Titans, Sons of God and Noah’s Flood

By Derek Gilbert

Why would the Greeks choose the name of an Amorite tribe, the Tidanu, for the old gods confined to Tartarus, the Titans? Was that tribe literally descended from the old gods—the rebellious “sons of God” in Genesis 6? In other words, were the Tidanu/Ditanu literally Nephilim—the mighty men who were of old?

While it’s possible, we think it’s unlikely. The Nephilim were destroyed in the Flood. Their spirits survived to become demons, a belief shared by Jews of the Second Temple period and early Church fathers such as Origen, Philo, and Justin Martyr. This was also the belief of the Greeks, although they tended to think that daimones were “kindly, delivering from harm, and guardians of mortal men.”

What’s clear are the links between the religions of the Amorites of the patriarchal age, the Hurrians and Hittites who lived to the north of Mesopotamia, and the Greeks of the classical era who lived west of the Hittites in what we know today as western Turkey and Greece. It’s not surprising that scholars are shifting from the consensus view of a hundred years ago, that Greek and Roman religion came from early Indo-Europeans, to what appears obvious in light of modern archaeology: The religion of Greece and Rome originated with the Semitic people of the Near East, specifically the Amorites.

The biggest change regarding the relationship of humanity to the “former gods” was that by the time the Greeks emerged onto the world stage, Kronos/Saturn was the only one of the old gods who received any kind of worship. His brothers and sisters had small roles in the cosmologies of the Greeks and Romans, but Kronos/Saturn was the only one with official rites.

This is a little odd, since the assembly, or council, of the Ditanu had its own temple at Ugarit as late as the time of the judges. Over the centuries, the only one of the spirits in the abyss who still commanded respect was their leader.

We can identify these spirits in the Bible. The clues are hiding in plain sight: Peter and Jude both refer to angels who sinned against God by committing an act of sexual perversion, for which they were tartarōsas, “thrust down to Tartarus.” The Greeks and Romans knew of only one group of gods confined to Tartarus, and that was the Titans. They correspond to the “former gods” of the Hittites and Hurrians and the Anunnaki of Mesopotamia, who likewise were believed to be deities who ruled long ago but had since been confined in the netherworld.

If the Titans were the angels who defied their Creator in the distant past on Mount Hermon, then it appears the Amorites worshiped those angels long after the Flood destroyed their progeny, the Nephilim. Under the influence of the demon spirits of the Nephilim who were destroyed in the deluge, these descendants of Canaan, son of Ham, terrorized the ancient Near East from before the time of Abraham until the time of David, when the soldiers of Israel finally wiped out the Philistine Sons of Rapha.

Identifying the Titans as the Watchers who swore an oath on Mount Hermon is consistent with the evidence from the myths of later civilizations. Textual evidence from ancient Mesopotamia identifies Kronos/Saturn as the Phoenician Baal-Hammon, and the earlier Mesopotamian deities Kumarbi (Hittites and Hurrians), El (Canaan), Dagan (Amorites and Philistines), and Enlil (Akkad and Sumer). All of them, from Kumarbi to Enlil, have their origins in northwest Syria or southeast Turkey, in an area generally bounded on the south by Jebel Bishri in northeast Syria and the Amanus mountains in southern Turkey. And this is precisely the region that eventually produced the Amorites, and the tribe from which the Amorite kings of Babylon claimed descent, the Tidanu/Ditanu, which apparently took the name of the old gods called Titans by the later Greeks. In fact, one of the mountain peaks in the Bishri range northeast of Palmyra is called Jebel Diddi, which may preserve the name of the ancient Amorite tribe.

In other words, after the Flood, spirits working in the vicinity of modern-day Aleppo led a group of Amorites to believe a twisted version of history—that the ancestors of this tribe had been demigods, “mighty men who were of old,” and that the old gods were still available to serve if only the Amorites pledged their worship and made regular sacrifices to them. Over time, as the influence of these old gods spread westward through the lands of the Hurrians and Hittites, they were adopted into the religion of the Greeks as the Titans, a name that reflects the bull-like appearance of these entities, who may be, like the divine rebel from Eden, rebellious cherubim who thought they could overthrow their Creator.

The most powerful of these rebels, known to us through the ages as the Watcher called Shemihazah, or the creator-god variously called El, Enlil, Dagan/Dagon, Kumarbi, Kronos, Saturn, and Baal-Hammon, continued to influence the world around the Mediterranean and probably elsewhere under other names.

To this day, one can make the case that the child sacrifice that’s become an industry unto itself is just a sanitized version of the ancient worship of a dark god who sits in Tartarus, waiting for what he believes will be the time to emerge and finally claim what is rightfully his—the very throne of God.

Nearly four thousand years after God made this statement to Abraham, it’s still true that “the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

Derek Gilbert hosts SkyWatchTV, a weekly Christian television program, and co-hosts SciFriday, a weekly television program that looks at science news with his wife, author, and analyst Sharon K. Gilbert. His broadcast career spans nearly four decades, with stops in Little Rock, Saint Louis, and Philadelphia, and he’s been interviewing guests for his podcast, A View from the Bunker, since 2009. Derek is author of the groundbreaking books The Great Inception and Last Clash of the Titans. He’s also the co-author with Josh Peck of The Day the Earth Stands Still, which exposes the occult origins of the modern UFO phenomenon. Bad Moon Rising: Islam, Armageddon, and the Most Diabolical Double-Cross in History was released in the summer of 2019. Derek and Sharon recently released Veneration: Unveiling the Ancient Realms of Demonic Kings and Satan’s Battle Plan for Armageddon, about ancient death cults and the Bible. Their newest book, Giants, Gods, and Dragons: Exposing the Fallen Realm and the Plot to Ignite the Final War of the Ages, was released November 30, 2020 and became a #1 “Hot New Release.” His newest book, The Second Coming of Saturn: The Great Conjunction, America’s Temple, and the Return of the Watchers, is available for pre-order and will be released November 15, 2021. Derek is a popular conference speaker, a lifelong fan of the Chicago Cubs, prefers glasses to contacts, and has been known to sing the high part in barbershop and gospel quartets. Find out more: www.derekpgilbert.com,  www.gilberthouse.org, www.vftb.net, and www.SkyWatchTV.com.