HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Wisdom of Solomon on the Giants and the Cult of the Dead

Dates: c. 50 BC (Alexandrian Judaism; deuterocanonical) Summary: The Wisdom of Solomon, a Greek-language Jewish wisdom book from Alexandria (roughly contemporary with Philo), supplies three data points the supernaturalist reading leans on: it names "the proud giants" as those who perished in Noah's flood (14:6); it traces the origin of idolatry to the deification of the dead — a dead son, then a dead king, honoured with "ceremonies and sacrifices" (14:15) — which is the mechanism behind the Rephaim/"dead kings become gods" theme; and it describes the resulting cult as one of child sacrifice and secret nocturnal rites (14:23). These ground Fr. Stephen De Young's claim that the giants' "ongoing ritual life" was human sacrifice — a claim he attributes in the Tucker interview to "the book of Wisdom, the Wisdom of Solomon." See De Young's page.

Claims & evidence

The giants perished in the flood

Wisdom, recounting how God's wisdom preserved the world, refers to the flood generation as "the proud giants":

For in the old time also, when the proud giants perished, the hope of the world governed by thy hand escaped in a weak vessel [the ark], and left to all ages a seed of generation. (Wisdom 14:6, KJV/Apocrypha)

This is a Second Temple Jewish text reading Genesis 6's "giants" as the wicked who were destroyed in the flood — alongside 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Septuagint's gígantes.

Idolatry begins with the deified dead — the "dead kings become gods" pattern

Wisdom 14:15 derives idol-worship from grief turned into a cult of the dead: a dead child, and then a dead king, is "honoured… as a god, which was then a dead man," with sacrifices instituted for him:

For a father afflicted with untimely mourning, when he hath made an image of his child soon taken away, now honoured him as a god, which was then a dead man, and delivered to those that were under him ceremonies and sacrifices. (Wisdom 14:15, KJV/Apocrypha)

This is the same logic De Young draws from Ugarit — the Rephaim are the deified spirits of dead kings receiving cult — now stated within a Jewish scriptural book. (Bonaventure's medieval commentary makes the link explicit, tracing the first such cult to Ninus' deification of his dead father Belus, "of whom some called that idol Bel, some Baal."¹)

The cult is one of child sacrifice and secret rites

Wisdom 14:23 names the practices of that idolatry — exactly the "ongoing ritual life" De Young describes:

For whilst they slew their children in sacrifices, or used secret ceremonies, or made revellings of strange rites; (Wisdom 14:23, KJV/Apocrypha)

Bonaventure (c. 1274) glosses this with the child-sacrifices "in the rites of Saturn," the nocturnal "rites of Egyptian Isis," and the night-revels "in the rites of Bacchus and Cybele."² This is the deuterocanonical witness De Young invokes for human sacrifice and cannibalism in the giant-cult, distinct from the 1 Enoch 7:4–6 passage already on file.

Notes

• The primary text is the Wisdom of Solomon itself (directly quoted); the medieval reception is Bonaventure's Commentary on Wisdom, the only commentator on these verses surveyed here.
• Wisdom's value here is as a witness, not an interpreter of the "sons of God" question per se — it presupposes the giants of Genesis 6 and describes the cult, rather than adjudicating who the "sons of God" were.