If you were curious about nephilim interpretations

A rabbit trail led to a podcast from Ancient Faith that looked too odd to skip by: Land of Giants. "But the Orthodox Church takes giants seriously." Well, one of the fathers explains that the Orthodox Church has few actual dogmas, and that their particular interpretation isn't holy writ, and I gather one can be a lifelong faithful Orthodox without giving a moment's thought to the nephilim.

I had no fixed idea of what in the world Genesis 6:1-4 was about--neanderthals, maybe?--but it wasn't and isn't important so I was OK with "idontknowbut" about it. The podcast above offers a take that's new to me, which I neither accept nor reject. Somebody might find it interesting. Since the podcast is quite long, without any obvious 1.25x speedup tool, I'll summarize. You're welcome.

Og had an iron bed 9 cubits by 4 (14 feet by 6 or thereabouts). A bed like this has been found, and another is attested as being at the top of a ziggarut where it was part of a place where a select woman would conjugally meet with one of the gods. Such unions no doubt took place (as they did in many other parts of the world--like Japan), and the likeliest understanding of them was that the already semi-divine representative (the king, or somebody like that) would be ritually infused with the god being called on.

Some texts have Gilgamesh as 2/3 divine and 1/3 human. The arithmetic doesn't work on that, unless you count the king and the god as two parents, and the woman as a third (purely human).

OK, so far you have evidence for a ritual in which a god and demigod join to impregate a woman--in Sumer, and quite possibly in Bashan as well. (Japan is a little different, in that the emperor doesn't get pregnant. The Aztecs had Toxcatl, but it isn't obvious what happened to resulting children.)

So far so strange. (I somewhat rearranged the order they presented things in for simplicity.)

They riffed a bit on "giant" having some additional connotations or even denotations revolving around power. Not nice giants... Maybe so nasty that they don't need to be oversized...

OK, suppose the god in the equation is a demon (1 Cor 10:20)--invited into the ritual in order to produce an exceptional child. Exceptional as intended by the demon, of course. Demonized, not just possessed.

Assuming this to be possible, a society that goes in for this sort of thing is going to have what will become an elite of really nasty characters. Why not Sumer? is a question I'd have liked to ask them. What is to be done with such a society? The same thing that happened to the Anakim?

I do not care to try to guess whether their speculation is justified, though we can think of a few historical figures (and criminals) that make you go "Hmmm." But that the early church fathers (later ones doubted that demons could reproduce) understood the giants as the mating of demons and women is illustrated by this from Irenaeus:

18. And for a very long while wickedness extended and spread, and reached and laid hold upon the whole race of mankind, until a very small seed of righteousness remained among them and illicit unions took place upon the earth, since angels were united with the daughters of the race of mankind; and they bore to them sons who for their exceeding greatness were called giants. And the angels brought as presents to their wives teachings of wickedness, in that they brought them the virtues of roots and herbs, dyeing in colors and cosmetics, the discovery of rare substances, love-potions, aversions, amours, concupiscence, constraints of love, spells of bewitchment, and all sorcery and idolatry hateful to God; by the entry of which things into the world evil extended and spread, while righteousness was diminished and enfeebled.

Their speculation gets around the problems with angelic reproduction and explains the weird 2/3 divine business too.

Yes, the alleged book of Enoch ties into this, though perhaps more as a witness to what Jews believed circa 200BC-100AD.

I'm not sure this was a good use of my time--it makes no difference in my life beyond writing a blog post--but I was curious what people thought. And before you ask me, someone asked them, and they averred that even the demonized had the possibility of repentence available to them.