Theology in the Raw - 809: Demons, Giants, and Other Gods in the Bible: Dr. Michael Heiser

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Dr. Michael Heiser is a biblical scholar with a Ph.D. in Semitic Studies, and he's the author of many scholarly books related to the spiritual realm, including the best-selling book The Unseen Realm. In this challenging conversation, we talk about the divine council that informs God's decisions, the meaning of "Elohim," the origin of demons, the nephilim, the anakim, other giants in the Bible, and lots of other "strange things" in the Bible that are only strange to modern readers. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Watch the podcast on YouTube Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

All right, friends, you ready for this one? I have on the show, the one and only Dr. Michael Heiser. He might be one of the more requested guests that I've been told that I need to have on the show. Michael Heiser is, how do I describe Michael Heiser? He is a top-notch Old Testament scholar. He's got a PhD from University of Wisconsin, Madison. For those who don't know, that is a, one of the highest level, uh, universities when it comes to Semitic Old Testament, ancient Mary studies. And he wrote a super provocative book called the unseen realm and his understanding of the Bible, his understanding of the Old Testament in particular, his understanding of God and the divine counsel that we'll get into is really kind of mind

blowing. And as I said in the conversation, the stuff he talks about isn't super disputed among scholarly circles. I remember first reading this book and I was like, yeah, this seems like what I learned when I started studying the Old Testament really on an in-depth level. But I think some of his claims, some of his, the points that he's going to make is kind of new to people in Christianity who haven't dug super deep into the Old Testament. We're going to talk about demons. We're going to talk about the Nephilim and giants.

We're going to talk about the. We're going to talk about the Nephilim and giants. We're going to talk about, um, the relationship between the old Testament and myth. We're going to talk about the divine council. We're going to talk about that evil spirit of second Kings 22, that God allows to go and to be a deceit, a deceiving spirit in the mouths of these false prophets. We're going to talk about Genesis six. We're going to talk about angelic beings having sex with women and producing a giant offspring whose deceased bodies give off the spirits that we now call demons. We're going to talk about demons. We're going to talk about the devil, Satan, the Satan, the adversary. This is going to be a gnarly episode. Okay.

It's going to be an engaging one. And I can't wait for you to engage this conversation. Hey, if you want to support Theology in the Raw, help me to keep getting good guests like Dr. Michael Heiser, then you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology in raw. That's patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. Support the show for as little as five bucks a month, which is incredibly appreciated during this, the wake of this COVID-19 season. Your support is greatly appreciated. One of the reasons why I've been upping my game, doing several podcasts, a couple podcasts a week, doing lots of YouTube conversations is because I need to start working a little harder. I need to start making some money through various channels during the season.

So if you would like to support the show, you want to keep it going, Theology in the Raw, no, no, no, patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw. And also, as I've been saying several times on previous episodes, this conversation is also a YouTube conversation. So if you want to see Dr. Michael Heiser

in all his glory, you can go to Press and Sprinkle in YouTube and see this conversation along with many, many others that I've been engaging in. Okay, without further ado, I want you to get to know the specialist when it comes to giants, demons, and other gods in the Bible. Welcome to the show, the one and only Dr. Michael Heiser. All right, I am here with Dr. Michael Heiser.

Michael Heiser is a Old Testament scholar. I'm going to read part of his credentials here off of one of his older books. He's a specialist in the fields of biblical studies and ancient Near East studies. He has worked for Faithlife, famous for putting out the Bible software Logos. He has an MA in Hebrew Studies, a PhD in Hebrew Bible and Semitic Studies from the University of Madison, Wisconsin. He's published widely in scholarly journals, written several books. I'm holding up two. For those of you who are watching on YouTube. This is both a podcast and a video. This is the one that I think made you maybe most well-known called The Unseen Realm. I'm blocking some of that. And I want to talk a little bit about that book. The one I would like to focus on is this. Is this your most recent book on demons? Yeah, that's the most

recent one. The most recent. i uh have been diving into this you know what motivated me to dive into demons is because my 13 year old daughter has had a fascination with the nephilim and giants in the bible no i my wife is really concerned she's like i don't know is this okay like she wants to just keep talking about these nephilim and she's doing all this study and she has notes. She's looking at passages and she saw this book and saw that you talk about the Nephilim. I'm like, it might be a little more academic than you're looking for, sweetie, but I'll read it. Maybe we can have a dialogue about it.

Michael, thank you so much for being on Theology in the Raw. Yeah, thanks for having me. So the unseen realm, and I told you this over email that I've done a lot of study in early Judaism that was part of my PhD and Old Testament studies. It was actually in New Testament, but with a lot of, I mean, it was almost mostly early Judaism with a lot of Old Testament background leading up to the New Testament. So when you started talking about things like the divine counsel, that Satan in Job 1 might not be Satan as we assume. It might just be one of the divine hosts, an adversary. To me, I didn't find it that controversial just because I had already kind of worked through some of that in my PhD studies.

And I didn't, in a sense, you know, when you're doing academic study outside of kind of a denominational pressure or Christian subculture, you just kind of read the Bible and it's like, oh, this is what it says. But apparently, some of these things are controversial. So could you maybe just give a really quick summary of what are some main things you talk about in the unseen realm and maybe some of the controversy that that has stirred up or some of the, you know, yeah, we'll just leave it at controversy. Yeah, I'll try to do this with,

with some brevity. Um, it's a challenge though. Yes. Um, you know, in unseen realm, I I'm, I'm really trying, I'm trying to do several things. You know, the book begins where I tell people about sort of my own watershed event in grad Wisconsin, a few minutes before church, and I had a friend who was there in church with me, who had his Hebrew Bible with him. And I don't know what we were talking about, but the way the conversation ended was life-changing for me. And, you know, again, I can't remember what the context was, but he hands me his Hebrew Bible and says, you know, you need to take a look at Psalm 82 in Hebrew.

And, I mean, I wasn't a newbie. I mean, I had two master's degrees. I had taught for five years. I taught 20 different courses. I'm in a doctoral program, you know, in a really good, you know, Semitics program. And I had never done it, you know, and I read that, and, you know, Elohim Nitzav Ba'adot El, you know, God, capital G, because Nitzav is a singular part of Sepulchre, there's only one Elohim there, you know, takes his stand or stands in the divine council,

and then the next line is Bekerav Elohim Yishpot, in the midst of the Elohim, in the midst of the gods, he passes judgment. And obviously, it's not about a trinity, because if we keep reading Psalm 82, they're corrupt. You know, the other Elohim are bad, you know, they're either inept or incompetent or, you know, bad or all, you know, all rolled into one. And I looked at that, and I thought, boy, that looks like a pantheon. God, the God of Israel, the God of the Bible, judging a bunch of other gods. And it sure doesn't sound like idols because, you know, if you take that, you keep reading, you get to verse 6, where the speaker, who's God, says to this group, you know, I said to all of you, plural pronoun, you are gods, Elohim, sons of the most high, plural. And again, idols aren't sons of the most high. But you're going to die like men. And then you go over to Psalm 89, you get the same council language, you get the same sons of God terminology, and they're the

councils in the skies. And I was just, I was lost. Like, what am I going to do with this? But fortunately, providentially, I had another thought, and that was, I bet Jesus knew this verse. I bet Paul knew it. I bet other New Testament writers knew it. with clarity about the uniqueness of the God of Israel and the deity of Jesus, that somehow this passage doesn't overturn that. There's got to be some way where this fits together and makes sense. But I didn't know what that was. And so I was, I couldn't, you know, I mean, God knew how to, you know,

the Lord knew how to push my buttons because I couldn't let it go. You know, eventually it became a focus of my dissertation. You know, I saw that it needed to be married to the two powers in heaven idea that Siegel was correct. That, hey, the Jews got this from somewhere. And then he has two sentences about where they might have gotten it in his really important book, Two Powers in Heaven, which was by that time, that was 1977. So that's like really old. But I had never encountered it because I had my experience was like you, you know, when you get to the doctoral level, they're not letting you read in translation. Right. You know, we're not doing this anymore.

Yeah. You know, you're going to have to read the text in context, the way that the ancient writers thought about it and the way they articulated it, what they meant, you know, what their audiences thought when they were reading this. You know, we're done filtering it to you through whatever tradition it is that you like. Yeah. So it's a wild, you know, it was a wonderful experience because when, you know, I had to work through the, there's a fear, you know, involved in this where, again, this is going to sound goofy, but it's like, if I like really decide to read the Bible, the way an ancient writer wrote it, and the way that his readers, because he's writing it to an audience. This is intentional. It's not random. I'm just going to scramble some words down and a thousand years from now,

they'll figure out what this means. It doesn't work like, no communication works like that. But if I go down this rabbit hole, if I take the red pill here, I don't know where I'm going to land and I'll probably lose friends. I'll probably be ineligible for jobs. You know, like, you know, what church is going to want me? I mean, all these things go through your mind and it's like I couldn't let it go. I couldn't let it go. And once you cross the Rubicon there, you know, once I did the scriptures again, I'm a doctoral student, but the scriptures just opened up.

And so like like when I talk about Unseen Realm and when we were putting the book out, I originally put out the first manuscript online because I figured no one would publish it. It would just be too shocking, you know, for like an evangelical, you know, an audience that took scripture seriously, that this, they won't be able to deal with this. But eventually, you know, one circumstance led to another where Lexham was formed. And then two years later, they found out about this manuscript, and then the rest is sort of history. But it was scary, but the scriptures have opened up to me in ways that I could never have imagined. And it really was like reading my Bible again for the first time as a doctoral student. Can you unpack maybe for an audience that might not understand quite what the what is the controversy here? I mean, yeah. And so maybe just explain it to somebody that hasn't quite followed. In Psalm 82, when I was confronted with the text, when God said, grab me by the neck and look at that.

When you're confronted by the text in that particular passage, and I said it looks like a pantheon, we're taught to not see what the text actually says. Again, you know, it's the Trinity. Oh, these aren't really gods, they're idols, or they're Jewish elders, or, you know, whatever, you know, anything but what the text actually says. And the reason we're taught that is because we are so reflexively used to when we see the letters G, O, and D on a piece of paper or on a screen, our brain defaults to, oh, the letters G, O, and D mean a specific set of unique attributes. That's what that means. So we can't put an S on the end of it. That just creeps us out. And it creeped me out too, because that's the way I was taught to think about G-O-N-D, okay? Well, the biblical writers don't use Elohim in that verse and in other

passages with the idea that the term itself means a specific set of unique attributes. And again, we know that because if you actually look up where all the places where Elohim occurs, it's a few thousand, but there's a payoff to it. If you actually do that, you'll discover that there's like five or six other things in the Hebrew Bible that are called Elohim, that are not the God of Israel. Right. You got the God of Israel. You've got the gods of the nations, you've got the disembodied dead in 1 Samuel 28, you've got the Shedim in Deuteronomy 32. I mean, you have this passage where you have sons of the Most High who are getting judged for being corrupt. You have this. So that alone

should tell you that Elohim does not refer to a unique set of attributes. And that's important because that undermines the liberal critical view of an evolution from polytheism to monotheism. It undermines that as well. They're operating from the same assumption. And so eventually I, again providentially, I come to terms with what this is. I mean, it dawns on me at some point where, you know, all of this really is, is Elohim is a term you would use if you were describing a member of the spiritual world who by nature is disembodied.

world, who by nature is disembodied. That's all it is. It's a word like spirits. It just tells you, okay, this is what the thing is, and this is where it lives. It lives over in the spiritual world. It's not the human world. It's the spiritual world. Okay, this is what you would call it. It's one of the things you would call it to label it. And that means that Yahweh, the God of the Bible, is an Elohim among lots of Elohim, but only one of those Elohim is him. He is distinguished by biblical writers by virtue of the ways he gets talked about in lots of other passages. Certain attributes that are specifically denied to all other Elohim. So it's almost like it's like polytheism in Psalm 82, you know, and this plays out in other passages, you know, like Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9, you know, which is where we get the gods of the nations, if we're reading it with the Dead Sea Scrolls anyway,

and the Septuagint. But again, there's an example where our English translations prevent us from seeing what the oldest form of the text actually is. Now, ESV has adopted it and LT has. I mean, a few others. They've seen the light of day that maybe we ought to put this in because, A, it makes sense, and B, it's the oldest text we have. So you run into these things, but the book has been controversial for what I, you know, I start with Psalm 82 to explain why I'm even writing the book, like what rattled my cage. But the whole notion of a God having a prior heavenly family, that scripture uses family metaphors to describe the relationship. And it also describes ruling and partnership metaphors with this group. That language is

also used of humanity from the very beginning. Okay, Genesis 1, 26, the plurality there is a divine council scene. God, the singular creator, is speaking to the heavenly host. And I talk about in the book why it's not the Trinity. Well, there's a controversial point. We talk about why that doesn't work, why they wouldn't have been thinking in those terms. But what Unseen Realm really does is it says, look, unlike Mike, who had one clock hour, one clock hour, not credit hour, clock hour, 60 minutes of angelology in seminary and Bible college and grad school. Unlike that situation, this is really important because the way God thinks about this family maps over to the way he thinks about his human family. And that's intentional. There's a connection relationship between these two families, these two things, and God as the common creator and common father of them. And what God wants with this new creature

called humans that are embodied now, a new kind of creation. And there's a reason why this relationship, even when it goes bad, even when there's rebellion and a fall, why these two things are constantly sort of bumping into each other through the rest of the metanarrative of scripture. There's a story to be told here. And you can't understand lots of scenes passages in the story if you cut yourself off from a supernatural worldview you know and here i'm not a charismatic i'm not a pen i don't have these aren't my traditions yeah you know i have lots of friends who are in these traditions that that love the book because now they have some scriptural roots to some of the ideas that they hold, but they've appreciated it. And I'm just saying, look, these two things just are,

they're symbiotic. I mean, you would know the Dead Sea Scroll material, you know, the Hodeot text, you know, the Shabbat Sharrot. I mean, they have this heaven on earth sync up thing going on in their heads, angelic glorification of believers. Okay, the language for all of these things shows up in the New Testament, and we have no framework as evangelicals to understand any of it, because we have cut ourselves off from this whole perspective of the way we look at the Bible. And so what Unseen Realm tries to do is it tries to create the framework for understanding that.

And I also try to convince readers that you need, when you read the Old Testament, you need the Israelite living in your head. When you read the New Testament, you need the second temple, the first century Jew living in your head. The right context for interpreting the Bible is not your context. It's not evangelicalism. It's not Pentecostalism. It's not Catholicism. It's not anything that postdates the biblical period. Zero. None of it.

The right context for interpreting the Bible is the context that produced the thing, that God picked people in these contexts to communicate to their audience. And if we can get them living in our heads, we're going to understand a lot of things that look really strange to us now. Or that, you know, our churches are filled with people who know lots of data points. They do know, you know, a good amount of Bible, but they have no framework in which to understand these data points. And so they can't see how these things interconnect. They can't see the intelligent interconnectivity of Scripture. You know, and so i'm just trying to kick that can down down the road a little bit you know to please consider reading the bible in this way and focus on the meta-narrative and have this worldview in your head don't be a modern don't be a post-enlightenment believing skeptic

okay don't be that person that you're actually born to be, okay? And that's the hard part, because we are modern. We live in a technological society. You know, we have Christians who are selective believers in supernatural content. Oh, I need Jesus. I need God. I need the concept of sin to mean something, because then salvation means something. You know, these are all spiritual, theological, you know, supernatural contexts. And we need this column, column A, but the stuff in column B, like that 1 Peter 3 passage, that Genesis 6, man, I can't deal with that. Well, surprise, surprise, both columns, both buckets come from the same source.

When you talk about the divine counsel, so what, instead of envisioning, you know, a white guy and a beard on a throne, just making, you know, decisions, you know, parting the Red Sea and doing this, or even if we can expand it and be more Trinitarian that you got father, son, Holy Spirit kind of, you know, like at the shack or whatever, you know, making these decisions, you're saying, just b Holy Spirit kind of, you know, like at the shack or whatever, you know, making these decisions. You're saying, just biblically, we should envision God, the triune God, with a whole council of angelic beings. And when they're deciding to do something, he is conversing almost like a judge, I don't

know, with a jury and an attorney, and you have an advocate and an adversary. And it's way more, for lack of better terms, messy than we make it out to be. Yeah, there's participation, and God enjoys participation. You know, all of these are metaphors that the writers are forced to use the language of order and decision-making and royalty, especially, you know, the royal court, to talk about what God is up to. And, you know, again, the meaningful input of his counselors, his advisors. You know, these are simple ideas. Do you like order or chaos? Well, you know, I like order. chaos. Well, you know, I like order. Well, that's good. You like order because you're smart, right? Yep, yep, yep. Well, is God intelligent too? Well, sure. Well, it stands to reason then he'd like some order, okay? And so to talk about God, we map over the conversation that help us express

these things, you know, just order and disorder. We map that, the biblical writers map that onto the spiritual world because they have to. It's not their world. You know, they're given information. They use reasonable deduction. They use the language and metaphor. All these things are in play, you know, when it comes to scripture.

And when you really get down to it, like I wrote this little book for new believers called What Does God Want? What God wants is a family. This is why humans exist. There's no deficiency in God. He just enjoys creating beings like himself to have relationship. And he likes to have those intelligent beings, the ones who are like him, to participate in enjoying what he has made and doing things. It's the dad to the kid, you know, the toddler. It's, you know, it's the guy who knows his business really well, and he has an apprentice. Well, you know, take a whack at it. You know, if you mess it up, we'll fix it and we'll move on from there. You know, it's this kind of relationship. And so

I get asked, well, what does God need with a council? You know, he doesn't need a council. He doesn't have that need at all. What does he need with a church? What does he need with you? He doesn't need any of this stuff, but he likes it. He likes participation. So you go to passages like 1 Kings 22. You go to passages like Daniel 7 or Daniel 4, where the Watcher, the Holy One, comes down to Nebuchadnezzar and says, well, I got some bad news. You're going to go insane for a while, so I hope you like eating grass. You know, just maybe you want to mix it with a little. But he says this sentence is by decree of the watchers, plural. Yeah.

And then three verses later he says that the sentence is by decree of the most high. So it gives you both sides of the same coin. I mean, we don't have a bunch of, you know, holy ones in the heavenly host running rogue and doing things that, you know, God doesn't want done, but he'll invite participation, say, okay, like with Ahab, it's time for Ahab to die, finally. So how do we want to do that? And, you know, one spirit steps forward. You know, I always, this is going to date me, but I always think of Arnold Horschak, you know, and welcome back, Cotter. Oh, you know, in the back of the room, you know. And so, you know, okay, what, you know, what's your idea?

You know, and he tells him, you know, I'll be a lying spirit in the mouth of all these prophets. I'll get him to go up to remote Iliad and he'll die. And God says, yeah, that'll work. I know I have to buy that. I mean, but if he would have come up with something stupid, God would have just said, I'm going to call on you later. Anybody else? You know, like, I want good ideas here, not stupid ideas.

That second Kings 22, I forget the verse. Is it verse 20? Yeah. First Kings 22, 19 through 23. Yeah. Go, if you're listening or watching, go read that passage. Just pretend like you're not a Christian. You never read the Bible.

You're just reading a text. And what would you envision? That is a disturbed – well, it's disturbing for evangelicals that have a lot of presuppositions. And we all have presuppositions. It's normal. It's part of life. But I think it takes a lot of courage to be open to say maybe my presuppositions need to be bent around this text rather than bending the text around our presuppositions. I want to transition though to Genesis 6, because this is a passage that

has intrigued me for years. And as a scholar in early Judaism, Genesis 6 is kind of like the John 3, 16 of early Judaism. There's few Jewish texts that don't mention this passage. And unlike many other things in early Judaism, or as we say, early Judaism, early Judaism's, um, this is the one passage that had a kind of a unanimous interpretation. Isn't that ironic? No. So can you unpack, I want to, okay. So let's talk about giants and demons and angels having sex with women. OK, unpack the story of Genesis six for us and what happens in the aftermath.

It's actually a good segue into the demons book because, you know, I like to say about Unseen Realm and I would say the same thing about demons, that the dirty little secret of Mike's books is that he never had an original thought. Yeah. Okay? What I do is I take scholarly stuff and try to make it decipherable to people who care and connect dots. I'm a dot connector, okay? So all the stuff in there, you can find in academia as you, I'm going to have to

steal your Genesis six is like, because you're right. It's like, this is like one of the few things that like, everybody's just towing this line. Yeah. And, and what, what you have here is you have essentially, you know, if you asked a Christian and the average Christian, why is the world such a mess? You know, why do we have evil and all this? Chances are, they're going to say, oh, it's the fall. You know, don't you read the Bible? You dunderhead, that's the fall. Well, if you ask the same question to a second temple Jew, that's not the answer you'd get. The answer you'd get is, well, there's actually three reasons why the world is just like going to hell in a handbasket here. We've got, you know, the problem in Genesis 3. Yeah, that was like a kickstart. And then we got Genesis six and that's, that's

really bad news. And then we've got what happens at Babel with the disinheritance of the nations and all that. So we got really three reasons. Of course, if you think that way, you think that the Messiah is supposed to fix all three. Okay. You're looking for reversal in all three, but what we're trained to do is we don't, we deny the second one, the third one we never find because, again, we're not reading the text with Qumran in Deuteronomy 32, 8, 9. So we're like one out of three pegs here. But when it came to Genesis 6, everybody in the Second Temple traditions, they saw this as not so much a problem because of the Nephilim stuff. Okay. Yeah. You know, we, we get that. And as I talk about in the demons book, I go into more detail about what the Mesopotamian backstory to that is with the Avkalu, which,

you know, I'm, I'm just standing on the shoulders of shoulders of the work of somebody like Amar Anas in Helsinki, who, you know, recolated, you know, all that Mesopotamian material and asked the question, hey, all this blood stuff that's in common that everybody knows about, does it talk about like the first four verses here specifically? You know, can we look for that? And so he did, and everything maps over, which is the neat thing. And so he did, and everything maps over, which is the neat thing. So there's a backstory here that Genesis 6, 1 through 4, the writer there is shooting at Mesopotamian theology in some very specific ways.

And what happens is, yeah, we've got this giant problem, okay, because we've got the sons of God. You know, the cohabitation language is typically the way everybody understood this. I talk about an unseen realm, but there's sort of a mythic way to honor the supernatural trajectory here, and that is to read it like you would be reading about Abraham and Sarah, where there's no, you know, God doesn't do anything sexually with Sarah, but nevertheless, he does something that a population emerges out of this woman. You know, maybe that's what we have. I don't really care. But what I care about is that we read it with the ancients, that there's a transgression of heaven and earth here. It produces a very specific enemy that when you get to the conquest, all of the other people groups around the Anakim who are said to have come from the Nephilim in Numbers 13, 32, and 33.

It's not just them. It's all of these other terms linked back into Hittite, Hurrian, and Amorite traditions that all involve giants and a flood. I don't do that in Unseen Realm, but that is the case. So they're drawing on this tradition in Second Temple Judaism. They know this. And so we've got a serious problem here. But this problem, the giants are eliminated by, catch the list, Moses, Joshua, and David. What do all those three guys have in common?

They're types of the Messiah. Okay, that's not a coincidence. And so the earthly problem, this lineage problem that provides a lethal element, and I believe this is the element that's actually targeted with the Kerem passages and the killing and destruction. I don't think they're random and wanton. This needs to be eliminated, and the job gets done by the time of David. But the worst part is all the Second Temple Jews have this tradition that the watchers, the angels that come down, teach humans certain things to

steer them toward idolatry and self-destruction. So we have human weakness in Genesis 3. We have human fallibility and human accountability for the fall. But the proliferation of evil is something that there's a supernatural ingredient to. This is why when we go to Genesis 6, we get the weird stuff in the first four verses, and then we get verse 5. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every thought of the imagination of his heart was only evil continually. Well, how do you get verse 5 out of the first four verses? If you know the back story, the Mesopotamian back story, again, you know the answer to that question.

And in Second Temple Judaism, they did, because they dip into that material. They know the whole framework here. And so Genesis 6 becomes the catalyst for depravity. It becomes a means by which supernatural beings that want their own imagers, that want their own peoples to rival Yahweh, that want their own peoples to rival Yahweh, that essentially see how one of their own kind was treated after the first rebellion, how Yahweh is only interested in redeeming humans. And he condemns one of our brethren. Okay. I mean, this is a factor. You get different Enochic traditions about what the motivation was. And this is one of these threads. But where it leads is that you have a situation where humans are now going to be taught weapons,

you know, arts of warfare and bloodshed and seduction and idolatry and astrology. All of these things are listed in a book like Enoch, which expands the story, but all those things actually are referenced in the Mesopotamian content. Again, that's not a coincidence either. So all of these things produce catalysts to drive people away from a relationship with the true God and toward self-destruction. Instead of healing what happened in Genesis 3, now we've made the problem worse. And it's going to get worse, too, by the time you get to the Babel situation. But this was about depravity in Genesis 6. That was the thing, that's the constant touchpoint, like Marianne Brand in her dissertation,

it's now published on the origin of evil, you know, Second Temple Judaism, you know, she says, yeah, there were people who looked at Genesis three and said, you know, humanity has to bear some of the blame here. But overwhelmingly, it's that we were taught to destroy ourselves, and to be adversaries of the true God and go off and worship other gods and, and essentially do things that really just lend themselves to our own ruination. We were taught to do that. This was a catalyst catalytic event to make the whole thing worse. And so that's why it was a serious problem and a consistent touch point. So I have a question about the, to the, so sons of God, why it was a serious problem and a consistent touch point in the second temple period.

I have a question about the, so the sons of God, angelic beings have sex with women and... Yeah, if you're asking me how it works, I have no idea. No, my question is, so you have Nephilim, which are the giant offspring of this union. And I don't know the DNA or biology of all that. How come Nephilim show up and then in Numbers 33, if've been wiped out by the flood? Was there? Yeah. You actually have a little bit more than three, but you got three major approaches to this. I outlined them in Unseen Realm because this was an old question. You'll find the answers that I'm going to give you emerge out of you know more ancient texts and one was well noah somebody in noah's family was for lack of i'll use a modern word a carrier

okay noah was righteous in his generation it's not toledote the genealogical word it's door you know like his time period okay and you And, you know, we have to admit that door is used in one passage for genealogy. So, you know, I'm aware of that, but, you know, this was one of the views that, that Noah, there was something wrong with Noah and his family, because you have other, you have later texts in the second temple period that have Noah as a giant. You've got, you know, the Genesis Apocryphon where Noah's, you know, parents are arguing, you know, Noah's dad says to his mom, hey, are you sure that's my kid? And she's like, no, it's not the Watchers.

Don't you remember the other night when – okay, okay. So you get texts like this that show you they're thinking about it. So that's one option. The other option is you have a regional flood, not a global not a global flood, but that and unseasoned a little bit. And then the second option is biblical. If you go to 6 in verse 4, where it says, and there were Nephilim upon the earth, you know, in those days, okay, and also after, when the sons of God went into the daughters of men. Now, if you look, I mean, Gesenius actually comments on this,

that you take that particle combination followed by an imperfect verb form, which is what you have in Genesis 6-4, and it can mean a continuative activity. In other words, what happened here happened afterwards as well. So there were some that thought, okay, maybe this is what is going on. But this is a very old question. You know, I don't really, you know, I view my job in Unseen Realm as sort of telling people, well, here are the buckets, you know, be warmed and filled, pick the one you like, or, you know, whatever. There are reasons why I kind of like the regional flood idea,

but that plays into the sea people and terminology with other people groups that share the same tradition. So I don't know that that's the case, but, you know, to me, that's the most attractive of the three trajectories right now. And also it's not just Numbers 13, but as you show, is it Deuteronomy 2, Deuteronomy 3, then um chronicles has passed there's giants i don't say everywhere but there's several passages that talk about giants so are we to say that literally there were well two questions one so we should assume that we've

transported ourselves back in the old testament time period and throughout times there are people in fate are facing giants and if so how big are these giants are they a goliath sort you know or is it like you know i know enoch says what like i don't know how many feet enoch's ridiculous 800 feet taller i forget i forget what they said yes he has it at 3 000 l's which is an l is a is another term that could mean cubit, you know, which is just absurd. Okay. Yeah. So what, what I think is going on is, and I based this on, on the two, the two people in the giant lineage that are actually measured in the old Testament. I mean, one doesn't have a name. It's an Egyptian, uh, with, which is five cubits. So that's in the seven-foot neighborhood.

Goliath, in the Masoretic text, is six cubits and a span, which is nine feet, six inches tall. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, he's four cubits and a span, which is six foot six. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I view these individuals as being unusually tall, you know, six foot, upper six foot, maybe seven feet, you know, that kind of thing, kind of like today. And that makes sense because based on skeletal remains, at least from 1000 BC onward, you know, because we don't, you know, linen and balm. So it's not like we've got, you know, ancient Israelite mummies or Canaanite mummies and that kind of thing. But the average, you know, the best guesses by people who focus in this area are the average Israelite male is probably five, five, five, five, six, you know, five and a half feet tall.

Women are a little shorter. So if you've got a guy who's a trained warrior, who's six and a half feet tall, and, you know, you're just sort of the podunk rabble, you know, from Egypt. You got a bunch of these people that are living, they're scattered throughout the land. I mean, I don't think we should think of this in terms of a race. I think we should think of this in terms of a scattered population. In hill country, there's concentrations. You get some in the Shafala Valley, in the conquest and some of the major urban centers. But you've got these people that they keep running into, and it's like, we're just toast. I mean, you can see where the 10 spies would come back and say, to quote the Aliens 2 movie, we're just dog meat.

Of course, Joshua and Caleb were like, hey, the Red Sea, that should have told us something. Did you remember that? I don't think we're dealing with something freakish. Or Hollywood-ish or cartoonish.

I think these are people who are just unusually tall and that's how their height is parsed based upon the Israelite story. Would you say though that they do have a genealogical background that's a combination of spiritual and human like Genesis 6 or does that the later Anakim, are they just more purely human? I would say, again, I'm one who says that the Bible doesn't teach us anything intentionally scientific. Because if that was the point of the Bible, God made some really terrible choices in authors. You know, why would he pick somebody living in the second millennium B.C. to tell us about advanced physics? Like, like God,

could you realize that that's just not going to work out really well? You know, Oh God just downloaded all that information and it's secretly encrypted in a Bible code. Well, that's great. That means everybody who read it, nobody could understand it. That's wonderful. There's the communicative enterprise for you right off the bat. You know, so I, I, you know, I, I'm one that says this has nothing to do with science. So I think we should resist using scientific language. Nevertheless, I will say that because all of these groups wind up going back to, you know, Babel is such a big deal. You know, Babel and Babylon pop up in the craziest places in the biblical worldview in all

periods. So much of this, the language group terminology winds up either in Amorite traditions, and we have to realize that Hammurabi was an Amorite. This is the Amorite dynasty of Babylon. For the Amorites, that actually means something to an Israelite. It means lots of chaotic, spooky, spiritual stuff. So we've got Amorites, we've got Hurrians, we've got Anatolians, the Hittites. They all have these same traditions because they're culturally mixed to a much greater degree. And also prior to Israelite occupation. They all use cuneiform, for instance.

They all have the same sort of flood stories and all that kind of stuff. Because it goes back to the great chaos enemy Babylon, I would say that there is a spiritual heritage here in some fashion. I don't know that we can use the language of DNA, because frankly, how does DNA, how do you get spirit stuff in DNA anyway? You know, it just doesn't seem the right way to talk about this kind of thing. But I think in view of who these people were and where they came from, when you saw among their ranks, who these people were and where they came from, when you saw among their ranks somebody unusually tall, the first thing you thought of was the Al-Qalu, like Gilgamesh,

the giant warrior from, you know, this is who the Babylonian gods raised up to oppose us. I mean, there's really just literally no other way you're going to parse this people group and that subset within that people group. You're just going to think that out of the gate, just out of the gate. This is what we're dealing with. They're still around. When are these guys going to die off? And so you go into Canaan or the Transjordan, why does God lead them up to the other side of the Jordan? And God tells Moses and Joshua, leave the Moabites alone, leave the Ammonites alone, because the descendants of Esau,

Isaac's other kid, the descendants of Esau have already eliminated them. They've already dealt with the Zuzim and the Zamzumim and the Amim and all, you know, don't worry about them. You go up to Bashan. Why Bashan? Because that's where the last of the Raphaim are, the Amorite kings. They must be taken care of. And you're going to do it here,

and then I'm going to bring you back to the same spot where you didn't believe. Okay. When we cross into Canaan and you will confront the Anakim who are Rephaim, which that's where these guys are. And they come from the, you know, it's this whole thing again, you're, this is why I think they're targeted because they, they, they do represent. And I think in some sense, there is a physical lineage going on here, because their own people would have identified

in the same way. They would have believed that these people descend from the gods in some way, and they have this lineage to them, this post-flood-up-Kalu tradition. So both sides are going to be thinking about these individuals the same way, and they become the thing that has to be targeted and dealt with. Can you explain the family tree of the three terms you use? So Nephilim, Rephaim, and Anakim, is that right? And what's the relation? Is Nephilim the overarching category?

Yeah, Anakim is a term that you'll see in Deuteronomy 2 and 3. And in Numbers 13, this is the group where when the spies go in, they bring back the report and they say, we saw the Anakim in the land. The sons of Anak is another way they're referred to. Yeah. And it says explicitly that they come from the Nephilim. to. And it says explicitly that they come from the Nephilim. So Anakim is an important term in the Canaan side, you know, Canaan proper. On the other side, the Anakim were called Rephaim.

So you get this terminological mix. If you read through Deuteronomy 2 and 3, it'll say that the Anakim, you know, are Rephaim. And that's where you also get Amorite, you know, referred to, but, but Amos two sort of lumps them all together. When Amos talks about the con the, the conquest and Amos two, nine, and 10, he refers to them all as Amorites, you know, tall as cedars and all that kind of stuff. Okay. See, it's kind of interesting. and all that kind of stuff. See, it's kind of interesting. Canaanite and Amorite and even Hittite are actually umbrella terms

for the pre-Israelite occupants of the land. And then a subset of them are these other guys. You know, like Ezekiel. There's a reason why Ezekiel 16 starts out with, you know, our father was an Amorite and our mother a Hittite I don't know if I have those two reversed but there's something going on there that's actually significant to an Israelite mind

but these are the guys so you get these terms used with some geographical concentration but they do overlap too and Raphaim is important I think this is what you're angling for. Because in Second Temple Judaism, when you killed one of these, their disembodied spirit

is what became known as a demon. Okay. The seeds of this idea are in the Old Testament in passages like Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 32. And there's a couple of Psalms where you have the Rephaim and Sheol. Right. Okay. And, you know, they're not handing out party favors. Okay. You know, you just, you don't, this is the place you don't want to be to begin with. And now, now they're there. to begin with. And now they're there. And again, it provides these little kernels, these little data points for linking that term with the biblical material of the giant clans, you know, when they were still alive, you know, on earth and all that. And then, you know,

some of these places like Bashan and Ashtaroth and Eddari, which even in Canaanite texts were viewed as gateways to hell, gateways to the underworld. And it's very easy to see how on the other side of that, you could come out with Second Temple Jewish writers saying, okay, they're evil spirits and they live in the underworld and they can come out because the original sons of God offenders, they got locked up in the abyss. You know, they're in chains of gloomy darkness, as Peter says. But these guys aren't. So they come out every now and then to harass us and seek re-embodiment.

And boy, we hate these guys. You know, it's just, they're bad news. You know, we don't want to be there. We don't want to meet them. They're out to get us and harass us and harm us and possess us. And you can see, again, the logic that goes into the association. And in the Demon's Book, I build off a dissertation that's now published in the More Seaback series by Clint Wallen,

who did his dissertation on unclean spirits, the impurity of spirits. And he asks a really simple question. He says, why are they called unclean spirits, the impurity of spirits. And he asks a really simple question. He says, why are they called unclean? And it's not because they're ugly and they're icky, okay, like Hollywood. It's because in the Levitical worldview, the fundamental premise of uncleanness was forbidden mixture. And this is what they are. They're the product of forbidden mixture. So of course they're unclean. Duh. But again, to us, we have to, I mean, somebody had to write a dissertation on that. That doesn't like intuitively occur to us. It's why in Qumran, they're called bastard spirits. Well, that's what they are.

Lo and behold, the terminology actually makes sense. So you get – what I'm trying to get at here is for us, the worldview is really foreign, and it takes a lot of work to even penetrate why things are talked about the way they are. To an Israelite, and again, a literate Israelite, somebody who actually has a Bible, and, you know, a Second Temple Jew, a lot of this is just intuitive. I mean, they just know this stuff. So you're saying demons are the spirit that came from, that come from deceased giants.

That is the second temple answer to where do demons come from. Now, the title of the book is deliberate. The book title is Demons, and the subtitle is what the Bible really says about the powers of darkness. I want people to know that not all the powers of darkness are demons. See, in Christian tradition, black hats are demons, white hats are angels. We're done then. This is why, again, I had one clock hour of training. And we didn't get into any of this stuff.

There's nothing to see here. Let's move on to something interesting and important. Like what? Dichotomy and trichotomy. We could spend a week on that. We can't do any of this. The demons you encounter in the Gospels, this is what the Jewish thinking is. Did you have Archie Wright at all? in the gospels. This is what the Jewish thinking is like. I don't know if, were you a contempt,

did you have Archie Wright at all? Was he a, I mean, you went to Durham? I was at Aberdeen. Aberdeen. You went to Aberdeen. Okay. I think Archie went to Durham, but you know, Archie Wright, who has been teaching at Regent in Virginia, he more or less wrote the book on this, you know, The Origin of Evil Spirits. I mean, there's other good books. But Archie goes through and he collects all the material. That was his dissertation and got published by Morris Seaback. And, you know, Annette Yoshiko-Reed has done some really good stuff here. And, I mean, Stukenbrook has done great stuff.

Yeah. When you have, again, I don't, it's wonderful because I don't have to do any work. You know, it's just like, you know, you get a few of these dissertations and it's like, okay, there it is. But, you know, how do we process the data points? Yeah. Because there are a lot of unanswered questions, you know, like the relationships between the Satan figure and, you know, who will, again, be capitalized Satan in the New Testament. And he also is in the intertestamental period as well. But Satan figure and the demons and then the gods of the nations, the fallen gods of the nations, which is actually where Daniel gets his theology from.

You know, principality, the princes, the supernatural princes over the nations. Where does Daniel get that? There's a good example of a question that we never ask, okay? Like, where does Daniel get that? Is he sitting there one day in Babylon thinking, I got to finish chapter 10, but I don't know what to say. Let's just make something up. That looks good. Nobody will notice. I can move on to chapter 11. He gets his theology from the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. That the gods of the nations were assigned to those nations, allotted to them in a punishment by the Most High. Which is a situation that goes terribly wrong. And we know from Psalm 82, they're getting judged for sowing chaos among the nations and injustice and all this stuff. You know, basically they turn their charge,

each of them into an anti-Eden and accept worship for themselves and seduce the Israelites to worshiping them as well. I mean, it just goes very badly, but that's a third group. So it's this group that's over the nations. This is where Daniel gets his theology, that somehow geopolitical, you know, turf and empires are somehow linked to supernatural powers. You know, it's obvious that humans, you know, Nebuchadnezzar is just a guy, he's a king, he's a tyrant, but connected to what he's doing is a supernatural intelligence that influences his thinking. This whole notion of cosmic geography, as scholars like to refer to it. Well, that's where Paul gets his theology of the principalities and powers.

I mean, he does use the word demon occasionally. In 1 Corinthians 10, 21 and 22, and he's alluding to Deuteronomy 32, which tells us, again, that the gods, Paul considered the gods to be real entities, the Shadim, who are Elohim in Deuteronomy 32, which tells us again that the gods, Paul considered the gods to be real entities, the Shadim, who are Elohim in Deuteronomy 32, 17. So he does refer to them as demons, and that's usually a Septuagint thing, you know, because the Septuagint kind of levels the terminology. But in these cases, he uses rulers, thrones, principalities, powers, dominions, you know, all this kind of language. And what do all these terms have in common? They're terms of geographical rulership.

And in Paul's head, he's the perfect guy to use this language. Why would he be thinking of it? Well, he's the apostle to the Gentiles. It's his job to take the gospel to all these disinherited regions and preach to them. And God is going to fulfill the Abrahamic covenant that says it's through the seed of Abraham, Jesus, the Messiah, that these nations are going to be blessed. I mean, God is out to get people from everywhere. It's not just Israel.

And this is the stuff that I think, you know, I like Bible stuff. I like biblical theology. arrested by Paul's connection between the resurrection and ascension and really the kingdom of God with the nullification of the authority of the rulers and principalities and powers. Paul connects those two ideas when he talks about the resurrection. And more specifically, he connects it to the fullness of the Gentiles, which is the fulfillment of his job in the context of the Great Commission. So in other words, when I get asked what spiritual warfare is, my answer is really simple. It's the Great Commission. You have to ask yourself, what do the powers fear?

What don't they want to happen? I'll tell you what they don't want to happen. They don't want the fullness of the Gentiles to happen. Because as Paul says, when that happens, Israel will have its awakening, you know, whatever all Israel means, okay? But that fullness of the Gentiles is a catalyst to the awakening of Israel, and then the end will come. the Gentiles as a catalyst to the awakening of Israel, and then the end will come. This is when the sentence passed in Psalm 82 is going to be carried out. They're done. They're destroyed. They're not just nullified in the authority they have. That's been withdrawn. As soon as Jesus sat down at the right hand of God, okay, we're done with that. They have no authority over the people living in these places. You know, the Lord says, go get them. I mean, you have the authority now, the great commission,

the verse we all miss verse 18. It's not just Matthew 28, 19 and 20. There's verse 18. Okay. All authority has been given unto me in heaven and on earth. Yeah. Okay. Why is that new? It's because by God's own judgment, the Gentile nations had been under dominion of other gods. We're done with that. I wish we had time. I could tell you a great story about me going on a pagan podcast.

Oh, yeah. I'll give you the short version. So I get an email one day, and it's signed by Hercules. So it's like, okay, Hercules sent me an email, so I should probably reply to this one. So I emailed this guy back, and we got into a conversation. He said, look, I'm going to be up front with you because I'm a pagan. He goes, I worship the gods of Greece and Rome, and I just read your little book, Supernatural.

He goes, I loved it. He goes, I finally found somebody that will know what I'm talking about when we talk about the gods. He goes, will you come on my podcast? And I'm like, I'm not sure this sounds like it would be fun. You know, why not? So I go on this guy's podcast, and no lie, I mean, the audio is terrible. It's unfortunate.

But for the first, I don't know, five, ten minutes, it's this guy going through all these Greco-Roman texts that describe the Deuteronomy 32 worldview. We worship the gods we do because they're allotted to us. And the bigger gods said you do this and that. I have a passage from Plato, the demon's book, that illustrates this point. They even use allotment language. It's just remarkable. they even use allotment language it's just remarkable but but what it what it it did for me is like okay you know I had this moment of this epiphany like right on this guy's show and I'm listening to this and I'm like this is

awesome I mean even even if I mess this interview up I mean this was just worth it because I'm like getting all this information. So he goes through all this stuff and he says, I have one question. If the most high of Israel set this whole thing up, what does he want? It's like, Oh, I'm so glad you asked. And so it's like, you know, the rest of it was like, okay, just reimagine Paul's ministry. Paul goes into a Gentile city, and he preaches the gospel, and he could have a conversation. It probably happened every day to

Paul, every day. He's got some pagan in front of him. He says, look, I get it. I get it. You know, you guys worship these gods, and you're thinking, you know, if I believe this Jesus stuff, You know, if I believe this Jesus stuff and I realign my loyalty to Jesus, I'm in serious trouble. You know, the gods are going to get me. I mean, they could get my family. You know, who knows if enough people do this in the town, the gods are going to come after us. It was a fearful thing. And Paul could look at this guy in the eye and say, look, I understand that completely.

Because the Bible, you know, the Most High did this. But you have to realize that the same Most High became a man and was born of a woman, died on a cross, rose from the dead, and is ascended to his Father. And in doing so, he stripped away the authority of these gods over you. So not only are you allowed by the Most High, the one who set all this up, not only are you allowed and authorized to believe in Jesus, but he insists on it. to believe in Jesus, but he insists on it. So, I mean, it just, this is a gospel conversation with a pagan gender. I mean, in a sense, their worldview has space for everything you're saying in a way that's much, you don't have to say that whole narrative that you've been believing is wrong. Let me give you an alternative one.

You introduce Jesus as the Savior, the main point of the narrative that they're embracing. I have had people in, I mean, you know, I've gone to conferences and done this and there's a bunch of African pastors sitting in the back and they're bored to tears. It's like, well, we do this every day, you know, it's the same with, it's the Africans, it's the Hindus. Yeah. Okay. This is one of the reasons why I was motivated. You know what? I mean, I have a nonprofit because one of my listeners called me up one day and said I was stupid for not having one and told me he would start it for me.

So I, okay, go ahead and do that. And it's like when he does it, when like, when he's seriously, oh, what are we doing now? You know? And so we're, we got supernatural translated into over 20 languages now. But I've had Hindus and, you know, people from these really polytheistic cultures tell me that, holy cow. I mean, the conversation just changes instantly. We don't have to tell them that they're silly or they're superstitious or they're idiots.

Right. You know, for having this part of their worldview it's like yeah we know all about that you need to think about it a little differently just as you're talking so many so many passages are coming to mind but it made me think like that first peter three passage jesus goes and preaches victory over the spirits in prison is that the first peter three one um yeah that's not just a troubling side note that That's actually integral to this, to this story. He must go preach victory over this. Into spiritual warfare. Yeah. It's a gesture of spiritual warfare.

You know, I, that was the only, that was the passage and I think I allude to it in Unseen Realm about we were visiting churches when we moved to Madison. And a pastor at a church we were visiting literally stood up. They were doing a series on 1 Peter. We got to this passage, and I'm like all excited. Like, this is going to seal the deal. This is where we're going to go.

And he gets up, and he says, well, we've been going through 1 Peter, and today it's 1 Peter 3, 14 through 22. And I'm just going to be honest with you. This is just so weird. I don't know what to do with it. So we're just going to skip it. He said that in a pulpit and I'm like, I can't believe I just heard, you know, and my wife didn't have to ask me if we were going back, but it's like all you need for the passage. I mean, you look at it and I'll, But it's like all you need for the passage. I mean, you look at it and I'll, I mean, at the time I thought, just try. Just say something.

Just try. It's like, no, we're going to bail. But if you look at it, yeah, it looks weird. Why do we get baptism and the ark and Noah and the resurrection and the spirits in prison? Yeah. It's like Peter just like put it all in a blender and hit the button. Wow, let's see what comes out. This will be awesome. But all you really need, it's actually a fairly simple thing.

Typology. A type is a person or an event or an institution that foreshadows something to come. It's a nonverbal prophecy, if you want to put it that way. So as Paul had used Adam as a type of Jesus, you can talk about Adam to foreshadow something later about Jesus. So Peter uses Enoch as a type of Jesus in his writing. He knows the Enochian version of what happens before the flood, and he knows his audience is familiar with that. So he uses the Enoch story to illustrate something about what Jesus did, like a foreshadowing. So if you know the story, and I mean, in the book, I go through, you know, the, just the little basics

of the Enoch version, how, you know, the watchers who are the sons of God of Genesis six, you know, they've sinned and, you know, things are just going terribly with these Nephilim and all this stuff. And God's going to judge everybody. And he's, you know, he's holding them, you know, in prison, waiting to announce judgment. And so they get Enoch to go talk to God. And can you, can you tell God we're sorry? And boy, we shouldn't have done that. You're right. You know, we're, it was wicked. And can you just forgive us and let us out? And so Enoch goes and talks to God and he comes back and he goes to the spirits in prison. And what does he say?

Well, the answer is no. You guys are still going to be here so long. It's bad news. I mean, they're in prison. They're not getting out. So Peter takes this and he says, now let's think about Jesus. You know, Jesus goes to the spirits in prison. And again, this is this is me, how I presented an unseen realm. You know, Jesus shows up there and it's like, wow, what's the son of God doing here?

Maybe we want he's dead. He's not dead. You know, like, it's a good, even though we're down here, we're not getting down, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so Jesus, you know, is down there in the role of Enoch.

And the way I imagine is Jesus saying, yeah, I'm here, but I know something you don't. I'm not going to be here long. I'm going to be know something you don't I'm not gonna be here long I'm gonna be out of here in three days and you're still going to be here so you didn't win anything you think you do and so does your master but that is incorrect so that's where you get the resurrection there and so Peter says when you get baptized when you, you know, this whole death, burial, resurrection imagery.

OK, when you get baptized. It is not only a confession and a profession to the people watching you, because this act identifies you as a member of the kingdom of Jesus and aligns your loyalty with him. It's also a message to them. It's like a reenactment of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection out of the realm of the dead, and they're still there all over again. Every believer is a persistent, salt the wound reminder to them that they are the losers in this exchange. Wow. And so then you get the language of conscience, which if you look it up in BDAG, it can be a pledge of loyalty. I mean, this is what baptism is.

I mean, it's not – if you understand the typology, it's not that hard to noodle it. But there's a gap there. Why? Because we're Protestants. We don't talk about Enoch. We don't talk about that Dead Sea Scroll stuff, that Second Temple, whatever it is. We just read the Bible. Great.

Great. Just like Peter, right? He had no idea what he was doing. And then we skip over passages in the Bible when we do. I mean, I use the analogy of one Enoch. People are always troubled by the quote in Jude or whatever. I'm like, look, one Enoch, I don't think it was inspired by God, but it was as widely read as crazy love and purpose-driven life combined today. And we quote from spiritual, inspiring literature all the time. Everybody knew one Enoch in that day.

Everybody knew Enoch. And the thing is, if you're driving and listening to this or watching, and you shouldn't be because it's video, you might want to pull over the road. I'm going to say something shocking. Take out a pen. Biblical writers read books. There you go. They really did. They were illiterate. They read books.

And when they were writing, they thought, you know, this is I like this book and lots of people read it. And I like what it says right here because it really helps me make a point. That's awesome. Yeah. I'm going to use that to make my point. Like, it's not rocket science. Yeah. You know, we don't have to have discussions about should we have Enoch in the canon?

Yeah. You know, everybody does this with Enoch, but nobody does it with the Baal cycle. All these Old Testament passages, they're dipping into the Baal cycle. Where's the discussion about should the bail cycle be in the canon? It's just because people don't – they don't have – they haven't been taught. I mean this is going to sound inflammatory, and I guess I have to do this once in a podcast interview. We have been taught, I think, pretty poorly about how to think about the enterprise of Scripture, like how we actually got this thing. You know, even though we deny a dictation theory, we still have this sense that if it's in the Bible, the content can't appear anywhere else.

It's got to be totally unique. It's got to teach modern science it's got to you know you need a if you have a ph degree and you know phd in electrical engineering you figure out the bible code oh it just opens up to you you didn't have to get that degree it's in the bible you know we have these really funky ways of thinking about scripture where we don't want to affirm god the spirit is whispering every word in the air, because when you get to the synoptics, that just works really badly. Okay. But there's all this other stuff. Look, if you strip the humanity out of scripture, you undermine its

inspiration. You just do. You know, I think what we really need is to get a better appreciation for a providential view of inspiration. That God was involved in the lives of these writers from the very moment of their childhood all the way up through their adulthood. What they knew, what they experienced, what they learned. I mean, all of these things are contributing factors, and God maintains an interest in these people because he knows at one point in history, they're going to be at this place at this moment, and they are going to be equipped to do the job. You know, it doesn't have to be. What we've done is we've turned the Bible into a channeled book. This is what UFO cults do, folks, okay? We've turned the Bible into a channeled book. This is what UFO cults do, folks, okay? We've turned the Bible into a channeled book, and we have stripped out a moment-by-a-moment providential interest

and oversight in the whole thing. And it's really, it makes it vulnerable to criticism, and we can't process simple things like a biblical writer liked a book that he read and thought it would be helpful yeah like we can't process that yeah you know well michael i i i could talk to you for hours we're over and over an hour here and i'm uh i don't want to cut in too much of your time but uh um i would highly recommend i don't want to cut in too much of your time, but I would highly recommend... It just means I don't have to go to another meeting. Yeah.

So, I mean, Unseen Realm sold over 100,000 copies, right? So I think people, a good percentage of my audience is probably at least familiar with it. If you haven't read it yet, I would highly recommend. I don't know, Demons, I thought... I mean, I have this line around the house and my kids are like, what are you reading? I'm like, yo, this is good stuff. You got to check this out. But I highly recommend Demons. It's, yeah, a lot of the stuff we've been talking about,

you go into great detail. I mean, what I love about your work is, you know, as an academic who likes to speak broadly to the church like you do, I mean, your books are, I would say, very academic, but they're also very clear too. I mean, it helps if you know the languages and you do go deep in ways that if someone's not familiar, there might be a little loss, but I find your books to be very clear for academic work, which is, as you know, is not always, you know, um, the giftedness of academia, but, um, where else can people go find your work? You have a website, right? And, uh, yeah, the, the, the nerve center is DR as in doctor DR MSH. So just DR in my initials, drmsh.com, you know, it's, it takes you to everything else for the

books, you know, just go to Amazon, everything's up there. Uh, I have a,'s up there I have a you know I have a fringe pop a three two one YouTube channel where we do I mean I've been in the fringe community for over 20 years so we try to do a gentle not in other words non-confrontational apologetics response to crazy stuff that's you see on the history Channel and the internet and YouTube and stuff like that. So we're about 100 episodes into that. You know, the nonprofit gets my – anything I have rights to, I try to translate to give away for free. You know, they're languages, so it's mcclock.org. But everything you can find is on the website.

Naked Bible Podcast, we do one episode a week where we just do biblical stuff and we try to, again, do what we're doing here, like try to keep it in its own context. So, yeah, lots of things going on. School of Theology is new. That's why I left Logos, you know, to hook up with this. So it's a large church that has had a, I'll put it the way they put it. We no longer want to be an entertainment based church. We want to be a content producing church. So it's actually a network of churches,

about 20,000 people and very, very mission minded and very international in its focus. So they asked me if I can go there and help so it's like yeah yeah we're up for that that's celebration church is that right yeah and what city is that in it's in jacksonville okay jacksonville florida so they have they have seven or eight campuses internationally and a few other ones in florida and one in dc okay one in washington dc but it's Florida and one in DC. Okay. One in Washington, DC. But it's, again, if you've ever wondered what would happen if, if like one of these huge mega church networks all of a sudden decided or, or, or came with, was confronted with the realization that, you know, what we're doing here doesn't look a whole lot like the great commission and maybe we should be teaching people and getting people focused on learning Scripture and doing our job.

Yeah. Rather than having events. That's what we're dealing with. So it's been a two-year process for them. I've been there since January. it's kind of amazing to see the church just go through that and, and just try to try to do what we're supposed to do. You know, I don't really know any, I wish there was a better way to put it, but yeah, that's good stuff. Thanks so much, Michael, for being on the show. Uh,

we'll see you next time on, uh, Theology in Raw. If you're listening to the podcast, if you're watching the YouTube channel, please subscribe below and we will see you again. Hey, if you found this content helpful and beneficial for your spiritual life, please consider supporting Theology in the Raw by going to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw and support the show for as little as five bucks a month. Get access to premium content like once a month blogs, once a month podcasts, and access to the Theology in the Raw community. Again, that's patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. And if you don't want to give it to the show, that's really cool too. This is a public podcast. So I'm glad you listened to this entire episode and are still listening to my voice well after an hour into this conversation. Okay, I'm going to stop talking and I'm going to see you next time on Theology Narrow.