Dr Paul Allen

So the Bible doesn’t record an ancient expulsion from heaven by hordes of angels who then became known as demons, where do demons come from? There’s actually a straightforward answer to that question, but it’s likely one you’ve never heard of:  In ancient Jewish texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls, demons are the disembodied spirits of dead Nephilim giants who perished at the time of the great flood. While I referenced the Dead Sea Scrolls above, don’t be misled. This explanation for the origin of demons has secure links in the biblical text, they just aren’t obvious—to us anyway.  To an ancient reader, someone who lived during the time of the Bible, this explanation would have been quite clear. For us to see what they saw, we need to go back to the Bible’s account of the great flood. The sons of God, the Nephilim, and the Mesopotamian Apkallu Noah's Ark: The first four verses of the Bible’s flood account read: When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were ...

One of the strangest is Genesis 6:1–4, the episode in the days of Noah where the “sons of God” (called the “Watchers” in Jewish literature written during the time between the Testaments) transgress the boundary between heaven and Earth in an illicit relationship with the “daughters of humankind.” The act produced the Nephilim, who are the forebears of the giant clans encountered by Moses and Joshua (Num 13:32–33). There have been many attempts to strip this passage of its supernatural elements to make it palatable to modern-day people. All such attempts have significant flaws of exegesis and logical coherence. But the greatest flaw is that any view that humanizes the sons of God and denies the unusual nature of the Nephilim invariably violates the passage’s original context and polemic meaning. Prior to 2010, that assertion may have been contestable. That is no longer the case. Recent scholarly work on Mesopotamian literature associated with events before and after the great fl...