The Divine Council Part 7: The Hierarchy
Angels, Demons, and the Spirits of the Giants: A Biblical Taxonomy of the Unseen Realm
Hello brothers and sisters,
Over the first six posts in this series, we’ve built a framework for understanding God’s cosmic government. We’ve defined elohim as a category term for divine power and authority (Part 1), watched God judge His corrupt council in Psalm 82 (Part 2), traced how the nations were divided among divine beings in Deuteronomy 32 (Part 3), explored the council’s presence at creation (Part 4), confronted the rebellion of the Watchers in Genesis 6 (Part 5), and unmasked the spiritual powers operating behind earthly thrones in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 (Part 6). If you haven’t read those yet, I’d encourage you to start there before continuing.
Get caught up on the Divine Council Series HERE.
Now I want to tackle a question that’s been simmering beneath the surface of this entire series. It’s a question most Christians have never thought to ask, because they assume the answer is obvious.
What’s the difference between a fallen angel and a demon?
For a great many believers, the answer is: nothing. They’re the same thing. “Fallen angel” and “demon” are just two labels for the same rebellious spiritual beings, the ones who followed Satan in his rebellion and now roam the earth causing trouble. That’s the version I absorbed from culture, from sermons, from movies, and from the general religious atmosphere permeating the places where I grew up.
But when I started digging into the text seriously, that answer fell apart in my hands. And what replaced it changed the way I read the Gospels entirely.
Let me tell you how I got there.
I need to be very clear about something first, though, because this is a post where I’ll be leaning on sources outside the canon of Scripture. So let me draw that line carefully before we go any further.
A Word About Sources
Much of what I’m going to say in this post does not come directly from the pages of Scripture. It comes from Second Temple Jewish literature, particularly 1 Enoch, and from inferences I draw when I read the New Testament in light of that literature.
I want to be explicit about that, because I take the authority of Scripture seriously, and I don’t want anyone walking away thinking I’m presenting 1 Enoch as though it carries the same weight as Genesis or the Gospel of John.
It doesn’t. And I won’t pretend it does.
But I also want to explain why I give 1 Enoch more weight than most other extrabiblical sources, because I don’t think it belongs in the same category as, say, the Book of Jubilees or the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, valuable as those are for historical context.
Here’s my reasoning.
First, 1 Enoch is the only extrabiblical book that not one but two New Testament writers directly engage with. Jude quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 explicitly and attributes it to “Enoch, the seventh from Adam” as prophecy (Jude 14-15). And both Jude and 2 Peter draw on the Enochic Watchers tradition when they describe the angels who sinned and are now imprisoned (Jude 6, 2 Peter 2:4). When inspired apostles reach for a source to make their argument, that source deserves our attention.
Second, 1 Enoch was treated as authoritative by significant portions of the early church. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Clement of Alexandria all engaged with it. Tertullian defended it directly. And to this day, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes it in their biblical canon.
Third, and this is the point I will develop in this post, the Enochic explanation solves a genuine biblical problem that no other explanation solves nearly as well. When I read the New Testament’s descriptions of demons, they simply don’t fit the “fallen angel” framework. But they fit the Enochic framework perfectly.
So here’s how I’ll proceed.
I’ll present the framework, I’ll show you where it comes from Scripture and where it comes from 1 Enoch, and I’ll be honest at every step about which is which. You can weigh the evidence for yourself. As always, I invite you to study these things and come to your own conclusions. Acts 17:11 is important here. Be like the Bereans. The Holy Spirit will guide you.
With that said, let’s dig in.
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The Biblical Taxonomy
First, let me lay out the full framework as I understand it. Then we’ll examine the pieces.
At the top is God. Sovereign, uncreated, incomparable. The Elohim above all elohim, as we established in Part 1. There is no one like Him, and the distinction between the Creator and everything He has made is absolute and immutable.
Below God are the faithful angels. These are divine beings who serve God, carry out His will, and possess significant power. They can take on physical form (we’ll come back to this). They are assigned to nations and tasks. Michael and Gabriel are named examples. The Bible calls them by various terms: angels (messengers), the host of heaven, the sons of God, watchers, and more.
Now, before you bring up cherubim, seraphim, and maybe even the living creatures of revelation, let me just say that one thing. While there are places between Judaism and certain forms of Christianity where you can find detailed hierarchies showing what angels are what, which are more powerful than others, etc., none of that is Scriptural.
There is no list anywhere in Scripture that says the living creatures are second only to God, that seraphim come after, then cherubim, then common angels. Or that the living creatures are the cherubim. Or that there are 3 spheres with 9 choirs of angels, or that there are 10 ranks of angels. Or whatever other hierarchy might exist.
I don’t claim to know the answers to any of these questions because Scripture doesn’t tell us and there is no extrabiblical source that I would consider authoritative that does. So I lump them in with angels, since as far as I can tell they seem to be of the same (or very similar) order of beings to one another.
Then there are the fallen angels, the rebellious members of the divine council. These retain significant power and governmental authority. Some of them are imprisoned (2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6, and the “spirits in prison” of 1 Peter 3:19). Others remain active as the powers behind earthly kingdoms, the “principalities and powers” that Paul says we wrestle against (Ephesians 6:12). These are beings of real, substantial authority. The prince of Persia and the prince of Greece from Daniel 10 belong here.
Then, distinct from all of these, are the demons. And here is my central claim: demons are a different category of being from fallen angels. They are lesser. They are the disembodied spirits of the dead Nephilim, the hybrid offspring of the Watchers and human women whom we discussed in Part 5.
And finally there are humans. Made in God’s image, but not elohim. We’ll deal with the significance of that in Part 8.
Now let me defend the part of this taxonomy that many Christians might find surprising: the sharp distinction between fallen angels and demons.
Why Angels and Demons Cannot Be the Same
Here’s the puzzle that started my whole investigation.
The New Testament shows us demons behaving in a very specific way. And that behavior makes no sense if demons are fallen angels.
Consider how angels operate in Scripture. When angels appear, they can take on physical form at will. In Genesis 18-19, three visitors come to Abraham, and two of them (angels) go on to Sodom. They eat food. They’re grabbed by the mob. Lot washes their feet. They physically take Lot and his family by the hand and pull them out of the city. These are angelic beings interacting with the physical world in physical bodies, and there’s no indication that this is difficult or unusual for them. They don’t need to possess anyone. They simply manifest.
Now consider how demons operate in the Gospels. They don’t manifest their own bodies. They seek out human bodies to inhabit. And when they can’t find a body, they’re distressed.
Look at what Jesus says in Matthew 12:43-45:
“When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first.” (NKJV)
The unclean spirit wanders through “dry places” (waterless places) seeking rest and finding none. It’s restless, homeless, desperate for a “house” to inhabit. That house is a human body.
In Mark 5, the Gerasene demoniac is possessed by a legion of demons. When Jesus casts them out, they beg not to be sent “out of the country” (Mark 5:10) and plead to be sent into a nearby herd of pigs instead (Mark 5:12). They would rather inhabit pigs than be disembodied.
Take a minute and think about that. Really think about it. These beings are so desperate for embodiment that they beg to enter swine rather than exist without a physical host.
This is the behavior that broke the “fallen angel” theory for me.
If demons are fallen angels, and angels can manifest physical form whenever they wish (as we see throughout Scripture), then why would a demon ever be desperate for a body? Why would it wander through waterless places seeking rest? Why would it beg to be allowed to inhabit pigs rather than remain disembodied? A fallen angel wouldn’t need a host at all. It could simply take a form, the way the angels at Sodom did.
The hunger doesn’t fit. And it was that hunger, specifically, that convinced me something was wrong with the standard explanation. Because the very fact that demons hunger for embodiment tells you two things.
First, they don’t have bodies of their own and can’t simply manifest them.
And second, and this is the part that struck me most, that hunger speaks of loss. You don’t desperately crave something you’ve never had. The demons behave like beings that were once embodied and now find themselves cut off from a state of existence they were meant to have. They’re not spiritual beings frustrated at being confined to the spiritual realm. They’re beings whose natural embodied existence was taken from them, and they claw to get it back.
I sat with this problem for a long time. I could see clearly that the cultural answer didn’t work, but I didn’t have a replacement. The pieces were scattered on the table and I couldn’t assemble them. It was frustrating, honestly. I knew the “demons are just fallen angels” explanation was inadequate, but I had nothing to put in its place other than a vague sense that demons are just a different order of spiritual being.
And then I read 1 Enoch chapter 15.
The Enochic Explanation
Everything clicked into place when I encountered this passage. In 1 Enoch 15, God is speaking to Enoch, giving him a message to deliver to the Watchers, the angels who left heaven and took human wives. God explains what will become of the Nephilim, the giant offspring of those unions, after they die:
“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. Evil spirits have proceeded from their bodies; because they are born from men, and from the holy Watchers is their beginning and primal origin; they shall be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits shall they be called... And the spirits of the giants afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth, and cause trouble: they take no food, but nevertheless hunger and thirst, and cause offences.” (1 Enoch 15:8-11)
Read that last line again. “They take no food, but nevertheless hunger and thirst.”
There it was. The hunger. The exact quality I had identified in the Gospel demons, sitting right there in a text written centuries before Christ.
The Enochic explanation is this. The Nephilim were hybrids, part divine (from the Watchers) and part human (from their mothers). When they died, their bodies perished, but their spirits did not. And because they belonged to neither realm fully, they had nowhere to go. They were not fully divine, so heaven was not their home. They were not fully human, so they didn’t descend to Sheol like the human dead. They were caught in between, disembodied spirits with no proper dwelling place, condemned to roam the earth, hungry for the embodied existence they had lost.
These are the demons of the New Testament.
Suddenly everything fit. The demons seek embodiment because they were once embodied and lost it. They wander through waterless places because they have no proper home in either the heavenly or the earthly realm. They hunger and thirst without being able to satisfy those cravings because they are spirits without the bodies that hunger and thirst were made for. They beg to enter pigs because any embodiment is better than none.
The 1 Enoch framework doesn’t just explain the demons’ behavior. It explains it precisely, down to the specific detail of hunger without the ability to eat. When a proposed explanation accounts for the evidence that thoroughly, and no competing explanation comes close, I take it seriously. Not as Scripture, but as the best available answer to a real biblical puzzle.
And I want to underscore why I lean on this so heavily. It’s not that I started with 1 Enoch and imposed it on the Bible. It’s the opposite. I started with the biblical text, identified a genuine problem in it that the standard reading couldn’t solve, and only afterward found that this ancient book provided the missing piece. The problem was biblical. The evidence was biblical. 1 Enoch simply supplied a framework that made sense of the biblical data better than anything else I had encountered. To this day, I have never heard a better explanation for where demons come from and why they behave as they do.
Where Scripture Supports This
Now, is any of this actually in the Bible, or is it all just 1 Enoch? Let me show you the canonical threads, because they’re there, even if they’re subtle.
First, the behavior of the demons themselves. Everything I described above (the seeking of bodies, the wandering in dry places, the desperation for a host) comes straight from the Gospels, from the mouth of Jesus and the accounts of the evangelists. That’s canonical. The Enochic framework explains the biblical data; it doesn’t invent it.
Second, there’s the curious language of the Rephaim in the Old Testament. The Rephaim are, on one hand, a name for the giant clans descended from the Nephilim (Deuteronomy 2:11, 20-21). But the same word is also used to describe the “shades,” the dead spirits in Sheol. Isaiah 14:9 uses rephaim for the departed spirits that stir to greet the fallen king of Babylon. Isaiah 26:14 says of certain dead, “they are deceased, they will not rise” (again using the rephaim concept), stating that these particular shades will not be resurrected. There’s a shadowy connection in the Hebrew Bible between the giants and a category of restless dead, which fits the Enochic picture remarkably well.
Third, there’s Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 10:20 that pagan sacrifices are offered to demons (δαιμόνια, daimonia), connecting idolatry to these disembodied spirits rather than to the governmental fallen angels. This distinction (idol-demons versus territorial powers) is one we’ll return to shortly.
None of these canonical threads, by itself, proves the Enochic explanation. But together they form a pattern that the Enochic framework ties together into a coherent whole. And I’ll be honest with you once more: the framework itself, the specific claim that demons are the disembodied spirits of dead Nephilim, is not stated explicitly anywhere in the canon of Scripture. It’s an inference. A strong inference, in my view, and one held by serious interpreters, but an inference nonetheless.
I want you to hold it as such.
The Early Church and the Nephilim Spirits
I mentioned that portions of the early church took 1 Enoch seriously. It’s worth noting that this specific explanation for the origin of demons was not fringe in the early centuries.
Justin Martyr, writing around 155 A.D. in his Second Apology, explicitly identified demons as the offspring of the fallen angels and human women, roaming the earth and afflicting humanity. Tertullian followed the same line. For these early Christian writers, the connection between the Watchers, the Nephilim, and the demons was not speculative; it was the received understanding, inherited from Second Temple Judaism and confirmed, in their view, by the behavior of the demons the apostles encountered.
The Sethite reinterpretation of Genesis 6 that we discussed in Part 5, popularized by Augustine, is part of what eventually eclipsed this understanding in the Western church. Once the “sons of God” were reduced to the godly line of Seth, the Nephilim became merely wicked humans, and the framework connecting them to the origin of demons collapsed. What had been a coherent explanation was gradually forgotten.
I would contend that recovering it clarifies a great deal.
Principalities, Powers, and the Question of Hierarchy
Let me turn now to the fallen angels proper, the governmental spiritual powers, and address a question that naturally arises: is there a hierarchy among them?
Paul uses a rich and varied vocabulary for spiritual powers. He speaks of ἀρχαί (archai, “principalities” or “rulers”), ἐξουσίαι (exousiai, “authorities” or “powers”), δυνάμεις (dynameis, “powers” or “forces”), κυριότητες (kyriotētes, “dominions” or “lordships”), and θρόνοι (thronoi, “thrones”). These terms appear across Romans 8:38, Ephesians 1:21, Ephesians 3:10, Ephesians 6:12, Colossians 1:16, and Colossians 2:15.
The variety of terms strongly suggests that Paul recognized different orders or ranks of spiritual beings. He’s not just using synonyms for stylistic variety. Terms like “thrones,” “dominions,” “rulers,” and “authorities” carry connotations of graded governmental structure. There does seem to be some kind of order to the spiritual realm.
But here is where I want to exercise restraint, and where I part ways with a long tradition of Christian speculation.
Paul never spells out a rigid hierarchy. He varies the order and grouping of these terms from letter to letter. In Colossians 1:16 he writes “thrones or dominions or principalities or powers.” In Ephesians 1:21 he writes “principality and power and might and dominion.” The sequence changes. He’s not giving us an organizational chart. He’s using an accumulation of terms to convey the vast, structured, but ultimately subordinate reality of the spiritual powers that Christ rules over.
This didn’t stop later theologians from building elaborate systems.
The most influential was Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, an anonymous author writing around the 5th or 6th century A.D. who was long mistaken for the Dionysius converted by Paul in Acts 17:34. In his work On the Celestial Hierarchy, Pseudo-Dionysius organized the angelic beings into nine orders, grouped into three triads. The first triad: Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. The second: Dominions, Virtues, and Powers. The third: Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. Each triad, in his scheme, represented a different degree of proximity to God and a different mode of divine illumination.
Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, adopted and elaborated this scheme in his Summa Theologica (First Part, Question 108). Drawing on Ephesians 1:21 and Colossians 1:16, along with other scriptural references, Aquinas systematized the nine orders and reasoned carefully about the nature and function of each.
I want to be fair to these men. Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas were brilliant, serious thinkers, and their work has shaped Christian imagination for over a thousand years. Aquinas in particular is one of the towering intellects in the history of the church.
But I don’t think their nine-order hierarchy is biblical teaching. It’s a systematic construct, built by taking the scattered vocabulary of Scripture and imposing an ordered architecture on it that the biblical authors never actually laid out. The names of the orders come from the Bible. The system that arranges them into three triads of three does not. It comes from a synthesis of scriptural terms with Neoplatonic philosophy, and however beautiful and internally coherent it may be, it goes well beyond what the text warrants.
Here’s my conviction: when Scripture is reticent about something, we should be reticent too. The Bible tells us that spiritual powers exist, that they are structured and varied, that some are faithful and many are fallen, and that all of them are subject to Christ. What it does not give us is a detailed org chart of the heavenly realm. And I think there’s a kind of humility in accepting that limit. Pretending we have the divine bureaucracy mapped out to nine precise ranks claims a knowledge we simply haven’t been given.
I’d rather tell you what the text says, acknowledge the mystery where the text is silent, and leave it there. There are different orders of spiritual beings. Beyond that, I hold my speculations loosely, and I’d encourage you to do the same.
Territorial Spirits and Idol Worship
There’s one more piece of the taxonomy to address, and it connects back to the framework we built in Part 3.
We established, from Daniel 10, that spiritual beings are assigned to specific nations. The prince of Persia and the prince of Greece are territorial powers, divine beings with governmental authority over geographic and political entities. This holds for the modern world. Behind the nations and their systems stand spiritual realities, and most of these, as Psalm 82 showed us, are fallen.
But here’s a wrinkle worth noticing. Territorial spirits don’t fully explain the way idolatry seems to travel.
If spiritual powers were purely territorial, tied to fixed geographic boundaries, then you’d expect the worship of a particular god to stay put in its assigned territory. But that’s not what we see. When a people migrated, their idols went with them, and the perceived power of those idols traveled too. The gods of the nations weren’t confined to national borders in the way a purely territorial model would predict.
I suspect this is because we’re actually dealing with two different levels of spiritual reality that we’ve been examining in this post. On one level, there are the territorial rulers, the fallen angels with genuine governmental authority over nations, the “princes” of Daniel 10. These are powerful, governmental beings tied to political entities. On another level, there are the demons, the disembodied spirits attached to idolatrous practice, which Paul says are the real recipients of pagan sacrifice (1 Corinthians 10:20). These lesser spirits could attach themselves to specific idols, cults, and practices, and travel with them wherever their worshipers went.
The territorial fallen angels govern the nations from above. The idol-demons infest the specific practices of false worship from below. Both are real. Both are corrupt. But they operate on different levels, and conflating them (as the flat “fallen angel equals demon” model does) obscures how the spiritual realm actually functions in Scripture.
I’ll say again that I’m reasoning here, drawing inferences from the biblical data rather than citing chapter and verse for every claim. But the distinction between governmental powers and idol-demons makes better sense of the biblical evidence than treating all evil spirits as a single undifferentiated mass.
If you found this helpful or enlightening, or even challenging, share it with a friend who needs to hear the deeper truths of the divine council.
Why This Matters for You
You might reasonably ask: does any of this taxonomy actually matter for my daily walk with Jesus? Isn’t it enough to know that evil spiritual beings exist and that Christ has defeated them?
In one sense, yes. The most important thing is exactly that: Christ has triumphed over every spiritual power, and no force of darkness can withstand His authority. If you never sorted out the difference between a fallen angel and a demon, if you’ve never given an instant of thought to the ordering of the spiritual realm, your salvation would still be perfectly secure.
But I think understanding this framework matters for two reasons.
First, it helps you read the Gospels with new eyes. When you understand that the demons Jesus cast out were desperate, homeless spirits craving embodiment, you understand the nature of the conflict differently. Jesus wasn’t just performing generic supernatural feats. He was confronting a specific category of ancient evil, the lingering consequence of the Watchers’ rebellion, and demonstrating His absolute authority over it. Every exorcism was a declaration that the corruption introduced before the Flood had met its master. When the demons cried out, “Have You come here to torment us before the time?” (Matthew 8:29), they were acknowledging that Jesus held their final judgment in His hands.
Second, it guards you against error. As I discussed at length in Part 6, we have no authority to bind or rebuke spiritual beings in our own name. That principle from Jude 9 applies to every category of spiritual being we’ve discussed in this post, the governmental fallen angels and the idol-demons alike. Understanding what these beings are, and are not, keeps us from both underestimating them and overestimating our own authority over them. Our confidence is never in our knowledge of the spiritual hierarchy or our techniques for confronting it. Our confidence is in Christ alone, in whose name every knee will bow.
What’s Ahead
In Part 8, we come at last to the resolution of everything this series has been building toward. Christ above all. We’ll see how the incarnation, the cross, and the resurrection represent the cosmic victory over every corrupt power we’ve examined: the fallen council members, the imprisoned Watchers, the disembodied demons, the territorial princes of the nations. We’ll return to Deuteronomy 32 and discover how the disinherited nations are being reclaimed. We’ll look at the astonishing reading of Deuteronomy 32:43 preserved in the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls, a reading the author of Hebrews builds on to prove Christ’s superiority over the angels. And we’ll close by confronting, directly and charitably, the question of what we become in Christ, and what we do not become. It’s the culmination of the whole journey, and I can’t wait to share it with you.
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