^{September 21, 2026}

This Bible Scholar Just Blew My Mind About Nephilim, Fallen Angels, and the Supernatural

Inside This Episode

What if there’s an entire supernatural story behind the Bible that most of us have missed? In Part 1 of our conversation with theologian and "The Unseen Battle" author Dr. Joel Muddamalle, we explore the Bible’s strange and often overlooked spiritual world—from Eden and the “sons of God” to the Nephilim, giants, the Tower of Babel, and the three cosmic rebellions of Genesis. Along the way, Joel explains why understanding the ancient world may completely change the way we read these stories—and why he believes the supernatural elements aren’t embarrassing leftovers from an ancient worldview, but essential pieces of the Bible’s larger story. 

Read The Unseen Battle ➜ https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310177626/ref=cm_sw_r_as_gl_api_gl_i_ZK6222JJFMXF8T4RF2TW?linkCode=ml1&tag=almindwif-20&linkId=ec48b52eb23a54b424f5534bbafe4e08&gaOptInStatus=true&ascsubtag=srctok-0e43b1ed2fa38c8e&btn_type=ss&btn_ref=srctok-0e43b1ed2fa38c8e

Read Joel Muddamalle’s Substack ➜ https://strangertheology.substack.com/

Transcript

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Are you trying to tell me that angelic beings had sex, procreated with human women? Here's what I'm saying.

Eric Huffman: Are you suggesting that these were actual, real giants that roamed the earth?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: What's going on with the Nephilim? So this is where this book called the Book of Enoch is really important. The Book of Enoch is actually three books in a time period called Second Temple literature. People in the Second Temple, they understood the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim to actually be the demons of the New Testament.

Eric Huffman: That is not what most Christians grow up-

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: No.

Eric Huffman: ...learning about demons. The other mentions of giants in the Bible, none of those mentions are after the flood, brother. So what does that mean?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: I'll say something, and people are going to get stressed out. The flood was not a literal global flood, but the flood was a regional flood that had global impact.

[00:00:56] <music>

Eric Huffman: Okay. So what if the Bible isn't the dogmatic book a lot of people assume it is? What if there is this wild, supernatural story unfolding behind the scenes that most readers completely miss? Our guest today is Dr. Joel Muddamalle, a Bible scholar, theologian, and author who has a lot to say about spiritual warfare and the unseen realm. He's here to help us uncover the hidden story of scripture and tell us why this ancient supernatural story about angels and demons is more real than what most people think of as the real world.

Joel Muddamalle, welcome to Maybe God.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Thanks for having me. Super excited for this conversation.

Eric Huffman: Glad you're here. All the way from the East Coast.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: The East Coast. Yes, sir.

Eric Huffman: To Houston, Texas.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah. To the heat. I mean, it's hot. My glasses... this humidity thing, you know?

Eric Huffman: Right. Welcome to my world. Literally. Now, before we dig into all the crazy and weird stuff that people are going to find fascinating, I'd like to get to know you a little bit and just how you got here in life. Did you grow up in a Christian home? I guess, when did you first become interested in the supernatural side of scripture?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, man. I'm a nerd. I'm a nerd through and through on probably every level. So, I'm Indian. My grandparents are actually missionaries in India. They have been serving Jesus for 60 years. There's this time period in India called the British Raj, where the Brits kind of come over and taken over India. It was a period of colonization. And then simultaneously, the gospel spreads into India.

Now, there's pockets of Christianity that have already been present in India prior to the British Raj. I think it's important for me to communicate that as well. But in terms of scale and growth, this was a significant moment. And it was a moment for my family that was important because my grandfather went to a school where these British missionaries put together basically an orphanage and gave both education, but also the gospel at the same time.

It's almost like a scene out of the book of Acts. He goes there. He hears the gospel. The Lord saves him. He comes back home. He shares the gospel with his family. They come to know Jesus. And really a unique thing for an Indian kid to really grow up in an environment where the story of Jesus was always around me.

My parents immigrated from India to the Chicagoland area in the 80s. And I was born in Chicago, the great land where Michael Jordan won the three-peat. We all cried when he tried to play baseball. But then our tears of sorrow turned to tears of joy with the iconic phrase, "I'm back."

Eric Huffman: "'I'm back." 45.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And the 45 was a stint. It was like 45, then he went out at halftime, came back, win 23. And you're like, "Okay, now we're back, maybe." That's where I grew up. But when I was two, my mom and dad sent me to India, in fact. So, from the ages of two to four and a half, I actually lived in India with my grandparents, raised by my aunts and uncles. My first language was Telugu.

Eric Huffman: Wow.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And in those early stages, early moments, my earliest memories of waking up very early in the morning with my grandfather, he would get in this Jeep, old-school Jeep, and he would drive hours to these rural villages to a group of people called Untouchables. It's a caste system that was prevalent in India. This was like the lowest of the lows. And my grandfather would proclaim the gospel, the good news of Jesus's death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. I believe that the Lord used those moments foundationally for me.

Then we fast forward, I come back to the States. I'm about four. And then I am in junior high, high school. I kind of had this idea that I want to become a lawyer. I want to live kind of the Christian dream, have a family, the picket fence, the whole nine yards, become a lawyer, make a lot of money, and then throw a little bit back to God, you know, in tithe or whatever.

And I had two people, a youth pastor who would not leave me alone. So, Pastor Rick would not leave me alone. And he saw something in me that I didn't see for myself or believe for myself. And he just continually pointing me to the scriptures, to the text. Honestly, this was confusing for me.

I loved reading Marvel, comic books, watching comic movies, Superman, the whole nine yards. And I had an English teacher when I was a sophomore in high school, Professor Scheidecker. And he forced us to read Homer's The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he taught us how to read critically. I mean, this is high school, not college.

And I remember going through thinking about author's intended meaning, about poetry and style and meter, introduction of a theme, only to have it recapitulate through narrative structure. And then I was like, "Wait a minute, how come when I read the Bible, I feel like I'm experiencing some of the same stuff in the Bible?" And then it just was like a key that clicked for me. And then I thought, "Oh, the Bible is literature. It is story. It is narrative."

The greatest, I think, miracle of the scriptures is the fact that this is all one cohesive story that's interconnected in a unique way. But you've got 66 books, 40 different authors over a period of 2000 years. This would be one of the greatest con games ever in the course of human history. And yet we find a cohesive story that connects together.

So those were probably the pivotal moments and particularly the epics of the Greek myths and the storylines of these hybrid beings and the heroes like Hercules and Odysseus. And then reading about people like Samson, Noah, Jephthah in the book of Judges. And you go, "Is there a connection point? And how come there is a story about a deluge, a flood, almost in every mythic story of every ancient civilization and also in the Bible? Is one ripping off the other? Is there a true story that rules them all?" I'm a Tolkien nerd, so I'd like the one ring to rule them all. And that really was the curiosity that led me into biblical scholarship and study in the original languages and the ancient world.

Eric Huffman: Hey there, if you enjoy conversations like this one with Dr. Joel Muddamalle, where we dig deep beneath the surface of scripture to explore the spiritual realm in search of truth that's often invisible to the naked eye, I hope you'll consider subscribing to this channel today. You don't have to agree with everything you're hearing to be a part of the Maybe God community. Our goal is to create a place where curious skeptics and honest believers have better conversations about the biggest questions of faith. So if that sounds interesting to you and you'd like to keep that conversation going, hit the "subscribe" button right now and click the notifications bell to stay up to date as we release new episodes in the future. Now let's get back to my conversation with Dr. Joel Muddamalle.

I'm really curious about the early days of that sort of transition into this world of biblical study. My story involves straying from believing in the Bible as truth and sort of lumping it in with other mythologies that were made up by normal human beings trying to make sense of a world they couldn't understand. Was there a time when you thought of the Bible as the same on par with Homer and other, you know, mythological stories and it was just one more in the mix? Or did you always have this impression that the Bible was, as Joseph Campbell said, the monomyth, right, the foundational story?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: That's such a good question. I think for me, the way my story worked out is I always knew or felt the Bible was different, like fundamentally different from the other stories. And yet I had people in my life consistently that would say things like, but the Bible is just one of many options. It would be like a universalist kind of idea, or Jesus was a really good dude. Like, obviously he was a great man, but Joel, can you really honestly believe that He was like actually the Son of God and that He defeated sin and death through death itself?

There were these kind of nagging points of contention for me in my faith. Along the way, I grew up in a context, I would call these folks, and I love them dearly, as functional cessationists. So theologically there's a term called cessationism, where the belief is after Jesus ascends into the heavens and you get the formation of the church, that the spiritual gifts essentially cease to exist. And so today we wouldn't have any spiritual gifts.

I grew up in a context of Christianity that they would say, no, the Holy Spirit can do anything, but doesn't do the charismatic gifts anymore. That to me was a devastation because I think, wait a minute, then what is the role of the Holy Spirit in my life? And how do I make sense of what seems to be supernatural encounters or even experiences that I've had other friends?

I remember being in high school and I had a friend who had an encounter with a Ouija board, and I'm telling you, it was the wildest thing. And this person was not like AWOL, like liar, like this was like the most down to earth, serious, honorable, and had an encounter. And you go, either the encounter was real, or this person was tripped out on acid, never did drugs in their life, or they're lying.

That led me to essentially a C.S. Lewis quote about Jesus, where it's kind of that famous quote where it's like... my idea is you can't have your cake and eat it at the same time, where people love to talk about Jesus as a great moral figure. And Lewis basically goes like, either Jesus is who He said He was, the Son of God, or He's a liar and lunatic. Like, you can't have the same Jesus who's making these incredible claims about Himself and His messiahship rooted in the Hebrew Bible and say, I'll keep the good moral stuff on the Sermon on the Mount, but everything else, nah, miss me with that. It's inconsistent and incoherent.

And for me, I had to rationalize it. The thing that really brought everything together was realizing that there was a part of the storyline of scripture that was either unintentionally, I think sometimes intentionally, hidden from me. And that was the supernatural cosmic aspect of the Bible that actually knit all of this together in a way that brought coherence to me. It makes sense of Balaam and the donkey, right? Like, why is there a talking donkey? It made sense of a talking snake in Eden. And how come everybody just overlooks the fact that Eve and Adam don't freak out when a snake talks to them, you know, which would be probably like right now, if a snake's still there to us, it's like a scene out of Harry Potter. We'd be like, Slytherin, get away from me. You'd be like, I'm not messing with that. But that's not what happens. There's an engagement of conversation that takes place.

So for me, I was like, where do we find the most coherence for the scriptures? And it's actually a retrieval of the cosmic supernatural elements that are actually the binding unit, in my opinion, of the Bible.

Eric Huffman: It grieves me how often even Christians will read the Bible and strip away or ignore the wonder and the mysterious elements of it that are so intriguing and fascinating. And it sounds like you had that hunger as well growing up loving the comic books and things like that. And if the Bible is just a historical and moral text and nothing more than... I mean, it's interesting, but kind of boring.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: What's compelling about it then? If it's just another textbook in a line of textbooks, what is so compelling that now we have to do some historical work? You go through the course of human history, the people are willing to die for this. They're willing to give up their lives. You look at the stories of the early martyrs. This is not easy stuff, right? You look at the... at least of what we can tell of the 12 disciples that essentially get martyred outside of John, and then there's some questions about the nature of the martyrdom for the other ones.

Sean McDowell actually did his thesis on the question of the martyrdom of the 12 disciples who become the apostles. And it's like, people don't die for a lie. And even if you have one that maybe will, right? We're talking about 11? And then one who lives on in agony, gets trapped in the island of Patmos. At the end, I think John's finally like, I think I would have rather been Audi earlier than make it all the way to that. He's like this old grandpa who's like, "What is wrong with you people? If you haven't figured it out yet, when are you going to figure it out?"

Eric Huffman: Anytime the idea comes up that people won't die for a lie, there's always skeptics in the comment section that are like, "People die for lies all the time." But the point isn't just that people won't die for a lie. They won't die for something they know to be a lie. And these first-generation Christians you're talking about, they did not doubt what they had seen. I mean, they did not doubt the truth of Jesus Christ. And so they died for that cause, you know, skeptics might say, well, the Twin Towers and 9/11 and people die for lies all the time, but they won't die for something they know to be a lie. And these were first generation eyewitness, disciples of Jesus that you're talking about.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: But I would also say to the skeptic also to consider is think about the scale of this. We're not talking about a one-off anomaly that happens in AD 70. We're talking about a storyline of, of people that have followed the ways of Jesus, that the longer you get distanced from the origin story, the intensity of love and faith and the explosion of the first century church grows. It doesn't diminish. So even if people would die for a lie, and let's just even hand to the skeptic, the idea that maybe they might even die for a known lie, would they continue to do so over the period of 200 years, 150 years? Would I do that? Like, nah.

Eric Huffman: 2000 years, it's happening now in some parts of the world.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: That's exactly right. And that's my point is part of this is an anthropological, social question as well of the nature of humanity. And for a society and for a human, everything that is inside of us is built for self-preservation. Like, I will not knowingly want to run into a burning building, but you tell me that my daughter MJ is inside of that burning building, Oh, I don't have to think about it. I'm going in, you know? And so now distance 2000 years later, there's a passion for the reliability of the truth, the veracity of Jesus and the story that still has people knowingly die for the truth.

Eric Huffman: I think the first time I came across your work was via the work of Dr. Michael Heiser, who influenced you greatly in your work. He's no longer with us in the flesh, but he really shook up the Christian world in terms of how we understand and interpret some of the most mysterious parts of the Bible, especially the archetypal stories in Genesis 1 through 11. I'm curious how you came across Dr. Heiser and how he influenced your life early on.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Mike. I know him as Mike. If you met Dr. Heiser, he would probably allow you and kind of same with me... It's like probably allow you to use the Dr. Heiser thing for a couple moments and then be like, "Listen, guys, I'm just Mike," which I loved about him. He influenced me greatly.

We both worked for a Bible software company called Logos Bible Software. I was a punk, just starting seminary, starting my MDiv program, young man, new family, and Mike was a scholar in residence. I had the job of helping to launch Faithlife Study Bible, and Mike was one of the general main editors for the study notes and the articles inside the Faithlife Study Bible. And I came from a particular tradition, a reformed tradition that, you know, I think would take a view, I know it would take a view of Genesis 6, the sons of God and use a divinized human ruler like Meredith Kline, a scholar Meredith Kline's view or a Sethite view. That was my training. So I come across-

Eric Huffman: We'll get into all that later.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: I get into Psalm 82, kind of this epic passage, Yahweh sitting amongst the divine council, and always was trained and taught in school academically that this is just God sitting in front of human rulers. He's giving judgment. And Mike had done an essay on Psalm 82 in the Faithlife Study Bible. So I have to market this. So I'm like, "Okay, what's the best essay that Mike wrote?" So I went, I read it and I go, "This is heresy. He's suggesting that the sons of God in Psalm 82 are angelic beings."

And I remember walking to Mike's office, his office was in this thing called the Flatiron building in the floor with like all of these video games and library. He had the coolest spot and you'd always have to walk past. And I walked into his office. Very important thing you need to know about Mike's office. You would walk in, behind his desk was a sign that said, "Reserved parking for Semitic scholars only." Like Hebrew Semitic scholars only. That should have let you know right off the bat what you're dealing with.

And I'll walk in like a punk, arrogant kid, and I'm just like, "You got Psalm 82 wrong, basically, you know? And I remember Mike could have literally... like if I were Mike... this is how arrogant and punkish I am. I'd be like, "Hey, sit down and bring out your Hebrew Bible. Let's work through the text." And he would have shut me up right away. But Mike said, "Oh, so what do you think the sons of God are? Who do you think the sons of God are?" He said, "Have a seat."

And we sat for maybe an hour, an hour and 15 minutes. And he just led me with question after question after question about what I thought I knew. And then I realized halfway through it, that everything I'm regurgitating is what somebody else has told me, not what I believe to be true based off the text itself and by the primary sources and the witness of the earliest church.

That was the beginning part of a relationship that I had with Mike. So then you fast forward many, many years. I started a PhD program. I'm working for a ministry called Proverbs 31 Ministries. My boss is a gal named Lysa TerKeurst, the best, most prolific, I think, author, and has written so many amazing books. So I started a PhD program, I'm like, "I think I want to do my stuff on the household imagery in Ephesians." And I want to argue that when Paul is talking about the household of God, that he has in mind a two-family household: a human household and a supernatural household based off of this language of the sons of God. And I reached out to Mike and I said, "Hey, would you be willing to be my doctoral advisor, my second reader?" And he said, "Yeah."

Eric Huffman: Wow.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And so he was my second reader. My first reader is an incredible New Testament scholar, Patrick Schreiner. When I had submitted my third chapter, sadly, Mike was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and it was really devastating.

Eric Huffman: Sure. I bet.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: I was actually ready to try to find a new reader and Mike messaged me and he was like, "Hey man, listen, don't even think about that. I'm going to see you through the finish line."

Eric Huffman: Soldier.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And he did.

Eric Huffman: It's amazing.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And we worked out when I submitted chapters of my dissertation based off of the weeks that he was in chemo. Because when he was in chemo, he was like, "I'm bored. I'd rather like work on your chapters edits." And that's what we did. I defended my dissertation and he walked me through that process. And then, about a year and a half later, he passed.

Eric Huffman: Wow. What an awesome connection and what a gift from God to have a man like that drop into your life. For people that don't know Dr. Heiser, I mean, he's a legend and wrote a book called The Unseen Realm.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Obviously my book.

Eric Huffman: Your book here is The Unseen Battle. My whole team and I read this book and were fascinated by it, had a lot of great conversations. One thing I would say just from the outset, we're about to get into some really crazy kind of scary stuff for people that aren't familiar with it, you know, the angels and demons and sons of God and spiritual warfare and all the rest.

I think a criticism from skeptical people or from some Christians, like you said, the camp you were raised in even is that Dr. Heiser and yourself, to some extent, maybe are taking certain ancient, hard-to-understand stories in the Bible that are obscure and maybe not meant to be as prominent, some might say, as you're making them, and you're sort of setting the scene as they are, as though they are foundational stories to understanding the grand sweep of scripture. Why is that the case? Where do you, as a scholar, see these stories like the flood and the fall in Eden and the tower of Babel as being sort of foundational for understanding the whole narrative of the Bible?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: If I were to ask you a question, who's the GOAT, MJ or LeBron, you would say?

Eric Huffman: Well, I'm an old guy, so I'd say MJ.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Right.

Eric Huffman: So when I say MJ, who am I referring to?

Eric Huffman: Oh, well, Michael Jordan.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: But how did you know I'm not talking about Michael Jackson?

Eric Huffman: Because I know ball.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Right. I love it. I love this. I love this. There's a lot of context clues, right?

Eric Huffman: Yeah.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: LeBron James, obviously as a basketball player. So now in your mind, you're making the connection that MJ means Michael Jordan, not Michael Jackson. And when I say GOAT, you're obviously thinking-

Eric Huffman: Greatest of all time.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Not a furry animal. Now let's think about how foundational that statement is to anybody who grew up in the Chicago area, but then anybody in the 90s and early 2000s that watched Space Jam, you know. You watch the number 23 become the most iconic number, you know, where other... By the way, LeBron James wore number 23 because of... okay, that's my point.

So 200 years from now, somebody comes across this clip and they hear who's the GOAT, MJ or LeBron? How do they interpret that? They're distanced from... there is no Last Dance. There may be an archeological, right? So how do they conceive of this? How do they make sense of it?

Eric Huffman: They can't, unless they have some way of studying the context.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Exactly. And you and I, we presume a foundational element of the sentence because we have the context in the back of our mind. This is a cutesy example, but I think it's actually really important because I think it's a fair criticism for people to have on Mike and for myself and for other biblical scholars and theologians. And I would just ask the same skeptics to consider our own moment right now and how foundational context and culture and social setting is for us to understand the narrative that's happening around us, that we're embedded in that world so we can make sense of that world. We don't have the need to say who is the greatest of all time, Michael Jordan or LeBron James who played basketball, but Jordan played in the 90s? You don't have to go into all of that, right?

Eric Huffman: It's assumed.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: It's assumed. And so the biblical writers were literate. The people lived in their own time that God in His providence chose to give us the biblical text through human agents who are products of their own environment. You can read Paul. And when you read Paul, I read passive-aggressive Paul. You can feel the chip on his shoulders. He's writing to the church in Ephesus. You can understand the annoyance that he has in Corinthians. You can understand the passion, love in Galatians. There's a personality that is coming out.

Well, in the Hebrew Bible, Genesis 1 through 11, this is one of the things that I would disagree with, Mike or some of my Hebrew scholar friends. I'm a biblical theology guy, which means, in my training, I'm trying to take the Old Testament and make sense of the New Testament and see this as one cohesive story. Hebrew Bible scholars typically are like, take the Hebrew Bible on its own terms.

Eric Huffman: Right.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Don't read into the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament often, you know? I'm exaggerating, but that's essentially kind of how they view it. So literates in a Hebrew Bible would take a look at the literary structure of Genesis 1 through 11 and they would say that this is one literary unit that is brought to give us a recapitulation or retelling of a story that happens from 12 really throughout the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Like, if you can really understand Genesis 1 through 11 well, you'll make sense of the rest of the Bible. I'm a biblical theology guy, and I'm like, why are y'all always hating on Abraham? Like, nah, you gotta do Genesis 1 through 12 because 12 is the Abrahamic covenant and it's the fulfillment of the disinheritance of the nations of the tower of Babel, which brings like a circular narrative closure to that literary unit. So that's how I would read it.

Eric Huffman: And you would say that your discipline more accurately, I guess, portrays what the story was intended to tell as bringing that reading it through the whole lens of scripture, especially, you know, the very next chapter, like you said, Genesis 12 is, I guess a more complete way of going at these passages that are hard to understand. Again, for those watching that may not be as familiar with the lingo, we're talking about these formational stories from the creation in Eden to the fall and the talking snake we're going to get into in a second, the flood of Noah and the ark and the tower of Babel in particular, and understanding those stories a little bit better.

I know just from reading it, that's part of the reason you wrote this book is to bring the whole sweep of scripture into focus for people. Does it grieve you maybe that as you wrote this book with the idea in mind that there are two simultaneous realms and stories playing out the invisible and the visible, do you feel like maybe most Bible readers today, most Christians even are just getting half the story?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah. I mean, it grieves me. But also I ended up being a guy who's glass half full, you know?

Eric Huffman: I like that.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Where I think like, yes, it grieves me, and it's like, man, there's so much opportunity. Because while we're watching a kind of deconstruction amongst evangelicals and Christians, what seems like at a skyrocketing pace, simultaneously, you're seeing a culture and a civilization that is more open to spiritual things than ever before. And it's like, man, we as believers, as followers of Jesus have the most compelling, rational opportunity to give a holistic view of the spiritual realm to humanity. But that presumes that we know the story, that we understand what's taking place in these stories in Genesis 3, Genesis 6 and Genesis 11, understanding the fulfillment of the story of Jesus. Like when Jesus comes in the incarnation, this is a fulfillment of the entirety of the story of Israel.

And so while yes, I do believe that it does grieve me, makes me sad, I tend to think of it as like, man, there's an opportunity here. Every time I walk across the street and I see another place that says tarot cards or Ouija boards or psychics, or I just read a thing of a famous celebrity, and she said that she was able to talk to her deceased, another celebrity, deceased ex-boyfriend through a psychic. And it brought such closure to her.

Instantly I think, oh, Saul and the Witch of Endor. None of this is new. There is a real enemy who hates us and who hates God. And yet there is a way for you and I to be connected to the spiritual world. It's through something so much more significant and helpful. It's through the power of the Holy Spirit that will give us the fruitful life that we long for.

Eric Huffman: I love it. I think for me, the Bible just comes to life in a way that it didn't before whenever I acknowledge and learn to look for the spiritual invisible side of the story. So we've been talking around it for a while now. Let's go after it now, starting with Eden. What's the invisible side of that story? Most people think of Eden and have the same picture in mind. Usually we picture whatever our children's Bible growing up showed, you know, like this idyllic, lush garden and two naked people who are never portrayed as naked in children's Bibles for obvious reasons, but we can choose our imaginations. What's missing in our typical conception of Eden?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: It goes back to the question that you asked me about the critique that people would have of me and Mike and of putting too much weight on ancient Near Eastern background texts or Greco-Roman texts and saying, well, the Bible is sufficient on its own. Why do you need to read into it other ancient literature? To which I would say, well, if you didn't, then you would probably not know that in the ancient Near Eastern world, the mountains were viewed conceptually as the place where God met with humanity.

So that simple cultural background that now filters into how we read about Eden as a cosmic mountain, stripped of that, we go, oh, this is a cute tale about God creating a bunch of people on a mountaintop. Sweet.

Eric Huffman: Let's move on.

Eric Huffman: But Genesis 1 and 2 don't include the phrase, well, this is what mountains meant to ancient Near Eastern people. It's assumed just like the MJ, LeBron thing is assumed.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Exactly, because you have the deity who comes down, Yahweh who comes down on top of a mountain. You know that this is a mountain because there's rivers and streams that come down from the mountain and flow down into the valley. Another interesting detail is in the ancient Near Eastern world, in the Hittite and the Mesopotamian myths, you have similar stories of mountaintops with lush gardens, with trees, with rivers.

In the Gilgamesh epic, you have Gilgamesh who's looking to find the... it's like the tree of life and has to go through a forest and go up a mountain. You're like, wait a minute, I've heard all of this before. So the background information actually helps the Bible to come alive. So one thing that's missing for us is, oh, God wants to meet with humanity.

This is also a subversion to all the other mythic tales of the known people of the time. What I mean by that is to say that the myths, the Greek myths, the Roman myths, the Viking myths, like all of these myths, it's a story about the supremacy of the deities who are essentially annoyed at humanity. Humanity is a nuisance. They're like ants. And humanity is like, "I just want the attention of the gods. Maybe if I do," you know, which is basically what's happening with Baal and the Mount Carmel, Elijah and the prophets of Baal. They cut themselves. They bleed themselves-

Eric Huffman: "Look at me, look at me.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: ...just to get the attention of their deity. This is a subversion to that, because here's God who is active, who steps into creation, who creates all things. And then He goes into the dust, adamah is the Hebrew term, and He creates mankind. And then in an act of intimacy, He breathes the breath of life, His own breath into humanity to animate humanity and bring humanity to life. Once again, you would probably be like, oh, that's a cute story. Awesome. And maybe would even preach it in a way like, can you imagine God got His hands dirty? Which I've done. I think that's true. Like, yeah, God got His hands dirty and He made humanity. I think that's beautiful.

There's another aspect of this that you would miss, which is in the ancient Near Eastern story with Tiamat and Qingu and the story of how the earth came into being, the purpose and the role for humanity that was created from the blood of the deity was to be the slaves of the deities.

So in that story, humanity is created from blood, not from dust. And then their role is to be slaves in the temple. Now you read the story in the Garden of Eden and you go, wait a minute, Adam and Eve are not created from blood, but they're created from the dust of the ground.

Eric Huffman: And the breath of God.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And the breath of God is what animates them. And then instead of being left in the ground, the text says that God lifts and places them. The Hebrew term is nuah, which is an odd term for placing or putting. There's a different Hebrew term that would make more sense, but this term nuah is the same word that's used in Exodus of God who rests on the seventh day.

The scholar G. K. Beale does a lot of work on this, but He picks, He nuahs them, places them in Eden on top of a mountain top. So the very first thing that God does for humanity is create them, breathe the breath of life onto them, lifts them, places them in Eden, and then places them in a posture of rest so that they could experience the blessing of God. And it's from this posture of rest they're given the great dominion mandate to go multiply and be fruitful.

So they are fruitful and they multiply not in order to achieve rest, but from the place of rest that God has already achieved from them. This is a direct inversion of every ancient Near Eastern story of the time, from the Hittites, the Mesopotamians to the Akkadians. This would have been something that was so prominent in the ears and the minds and the hearts of the ancient Near Eastern people that they would have gone away. There's something different that's going on with the Israelites, with their story.

Eric Huffman: Sorry to interrupt you. What's the significance of the mountain exactly? Because I've never seen a mountain in a children's Bible illustration of the Garden of Eden.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, because the mountains were the place where God met with the deity and the mountain top was viewed as the location of the divine assembly, of the divine council. So God would set up His kingdom on top of a mountain. Ancient kings would often in the place of residence, set up a garden on top of an elevated structure as a place of their pleasure, their leisure. But then also where the kingdom reside is also where His council would take place.

So Eden is a cosmic mountain. Yahweh is king. He creates His royal children, Adam and Eve, made in the likeness and image of God, places them in His royal garden, and then gives them the dominion mandate to take the goodness of Eden and spread it out and into the ends of the earth.

There's a saying that Mike had once that actually shook me. And Mike goes, "Remember that Eden is on earth, but all of earth is not Eden." Eden, Garden of Eden, the Mount Eden, it's on earth. It's on a parchment of Mesopotamian land, but all of earth is not Eden. Which then makes sense of why God tells Adam and Eve, go be fruitful and multiply. The goal is not to build a monastic society of walls, right? It's actually to spread, to invade. It's militaristic in nature. It's conquest. It's to go out and bring the goodness of God out and into the ends of the earth.

Eric Huffman: Wow.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And the mountain, the mountain thing. So I have a project called Stranger Theology. In Stranger Theology, we're working through a podcast series called The Cosmic Mountain. So just think about this, and this is a good exercise for everybody to do. Think about everything that happens on mountaintops throughout the biblical narrative. So you've got Mount Eden. We're going to talk about Genesis 6, Mount Hermon. We've got the Tower of Babel because they're in a plain where there is no plains. They build their own mountain. You have Mount Sinai. You have Mount Carmel. You get into the New Testament. You've got the Mount of Transfiguration. You've got Jesus who goes up onto a mountain for a temptation scene in the wilderness. And then let's not forget Golgotha, which happens on a mountaintop.

Eric Huffman: Fascinating. Is it your take then that the Genesis creation story was, after the fact, corrective against pre-existing Near Eastern narratives that had gotten the story wrong, or that the true story in Genesis pre-existed those other narratives and they bastardized it, and so, you know, there was... I guess, which came first, chicken or egg?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: This is so good. This is so good. Job 38, I believe it's Job 38:7 says... by the way, Job is such a wild book.

Eric Huffman: It is, man.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: It's like 37 chapters Job is getting whooped, just whooped. And Yahweh is just like, all right, cool, cool, cool. And then 38, chapter 38, God decides to speak. And when He decides to speak, He's like, "Yo, Job... And this is Joel's translation. Like, "Yo, get ready, homie. It's about to go down."

Eric Huffman: I need to read the Joel translation.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And then in Job 38, He goes, "Where were you? Where were you?" And He goes through it, like, you know, stretched out the heavens where I laid everything on? And He goes, where were you when the morning stars shouted for joy and the sons of God shouted and sang in the beginning of creation.

I just want to take a moment and pause on that little detail that Yahweh Himself says to Job, which Job, from a dating standpoint, is probably one of the earlier books that was ever written. In terms of placement chronologically, I'd probably place it right after Genesis 12, honestly. If you're reading through a chronological Bible. And the reason why I think this is so important is think about this, that in the beginning of creation, who is there witnessing the beautiful cosmic creation of Yahweh? The sons of God. The heavenly host are there. They've seen it.

Who's there to see God set up a mountaintop, create a council? Who's there to see how God has created a theocratic kingdom to see how He desires to work in and through creation? All of these angelic beings are there. The heavenly host, the sons of God are there.

The best counterfeits are not recreation in something brand new. The best counterfeits emulate and steal vestiges of what were already true, but then, in intentional ways, subvert it. They distract from it at a core element in order to be the most deceptive. So why is it, to your point, that we have so many creation stories? They all deal with mountains. They all deal with deities. And then you have the biblical story. So then you have this question, which one came first? This is going to sound odd. I'm actually okay with a first written evidence of creation stories coming from other civilizations in the ancient Near Eastern world, because we also have to remember that the ancient world was first primarily an oral tradition, not a written tradition, right?

Eric Huffman: The true story could have been orally communicated.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Most likely it was. I mean, realistically, all of them were orally communicated. And there's a whole study on the legitimacy of oral tradition, how you can study it, and how it was passed on from generation to generation. This takes us to Deuteronomy 5 and 6. You've got the Shema: Listen O Israel, and write this on your hearts and teach it to your children.

So outside of, okay, which one came first, I want to ask which one is the true story. Because I think, this is my view personally, that obviously the creation story, in my view, the creation story that the Bible presents came first. And the reason why I believe it came first is because that is what the witness was of these angelic supernatural beings. They saw creation come into play. And then when they go into rebellion, these supernatural, evil, malevolent, spiritual beings, they are jealous. They want to have the kingdom of God as established. They want to have the progeny that is promised to Adam and Eve that's never given to angelic beings. "To be fruitful and multiply" is a unique command that's given to Adam and Eve. We have no evidence in the biblical storyline or even Second Temple literature that I'm aware of where God gives that command to angelic beings. And so now in my view, I'm like, oh yeah, of course they're ticked off. Because they're like, how come Adam and Eve get to procreate and to spread their image, but we as angelic beings don't get to spread our image.

Eric Huffman: But not all of them were, some of them.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Some of them. A subset of them. We'll get into the three rebellions piece of it. The original story of the biblical narrative comes back in written form, and it comes as an intentional corrective. The technical term is it's a polemic. It's an argument against the counterfeit stories that are presented there. And if you pay very close attention to the story of Genesis and Eden compared to the Mesopotamian myth, the Akkadian myth and the Hittite myths, the story in Genesis with Eden and the deluge is literally attacking specific points of the other ancient stories.

The nature of the deities, their relationship with each other, the nature of humanity, what the role and purpose of humanity is. Even the fact that even amongst the divine spiritual beings, there's cosmic conflict amongst them. But the creation story, there ain't no cosmic conflict against Yahweh. He creates. He speaks it all into existence. You don't have cosmic conflict until well after the fact with Adam and Eve, Genesis 6 and Mount Hermon and then the Tower of Babel. And so I would say that the oral tradition of the biblical narrative happened first. Then you have the counterfeit stories of the ancient worlds around them. And then you have the written narrative that comes back in as a polemical argument against the preexisting stories.

Eric Huffman: Setting the record straight.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Setting the record straight. Again, it would be very... People are going to get tired of me saying this. But when was the last time you heard Michael Jordan say, I'm the greatest of all time?

Eric Huffman: I don't think He ever has.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: He doesn't have to.

Eric Huffman: No, that's right.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: That's the true story. Now, well after the fact, when somebody else who comes in and suggests that they're the greatest of all time-

Eric Huffman: We know who you're talking about.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Now you go, oh, let's bring out the last dance. Let's show the clips. I sit in my car with my boys and I watch 90s highlight reels of Jordan in the dunk contest. And then my son was like, "Dad, it's like he could fly in the air.

Eric Huffman: Exactly.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: "Why didn't they call him [Eric Jordans?], bro?

Eric Huffman: "If I could be like Mike."

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: "I want to be like Mike."

Eric Huffman: All right. There's one more question and we'll dig into the three rebellions. How do we make sense of the sons of God? You've mentioned that they appear to be angelic beings. Were they created before human beings? And what's their role in the whole cosmology of the Bible?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: The cosmology of the Bible. So Genesis cares about cosmology, right, the ordering of it, of the universe. Job 38 gives us that the morning stars, the heavenly host, and the sons of God, the exact Hebrew phrase, B’nei ha-Elohim, is used to describe these spiritual beings. I take a hermeneutic principle where we take the clearest reading of the Bible and we take that clearest reading and then read that back into obscure passages of scripture.

Genesis 6 is an obscure passage of scripture where you have the exact same phrase, sons of God. And so there are many theories of who these sons of God in Genesis 6 are. The primary theories are the Sethite view, that these are the holy line of Seth.

Eric Huffman: Seth was who?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Seth was one of the sons of Noah. You have the divinized ruler view, which then takes it a step further and says, it's not just any human, any royal line of Seth. These are actual kings. Kings in the ancient Near Eastern world that had this divinized responsibility. They were representatives of the deity. So you have that. And then you have, in my opinion, the more and most coherent view, which is the divine beings view. These are spiritual beings. And the reason why I would argue for spiritual beings is because that exact phrase, sons of God, is used in Job 1, in Job 2, to refer to the divine council scene where the sons of God present themselves before Yahweh. And remember the dating of Job is much earlier. So in terms of literary connection point to the historical storyline, we have an earlier dating, exact same phrase, and then you have a very clear context. And the clear context is a divine council scene.

Eric Huffman: When Lucifer was there in Job.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Then you have the Ha Satan. You have this divine council member who shows up right there.

Eric Huffman: He's allowed to come before Yahweh. It's crazy.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah. He's there. And then you have Job 38. This is the sons of God are there when? At the beginning of creation. So they are pre-existent to the creation of humanity. If that's the case, and I would argue that's the case. And in fact, not just me, but this was the primary and to my understanding, the unanimous view of the church up until the time of Augustine. So when Augustine shows up, we see an alternative theory.

Eric Huffman: And Augustine was fourth century.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Fourth century. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So from Irenaeus to Origen to Clement to, I think even Polycarp-

Eric Huffman: All these are church fathers.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Church fathers. Ante-Nicene, much earlier than Augustine, Tertullian, they held to a spiritual beings view of the sons of God. That was just normative. And the biblical text itself seems to hold to that because of Jude, because of 1 Peter and 2 Peter that make connection points to the days of Noah. Well, the days of Noah is connected to Genesis 6. What happens is Genesis 6, the sons of God and a flood and then their appearance of these enigmatic figures called the Nephilim. With all of that information, with that data, just biblical data, I haven't even gone to Book of Enoch yet, just biblical data, the most coherent reading for me is that the sons of God are angelic beings.

Eric Huffman: I agree with you on that.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Then here's the big issue. If the sons of God are angelic beings and they see the daughters of man, and there's this little Hebrew thing that's happening. I get into this in my book, The Unseen Battle, that in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, whenever you see the three phrases in Hebrew, it's two words, but the three phrases are see, desire, and take. Things go sideways for humanity. They just go sideways. Eve sees the fruit, desires the fruit, takes the fruit. In Genesis 6, the sons of God see the daughters of man, desire the daughters of man, and take the daughters of man.

In each of these instances, they see, they desire, they take, and the outcome of this action becomes the spread of evil. Genesis 3 is the fall of humanity. In Genesis 6, it's the production of these beings called the Nephilim. Here, I already know the skeptic. The skeptic is going, "Joel, hold up, wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me that angelic beings had sex, procreated with human women?"

Here's what I'm saying. That angelic beings had an unholy union with human women, and the result of that unholy union were these giants, these half-breed Nephilim. How the-

Eric Huffman: The mechanics of it?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: ...the mechanics of it work, it's open for debate, honestly. I have a couple thoughts. One of them is you find angelic beings throughout the Old Testament, particularly in the scene with Abraham, where angelic beings show up with Yahweh, and they sit and they eat with Abram. So somehow spiritual beings, Elohim, can take corporeal form, walk on earth, sit down, have a meal, which would suggest they somehow have a digestive system in order to eat the meal, get up, and walk away.

In the story of Lot with Sodom and Gomorrah, you have an angelic being who comes in. And a couple of things that are very easily overlooked in this story: the people in the city look at the angelic beings and can make out that they're masculine. This is an important detail. It's because they are masculine, they're men, that they want to take them and essentially assault them sexually. So clearly these spiritual beings can present themselves in corporeal form in a gendered way.

Then the second thing, when Lot is like, which is crazy, you have my daughter instead, like, what are you doing, right, the angelic beings grab Lot. So there's physicality, grabs him, pulls him back into the house, you know? So you have examples throughout the Hebrew Bible of angelic beings that are doing things in the physical realm.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, they're embodied.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: They're embodied. So we're left with a potential. Is it possible? It seems like it could be possible. Then another big objection. Well, what about when Jesus says, "We will be like the angels, right? In heaven, who do not marry or are given over to marriage." I would just say, pay close attention to what Jesus says and what He doesn't say. First of all, Jesus locates the spiritual beings where? In heaven. So we're talking about spiritual beings not embodied on earth, but disembodied in heaven. And then He says to be given over in marriage. He doesn't say anything about procreation. Once again, I think we have to be careful to allow the words of Jesus to stand.

Then kind of just notice in the Old Testament, you have examples of barren wombs that come to life. Is it possible the dark powers could subvert, could corrupt the same kind of practice to create something evil? At the end of the day, you have the Nephilim. The Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek, translates that Hebrew term Nephilim into Greek as Gigas. Gigas is the term for giants. In the Greek speaking world, when you said Gigas, when you said giants, you're thinking in your brain, the Greek giants of old. I mean, you're thinking about a hybrid beings. The Odyssey just came out. I think there was a depiction of them in there. Like you're seeing that in real time. Again, culture and context gets to that conclusion.

I want to build a coherent argument that fits in all these places. There's an incoherence with the Sethite view and the divinized human ruler view. What are those incoherences? One is the sons of God are never elsewhere in the Bible associated with the righteous line of Seth. You have to read that into that text, which I don't know how you read it into the text.

Eric Huffman: It would have been sons of Seth in that case, right?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: It would have been sons of Seth, not sons of God.

Eric Huffman: Right.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: The daughters of man, how in the world did they get automatically assumed to be the unholy line of Cain, right? That's another reading into the text. And then you're still left with both in that view and the divinized human rulers view. How do you make sense of a human-to-human procreation that results in hybrid demon... you know, hybrid giants? Like there's an incoherence even with that.

Eric Huffman: Right, right. Okay, Joel. This has been fascinating, but I will say your brain works on another level. And I'm trying to stay with you. I'm trying to make sure everybody watching is staying with us. It's like you're driving a Tesla and I'm in a Kia or something. I'm trying to keep up. But let's sort of set the table here. You wrote this book again, The Unseen Battle, with... the center of the framework is this holy family, this divine kingdom that God had in mind. And then there are these three rebellions in the early stages of Genesis that threaten the divine objective of the holy family. Let's take them one by one. First of all, just tell us how you got to the conclusion that God's objective with creation was to establish for Himself a family.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: First is the phrase that God created Adam and Eve in His likeness and in His image. He gave them the image of God. Well, that term "likeness and image" in Hebrew, tselem and demut, were terms that were used of royal children that would represent and reflect the royal king out into the world. So right off the bat, you've got a language connection.

And then you have their role and their function. This is what theologians and scholars would call the dominion mandate, that they're not to just sit and eat and have a jolly day. They're supposed to multiply, be fruitful, to go out. God gives them a task to guard. The Hebrew term is shamar. We think in our modern mind that's a gardener. Like, oh, you're just supposed to cultivate the land. Actually, that's the exact same term that's used in the Levitical priests that guarded or protect the temple, exact same word that's used of Nehemiah, the watchman on the tower.

Eric Huffman: Really?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah.

Eric Huffman: So it's militaristic too?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: It's militaristic in nature. So who told us it has to be one or the other? What if this is a holistic view that, yes, are you supposed to tend to the guard? Of course you are. And are you supposed to expand and go out and protect and guard it? Yes. Here's the other big question. Why would God tell you to guard Eden if there wasn't something to guard Eden from?

Eric Huffman: Yeah, that's a mystery.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: That's a mystery, right?

Eric Huffman: Yeah.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Well, what if the mystery reveals itself when you realize that the issue was not that the snake enters into Eden, but the substance of what the snake says. So we have the English term snake. This is the first rebellion in Genesis 3. That English term snake is the Hebrew term nakash. And nakash can mean a garden, a cherubim. So think of throne room guardian beings, the cherubim that are placed outside of Eden at the end of Genesis 3. It can mean a bronze fiery image, or it can mean the literal snake. I take the view that this snake embodies all three aspects of it.

And remember, Eden is a cosmic mountain where Yahweh and His heavenly host would have come to and fro. They would have been hanging out in Eden at the end of every day in the cool of the evening breeze. It says the Yahweh would walk and talk with Adam and Eve. So the issue for Eve and Adam is not the presence of the snake. The issue is what does the snake say? The snake suggests that God is not good, which to me is the core of all of sin in all of humanity. Every missing the mark, every evil tenacity, tendency, every time we do something that hurts another human being, at the core of it is this fear that God is not going to be good and sufficient for us.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, it's not that God isn't real. It's not that He's not good. It goes back to the deception thing you said earlier, which being the most formidable weapon in the enemy's arsenal.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Exactly.

Eric Huffman: It's not casting an alternate vision of reality. It's just twisting the one that was already. Just a little.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Just a little bit. And that's all it takes. It's like a compass. I'm a nerd. So I watch shows like Alone and these survival shows because I like to live vicariously through these people. I want to do RV camping. We had a camping trip recently and there was a bear that came through our campsite. I'll never go camping again, just so you know.

I mean, the one show I remember, I watched this dude got one degree off of a compass, one degree. And he's going traveling like 12 miles with the group. You know what happens when you're one degree off over a period of 12 miles? You get lost.

Eric Huffman: That's right.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: You get lost. That's what happens. That's what the enemy is doing. The enemy doesn't need to give us this massive deception. The enemy just needs to give us one degree where instead of staying on course to true north, which is Jesus, we just take a step left.

Eric Huffman: What did he say in Eden to do that?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: He goes, "Did God really say that you must not eat of the tree?" And then Eve responds and says, "He said we must not touch of the tree or we will die." There's a whole thing about the tree of the knowledge and the tree of life that's inside of Eden that also emulates other ancient Near Eastern stories of wisdom narrative, where there's a tree at the center of a garden and it's a protection and it's a desire for humanity. And what the serpent tempts Adam and Eve with is the thought that God doesn't have your best in mind. He's withholding something from you, and this is actually a cruelty of God, not a blessing of God. Lo and behold, what the serpent is actually doing is leading them into a snare, into a trap.

Eric Huffman: Leading them into rebellion.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Into ultimate rebellion based off of the thought, an erroneous thought that God doesn't have good for them.

Eric Huffman: So their heavenly Father isn't who they thought He was, and they can chart their own course now. And that was sort of the heart of their rebellion.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And this rebellion creates a breach. It creates a transgression, a separation. This first rebellion, Genesis 3, creates a separation between humanity and God. The consequences, they're cast out of Eden. Garden cherubim are placed in Eden. Eden is taken away as a holy place to be reserved as the household. It's like the throne room of God, essentially. And so it can't have anything to do with evil. But the goal, and this is found in Genesis 3:15, it's the protoevangelium, the first glimmer of the gospel.

Eric Huffman: What is?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: In Genesis 3:15.

Eric Huffman: Genesis 3:15.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, 3:15, 16, and 17. It's the protoevangelium. It's the first glimmer of the gospel. It's where Yahweh says to Adam and Eve and to the serpent, essentially, hey, by the way, there's going to come a time when the serpent, he's going to strike at the heel of the seed of the woman, but the heel is going to crush the head of the serpent. This sets into motion the war against the seed of man, humanity, against the seed of the serpent, which are really anybody who's antithetical and lives in rebellion against Yahweh and His kingdom.

Eric Huffman: So just to put it in simple to understand terms, you're saying that, as you said, Eden was on the earth, but not all of earth was Eden. God planted His family in Eden, close to Him, in intimacy with Him, but outside of Eden, the fallen angels had been cast to the earth, perhaps in some way. And-

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: There's some level of rebellion and chaos.

Eric Huffman: There was something going on. And somehow there was interaction with those fallen angels and this serpent, whether it was an animation or a possession of the serpent or something, speaking through the serpent.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: I have a very speculative idea on what happened on this. My speculative idea of what happened is that you had a spiritual being that was on the outside that created an unholy union with the literal snake on the inside. Remember, there's this little detail. All of the animals were presented in front of Adam, but none was found suitable. And there's this little detail about the snake. The snake was crafty, that it was wise amongst all that. So if I were to ever write a children's book, I'd be like, oh, that's what happened. I think the snake is like the Bachelor, you know? The snake was like the last one, and at the end was not given the flower. It wasn't given the rose and the snake got pissed, got angry. It was like, oh. And then in that level of disgruntled nature, there was a spiritual being on the outside, a fallen, you know, the nakash, the enemy, Satan, and goes, "Oh, let me hijack your body. Let's go and let's mess with Adam and Eve together."

Eric Huffman: An alliance.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: In a kind of unholy alliance. That's my thought. My speculative thought.

Eric Huffman: As you say, it's speculative, right? But it's fascinating. But the main idea here is that their objective was to subvert God's good plan for humanity and for this family, because they wanted that for themselves and it wasn't given to them. And this subsect of the sons of God who rebelled were envious, basically, and so they took delight in breaking up God's plan.

That's Genesis 3, the first rebellion. Fast forward ahead now to Genesis 6. And you mentioned a little bit about it earlier, but to the story of the Nephilim, man. Well, everybody thinks Genesis 6 is the story of the flood. And if you grew up in church, you grew up hearing about the flood. For some reason, we put the ark on the cover of every children's Bible like it's a nursery rhyme, and it's horrific.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Man, devastating.

Eric Huffman: Anyway, we leave out the part of the Nephilim, the beginning of the flood narrative. Why do you think that is? Is it just too weird?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, I think it's uncomfortable.

Eric Huffman: We don't think the kids are ready?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: My view now is like, I mean, kids are really ready.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, man, they've seen it all.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: They really have seen it all. I'm worried about the future with AI. The amount of times I watch a video, I'm like, "Oh, this is so funny." And I'm like, "Wait a minute, this is AI-generated. This is not even real people. This is not real animals." And it feels like I got robbed of something true and good and joyful. And so, yeah, Genesis 6:1-4-

Eric Huffman: Let me read it. Just for everybody, this is starting in verse 2. It says, "The sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, 'My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal. Their days will be 120 years.' The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown." So, Joel, we've got heroes of old, men of renown, Nephilim giants. Help us out. What's going on here? Help us make sense of this.

Eric Huffman: Earlier, I already gave you kind of an exegetical argument for why we should read sons of God as spiritual beings. And then what's going on with the Nephilim? This is where this book called the Book of Enoch is really important. The Book of Enoch is actually three books. It's actually a compilation of writing in a time period called Second Temple literature.

Eric Huffman: What time period was that?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: This is roughly... you've got the end of Malachi, right, p until AD 70.

Eric Huffman: Like 400 BC to AD 70.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: AD 70, yeah. This is often referred to as the intertestamental period, often referred to the 400 years of silence. While from a biblical canon standpoint, it was silent, from a literary writing standpoint, a lot of stuff was being written around this time period. The Book of Enoch was written around this time. It's a compilation of books. The second two books are much later dated and honestly not very helpful.

Eric Huffman: So, 1 Enoch is the most helpful of the three?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, and it's often called the Book of the Watchers. The Book of the Watchers, the term watchers actually is not new a novel to Enoch. It shows up in Daniel. This is in context actually in Daniel where a watcher is described as a heavenly being who comes down as part of this kind of divine council scene. The Book of the Watchers actually is a retelling and an elaboration of the Genesis 6 narrative that takes place with the flood.

Eric Huffman: Really?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And in the Book of the Watchers, you have the story take place on, guess what? A mountain. Mount Hermon.

Eric Huffman: Imagine that.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: So, think about this. You've got Mount Eden, the holy cosmic mountain of God. Then you have the sons of God who create desecration on what? Mount Hermon. And it's like this intentional corruption of what God is already doing. Based off of the Book of Enoch, Enoch... I think the way that we should read Enoch is not canon. I do not believe that-

Eric Huffman: What do you mean by canon?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Some people would be like, the historians and the Council of Nicaea, they hid us from the truth and they didn't canonize the Book of Enoch.

Eric Huffman: Oh, by excluding it from the...

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: By excluding it from one of the 66 books of the Bible and all of that. Or some people say it's a conspiracy theory. Or the other view is it's not canonized, so why should we take it seriously at all? It's just a distraction to us. To which I would say, once again, if you have access to culture and context, why wouldn't you want to read it?

Eric Huffman: Sure.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Why wouldn't you want to have the conceptual background of the biblical narrative that the biblical authors themselves do? And we find this in Jude 5, 6, and 7.

Eric Huffman: What do you mean you find it in Jude?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: In Jude, you've got the story of the spiritual beings imprisoned in Tartarus in the days of Noah, which is a clear connection back to Genesis 6. It dates to the days of Noah, what happens in Genesis 6. You have the sons of God that cohabitate. They have an unholy union with human women.

Eric Huffman: But does Jude directly quote Enoch? Is that what you're saying?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: There's a debate. There's a debate among scholars on if this was a quotation or if this was an echo and an allusion.

Eric Huffman: Okay.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: My view is that Jude is intentionally alluding to the Book of Enoch. I don't think it's a direct quotation. I do believe you find direct quotations in 1 Peter and in 2 Peter.

Eric Huffman: Okay.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: It's very likely that Jude is actually borrowing from 1 Peter and 2 Peter, in fact.

Eric Huffman: So, the text was known by early Christians.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: 100%.

Eric Huffman: And certainly by ancient Jews.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yes, 100%.

Eric Huffman: And it, for them even, might have not been canon worthy in terms of being accepted into the canon of Scripture, but it was helpful history. Helpful context or color.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah. They draw on it, you know. One of the things that they're pulling back from is if you read Enoch and you read Genesis 6. Genesis 6 is so brief because, again, the biblical authors presume that we already understand the story of the flood and the deluge and the competing myths of the Apkallu and the Mesopotamian myth and these sages and all these things that are happening in that storyline. The Bible doesn't feel the need to retell all of that to us.

Eric Huffman: We're back to the who's the GOAT thing, right?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Exactly. So, in Genesis 6, you have a transgression of boundaries. In Genesis 3, you have a transgression of role and responsibility. Now, in Genesis 6, you have a transgression of boundaries. You have the sons of God who leave the place that they're supposed to be to step into humanity and then they transgress boundaries. They take human women, they cohabitate with them and they produce these Nephilim, these giants, you know?

Eric Huffman: Physical giants.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Physical giants that caused havoc and chaos on the earth. This is where Enoch builds on this idea. And it says that when the Nephilim come onto the earth that the Nephilim, they create havoc. They begin to devastate the earth. They have an appetite that's-

Eric Huffman: It's insatiable.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: It's insatiable. Once the food is given up, then they go to basically killing other humans, the cannibalism. They start eating humans and they just create so much disaster and chaos. There's another very important detail that happens in Enoch 2. We are told that there is exchange of goods that takes place. Because remember we're talking about a patriarchal society. So, in a patriarchal society, these daughters belonged to fathers. I make the argument in my book, The Unseen Battle, that the origin story of human sex trafficking actually happens in Genesis 6.

Eric Huffman: Really?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: There's particular language that's used for forcible taking of a woman. That language is void. It is not present in the Genesis 6 narrative. There's something actually, I think, more evil, like really evil that's happening in Genesis 6. The Book of the Watchers helps unpack this. You have the fathers of these daughters who exchange their daughters to the sons of God in exchange for knowledge. Wait a minute. Where else have we found this desire for knowledge that destroyed humanity? Oh yeah, the Garden of Eden.

Eric Huffman: There's a pattern.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: There's a pattern that's happening. Here, and the Book of the Watchers kind of extrapolates this idea that you have the teaching of astrology. You have the teaching of the cutting of roots, of pharmakeia. You've got the teaching of metallurgy.

Eric Huffman: Wait, who was teaching who?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: The sons of God... different supernatural beings had possession of different kinds of knowledge. In exchange for the human women, they teach humanity these hidden knowledge, this hidden wisdom, right?

Eric Huffman: Technology almost.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Exactly, technology. It's pharmakeia. It's cutting of roots, for elucidatives, DMT, ayahuasca, right? How to scale that metallurgy.

Eric Huffman: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Exactly. The metallurgy one I think is one of the most fascinating ones.

Eric Huffman: What is?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Metallurgy, because they teach humanity how to basically use metal to create swords. Well, swords have one purpose. To kill.

Eric Huffman: Sure.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: To kill. And so, what do these spiritual beings teach humanity to do? To become more prolific and more proficient in murder, in killing.

Eric Huffman: Which is the reason why the flood, according to Genesis 6, was...

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And in those days, everything was so evil. Evil had spread amongst the earth. Violence had spread amongst the earth. And so, God wanted to restart the world.

Eric Huffman: Okay. I interviewed your friend, Timothy Alberino about this very topic recently. His take, I think, is that the Enochian narrative about the pre-flood days, like we're talking about now, and the Nephilim, predated the Genesis 6 writing and was sort of the source material that everyone knew by heart, probably, when Genesis 6 was written. So, I guess we're back to the chicken or the egg, before-or-after thing. Do you agree with that? Or do you think that part of Enoch was a later addition to the pre-existing?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: I think the oral tradition existed beforehand.

Eric Huffman: Just like the other issue.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: The challenge that you have is that the fragments and the writing of 1 Enoch has a later dating. Late 2nd century, early 3rd century. So, with that, the common element... So, I think of this as a table with three legs, and there are three stories that are very important in this. One leg is Genesis 6. The other leg is what's elaborated in the Book of Enoch. But there's a third story. And that third story is the story of the Deluge, the Kaluz, and the Mesopotamian myths that are present. In Genesis 6, you get fragments of what happens in Enoch, because it elaborates on it. And then you have an intentional attack against the deluge, right?

Eric Huffman: What do you mean an intentional attack against the Deluge?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: With the way that the flood is set up, you have a retelling of the flood in a way that honors the biblical story and the reason for what happens. It presents the spiritual beings as evil, not as being saviors. In the Mesopotamian myth, the Kaluz are saviors. They help humanity. It devoids Yahweh of His salvific nature. You see what I'm saying?

Eric Huffman: Yeah.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: It presents the deities as the ones who... Versus the Genesis 6 story said, "No, don't get it twisted." Actually, the spiritual beings are the ones that created all this evil, Yahweh steps in and saves the righteous in order to restart humanity. What Enoch does for us, or the Book of the Watchers specifically, is it is doing a couple of things. It is preserving, it is... Sorry, I'm going to do it in order. It's retrieving, it's preserving, and it's transmitting. So, it is retrieving the story of the Deluge, the Kaluz story, the Mesopotamian stories, and the Genesis 6 story, right, retrieving it, it is preserving it in literary form now, so we don't lose it again, but it's also now transmitting it back to us. So, we're able to understand the concept and the thematic and theological framework of what's taking place amongst the three.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. Again, it's not part of the scriptural canon. I think you would agree it probably shouldn't be, just because of...

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: No, I don't think it should be, yeah.

Eric Huffman: ...authorship and dating questions and things like that.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, it's a category of writing called pseudepigraphical writing, false writing or false attribution. It's a very important detail, though, for people to recognize that just because it is categorically pseudepigraphical, there's an anonymity to the author. There's a difference between an intentional literary forgery from a pseudepigraphical writing that has literary quality to it.

For instance, all literary forgeries are pseudepigraphical in nature, but the intent is malicious. The intent is to falsify information. The Book of the Watchers isn't doing that. The Book of Watchers is a kind of ancient writing that was intentionally pseudepigraphical. It was anonymous, and it was attributed to Enoch with an intention to give it... It's like a sponsorship deal. It's like if you're sponsored by Nike or by Adidas, it'd be like, "Hey, you should probably pay attention to this person."

There was a reason to recall Enoch as the figure, as the label over it, because it would have given it some authoritative setting in a place like the Library of Alexandria or these other places where people were processing and understanding the literary work. There's a brilliant scholar by the name of D. A. Carson, and Carson does a lot of work on this. He's got a great little paragraph where he talks about the difference between literary forgeries and pseudepigraphical works that are not malicious in nature. They're just part of a known writing strategy that, for you and I, feels very fraudulent because it's not-

Eric Huffman: We're chronological snobs. We're looking at it with our standards.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Exactly. But in the ancient world, that's not how they would have viewed it.

Eric Huffman: What about the third option of like everybody knew... by the time whoever it was got around to writing this stuff down, everybody knew Enoch was the one that originated that story. What if it had been oral tradition and finally written down in Enoch's name because he was the originator?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, maybe. I don't know.

Eric Huffman: Speculative.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Speculative. I think because of the way that it's written and because of the details inside of the story and what is so little known about the biblical figure of Enoch, I just think that that would be... It's plausible, but I think... yeah.

Eric Huffman: Well, I appreciate the fact that you're being clear about this. I also think the fact that it's not in the Bible officially doesn't mean it doesn't have explanatory power.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Exactly.

Eric Huffman: I appreciate the Book of the Watchers explanatory power regarding the flood in a lot of ways, but especially just the need for the flood, something so drastic. I think when I was a skeptic, the flood always seemed just like an overreaction from God. Like, okay, so people got out of hand, but you had to kill all the puppies. It's like, what's going on? And when you read the Book of Enoch and see, like you said, the origins of something like human trafficking and just the demonic nature of what was going on, I think it makes a little more sense why God took the action that He did.

Let's jump back into it now and talk about the results of that unholy union between the sons of God and the daughters of men and these Nephilim. Are you suggesting that these were actual real giants that roamed the earth? Were they wiped out in the flood or did some of them maybe survive? And the age old question, are they still with us today?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: One, you have a literary question with this phrase, "and the Nephilim were on the earth in those days and the days after."

Eric Huffman: Yeah. We just read it.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: We're sure like, whoa, what does that mean? So let me try to answer him in question. I'll try to be more concise right now. So, were the Nephilim real beings? Yes. I believe they were real beings. Were they actual giants? Yes, I believe they were, because the Septuagint consistently translates this Hebrew term Nephilim, which in terms of etymology, the origin of that word and what it means. I mean, Hebrew scholars to this date debate what in the world it means. Some think that it comes from a Hebrew verb, nephal, which means to fall, like fallen ones. And so they would say, "Oh yeah, it makes sense because if you got big old massive giants, you know, 11 feet, 12 feet or whatever, and they fall, that's going to be chaotic."

Eric Huffman: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: If you watch Lord of the Rings, anytime one of those big old trees or those, you know, they create disaster all around us. You're like, "Oh yeah, that makes sense." Mike had a very creative Hebrew grammar thing that he did with the loanword from Akkadian. And that's one of those things that I thought like, that's super interesting. I don't know that I'm smart enough to follow what he was doing with that. But at the end of the day, yeah, they were real beings and they were viewed as giants that created chaos.

And then what happened to them? We might have to go into more than we have time for, but I've written it in The Unseen Battle. There is a period of writing that we just talked about, the Second Temple literature, where in that writing, including in the Book of Enoch, in the Book of the Watchers, the death of the Nephilim, the giants created chaos. Also, why? Because if you think about it, you have a hybrid being, half supernatural, angelic, and half human.

I think it's like 1 Enoch 15, it talks about how everything has its place. Things in heaven belong in heaven. Things on earth belong in earth. When the things on earth die, their place is under the earth. The things in heaven should stay and remain in heaven. But when you have an unholy unit of a thing that is half heavenly, half spiritual, and half earthly, and that thing dies, where does the spirit go? It doesn't have a place to go. So what does it do? It wanders onto the earth.

So when Jesus comes in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and when He is dealing with demons, the Greek term there is daimonosomai, which I think is better translated as a transliteration, demonization versus demon possession. And there's a whole reason for that.

Eric Huffman: We'll get into it in our next conversation.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Okay, we'll get into it in our next conversation. The important detail about that is that the people in the Second Temple, that 400 years of silence writing, they understood the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim to actually be the demons of the New Testament of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Eric Huffman: Say that one more time for the people in the back.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: The disembodied spirits of the Nephilim, because they have no place to go, they can't go to heaven, they can't go under to Sheol, even though some of them end up going into the watery place after they're cast out. That's a whole different category. That a subset of these spiritual beings, they are left stranded on the earth to roam and to wander.

Eric Huffman: And those are the demons we find in the New Testament.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Those are the demons we find in the New Testament.

Eric Huffman: Theoretically, at least.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah.

Eric Huffman: They're portrayed in the New Testament as wandering to and fro and searching for embodiment.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Exactly. And remember, why would they search for embodiment unless they already experienced embodiment before?

Eric Huffman: Right.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Because they already knew what it felt like to be embodied, now they're disembodied, they want to return to what they had gone to before. There's another lexical literary connection, and that is that the Greek term evil spirits or unclean spirits was a term that was used as a technical term for the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim. Well, guess how Matthew, Mark, and Luke portrayed these evil spirits. There's always an adjective in front of it. Evil spirits or unclean spirits. So, once again, in the mind of a Second Temple literate person, they would hear that term and they would be thinking, Book of Enoch.

Eric Huffman: That's right.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: They would be thinking unclean spirits, disembodied spirits of the Nephilim.

Eric Huffman: They would be thinking Nephilim.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Exactly.

Eric Huffman: Gosh. That is not what most Christians grow up learning about demons.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: No.

Eric Huffman: Paul has different terminology for the sons of God of the Old Testament that we just were talking about. Paul's terminology, and I wrote my dissertation, which is in The Unseen Battle. The whole second half of The Unseen Battle is about this. Paul's terminology is powers, principalities, authorities, dominions. He uses in Colossians this really cool term, elemental spirits, stoicheia. When Paul is talking about these angelic beings that have gone evil into rebellion, he uses these systemic categorical archon ruler terms. It's present also in Daniel 8, 9, and 10. But in the Gospels, there's a different term that's used for these unclean spirits. And you're left wondering, well, what are those spirits if they're not the sons of God? The best explanatory power seems to be that they are, in fact, disembodied spirits of the Nephilim.

Eric Huffman: Wild. That is wild. It does, though, help tie a lot of loose ends in the Bible together and to see, again, the grand story arc of Scripture, like the other mentions of giants in the Bible. But a lot of those mentions are after the flood, brother.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Are after the flood.

Eric Huffman: So, what does that mean? Like you've got Goliath and you've got...

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: I'm going to say something and people are going to get stressed out. Okay?

Eric Huffman: Okay.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: And if you've been following along this long, then maybe you're in for it. And understand that there are people that love Jesus, love the Scriptures, that are faithful to God's Word, that just land in different places on different doctrinal issues.

Eric Huffman: Things that aren't crystal clear.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: I'm going to give you a solution to this that I'm convinced of. You don't have to be convinced of it. You can be convinced of it. Just do your reading, do your research. I have a friend of mine who once said to me that sometimes people's passion for a subject outweighs their depth of study on the subject. So, people are super passionate...

Eric Huffman: Jordan Peterson says, "Your confidence outweighs your competence."

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yes. Same way I've said the same thing. People are super passionate about it. So, it's like somebody right now would be like, "Man, LeBron James is the greatest of all time." I'm like, "Oh yeah? Can we talk about consecutive MVPs, defensive player of Jordan..."

Eric Huffman: You're really passionate about this, MJ, LeBron.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: I really am because it's what I know. And they're like, "I don't know." I'd be like, "Well, you're not really that passionate about LeBron then. My bad, dude. If you're really passionate about it, then you would know all the kind of arguments for everything."

Eric Huffman: You'd do your homework.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Right, you'd do your homework. And so, with this, I would say the same thing. The rationale for me is that the flood was not a literal global flood, but the flood was a regional flood that had global impact. And the reason why I would suggest this is because the Hebrew phrase Kol eretz is a phrase that's used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible-

Eric Huffman: What does that phrase mean?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Kol eretz, the whole earth.

Eric Huffman: Okay.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: The whole land. It says the flood, the water's covered the whole earth or the whole land. That Hebrew phrase Kol eretz, it's used elsewhere in the Bible to describe the known land to the biblical author. So, if the biblical author only knew of the Mesopotamian area around them, they would say that's the whole earth because that's what they conceptually knew of the whole earth. Does that demand that the literal whole earth was covered under water? I don't think so.

Now, it kind of helps us make sense of the Nephilim on the earth in those days and the days after. The other really big issue is...

Eric Huffman: How they survived, in other words.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: How they survived afterwards is it's possible that there were pockets of these Nephilim, giant clans, that because of their height, because of their strength, their hybrid nature, they were able to endure through a cataclysmic, a massive event like that and survive. And so, that's how I think you end up with Goliath of Gath, why in Joshua and the conquest you find these giant cities, which also for the skeptic, I know a lot of skeptics are really upset about the Joshua conquest because it feels like, is this just God basically good with genocide? He's just wiping out entire people?

Something to remember as you're looking at the military strategy of Joshua as he goes through these conquest episodes, he is tactically searching out giant clans and he's dealing with the Nephilim. The Nephilim, the Raphaim, the Anakim, these are all cousins of the same group of Nephilim. These are all types of giant clans that were creating chaos and evil in the world. And once again, there's a great book by a scholar, I'm blanking on his name, but the book is called Flood and Fury. And he points out how at times Hebrew poetry, Hebrew language is exaggerative in nature. It's like a good preacher. A good preacher sometimes embellishes a story every now and then.

Eric Huffman: Hyperbole, yeah.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah. So the same kind of thing can be happening here. And that helps us to ease like this, "Oh my gosh, is God just this vindictive?" It's like, no, the Bible is narrative. It's literary. It's trying to show emphasis of the devastation of evil.

Eric Huffman: Well, and there's so much invisible, understood stuff. Like if the Nephilim were known to the people called Israel and they presented not just an earthly, militaristic threat, but a spiritual one, they must be dealt with, you know? And it doesn't mean the Bible's easy to read or understand in the Joshua conquests and other parts, but it does offer, again, explanatory power and some justification for why that sort of aggression was necessary to deal with this supernatural threat of giants. Last question on this and we got to move on. Would you posit that there are still giants among us today?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Man, this is such a hard one for me because I'm like-

Eric Huffman: I know you're a historian. You don't love speculation.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: I don't enjoy speculation unless I've got some kind of real, strong thesis behind it. I would have a general hesitancy to suggest that the same kind of Nephilim that we found in the biblical time period are still around today. Do I think that there might be anomalies where, I don't know, in Afghanistan, the giant of Kandahar, we were just talking about that.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, I heard a lot about the giant of Kandahar.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, Kandahar. Is that a possibility? I would be open to that possibility. Do I think it's normative? No, I don't think it's normative.

Eric Huffman: Okay. All right. So we have two rebellions and we didn't leave much time for the third one. But the first rebellion was human beings in Eden. The second rebellion was the fallen sons of God, and the Nephilim being the result. The third rebellion?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: There's the Tower of Babel. This is Genesis 11. And I always want to read Genesis 11 in light of Genesis 12.

Eric Huffman: Genesis 11 being the Tower of Babel story. Genesis 12 being the Abrahamic.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, the call of Abraham and the Abrahamic covenant. So the Tower of Babel. The people find themselves as they migrate out in the Plains of Shinar. Quick question, plains are flat land, right?

Eric Huffman: Yeah.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: What is not on a plain?

Eric Huffman: A mountain. Right.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: So, problem, how am I going to commune with the Lord? How do I commune with the deity? Where's the meeting place? So they go to the plains and they go, "Well, we've got to build a mountain," right?

Eric Huffman: Build a mountain.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: So they build what's called the Ziggurat Temple Tower. In archeological digs, they've actually found these exact temple towers. What's so fascinating about the temple tower is at the top of the temple, there was a house for the deity. And at the base of the temple was a location for the priest who would walk up the stairs to get to the house. So really what they're building is an ancient form of a pyramid. They're building a temple and they're trying to force God to come down. Very interesting detail.

Yahweh looks upon the ingenuity, the creativity of humanity and notices that, "Wait, they've used it in rebellion, not for good." Which is like so humanity, right? Most creative, most efficient. We can do all kinds of things. And it's like, why do we keep doing evil things? Why don't we do good things? That's what happens in Genesis 11. And so God comes down. The phrase specifically is, "Let us go down. Let us come down and deal with them, diversify their tongues." That same phrase "let us come down" is the same phrase that's used in Genesis 1:26 and 27 of the let us language of the creation, right?

Eric Huffman: "Let us make humankind in our own image."

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: In our own image, right? And there's a whole thing on that. Probably don't have time for it. But the reason why I think it's important is it's a connection back to one of the earlier rebellions, right? Back to the Genesis 3 rebellion. So people go up, they try to build this temple tower, Yahweh comes down. Genesis 10 is the table of nations. It says all the people had the same, or all the people had lands, language, culture. And then Genesis 11 opens up and says they all had one language. So now you're left with like, "Wait a minute. How can you have multiple languages in one language?"

My solution to this, and I follow a scholar, Old Testament scholar, Jim Hamilton, and he says, this is a concept called the lingua franca. And we have this today. In India, if you went to India, multiple Indian languages. There's Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, but everybody speaks Hindi. Hindi is the one language that connects all other languages.

English is becoming the lingua franca of our day. My family and I were just in India last year. Amazing. Everybody spoke English in India. So the same thing is present, I believe, in Genesis 10 and 11, where you have the presence of a multiplicity of languages. And the one language that knits everybody together. And this becomes really important. Because when Yahweh comes down, what does He do? He takes away the one language that knits everybody together.

And so if right now, you spoke German, I spoke Telugu, you know, the producers and the group that's back there, let's say that they speak French, but all of us speak Hebrew. But in a second, Hebrew Marvel Snap. Like Hebrew is gone. Who do we hang out with? Well, we hang out with the people that we know how to talk to. The German, you know, Telugu and French or whatever it might be. Because we lost the one language.

So in the Tower of Babel, when Yahweh comes down and He takes away the one language, who do the people hang out with? Their own lands and their own languages and their own cultures. We have to read a passage of Scripture, Deuteronomy 32:8-9, as the post-credit scene of Genesis 11. I remember sitting in the theater watching Iron Man and the post-credit scene was first introduced to the world. And we saw Thor's hammer and everybody lost their minds. They're like, "What?"

Eric Huffman: So what does Deuteronomy 32:8-9 say?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Deuteronomy 32:8-9. I'm going to pull it up. If you've got your Bible, because it is a passage that, depending on your Bible translation, I'm going to ask you to look at either your footnote or the main line is going to handle it.

So Deuteronomy 32, 8 and 9. So if you're reading from NIV, it's going to say, "When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He divided all mankind..." So when was mankind divided? Towe of Babel. "...he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel." Verse 9, "For the Lord's portion is His people, Jacob his allotted inheritance." If you look next to sons of Israel, there's a little footnote, B. If you follow that B down to the footnote, it says, Masoretic text, Dead Sea Scrolls. See also Septuagint 'sons of God'."

If you read from the ESV or the CSB, you'll notice that verse 8 says, when He divided all mankind, He set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. So what is the right translation there? The Masoretic text, the Hebrew Bible translated into Hebrew or in Hebrew, has sons of Israel. But the Septuagint, the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek, says the angels of God. People are like, "Wait, what's the right reading?"

And what's fascinating is the Septuagint is technically an earlier dating than the Masoretic text, which is wild. And so there's a New Testament scholar, G.P. Caird, who was reading this, and before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, was one of the first people that I know of that said, "Something's off here. I think the right reading is actually sons of God, not sons of Israel." Some time ago, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. And when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the caves of Qumran, they found... Deuteronomy 32:8, and 9, and they found Sons of God, b'nei ha elohim, as the primary reading.

So now, when many Bible translations are updated, including ESV, CSB, I think NLT is in the process of updating, what you'll notice is what was a footnote now goes to the mainline text as affirmation that the more credible reading of this verse is not Sons of Israel but his sons of God. Well, what is sons of God? B'nei ha elohim. Where else have we seen that? Oh, Job, oh, Genesis six.

So what does this mean? This is the origin story of the gods of the nations. I'm going to summarize this very quickly.

Eric Huffman: The gods of the nations.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: The gods of the nations. I'm going to summarize this very quickly. After human rebellion, God disinherits the nations. But He doesn't want to leave them without any help, any support. So He gives... my language is very important here. He gives as stewards, as guardians over the nations, the sons of God. Their responsibility was protection and stewardship. It was not to be the, quote unquote, God of the nations.

Eric Huffman: These good angels are fallen angels.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: These are, at this point, good angels. But then you have passages like Deuteronomy 4:19 you have the Exodus narratives. We're not told exactly when they fall, but we're told that these sons of God go into rebellion. How? They entice humanity to worship them as God. And then they entice Israel, God's allotted people, to worship them as gods. This is the backdrop of the gods of the nations. This is the backdrop of the entire Old Testament.

Eric Huffman: The whole Bible. I mean, idolatry comes up again and again, and that's what we're talking about.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Baal and Asherah and Molech and Egypt and the 10 plagues make sense when you understand that each of the plagues was aimed at one of the pantheon deities of Egypt. I mean, this becomes, again, what I would refer to as the binding agent of the Hebrew Bible, of the Old Testament when we understand that Yahweh wants His people to be wholly set-apart people, and He keeps telling them, "Don't go after the gods of the nations. Don't go after the people of the nations." All the requirements were actually set up uniquely, not for the people to assimilate into other nations, but actually for Israel to be a winsome witness, so the nations would be relieved of the rebellious gods and would be welcomed back into the household of God, which is where they always belonged, which is why Genesis 12 is so important in this narrative.

Genesis 12 is a story about Abram. Where is Abram from? Ur of the Chaldeans. He stops and takes a pit stop in Heron. Where is Ur of the Chaldeans?

Eric Huffman: Babel.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: It is the general vicinity of Babel. So this is a mind-blown emoji. Yahweh reaches into the epicenter of rebellion, of Babel, picks one man and his family, and then Genesis 12, 15, 17, 22 says, hey, by the way, through you, I'm going to bless all the nations of the world. There's going be a path for all the nations to come back into the household of God, which is where they always belonged. So now we can make sense of the gods of the nations, the conflict that's happening in the Old Testament. It makes sense of the purity rites and rituals, the law of the-

Eric Huffman: Set apart.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: Set-apart nature of it, because now we see it in the backdrop of these false gods.

Eric Huffman: Wow. How awesome is it to see the invisible part of scripture and have it come alive? And I hate that we can't go further right now, but we do have the honor of having you back for a second conversation, so we'll pick it up where we're leaving this one off.

Final question. Just keep it short. My team wants us to wrap. You and I are both talkers. What do you wish everyone watching, especially skeptics, unconvinced people, knew about the whole breadth, the whole story of scripture that they may not have really thought about before?

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: I would just ask you to consider what is compelling about the story, what is compelling about the story. The nature of the skeptic at times is to try to rationalize life and literary writing and come up with answers to it. And what I found in my life is the more I've tried to rationalize and come up with answers, there's more questions that pop up.

And there's something about coming into an honest awareness of who Jesus is, that He lived, that He was real, that He dealt with these gods of the nations, that He conquered sin and death, that there is an empty tomb, that the resurrection is real, that brings us to a place, not necessarily of all of our answers to the questions that we have, but comfort in the midst of what is unknowable. For me, that is why this conversation about the spiritual realm is so important. It's because it doesn't necessarily ease all of the questions... we're always going to have questions. But for me, it gives me comfort to know that there's a God who actually cares about humanity that's willing to walk with us through that.

Eric Huffman: So good, man. In our next conversation, we're going to get into more of Jesus. We're going to get into what part He plays in this whole narrative, and we're going to get into how we should live. Things like spiritual warfare and just day-to-day life as we follow Jesus. I'm looking forward to getting into all that and more with you in our next conversation.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle, thank you so much for joining us on Maybe God.

Dr. Joel Muddamalle: So welcome. Thanks.