I do not like Bible movies. Let me begin by saying, I didn’t watch The Bible: In the Beginning. I also chose not to watch, “The Chosen.” “Veggie Tales” has plenty of Bible stories, but I haven’t munched on any of them. Groucho Marx supposedly said, “I’m not a vegetarian, but I eat animals who are.” Well, I’m not into “Veggie Tales,” but I know people who are; and, in my opinion, they are worse off for it (can anyone be “fine” after watching “Minnesota Cuke and the Search for Samson’s Hairbrush”?). The only Bible movie that I could ever watch was The Ten Commandments, but only because Edward G. Robinson used his Little Caesar voice to say, “So, where’s your God, now, Moses?” And the reason I disliked all of these movies is the same reason I disliked Russel Crowe’s Noah—Hollywood feels they have to add things to the biblical story to make it more engaging and entertaining. I find that insulting. For instance, in Noah, they have this whole made-up storyline about the “Watchers” which is pure science-fiction malarky about a race of angels who disobeyed God and are punished by being sent to earth. Where do they come up with such crazy ideas? Wait? What? They were following a third-century BCE interpretation of Genesis 6 that every Jew who lived between the end of the Old Testament and the start of the New would have known and loved? Ugh. You have the right to ask: “So, where’s your 400 silent years smarts now, Lewis?”

Last week, we asked the question, “Where do the demons we see in the New Testament come from?” And we saw that Second-Temple Judaism believed that Genesis 6 was the ground-zero answer. Instead of reading the first four verses of Genesis 6 as a conclusion to the genealogy in chapter 5, they believed it was the beginning of the flood narrative and depicted the reason why everything went so terribly wrong (fallen angels coming down from heaven to have sex with human women will do that). As a result of their rebellion, these fallen angels caused wickedness to spread exponentially throughout the world and also the flood. Just to be clear, I believe that these verses fit far better at the end of chapter 5, then they do as an introduction to chapter 6.  Last week, all we had time to do was to mark two points on the map. We identified where these Jewish scholars started (Genesis 6) and where they ended up (with demons afflicting people and the world like we see in the Gospels and Acts), but we did not map out how they got from point A to point B. That’s our assignment this week.  

We are looking at chapter 4 in Matthias Henze’s book, Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus (Fortress Press, 2017).  Henze has done a great service to those of us who have ignored those 400 “silent” years for years and has given us fresh insight into the world of Jesus.  This post, in particular, leans heavily on Henze. It had too as you can plainly see. Before I watched Russell Crowe’s Noah, I had never heard anything about “the Watchers” and thought for sure Hollywood had simply made it up.  Three years later, Henze published his book and I realized my mistake.  I was chagrined.  Hollywood apparently knew things about the Bible and its interpretation that I didn’t (“Where’s your biblical smarts now, Lewis?”).   

We ended last week in Genesis. Let’s pick up from there with a little forecasting. Matthias Henze writes: 

Later Jewish writers were quick to pick up the story of the fallen angels and to develop it further, filling in many of the gaps in the biblical account. Beginning in the third century BCE, a number of Jewish authors told the story of the fallen angels anew, albeit in much greater detail.”  

Watch closely to see how this happened.

In the third century BCE, a conservative Jewish branch began to compose the book of 1 Enoch. The first 36 (36!) chapters of this apocalyptic book are called the “Book of the Watchers.” The watchers are the fallen angels of Genesis 6. The word, “watchers,” (also referred to as “spirits’) is a direct translation of the Aramaic (which scholars think is the language in which Enoch was most likely written) and implies that these creatures do not sleep. Matthias Henze provides more background:

“[The “Book of the Watchers”] was written during a period in ancient Judaism that saw a remarkable increase in the interest in the spiritual world. Early Jewish writers began to speculate about the spiritual realm and to write about spirits and demons at an unprecedented rate. In this remarkable literature, demonic beings are given names, and for some of them we are told specifically what they do. There is nothing comparable in the Bible!

Our question is this: “How did the earth become infected with demons?”  The “Book of the Watchers” tells us. In chapters 15 and 16, God speaks to these fallen angels (this is from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, translated by RH Charles and can be found in 1 Enoch 15:6 – 16:2):

But you were formerly spiritual, living the eternal life, and immortal for all generations of the world. And therefore I have not appointed wives for you, for as for the spiritual ones of heaven, in heaven is their dwelling. And now, the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling. Evil spirits have proceeded from their bodies; because they are born from men and from the holy Watchers is their beginning and primal origin, they shall be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits shall they be called. [As for the spirits of heaven, in heaven shall be their dwelling, but as for the spirits of the earth which were born upon the earth, on the earth shall be their dwelling.] And the spirits of the giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth, and cause trouble; they take no food, but nevertheless hunger and thirst, and cause offences. And these spirits shall rise up against the children of men and against the women, because they have proceeded from them. From the days of the slaughter and destruction and death of the giants, from the souls of whose flesh the spirits, having gone forth, shall destroy without incurring judgement—thus shall they destroy until the day of the consummation, the great judgment in which the age shall be consummated, over the Watchers and the godless, yea, shall be wholly consummated.” 

You can tell this is the same story as is told in Genesis 6. If you skipped reading the long quote, let me summarize what it said. Before the watchers came to earth, they were male angels (immortal and heavenly). Apparently, God did not feel that his angels needed to procreate, and so he made no female angels. And that was fine until God created humans, especially female human women. Now, these were heavenly angels and they should have enjoyed their life in heaven, but when they saw these women on earth, they decided that they should pay them a visit. This was sin. They were created for heaven, not to come to earth. Once on earth, they caroused with these women and had sex with them. Worse, these women became pregnant and gave birth to giants. These giants were a problem and intensified the violence, wickedness and sin on earth. As a result, God felt compelled to bring a flood to destroy all life on the planet. Everyone on earth drowned, except for Noah and his family. Every person, every fallen angel, every mother to these giants and even the giants themselves died. Everything drowned. And that should have been the end of the story. However, out of the bodies of these dead giants came evil spirits. They were evil because they were the result of sinning against the created order. They were spirits because they were the offspring of angels. And since these spirits were born on earth, God imprisoned them on earth. These are the “unclean spirits” or “demons” that appear in the Gospels and Acts. And these demons went out throughout the world and created chaos and violence and misery. And because they were half-human in origin, their hatred of humankind was uncontrollable. They led people astray, did violence to people, brought desolation to the earth and caused illness of all sorts. And they will rage against humanity until the great judgment at the end of the age. Mark that down. Only when time ends and all things are put to rights will these demons cease to be. But that day is still far off into the future; and until it comes, these demons are given free reign to do their will on earth.

But that changes when Jesus comes to earth. When Jesus encounters demons, he expels them with a simple command. These agents of doom are powerless before him. But interestingly, Jesus does not obliterate them. He lets them live. Henze explains: 

“The Gospel of Mark agrees with the Book of the Watchers that, in spite of Jesus’s exorcisms, demons continue to be part of this world. But Jesus puts them in their place. He frees the possessed from their tyrrany, cures the afflicted and invites those who have been freed to receive once again the blessings of the kingdom of God. Jesus’ acts of exorcism thus anticipate the total victory over all demons at the end of time, even though the final, complete destruction of the evil spirits lies in the future.”

Now, I am sure that you are with me in wondering how they got all of this from four or five rather innocuous verses at the start of Genesis 6. They obviously didn’t. Instead, they had to be driven by other factors. Yes, they were a people of the Old Testament, but they were also a people of their time, their culture and their world. And during the Second Temple period, people from all over the world wrestled with questions about the origin of evil and the problem of suffering. And one of the key peoples in this pursuit were the Babylonians. They concluded that human misery was often the influence of lesser deities, those evil spirits or demons that are part of the spiritual world.  Now, the Jews could not accept this idea at face value. They were a people of the Torah. They needed biblical support. However, they LOVED these ideas. They knew God was good and loving, and yet they also knew that death and misery and sin were part and parcel of the human condition.  But what causes these things? Now they had something tangible to blame for human misery. Evil spirits caused all this harm. They were spiritual beings like God, but there, the comparison ended. God was good. Evil spirits were evil. God was all-powerful. Evil spirits have power, but it is limited. Evil spirits were definitely the answer these Jewish scholars were looking for. All they needed now was to find a passage in the Torah that would allow them sufficient latitude to import this idea into the text. Perhaps, that is too strong. It is not that they intentionally fabricated this whole idea and then forced it upon the Bible. Rather, as they looked at Genesis 6, they saw a passage that matched what they already suspected about their world, that demons are a cause of so much of human misery.  Does the passage come right out and say that? Of course, not. But the passage is certainly vague and confusing which signals that there is more there than meets the eye. And it seems like the author was far more concerned about concealing parts of the story, than explicating all that took place which signals that whatever it is that is being hidden, is dark. And once this passage made itself available, these Jewish interpreters ran with it. And from that point on, Jewish thought accepted a biblical understanding of demonic forces.  

Now, there were two more Second Temple books after 1 Enoch that developed this idea further. We will look at those two books next week. But let’s be honest. It is somewhat disconcerting that the foundation for believing in demons is built on such thin ice. Please, don’t misunderstand me. I am not ready to dismiss the idea of demons, but I find it unsettling that the origin of this idea in Jewish thought comes from a misuse of Genesis 6 and the influence of Babylonian beliefs. I will say it this way: If this was all we had to base our idea of demonic activity in the world and if Jesus did not cast out a single demon in the gospels, I would gladly dismiss the whole idea. But Jesus most clearly believed spiritual forces were at work in his world. So, what do we do? I’m not sure. It is perplexing.  

Two cautions arise from today’s study.  First, we must watch carefully so that we don’t read into the text what we want to find. If we do give in to this urge, the chances are good that we will only be reading what we want the Bible to say and not what it is actually saying. George Bernard Shaw said it this way: “No man ever believed that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.” That’s terrifying.

Second, we must watch carefully that in conversations about evil and suffering, we never lose sight of the goodness and love of God. Because watching a book is so much better watching a movie, let’s conclude with another quote from C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape, the demon, says this about God: 

“[A demon] must face the fact that all the talk about [God’s] love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as [we demons] would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. [God] really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them, but because their wills freely conform to His. We [demons] want cattle who can finally become food; [God] wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. [Satan’s] aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: [God] wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”

Now, that is great stuff! “So, what do you think about your 400 silent years now?”