What Are Demons? 3 Ancient Origins of Nephilim, Pre-Adamic Beings & Fallen Angels
Demons do still exist and function in the modern world just as they did all throughout biblical history.
The understanding of the ancient biblical worldview must be discussed. To study the scriptures without first understanding the supernatural worldview in which they were written is simply ignorant. The modern worldview is drastically different from the biblical worldview.
Biblical Translations
The Bible describes a supernatural world that is foreign to many modern Christians. Most believers in the modern era fail to understand the ancient cosmological understanding that the scriptures were written upon, thus losing the context of many biblical stories and passages. As a result, many modern Bible translations have changed the supernatural language of scripture to fit the context of the modern, intellectual worldview that is explained solely by science and human logic. Further, most translations have even removed the proper names of demonic entities that are stated in both the Old Testament and the New Testament and changed them to fit a modern worldview and contemporary context.
Without a proper understanding of the ancient cosmology, many modern translations fail to capture the fullness of the Bible as well as the theological implications that come from this understanding. Further, there will never be a complete understanding of the spiritual world in which Christians live today without this understanding. As a result, many in the church today are living from a defeatist, victim mentality and not fully assuming the victorious role and authority that Jesus has given His church and all believers in the New Covenant. We are not on the defense just waiting on attacks from the enemy, but we are called to live on the offense and bring the battle to the gates of hell!
Ancient Cosmology
“Cosmology refers to the way we understand the structure of the universe.” Postmodernism has greatly affected the views of the Western world today, especially how our society translates the universe and its structure and thus, how we relate to it. The basic tenets of postmodernism address what is a reality in the realms of knowledge and what is taught as being real. This is why absolute truth sourced solely from God and His Word is crucial; in the modern era, truth is being challenged and adapted to fit each per- son’s own convictions or beliefs. This is dangerous; the results are evidenced throughout our society and through much of American culture.
There is clearly a search for supernatural experience, but sadly, it is often being sought after through science, self-enlightenment, New Age practices, yoga, and other outlets, most of which are sourced in the demonic world. Even entertainment is inundated with this spiritual fascination. The Barna Group has performed multiple studies over the past two decades, which have provided the following results concerning the supernatural experience of the younger generation within the modern church.
Only 28 percent of young adults ages 12 to 29 recall receiving any teaching on the supernatural realm within the past year. While 79 percent of this same group believe in some form of an immaterial, spiritual world, over 50 percent could not articulate a structure for this universe. Only 58 percent believed that Satan and demons exist at all but did not identify them as enemies of God, yet 89 percent professed a belief in angels. The trends revealed that many in this generation have adopted a belief in what they view as “good” concerning the spiritual realm and reject the notions of evil in this same world.
Thus, the fruits of this belief have created a staggering trend of experimentation in the spiritual world without understanding the consequences or risks associated with it. In this group, 81 percent of Protestants stated they had experimented or engaged tarot cards, Ouija boards, divinations, séances, occult practices, and other forms of witchcraft. There is an increasing trend that this generation is willing to accept what is viewed as “good” in the spiritual realm while ignoring the “evil” that exists as well.
The modern trends in entertainment would further this desire for spirituality with the precept of accepting what is deemed “good” but denying that which is perceived as “evil.”
What Are Demons? Three Modern Views
This is a loaded question that many have attempted to answer for centuries. There are many opinions that attempt to define, “What is a demon?” One view is that of fallen angels, which is the most common view in Evangelicalism today. This view comes from Luke 10:18: “And He said to them, ‘I watched Satan fall from heaven like lightning.’” This view is further supported by Revelation 12:7-9:
And there was war in heaven, Michael and his angels waging war with the dragon. The dragon and his angels waged war, and they did not prevail, and there was no longer a place found for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
Another view is that demons are disembodied Nephilim. Dr. Michael Heiser supports this view. The primary scripture to support this comes from Genesis 6:1-4:
Now it came about, when mankind began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of mankind were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not remain with man forever, because he is also flesh; nevertheless his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of mankind, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
This view argues that the serpent who deceived Eve in the Garden of Eden was a spirit, not a natural snake. Genesis 3:15 describes the descendants of Eve would be at war with the offspring of the serpent: “And I will make enemies of you and the woman, and of your offspring and her Descendant; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise Him on the heel.” This view connects Jesus’s rebuke of the Pharisees in Matthew 23:33 to further support this claim: “You snakes, you offspring of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell [Gehenna]?” Jesus further describes the Pharisees as sons of the devil in John 8:44, giving implications from Genesis: “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies.” Therefore, in this view, demons are the spirits that corrupted humanity as the seeds of Satan, which came through the reproduction between the spiritual Nephilim and humanity.
A third view is that before the creation of Adam, there was a pre-Adamic race that God created but not in His own likeness or image. This race rebelled against Him and aligned with Satan and his fallen angels who were cast out of heaven due to their rebellion. As a result, the world was destroyed. All of this is believed to have occurred between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. According to this view, this accounts for the state of the world being “formless and void” at the beginning of Genesis 1:2 since it had just been completely destroyed and was about to be recreated. This race was stripped of their physical bodies and became disembodied spirits which they refer to as “demons.” As a result, they are constantly searching for a body to inhabit according to Luke 11:24-26.
While each of these have strengths and weaknesses, ultimately, scripture does not provide the specific answer to this question. What scripture does emphatically answer, though, is that demons are evil, spiritual beings; God is supreme in power and authority over all of them; and finally, Jesus cast them out, and commanded us to do the same. At the end of the day, these are the principles that we stand on.
The Sons of God
Scripture does provide insights into the understanding of ruling, territorial spirits that would be described as principalities. These are distinctly different from demons that are cast out of individuals, but understanding these spirits will help provide a further framework for deliverance ministry. First, let’s look at the Hebrew understanding of the Sons of God or the elohim. Understanding the Sons of God in both title and function provides the framework for a biblical worldview as well as an understanding of demons that impacts both deliverance ministry and spiritual warfare. Many modern translations of scripture have changed the supernatural language of the Bible to fit a cessationist or natural-human understanding.
Elohim is a formal title in Hebrew used exclusively as a name of God; there are over 2,000 references to this name of God. However, there is another form of this Hebrew word used as a generic “god,” which is used in both singular and plural forms. It is often translated as angels, sons of God, heavenly beings, spirits, hosts, or gods. These spiritual beings, in all forms, reside in the spiritual realm but interact with the natural earthly realm. As spirits, these entities “by nature, are not embodied, at least in the sense of our human experience of being physical in form.” The Old Testament writers used the language of “spirit” to contrast the natural realm of humanity. As spiritual beings, then, the plural usage of elohim is understood to refer to “a populated spiritual world.”
The Divine Council of God
In the Old Testament, God had a Divine Council that was made up of these elohim. This is described in Deuteronomy 32, 1 Kings 22:19-23, Psalm 82, and Daniel 7. The purpose of this divine council was not to tell God what to do or make decisions for Him, but rather “the council served only to reemphasize and execute His decisions.” The title that is most accurate to translate the plural elohim is the Sons of God.
Deuteronomy 32 and Psalm 82 provide the framework for this understanding. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 states:
When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. For the Lord’s portion is His people; Jacob is the allotment of His inheritance.
In these verses, God Most High has disinherited the nations of the earth and assigned dominion to the elohim as the Sons of God; He separated Israel apart from the rest of the nations as His own inheritance. In their corruption and rebellion, the Sons of God enslaved the people and ruled with injustice. They caused the nations to worship them as gods, and at times, even ancient Israel fell into this same trap of idolatry by worshiping the “gods” of other nations. Deuteronomy 4:19-20 supports this interpretation:
And be careful not to raise your eyes to heaven and look at the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the heavenly lights, and allow yourself to be drawn away and worship them and serve them, things which the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven. But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, from Egypt, to be a people of His own possession, as today.
Psalm 82 explains that the Sons of God rebelled against Him and became corrupt, causing God’s created order of the world to be thrown into chaos.
Scholar Clinton Arnold translates the elohim to be fallen guardian angels, which he states could be called demons. His support comes from the Septuagint translation of Psalm 96:5,“For all the gods of the nations are demons, but the Lord made the heavens.” Deuteronomy 32:17 states that Israel embraced the gods of the nations and sacrificed to demons in their idolatry. In conclusion, Arnold argues that in the Old Testament, “Demons stand behind the idol worship and animate it as part of their attempt to subvert the plan of God and seek worship for themselves.” The Hebrew word translated as “demon” is only used three times in the Old Testament, but in function, the disobedient elohim are connected to the demonic entities that were still operating all throughout the New Testament.
Resisting Idolatry
The temptation of Israel was always to worship idols or the gods of the nations rather than God Most High. It is important to note that the designation of the Sons of God does not describe the act of polytheism; Israel was a monotheistic nation. The call to worship their one true God is found in Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one!” Jews today still recite this passage twice daily as a confession called the Shema. This passage affirms Israel’s triune God as well as the nation’s radical, monotheistic faith.
The holy identity of ancient Israel was that they were a people separated for God by God who were to worship only God alone. Comparatively, the nations of the earth worshiped many gods, which made Israel unique as a monotheistic nation. This same concept is evidenced today as well. Many nations of the world worship a multitude of gods, but the distinction of Christianity is that Christians are called to worship only the one, true God.
Deuteronomy 32
A deeper dive into Deuteronomy 32 provides an important piece in understanding the elohim and their roles in the created world. Deuteronomy 32:17 states, “They [the Israelites] sacrificed to demons [shedim], who were not God [eloah], to gods [elohim] whom they have not known, new gods who came lately, whom your fathers did not know.” The Hebrew term shedim is also used in Psalm 106:37 and is translated as “demons.” This word comes from the ancient Near Eastern Akkadian word, shedu, which was defined as a protective, guardian spirit-being.
“In the context of Deuteronomy 32:17, shedim were elohim—spirit beings guarding foreign territory—who must not be worshiped.” Their roles were to guard or protect their assigned territory and the people within that territory on behalf of God. However, not all of them stayed true to their assignment, and many rebelled against it. The key of this passage is to understand that the elohim had specific, territorial assignments given by God to guard and rule over regions and nations.
