The last time we caught up with Brian Godawa was right before the books Joshua Valiant and Calab Vigilant were released. Since then he has come out with When Giants Were On The Earth and David Ascendant.
This series is fascinating, full of great writing and has caused me and I’m sure most other readers to look deeper into God’s word. This is one “Christian” book series that I am not embarrassed to recommend to Christians and non-Christian alike.
So, lets get to it!
Brian, the appendices of all the books in the Chronicles of the Nephilim series has in depth research on the Nephilim, the Watchers and the War of the Seed. You recently published the book When Giants Were Upon The Earth that contains all the research from the books. Why did you think it was important to put all of this research together in one book?
Originally, my purpose was twofold. First, I was concerned that the imaginative license I was taking with the Bible stories might be misunderstood by some Bible believers, who would be my dominant audience. I wanted to respect their high view of Scripture by providing them with the Biblical and ancient historical research behind my creative choices so they could appreciate the creative imagination that the Bible itself displays. It’s not as literalistic as we sometimes think.
But secondly, I am just one of those bipolar people who love both the intellectual scholarly side of things as well as the imaginative creative side. I love to discover what truths fiction is founded upon. Michael Crichton, one of my personal writing heroes, would always put an appendix at the end of his fictional novels that explained the real science that his speculation was rooted in. I always appreciated that so much that I figured I would do the same for the theological research that my speculative fiction was rooted in.
Looking at the Bible through the lens you propose made me rethink how I view the entire Bible. This was indeed a paradigm shift. Why does this seem to be a new way of looking at the scripture?
It is a paradigm shift. It comes from a closer look at the original ancient Near Eastern background of the Bible writers and their readers and audience. You uncover your own modern bias when reading the text. When I discovered the “Divine Council” that is in the Bible through scholar Michael S. Heiser’s work, it started to piece together so many weird things I had read in the Bible, but just ignored or chalked up to “we can’t understand everything.”
But the more I read Canaanite poetry and texts as well as ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, and other Mesopotamian literature, I began to see common memes, motifs and metaphors in the Bible that now stuck out. Because of course, the Bible was written by men of similar backgrounds and cultures as these ancient texts and their authors.
That ancient Near Eastern and Biblical paradigm shift is a narrative. In brief, it is that God has a divine council of divine beings called “Sons of God,” or “gods,” (Psa 82; 89:5-8) who counsel with him and do his bidding and errands (Job 1; 2; 1 King 22). Around the time of Noah, a group of these supernatural angelic Sons of God came to earth in rebellion against God and sought to violate the separatedness of God’s creation and pollute the human bloodline of Messiah as war against God’s Promise (Gen 3:15). They mated with human women who birthed giants called Nephilim (Gen 6:1-4). God destroyed them at the Flood, but the Nephilim bloodline survived. At the Tower of Babel, God divided the nations and put their geographical territories under the authority of rebel Sons of God, while maintaining Israel for himself (Deut 32:8-11). The Nephilim clans expanded and filled the Promised Land of Canaan, so God had to wipe them out to gain control of his territory (Num 13:32-33; Josh 11:21-22). But some giants survived in Philistia and sought to kill the Messiah Seed, David (2Sam 21:16-22; 1Chron 11:24-25). David finished off the last of the giants as a type of the Messiah, Jesus, who would have the last battle with the spirits of the dead Nephilim as demons (Matt 12; 1Enoch 15:8-16:1), who through his death and resurrection would destroy the power of Satan (Heb 2:14), who was the territorial spirit over Rome that oppressed Israel (Matt 4; Jn 12:31). Jesus would go into Sheol to claim his ultimate triumph over those primary principalities and powers he had imprisoned at the Flood (2Pet 2:4-6; Jude).
When I discovered all these things were connected in a storyline thread that was part of Israel’s “War of the Seed of the Serpent with the Seed of the Woman,” (Gen 3:15) it all began to make sense. And it is all wrapped up in the New Testament notion of Christ’s victory over the principalities and powers of this world.
I finished both Joshua Valiant and Calab Vigilant quite quickly since they were both page turners. I don’t want to give too much away but there was a name change with a character to the name we recognize in the Bible that I was not expecting at all! Why do you change a lot of the characters names in this series?
Name changes was a peculiar technique universally engaged in by all ancient Near Eastern writing including the Bible because in that world, names were not merely arbitrary sign references. Names reflected the essential purpose, meaning, or achievement of people or places. Thus, when people experienced significant changes in their lives, they might also change their name or the name of a location where it occurred (Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Saul of Tarsus to Paul). Or when one nation adopted another nation’s deity, it would give it their own name. Even the God of the Bible uses different names for himself in different instances to communicate his different attributes (El Shaddai, Yahweh, Adonai, Elohim: Ex 6:3). While this is not familiar to modern readers and can cause difficulty in keeping all the names and identities straight, I chose to employ that peculiar technique as a way of incarnating the ancient worldview and mindset. I want to help readers think like the ancient world as they read it.
I think most people will at least admit to one giant in the Bible, Goliath. How are you approaching this story in the latest edition of the series David Ascendant?
In several Biblical passages of David’s story, we read of five other giants than Goliath who were called “The descendants of the giants” in some translations (1Chron 20:4-8; 11:20-25; 2Sam 21:16-22). They are described in context as seeking to kill David. They were so significant, that three of them were named. One of them was the brother of Goliath, whose name was Lahmi (revenge, anyone?). Interestingly, the phrase in Hebrew for “descendants of the giants” is actually more like “devotees of Rapha,” which would be the kind of designation given to a sacred military cult devoted to a giant deity (since Rapha is singular for “Rephaim,” which meant giants). In my book I update that phrase to “Sons of Rapha” for stylistic purposes (a hinted reference to the Sons of God). So my story focuses in on those giants as they hunt down David, in order to destroy him as the Messianic Seed of Eve. I take a closer look at the world of the Philistines and their gods, and I even show the fallen Watchers masquerading as those pagan deities, since the Bible does describe them as demonic, not merely non-existant (Deut 32:17; 1Cor 10:18-20).
So exactly how tall was Goliath?
There is much scholarly debate about this. I write about it on my blog here. The controversy comes from there being multiple manuscript sources that give different dimensions for Goliath. The Hebrew manuscripts say 6 cubits and a span (which is about 9 feet, 9 inches). But a more ancient translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, has some manuscripts that say 4 cubits and a span (which is more like 6 feet 9 inches). But an interesting complication arises when one discovers that the Egyptian royal cubit, which is the cubit Moses was raised with, is a bigger cubit dimension than the standard cubit. So one scholar suggests that some of the Septuagint translators, who were Egyptian, may have been translating down to their taller Egyptian cubit. Using the Egyptian cubit (about 20.65 inches versus the standard cubit of 18 inches), that 4 cubits and a span would be about the same nine foot dimension as the Hebrew text. But either way, Goliath was huge compared to the rather small average height of many Israelites at about 5 foot 5 inches.
The final book in the series is Jesus Triumphant. Nephilim at the time of Christ, really?
Well, I can’t give too much away. But believe me, there are a lot of spiritual things going on in the Jesus story regarding Watchers and Nephilim that we are not aware of without this ancient Near Eastern context. But suffice it to say that while there are no giants in the Gospels, there are demons. And the Bible nowhere says that demons are “fallen angels.” That is a Medieval notion that we picked up and now falsely assume. The Bible doesn’t say at all where demons come from. But there is an ancient text that does. That is the book of 1Enoch. Though it is not Scripture, it is quoted favorably by Scripture (in Jude and elsewhere). Get a load of this:
1 Enoch 15:8-16:1
“But now the giants who are born from the (union of) the spirits and the flesh shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, because their dwelling shall be upon the earth and inside the earth. Evil spirits have come out of their bodies. Because from the day that they were created from the holy ones they became the Watchers; their first origin is the spiritual foundation. They will become evil upon the earth and shall be called evil spirits… And these spirits shall rise up against the children of the people and against the women, because they have proceeded forth (from them)… From the days of the slaughter and destruction, and the death of the giants… they will corrupt until the day of the great conclusion, until the great age is consummated, until everything is concluded (upon) the Watchers and the wicked ones.”[1]
I’ll leave you with that juicy tidbit. If your readers want to know more, go to my website for links to scholarly articles and to sign up for updates on the series.
These books are a great read and make wonderful gifts. The series are available both in print and digital versions, where are they available?
BRIAN: Amazon.com!
But also, go to www.ChroniclesOfTheNephilim.com to see book trailers, author videos, cool artwork and free articles on all things Nephilim. Sign up for updates on the series!
[1] James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1 (New York; London: Yale University Press, 1983), 22.
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