jabberwock....The rebellious angels did not escape the wrath of God according to the references to them in Jude and 2 Peter; there the angels are described as bound in the dense darkness (= Tartarus) where they await Judgment Day (Jude 6, 2 Peter 2:4). These statements are directly dependent on 1 Enoch (even utilizing the same phraseology and terms), a Jewish apocalypse written from the third century BC to the first century AD, so an understanding of the latter is critical to understanding the biblical references correctly. The Society errs considerably in identifying the demons with the fallen angels. Such an identification flatly contradicts Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4, as the fallen angels couldn't be roving around freely if they were long ago bound and imprisoned in the abyss. So the Society is forced to interpret these scriptures in a figurative sense, as describing a state of inactivity of the fallen angels, but this is nonsensical if the Society simultaneously wants to claim that the demons are busy doing the work of Satan on the earth. The notion that the fallen angels departed their "materialized" fleshly bodies during the Flood (thereby becoming demons) is a Watchtower extrapolation that does not reflect what first century AD Jews and Christians believed. The actual early Jewish and Christian belief was that the demons were not the fallen angels but their bastard Nephilim children who drowned in the Flood (on the drowning of the Nephilim, see 1 Enoch 89:6). The hybrid nature of the giants meant that their earthly bodies were mortal but their souls were immortal (inherited from the immortality of their angelic fathers). The identification of the giants with the demons is explicit here:
1 Enoch 15:3, 6-11, 16:1: "Why have you abandoned the high heaven, the eternal sanctuary, and slept with women, and defiled yourselves with the daughters of men, and taken for yourselves wives and done as the sons of earth, and begotten yourselves sons, giants? ... The proper abode of spirits of heaven is heaven, but now giants who were gotten by the spirits and flesh, they will call them evil spirits upon the earth, for their dwelling will be upon the earth. The spirits that have gone forth from the body of the flesh are evil spirits, for from humans they came into being, and from the holy watchers was the origin of their creation. Evil spirits they will be on the earth, and evil spirits they will be called. And the spirits of the giants lead astray, do violence, make desolate, and attack and wrestle and hurl upon the earth and cause illnesses. They eat nothing, but abstain from food and are thirsty and smite. These spirits will rise up against the sons of men and against the women, for they have come forth from them. From the day of the slaughter and destruction and death of the giants, from the soul whose flesh the spirits are proceeding, they are making desolate until the day of the consummation of the great judgment, when the great age will be consummated".
This passage from the Book of Watchers was written in third century BC and is directly alluded to in Jude 6, which also alludes to 1 Enoch 10:4-12 which concerns the binding and casting of the fallen angels into the darkness beneath the earth where they will be held for seventy generations until "the day of their judgment and the consummation until eternal judgment is consummated". The Animal Apocalypse (second century BC) relates that the fallen angels were imprisoned prior to the Flood: "And I saw one of those four [archangels] who had come before; he seized that first star that had fallen from heaven, and he found it by his hands and feet and threw it into an abyss, and that abyss was narrow and deep and desolate and dark .... one of those four gathered and took all the great stars ... and bound them by their hands and feet and threw them into an abyss of the earth" (1 Enoch 89:1-3; compare Revelation 20:1-3). The book of Jubilees (second century BC) elaborates further on the Enochic myth of the origin of the demons. In a clear allusion to 1 Enoch 10, the author relates that prior to the Flood the fallen angels "were bound in the depths of the earth forever, until the day of great judgment in order for judgment to be executed upon all" (Jubilees 5:10; compare Jude 6 which says that the fallen angels are "kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day"). Then immediately after the Flood, the demons began to plague Noah and his children (7:26-28, 10:1-2), and Noah prays for them to be imprisoned with their parents. But their leader Mastema reaches an agreement with God to have one-tenth of them remain free to continue their activities unhindered (10:8-11), so while the majority are bound and cast down into the place of judgment, a small number are allowed to roam the earth, being subject to Satan. This same identification of the demons with the antediluvian giants was also a mainstay of early Christian thought (cf. Acts of Thomas 32, Justin Martyr, 2 Apology 5.2, Athenagorus, Plea 6.3.2, Minucius Felix, Octavian 26, Tertullian, De Idololatria 4, Lactantius, Divine Institutes 2.15, Commodianus, Instructiones 3, Pseudo-Clementines, Homily 8.10-20). And once we appreciate the actual conceptual background underlying the NT references to demons, a lot of things begin to make sense. In Matthew 12:43-45, demons are depicted as wandering the earth seeking new bodies to inhabit. Why do they do this? Because they originally had bodies but lost them when they drowned in the Flood. One may even appreciate the subtle irony in Matthew 8:31-32 in the story about the demons possessing the herd of swine, who then proceed to drown themselves in the sea. This story makes the demons, in effect, re-enact their own original demise, forcing themselves to become again bodiless in search of new hosts.
