But again this is where it diverges. Nowhere in the OT do we find the spirits of humans leaving their body to become ghosts and to hang around the earth to torment people. This is what is suggested about the Nephilim…but all humans perished in the flood, including the Nephilim. It was their errant fathers who were forced back into the spirit realm where they thereafter had their ability to materialize curtailed.
The
fathers of the Nephilim were the fallen angels (the “sons of God” in Genesis 6), and
their offspring — the Nephilim — were
not human. That’s the point. They were
hybrid abominations, a forbidden mixture of divine beings and human women. What we would understand today as genetic abominations.
And that’s why God judged the world with a flood.
“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them.” (Genesis 6:4)
The early Jewish understanding — confirmed in the Book of Enoch, Jubilees, and echoed in 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 — is that when the
Nephilim died, their disembodied spirits had no place to go. They weren’t fully human (so not judged like humans), and they weren’t angelic (so not cast to Tartarus like their fathers). They became
unclean spirits — what Jesus and the apostles later refer to as
demons.
That’s why demons crave bodies.
That’s why they’re “restless.”
That’s why they fear the abyss.
You won’t find a single verse in the Old Testament describing
dead humans wandering the earth as tormenting spirits. But you will find plenty of references to
unclean spirits in the New Testament — and
none of them are called fallen angels.
So if demons aren’t fallen angels, and they aren’t human ghosts, what are they?
1 Enoch 15:8–12
“And now, the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling.”
This puts
Genesis 6 into sharper context.
It explains what happened to the
Nephilim after the Flood — their bodies died, but their spirits remained. These disembodied Nephilim became what we now call
demons: cursed, restless, violent, and bound to the earth until final judgment.
They’re not fallen angels, and they’re not human ghosts.
They are the bastard spirits of a forbidden union — and that’s why Jesus encountered them constantly.
That’s why they fear the Abyss.
And that’s why
this passage in Enoch matters — it connects the flood, the origin of demons, and the spiritual war still raging today.
The flood wiped out their
bodies —
not their spirits.
And now those spirits roam the earth, angry, defiled, and seeking flesh.
Jesus knew exactly who and what He was casting out.
The early church did too.
It’s only modern theology that decided to “demythologize” what the Bible made clear.
