Is Goliath a demon now? The general answer in the Jewish lore written in between the Old and New Testaments would be, “Yes.” This strange belief is not without biblical support.

In Genesis 6, some of the spiritual beings of Heaven procreated with the women of Earth and gave birth to the giants known as the Nephilim. While these giants should have been wiped out in the flood, they still exist after it. After the flood, they spread out to different areas and took on different clan names. While they’re still called the Nephilim, they’re also referred to as the Anakim, the Emim, the Rephaim, and the Zamzummim. Some of these giants lived among the human clans of the Amalekites, Hittites, Jebusites, Canaanites, Amorites, and Philistines.

Because these rebellious giants have an unclean origin, having been born out of the forbidden copulation of humans and rebellious angels, we naturally assume that they have no place in Heaven when they die. Indeed, the Bible says their angelic parents were chained up in Tartarus, a prison area in the underworld where the Greeks believed the Titans to be imprisoned. As for the disembodied souls of the giants, they’re mentioned to be shades (literally in Hebrew, “Rephaim”) in the underworld. Jesus may have further advocated this popular belief in his time when he called them “unclean spirits“—a possible callout to the unclean relations that created them.

All of this being said, I think it’s entirely plausible that some demons we exorcise are the disembodied souls of the giants. But have I ever cast one out? As of right now, I have no idea. For one, I try not to make a habit of ascertaining information from demons that I don’t need to know for the exorcism. Not only do demons tend to lie, but there’s a fine line that can be crossed if I’m not careful, in which I become a practitioner of the occult—going straight to demons for answers that God has not necessarily allotted me.

Secondly, I often deal directly with the lead demons in a person because when they go, they often take the lesser demons that have been stationed with them. Sometimes, there are dozens to hundreds of those lesser demons, and I have no idea what all of their spiritual origin stories are. That being said, there is potential that I’m casting out plenty of giant demons all the time without knowing.

Regardless of what kind of demon it is, the instructions remain the same: work with the Holy Spirit to figure out how to remove it.