Biblical Giants: What were they? with Doug van Dorn

Hello, welcome Creation Fellowship Santee. We have a different forum tonight that we're trying out. We have Douglas Van Dorn here. I found Douglas watching Prophecy Watchers and he is quite the accomplished author.

And I'm going to turn it right over to him for our new open forum tonight. And everybody, just to let you know, you are being recorded and you are being live streamed. So, if you don't want to be in the recording, you can leave your cameras off and your microphones muted.

If you do not mind being recorded or heard, you can unmute if you have a question to ask Doug Van Dorn. Okay, Doug, I'm going to turn it over to you.

How Douglas Van Dorn Became Interested in Giants

Can you tell us who you are, what you do? Yeah, thanks Robin. Nice to be with you all tonight. I just found out about you, I don't know how long ago it's been, a month or three weeks or something like that, not too long.

And I was asked to talk about Giants tonight. So, I'm a pastor. I've been a pastor for 22 years in Colorado, a Reformed Baptist pastor. Church is called the Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado.

We started it back in 2002, when my oldest kid was born, about eight days before the crazy 9 -11 stuff. That's how I remember when we started the church. I've been doing that ever since. How did I get into this strange topic of Giants?

It's been a while, I think it's been about 15 years. I preached through books of the Bible, and I was preaching through Exodus. I don't remember exactly where I was at, but I do a lot of research using journal articles for whatever reason.

In the Google search came up this journal article on a very important passage to the subject of Giants, although most people might not really think it. It's Deuteronomy 32 .8. This is Moses' second song, and this was the content of that article.

This verse, Deuteronomy 32 .7 and 8 says, Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations. Ask your Father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.

I just read that from the ESV. His article was on the last couple of words there, the sons of God. If you were to read, for example, the New American Standard Bible, which only uses the Masoretic Hebrew text for its translation, it reads according to the number of the sons of Israel instead of the sons of God.

This was a 40-page article just on this one little textual variant. I was really interested in the article. I can tell you about this a little bit later if you want to know, but he was arguing that the original reading of that is the sons of God because of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint that we also have of this, which are a thousand years older than our oldest copy of the Masoretic Hebrew text.

I was completely fascinated. I don't even know why I read the article other than it was just mesmerizing. Then I just put it away because it actually didn't have much to do with what I was preaching on.

A few weeks later, I'm a little bit later in Exodus, and I'm doing some more research. I found another article, and I started reading it. I thought, this really sounds like that article that I had read before, and I wonder if it's the same guy.

So, I went and looked at the author, and it turns out it was the same person. Do you recall who it was? Oh yeah, absolutely. Fifteen years ago, he was not known to hardly anybody in evangelicalism. He had done a lot of coast-to-coast radio shows with Art Bell, and then he had gone down to Roswell, New Mexico, probably four or five years in a row, to give biblical theology lectures.

It's LA, isn't it? It's not LA. But LA would know who he was because he was friends with him. It was Michael Heiser.

Oh, Dr. Michael Heiser. Yes, he has passed away, but I followed him extensively.

Exactly. Like I said, nobody knew who he was that I knew, anyway, 15 years ago. I'm reading this stuff, and he happened to be giving away a copy of his Unseen Realm book, that's what it became, to his fan base on his website.

So, I decided to start reading it, and I could not put the thing down. I read it twice, and I was so nerdy about it that I ended up creating a subject index at the back of it so that I could find references more easily.

Was that the Unseen Realm that you read?

It was the Unseen Realm, but he called it The Myth That Is True, is what he was titling it back before Lagos ended up publishing it for him. It's mostly the same book, but slightly different, but basically the same idea.

This was the guy who had written this paper on this textual variant, The Sons of God. In that book, he talks about a number of very important things in the Unseen Realm, since that's what they ended up titling it.

Among those are who are these Sons of God, which is very relevant to Genesis 6, which is the giant story. He talked a lot about the giants themselves, which I had never really heard anybody give any other interpretation for them other than that these Nephilim are the sons of Seth.

So, we'll get into that when we get to the text. He talked a lot about Christ in the Old Testament, which was probably my favorite part of the book, because that's what I do. When I preach, I'm telling people about Christ.

That's all I want to tell them about, frankly. To learn that Christ is in the Old Testament in ways that I had never even considered just revolutionized my life. I don't know how else to say it. As I'm sitting here thinking about this stuff, having nobody to talk to, I end up writing a book myself that I never published, because it was basically plagiarizing everything that he had written.

I was only doing that for my sake, to try and work through the information that was there, because I didn't have anybody to talk to about it or interact with. That's how I learned the subject matter.

Have you ever heard where the Old Testament is the New Testament concealed, and the New Testament is the Old Testament revealed?

Sure. I had known that there was this idea of giants. I had known about what is called the divine counsel, which is this heavenly counsel of the sons of God, frankly, which was what he was arguing for in that text.

Psalm 82. I'd heard a little bit about it, but I never heard anybody go deep into it. Then the whole angel of the Lord thing, I think I had heard people say that it's Christ, and then other people said it wasn't.

But he went on such a deep dive with that subject, especially the word of God. John 1 in the beginning was the word, the word is with God, the word was God. At seminary, they teach you that John is writing this against Gnosticism in the late first century, Gnostic pagans.

But he basically made the argument that no, he's getting it from the Old Testament, and there was a person in the Old Testament called the word of God. I'd never heard anybody say that in my life. That's just tragic when you start to think about the fact that this is what they're teaching people in seminaries.

I had not heard that till just right now. The word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision. What's so strange about that is that words don't come to people in visions. They come in ears, because they're words.

But this word comes in a vision. Then he goes systematically through several other stories, such as the story with Samuel when he's a little boy, how the word comes to him and lifts him up. He sees him in Jeremiah's call in Jeremiah 1, the same kind of idea that the word touched me.

What he's arguing is that words like the word, or the name of God, or the glory of God, or the arm of the Lord, there are all different ways of talking about this person in the Old Testament called the angel of the Lord, and that the angel of the Lord is really Christ pre-incarnate.

I was utterly fascinated with that. What did you think about Melchizedek? Yeah. I recently did a podcast with the Blurry Creatures guys on that, that they haven't released yet. But my opinion is that Melchizedek is the same person.

Yeah, that's what I thought too. I think Hebrews lends itself to that. Anyway, this is a long way of saying how I got interested in the Giants. When I was done with my little plagiarized book, I thought to myself, I think I could actually maybe write a book on the Giants.

I think there's a lot more here that Mike hasn't dealt with. I did that. I finished that in 2013 and then published it. Over the course of the next couple of years, I became friends with Mike through a catechism, question and answer book that I wrote on the supernatural.

I decided on a whim to just send it over to him and see if he might... I wanted him to just give me a blurb for the thing, because that'd be pretty cool. But he actually wrote me back and said that he wanted to publish this as a companion volume to his Unseen Realm, and that's what they ended up doing.

So it's called The Unseen Realm, a Q &A Companion, I think is what they called it. It has the same cover and everything. It's his book. I got to become friends with Mike, and we ended up doing a podcast together that we called Piranormal, where we peer-reviewed literature on really bizarre things.

We had a panelist of five or six of us that were part of that. Then he passed away just a year and a half ago, I guess it's been. Very sad. He was the guy that was promoting a lot of this stuff. Now it's up to those of us who have come after to take the baton up and keep talking about it.

I focused my first book on the giants, and I really wanted to tell a biblical theology of the Nephilim. A biblical theology as opposed to a systematic thing, where I really go from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation and talk about how the giants are there, why they matter, who they are, and how it's part of the storyline of the Scripture.

I knew that there were a few other books on the Nephilim that were out there already. There weren't a lot of them. I also knew that I did not want to write a book like they were writing, because I don't get into end-time speculation.

That's what most people do. I'm not a big prophecy guy. I was in that world. I was a freshman in 1988. I don't know if you remember this book that came out, 88 Reasons Why Jesus Will Return in 88. We were all completely freaked out about it.

Everybody was on the edge of their seat, and it didn't happen. The guy writes another one in 89 and said he missed it by one one thing, and then that didn't happen. Then another guy came out with the 1994, and that didn't happen.

Another guy in 96, and that didn't happen. I just kind of got tired of it. I think Campo in 2008 or 2009. 2000 was obviously a big one. 2001 was a big one. 2012 was a big one. I just decided I wanted to write a book on the giants that would be different from what other guys are doing.

I decided I wanted to end that first volume at the first coming, instead of going into the second coming. My opinion is that the church, as fun as it is to talk about the second coming and to speculate about it, and don't get me wrong, I do that.

I just think the true power that we have as Christians is in understanding what Jesus has already done for us, and with regards to giants, how he has actually defeated them, and what that means for us today.

That was the way that I brought that book to a climax. A lot of people would say, how could you talk about giants in the New Testament? They're not even in the New Testament. That's actually totally incorrect.

They actually are in the New Testament.

Genesis 3:15 and the Seed War

Okay, now you have piqued my interest. People don't know what they're looking at.

Here's the way that I went about writing the book. I went to Genesis 3 .15. This is the first gospel message in the Bible. It's really God talking to the serpent after the fall, after they've eaten the fruit.

He says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. This verse is telling us about a coming war between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.

I never had any problem believing that there was a spiritual seed of the serpent, because Jesus calls the Pharisees sons of the devil. I don't think he's talking about how the actually was their biological father of every one of them.

He was talking in a spiritual manner, that they're following after their spiritual head. Cain, the same sort of a thing, is called that in Hebrews, the father is the devil. It's really spiritual. But when I read Mike's book on this, I came to the conclusion that this is really setting up the story of the giants in Genesis 6.

In my circles in the Reformed world, they're huge on this whole idea that Genesis 6 is talking about Sethites marrying Cainites, essentially. A lot of them won't even entertain the idea that it has anything to do with the supernatural at all.

That's just basically the tradition that the inherited all the way back from Augustine and Chrysostom in the 5th century. Then the Reformers, the Protestant Reformation, they didn't even really think to look into it.

In fact, they didn't have most of the books that we have today in the intertestamental literature that confirms that that's actually not the right view. It hasn't been until fairly recent decades that this has been really challenged.

Today, I think most scholars would say that no, it has nothing to do with Sethites marrying Cainites. It has to do with something much more interesting.

And crazy. Recently heard, I think it might have been you being interviewed on Prophecy Watchers about how that Sethite view came to be, and it didn't come to be until maybe the 3rd or 4th.

Century. There's a scholar named Jaap Dodens who's out in the Netherlands. I think he teaches somewhere in one of the Eastern European countries. He did his dissertation on the history of the interpretation of Genesis 6, 1 -4.

You can get that on Academia. You can go and read it. He has 110 pages of just nothing but quotations from early church fathers and the early Jews and what they believed. What's so interesting about that is that he proves that from all the known literature of the time, so it doesn't mean there wasn't something that we don't have, but all the known literature of the time with the Jews prior to the New Testament going all the way into the early 2nd century, every single Jew believed that we know of that it was a supernatural thing that happened, that the sons of God are actually angelic beings.

Then he shows in the church, starting with the New Testament with Jude and Peter, and then going into the apostolic fathers, the early church fathers. This was the only view that was known in the church for the first 250 years, and then it was really the only view that was taken in the church until about the 4th century, the middle of the 4th century.

That's 300 plus years that it was the only view. When you add them all up, it's something like 50 different sources that not a single one of them has anything to do with a sethite interpretation of this passage.

It all has to do with fallen heavenly beings coming to the daughters of men and creating demigods,.

Which are the Nephilim. As you progress here, will you be able to explain anything about the Greek and Roman myths and how they line up possibly with the giants?

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe it would be helpful just for people. I don't know how familiar everybody is with this topic, but if we look at Genesis 6 -1, we can just go through it really quickly. Genesis 6 -1 -4.

I can help you see from the text that this is in fact what it's talking about. I'll read from the ESV here. When man began to multiply in the face of the land, and the daughters were born to them. This is really important, because the word man there is the Hebrew word Adam, where we get the guy's name in Genesis 1, 2, and 3.

The plurality of Adam. Adam's children began to multiply in the face of the land, and daughters were born to them. To the sons of Adam, to the children of Adam. That's totally different than saying that they were born to the children of Cain.

Cain's not in the text. Adam is in the text. The next verse says, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. The daughters of man are the same as they were in the first verse. So, it's the daughters of Adam, literally the daughters of Adam.

Somehow, the sons of God are distinct from these Adamite daughters. They're not of the same race. There's something different. There's about 10 other places in the Old Testament where the phrase sons of God appears.

Actually, Heizer argues that it's technical language. You can find things like Israel is God's firstborn son and stuff like that, but that's not what the phrase is here. This is a technical language that was used in the ancient Near East to refer to heavenly beings of the cycle of Baal.

That's who it's referring to. We know this, for example, because in Job 38 .7, God is talking to Job. He tells Job, where were you when I created the foundations of the earth? He's talking about there in Genesis, day one and day two stuff.

We know that man wasn't made until day six. He's asking, where were you when all the sons of God were shouting for joy? How can the sons of God shout for joy on day two if they're humans when we weren't created until day six?

That's probably the best text that I take people to, to help them see that yes, indeed, sons of God refer to something else other than us. Early on in Job, you see the sons of God appear as well in chapter one and chapter two when they go with Satan into heaven.

It's really a divine counsel scene where Satan, who's acting like a prosecuting attorney, God comes to him and says, hey, have you considered my servant Job? Satan says, yeah, I can't do anything to touch him.

That lays the foundation of the book. It's the sons of God who are going with Satan into heaven. I don't know how in the world you can have human beings doing that sort of a thing. This is the same phrase, and it's the same idea, and it makes perfect sense of the context.

Greek Septuagint will translate that as angels to help us understand even more that these are heavenly beings. They take as their wives any as they choose. In verse three, the Lord said, my spirit will not abide in man forever, for he is flesh.

His days shall be 120 years. That's not referring to how old man will live. It's referring to how long it will be before the.

Disaster comes. I think that's a hotly debated topic in this room. I think it was the disaster until the disaster. I know a few people in the room believe that's how long man was going to live.

I can see how you can say that, just because later on in the genealogies, starting with Moses, he lives to be 120 years. Then from then on, you don't find anybody living longer than that. But the problem with that is that you have literally a thousand years where people are living longer than that, including all of the descendants between Noah and Abraham, including Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, all living beyond that time.

I think that refers to how long it will be before the flood. But that verse is really a parenthesis to what we're talking about tonight. Verse four is where you get the giants. The word is the Nephilim.

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These are the mighty men who are of old, the men of renown.

So, you have the Nephilim, mighty men of old, and men of renown. They're all the same thing. The question is, what does Nephilim mean? A lot of pop teaching on Nephilim, they don't understand that. They will say that Nephilim comes from a Hebrew verb meaning to fall.

The word is nephal. Its etymology is that. Then they'll say that Nephilim means the fallen ones. The problem with that is that there's only one other verse in the whole Bible that even mentions the Nephilim with this word.

It's the last verse in Numbers 13. That chapter is where the spies go into the land, and they come back, and they give a bad report to Moses. The very end of that section is Numbers 13, 32, and 33. They brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, The land through which we have gone to spy it out is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height.

That establishes that they're giants. Then it says, We saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim, and we seem to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seem to them. The grasshoppers also confirms that they were giants.

When you go and read in Joshua, you find that the sons of Anak are there, and Joshua has to kill them. You go read in Josephus, and he tells you how huge these guys were.

When you say Anak, is that with an A? You're not talking about Enak?

No, it's A-N-A-K.

What was the race of the Nephilim? They were called Anakims, right?

Yeah, the Anakim. Then they come from another ancestor. The key thing in this is that the word Nephilim actually appears twice. There we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim.

Why does that matter? It's because in the Hebrew, it's actually spelled two different ways. It's not spelled the same way. You have to account for the spelling. The problem is that the second spelling, the one that's different from Genesis 6, has the letter Yod, which is basically our English letter Y in it.

The only way to account for how that Yod is there is through an Aramaic word. Aramaic is actually a cousin language of Hebrew. It's got a lot of overlap in the way that the letters actually are the same letters, any of the words that resemble each other.

This Aramaic word that spells Nephilim actually means a giant. That's its definition. It seems, and this is what Heizer and others argue, that the second Nephilim is spelled differently. They call this a gloss, so it wasn't original to the text.

It was something that a later scribe inserted for the people of his day to bring a little bit of clarification to who they were. In other words, it seems like even as far back as whenever that happened, probably second temple sometime, maybe the days of Ezra or something, that they had forgotten what the word itself meant.

He puts this little Yod in there, this little Aramaic word, in order to help the people understand that the word means a giant. That's what it means. It doesn't mean fallen. It means giant. This is also what you find in the Septuagint translation, where it actually translates Genesis 6 -4 as a giant, the Gigantis.

You asked about the Greek myths, and that's coming right into the Greek myths, because this is exactly what these guys were called in the Greek myths. They were called Gigantis. They actually translate not only Nephilim, but the men of renown, the Giborim.

They translate that with Gigantis too. They translate both of those words with the same word that we translate as giant. If you were to get an English copy of the Septuagint, and there's plenty of them out there, every one of them will read, the giants were on the earth in those days.

They won't read.

Nephilim. I did read that in there about 20 years ago, and that was my first exposure to giants. I wanted to ask about the men of renown. What do you say about that? When I read that in.

There, what are they trying to convey there? I think that this is actually coming into the whole context of what all the ancient peoples talked about as demigods. Whether you're dealing with Babylon and Gilgamesh, or in chapter 10 of Genesis with Nimrod, where he becomes a Giborim, he becomes a mighty man on the earth.

Some of the guys in this space, LA himself might say that he thinks that somehow Nimrod transformed himself into a Nephilim. There's a lot of speculation about that that's interesting to me. Who were these guys in the mythology?

This is where you need to know a little bit of your myth. Let's go to Greek mythology just for a minute. This goes into something Peter says. He talks about how these guys were locked into Tartarus. Your English translation will most likely read, they were locked in hell.

This is 2 Peter 2 .4. The Greek word is Tartarus. It's not the normal word for hell, which is either Hades or Gehenna. It's Tartarus. It's the only time that that word is used anywhere in the New Testament at all.

Why would he use that word? Especially when you understand that your Greek mythology is that this is where Zeus locked up Kronos and the Titans during the big war that they had when Zeus usurped him and became the high god of their pantheon.

They use the word Tartarus for that. They do. The Greeks use that word Tartarus for that. What you have there is essentially, to put an overlay on them, Zeus is the equivalent of the sons of God in our text.

Go to the Wikipedia. You'll see that Zeus had relations with a hundred different women and all these different children that came from him. Guys like Hercules, or Perseus, or whatever. These are all half-god, half-women.

That's exactly the story of Genesis 6. Those characters, Hercules, Perseus, all the children of Zeus, born of women, are considered demigods. They're half-men, half-gods. That's basically what Genesis 6 .4 is playing into when.

It talks about men of renown. I thought it might have meant that. There's so much information out there. Is your information more correct than L .A.'s, more than Michael Heiser? I'm trying to.

Think of who else does it. I think on most of this stuff, we're in agreement on this. The only thing we'd probably be in disagreement on would be the speculation stuff. That's stuff I just don't even talk about.

If you can get to the point where you recognize that there's giants that are actually half-human, half-divine, that will become very important for the New Testament. But now you can start to go backwards in your Bible and come to a genesis of where these guys come from after the Flood.

It says they're there in those days and also afterwards. In other words, the Nephilim were there before the Flood, and they're there after the Flood. That's what Numbers confirms. They're still here after the Flood.

We had a speaker mention that.

Very thing. Then when I heard your interview, I knew I had to ask you to come speak. The giants during the Genesis time were not really giants. They were just tall people.

Right. I don't even know how in the world people can get that. In this whole Sethite, sons of Seth marrying daughters of Cain thing, they still have to deal with the fact that these guys are giants. I know a lot of Christians marrying non-Christians.

I don't know any of them having giants because of that. My kids are rather short, actually. At any rate, when I first started teaching this to our church, one of the guys, he was having none of it. He was just getting frustrated and angry.

He's like, what does this have to do with anything in the Bible? Just kind of getting mad, thinking I'm making stuff up. It kind of struck me. I said, you believe in Goliath, don't you? He goes, yeah.

I said, you know he's a giant, right? He goes, yeah, I guess so. I said, have you ever looked into his genealogy? He said, no. For this particular guy, I got him on that because he loves genealogies. He started looking into the genealogy with me.

You find out that Goliath and there's about four other giants that are mentioned contemporary with him. That makes five giants. By the way, just a sideline note, when David takes up five smooth stones, it's not because he thinks he's going to miss.

It's because there's four others of them that are there that he might have to kill too. When you look and see that Goliath comes from Rapha, which is where we get the word Rephaim, now you can start to go backwards and you can start to see, all right, where does Rephaim appear?

The first place it shows up is actually in Genesis 14. This is where there's this battle between four kings and five kings. Some of those kings are the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah. It talks about how there are all these ites that are there.

The Rephaim are part of those. You start to look at those tribal names, and then you start looking at where they appear in other places. Very quickly, it becomes apparent that these guys are related to the Nephilim, are related to the Rephaim.

They're all called giants in various places. Whether it's in the Numbers 13 that gives a list of them, or in Deuteronomy 2 is another really good text for this. Deuteronomy 2 is recounting the history of the nations around Israel.

It basically says, look, the Moabites that were over there to the south and the east, they had this group of giants that they had to fight, and they dispossessed them. Then the Edomites had a group of giants, and they dispossessed them.

Most of those names that are given in Deuteronomy 2 show up in Genesis 14. What's happening is that we're in the days of Moses. We're way after Abraham. There were people that were living in the land of Canaan when Abraham came into it.

Part of the early part of my book shows you that I think that some of those people that Abraham actually dealt with, and not just in this Genesis 14, but others, especially the Amorite people, the Amorite kings, they were themselves giants.

By the time you get to Moses, what happened was there was a promise, I think it's given at the end of Genesis 17, that God tells Abraham something like, your people will be in a land not their own for 400 years or whatever, because the sins of the Amorites and the people in the land have not yet come to their full fruition.

By the time you get to Moses, that has been fulfilled. You find that now the nations around Israel, like the Edomites, their cousins, the Moabites, the Ammonites, who are descended from Lot, they've all had to fight these giants, and they've all defeated them.

Now the giants that are left are King Og up in the northern part of Canaan, and then throughout the other places where Joshua will have to defeat them. Og and Sion, his either brother or cousin or whatever, the sons of Anak that we talked about are mentioned quite a bit in Joshua.

You find that there are all these wars that start taking place, whether it starts there in Genesis 14, which is actually right after that war ends. That's actually when Abraham meets Melchizedek on the plain there and offers him a tenth of everything.

Or whether it's Moses fighting Amalek. That's the story when he has to have his hands held out, and then they get too tired, and so Joshua and Caleb have to hold them up. So people get confused about Amalek, because there was a son of Esau named Amalek, and a lot of the scholars will say that that's who Moses was fighting, but it's not.

When you go back to Genesis 14, you find that the Amalekites are in these giant wars, but here's the problem. Esau hasn't been born yet, so how could it possibly be one of his descendants? In other words, there's two different Amalekites that are there in Genesis.

One was there long before Esau was ever there. In fact, they were there before Abraham ever got to the land. Then the other one is a descendant of Esau. My guess is what happened was that Esau was doing some bad things, mixing with the Amalekites themselves, and so he probably named one of his children after those guys.