Fascinating: The Book of Giants from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Read it in the translation that reflects the original Aramaic/ Hebrew word translation, so that instead of the word “angel” replace it with “messenger”; instead of the word “giants” (Hebrew: Nephillim) replace it with “sons and daughters of the king (god)”; instead of the word “demon” replace it with “harmer” (one who harms).
I think that the world and events are far simpler than we like to believe. We imbue what we don’t understand with irrational fantasy in order to make it comprehensible, if only to ameliorate our shortcomings in order to grasp an obtuse reality as a feeble interpretation of what’s actually going on.
For curiosity’s sake, I have to ask a bunch of questions:
What if there was an incredibly sophisticated civilization in pre-recorded history that mastered mathematics, geometry, astronomy and the like?
What if these “people” inhabited the entire earth, mastering sea and land navigation, establishing colonies or a kingdom all over the world?
What if these people predicted a flood, a glacial flood, that would cover the earth?
What if this flood occured around 10,000 years ago around the last ice age?
What if these people were called “messengers” (or translated, “angels”) by the civilizations they met and came after them?
What if there were some messengers that brought disharmony to the other cultures they encountered, much in the same way imperialism and cultural hegemony has worked throughout history?
What if the people that adopted the new knowledge subsequently destroyed themselves, their culture and identify, in the process? (think South American civilizations)
What if these messengers or angels were considered bad, or “evil” as a result of importing their knowledge?
What if these messengers (angels), or demons, were simply outsiders, simply people, or conquerors from other lands?
In Aramaic the Nephilim (plural), or giants, are the offspring of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men” in Genesis 6:4, or giants who inhabit Canaan in Numbers 13:33. Maybe these “sons of god” or “sons of the kind” were taller in stature than other people, and thus we considered “giants”? I’m curious how this translation occurred and why…
Also, regarding demons:
Rabbinical demonology has three classes of demons, though they are scarcely separable one from another. There were the shedim, the mazziḳim (“harmers”), and the ruḥin (“spirits”). There were also lilin (“night spirits”), ṭelane (“shade”, or “evening spirits”), ṭiharire (“midday spirits”), and ẓafrire (“morning spirits”), as well as the “demons that bring famine” and “such as cause storm and earthquake”
Although I haven’t checked the relationship between demons in Hebrew texts and Greek texts, there is a fascinating insight if we assume some sort of relation into the Greek word demon. In Latin “demon” is translated as “genius”, our modern day word for people that show exceptional creative problem solving abilities. It literally means spirit, or spirit of insight, or internal inspiration of knowledge.
Heaven in Aramaic refers to the firmament.
The word “firmament” is used to translate raqia, or raqiya` ( רקיע), a word used in Biblical Hebrew. The connotation of firmness conveyed by the Vulgate’s firmamentum is consistent that of stereoma, the Greek word used in the Septuagint, an earlier translation. The notion of solidity is advanced explicitly in several biblical passages. The original word raqia is derived from the root raqa ( רקע), meaning “to beat or spread out”, e.g., the process of making a dish by hammering thin a lump of metal. Raqa adopted the meaning “to make firm or solid” in Syriac, a major dialect of Aramaic (the vernacular of Jesus) and close cognate of Hebrew.
I have to ask if our conception of heaven is accurate: could heaven refer to a place of technology, or engineering, or a city that has high buildings made from earth?
Regarding the text of The Book of Giants: it reads like a typical drama. Someone smart comes in, corrupts your culture with their knowledge, takes your women and has sex with them, and just dominates you. There are other nuances which I find compelling and relate back to my intuitions that the human condition has remained relatively the same for hundreds of thousands of years, and what has changed is simply the degree of stability within a culture or the length of time a civilization has been able to grow due to geological periods of stability in the region. The consequence of my intuition is that great civilization’s have existed throughout time with similar degree’s of knowledge and understanding about their world (and maybe even greater?). Human warfare, vices for power, entropy and other normal geologic events and catastrophes have limited our access to ancient knowledge, artifacts and evidence of civilizations. The only remnant we have left are enduring megalithic structures and a very tainted, biased historical record.
I would not be surprised if there was a massive civilization with great knowledge living in some pre-glacial time period that sent messengers to warn of a destructive geologic event and educated them on how to prepare, such as building boats and what not (Noah, Gilgamesh, Easter Island, etc, etc). I also would not be surprised if after this flood these messengers traveled the world looking for survivors so that they could teach and educate people about what exactly happened, as well as endow them with their ancient history, knowledge, and technologies that they could in turn carry on. Hence we find ancient myths and statues of African, Caucasian, and bearded white Mediterranean men in South America long before any recent common era colonialism.
William Dare 