Where Angels Fear to Swim

Dan McClellan So I think what we have here is a reflection, an echo of this idea that there are angels bound. Only here it's placing them at the Euphrates River. And when they are set free, they're going to go and marshal an army of 200 million cavalry, and their horses are going to have the heads of lions and they're going to breathe fire and their tails are going to be like scorpions.

Dan Beecher Where are you going to find 200 million lion-headed horses? You can barely find two of them, let alone- There's not a market for that anymore.

Dan McClellan It is dried up.

Dan Beecher Just like the Euphrates.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we seek to increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How do, Dan?

Dan Beecher Hey, man, I am excited. We're going to delve into some crazy stuff.

Dan McClellan It's going to get weird, that's for sure.

Dan Beecher And stuff that some people are still flogging as potentially possible now.

Dan McClellan We're going to find out.

Dan Beecher We're going to find out if there is just literally underneath the surface, crazy things lurk here in the modern world.

Dan McClellan Yep. We're going to respond to a popular TikTok video from a popular creator that is going to remind those of you who are of a similar age as Dan and myself of an old Simpsons episode- ... that involved Lisa Simpson and her skepticism.

Dan Beecher So- Uh-oh. Skepticism coming up. That sounds like it is time for a patented Dan McClellan catchphrase. Why don't you hit us with it?

Dan McClellan All right. Let's see it. And today we are looking at a video from a gentleman who is on a handful of different social media platforms, goes by the handle khalilstoryteller on TikTok. I'm not sure if that's their real name, but they're going to talk a little bit about the Euphrates River, and this is something that has been in the news quite a bit recently and has been all over social media.

Dan Beecher But let's see what this creator- To be clear, the river is real. The river is real. So we're starting with a real river, and we'll go from there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this has as much relevance to the accuracy of these claims as the reality of New York City has- ... to the reality of Spider-Man. So, let's get into the first part of this clip. Have you guys heard of the scary things happening at the Euphrates River? It's one of the longest rivers in the world, and it's located in the Middle East. But lately it's been drying up, and in 2020 they started finding ancient caves that revealed themselves while the river was drying up. The caves and structures had been there all this time, and no one knew about them. Okay, we're going to pause there and talk about the two claims that are made here. One, that the Euphrates River is drying up, and two, that ancient caves that nobody knew about are being unveiled.

Dan Beecher Revealed.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Yes, by the lowering water levels. The first claim is accurate in a lot of ways. The Euphrates River, the water level has been going down, and this is something that has been somewhat cyclical. Every few years the water level goes down because of the convergence of a number of different factors, including climate change. But probably more directly related is a bunch of dams have been built further upstream on the Euphrates, and more people are diverting water further upstream, and less water is able to make it down into particularly the southern parts of Iraq. So this river that used to feed so much of Iraq's agriculture and their society is partly because of natural things that ultimately come back to human-caused problems and other issues related to dams. Now, in the video, this creator shows two satellite photos, one that shows a reservoir on a little bend in the Euphrates River chock full of water, and then one that shows it looking like a little trickle. Now, there are a number of things to note about this. One, that's a reservoir where somebody dammed up water, and that's why it is so full in the one picture. In the other picture, there was a drought because this was back in 2009. That's where there was a very serious drought that lowered the water level significantly as much and even more so in some places than it has been recently. So that satellite photo is showing circumstances 13 years ago. If you go on Google Earth and look for this reservoir today, you will see that it is back to almost the height of the water level that you see in the first picture.

Dan Beecher Well, Dan, I feel like you're poking holes in this guy's story, and that's not very nice.

Dan McClellan One also wonders if the Book of Revelation has anything to say about the Colorado River because it's in a very similar- Well, in fact, one of the videos that was done maybe six months ago that was trying to leverage this claim- Uh-huh ... took a photo from... They had a handful of photos of dried-up parched riverbeds.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And they insisted it was the Euphrates. One of them was from a river on the island of Lesbos in Greece.

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan And the other was of the Colorado River. So- Well, we've been really Drinking that one dry, so- Yeah ... it makes sense. But, the other claim here that this is uncovering caves also is only partly true, mostly false.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan See, back in a lot of these dams that have been built, some of them are to create reservoirs like the one in the satellite photo that gets shown all over the place without showing you the years. That flooded some cliffs, and we've known that there were ancient tombs carved into those cliffs. So it was like the '80s or the '90s when they originally created this reservoir and flooded this area and submerged all these rock-cut tombs from antiquity. So in 2008 and '09, when there was this drought and these water levels lowered, that was when we saw these rock-cut tombs, and people went, "Oh, forgot those were there." And they're just tombs. They're not prisons. They're not caves that people were living in. They were just rock-cut tombs.

Dan Beecher I mean, you say that, but the difference between a tomb that contains a human corpse and a prison for an angel, we might be talking semantics at this point.

Dan McClellan Not really.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But- All right.

Dan Beecher Fine. Let's go on and hear a little bit more from this creator.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so, what is being revealed is a handful of these rock-cut tombs.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so we've known about this. It's not something nobody knew was there. So the creator's claims there are false. Now, this is the scary part. The river drying up is actually in the Bible. In the Book of Revelations 9:14 through 9:15, it says, "Release the four angels who are bound at the great river of Euphrates." It then goes to say that the angels will be released to kill a third of mankind. That's around 2.6 billion people.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So a couple of things to point out here. First, he says the river drying up is in the Book of Revelation, and then he shared a handful of verses that don't mention anything about the river drying up. He's talking about Revelation 9, where it talks about four angels being bound at the River Euphrates.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan It's in Revelation chapter 16. It's an entirely different story, where it says that the Euphrates will dry up so that the kings of the east can march across and go to battle against the land to the west- Okay ... the nation of Israel. And so these are two separate events within this mythical narrative of the Book of Revelation separated by six chapters. So it is kind of a bait and switch. It's manipulative to try to connect these two events. They're not connected in the actual text itself.

Dan Beecher But they both take place at the Euphrates, so checkmate, I guess.

Dan McClellan Yeah. The Euphrates was one of the most significant rivers in the world of ancient Israel at this time. That was the river that fed the civilizations of Mesopotamia that frequently exercised hegemony or oppressive rule over the nation of Israel. So it was a symbol of this oppressive regime and these empires that existed off to the east.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Let's hear a little bit more of what all this means.

Dan McClellan All right. Now, people have recorded and heard screams coming from the ground before. So this is a video with audio that has been shared a number of times on social media recently. The idea being- It's horrifying.

Dan Beecher I'm going to give it to him.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Those are very scary sounds- Yeah ... that he just played.

Dan McClellan And the video shows some shaky kind of found footage style imagery of what looks like some kind of excavated area, some dirt and stuff like that.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It looks like they found a place where there's a hole in the dirt.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Who knows what it is.

Dan McClellan And the problem with suggesting that these are sounds of angels that are bound under the drying up Euphrates River is that this video has been on the internet for almost 10 years. And the audio is very clearly added to the video. It is not part of the video because- ... when it was originally shared back in, I think 2015 or 2016, it was shown as part of a newsreel.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Somebody put a popular Arabic news station's frame around the video- Right ... and presented it as something entirely differently, but the audio repeats.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan At the end of the full video, the track repeats. And so it's very clearly somebody's audio overlaid on this video. But when this was originally shared, well, not originally, but when it became very, very popular, when it was shared millions of times, was just after the assassination of a famous/infamous Pakistani cleric named Sami ul Haq.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And the claim back then in late 2015, early 2016, was that this was footage of this cleric's grave, and this was audio of him being tortured in his grave as- Oh, my ... part of what I understand is one stream of tradition within Islam regarding unrighteous folks. But the video- Who'd have thought...

Dan Beecher Can I just say, who'd have thought- That one of the angels of the apocalypse would be a Pakistani cleric. You don't see it coming.

Dan McClellan And he didn't really hit the bullseye when it came to where he was supposed to be bound.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Pakistan is at some distance from the Euphrates River- It's a little ways off.

Dan Beecher Sure ...

Dan McClellan if my middle school geography- ... is accurate.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And the other thing to note is that people have found that video posted online even before that Pakistani cleric was assassinated. And so this is just something that- Man, just take your own video.

Dan Beecher Yeah. If you're going to do a conspiracy thing, just don't go recycling other video. Go to your backyard, dig a hole, and make your own video.

Dan McClellan That requires initiative. It requires effort. It requires creativity. In some instances, it requires money, and that's, I think, a bridge too far for- Yeah ... a lot of our conspiracy theorists. And so, that's absolutely not audio of bound angels. I know that has really freaked a lot of people out recently. But it has absolutely nothing to do with our text from Revelation, which is not about the future anyway- Right ... as we have discussed before on- Yeah.

Dan Beecher Bart Ehrman- ...

Dan McClellan this very podcast ...

Dan Beecher set us straight on that. But I will say this, the other thought is, people have been living along the Euphrates since biblical times, since Revelation was written, and nobody's heard that screaming, howling, whatever the whole time. It apparently couldn't resonate through the water or whatever. Just try to be a, even a modicum of skepticism would be useful- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan for this.

Dan Beecher All right. Let's hear what else we got.

Dan McClellan So were these caves and structures actually prisons for the angels? And now that the river is finally drying up, have they finally been released? Dun-dun-dun.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It's scary out there. Remind us a little bit, in Revelation- Mm-hmm ... what are these angels doing?

Dan McClellan So these angels aren't really doing much of anything. They're just one of the calamities that is supposed to befall the Earth. And what's supposed to happen, we got four angels bound at the Euphrates, and this is drawing from a tradition that was in circulation at the time regarding disobedient angels. And we'll talk a bit in our next segment about what that is about. But this is coming from traditions that are found in the Enochic literature and another Greco-Roman period literature, where basically, there were some disobedient angels, and they fell. And in the Book of Enoch, God binds some of them, and they are, like the Valley of Hinnom, outside of Jerusalem is likely where the text is saying some of them are bound. It also talks about them being bound under mountains. And so I think what we have here is a reflection, an echo of this idea that there are angels bound. Only here, it's placing them at the Euphrates River. And when they are set free, they're going to go and marshal an army of 200 million cavalry. So soldiers on horses, and their breastplates are going to be shiny and multicolored, and their horses are going to have the heads of lions, and they're going to breathe fire, and their tails are going to be like scorpions.

Dan Beecher And- Where are you going to find 200, what is it? 200- 200 million ... million lion-headed horses? You can barely find two of them, let alone- There's not a market for that anymore.

Dan McClellan It is dried up. And so, yeah, you will be lucky- Just like the Euphrates.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So you will be very lucky to find even one anymore in any kind of usable condition. And so, yeah. Some people are suggesting on social media, "Ah, well, this must be Russia and China collaborating, because only they could create an army that large." And that's laughable.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan If the two of them put together all of their currently active and reserve military, they'd have maybe six million, and not cavalry. So yeah- Yeah ... the attempts to try to historicize this and make this about the future are just laughable. And so to answer this creator's question, are these prisons? Is this angels bound? Are they going to be set free? The answer is, ha-ha, absolutely not- ... because the Book of Revelation is not about our day. And the final thing I want to add here in reference to this claim about the Euphrates drying up is that these water levels that are being depleted every few years because of climate change, because of dams diverting water, sometimes it's coming from other nations. This is ruining the lives of countless people who rely on this river for survival in ways that people who spend their days on TikTok, and I'm including myself in that, could never imagine. And so this is causing all kinds of suffering, and it is awful that people look at this and their first thought is not that there are a lot of people suffering because of climate change and because of these struggles for access to water. Their first thought is for making videos about how the end times are going to be here so that they can exploit this end times anxiety, get more clicks, get more views, and in the end, I imagine, get more money. And so- I don't think that this is even-- And even folks who are saying, "Well, this is for humor," or, "I'm just asking questions," which is sometimes what these people say. Stop doing it.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It is not helpful, and you're making light of circumstances that are ruining, and even in some cases, ending lives on the other side of the world.

Dan Beecher Well, and you're not even properly referencing what you're claiming to be referencing. You're not doing anybody any favors warning them about end times that, A, were already meant to have happened.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And B, even if we were to interpret the Book of Revelation to be saying these end times are going to be applicable to now or whatever, yeah, you're bending and shaping the Euphrates River to be different things. It's just every time someone goes looking for the ways that the Revelation predictions are happening in a modern time, it ends up being destructive. It's never productive. And also, not for nothing, it's never right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Every time someone predicts, "Oh, it's coming." We just passed another rapture prediction moment.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Which, unless nobody was raptured, did not come true.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Maybe the rapture happened and, like, two guys went and none of us knew about it.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and that's another claim from the Book of Revelation, this idea that there was a vision of a woman travailing in delivery, and she has a crown of 12 jewels on her head, and the moon is under her feet, and people think this is the constellation Virgo. And they try to squeeze these things in so that it will make it relevant to today. And yeah, it never happens. It ends up causing an awful lot of anxiety. I was fortunate enough not to be raised with any of that kind of ideology, and so that's not something that computes for me. But I understand that this causes untold anxiety in the lives of people all around the United States and other parts of the world. And so, yeah, it is corrosive. It is not helping anyone. It may get you a few extra clicks one day. But is that really worth cumulatively adding to the suffering that's going on around the world? I saw somebody put on TikTok a video where somebody was like, "Me waking up on September 20th." And they were like, "Time to go outside and fix the world now that all the problems are gone." And then they go outside and everybody's still there and they, "Oh."

Dan Beecher Darn it.

Dan McClellan All right. Yeah, so these videos are harmful. These videos are ignorant, and misleading, and that is some of the misinformation, the spread of which we are trying to combat on this channel.

Dan Beecher Well, for this week's chapter and verse, we're going back toward the beginning of the book, back to Genesis. And we're in Genesis 6 now. There are other creators who are making interesting reference to this. This isn't from Revelation, but man, people are talking about this in some fascinating ways. You're going to help me help expound on it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We'll start with the very first line of this, or the first verse, which is, "When human beings began to increase in number." We're back at the beginning of creation, so we're sort of early on.

Dan McClellan Towards the beginning of creation. Not all the way to the beginning, but yeah.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher We're still new. Humans are still new.

Dan McClellan We've just gotten through this long genealogy, so folks like Adam and folks like that have passed away.

Dan Beecher Oh, that's true. So, if you refer back to our episode on the patriarchs and- Mm-hmm ... the age of them, we're many thousands of years or- Yeah, we're thousands of years into this at this point, because those dudes were living for crazy amounts of time. But human beings are still pretty new.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And you know what?

Dan Beecher I'm reading the NIV, so just- Okay ... to clue people in. It's just what- Full disclosure ... my browser happened to pull up, so.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher "When human beings began to increase in number on the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married them, or they married any of them they chose."

Dan McClellan Mm.

Dan Beecher Okay. Mind blown. Who are the sons of God? What is happening?

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Why do they get to choose all the pretty girls? What is going on?

Dan McClellan So, the Hebrew here is bene ha-elohim. So literally, sons of the God. And this is a term that occurs a handful of times in the Hebrew Bible. It occurs in Job, talks about the sons of God shout for joy at the foundation of the earth. It occurs in the beginning of Job, where it says there was a day when the sons of God presented themselves before the throne and Satan was among them. And it occurs in a handful of other places. In Psalm 29, the psalmist calls upon the-- Here it's bene elim, a different form of the word for God, but still a plural, sons of God.

Dan Beecher You said that it was Elohim. Now, sometimes that word refers to a singular God, and sometimes that word refers to multiple gods, right?

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Yes. Do we know that this is a singular version of that? Of the use of that word?

Dan McClellan It is possible it could be plural. It could be sons of the gods.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan That's not outside the realm of possibility. Elohim is a concretized abstract plural, and I don't know if we've talked about this before on the channel, but this might be fodder for a future episode. But the idea is that Elohim was originally a plural that began to be used as an abstract plural to refer not to deities, but to divinity.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And then it became used so frequently in reference to specific deities that it became concretized or re-concretized. And so it can be used in reference to a single deity or a plural, and you can know just by looking at the verbs and the pronouns. If they're plural, you have plural deities. If they're singular, you have a single deity. Unfortunately, here, we don't have any verbs or pronouns associated with the word Elohim, so we cannot tell. We can only- Okay ... deduce from usage. And based on comparison with the other literature from ancient Southwest Asia, the other Northwest Semitic literature, the bene Elohim seem to be the second tier of deities in the Northwest Semitic pantheon, which generally had the divine pair at the top. So that would be the high deity and their consort. And their children, the bene Elohim, the children of God, would make up the second tier of the pantheon, and they would be responsible for the functioning of the universe. And then according to some reconstructions, there's a third tier of craftsman deity- Oh, wow ... and then the fourth tier would be the servile deities, the servants, which is largely in the Bible, this is messenger deities or angels.

Dan Beecher Okay. And so Genesis 6- And all of them are chained up under the Euphrates, so.

Dan McClellan Well, we're going to get to that.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan They're not there yet.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So Genesis 6 is talking about this second tier, and it's kind of going to condemn them for being a little too randy and not obedient enough to their station. And so they like the looks of the human women, which is something that evidently the gods of the ancient societies, that was their wont.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so they go down and took wives of all those that they chose, which is going to result in something- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher unfavorable.

Dan McClellan But we've got a verse in between this and this.

Dan Beecher Yes. And it has echoes of, like you mentioned, of Greek gods taking human brides or human mates. The whole concept is fascinating.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So, yeah, let's move on. This is verse three. "Then the Lord said, 'My spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal.

Dan McClellan Their days will be 120 years.'"

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And contend is one interpretation of the verb here. It's a very uncommon verb.

Dan Beecher It's dun.

Dan McClellan So daled, vav, nun are the three letters of the verbal root. And it can mean contend if we hypothesize that it comes from a specific root. It could also mean remain or stay.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And so, what does the King James Version say? "My spirit shall not always strive with man."

Dan Beecher Oh, interesting.

Dan McClellan And I think some people understand strive in the martial sense, but the idea is remain with. And so this seems to be suggesting that there's... And it says, "Their days will be limited to 120 years." And this is basically God saying, "I'm sick of people living to be 930, 969 years. We got to put a stop to this. We're going to cap it at 120- ... and that's my final offer." So you got to imagine the Pawn Star guy going, "Best I can do is 120."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And yeah. And so the idea that God's spirit will not always remain with humanity, with man, seems to suggest that human lives are kind of sustained by an indwelling of the spirit or the companionship of the spirit. Somehow, God's spirit is sustaining human life, and God's like, "Not anymore." And so this is something that we see in the Mesopotamian literature, where the Sumerian King Lists and different Akkadian iterations of that have the pre-flood kings living or having reigns that are 38,000, 42,000 years long. And then after the flood, it's like you only get 1,200 years to reign.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, there's a big drop-off as soon as you have the flood. And here, we're setting the stage for the flood, because God doesn't seem happy about what's going on here. Verse 3 suggests that it is a result of the sons of God having offspring with the daughters of humans, that he's like, "Ugh, this is a problem."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so the solution is, well, we're going to cap the years, and then after the next verse, God's going to say, "Well, no, we need to do more than that. We're just going to destroy all of humanity."

Dan Beecher Goodness. That sounds extreme. I will just say that. My mind made an interesting connection. It's a feeble connection, so I wanted- ... to check in with you about it. Because contending with God, isn't that the meaning of a word that's very prominent? Contends with God or strives with God?

Dan McClellan Well, that would be the name Israel.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, that's one way to interpret it. I think more than likely, the name Israel, the idea was El contends, God contends.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But, yeah, there are different ways to interpret it. And there's a little etiology in Genesis, we have Jacob fighting with God.

Dan Beecher Right. And, that's where God says, weird story, where- We'll get to that one, I'm sure.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We're going to talk about that at some point, and genitals are involved.

Dan Beecher It gets weird.

Dan McClellan And then there's a reference in Hosea, and Hosea suggests it's an angel. But I would argue that that's actually an interpolation. Someone has changed that. But the story is basically an etiology for where Israel got his name, and that it means contends with God. But that probably wasn't what that name originally was understood to mean.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Fascinating.

Dan Beecher Sorry about that. Just wanted to go down a little rabbit trail right there.

Dan McClellan All right. I'm going to keep reading.

Dan Beecher Okay. So, we've got human women being taken as wives by sons of God, the Lord getting a little bit huffy about that, and then we get to verse four, which is, "The Nephilim were on earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them, they were the heroes of old, men of renown."

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Nephilim. That is a can of worms right now- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan on the internet.

Dan Beecher Walk us through it. What have we got? What are the Nephilim?

Dan McClellan So, Nephilim, there is some debate about what this means, but I think most scholars would probably say this comes from the verbal root naphal, which means to fall, and is frequently used to refer to dying. And I think the theory that I think makes the most sense is that this is a reference to an ancient tradition of the spirits of deceased warriors, people who fell in battle, and so were celebrated as heroes of old, warriors of renown, as it says. And there is some lack of clarity in this verse. Who are the heroes of old, the warriors of renown? Is it the Nephilim, or is it the children of the union of the sons of God and the daughters of humans? It's not perfectly clear, and there are arguments for both sides of that. But I would suggest that, well, actually, I think they could work either way. It could be these demigods that were the product of this union became the heroes of old, the warriors of renown. But it could also refer to the Nephilim.

Dan Beecher A Hercules sort of figure.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so, there's an argument to make that there's some resonance with some of these other traditions about demigods from elsewhere in the world. Now, when we look at the Greek translation of this passage, the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, it does not transliterate Nephilim, like many English translations do today. It says gigantes, which would be giants. So, there are a lot of translations that render giants here, because of this Greek translation. And this is based on a tradition that arose probably within the Persian period and into the Greco-Roman period. So, we're talking the end of the sixth century up to 500 BCE, 400, 300 BCE. We have the Enochic literature, like 1 Enoch, a very famous text that was phenomenally influential within Greco-Roman period Judaism and early Christianity before finally being jettisoned from most biblical canons. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church still includes 1 Enoch in their canon. But 1 Enoch is basically a retelling of this story. This is the center of the story, and then several other stories from the Book of Genesis. And it's expanding on things and is building on this tradition, because we just have these few little verses, and they seem to be, many scholars would say this is a fragment from some separate story, and is just kind of inserted at the beginning of chapter 6 here to make it seem like there was some reason for God to be upset.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It does feel out of the blue. It feels- Yeah ... very apropos of nothing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Because you could take out verses two and four, and the story would actually make more sense. It's like the men began to multiply. So, here's the NRSV. "When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, daughters were born to them."

Dan Beecher Skip.

Dan McClellan "Then the Lord said, 'My spirit will not abide in mortals forever. They are flesh. The days will be 120 years.'"

Dan Beecher Skip.

Dan McClellan "The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great on the earth." It makes more sense without this.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But I think that this story seems to be inserted in here to give a better case that people needed to be killed, by suggesting that there's all this wickedness and these monsters that are resulting from the wickedness of the sons of God, who are reinterpreted in the Enochic literature as disobedient angels.

Dan Beecher Whoa.

Dan McClellan Yes. So, we talked a little bit about the pantheon earlier, where we have the high deity and their consort, and then their offspring are the second tier, and then we've got the servile deities, the angels at the bottom.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan As we move into the Persian period and the Greco-Roman period, there's a lot more discomfort with the parity between the different deities of the pantheon, and you get a lot more exaltation of the God of Israel. We have this rhetoric of incomparability, and we have the authors of the biblical and other literature championing Adonai as incomparable to everybody around them. And so, we get what Seth Sanders has called pantheon reduction, where other members of the pantheon are like, "Eh, you're not welcome anymore. You're not good enough." And I suggest we get a squeezing of the pantheon where Adonai pops out the top as the main baddie, and then all the other deities get squished down into the bottom tier. And so, the bene Elohim, the sons of God, are now squished down into the servile angelic tier. And so, where they used to be the patron deities of the nations of the earth, they are now angels. And so, in 1 Enoch, we have them represented as angels, and they rebel, they come down to earth, they teach humanity all this wicked stuff like murder, like makeup.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That's in 1 Enoch.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan All right. They teach him how to make weapons. Basically, all of the evil that is on the earth is a product of these disobedient angels coming down and teaching humanity about all this bad stuff.

Dan Beecher I'm just going to say, murder and makeup do not feel like they are on the same plane. Those feel like two very different levels of naughty.

Dan McClellan I don't remember if they are juxtaposed on the actual list or if they occur farther apart.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But you have these angels being named, and so and so was whoever knew about makeup, or so and so was the one who knew about abortion- Interesting ... and this kind of stuff. And one of the things that they do is that these angels sire offspring with human women, and initially, they create the giants. And, the giants, when they die, the spirits or the ghosts or whatever that come from their corpses are the Nephilim. And so this is- Oh, wow.

Dan Beecher So, they are dead giants. They are expired.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And we've got a few different versions of this tradition, but in the Book of Enoch, the Nephilim are not the direct product of this union. And so when we see Nephilim in the Hebrew Bible, there's only one other place where the Nephilim are referred to, and it's in, I want to say Numbers. And this is where they have the spies they're sending into the land to see if Canaan is suitable for them to come in and take over, and they come back and go, "Oh, ah. Yeah, we barely got out of there with our lives. They had the Nephilim, or these giants. We were like grasshoppers to them." Which is probably one of the reasons that we have this statement here, which is kind of peculiar. "The Nephilim were in the Earth in those days, and also afterwards," because we're about to have the flood wipe everything that breathes out.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so, all the Nephilim are obviously going to be killed as well. And so, we seem to have somebody who's inserting this story here going like, "Ooh, we got an issue here, boss. We'll just write that they were there afterwards as well."

Dan Beecher "Okay.

Dan McClellan That'll work."

Dan Beecher They had snorkels.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher They were fine through the flood. They were very tall, so their noses- Yeah ... did not go below the waterline.

Dan McClellan And if I recall, the Book of Enoch, the first Enoch says that the giants were 450 feet tall or something like that.

Dan Beecher Oh, that's quite tall.

Dan McClellan Yeah, pretty big.

Dan Beecher Yeah. You'd notice.

Dan McClellan Not Goliath. Yeah, not Goliath, 6'4", but yeah, something much larger than that.

Dan Beecher We're not talking cubits and a span. We're talking up there.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But you see the influence of this tradition in a number of different places within early Jewish literature and early Christian literature, and in the Bible. For instance, there's a part in one of the Epistles of Peter where it talks about the disobedient angels in the days of Noah.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And that's a reference to this. We've talked about the Book of Jude, where it talks about Sodom and Gomorrah pursuing strange flesh or other flesh, sarkos heteras, which would be other flesh. And this is most likely a reference to this idea that angelic or intercourse between angels and humans is a big no-no. This is the great sin that brought evil into the world, is these angels having intercourse with the human women. And so, that becomes this symbol of everything that's wrong, is that intercourse. And there were even debates about whether or not this could actually happen. We see rabbinic debates about whether angels were sexually compatible with humans. And some of them are saying, "Oh, well, what it really means is that the angels were in the room when the women were having intercourse with their husbands, and so that's what made their children all messed up."

Dan Beecher I don't think that accounts for a 400-foot tall person, to be perfectly honest with you. Hey, you know what?

Dan McClellan It does not tag all the bases. You are correct.

Dan Beecher And so- I mean, I can see why they would want to distance themselves from this idea. This idea is I think it's fascinating. I think it's interesting, but it is a rough one. I'm also confused. Let me ask you this. I know that you're going down a path. We'll get back to it, but I suppose it would be the height of foolishness for me to suggest, are there female angels that then took husbands of humans, or is it just male angels taking female humans as their mates?

Dan McClellan I do not recall any references to female angels, and there is always a possibility that I am entirely wrong. But I don't recall any, and I do recall thinking that the idea of female angels is entirely absent from this part of early Judaism.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan So I'm going to say no. But I could be proven wrong, and if there's a listener out there who can prove me wrong, please do so.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I love it. So getting back to the path.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan These angels do not escape accountability. God punishes them, and this is another part of the Book of Enoch. And one of the things that happens is they get cast down. Some of them, some of the named angels, are bound, in, the Valley of Hinnom, which is associated with child sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible, later is a symbol of hell.

Dan Beecher And- Yeah, we've talked about that a little bit.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so this idea that these angels and the unrighteous dead are going to be inhabiting this realm is probably what starts the ball rolling on this idea of postmortem divine punishment, of hell. And so this tradition and the literature, the Enochic literature, sits at the foundation of a lot of the ideas that are going to be developing within early Christianity, and down to today. And so when we talk about fallen angels, when we talk about things like hell, when we look at some of this literature that is very prudish about sex, a lot of this is based on these traditions that were in circulation in Greco-Roman period Judaism about disobedient angels coming down and inappropriately having sex with human women, which is one of the reasons that in the New Testament, people are neither married nor are given in marriage in heaven, but are as the angels of heaven. This is a way to say, "Not the bad angels who had sex. They're going to be like the celibate good angels who are still up in heaven." So there are a lot of different ways that we see echoes and vestiges of this tradition within the Bible and elsewhere in early Christianity. And the Book of Jude, I didn't mention it earlier, but the Book of Jude actually directly quotes the Book of Enoch. And so when people talk about the Book of Enoch not being scripture, not being authoritative, not being inspired, one of the authors of a New Testament text certainly thought it was all of those things.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan And so we're rejecting that author's estimation of the Book of Enoch when they quote Enoch and say, "The seventh from Adam," and then shares a quote directly from the Book of Enoch. So we skip right over this, over Genesis 6 when people are reading this. It's weird. We don't know what to make of it. It's just these two passages. These two passages have had an immeasurable impact on the development of Greco-Roman period Judaism, which is the seedbed for Christianity. And so we see the echoes of this tradition, down to today in so many of the ideologies, so many of the stories, and so many of the traditions of Christianity, and even, to a much lesser extent, within Judaism.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It is easy when you don't understand something that you're reading in the Bible to skip down, especially when you know that half a page down, we're starting a very familiar story of Noah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And you just want to get to the good stuff on that. But yeah, there's this whole section that is befuddling and confounding and fascinating.

Dan McClellan And I think that's one of the reasons we have the Book of Enoch, is because it's so befuddling. And so we couldn't help but try to fill in the gaps, because we go from these angels, they took wives of the women, and then they had children with them, and then God saw that the wickedness of humanity was too much. And so what happens between verse four and five that this results in all this wickedness, and you get the development of this tradition. Oh, well, maybe these angels were wicked angels, and maybe they taught humanity all this wickedness and all this violence. And so it's kind of filling in the gaps in this fractured, stuttered, story that is probably the result of people cobbling together different traditions to just try to get some kind of rough narrative out the door.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Actually, that's really cool that the Book of Enoch would go through that and at least attempt to fill in those gaps because it is confusing- Yeah ... to jump straight to, "Well, everybody just got wicked. We got to kill all of them now."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I think- There's no line drawn in Genesis that makes any sense to me whatsoever about How we got to that level of evil that the Lord had to kill everyone.

Dan McClellan Yeah. But this is how some of these stories go. It's just like we're in verse one, it's like, "So it turns out everybody was evil." And, but, later on people are like, "Eh, we should probably ease our way into this one.

Dan Beecher We need to base this-" Although I've got to say, whoever it was that inserted the Nephilim as an explanation, you didn't do a great job. How does that reflect on humanity? That the sons of God dive in and start taking mortal wives.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher How's that our fault? Why are you blaming us for that?

Dan McClellan Yeah. And I think a lot of people use this pejoratively or facetiously, but I think 1 Enoch is one of our earliest really good examples of fan fiction.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Okay. This is taking this story and going, "Needs more. I'm going to write my own version of this."

Dan Beecher I love it.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, and including all of the kissy face and stuff like that- ... that so frequently goes on in the fan fiction.

Dan Beecher Well, you've got to include, you've got to jazz it up somehow.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That sells books.

Dan Beecher I do want to get to, we teased it a little bit. So you have talked about, to me at least, how Nephilim and giants are showing up in creators'- Yeah ... videos and stuff.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Talk a little bit about how people are talking about that, what they're saying, and why that might be coming up.

Dan McClellan Well, a lot of people are only recently finding out about the Book of Enoch and think it's fascinating and think, "Well, this has been hidden from us for so long," and think this makes so much sense of the world around them. And so they want it to be something that is historical and something that is accurate, just as much as they believe the Bible to be historical and accurate. So where did all these giants go? And so there is a remarkably durative contingent of conspiracy theorists and social media folk who think that there are giants hiding out around the world. And I think one- Oh, still alive?