Demons, Territorial Powers & the Allotment of Nations – Michael Heiser | Part 3

Part 1: https://youtu.be/aaiVY7sWF2s Part 2: https://youtu.be/U0GhyMkCDWs Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCAyZSJekX4 In Second Temple Judaism it was widely believed that a demon is the disembodied spirit of one of the dead Nephilim, a member of the giant clans such as the Nephilim, Anakim, Rephaim, Emim, and Zamzummim, whose bodies were destroyed after being spawned through a supernatural, forbidden mixture between divine beings and human women. When one of these giants was killed, the body died but the spirit lived on, wandering the earth and seeking re‑embodiment, and this is what Second Temple texts identify as an “unclean spirit” or demon, unclean because it originated in a prohibited union between heaven and earth. Traces of this worldview appear in intertestamental works such as 1 Enoch, where the spirits of the slain giants are described as “evil spirits” that afflict humanity, and in parts of the Old Testament that speak of the Rephaim in the underworld, suggesting that these Nephilim‑related spirits inhabit the realm of the dead. In this framework, Jesus’ encounter with Legion in Mark 5 becomes a concrete instance of that belief in action: a man tormented by an unclean spirit living among tombs in Gentile territory, where the spirits beg Jesus not to send them “out of the country,” revealing their attachment to that land and their desire to remain embodied—in this case, entering a herd of pigs and driving them over a cliff. This episode is then read within a larger theology of spiritual warfare: the demons Jesus confronts are understood as the spirits of dead giants operating under the jurisdiction of fallen divine powers over the nations, while Jesus’ ministry, including the sending of the 70 (or 72) disciples and the events of Pentecost, is seen as a deliberate campaign to reclaim every nation that was disinherited at Babel, systematically infiltrating the territories once ruled by these powers through the spread of the gospel to every region tied to the table of nations in Genesis 10, culminating in Paul’s ambition to reach Spain—the final “outlier” place—so that the redemptive mission might encompass “every last inch” of the earth under the dominion of the cosmic powers.