The Giants and the Battle for Human Bloodlines

Giants are a recurring theme throughout Scripture, connected to Genesis 3:15, Genesis 6, demonic rebellion, and an ongoing conflict between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Saul may reflect a form of inherited spiritual corruption, while Goliath, Og, Sihon, the sons of Anak, and the giant wars in Genesis are part of a larger biblical pattern that extends far beyond isolated stories. The Watchers tradition in 1 Enoch connects giants to corrupted knowledge, false divine rule, and widespread bloodshed, raising questions about the preservation of humanity and the coming of a fully human Messiah. Christ reverses that corruption through His incarnation, sacrificial blood, and victory over rebellious spiritual powers, while a Christ-centered reading of Scripture is necessary to properly understand both the supernatural themes and the broader redemptive narrative.

Doug Van Dorn: There is a biblical-theological storyline that runs from the very beginning of Scripture to the end of it that is about giants, and most people don’t know that.

Brandon Spain: I’ve always wondered about his mighty men and whether there could be the bloodline there, because they were just such beasts.

Anthony Delgado: I think it’s fair to say that we can read these things thematically and symbolically. When Saul comes into the picture, he’s presented sort of like a David, honestly. They want a king like the nations, right? They want a warrior king to make their nation great.

But as he comes in, he’s anointed by Samuel, he’s chosen by God. It’s very much like God saying, “Okay, if we’re going to have a king, here’s my champion.” You get a sense that he’s chosen by Yahweh to be the king—to be the king like the nations have.

Then we know that goes south. I think what we’re supposed to do when it goes south is recognize that he becomes a king like the nations—that they got what they asked for. They wanted a king like the nations. God tried to give them a king after His own heart, but Saul chose otherwise, literally to the point that God gives him over. He sends the evil spirit. He gives him over to the lusts of the flesh—very much like Paul in 1 Corinthians 5. He gives him over to those passions of the flesh.

As Saul pursues his own kingship and his own kingdom, God gives him over to that. Today, I like how Sam Storms and Clinton Arnold describe that as demonization. Some people might say demon possession, but I like that language because the spirit comes and goes on him. It feels more like demonic influence that really does take control at times—maybe even like possession.

I think you’re seeing the giant man being confronted with the giant spirit. Perhaps I’ll think metaphysically about that and separate the two—call me a Platonist if you want—but I’ll separate them a little bit to understand the working parts of that.

Then I’d say the initial giants we see in Scripture, like in Genesis 6, are born physically and metaphysically as giants, while other characters throughout Scripture—perhaps Saul—inherit a kind of spiritual giantness. And perhaps the mighty men are those who lose that as they give themselves over to Yahweh and follow David. You could say they’re saved from the giant spirit.

Brandon Spain: Yeah, that’s a fascinating topic. If you were going to do a theology of giants, what’s their importance in the story? Why do they matter? What was perhaps Satan’s intent with the giants and all that kind of stuff?

I guess I’m asking this because it seems to me there’s a new type of theological liberalism coming out, and it sounds very evangelical in the sense of, “Let’s get back to the context.” I’m not referring to Michael Michael Heiser at all—he pushed that in this category and area—but it’s this idea of, “Let’s get to the context,” except it has to be my context, and not necessarily whatever the text is actually saying.

It almost feels like a way to pull the rug out from the supernatural nature of what the text clearly says. One of the biggest ways I’m seeing that is the attack on blood in general—but specifically the blood of Jesus—and the importance of blood in Scripture.

There are alternative theories of the atonement that are trying to correct certain things, but they go way too far and it becomes just a moral influence theory, and you lose any substitutionary aspect altogether. I go back to the Scripture: “without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.” That’s foundational to what I believe is part of the gospel of the kingdom.

So I guess what I’m’m asking is: does the place of giants in this story affect blood? Is it primarily an attack on blood? Why did Satan bring giants into the whole picture?

Doug Van Dorn: At the very least, I think there’s a roundabout way that it’s related—a secondary cause. There could be a primary cause I haven’t thought of, but Genesis 3:15 is really how I’ve told this story.

That’s kind of what I was going to say—why this matters. These two questions are very similar. This whole discipline of biblical theology is very different from systematic theology, where you’re trying to systematize doctrines into a logical, cohesive form to help teach people about the doctrine of God, the doctrine of the church, the doctrine of the end times, and things like that.

Brandon Spain: Nothing wrong with that. I feel like—

Doug Van Dorn: No, no. Some people—

Brandon Spain: They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Doug Van Dorn: Don’t get me started on the fights between biblical theology and systematic theology guys. I don’t understand for the life of me why these two have to be antagonistic toward each other.

Brandon Spain: Divorced.

Doug Van Dorn: Exactly. They should be handmaidens to each other. But for whatever reason, both sides have treated the other almost like an enemy.

But in the case of giants, I think this matters significantly because there is a biblical-theological storyline that runs from the very beginning of Scripture to the end of it that is about giants, and most people don’t know that.

If people think of giants at all, they usually think only of Goliath, as if he’s an outlier—the only one who ever existed. Let alone the fact that he had five brothers.

Brandon Spain: Brothers.

Doug Van Dorn: Yeah. Let alone the fact that Og is even more famous than him—and Sihon was his brother. Let alone the sons of Anak throughout Joshua, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Never mind the giant wars in Genesis 14 that Abraham was part of.

And never mind the fact that when a giant dies, many in the early church believed they became the demons we’ve already talked about and alluded to. This is a major storyline.

That matters because if the root of all of this goes back to Genesis 3:15—what we call the protoevangelion, the first gospel—then there’s a war between these seeds: the woman and her seed, and the serpent and his seed.

You can spiritualize that, and I don’t necessarily have a problem with that because Jesus and the New Testament do that too—talking about Cain being of Satan, or the Pharisees being children of their father, the devil. That’s not biological—it’s spiritual. They’re following their master.

But there may also be something literally biological happening. Why would that matter? Because that first promise of the gospel is ultimately a promise of the coming Messiah—that He will crush the head of the serpent.

It seems plausible to me that Satan and the watchers understood that. So if they could somehow genetically breed human beings out of existence, then the Messiah couldn’t come as the seed of the woman. He would come as the seed of something else—a mixture.

Brandon Spain: Yeah.

Doug Van Dorn: And so the blood part of your question really, in my mind, goes to the heart of what Jesus does on the cross as a human being. It’s human blood that is sacrificed for human sin.

So if there is no human Messiah because humanity is bred out of existence, then that strikes right at the heart of what I think your question is getting at.

Anthony Delgado: Yeah, I’m going to agree with Doug in a primary sense. I’m not seeing a primary line of thought that goes straight after that connection to the atonement.

But I do think that whenever we’re reducing truth out of our biblical theology or our systematic theology—and obviously I agree with Doug that you actually can’t fully divorce the two—once you start talking about atonement, you’re technically talking about systematic theology because it’s been systematized for so long.

And yet biblical theologians are often saying, “No, atonement—it’s right here.” And it’s like, well, yeah, but you’re smuggling in a systematic ideology here.

But we don’t need to talk about that too much because I think we all seem to have that same hobby horse. We just think that way naturally.

Doug Van Dorn: Exactly. Yep.

Brandon Spain: Yes. It’s a hobby horse big time.

Anthony Delgado: But it is interesting that you’re recognizing something here. I actually think it’s a dispensational hermeneutic that gets smuggled into a lot of the thinking of these biblical theologians.

They want to insist on a strict left-to-right reading of Scripture. So they take a book like Leviticus—which is instructional and not overtly theological—and then say we can only have the theology of atonement that appears in Leviticus and a few parts of Numbers.

Then when they get to the prophets, Second Temple literature, and the New Testament, they have to make excuses for what people call progressive revelation—the idea that revelation develops and clarifies.

Brandon Spain: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” I mean, right there in Gospel of John. Boom. Sorry.

Anthony Delgado: Right—and now we have to make excuses for what that means because it can’t mean something that Leviticus didn’t explicitly say it meant.

Brandon Spain: That’s what I meant by this seeping in of a kind of theological liberalism—not in the classic sense of denying the Word or rejecting the fundamentals of the faith. It empties the supernatural aspect of this narrative you were talking about, Anthony.

It has a form of godliness but denies the power thereof. I know that’s out of context, but am I making myself clear?

Anthony Delgado: You are. I think that’s exactly it.

This was the point I was going to make: you read these books—and I don’t want to name them because I’m sure a lot of your listeners are reading them—and what they’re saying about Torah often includes beautiful exegesis. They’re doing strong work understanding Old Testament texts.

Then they reach conclusions that seem to suggest all of this New Testament teaching—if we’re going to pit it against those conclusions—isn’t actually saying what you think it means.

And it’s like—oh, you were so close. It’s like, can we understand this beautiful exegesis of Leviticus in light of Christ in the New Testament? That’s the way Reformation theology has always thought about this.

Biblical theology starts and ends with Jesus. I’ve heard the illustration of a boomerang—it swings back to Genesis, moves through the whole narrative, and finishes with Christ in Revelation. But it starts with Jesus in the Gospels, and that’s how biblical theology works.

That’s why I say it’s this dispensational, left-to-right hermeneutic that has come in. And it’s weird because, like you said—I realize it’s out of context—but it really is “having a form of godliness but denying its power.” It’s like you understood this, and then you’ve taken the gospel and reduced it to something like, “All Jesus does is purify,” or “All Jesus does is restore sacred space,” or something like that.

And by the way, that’s what systematic theology does. When you approach Scripture from a systematic perspective initially, you’re always choking out things that don’t work in your system. Like Michael Michael Heiser always said, “All systems cheat.”

So it is a little bit of that. I say all of that to say this: the first demonic oppression we see in the Bible happens in Genesis 3 when Satan says, “Did God really say?” And you’ll notice he’s not exactly lying—that’s what makes it so deceptive. He’s not really lying, but he is deceiving.

A lot of these ideas can sound true, yet they’re twisted just enough to remove the power and beauty of the gospel from them.

And I just want to say—I find it hilarious that we set out to talk about giants, and just a few minutes in we’re talking about substitutionary atonement. I just wanted to throw that out there.

Brandon Spain: I know. I didn’t mean to go there, but the blood is important.

I want to go back to the whole imago Dei. We were created in the image of God—how does that play into the giant discussion? How is that corrupted, not just physically but spiritually?

Doug Van Dorn: My head is still back where we just were, Brandon. I have a thought I want to get out here.

Anthony brought up this idea of a dispensational hermeneutic, but to me it seems even more basic than that. It’s a hermeneutic that is not Christocentric. It reads the Bible like it reads every other book.

But we don’t read the Bible like every other book because we have a supernatural Author who has superintended the entirety of the Word and the story from beginning to end so that it points to a particular person who would come in the New Testament.

You don’t read any other book that way. You can’t really do biblical theology on William Shakespeare—it just doesn’t work that way.

That got me thinking about secularism. Why are we so antagonistic in certain parts of the Reformed world and broader evangelical world toward supernatural realities?

You brought up liberalism, and I think there’s a lot going on there that we haven’t admitted to ourselves. We pride ourselves on fighting against liberalism, materialism, evolution, and all these things, but we don’t realize that in some ways we’re products of that same culture.

In some ways, we’re guilty of using the same kinds of hermeneutics that liberals use—it just comes out differently.

Honestly, when it comes to these topics, I’ll read liberal scholars over conservatives every day of the week, because liberals will often be honest with the text in front of them. For them, it doesn’t matter because they don’t believe these things are real anyway. It’s almost like they’re saying, “These people were superstitious, and everyone knows there’s no such thing as ghosts, spirits, or demons, so I’m just going to show how absurd the Bible sounds by being honest about what it says.”

Meanwhile, evangelicals and Reformed people often confess the supernatural while still operating with a materialistic worldview they won’t admit they have. That creates a real tension.

They’re reading the Bible like they read every other book. They say they believe in the supernatural, but they can’t bring themselves to see the supernatural when it’s right in front of their face. It’s bizarro world.

I’ve had to think through some of this because I’ve been attacked in some very serious ways—especially last fall—over my views on these things. And it made me ask, why is this happening?

I think you’ve touched on something a lot of people have never stopped to consider: maybe we actually have quite a bit more liberalism in us than we ever want to admit.

It’s a hermeneutic. It’s a way of approaching the text. I remember being taught in seminary that historical-grammatical interpretation is the way you have to read the Bible. And I thought, “Well, that’s how you should read every book, not just the Bible.”

Brandon Spain: Exactly.

Doug Van Dorn: But there’s something special about the Bible that requires more than historical-grammatical interpretation. You need a Christocentric way of reading Scripture because that’s how Jesus taught us to read the book.

Anthony Delgado: That’s exactly it, Doug. Historical-grammatical hermeneutics is simply how you should read—it’s the first level. I agree with it. It helps you understand the words on the page.

But from a narrative standpoint, that’s only the beginning.

Brandon Spain: Absolutely. Robertson was the one who really showed me that years ago. I realized that the Bible is about Jesus. It’s about Yeshua. It’s about the Messiah.

If we take those glasses off, we put on the wrong lenses. We all have spectacles, but we need the right glasses to read—and those are the glasses we need.

Doug Van Dorn: That’s right. And Brandon, why do people fixate on giants as an end in themselves? I think this is a major reason why. They don’t have a Christocentric way of reading Scripture.

So giants become an end in themselves rather than a means to an end—which is Christ using the giants the way the Bible does to tell the story of this seed war between the woman and Satan, ultimately culminating in the final victory of Christ through His first and second coming.

If you’re not reading the whole Bible that way, then you become fascinated with giants, angels, demons, or a million other things. It could even be moralistic issues—it doesn’t matter what it is.

Brandon Spain: Or even the Torah itself. You can become fascinated with just the Torah.

Doug Van Dorn: Exactly. And that’s what Jesus said to the Pharisees: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me” (cf. Gospel of John 5:39).

“I am the purpose of this. It’s not an end in itself—it testifies about me.”

That’s a fundamentally non-evangelical, liberal way of reading the Bible, in my opinion.

Anthony Delgado: One of my favorite things to do—and I just remembered this—is read Second Temple literature like 1 Enoch, but also the Apocrypha, and look for messianic expectations.

It tells us something about how Second Temple Jews were thinking about Torah and the prophets. That helps illuminate how they were reading those texts.

Are those books in our Bible? No. But from a historical-literary perspective, they help us understand how those communities were thinking.

Anthony Delgado: I was reminded of a section in 1 Enoch—somewhere around chapters 10 or 11. This is from a narrative version, so I don’t have the verse numbers.

After the sin of the Watchers—the Genesis 6 framework where they come down—you have this angelic intervention, and they’re recounting the narrative. It says:

“The Watchers went to the daughters of men upon the earth. They slept with the women and defiled themselves. They taught the women all kinds of sins and vindictive charms.”

So you have them creating their own version of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, if you will. They’re putting forward their own knowledge so that they become gods in a sense—offering their own knowledge through their own sons.

Because Jesus is the Word of Yahweh—the Word of the one true God—and now the women give birth to giants, demigods.

Then the text says, “Therefore the blood of men has been shed on the earth.” That therefore is such an interesting statement.

“So the whole earth is filled with blood and unrighteousness.”

I bring that up to say this: on a Christocentric reading, this is part of where the gospel fits into the conversation. At the very least, we should understand Jesus as the Son of the one true God, and the giants as the sons of false gods—the sons of rebellious gods.

Brandon Spain: That’s a great point.

Anthony Delgado: And that connects to some Deuteronomy 32 themes as well.

Christ becomes a personified polemic against the giants, showing how the Son of the true God operates in the world.

The sons of false gods—the sons of fallen gods—produce bloodshed on the earth. Jesus comes in humility, not to be served but to serve others. And He serves us by giving His blood so that our blood does not need to be spilled.

I think that may be one of the primary threads for understanding how this theme of blood fits into the broader biblical theology surrounding giants.