Finish this rhyme: Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum [I smell the blood of an Englishman].
Do you know the next line? “Be he alive, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
Two children’s movies featuring hungry giants were recently released:
In The BFG, unlike the Big Friendly Giant, the evil giants want to eat humans. They have names like Bloodbottler, Manhugger, Fleshlumpeater, Childchewer, Meatdripper, Bonecrusher, Gizzardgulper, and Butcherboy.
In Trolls, the Bergens are large creatures who never feel happy. They discover that they can feel happy for a moment if they devour a Troll. The Bergens put the Trolls and their tree in a cage, and hold an annual festival, called Trollstice, in which each Bergen gets its feeling of happiness by eating a Troll.
Do you see a pattern among giants? It might surprise you, but this idea that giants eat people comes from the Nephilim of the Old Testament.
If you missed our last study, let me try to quickly catch you up. In Genesis 6:4 we read,
Gen 6:4 There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
The word “giants” translates to Nephilim. They were a race of superhuman beings of great stature that were produced by fallen angels marrying and mating with human females.
They were a primary reason for the global flood wiping out all of humanity, save Noah and his family. The fallen angels were corrupting the DNA of the human race in an attempt to prevent the birth of the Promised Seed of the Woman – the Savior, Jesus Christ.
We see Nephilim – lots of them – post-flood, in the Promised Land. It seems their strategy there was to prevent Israel from possessing her land.
Back to Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum. By all extra-biblical accounts, the Nephilim ate the flesh and drank the blood of humans. One researcher of ancient texts on the subject summarized, saying, “their crimes, which include murder, cannibalism and the consumption of blood, are driven by their insatiable appetites.”
Much of the information about the behavior of the Nephilim comes from the Book of Enoch.
Enoch you know from the Bible. He’s introduced in the Book of Genesis. He was the great-great-great-great-grandson of Adam. He appears to have been a nonbeliever until the birth of his son, Methuselah.
Genesis 5:22–24 says, “After he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked faithfully with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Enoch lived a total of 365 years. Enoch walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.”
Hebrews 11:5 gives more details: “By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death: ‘He could not be found, because God had taken him away.’ For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.”
Enoch was removed from the earth prior to the judgment of the global flood. He is thus a type of the rapture of the church, as we will be removed from the earth prior to the judgment of the Great Tribulation.
Noah and his family, kept safe on the Ark through the flood, are typical of the nation of Israel being saved through the Great Tribulation.
The book attributed to Enoch was circulated widely in Jewish and Christian circles for several centuries. It is divided unto five major sections. The first section, called The Book of the Watchers, is the one pertaining to the events in Genesis chapter six.
According to the Wesley Center:
In The Book of the Watchers, Enoch is a righteous man who has received heavenly visions. The book is a collection of revelations regarding divine judgment. It describes the rebellion of angels. The fallen angels, called “Watchers,” have sexual intercourse with human women, who give birth to a race of wicked giants. The giants lay waste to the earth and humanity, and so become the occasion for the flood, in which they are destroyed. But once their demonic spirits are released from their dead bodies, these demons wreak havoc in the world until the end time of judgment.
The book itself was considered to be “lost” until the 18th century, when European travelers to Africa discovered that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church had preserved a version in its biblical canon.
Since then, fragments of the work in its original Aramaic have been discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Portions of the text in Greek and Latin have also survived.
By the 4th century, the Book of Enoch was mostly excluded from Christian canons, and it is now regarded as inspired by only the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
If it isn’t inspired, why refer to it? One scholar, who rejects it as inspired, nevertheless says this:
The fact is, the entire New Testament shows such a multitude of allusions and linguistic echoes of the entire corpus of… Enoch, that one can safely say, the book and its basic interpretations may not be Scripture, but are surely legitimated by the Bible and are therefore worthy of study and high regard by the Christian Church.
James Montgomery Boice said, “Enoch… could be wrong in many places… Nevertheless, it is significant for our interpretation… because it was apparently known by Peter and Jude who, in their oblique references to the same subject, seem to put their stamp of approval on it, at least in this matter.”
Enoch is referred to, and quoted, by Jude, in his letter:
Jud 1:14 Now Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men also, saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of His saints,
Jud 1:15 to execute judgment on all, to convict all who are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.”
If you read Enoch alongside Second Peter, you’ll see many similarities when Peter is discussing the days of Noah.
When both Peter and Jude wrote about angels who sinned in the days of Noah (Second Peter 2:4-5; Jude 6), they were alluding to history in Enoch that is not part of the Genesis flood account. Genesis, for example, never tells us that the sons of God were imprisoned until the end of days, but Enoch does (Enoch 6: 1-4; 7: 1-6; 10:4, 11-13), and Peter and Jude take it as true.
The historian, Josephus, refers to Enoch. Many church fathers, from the first through the fourth centuries, quoted from Enoch, some as inspired, but all at least as being accurate and authoritative.
Modern scholars we would trust can show passages in the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel of John, Colossians, Hebrews, and the Revelation that bear similarity to passages in Enoch.
Since Peter and Jude believed that Enoch was in part an accurate and authoritative source of historical information regarding the Days of Noah, we can at least seriously consider what it says.
Back to the Nephilim giants. Enoch identifies the “sons of God” by name, claiming there were two hundred of them. Collectively he refers to them as “the Watchers,” whose mission it was to watch-over human beings but not interfere.
“Watchers” is in fact a title that appears as a description of supernatural persons in the Bible. Daniel 4:17 says, “This decision is by the decree of the watchers, And the sentence by the word of the holy ones…”
In Enoch, one of the Watchers is named Azazel. He is, in fact, the worst of them. Azazel appears in Leviticus 16:8. The word is translated “scapegoat,” but that’s a stretch. The Jews in Jesus’ day understood it to refer to the fallen Watcher by that name.
We started by describing the Nephilim as eating humans. Enoch reads, “ The women became pregnant and gave birth to great giants… They ate the labors of men. As [men] were unable to supply them, the giants grew bold against them and devoured the men. They began to sin against birds, animals, reptiles and fish, and to eat the flesh of each other. And they drank the blood.”
Other ancient extra-biblical books also attest to this eating of flesh and drinking of blood.
This tradition was known to the Jews in the first century, and believed by them to be true, giving context for the words of Jesus when He pointed back to the days of Noah:
Mat 24:38 For as in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark,
We hear, “eating and drinking,” and think of dinner out at Figaro’s. Those same words to a Jew meant flesh-eating, blood-drinking Nephilim.
The point I want to make is that we have generally ignored what is an important part of the days of Noah, and of the conquest of the Promised Land:
The Nephilim figured prominently in the flood account.
They were major players in the conquest of the land.
They factor in to the New Testament, especially in Jude and in Second Peter.
When Jesus said, “they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage,” He wasn’t saying folks will be attending weddings and enjoying the menu at the receptions.
He was pointing to a great evil in Noah’s day that would have a similarity to the end times.
I think it is the messing around with human DNA, which is on a fast track ever since the discovery of the technique geneticists call CRISPR.
Google it – C-R-I-S-P-R. It’s frightening.
In Noah’s day, fallen angels were messing with DNA. Today, fallen humans are doing it.
I’ll give you a preview of Sunday’s Prophecy Update. A recent article on a science website was titled, Human Ancestor Mated with ‘Ghost Lineage.’
Excerpts:
A protein that helps make human spit slimy reveals signs that the ancestors of modern humans interbred with an extinct human lineage…
Previous research… suggested that the ancestors of modern humans may have interbred with other human lineages not known from the fossil record. For example, a 2011 study analyzing modern human DNA found that the species may have bred with a now-extinct lineage of humanity before leaving Africa.
Now, researchers suggest that a “ghost” lineage of ancient humans may have contributed the DNA for a protein called mucin-7 found in the saliva of modern humans living in sub-Saharan Africa today.
https://www.livescience.com/59931-human-ancestor-mated-with-ghost-lineage.html
I’m no scientist, and I don’t want to read anything into it, but when I read, “ancestors of modern humans interbred with an extinct human lineage…” I can’t help but think sons of God and daughters of men producing Nephilim.
“As it was in the days of Noah.”