Goliath, Og King of Bashan, And The Nephilim Giants Of The Old Testament?
START BY READING Joshua 6: 1-27 (whole chapter).
Joshua 6:21 is one of the most distressing verses and therefore subjects in the Old Testament and has put off many a person from becoming a Christian. And understandably so upon a first casual reading of this slaughter of human beings and animals.
But when you are reading your Bible and you come across something that makes you uncomfortable – please resist the temptation to simply move on to something else. Where the Bible makes us uncomfortable is precisely where WE NEED TO SLOW DOWN. It is compelling evidence of a specific weakness. When our thoughts or feelings bristle under God’s Word – Remember - He is right and we are wrong.
That said, it is understandable that so many would recoil from God’s command that every living person in Canaan be put to death, as His people conquer the land. No mercy for those women and children, no compassion on the aged, God’s instructions were as clear as they were brutal.
Many outside the faith have planted their flag here, arguing that our God is immoral, monstrous (RICHARD DAWKINS for example). Many on the fringes of the faith perform sundry exegetical gymnastics to wiggle out from under the account. Many faithful believers are simply puzzled and embarrassed. The God we worship, however, the true and living God, did in fact give this command, and rightly so. If we would rightly worship Him, even here we would praise His name. There are at least four reasons why God did this. The first is that The LORD YAWEH is sovereign, and as such is completely holy and does not make mistakes.
The second reason is evidenced in what came to pass when Israel did not obey God in this command. God wanted the land cleared of all temptations to His people to turn from Him, His worship and His law. The Canaanites were a threat to the purity of God’s people. He had set them apart, consecrated them and adopted them. In giving this order, He was protecting them.
Joshua, for all his faithfulness, left the job unfinished. Once Israel was in the ascendency, once they felt safe, they began to think it might prove helpful to leave some of the Canaanites around, to fetch their water and chop their wood. The book of Judges reveals the results. THOSE FEW WHO WERE SPARED BECAME A SNARE, just as God predicted they would. Soon, everyone did what was right in their own eyes.
Of course one might understand this motive, and still be horrified. These Canaanites were not mere abstractions, but real people. Is it not still rather cruel to kill them all simply for seeking to protect the moral purity of Israel?Perhaps - were that God’s only motive.
The third reason God commanded them all to be put to death is because they were all, every man, woman and child of them, SINNERS. And the wages of sin is DEATH. In short, God did this for the same reason He does all that He does, for the good of His people, and for His own glory.
It is because we are sinners, and because God so often showers us with grace, that we lose sight of the justice of God, and the blackness of sin.
When we read about the execution of the Canaanites we ought not to ask, “How could God do this?” but “Why does He not kill us all?” The shocking part of the story of the conquest of Canaan is God’s love for His rebellious people, not His just wrath toward other rebels. From the moment of our conception we are all under God’s just death sentence.
Every moment of every day is a momentary stay of execution. When we forget this truth we show ourselves to be the sinners we are. But praise His name, CHRIST CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS. He who knew no sin became sin for us, and died a sinner’s death that we might live. May we who are called by His name never lose either the amazing, or the grace, in amazing grace.
However, there is a fourth reason which is not readily discussed in many Christian circles, even by mature scholars and Bible commentators as they find it too hard to present to their followers, their readerships, and their congregations.
Namely that the Canaanites and their families and animals had become so tainted with sin and so corrupt as an ABOMINATION in the eyes of YAHWEH that they had become The Evil Seed or better THE SEED OF SATAN, and as such had to be utterly destroyed as will be the case at the end of the age in the final judgement.
The LORD YAHWEH cannot bear sin as a perfect holy sinless God, and even more so when the arch enemy from the heavenly places (Eph 6:12) has sown his seed into the human race as he has managed to achieve in the past.
Why do you think that the Lord saved only eight souls when he instructed Noah to build a huge ark back in Genesis chapter six so that He could wipe all human beings and their animals off the face of the earth in the great flood, except for eight people and chosen animals?
Let us have a read of Gen 6:1-8 again and see what the Lord actually says.
Genesis 6 King James Version (KJV)
6 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
3 And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
6 And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
7 And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.
8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord”.
The “sons of God” (v2) came down from heaven to have sexual intercourse with “the fair daughters of men” (v2) and produced a race of sinners called “giants” (v4).
These “sons of God” in the Hebrew are the “b’nai Elohim” which literally means“fallen angels”, and these are the ones who followed Lucifer rather than YAHWEH in the first rebellion in heaven when Satan fell from glory. And although they were cast out from the highest heaven and the holy presence of YAHWEH, they nevertheless retained a home in the lower heavenly places and still do today (Eph 6:12).
You can read a little more of these fallen angels in Jude 1:6 which reads:
“ And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, God hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day”.
Also again in 2 Peter 2:4 which reads:
“For God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment”.
This progeny of beings produced by the sexual activities of these intimate gatherings are called “nephilim” or “rephaim” or “giants”, and they take various shapes and sizes. In Genesis chapter 6 it was a race of giants, but in other places they resumed more normal human shapes as we will see later.
A similar or identical Biblical Hebrew term (read as “Nephilim” or “the wicked” is found in Ezekiel 32:27 where we read:
“And they shall not lie with the mighty that are nephilim of the uncircumcised, which are gone down to hell with their weapons of war: and they have laid their swords under their heads, but their iniquities shall be upon their bones, though they were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living”.
This word is loosely translated as “giants” in some Bibles and left un-translated in others. The “sons of God” have been interpreted as fallen angels in most traditional Jewish explanations.
According to Numbers 13:33 they later inhabited Canaan at the time of the Israelite conquest of thePromised Land of Canaan. This reads:
“And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight”.
A fuller description taken from the New Revised Standard Version reads:
“The Lord said to Moses, "Send men to spy out the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites" ... So they went up and spied out the land ... And they told him: "... Yet the people who live in the land are strong, and the towns are fortified and very large; and besides, we saw the descendants of Anak there”. So they brought to the Israelites an unfavourable report of the land that they had spied out, saying, "The land that we have gone through as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people that we saw in it are of great size. There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakites come from the Nephilim); and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them."
(Numbers 13:1–2; 21; 27–28; 32–33. New Revised Standard Version).
These giants took many forms for in Gen 6:4 we read that somehow Satan infiltrated the human race yet again after the Great Flood as we read “There were giants in the earth in those days; AND ALSO AFTER THAT”!!!
This is why as we journey through the early books of the Bible we come across these giants or Nephiimin their many and various forms and sizes!
The most well known of these giants was Goliath the Gittite, and his brothers, for that is why David carried five stones in case he needed to kill all five with his deadly accurate sling shot (1 Samuel 17:40). However, only one was needed for the Philistines fled when they saw the beheading of their giant hero Goliath!
Goliath is described as a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, whose height was six cubits and a span (1 Samuel 17:4) which is approx three metres or 9.84 feet!
In another passage we read:
“And it came to pass after this, that there arose war at Gezer with the Philistines; at which time Sibbechai the Hushathite slew Sippai, that was of the children of the giant: and they were subdued.
5 And there was war again with the Philistines; and Elhanan the son of Jair slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite, whose spear staff was like a weaver's beam.
6 And yet again there was war at Gath, where was a man of great stature, whose fingers and toes were FOUR AND TWENTY, SIX ON EACH HAND, AND SIX ON EACH FOOT, and he also was the son of the giant.
7 But when he defied Israel, Jonathan the son of Shimea David's brother slew him” (1 Chronicles 20: 4-7).
We also read of more giants, or Nephilim, or Rephaim in Deut 2: 10-12 where they are named as Rephaites, Emites, and Horites. And in verse 20 they are referred to as Zamzummites.
Then when we turn to Deut 3:1 we come across Og King of Bashan whose bed is described as thirteen and a half feet long and six feet wide, perhaps the tallest of all of the giants?
Bashan was a country frequently cited in the Old Testament and later was important in the Roman Empire; it is located in what is now Syria. Bashan was the northernmost point of the Transjordan, and also of the three ancient divisions of eastern Palestine, and in the Old Testament it was proverbial for its rich pastures and thick forests.
Joshua was born in 1544BC according to Dr E.W. Bullinger in “The Companion Bible”, and also his conquest of all of these cities and giants would have taken place in the 16th century BC according to Bullinger. Joshua and Caleb led the Israelites into the Promised Land of Canaan as they slaughtered the seed of Satan put in their way to prevent their victorious path by their Luciferian enemy.
Just a little side note – Joshua was 27 years younger than Moses and only he and Caleb were allowed to enter The Promised Land, as all of the other Israelites from The Exodus from Egypt were not allowed to enter because of their unbelief and were sentenced to a 40 year wandering in the wilderness. Even Moses did not enter, although he was allowed to see it from a distance.
Moving on, I would like to suggest my own theory on the slaughter on a genocidal scale which horrifies so many people. God’s command to thoroughly destroy these people and their animals was because they had become so corrupt and contaminated with sin that they had actually become THE SEED OF SATAN. We read right at the beginning of the Bible that there are TWO SEEDS on the earth, one belonging to YAHWEH and the other belonging to Satan (Gen 3: 15) - Read below:
“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between THY SEEDand her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen 3: 15).
Although YAHWEH removed all of Satan’s seed at the Great Flood of Noah, the the Lord allows the Luciferian enemy to somehow REPEAT his hideous and sinful acts by invading and violating the human race and the animal kingdom again and again with his fallen seed!
We have another obvious case of this in the account in Genesis 19 of Lot where only he and his daughters were saved as God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding plains because of their abominations before the Lord.
Read: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt” (Gen 19: 24-26).
We also have the obvious cases of the Nephilim, the Rephaim, the Horites, The Gittites, The Anakites, the Horites, the Emites, the Zamzummites, and the giants as we have looked at. And in the New Testament we have another obvious reference to this in the Parable of the wheat and the tares.
READ: “Another parable put He (Jesus) forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? From whence then hath it tares? He said unto them, an enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up? But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn” (Matt 13: 24-30).
In summary then, I would submit to you that from Genesis chapter three and right up to the world we live in today, there has been a SEED OF SATAN on our planet! From the seed of Abraham was produced two nations - Isaac by Sarah his wife who then produced Jacob or ISRAEL. But by his and Sarah’s maid servant Hagar the Egyptian, Abraham produced Ishmael representing the Arab world who have been anti-semitic in the main ever since.
In the early books of the Bible the evil seed took the form of the Nephilim or, in reality, GIANTS, but today like the parable of the wheat and tares, they are now in-distinguishable by height or appearance but only by their evil and Satanic actions.
The obvious persons who come to mind are ISIS (or Islamic State), with their Luciferian actions of beheading innocent people on camera and gloating over their treacherous actions to the world at large!
There have been other evil and Satanic genocidal leaders such as Pol Pot and his Cambodian Khmer Rhouge, the Vietnamese Communist Revolutionary Leader Ho Chi Min, the Italian genocidal leader Benito Mussolini, Uganda’s Ugly Idi Amin, Taliban commando Mullah Omar, his leader Osama Bin Laden.
And what about Josip Broz Tito of the former Yugoslavia, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Russia’s Leonid Brezhnev, North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung, the Ottoman despotic leader Ismail Enver, Jozef Stalin the Soviet Revolutionary Despot, Leopold II of Belgium who slaughtered thousands, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet who did similar monstrous acionsg, Romania’s evil Nicolae Ceausescu, Chinese Despot Mao Ze Dong, and of course the Satanic Adolph Hitler.
And what about mass killers such as Charles Manson, London’s Jack the Ripper, the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, Fred and Rosemary West from Gloucester, etc, etc as the list could go on and on and on!
PRAISE GOD THAT YAHWEH WINS IN THE END THAT THE EVIL SEED WILL END UP IN THE LAKE OF FIRE ALONG WITH THEIR EVIL MASTER – SATAN!!
Maranatha Blessings,
Nev.
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