{"id":507,"date":"2018-12-10T14:52:31","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T20:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?p=507"},"modified":"2018-12-10T14:52:31","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T20:52:31","slug":"the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/","title":{"rendered":"The Angels Who Left Their Former Estate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In a previous post<\/a>, the giants of the Old Testament, who came into being through demonic sexual immorality, were discussed.\u00a0 Only brief comments were made at that time about their angelic “parents”.\u00a0 These angelic beings, however, play an important role in the unfolding of the Old Testament and in New Testament theology.\u00a0 In another post<\/a>, the three events of Genesis 1-11 which might be termed a ‘fall’ of humanity were discussed.\u00a0 It was commonplace in the Fathers and other early Christian writers to speak about the sinful state of humanity remedied by Christ in terms of one of these three events, with the other two subordinated, but which event varied.\u00a0 St. Irenaeus sees all three in terms of the sinful corruption of humanity begun by these angelic beings.\u00a0 Eusebius of Caesarea sees all three in terms of the Babel event and the consignment of the nations to angelic beings who came to be worshipped as gods.\u00a0 St. Augustine saw all three in terms of the curse of Genesis 3.\u00a0 St. Augustine’s understanding, coupled with his rejection of the traditional understanding of Genesis 4-6, became paradigmatic for Western theology from the late antique period until the present day.\u00a0 In scripture and the Fathers, however, mortality (Gen 3) and sinful corruption (Gen 4-6) are seen to have different, though related origins.\u00a0 Sinful corruption enters into humanity, weakened and mortal, through the efforts of these angelic beings resulting in their own fall and imprisonment.<\/p>\n

The story which unfolds from Genesis 4-6 is a deliberate parallel to a Mesopotamian story, both of which are told primarily through genealogical material.\u00a0 The Mesopotamian story, as exemplified in the Sumerian Kings List, describes the greatness of Babylonian civilization and its divine origins.\u00a0 Each of the kings before the great flood is paired with a divine being called an ‘apkallu’ which the Mesopotamians worshipped as gods.\u00a0 These beings are also sometimes referred to as the ‘seven sages’.\u00a0 These beings were believed to serve at the behest of the high god and assist in his governance and maintenance of the universe.\u00a0 They are said to have taught the kings with whom they are paired various wisdom regarding metallurgy, astrology and other forms of ancient wisdom.\u00a0 These secrets made them powerful and great.\u00a0 After the flood, the kings are described as being part man and part apkallu, and the reason for Babylon’s greatness is that it has preserved this divine knowledge from before the flood centered around the person of its king.\u00a0 In later Mesopotamian material, these apkallu were portrayed as having given these secrets over to human beings without permission.\u00a0 For this misdeed, they were imprisoned by the high god in the depths of the river, the abyss.\u00a0 In the third century BC, a certain Berossus who was a priest of Bel (Baal) serving in the court of the Seleucid king in Syria presented the basic mythology of his religion in Greek.\u00a0 In addition to recounting the information above, and including a story parallel to that of the tower of Babel, he parallels these stories to the Greek story of the defeat of the titans and their imprisonment by Zeus in Tartarus.<\/p>\n

Genesis 4-6 tell the same story, but rather than a story of the greatness of the world’s kingdoms culminating in the establishment of the city of Babylon, it is a story of the corruption, sin, and wickedness of humanity under the influence of rebellious angelic powers.\u00a0 The telling begins with Cain becoming a murderer under the influence of the power of sin, portrayed as a creature who has come to master him (4:7).\u00a0 Cain then goes and builds the first city, naming it after his son (4:17).\u00a0 The line of Cain’s descendants then produces the great innovations of culture and technology, culminating in the kingly figure of Lamech.\u00a0 Lamech sings a song about his own greatness, and superiority to God himself, to his two wives (4:23-24).\u00a0 Seth’s genealogy in Genesis 5 then contains none of the great achievements of his brother Cain, merely reiterating over and over again that as long as their lives may have been, other than Enoch, each one of them died through the mortality inherited from their father Adam.\u00a0 Likewise, the giants, the great men of renown, the great kings and heroes of Mesopotamian religion, are here cast not as the preservers of ancient wisdom but as the illegitimate and unclean offspring of rebellious angelic beings and their interactions with humans (6:1-4).\u00a0 By the end of the story, God looks upon the world and sees that mankind has become so corrupt that every thought of his heart is always evil all the time (6:5).\u00a0 He therefore determines to save his creation through Noah, by using the waters of the flood to cleanse the taint of humanity’s sin from the earth (5:29).<\/p>\n

These chapters of Genesis interact polemically with Mesopotamian religious belief, but they do not themselves preserve the traditions upon which Genesis comments.\u00a0 These traditions were, however, preserved in a multitude of Second Temple Jewish texts, most famously in 1 Enoch, but also in a multitude of other texts such as the Book of Giants from among the Dead Sea Scrolls.\u00a0 These connect the two opposing traditions in a way that makes the original context and interpretation plain.\u00a0 Cain’s descendants produce these cultural and technological innovations because they are receiving these secrets from angelic beings who are giving them over not in order to assist mankind, but in order to aggrandize themselves and be worshipped by humanity and to ultimately destroy humanity by giving over secrets for which humanity are not ready.\u00a0 Their sin is therefore directly parallel to the sin of the Dragon in Genesis 3.\u00a0 They follow after his example.\u00a0 And so it is that God punishes these angelic beings by imprisoning them in the abyss, in the underworld beneath the earth until the last day when they will find their judgment in the lake of fire (cf. 1 Enoch 21:6-7).<\/p>\n

This understanding of the identity of these beings is referenced repeatedly in the text of the New Testament.\u00a0 2 Peter 2:4 reads, “For if God did not pardon angels when they sinned, but rather threw them into Tartarus and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment…”\u00a0 Here St. Peter makes plain the connection between these wicked angels and the titans of Greco-Roman religion through reference to Tartarus in addition to paralleling the language of 1 Enoch and other related literature.\u00a0 In his list of examples, St. Peter places this example immediately before the flood.\u00a0 St. Jude, likewise, refers to the angels who did not remain in their original estate and are now kept in eternal chains beneath gloomy darkness until the day of judgment (v. 6).\u00a0 St. Jude parallels this with those of Soddom who chased after ‘strange flesh’ (v. 7).\u00a0 Revelation 9 presents part of the final judgment as the abyss is opened, with smoke rising from it as from a furnace, and demonic beings emerge therefrom (9:1-3).\u00a0 They are ultimately all thrown into the lake of fire (Rev 20:10), which Christ himself says was prepared for “the devil and his angels” (Matt 25:41).<\/p>\n

It is these rebellious angels who are responsible for the spread of sin and corruption in the world and this is brought out in Second Temple Jewish literature through the identification of their leader.\u00a0 Texts such as 1 Enoch and the Apocalypse of Abraham identify the leader of these rebellious angels as Azazel.\u00a0 Azazel functions as a devil figure in this literature and is sometimes blamed for the whole of the evil of these fallen and imprisoned angels.\u00a0 1 Enoch 9:6 states that Azazel had taken the secrets reserved in heaven and taught them to men and women who were striving to learn them.\u00a0 As a result, 1 Enoch 10:8 says, “The whole earth has been corrupted through the works taught by Azazel, to him credit all sin” (compare 1 John 3:8; 5:19).\u00a0 This is not merely a made up, demonic sounding name.\u00a0 Rather, Azazel is a figure who appears in the book of Leviticus in relationship to the ritual of the Day of Atonement (Lev 16:6-10).\u00a0 In that ritual, two goats were selected, one for Yahweh the God of Israel and the other for Azazel.\u00a0 The latter goat, for Azazel, had the sins of the people placed upon it and then was sent out into the wilderness to the place of Azazel.\u00a0 The goat for Yahweh was offered as a sacrifice to him and its blood was used to purify and purge the contamination of sin from the tabernacle and the camp as a whole.\u00a0 It is unclear whether Azazel was seen as a personal being at the time of the writing of Leviticus as Azazel can simply refer to a goat who is sent away, however the reference to pagan sacrifices to goat demons in the wilderness (Lev 17:7) might serve to indicate otherwise.\u00a0 Second Temple Judaism, however, very clearly saw Azazel as a demonic power that held sway in the world outside the camp, in particular the desert wilderness, and this identification was maintained in Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity.<\/p>\n

The understanding of sin described by finding its origin in the corruption of angelic beings and solution in atonement differs from the common modern notion in terms of physicality.\u00a0 Sin and corruption are here seen to leave a physical taint which must be purified and restored, it is not an issue of a legal infraction for which restitution is made.\u00a0 Despite the repeated sin and guilt offerings held in Israel throughout the year, once a year the sins of the people had to be removed and then the stain left by them on the physical objects in the tabernacle and in the camp had to be purified.\u00a0 When the whole world became utterly corrupt, God sent the flood the purify it all and cleans away the stain of blood and violence.\u00a0 St. Peter moves from a reference to the imprisoned angels (1 Pet 3:19) to a reference of the cleansing power of the flood (v. 20), to a reference to our baptism (v. 21).\u00a0 Baptism not only removes sin, but washes away the taint, the residue, the physical effects of sin in soul and body.\u00a0 Objects, likewise, are taken out of the world where they lie under the power of the evil one (1 Jn 5:19) and blessed with holy water to purify them and devote them to their original purpose in the Kingdom of God.<\/p>\n

The Orthodox Church is clear that salvation embraces the whole human person in transformation into the likeness of God.\u00a0 Through theosis, human persons participate in God’s work in creation and are transformed by him.\u00a0 This is paralleled in a negative way by a proper understanding of sinfulness.\u00a0 St. Dionysius the Areopagite makes it clear that the reason that angels differ from one another in glory (1 Cor 15:40-41) is that based on their offices, they participate to different degrees in the grace of God.\u00a0 The loss of this participation and the subsequent diminution and corruption of their being is what it means for an angelic being to fall.\u00a0 The same is true for human persons.\u00a0 To be corrupted by sin means that the body and soul of a human person lose their connection with the life of God and they become subhuman and unliving.\u00a0 Condemnation on the last day consists in the permanence of this state.\u00a0 In our current age, salvation takes the form of repentance, and repentance is purification, healing, and transformation in being conformed to the likeness of Christ (Rom 8:29).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a previous post, the giants of the Old Testament, who came into being through demonic sexual immorality, were discussed.\u00a0 Only brief comments were made at that time about their angelic “parents”.\u00a0 These angelic beings, however, play an important role in the unfolding of the Old Testament and in New Testament theology.\u00a0 In another post, the three events of Genesis 1-11 which might be termed a ‘fall’ of humanity were discussed.\u00a0 It was commonplace in the Fathers and other early Christian writers to speak about the sinful state of humanity remedied by Christ in terms of one of these three events, with the other two subordinated, but which event varied.\u00a0 St. Irenaeus sees all three in terms of the sinful\u2026 <\/i> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"The Angels Who Left Their Former Estate - The Whole Counsel Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Angels Who Left Their Former Estate - The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In a previous post, the giants of the Old Testament, who came into being through demonic sexual immorality, were discussed.\u00a0 Only brief comments were made at that time about their angelic “parents”.\u00a0 These angelic beings, however, play an important role in the unfolding of the Old Testament and in New Testament theology.\u00a0 In another post, the three events of Genesis 1-11 which might be termed a ‘fall’ of humanity were discussed.\u00a0 It was commonplace in the Fathers and other early Christian writers to speak about the sinful state of humanity remedied by Christ in terms of one of these three events, with the other two subordinated, but which event varied.\u00a0 St. Irenaeus sees all three in terms of the sinful\u2026\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2018-12-10T20:52:31+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2018\/12\/The20Three20Apkallu2color.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fr. Stephen De Young\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Fr. Stephen De Young\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/\",\"name\":\"The Angels Who Left Their Former Estate - The Whole Counsel Blog\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2018\/12\/The20Three20Apkallu2color.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2018-12-10T20:52:31+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2018-12-10T20:52:31+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#\/schema\/person\/247da0ea47cc50719afc0ec2a8ee5e90\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2018\/12\/The20Three20Apkallu2color.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2018\/12\/The20Three20Apkallu2color.jpg\",\"width\":405,\"height\":232},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2018\/12\/10\/the-angels-who-left-their-former-estate\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"The Angels Who Left Their Former Estate\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/\",\"name\":\"The Whole Counsel Blog\",\"description\":\"The Scriptures in the Orthodox Church\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#\/schema\/person\/247da0ea47cc50719afc0ec2a8ee5e90\",\"name\":\"Fr. 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