element of divine-council throne-room scenes (e.g., Isa 6:4, 6; Dan 7:9). It is especially prominent in the appearances at Sinai
