Background on the nephilim or Canaanite problem
E Mullins
The prohibition against mingling with the demon-worshiping Canaanites remained one of God's strongest commands. God said, "So shall we be separated, I and all of Thy people, from all the people that are upon the face of the earth" (Exodus 3:16).
God characterized the Canaanites thusly: "And I will make them a terror and an evil for all the kingdoms of the earth [referring to the Diaspora-Ed.], as a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse on all places where I shall scatter them" (Jeremiah 24:9).
Thus we see the Canaanites, newly named the Phoenicians, dispersing along all of the trade routes and avenues of commerce throughout the earth. As God prophesied, they spread corruption, terror, and devastation wherever He scattered them. Later known as the Venetians,they dominated the avenues of commerce; when they settled inland, they specialized as merchants, and later, as bankers, at last comprising a group now loosely known as "the black nobility," which holds seemingly irresistible power today.
God further warned His people against the dispersed Canaanites. Deuteronomy 7:2-5: " ... thou shalt smite them, lilt! utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with I hum [such as the League of Nations or the United Nations- Ed.] nor shew mercy unto them. Neither shalt thou make marriage with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods; so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly. But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven mages with fire."
This was a direct command to destroy the groves and shrines of the demon-worshiping Mystery cults, now known as Freemasonry. The prohibition against "graven images" has been misunderstood by many well-meaning Christians. God did not prohibit graven images –He prohibited the obscene images of the Baal and Ashtoreth cults, which were made to create sexual excitement as part of their obscene rites. The battle against obscenity goes on today,although it often seems that American Christians are losing it.
In making these demands (they were not requests), God was not offering a program for a school picnic; He was laying out the only program which would allow His people to survive on this earth. Otherwise, He warned, "And a mongrel race will dwell in Ashdod" (Zechariah 9:6).
Should His people fail to carry out His instructions, God specifically described what would happen, and in so doing, He accurately described the world of today.
"But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, too serve and to do all His commandments and His statutes which I command thee this day, that all these curses shall come upon thee and overtake thee: .... The stranger that is within thy gates[the Canaanites or their descendants-Ed.] shall get up above thee very high, and thou shalt comedown very low. He shall lend to thee, and thou shall not lend to him; he shall be the head and thou shalt be the tail" (Deuteronomy 28: 15, 43-44).
Certainly this is the situation which exists in the United States today. The Venetians control the Federal Reserve System; they lend to us, but we do not lend to them; they are the head, and we are the tail. Having become Satan's curse on humanity, the Canaanites now spread across the earth like some evil plague. Genesis 10:18: "The families of the Canaanites were spread abroad." This diaspora brought troubles to every nation in which this people landed. Ezekiel 16:3, 45, and 46 lists the racial tribes of the Canaanites, denouncing them individually, "thy father an Amorite, their mother a Hittite, their older sister Samaria, their younger sister Sodom." Yeshua, the minister of compassion, when he was asked to cure a Canaanite, denounced them as dogs.
Matthew 15:22:"And, behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and cried, 'Have mercy on me, o Adonai, son of David; my daughter is severely possessed by a demon.' But He did not answer her a word." At last He did answer her, verse 26, "And He answered, 'It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." By children, He meant the children of Israel, and that the Canaanites were dogs. She persisted and he finally did heal her daughter. The Canaanite political parties were the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, Essains, Assissins,Herodians, and Scribes. A later group, the Edomites, descended from Esau and later inter married with the Turks, producing a Turco- Edomite mixture which later became known as the Chazars,the present occupants of Israel, according to the great Jewish scholar, Arthur Koestler.
The Canaanites were divided into the Amorites, Hittites, Moabites, Midianites, Philistines,Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, Sepharvaims, Perizzites, and affiliated tribes, all of which are routinely denounced in the Bible. Genesis 3:17: "The Perizzites are the enemies of God; the Ammonites worshiped Moloch Chemos and were demon-possessed." The Ashodites worshipped the fish and god, Dagon-they were robbers and hated God (as recorded in the British Museum --Ed.). The Egyptians were known as worshipers of black magic, which resulted in God's rebuff to Hagar. The Amorites were cursed by God (Ezra 9:1). Hittite was defined as meaning to destroy or to terrify; Perizzite came to stand for strife and disorder; the Sepharvaim(later Sephardim) were revolutionaries; Jebusite stands for trampling underfoot.
In his monumental work, "The History of the Jews," Joseph Kastein writes, p. 19, "The Canaanitish cults were closely connected with the soil and expressive of the forces of nature,particularly the force of fertilization .... This force or divinity, was called Baal .... Whenever any question arose Involving their existence as a nation, they knew only one God, and recognized but one idea-the theocracy." Thus Kastein admits that the Canaanites were fertility cults, but he does not explain that the worship of Baal as a god of fertility, with the obscene rites of his queen, Ashtoreth, was so abominated in the ancient world that whenever Baal was used in this context, in referring to proper names, the suffix for Baal was "bosheth," or shameful; thus we get the names Ishbosheth, Mephibosheth, etc. The destructive nature of the Canaanites upon other nations in which they settled is nowhere more strongly demonstrated than in Egypt, the first land to be corrupted by their barbaric practices. Originally, "Baal" simply meant Lord in the Canaanite language.
The obscenity of the rites soon developed a popular image of Baal which had three heads, the head of a cat, the head of a man, and the head of a toad. His wife, Ashtoreth, also known as Astarte and Ishtar, was the principal goddess of the Canaanites. She also represented the reproductive principle in nature,and in case anyone might overlook it, all of her rites were sexual observances. In Babylon, the temples of Baal and Ashtoreth were usually together. Mainly, they served as houses of prostitution, in which the priestesses were prostitutes, and the male priests were Sodomites who were available for the worshipers who were of that persuasion. The worship of the Canaanite gods consisted of orgies, and all their temples were known as centers of vice. They also originated voodoo ceremonies, which became the rites of observance in Ethiopia through the Ethiopian Jethro, the tutor of Moses.
These same rites now enthrall tourists in the Caribbean. It was not long before the simple ceremonies of vice began to pall on the worshipers of Baal. They sought greater excitement in rites of human sacrifice and cannibalism, in which the torture and murder of small children were featured.
To consolidate their power over the people, the priests of the Canaanites claimed that all firstborn children were owed to their demon gods, and they were given over for sacrifice. This lewd and barbaric practice was noted in Isaiah 57:3-5:"But you, draw near hither, sons of the sorceress, offspring of the adulterer and the harlot. Of whom 'are you making sport? Against whom make ye a wide mouth, and draw out the tongue?Are ye not children of transgression, a seed of falsehood? Inflaming yourself with idols under every green tree, slaying the children in the valleys under the cleft of the rocks?"
Thus Isaiah inveighed not only against the obscene expressions of the blood-maddened orgiasts,their salacious grimaces, but also their now well-established custom of practicing their horrible rites in "groves" and "shrines," where they could murder children without being seen and punished by the descendants of Shem.
Macalister, under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund, from 1904 to 1909, found in the Canaanite stratum of about 1500 B.C., the ruins of a"High Place," a temple to Ashtoreth, containing ten crude stone pillars, five to eleven feet high,before which human sacrifices were offered. Under the debris in this "High Place," Macaliste rfound great numbers of jars containing the remains of children who had been sacrificed to Baal."Another horrible practice was what they called 'foundation sacrifice.' When a house was to be build, a child would be sacrificed and its body built into the wall, to bring good luck to the rest of the family. Many of these were found in Gezer. They have been found also at Megiddo,Jericho, and other places." (Halley's Bible Handbook) Halley's also notes that in this "High Place,"
Macalister found large piles of images and plaques of Ashtoreth with rudely exaggerated sex organs, designed to stimulate sexual acts. Ashtoreth images found in many areas of the Canaanite influence emphasize over-sized breasts, sensuous smiles, heavily accented eyes, and nudity. The demonic nature of this sex worship is traced directly to Ham's intercourse with the witch Naamah on the Ark.
Col. Garnier, in his "Worshipof the Dead," writes, "Naamah was celebrated for her beauty, talent, energy, lustfulness, andcruelty, and she was of Nephilim (fallen angel) parentage." The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the Canaanite demonology as featuring Lilith, the vampire; Reseph, the god of the plague; Dever, god of pestilence; and the god of the underworld, Mot, from mavet, the Hebrew word for death. Despite their prominence as destructive influences in the ancient world, the Canaanites and their demon-god Baal seldom appear in the authoritative works on the ancient Near East. Gaston Maspero's great history of Egypt, "The Dawn of Civilization," published in 1894, and republished in 1968, does not mention either Baal or Canaan.
H. R. Hall's "Ancient History of the Near East" does not mention Shem or Canaan in the index. Baal has a single mention. How much of this is due to the deliberate falsification and destruction of historical records by the Egyptian priesthood cannot be ascertained, but the results are obvious. Another contributing factor is the sudden disappearance of the names' 'Canaan" and "Canaanites" from all historical records after 1200 B.C. How did this come about? It was very simple. They merely changed their name. Chambers Encyclopedia notes that "After 1200 B.C. the name of Cana disappeared.
The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the Canaanite demonology as featuring Lilith, the vampire; Reseph, the god of the plague; Dever, god of pestilence; and the god of the underworld, Mot, from mavet, the Hebrew word for death. Despite their prominence as destructive influences in the ancient world, the Canaanites and their demon-god Baal seldom appear in the authoritative works on the ancient Near East. Gaston Maspero's great history of Egypt, "The Dawn of Civilization," published in 1894, and republished in 1968, does not mention either Baal or Canaan.
More civilized Phoenicians, seemingly harmless merchant folk, took their place. Having obtained a monopoly on purple dye, which was highly prized throughout the ancient world, the Canaanites advertised their control over this product by calling themselves Phoenicians, from phoenicia (phoenikiea), the Greek word for purple. From the outset of their history, the Phoenician Canaanites always managed to get a monopoly on some essential product. They later had a monopoly on tin for some centuries, until the Greeks discovered tin in Cornwall in 233B.C.
The change of name did not mean that the Canaanites had abandoned their worship of Baal and Ashtoreth. They became more prudent in their worship of Baal, and in the colonies which they established along the length of the Mediterranean, they built their temples to the female of the species, Ashtoreth. In the Egyptian city of Memphis, the Phoenician Temple of Ashotoreth was the largest religious edifice. She was known there as the wife of the supreme god, El, and his seventy deities. In their rituals, Ashtoreth was sometimes worshiped as the male demon,Astaroth, who survived in European rites as Astara or Ostara. In this form, he became the patron god of the Nazi movement in Germany.
The western most outpost of the Phoenicians was Cadiz, a Phoenician colony which derived its name from the Semitic gadir, or fortress. Their most important colony, which soon became arrival to Rome itself, was Carthage, which they established about 900 B.C. The name derived from Hebrew, Kart-hadshat, or new city. The Phoenicians often named their cities with the prefix of "new." During the fifth century, the Carthaginians had fought the Greeks and survived,but in 264 B.C. Rome attacked in full force. A series of wars ensued, called the Punic Wars,because the Carthaginians called themselves the Punics. St. Augustine noted that the Punics among themselves referred to their people as the "Chanani," or Canaanites, but this name was like a secret code; they never used it in dealing with other people.