Are the sky armies in the Bible real? In this conversation, Paul Wallis, a former Anglican archdeacon turned author, tells Billy Carson that the Hebrew phrase usually translated host of heaven describes the arrival of advanced beings, that the earliest form of Judaism was a memory of that contact, and that a political reform under the kings of Judah rewrote the story into a religion of worship and obedience. Carson adds the parallel of Akhenaten in Egypt, the plural noun Elohim, and his view that the same pattern of narrative control runs from the Cathars to the Library of Alexandria.
The topic matters because readers who take the ancient astronaut reading seriously want to know which verses it rests on, and readers who do not want to know what the Hebrew says and where the consensus differs. Wallis is unusual in bringing 33 years of church ministry to the paleo-contact side, and the video is as much about how texts get translated and edited as about who the sky armies were.
What the video covers
Who Paul Wallis is (from about 2:15)
Carson introduces Wallis as a bestselling author, host of The 5th Kind TV and author of The Eden Conspiracy. Wallis describes 33 years in church-based ministry, work training pastors in the history of Christian thought and hermeneutics, and a term as an archdeacon in the Anglican Church of Australia. His aim, he says, is not to debunk the Bible: "I believe the Bible is full of accurate information that we've often misinterpreted, mistranslated."
Sky armies and the memory of contact (from about 4:00)
Wallis's central claim is that the Bible contains a narrative of paleo contact. He points to the phrase he renders as sky armies, the Hebrew tsaba hashamayim, usually translated host of heaven, and says Jeremiah and 2 Kings describe what he calls primitive Judaism: a canon of memory about the beings who arrived. The people raised standing stones where they had met these beings, built temples for thanksgiving ceremonies, and credited them with the leap from subsistence to farming and cities; the same books complain that these installations stood on every high hill and under every green tree.
Hezekiah, Josiah and the two-phase reform (from about 5:40)
Then, Wallis says, a king decided everyone should worship the god he worshipped. He names Hezekiah, who removed the standing stones, broke the rival altars and dissolved the other priesthoods so that one king, one high priest and one temple received the tithes. The transcript places the high priest Hilkiah here; in 2 Kings he belongs to the later reform under Josiah, and the two reforms are usually read together. Wallis describes a reformation in two phases, first of ritual and then of story, after which "the Bible stops being about paleo contact and starts being about worship, obedience, paying your tithes." Carson adds that the pivot also served money and control.
Akhenaten and the jealous god (from about 10:00)
Carson offers the Egyptian mirror image. Pharaoh Akhenaten pushed a single god, the sun disk Aten, and had the names of other gods defaced; the priesthoods and the public turned on him, and his son Tutankhamun, Carson says, was killed soon after. His point is that a god who calls himself jealous behaves like a person, not the creator of the universe. Wallis adds that Akhenaten's monotheism disempowered the priesthoods, and concedes that the biblical rewrite had an empowering layer, the idea of one source of the cosmos, mixed in with the suppression of older knowledge.
Elohim, holy wars and the divine names (from about 12:50)
Both men describe the gods of the old stories as relatives with large egos who went to war over land, resources and who would be top god. Wallis argues that because Elohim, a plural, has been translated as God, those wars read as holy wars and the reader is pushed to accept scorched-earth warfare as holy. He then works through the names: Elohim as the powerful ones, El Elyon as the highest of them, and El Shaddai, which he says the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon connects to a root meaning the destroyer rather than the almighty. Yahweh, in his reading, first appears as one of many Elohim competing for territory, while other named beings such as Asherah came for humanity's benefit. He also reads the first sermon of Jesus in Matthew, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, as an invitation to go beyond the mind, and the kingdom within you as the whole cosmic realm inside the person.
Thoth, the Cathars and the control of narrative (from about 21:10)
Carson brings in Thoth, the Atlantean priest-king of the Emerald Tablets, who in his account travelled the world teaching under names such as Huangdi and Quetzalcoatl; the site's profile of Thoth covers the Egyptian sources. Wallis says that wherever that tradition appears there is an ascension tradition, and traces it to the Cathars of thirteenth-century Languedoc, a community he describes as healthy and serene until the Church destroyed it. He estimates up to a million deaths across nineteen popes; Carson cites 80 million over 700 years of inquisition. Giordano Bruno's execution in 1600 is their example of the pattern: public punishment for anyone with a following and an alternative story.
Alexandria, Robert Kirk and the nonhuman layer (from about 28:00)
Carson suggests the Library of Alexandria did not simply burn but was the cover for a book heist; Wallis adds that some of its knowledge took 1,500 years to recover. Asked whether nonhuman beings pull the strings today, Wallis answers that the takeover of Judaism by Yahwism is explicable at a human level, since the king and high priest were the Yahwists, but that there is an active nonhuman layer. He cites Robert Kirk, a Scottish minister of the 1600s who recorded the abduction narratives of Aberfoyle in The Secret Commonwealth, and summarises Kirk's model as visible government, covert government, elites, and nonhuman entities in contact with those elites. Carson says he believes that "1,000%."
The Apocrypha, the Septuagint and the Gnostic texts (from about 34:00)
Wallis describes the Hebrew canon as built in stages: the Sumerian narratives summarised in the Abrahamic stories, laws added, worship material layered on, and the name Yahweh pasted over the whole in a sixth-century BCE rewrite. A later Greek version, the Septuagint, added books with new ideas about the soul, the afterlife and contact with other beings, and the New Testament writers quote it. He says Jewish authorities later pared the canon back, and Christianity did the same once an empire ran it. Carson recommends reading the omitted books and singles out the Book of Adam for its account of the expulsion from Eden. Wallis adds the Gnostic texts and the Gospel of Thomas, which he calls probably the earliest testament to the teaching of Jesus.
Quantum fingerprints and Acts 17 (from about 40:00)
Carson closes by saying that neither man denies God; his view is that "the fingerprint of the Creator is on everything," from the quantum realm to pi and phi. Wallis defines his terms through Acts 17, where Paul describes God as the source of the cosmos in which all live and move. Carson's fractal reading follows: a universe divided into countless entities so it can experience itself, where "you're just a bunch of atoms observing itself trying to figure out what it is." Wallis's parting advice is to decide each morning what energy to bring to others.
Key takeaways
Wallis reads the host of heaven in Jeremiah and 2 Kings as a record of contact with advanced beings, and early Judaism as the memory of it.
He argues that Judah's kings centralised worship on Yahweh and a later rewrite turned paleo contact into a religion of obedience.
Both men treat Elohim as a plural and argue that translating it as God turns wars between rival beings into holy wars.
Carson sees Akhenaten's failed monotheism, the Cathars, Bruno and Alexandria as one recurring pattern of narrative control.
The Septuagint, the Apocrypha and the Gospel of Thomas preserve, in their view, a broader picture of the cosmos that later canons removed.
Neither denies a creator; both define it as the source of the cosmos rather than a king to be obeyed.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson's position is that the gods of the Hebrew Bible, like the Anunnaki of the Sumerian tablets, were a related group of powerful beings who engaged humanity, fought among themselves and were later merged into a single deity by editors with political motives; the pillar article on who the Elohim were sets out that argument and its critics. A jealous god, in his reading, is a person, not the creator. He holds the view because the same structure appears across cultures, from Akhenaten to the plural noun in Genesis. Underneath it sits the cosmology of The Fractal Holographic Universe, in which a single source has divided itself into countless observers, so that discovering the cosmos and discovering oneself are the same act.
What mainstream scholarship says
Biblical scholars read tsaba hashamayim, the host of heaven, as the sun, moon and stars and the astral deities associated with them. Deuteronomy 4:19 warns against worshipping them, and 2 Kings 17, 21 and 23 and Jeremiah 8 and 19 condemn altars to them on rooftops and high places. The texts do record a real religious plurality in Judah, including the goddess Asherah, named beside Yahweh in inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom, and a real centralising reform under Hezekiah and Josiah. The disagreement with Wallis is over what that worship was directed at: astral and Canaanite deities, in the consensus view, rather than physical visitors.
On the names, Elohim is grammatically plural but takes singular verbs when it refers to Israel's God, which grammarians treat as a plural of majesty; elsewhere it means gods. The etymology of El Shaddai is uncertain: Almighty follows the Greek translators, and proposals include God of the mountain, from Akkadian shadu, and a root meaning to destroy, which lexicons list as possible rather than settled. Metanoia in Matthew 4:17 does mean a change of mind; the kingdom of God is within you comes from Luke 17:21 and Thomas logion 3 rather than Matthew, and the Greek can also mean among you.
The historical claims are more contested. Akhenaten promoted the Aten and defaced the name of Amun; Tutankhamun died young for reasons that remain undetermined. The Albigensian Crusade of 1209 to 1229 and the inquisitions that followed were brutal, but historians' estimates of deaths run to tens of thousands rather than millions, and the figure of 80 million has no support in the record. The Library of Alexandria is now thought to have declined over centuries; Eratosthenes did estimate the size of the Earth there, but its mass was not measured until the eighteenth century. The Torah reached its present form in the Persian period, the canon closed in stages afterwards, and the Septuagint was produced from the third century BCE. The Gospel of Thomas, found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, is dated between the mid-first and mid-second century, and its priority over the canonical gospels is a minority view. Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth, written in 1691, is a treatise on fairy belief; the governance model Wallis describes is his own extension of it. The broader framework is assessed in the site's article on ancient astronaut theory.
Watch, read and go deeper
The argument sits inside the Anunnaki and Sumer hub, where the Sumerian sources Wallis calls the root of the Abrahamic stories are set out. For the texts the two men recommend, start with the lost books of the Bible and the Gnostic gospels and Nag Hammadi. Carson's verse-by-verse approach to scripture continues on the 4BK TV series Bible Study.
Frequently asked questions
What does host of heaven mean in the Bible?
The Hebrew tsaba hashamayim literally means the army of the heavens. Most scholars take it to mean the sun, moon and stars, often personified as divine beings, whose worship Kings and Jeremiah condemn. Paul Wallis reads it as a memory of advanced beings who arrived from the sky.
Is Elohim singular or plural?
Elohim is a plural form. When it refers to the God of Israel it takes singular verbs and adjectives, which grammarians read as a plural of majesty; in other passages it means gods. Wallis and Carson argue the plural should be taken at face value in the early stories.
Who is Paul Wallis?
Paul Wallis is an Australian author and former Anglican archdeacon with 33 years in ministry. He hosts The 5th Kind TV and wrote the Eden series, including Escaping from Eden and The Eden Conspiracy, which argue that the Bible preserves a record of contact with non-human intelligences.
What is the Apocrypha?
The Apocrypha are books in the Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate but not the Hebrew canon, such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom and 1 and 2 Maccabees. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles keep most of them as deuterocanonical; Protestant Bibles generally omit them. Works such as the Life of Adam and Eve belong to the wider pseudepigrapha.
Sources mentioned
Wallis cites Jeremiah and 2 Kings for the host of heaven and the reforms of the Judahite kings, the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Thomas, Acts 17, the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon and the New Jerusalem Bible on El Shaddai, the Septuagint, the Nag Hammadi library, Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth, and his own Eden series, most recently The Eden Conspiracy. Carson refers to the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, his book The Fractal Holographic Universe, the Book of Adam from the collected Apocrypha, and the Hermetic principle As Above, So Below. Standard references for the mainstream reading include Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God; William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife?; and Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War.
