After the fall from Eden and Cain’s murder of Abel, the third great instance of evil of which the scriptures tell us occurs in Genesis 6:1-4. It is an enigmatic passage in which fallen “sons of God”—or, per the Jewish scribes who translated the term into Greek in one of the Bible’s Septuagint manuscripts, fallen “angels of God,” and variously referred to as “the Watchers”—unite with daughters of men to produce “Nephilim,” giant offspring.
We now have solid historical-critical evidence that this narrative is a polemic against Mesopotamian beliefs about the spirits or gods that engendered semi-divine kings. Writes Amar Annus from the University of Tartu in his “On the Origin of Watchers”:
The mythology of the Watchers and their sons the giants derived from inverted versions of various Mesopotamian myths and beliefs about apkallus (spirits, gods). In some parts or layers of Mesopotamian mythology and ritual practices the sages were already regarded as dangerous and potentially malicious creatures, upon which the Jewish authors could build their parody.
Indeed, there are cuneiform inscriptions that show some ancient Mesopotamians accounts of his story describing Gilgamesh as a giant, and the Manichean “Book of Giants,” some fragments of which were found among the Biblical texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, specifically list Gilgamesh as one of the offspring of the fallen angels.
The Biblical polemic recurs in the post-flood narrative, when giants are again encountered and slain by Joshua and David. Deuteronomy 3:11 refers to the last remnants of the giant lineages, the king Og, and specifically to his large bed, which seems to be a reference to Babylonian ritual hierogamy (a wedding night ceremony in which a monarch consummated his relation with a god by way of a proxy such as a temple prostitute).
Writes theologian Michael Heiser in The Unseen Realm:
The most immediate link back to the Babylonian polemic is Og’s bed. Its dimensions (9 x 4 cubits) are precisely those of the cultic bed in the ziggurat called Etemenanki—which is the ziggurat most archaeologists identify as the Tower of Babel referred to in the Bible Ziggurats functioned as temples and divine abodes. The unusually large bed at Etemenanki was housed in “the house of the bed” (bet ersi). It was the place where the god Marduk and his divine wife, Zarpanitu, met annually for ritual love-making, the purpose of which was divine blessing upon the land. Scholars have been struck by the precise correlation. It’s hard not to conclude that, like Genesis 6:1-4, those who put the finishing touches on the Old Testament during the exile in Babylon were connecting Marduk and Og in some way … Sacred marriage rituals included the blessing of fertility for both the land and its inhabitants … The ritual was also concerned with maintaining the cosmic order instituted by the gods. Consequently, in addition to the giantism element, a link between Og and Maduk via the matching bed dimensions may also have telegraphed the idea that Og was the inheritor and perpetuator of the Babylonian knowledge and cosmic order from before the flood.
In this context, then, the Babylonian cultural paradigm being rejected is responsible for the events around the Tower of Babel.
I would argue that the above hierogamy constitutes the ritual practice and paradigm of political legitimation that would have been known in the cultural context of the authors of Genesis, and which they are attacking.
More subtly, reifying, literalizing, the political community, nature or the universal principles on which political authority is based, such as Justice, into a specific deity that can then be engaged with erotically, might have constituted:
- The cause of political excess: if a universal principle is identified with one particular, contingent entity, the result will tend to be tyrannical: e.g. “all human beings need rules,” therefore “all human beings (should) have one ruler,” or “all human beings speak language,” therefore “all human beings (should) speak one language.”
- And the basis for idolatry or king worship: if a ruler can relate to a higher archetype or god, in a bodily and, indeed, erotic, sense, then that means he himself belongs to that higher order.
The correct version of this involved the idea that the social and the political are the feminine and masculine halves of human community: Jerusalem/Church as Bride, Christ as King.
Medieval conceptions of the king as persona mixta reflect this, where a monarch is thought to have both his natural body and an extended body politic, so that his health and relations with the queen were related to the prosperity of the people and fertility of the land. But the two planes mustn’t be confused.
There is a final repetition of the Nephilim ritual in John’s Apocalypse, when the kings of the earth fornicate with the Whore of Babylon, engendering the “abominations” of her cup. This is specifically a reference to the Tower of Babel and the homogenizing and centralizing of the nations by way of some disordered eros.
So, we have:
- Improper erotic union with inhuman entity in an act of prostitution (ancient temple prostitute, Whore of Babylon)
- Deification of the ruler on account of his kinship relationship to the gods.
- Literalizing archetypes into specific entities that subsist at the level of human biology and can mix with humans.
- The political correlate of which is to homogenize/centralize: again, if a universal principle like “Language” is identified with one specific language, then all humans should ideally speak that one specific language. Such a hypertrophic political order is precisely the “giant,” the thing that grows out of proportion. The obvious scriptural example here is the Tower of Babel.
And this is the sort of dynamic we see today.
On the basis of universal ideals (‘love is love’), specificity and the natural ends of things are crushed under the weight of a biomedically sophisticated, administratively high-tech, yet clumsy, monoculture. All of this as the West’s cultural elites tend to live disordered, not to say perverted, private lives.
In order to slay the giant of globalism, so to speak, and not re-engender it, politics must wed society; not to a demonic impostor claiming to be a universal principle, but to the specific manifestation of that principle that is proper to it.
Leaders should not court the World Economic Forum or EU or whatever else, but their own peoples; not the Apocalyptic “whore” but the bride.
And even as Jesus prophesied a judgement on corrupt authorities, recommending that people “flee to the mountains,” and that “no one in the field” should “go back to get their cloak” (Matthew 24:16-18), we may put our stock on the rebellious countryside, on “the mountains” and “the field” and farmers throughout the West struggling to resist an elite that no longer cares about its people, seduced as it is by global funding schemes and projects.
