by Brian Godawa
The LXX then adds this gloss:
2 Samuel 21:11 (LXX)
11 And it was told David what Rizpah the daughter of Aia the concubine of Saul had done, and they were faint and Dan the son of Joah of the descendant of the giants overtook them.[17]
Apparently, Dan ben Joah, was a giant. The text is not clear as to who was faint or what it means that Dan “overtook them.” Overtook who or what? The bones, or the scavengers that Rizpah was keeping from the bones? It would not make sense for Dan to overtake the scavengers of the bones, because giants are always in a negative disposition toward Israel in the Bible. Dan would not care to protect Israelite bones. If it was the bones that Dan overtook or “captured” as other translations have it, then David would have had to fight the giant to get them back because in verse 21, David gathers those bones with the bones of Saul and Jonathan to bury them all.[18]
Interestingly, the name Dan has a nefarious heritage in Biblical tradition. He was described in Genesis 49:17 as “a serpent in the way, a viper by the path, that bites the horse’s heels so that the rider falls backward.” This serpentine connection rings ominously familiar with the Genesis 3:15 prophetic curse on the Serpent’s Seed biting the heels of Eve’s Seed. And is it mere coincidence that the tribe of Dan lost their apportioned land in Canaan (Josh. 19:47), leading them to take the territory of the city Laish (Judg. 18) in the far north of Bashan, “place of the serpent,” in the foothills of Mount Hermon, the location of the Watchers’ fall and the pagan community of Banias that worshipped Azazel?[19]
The text also says that this giant Dan was from the “descendants of the giants.” The Greek for this phrase in the LXX is apoganon ton giganton, the same Greek translation of the Yalid ha Rapha warrior cult of the other four giants in 2 Samuel 21:22 (LXX): “These four were descended from the giants (apoganoi ton giganton) in Gath.”[20]
Like the other five giants spoken of in 1 and 2 Samuel, we have no personal details spelled out for us beyond the statements of fact. So the storyline of these giants in David Ascendant is speculative conjecture, but surely consistent with the explicit facts and implicit connections of the text.
Giant Weapons
Goliath’s armor is among the most studied in the Old Testament. The reason for this is because it is the most descriptive of all passages about a soldier’s armor anywhere in the entire corpus. It reads like a Homeric description of the heroic warrior in Greece.
1 Samuel 17:5–7
5 He had a helmet of bronze on his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail, and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of bronze [126 pounds]. 6 And he had bronze armor on his legs, and a javelin of bronze slung between his shoulders. 7The shaft of his spear was like a weaver’s beam, and his spear’s head weighed six hundred shekels of iron [16 pounds]. And his shield-bearer went before him.
Though the Philistines most likely consisted of Mycenaean and other Sea Peoples who had migrated to Canaan from the Aegean, they nevertheless were highly adaptive and built their own culture through assimilation of others. Thus, scholars indicate that Goliath’s armor was not distinctly Mycenaean Greek or even uniquely Philistine but rather a kind of conglomeration of different styles.
His helmet was not the typical feathered headdress of the Philistines, but rather a bronze covering more akin to Greek or Assyrian protection.[21] His bronze cuirass of armored scales was also unlike Aegean style armor, but more like Egyptian styled scales like that seen on Pharaoh Shishak’s tenth century engravings.[22] His bronze shin greaves were Greek and his shield bearer before him apparently was carrying a full-bodied shield rather than the small round one of the Philistines and other Sea Peoples. Goliath was a Philistine, but his Rephaim background and his distinct armor indicates he was most likely indigenous to the region, making him either a Canaanite convert or conscript of his Philistine rulers.
In the English translation it says that Goliath had a “javelin of bronze slung between his shoulders.” Citing similar language in the War Scroll at Qumran’s Dead Sea Scrolls, recent scholars have more accurately translated that phrase as referring to a bronze scimitar sword (curved blade), not the javelin.[23]
Another translation clarified by many scholars is that the shaft of Goliath’s spear being “like a weaver’s beam” is more accurately a likeness of the shape rather than the size of his dart. A well known form of javelin used in both Egypt and Greece included a loop or leash attached to the missile that could be flung by the fingers of the soldier to facilitate a throw of up to three times the normal velocity and distance.[24] This looped leash is very similar to what the heddle rod on a weaver’s beam looks like, thus indicating it as a new weapon in the eyes of the Israelites.
And that “weaver’s beam” javelin is the exact same description used of the weapon of another giant, the unnamed Egyptian Rapha (1 Chron. 20:5, 11:23). These giants are linked together by their elite guild connection as well as the weapons they use.
Goliath’s iron spearhead weighed 16 pounds. Ishbi-benob’s bronze spearhead weighed 7.5 pounds, since bronze is a lighter metal. Ishbi-benob is also described as carrying a “new sword,” in 2 Sam. 21:16. But as commentator Robert Bergren points out, the Hebrew word for “sword” is not actually in the text, making the phrase a reference to an unnamed weapon unknown to the writer. Translators assumed it was a sword, but we don’t know for sure.[25] Thus, the strange new weapon Ishbi-benob carries in David Ascendant. Strange for the Israelites, but not for readers of previous Chronicles of the Nephilim
Lastly, the unnamed giant killed by Jonathan in 2 Sam. 21:20 and 1 Chron. 20:6 is described as having six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. This is the only place in the Bible where a giant is described with polydactylism, but its genetic connection to the other giants is a strong possibility. While some may not think extra digits on hands and feet are a weapon, they certainly increase the gripping power extent of hands while adding wider balancing skill for feet that are no doubt advantageous in battle. This is the origin of the polydactylism of the giants as read in Chronicles of the Nephilim.
The descriptions of the giants and their weapons mentioned in Chronicles and Samuel indicates obvious ties between Goliath and the elite members of the giant warrior guild, the yalid ha rapha. And these giants are strongly implied to be part of a deliberate plan on the part of the Seed of the Serpent at war with the Seed of Eve: God’s people, king, and messiah.
Lion Men of Moab
Another strange warrior breed shows up in David Ascendant: Lion Men of Moab called Ariels. They are effectively werewolves – but more like werelions.
In 2 Sam. 23:20 Benaiah, a valiant warrior, strikes down “two ariels of Moab.” The word “ariel” is a transliteration because scholars are not sure what it means. The King James and Young’s Bibles translate these opponents of Benaiah as “lion-like men of Moab,” which captures the strangeness of the creatures but fails to express the religious or supernatural connotation of the word.
Some translators translate the phrase “ariels of Moab” as “sons of Ariel of Moab” after the unlikely LXX Greek translation,[26] or “lion-like heroes of Moab.” But there is no Hebrew word for “sons of” in the sentence, no indication of ariel being a personal name, and no Hebrew word for warrior used in the sentence. The Hebrew word for mighty warrior, gibborim, is used frequently throughout David’s narrative and that word is not here. The text says “two ariels of Moab.”
Some suggest it may be a reference to killing two lions. But the very next sentence states that Benaiah, the killer of the ariels, then killed a lion in a pit.
2 Samuel 23:20
And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was a valiant man of Kabzeel, a doer of great deeds. He struck down two ariels of Moab. He also went down and struck down a lion in a pit on a day when snow had fallen.
The Hebrew word for “lion” is not ariel, but aryeh. Adding the suffix “el” to the word adds a religious dimension of meaning that transcends mere lions. This is why Hebrew l
exicons explain the most likely meaning as “lion of god.”[27] El was not merely a name used of Yahweh in the Bible, it was the name of the figurehead deity of the Canaanite pantheon as well as a general reference to deity in Mesopotamia.[28]
In 1 Chronicles, some additional warriors from Gad join David when he is at Ziklag, and they are described exactly like ariels as “lion-faced warriors” with preternatural skills:
1 Chronicles 12:8
From the Gadites there went over to David at the stronghold in the wilderness mighty and experienced warriors, expert with shield and spear, whose faces were like the faces of lions and who were swift as gazelles upon the mountains:
Though animal-like skills is a common metaphor used to describe extraordinary warrior skills, having faces like the faces of lions could mean more in light of the existence of these ariels, or Lion Men of Moab. Since the tribal location of Gad was precisely all the land of Moab across the Jordan, I decided to make the Gadite lion-faced men be those very Lion Men of Moab who converted to Israel and joined David. Two of these hybrid warriors then become the two traitors who face down Benaiah.
Psalm 57 was written when David was on the run and hiding out in a cave from Saul’s bounty hunters. Verse 4 says, “My soul is in the midst of lions; I lie down amid fiery beasts— the children of man, whose teeth are spears and arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords.” Though a surface reading of this text appears to be an obvious figurative expression of David’s enemies, scholar B. Mazar suggests it may be a reference to a mercenary military corps of archers whose emblem was the lion-goddess.[29] Could they have come from Moab?
So what if these ariels are hybrid creatures reminiscent of the Watchers’ miscegenation in Genesis 6? What if they are elite warriors with hairy bodies and lion-like faces that only one of David’s own gibborim Mighty Men could slay? After all, the exploits of those Mighty Men in the passages we have been looking at are supernatural slayings of giants and hundreds of soldiers by single warriors. If these ariels were mere warriors, then the feat accomplished by Benaiah in slaying them would be the only one in the entire passage that was banal and without significance.
These ariels were something more than men, something supernatural.
The ancient understanding of ariel as a lion-like hybrid humanoid finds support in a later Nag Hammadi text that speaks of a gnostic deity, Yaldabaoth, who was an ariel (spelled slightly different): “Ariael is what the perfect call him, for he was like a lion.”[30]
The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible says of this possible religious mythical interpretation of ariel:
This interpretation could be supported by a recently found bronze-silver figurine from Tell Abū el-Kharaz in Transjordan representing, according to the excavator’s opinion a male lion-faced warrior(-god?), which can be viewed, because of its appearance and its attributes, as a male pendant.[31]
The author then reveals that the word ariel shows up in the Mesha Stele, a Moabite stone inscription not too long after the time of King David.[32] These are the very Moabites from which 2 Samuel says the ariels come. The line of text in question could be translated, “the lion figure [ariel] of their beloved (god)’ which was dragged before Chemosh after the fall of the Israelite city.”[33]
Bible scholar B. Mazar notes this Mesha Stele connection and adds that the word ariel became a synonym for the lion-headed cherubim at the base of kingly thrones.[34]
So in David Ascendant, I created a special unit of these Ariels, lion-headed warriors of Moab, to explore that supernatural dimension with imagination that fit the thread of the cosmic War of the Seed.
The ancient Book of Jasher was a source text for both Joshua and David’s stories (Josh. 10:13, 2 Sam. 1:18). The extant version we have of the Book of Jasher, though dubitable, tells of two different stories that contain hybrid creatures that may be similar to the lion-men of Moab or the satyrs of Banias. In Jasher 36:29-35 we read of Anah, one of the sons of Seir the Horite, (remember the Seirites’ connection to satyrs) during the days of Abraham. There is a large storm that the writer says caused a group of about 120 “great and terrible animals” to come out of the forest by the seashore to be witnessed by Anah feeding his asses.
Jasher 36:29-35
And those animals, from their middle downward, were in the shape of the children of men, and from their middle upward, some had the likeness of bears, and some the likeness of the keephas, with tails behind them from between their shoulders reaching down to the earth, like the tails of the ducheephath, and these animals came and mounted and rode upon these asses, and led them away, and they went away unto this day.[35]
Another chapter in Jasher tells the story during the youth of Balaam son of Beor, about a strange animal that was devouring the cattle of the people of Chittim. A man named Zepho went in search of this creature and…
Jasher 61:15
he came into the cave and he looked and behold, a large animal was devouring the ox; from the middle upward it resembled a man, and from the middle downward it resembled an animal, and Zepho rose up against the animal and slew it with his swords.[36]
Were these creatures just legends or were they genetic hybrid remnants of the miscegenation of the Watchers?
Dagon and Asherah
Two new gods take the stage in David Ascendant that were not in previous Chronicles: Dagon and Asherah. These are both mysterious deities about whom not much is revealed in the Old Testament or in ancient extra-Biblical sources beyond their names and few details.
Dagon. In the Bible, Dagon is described as the chief god of the Philistines. The story of Samson’s death in Judges 16 takes place in the temple of Dagon, god of the Philistines. In 1 Chron. 10:10 the Philistines are said to have hung the decapitated head of King Saul in a temple of Dagon at Beth-shan. 1 Sam. 5 tells the story of Philistines capturing the ark of the covenant and placing it in the temple of Dagon in Ashdod. Two mornings in a row, the statue of Dagon was found flat on its face before the ark, the second time, with its head and hands “cut off.” Severing hands and heads was a common tactic of ancient Near Eastern powers, both Mesopotamian and Canaanite.[37] This supernatural “power encounter” between Yahweh and Dagon becomes then a spiritual polemic of warfare and conquest between gods. But beyond these mentions, nothing more is revealed in the Old Testament.
The meaning of the name Dagon is uncertain. Early scholarly interpreters argued that it came from the Hebrew word for “fish,” thus one tradition depicts him as a hybrid deity with the upper torso of a man and the lower bottom of a fish. The 1 Samuel passage describing the lower part of the Dagon statue has been interpreted by some as “his fishy part.” Later scholars argued the name Dagon came from the Hebrew word for “grain,” thus another tradition understands him as a god of fertility or grain. Still others have argued Dagon was a storm god, whose name came from the Arabic word for cloudy rain.[38] No scholarly consensus has been reached on these interpretations, though the earlier ones have fallen out of favor.[39]
Dagon had a strong presence in Mesopotamia and Syria primarily as a storm god, spelled Dagan, and likened to the Babylonian weather god Enlil.[40] The Syrians included Dagon in their pantheon at Ugarit, which was in Syria, but nowhere in Canaan. The Canaanite champion deity Ba’al is described throughout the Ugaritic texts as the “Son of Dagon” which made him an outsider to the family of gods ruled over by the high god El and his wife, Athirat (Asherah), the Mother of the Gods.[41]
But since the Philistines were known for adapting customs and gods from their newly conquered lands it is entirely possible that Dagon was imported from Philistine contact with Syria and adapted to the interests of the coastal Sea People.[42] Because of this syncretistic worldview of the Philistines, I combined all three of the major interpretations of Dagon into one in David Ascendant as a hybrid fish-man who is a god of both storm and grain. And this is not too different from the nature of the Babylonian Marduk and the Canaanite Ba’al, who were also both gods of storm and vegetation.
Asherah. The name Asherah appears 40 times in the Bible (plural: Asherim, Asheroth, Ashtaroth). Some of those instances refer directly to the goddess herself (Judg. 3:7; 1 Kgs. 14:13, 18:19; 2 Kgs. 21:7, 23:4) and many others refer to a wooden cult object used in worship to symbolize the goddess (Deut. 16:21; Judg. 6:25-30; 2 Kgs. 18:4; Isa. 17:8; Jer. 17:2). From the time of Judges on into the monarchy and the Josianic reforms, The Asherah poles or sacred pillars are often spoken of in close connection with altars of Ba’al (Judg. 6:25; 1 Kgs. 16:33; 2 Kgs. 17:16; 21:3), which hints at a theological connection between this unseemly pair of idols that exercised an ongoing apostasizing influence on Israel throughout her history. Archeological discoveries of inscriptions in Israel have even confirmed the attempt of Israelites to syncretize Asherah into their religion as Yahweh’s consort (Deut. 16:21-22).[43]
Asherah appears extensively in the Ugaritic texts from Ras Shamra. There, she is referred to as Athirat. John Day points out that as consort of the high god of the pantheon El, she is called “mother of the gods,” whose divine offspring are called the “seventy sons of Athirat.” He then concludes, “There is a direct line of connection between this concept and the later Jewish idea of the seventy guardian angels of the nations (see 1 Enoch 89:59; 90:22-25; Tg. Ps.-J. on Deut 32:8).”[44]
She is a goddess of fertility and connected to sacred prostitution (2 Kgs. 23:7). She is also linked with the host of heaven (2 Kgs. 17:16; 21:3; 23:4), which are acknowledged as deities (Job 38:7), thus supporting her moniker the “mother of the gods.”
