Weird Stuff in the Bible

Who are the Sons of Anak?
Jude 5-6, Numbers 13

Introduction
We all have that weird uncle at Thanksgiving and Christmas that you don’t want to sit next to, right? Because he’s always sharing his bizarre religious opinions or radical political leanings. Everybody has a crazy uncle like that who we see during the holidays, right?
And we certainly did at my family’s Thanksgiving this year. I first saw him that morning when I looked in the mirror. Yes, I’m the crazy uncle with wacky religious ideas. I have come to be the one who fills that role now. I have found my place in this world.
So welcome to today’s edition of the Crazy Uncle podcast, where we’re going to build on the past couple of lessons where we established who the Sons of God are and who the Nephilim are.
So we’re moving forward from there. We’re going to talk about somewhere else that the Nephilim show up AFTER the flood. Yes, they came back after the flood. And so first we had to establish how they first showed up before the flood. But now we’ll talk about how they came back after the flood.
If you’re not on board with that, go listen to the last couple episodes again until you are. That’s all I can tell ya. If you are on board, grab a Bible and turn to Numbers 13, and lets get weird.
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Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and I’m your crazy uncle for today, and we’re going to be talking about when the Nephilim came back.
Do we know when the Sons of God came back down and tried all that stuff again that they did prior to the flood? No, I don’t know exactly WHEN it happened. But Genesis 6 told us that before the flood was not the only time.
Genesis 6:4 says
There were (Nephilim, or) giants in the earth in those days; and also after that…
So it happened in those days, and it would happen again. These spiritual beings who were in charge of certain sectors of humanity- called the Sons of God- came down and impregnated human women.
Now, this is a hard pill for many people to swallow. Did they create sexual organs to reproduce with women the essentially normal way that humans reproduce? Perhaps they did. That is my theory on how they did it. I think that as we study more about the capabilities of angels and spiritual beings that this won’t be as far-fetched as it sounds.
But if that does sound a little too weird, perhaps they impregnated women in a similar way to how God impregnated Mary. God supernaturally caused a life to begin in her womb. Perhaps the Sons of God did something more similar to that with the women of those days. That’s not how I look at it, but that’s how some do because it makes a little more sense to them that way.
Regardless of how it happened, the Bible is clear that it did happen. I don’t know if it was the same Sons of God who tried it the first time and they just hadn’t been locked away yet, or if it was a different group of the Sons of God. But oops they did it again, and so after the flood, there are once again Nephilim on the earth. The original line of Nephilim all died; they didn’t survive. But there was a phase 2, at least, if not more, but a Phase 2 line of Nephilim once again after the flood.

The Numbers 13 giants
It appears that they populated the land that was promised to Abraham and his descendants. That’s why I believe it was literally a plot of Satan to inhibit God’s promises by polluting that land with violent, wicked, gigantic demonic beings known as the Nephilim. They messed around with human women and created this alternative race of beings who were much larger in size than regular humans.
So if we go way back in Biblical history, there was a period of time where Abraham’s descendants were living in Egypt and eventually became enslaved there. But God sent a man to set them free and bring them back to the Promised Land. You’ve probably heard of this guy, his name was Charlton Heston, and he stood before Pharaoh and got the children of Israel set free. They traveled through the red sea and through various trials and came upon the land of Israel, and at this point, Charlton Heston sends 12 spies in to check out the land and come back with a gameplan for how to take it. However, 10 of the 12 spies don’t bring back a favorable report.
Numbers 13:32-33
32 So 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. 33 And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”
10 of the spies freaked everybody out because they said that the Promised Land was full of the Sons of Anak. The Sons of Anak were Nephilim- or, as some translations will say it- giants.
So why are they called the Sons of Anak- or as some say, the Anakim or Anakites- right here? Well, they probably descended from someone named Anak. These are the Phase 2 Nephilim- the first one was probably named Anak. They probably lived in a town called Anak. And so these are known as the Sons of Anak.
It said that they were so big and mighty, that the Israelites were like grasshoppers in their sight. Now, this is a bit of an exaggeration if we were to take it literally. A grasshopper is like 1/100th of the size of a human, it’s itty-bitty compared to us. The Nephilim were more like a few feet taller than the average Israelite. As we’ll read in the Bible in a few places that they are described, they are more like 7 to 10 feet tall.
So it’s a bit of an exaggeration to pull out the grasshopper thing. But, I certainly acknowledge why it would have seemed intimidating to come across these fellas.
However, God had told them that they could do it. He was going to help them. But they were too afraid, too fearful. So God told them that they would have to spend 40 years in the Wilderness. 40 years in the desert, until all the cowards died out, so that the next generation could move in and fight the giants.
It was not God’s intention to drown the giants again in a cataclysmic flood. This time, God’s intention was to have the humans wipe them out. So they come back 40 years later.
Deuteronomy 9:1-3
“Hear, O Israel: you are to cross over the Jordan today, to go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you, cities great and fortified up to heaven, 2 a people great and tall, the sons of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you have heard it said, ‘Who can stand before the sons of Anak?’ 3 Know therefore today that he who goes over before you as a consuming fire is the Lord your God. He will destroy them and subdue them before you. So you shall drive them out and make them perish quickly, as the Lord has promised you.
You see when God puts something in front of you to do, He expects you to do it, or at least try. But see, they chickened out, because they didn’t have confidence in themselves, and they didn’t have confidence in God to help them. Hear me, people: not having enough self-confidence is not an excuse. When God says to do it, you do it. I’m not gonna get preachy, that was just for free.

The Jude 5-6 Lesson
So what happened when they got back into the land and fought these giants and did actually kill them off- was that the end of the Nephilim? Well, yes and no. Yes, they wipe out the Anakim, but we will find out that there were actually a few different pockets of giants. Some were the Anakim, there were the Rephaim, and we’re going to explore all that in next week’s lesson. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you can continue this journey through the Bible. I am going to spend one more week talking about Nephilim stuff.
Mailbag here: Had a lot of response to the previous episode, and I appreciate the comments. Joe says, “"which species of early human" is indeed humorous, though unintentionally. A human-angel hybrid isn't strictly human.” Joe is referring to an article I referenced in that episode from Business Insider. It included a line questioning which species of early human must have used these gigantic axes that were discovered in an archeological find over in England. Of course, when they talk about early species of human, they’re looking at this from an evolutionary standpoint, so they thing that gigantic humans may have lived long ago before they eventually evolved into the smaller humans of today. I thought that was a funny thing to say because I don’t believe that’s where humanity came from, yet it actually was a human-adjacent species that must have created those axes. So it was an interesting line for them to use, for sure.
Keep the comments coming by emailing weirdstuffinthebible@gmail.com, or leave a comment if you’re on a platform that does that.
Now, if you remember, a few episodes back, we started into an exploration of the Book of Jude, and I said that for you to understand what was coming next in Jude, you needed to understand about the Sons of God and the Nephilim. Jude is about the world right before the end of the world. And Jude is trying to teach us something about living in those last days. If those are the days we’re living in, then Jude has something to teach you and I.
So let’s look at Jude 5 and 6 today. We’ll start with just verse 5.
Jude 5
5 Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.
What a powerful verse right there. Some people talk about how they like Jesus but they aren’t so crazy about the Old Testament God. Guys, Jesus IS the Old Testament God. He said “if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” Jude right here says Jesus was the same God who killed off an entire generation in Numbers and Deuteronomy because they were afraid of the giants. Wow. What a verse right there. If your Jesus is a wimpy savior who was too gentle to use a flyswatter, you got the wrong Jesus. The real Jesus puts a sword in your hand and tells you to go slaughter the half-demon hybrids that are causing trouble in your neighborhood. And if you think that sounds too hardcore, remember that He had David do it with a slingshot. The Israelites had it easy.
So let’s remember what Jude is about; apostasy. Falling away from God. And II Thessalonians says that just before the tribulation and antichrist, there’s going to be a great falling away. It’s not talking about the rapture right there, although I do believe in the rapture. But the falling away is not the rapture. The rapture is going to be a good thing. The falling away will be a bad thing. It’s a departure from the faith. People rejecting the truth of God and the Gospel and the Lordship of Jesus Christ over everything. A lot of people in churches will call Jesus Lord but they won’t make Him their Lord. That’s apostasy, and that’s what Jude is dealing with.
Also remember that everything in Jude is in threes. And in verses 5, 6 and 7 of his book, he gives three examples of things that lead people to commit apostasy. The first one covered in verse 5 here is fear. The faithless, fearful Israelites who wouldn’t take the Promised Land. God- or Jesus- took them out of slavery in Egypt, He took them through the waters of the Red Sea, and then when they crossed the desert and came to their special land, they chickened out because of the giants.
And Jude says this is just like the apostates who hear the Gospel, hear about and believe that Jesus is real, but won’t follow Him and do what He says.
Guys, we will always be able to come up with some excuse not to do what God says. We always think we’re the exception to the rule. That our situation makes us exempt from doing what God said.
We look at our problems or our temptations or our place in life and we say, “Well I’m a grasshopper and that’s a giant.” Hear me, guys: if you look at the Israelites who were afraid to fight those giants and your reaction is: well maybe they had a point. After all, it was demon giants descended from the Nephilim. If that’s your attitude, you are not in the right headspace spiritually. When God says go after the giants, you go after the giants.
Most of them were probably afraid they were gonna die. And you know what, some of them probably would have. You go to fighting giants, there’s gonna be some casualties. But you know what, they were gonna die anyway in the wilderness. You’re gonna die one way or another. Might as well die doing what God told you to.
So the first example of an apostate is a coward. Someone not brave enough to stand for God and do what He says. Fear will drive someone away from following God. What else?
Jude 6
6 And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day—
The second thing Jude warns us about are the Sons of God who rebelled. Remember, the New Testament’s word for spiritual beings is a little more vague. It calls them angels. That’s just a generic term for spiritual beings in the New Testament. The Old Testament term is “sons of God.” These beings who are each assigned their own territory over humanity. They are to come to God’s Divine Council meetings and act as representatives for their regions.
However, they became entranced with human women and left their positions up in the heavenlies to come down and interact and even reproduce with human women. As I said in the last episode, this is the weirdest thing I believe, yet it’s what the Bible says. And I have it on pretty good authority that the Bible is true.
As I said before, I don’t know how many times they did this. There was a phase where it happened before the flood, and they clearly did it at least one more time after the flood. Perhaps they thought: God says He won’t do a flood again; perhaps we can get away with it this time if we try this once more.
Only, Jude says they didn’t get away with it. It says they have been locked away in chains in gloomy darkness, referring to a dungeon in hell. They’ve been locked away down there for a future judgment called The Final Judgment, probably the time of the Great White Throne Judgment spoken of at the end of Revelation, at which point these Sons of God who sinned will be thrown into the Lake of Fire for all eternity.
II Peter 2 runs parallel to Jude; it’s fascinating if you put these two chapters side by side, because they’ll illuminate each other a bit.
II Peter 2:4 says
 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment;
The word for “hell” right here is not the typical word for hell in the Greek. Usually, hell is “hades” in the New Testament, but right here it uses the term “tartarus.” This refers to the deepest and darkest part of hell. Hell actually has different levels, and some places in hell are worse than others. And these Sons of God who mated with human women were cast down into the deepest and darkest and worst part of hell, known as tartarus.
These Sons of God were apostates. They knew the truth. They believe God was real. They acknowledged that God was the Creator of the Universe, the Lord of Heaven and Earth. But they did not submit to Him as their Lord. It’s not enough to simply give God lip service and know that God is Lord. You also have to submit to Him as Lord.
But these particular sons of God were rebels against God. They didn’t care to follow and obey Him. It wasn’t a question of head knowledge. They knew the facts about God. It was a question of the heart. They didn’t fear God or obey Him. They thought they could rebel against Him and get away with it.
And that’s a bit like everyone who has played with sin, played with fire, and thought they wouldn’t get burned.
And Jude uses this as an example to teach us that when you’re a rebel against God, you’re an apostate, and you will pay. There’s a lot of places in Scripture that Jude could have gone to to make this point. Lots of people who rebelled against God and paid the price. And he chooses to go to literal angelic beings, far above any human, to make the point that if they couldn’t get away with it, you can’t either.
Two of three examples of apostasy here in Jude. And one more to come, which we’ll tackle in two weeks. Next week, I want to talk just a little bit more about these Nephilim we see after the flood. And then in two weeks, after Christmas, we’ll come right back here to Jude and read about a third example of apostasy that he gives us in verse 7.
So the book of Jude uses some odd examples, but it has something vitally important to your life today. So if you think Jude is weird, I hope you’re a little more weird today, too. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time.