HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Dates: 2018–2026 · The Whole Counsel Blog · Lord of Spirits podcast · Tucker Carlson interview Summary: Fr. Stephen De Young, an Orthodox priest, represents the supernaturalist revival of the Genesis 6 reading. He holds that the Nephilim are giants and the offspring of demonic fornication, recovers the Second Temple and Babylonian background (1 Enoch, the Book of the Giants, the apkallu, Gilgamesh), and reads Israel's conquest as a war against demonic powers — Og of Bashan, the Anakim, and Goliath being surviving Rephaim/Anakim. In the Lord of Spirits episode "Land of Giants" (co-hosted with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, c. 2020) he develops the mechanism of the Nephilim's begetting (a sacral-kingship fertility ritual, not literal angel–human breeding), the "demonization" theology behind the giants, and the New Testament and historical-reception case for the angelic reading. He frames the rival Sethite reading as a later Rabbinic-Jewish development that entered Christianity only at the end of the 4th century.
This page merges three sources by the same author: the 2018 blog essay "Here There Be Giants," the c. 2020 Lord of Spirits podcast "Land of Giants" (with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick), and a 2026 long-form interview on the Tucker Carlson Show ("Young giants"). All three are firsthand and are cited per claim. The Tucker interview restates much of the earlier material for a general audience but adds several new strands (the Sumerian King List ↔ Enoch parallel, the nous and the "ladder" of demonization, the Ugaritic funerary cult of the Rephaim, Mastema and the 10% reprieve, Wisdom of Solomon on the ongoing cult, and a "covert-paganism" reading of the modern West); those are gathered under "From the Tucker Carlson interview (2026)" below.
The perspective, then, of the Biblical writers, as well as later Jewish and Christian interpreters, is that these so called 'gods' were in fact demonic spirits (Deut 32:16-17), the wisdom which they taught was actually depravity and corruption, and that these heroes were petty tyrants produced by demonic fornication.
— Here There Be Giants, The Whole Counsel Blog. De Young identifies the "gods" of Genesis 6 as demonic spirits and the heroic offspring as tyrants produced by demonic fornication.
Later Second Temple Jewish literature such as 1 Enoch and the Book of the Giants discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran preserve the ancient Babylonian traditions which formed the background for the genealogies and narratives of Genesis 4-6. In Babylonian tradition, there were a group of seven gods called the 'apkallu'. … The Book of the Giants from the Dead Sea Scrolls identifies Gilgamesh as one of the Nephilim. Genesis can therefore be seen to be interpreting what was, for its original hearers, the historical record of gods and kings through a very different theological lens.
— Here There Be Giants, The Whole Counsel Blog. He grounds the giant traditions in Mesopotamian sources (the apkallu, Gilgamesh as "2/3 apkallu") that Genesis reframes theologically.
the king, as the high priest of the religion, would ritually embody the god whom they were worshiping … And then would go in and ritually have intercourse with a temple slave or a temple prostitute on this bed. … If a child was conceived to said king out of this ritual, that child would essentially have two fathers, the king who was regarded as divine himself [and] the god, and then one human mother, the temple slave who actually gave birth to him.
— Lord of Spirits, "Land of Giants." This answers the standard objection ("demons can't interbreed with humans"): the ritual involves two humans (the divinized king and the temple slave) and the worshiped spirit, so the offspring is reckoned "two-thirds divine" — as Gilgamesh is "two-thirds divine, one-third human." On De Young's reading the Sethite objection rejects a misunderstanding of what the tradition claimed. (Now adjudicated on its own argument page — The sacred-marriage rite as the mechanism of the Nephilim. Assessment: sound. A documented human-king bed-rite (the Sumerian hieros gamos) anchors the form of the mechanism and does answer the "spirits can't interbreed" objection on its own terms; "to produce the next king" splits — and the seam is partly one we impose, since in sacral-kingship ideology legitimation is divine sonship, conferred performatively (the king "begotten" by decree — Ps 2:7's "today I have begotten you"; the akītu's own Marduk→Nabû father-son theology), so read as "perpetuate the divine kingship" it runs with the grain, the divine-sonship payoff being native to the rite's world rather than borrowed. What genuinely outruns the evidence is the narrower biological routing of that begetting through the bed (a child conceived on it to "two fathers"), which is in tension with those very parallels (divine sonship is conferred performatively, not by a procreative rite) and runs against the majority trend reading the hieros gamos as metaphor more than a performed rite — and he routes the "two-thirds divine" motif through the rite, when it belongs to the apkallu-hybrid strand (Lu-nanna, "two-thirds apkallu" — the genuine Nephilim parallel) and Gilgamesh's divine birth. See the argument page for the full weighing.)
To be a giant is to be one of these fully demonized people. It's like the opposite of a saint. It's the opposite of someone who's achieved theosis and become like Christ. It's someone who's become like a demon, with all of their lusts and fury and violence and destructive capacity and spite.
— Lord of Spirits, "Land of Giants." Just as the saint is divinized by imaging God, the giant is "demonized" by imaging the demonic father he is ritually bound to — an anti-theosis.
these unclean spirits, the spirits we see in the synoptic gospels, who are the subject of Christ's exorcism, are the spirits of these dead nephilim who have become demonic and demonized. 90% of them are in the abyss according to the book of Jubilees; the other 10% are still roaming around, and that's why they're unclean spirits, because they're a mixture.
— Lord of Spirits, "Land of Giants." De Young distinguishes "unclean spirits" (dead, demonized Nephilim) from the fallen angels proper — following 1 Enoch 15 and Jubilees.
this is going to be important when we get to talking about Joshua, which people today want to present as genocide. They say, "Oh, well, this is going and murdering people because of their race or ethnicity," and, no, there's not a concept of race or ethnicity. … this is the idea of wiping out these ritual and cultural practices. This is what has to stop.
— Lord of Spirits, "Land of Giants." Membership in a giant clan (Amorites/Martu, Anakim, Rephaim, Emim, Horites, Avim) is constituted by participation in its rituals, not descent; so a clan is "eradicated" when its members are killed or assimilated into another community — which is why Deuteronomy's rules of war single these clans out (cf. Amalek, born of Eliphaz and Timna the Horite concubine, Gen 36).
The text of Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua do not describe a 'holy war' or genocide directed at a particular ethnicity of human beings, but of a war waged by the worshippers of Yahweh, the God of Israel, against his spiritual enemies, demonic powers that had come to dominate the region of Canaan and the Transjordan.
— Here There Be Giants, The Whole Counsel Blog. The targeted destruction in the conquest, on De Young's reading, falls precisely where the Anakim/giants dwell (Og of Bashan; Goliath of Gath, Joshua 11:22), framing it as spiritual warfare; David completes the gigantomachy.
2 Peter 2:4-9 talks about angels who sinned and who are imprisoned in chains of gloomy darkness. That 'chains of gloomy darkness' phrase is essentially a phrase from 1 Enoch, talking about the imprisonment of the angels who created the nephilim.
— Lord of Spirits, "Land of Giants." De Young marshals the Septuagint (Gen 6 "angels of God" / "giants"), 1 Peter 3:19–20, 2 Peter 2:4–9 (note tartaróō), and Jude 6–7 as witnesses, arguing the angelic reading "is the universal view of the first three centuries, almost four centuries, of the Church."
the Jewish community repudiated that [the Enochic literature] and came up with what's called the Sethite hypothesis sometimes in the literature, that it's the line of Seth and the line of Cain. This gets adopted by Church Fathers.
— Lord of Spirits, "Land of Giants." De Young dates the Christian Sethite reading to Julius Africanus first, then Ephrem and Augustine (late 4th/early 5th c.), and argues later Fathers rejected a misunderstanding (literal inter-species breeding) because, unlike the ante-Nicene Fathers, they no longer witnessed living pagan fertility cult — "it wasn't happening in the Provence" where John Cassian lived. (This "Africanus → Ephrem → Augustine" pipeline, and the claim that the Sethite reading is a Rabbinic invention, are qualified in the note below and weighed on the argument page Did the Sethite reading originate as a Rabbinic reaction against the Enochic reading?, assessment: plausible.)
A long-form interview ("Young giants") covering the same supernaturalist reading for a general audience. The transcript is auto-captioned; quoted fragments below preserve De Young's wording, with obvious caption artifacts (timestamps, doubled words) and mangled proper nouns silently corrected. Citation for all claims in this section: Fr. Stephen De Young, Tucker Carlson Show, "Young giants," 2026, YouTube.
De Young develops the apkallu theme into a general principle. The post-flood Babylonian kings did not claim to possess texts that survived the flood:
they're not saying we have some texts or something that survived the flood; they're saying that they're in contact with spirits who were active before the flood … and it's the same spirits who are now revealing this wisdom to them.
The revealed "technology" is metallurgy, sorcery, divination, and the like — the same advances Genesis assigns to the line of Cain — and the mechanism is the demonic gift of knowledge given prematurely:
these demonic spirits that are antithetical to humanity bring knowledge to humans before they're ready for it … a time would come when humanity had reached a level of spiritual maturity when they could receive this knowledge … And that begins with the serpent in the garden.
He reads the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil the same way — not an evil thing, but a maturity withheld until humanity was ready, which the serpent offers as a "shortcut." His modern analogy is the atomic bomb: knowledge revealed to man that "we use … to make a weapon," whose first use "wipe[d] out most of the Christian population of Japan" at Nagasaki. The strand extends his apkallu theme into a general principle — knowledge as a demonic gift given before humanity is ready, with the serpent and the bomb as its bookends.
(Flagged — overstatement.) The factual kernel is sound: Nagasaki, and its Urakami district in particular, genuinely was the historic heart and largest concentration of Japanese Christianity — of Japan's roughly 100,000 Catholics, some 50,000–60,000 were in the Nagasaki region, mostly descendants of the Kakure Kirishitan ("hidden Christians") who had survived centuries of persecution. The "Fat Man" bomb detonated about 500 m from Urakami Cathedral (then the largest church in East Asia), and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum estimates that of ~15,000 Christians in the area more than 10,000 were killed (other accounts give ~8,500 of the parish's 12,000). But "most of the Christian population of Japan" overstates it: Japan's total Christian population c. 1945 was on the order of 300,000–650,000 across all denominations (Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox), so the ~8,500–10,000 killed at Nagasaki was a small fraction — under a tenth even of the country's Catholics. The bomb fell on and devastated the historic center of Japanese Christianity; it did not wipe out most of its Christians.
De Young claims the patriarchal ages are not naïve literalism but encode a pattern shared with Mesopotamian king-lists, partly through Babylonian base-60 mathematics:
if you look at those ages as sets of 60 there are … certain things encoded about the different kings and the different generations … nobody's totally cracked the code in Genesis.
His worked example ties Enoch to the seventh antediluvian Sumerian king (traditionally Enmeduranki of Sippar, associated with the sun-god and divination):
the seventh king in the [Sumerian King] list is the one who creates the solar calendar … And if you look at Genesis and the Epistle of Jude … he refers to Enoch as the seventh from Adam … in the genealogies of Seth in Genesis, he lives for 365 years. So you have … the solar-calendar year as his age. He's the seventh person. The seventh person in the Sumerian Kings list creates the solar calendar.
(Now adjudicated on its own argument page — The Sumerian King List ≅ Enoch (the seventh antediluvian). Assessment: sound. The seventh-from-Adam ↔ seventh-king parallel is well-grounded scholarship (Enmeduranki of Sippar, the sun-god's city) — one of De Young's stronger ANE parallels — but the clause "the seventh king creates the solar calendar" misremembers Enmeduranki, who is the founder of divination, not a calendar (that role belongs to Enoch). See the argument page for detail.)
A theological premise behind the "demonization" claim. Following the Orthodox/Greek sense of nous, De Young treats the mind as a perceiving organ rather than a generator:
they thought about the mind more as a sensory organ like your eye … the eye of the heart or the eye of the mind … ideas are like sights or sounds or smells. They're not produced by the brain … they come from outside.
This grounds his account of how a man comes to "image" a spirit (good or demonic): thoughts are received and then entertained, not manufactured.
The page already carries De Young's "demonization / anti-theosis" theology; the interview adds the explicit ladder. A thought arrives (not yet sin); it is entertained, becomes a plan, then an action, then a habit — at which point it becomes a passion ("the sins as the passions because they make us passive"), then possession, and finally a free, deliberate agreement with the spirit:
the furthest you can go … is that spirit isn't in control of you anymore. You just agree with it. You're on board with that sort of demonic spirit deliberately … you're rejoicing and enjoying … the chaos and the destruction.
when you … have a person who we're calling a … nephilim, we're talking about … a fully demonized human.
De Young offers a definition of "spirit" (used of both the Holy Spirit and demonic spirits): a level of consciousness above the individual that humans participate in and embody but do not create:
a spirit is a sort of collective consciousness at a level … above human … They exist separate and apart … we participate in them … but we don't create them. We sort of embody them in the world.
He illustrates it with the body's sub-organisms ("gut flora … having chemical conversations") summed under a higher human consciousness — and with mass evil "within living memory" that cannot be explained as a coincidence of individuals making the same bad choices.
Richer than the blog's treatment. Og of Bashan is "the last of the Rephaim," and the Rephaim are illuminated by the mid-20th-century discovery of Ugarit (Ras Shamra), destroyed in the Bronze Age collapse c. 1200 BC:
one of the texts there is a ritual text for when the king died … they did this funerary ritual where they … did … ritual magic to try to ward off the Rephaim — who were the spirits of these dead ancient kings — so that the king who had just died could pass by them safely to get into the underworld.
This, he says, is what Isaiah 14 and Psalm 88 mean by the Rephaim. (Now adjudicated on its own argument page — The Rephaim as the spirits of dead kings (the Ugaritic funerary text KTU 1.161). Assessment: sound. The identification (Rephaim = the deified spirits of dead kings, attested in the royal funerary liturgy KTU 1.161) is near-consensus scholarship and one of De Young's stronger ANE parallels; but he inverts the rite — KTU 1.161 summons and welcomes the royal dead and seeks their blessing, it does not "ward them off" so the new king can pass by. See the argument page for detail.) He reaffirms the mechanism behind Og's gigantic iron bed (Deut 3:11):
we found a ritual bed of the same measurements in the great ziggurat of [Etemenanki] in Babylon … that ritual bed was used in these sexual rituals to produce the next king.
(On Og's bed ≅ the Etemenanki ritual bed: now adjudicated on its own argument page — Og's bed and the bed of Marduk. Assessment: sound. The core dimensional parallel is well-grounded (Maria Lindquist, CBQ 73 [2011]), and De Young's location holds — the dimensioned bīt erši ("house of the bed") sits in the summit temple of Etemenanki, as he says. The old tomb/sarcophagus rival is superseded (von Rad, Eslinger, Millard; no post-2011 defender), so against it the Marduk-bed view plainly wins. The load-bearing step — the deliberate Marduk allusion Lindquist layers on the literal "iron bed" reading she shares with the mainstream (Millard, Weinfeld, Tigay, Block) — rates the interpretation sound on the "well-grounded and unrefuted" standard: it has stood unrefuted for fifteen years and has begun to be adopted (Laura Quick takes it up; Ronald Hendel cites it favorably), the older commentaries' silence being chronological (Weinfeld 1991, Tigay 1996 predate the 2011 proposal). It is short only of majority uptake, a non-allusive "size-only" reading remaining available. What remains overstated is in De Young's framing: the dimensions come from a text — a cuneiform description of a furnished cultic bed, independently echoed by Herodotus's summit couch — rather than an excavated artifact (a narrow wording point that leaves "we found a ritual bed" fine as spoken), and "to produce the next king" splits. That last no longer splits cleanly into "legitimation" versus "divine begetting": that seam is partly one we impose, since in sacral-kingship ideology legitimation is divine sonship, conferred performatively (Šulgi "born of Ninsun"; the Israelite coronation "today I have begotten you," Ps 2:7) — and the akītu the bed belongs to is itself built on a father-god→divine-son theology (Marduk and his son Nabû, the "son and avenger"), so the divine-sonship payoff is native to the bed's festival, not borrowed. Read as "perpetuate the divine kingship" it runs with the grain; what alone outruns the evidence is the narrower biological routing of that begetting through this bed (a child conceived on it to "two fathers"), in tension with the parallels themselves and against the majority trend reading the hieros gamos as metaphor more than a performed rite. (Where the allusion is granted, its payoff runs De Young's way: Lindquist herself concludes it "likens Og to a god" and reads the Rephaim/Nephilim as semidivine.) See the argument page for detail.)
De Young rests the supernatural Og case here on the iron bed and the funerary liturgy, but the firmest support his framework could claim is one he does not press: the Ugaritic Rapiu libation-prayer KTU 1.108 hails Rapiu, King of Eternity — the divine eponym of the rpʾum (Rephaim) — as the god enthroned at Ashtaroth and Edrei (Deut 1:4; Josh 12:4), Og's own two cities, so that Og's royal seat was, in a pre-biblical Canaanite text, the cult-place of a deified Rephaim-king — with no bed and no performed rite to defend. (Now adjudicated on its own argument page — Og's cities Ashtaroth and Edrei as the seat of the Ugaritic Rapiu (KTU 1.108). Assessment: sound. The Ashtaroth/Edrei ↔ Og identification (B. Margulis 1970; del Olmo Lete; Mark S. Smith; Lindquist) is the majority Ugaritological reading, resting on an undisputed name-link (rpʾu = the Rephaim) and the underworld-king Milku seated at Ashtaroth (RS 24.244); it is short of airtight only on philology — the heh of hdrʿy answers awkwardly to the aleph of "Edrei," and ʿṯtrt is spelled identically for the town and the goddess. See the argument page for detail.)
The page already states that the unclean spirits are the dead Nephilim (1 Enoch 15 / Jubilees); the interview names the spirits' leader and the theodicy of their reprieve:
at the time of the flood the Nephilim are wiped out … they have … a leader who's named Mastema … Mastema comes to God and wants to strike this bargain … "Let some of us stay on the earth. We promise … we'll only torment bad people" … God agrees to allow 10% of them to remain … but … God's motive is he wants to use that to bring wicked people to repentance.
He ties this to the demons' cry "Have you come to torment us before the time?" and the Legion-into- swine-into-the-abyss episode. Mastema's bargain and the 90% / 10% split are in Jubilees 10:8–11 (see the Book of Jubilees page).
This sharpens the page's "giant clans are ritual social units" claim. Membership in a people, he says, is two things — "participating in their initiation rituals" and "the ongoing ritual life of the community" — paralleled across Israelite (circumcision + Passover), Christian (baptism + Eucharist), and pagan practice. The pagan "ongoing ritual life" is the damning part:
according to the book of wisdom — or the Wisdom of Solomon … makes this explicit. Other texts outside of the scriptures make this explicit, that the ongoing ritual life of these people involved human sacrifice, and human sacrifice involved cannibalism.
(Now adjudicated on its own argument page — Does the Wisdom of Solomon attest the giant-cult's human sacrifice and cannibalism? Assessment: sound. The proof-text holds, and unusually directly: Wisdom 12:3–6 names the Canaanites' "wicked sacrifices," "merciless murderers of children" (child-sacrifice), and "devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of blood" (cannibalism) in a single breath, with the idolatry→child-sacrifice spine restated at 14:23/14:27. The one precision is a citation point: the cannibalism clause is specifically Wisdom 12:5, not the 14:23 list, so that link rests on chapter 12. (Distinct from the 1 Enoch 7 strand cited elsewhere on the page.) See the argument page for the full weighing.)
His proof that descent was malleable is Caleb the Kenizzite — by descent a member of a Canaanite/giant clan Israel was to wipe out, yet "listed as an elder of the tribe of Judah … because he was incorporated." He dates matrilineal Jewish descent ("son of a Jewish mother") to after the exile (Ezra–Nehemiah), as a later guarantee of genetics, not the original rule.
Consistent with the blog's opening swipe at "doctored photos" of giant skeletons, De Young keeps the giants firmly in the realm of ritual symbolism rather than literal 50-foot men. Standard depictions of 15 feet are "a deliberate coding" reflecting the gods' "ritual body":
in the ancient Near East, they believed that their gods had a ritual body … about 15 ft tall … excavated temples of Baal … [have] footprints … based on him being about 15 foot tall.
On Goliath he notes the textual spread — "according to the Greek Old Testament tradition, he was 6'6" … in the Hebrew text he's 9'9", which is more clearly a … supernatural … height" — against an average man of "like 5'5"" in the early Iron Age. And he flatly denies verified giant fossils:
there have never been found on Earth fossils of … [giant] human beings? Not verifiably … a million reports from the 19th century in North America … finding 9-foot-tall skeletons … all destroyed by the Smithsonian … not as far as we could verify … some … were proven to be … the Cardiff Giant … hoaxes.
He attributes the 19th-century "giant skeleton" lore to the anti-modernist impulse in nascent evangelicalism — "we need to scientifically prove that everything in the Bible is literally true." This firmly distances De Young's reading from popular "Nephilim giant" conspiracism — the giants are demonized men and ritual kings, not crypto-archaeological fossils.
De Young restates that the sacral-kingship ritual persisted into living memory — the Japanese emperor's accession rite, in which he "ritually and ceremonially spends the night with the sun goddess," its sexual element officially "removed after World War II," so "Hirohito would have been the last one." (Now adjudicated on its own argument page — The Japanese accession rite (Daijōsai) as a surviving sacral-kingship bed-rite. Assessment: contested. The core is real: the Daijōsai secludes the emperor overnight with a bed-like god-seat (the shinza) to commune with the sun goddess Amaterasu, which R. S. Ellwood reads as a hieros gamos — an arresting match to De Young's mechanism. But two specifics fail: "sexual element removed after WWII" overstates a postwar change that was really to the emperor's divinity and the rite's legal status, not its choreography; and "Hirohito would have been the last one" is simply false (Akihito performed the Daijōsai in 1990, Naruhito in 2019). The sacred-marriage reading is itself a contested minority view. See the argument page for detail.) Alongside Japan he adduces a Khmer parallel from the Lord of Spirits material — the king of Angkor who "spends the night" with a serpent-spirit. (Now adjudicated on its own argument page — The Khmer nāga-tower rite (Zhou Daguan) as a sacral-kingship parallel. Assessment: sound. The thirteenth-century envoy Zhou Daguan (at Angkor 1296–97) really does report that in a gold tower the Khmer king coupled nightly with a nine-headed nāga serpent-spirit, "the lord of the earth for the entire country," appearing as a woman, his life and the realm resting on the union — among De Young's strongest "king sleeps with a spirit" parallels, the partner being explicitly a spirit. The one overlay to flag is his recurring "to produce the next king": the rite's attested function is the king's legitimacy and the land's welfare, not heir-production (though the heir/lineage motif surfaces in the Kaundinya–Soma foundation myth), and Zhou reports it as what "the local people all say" of a secret tower. See the argument page for detail.) He reads the Epstein files as a modern glimpse of the same complex — "a fixation on blood, on genetics … human sacrifice, sex … as a ritual." And he argues the secular West has not escaped paganism but driven it underground:
the way most people talk about the economy is essentially the way ancient people would talk about a god … we don't call it Mammon … [or] Ares … if you remove overt religion, you just get covert … religion … It's paganism. It's human sacrifice … whether it's abortion or war.
He distinguishes pagan religion (the gods remain free and may refuse) from magic (ritual that compels the spirit to do one's will) — and warns that "name it and claim it" prayer is functionally the latter. The Epstein-files and "covert religion" framing are cultural commentary rather than textual claims, but they flag De Young's thesis that the Nephilim pattern is ongoing.