by Brian Godawa
It took seconds for the deluge to wipe the battlefield clean. A few seconds more, and the city was completely enveloped. The water smothered everything that breathed. It dissolved man-made structures as if they were sand castles.
The torrential wave made its way across the plain, extinguishing everything in its path. All flesh that moved on the land died, everything in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. Elohim blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground.
Only Noah was left, and those who were with him in the box.
Chapter 34
The box had been built effectively. It floated barge-like in the water, about two thirds of it below the waterline. It was a drift ship or a current rider, not a sailing vessel. Elohim would be its rudder.
Inside, Noah’s family settled in for a long voyage. They did not know exactly how long it would be, but Elohim had told them it would rain for forty days and forty nights. They knew the terrible truth that he was going to blot out all living things in the land. They knew they would be the only survivors. They knew they would start anew Elohim’s plans for the human race.
Noah was already organizing the work details. The barge was full of animals of every kind. Though many had been nestled into hibernation by Elohim’s hand, there were still many that had to be taken care of and fed. It would be a consuming job for these mere eight people. They had to get to work immediately. The sounds of bleating, mooing, squealing, braying, growling, and whinnying already filled the air in a cacophony of need. It would be a long journey indeed.
Noah’s family did not hear Lugalanu, hiding just down the hallway and around the corner from them. He had snuck into the boat when everyone’s attention had been on the battle. He carried a long dagger in his hand and waited for his moment.
He found it.
Lugalanu gripped his blade tightly and walked down the hallway toward the family. He had no need to conceal himself or surprise anyone. He was fully capable of taking them all out in a fury. He muttered to himself with satisfaction, “It is not so easy to kill a demigod.”
Noah looked up from the table where they counseled. He saw Lugalanu approaching them, dagger clutched in one hand, eyes full of rage.
Everyone followed Noah’s gaze. His sons pulled the women behind them to prepare for a battle. Unfortunately, the few weapons aboard were not at hand. They had not anticipated such a moment.
But Lugalanu had not anticipated what happened next.
He was halfway to the family. Suddenly, a lion jumped out of a stall, blocking his way. It growled, ready to pounce. A nuisance, thought Lugalanu, but killing it would be an opportunity to excite his blood rage before he took the family.
Then another lion joined it. And a tiger. And then a panther. Soon, feline predators with bared teeth and protracted claws entirely obstructed his path.
It made him pause.
A snort behind him made him look back.
A big black bull stomped its feet, preparing to charge. Behind it a huge gorilla joined in.
Lugalanu’s eyes went wide with fear. The animals knew he was their enemy and they were going to protect their own.
The bull charged. It hit Lugalanu in full stride, goring him on its horns and throwing him to the floor. The predators all pounced. Lugalanu disappeared beneath their teeth and claws.
Lugalanu had believed his own lie. He was no demigod. He was very human.
And then he was no more.
Noah’s family clung to each other in protection.
Elohim worked in mysterious ways.
Outside, all was darkness and rain and tempestuous waters. Seventy cubits from the boat, Inanna broke the surface, shorn of all clothing and accouterments. No more masquerade. Azazel was a pure, undefiled predator. He cut through the water like a shark toward the boat. His eyes focused on the craft with intense determination. He was weakened in the water, but he was one of the strongest of the divine Bene Elohim, and had a will of iron.
But even a Bene Elohim was no match for the jaws of the mighty Rahab. She burst through the water from below and clamped down on his body with her iron jaws. The speed of Rahab made it leap out of the water a dozen cubits before splashing back down in a fountain of spray. The monster sank fast and carried Azazel deep into the murky abyss.
It rode a violent current with its victim into the convulsive swirling sea below. Then a large wall of rock and sediment buried them, freezing Azazel in Rahab’s jaws, unable to move but bound alive forever.
In the boat, Noah’s family had already begun their arduous task of feeding the animals and cleaning the stalls.
Neela offered some hay to a couple of sheep. They grabbed it and munched to their heart’s content.
She stopped, a stabbing pain in her belly. A wave of nausea overcame her. She quickly found a pail and wretched.
Ham rushed to her, comforting her with a loving hand on her back.
Noah noticed her retching and was concerned. “What is wrong, Neela?” he asked.
“She must be seasick,” Ham offered.
“I hope you get over it soon, because we have a long drift ahead of us,” said Noah.
“It is not seasickness,” interrupted Neela. “I am with child.”
Ham grinned wide with happiness. Emzara hugged her first, followed by the rest of the family.
Noah said happily, “Well, we will have a world to repopulate, and it appears Ham and Neela have beat us all to the task.” Everyone laughed and got back to their work.
Neela sought hard to conceal her own fears. She had secrets she could not reveal—secrets of the Watchers. Semjaza and Azazel had achieved their goal of cross-breeding a normal human being that would carry the Nephilim genetic traits in a recessive form, to blossom in later generations once the lines had spread throughout the land.
Neela knew that the first of those demigods had been created, and it grew inside her.
Chronicles of the Nephilim continues with the next book, Enoch Primordial, the prequel.
Appendix A
The Sons of God
Deut. 6:4
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”
Psa. 82:1
God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.
A major premise of my fictional novel Noah Primeval is that the gods of the ancient world were real spiritual beings with supernatural powers. Thus, the mythical literature and artistic engravings of the gods that have been uncovered by Mesopotamian archeology reflect a certain amount of factual reality. The twist is that these gods are actually fallen divine angelic beings called “Sons of God” (Bene Elohim) in the Bible. These Sons of God had rebelled against God’s divine council in heaven and came to earth in order to corrupt God’s creation and deceive mankind into worshipping them in place of the real God. While this is not polytheism, neither is it absolute monotheism. It is Biblical theism, which will become clear shortly.
Though I have clearly engaged in imaginative creative license and fantasy in the novel, it is not without Biblical theological foundation. The purpose of this essay is to make an argument that in principle the Bible does in fact suggest a paradigm that reflects something similar to the theological interpretation presented in the novel. For that reason I might call Noah Primeval a theological novel.
Jewish monotheism and Christian Trinitarianism affirm the oneness of God’s being. Christianity contains an additional doctrinal nuance of three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who share the same substance while maintaining separate persons. In this way, the Christian is able to both affirm God’s oneness (unity) and his threeness (diversity). Simply put, God is three persons in one being, not three beings.
Jews, Muslims and atheists who seem to assume that a monotheistic worldview cannot provide for diversity within the divine realm have often accused Christians of being polytheists. I call this Jewish/Muslim viewpoint, “absolute monotheism” as opposed to Biblical theism. What would shock most
readers of the Bible is that the same Old Testament quoted by the Shema about God being “one,” also describes a cosmic worldview that includes a hierarchy in heaven of divine beings, a kind of governmental bureaucracy of operations that counsels with God, and carries out his decrees in heaven and earth. Biblical scholars refer to this hierarchy as the divine council, or divine assembly and it consists of beings that are referred to in the Bible as gods.
Before examining the texts about the divine council it is important to understand that the English word “God,” can be misleading in Biblical interpretation. The most common Hebrew word translated in English as “God” in the Bible is Elohim. But God has many names in the text and each of them is used to describe different aspects of his person. El, often refers to God’s powerful preeminence; El Elyon (God Most High) indicates God as possessor of heaven and earth; Adonai means God as lord or master; and Yahweh is the covenantal name for the God of Israel as distinguished from any other deity. Elohim, though it is the most common Hebrew word for God in the Old Testament, was also a word that was used of angels (Psa. 8:5; Heb. 2:7), gods or idols of pagan nations (Psa. 138:1), supernatural beings of the divine council (Psa. 82:6), departed spirits of humans (1Sam. 28:13), and demons (Deut. 32:17).[1] Scholar Michael S. Heiser has pointed out that the Hebrew word Elohim was more of a reference to a plane of existence than to a substance of being. In this way, Yahweh was Elohim, but no other elohim was Yahweh. Yahweh is incomparably THE Elohim of elohim (Deut. 10:17).[2]
Of Gods and Elohim
A common understanding of absolute monotheism is that when the Bible refers to other gods it does not mean that the gods are real beings but merely beliefs in real beings that do not exist. For instance, when Deuteronomy 32:43 proclaims “rejoice with him, O heavens, bow down to him, all gods,” this is a poetic way of saying “what you believe are gods are not gods at all because Yahweh is God.” What seems to support this interpretation is the fact that a few verses before this, (v. 39) God says, “See now, that I, even I am he, and there is no god [elohim] beside me.” Does this not clearly indicate that God is the only god [elohim] that really exists out of all the “gods” [elohim] that others believe in?
Not in its Biblical context it doesn’t.
When the text is examined in its full context of the chapter and rest of the Bible we discover a very different notion about God and gods. The phrase “I am, and there is none beside me” was an ancient Biblical slogan of incomparability of sovereignty, not exclusivity of existence. It was a way of saying that a certain authority was the most powerful compared to all other authorities. It did not mean that there were no other authorities that existed. We see this sloganeering in two distinct passages, one of the ruling power of Babylon claiming proudly in her heart, “I am, and there is no one beside me” (Isa. 47:8) and the other of the city of Nineveh boasting in her heart, “I am, and there is no one else” (Zeph. 2:15). The powers of Babylon and Nineveh are obviously not saying that there are no other powers or cities that exist beside them, because they had to conquer other cities and rule over them. In the same way, Yahweh uses that colloquial phrase, not to deny the existence of other gods, but to express his incomparable sovereignty over them.[3]
In concert with this phrase is the key reference to gods early in Deuteronomy 32. Israel is chastised for falling away from Yahweh after he gave Israel the Promised Land: “They sacrificed to demons not God, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently, whom your fathers had never dreaded” (Deut. 32:17). In this important text we learn that the idols or gods of the other nations that Israel worshipped were real beings that existed called “demons.” At the same time, they are called, “gods” and “not God,” which indicates that they exist as real beings, but are not THE God of Israel.
Psalm 106 repeats this same exact theme of Israel worshipping the gods of other nations and making sacrifices to those gods that were in fact demons.
Psa. 106:34-37
They did not destroy the peoples, as the LORD commanded them, but they mixed with the nations and learned to do as they did.
They served their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons.
One rendering of the Septuagint (LXX) version of Psalm 95:5-6 reaffirms this reality of national gods being demons whose deity was less than the Creator, “For great is the Lord, and praiseworthy exceedingly. More awesome he is than all the gods. For all the gods of the nations are demons, but the Lord made the heavens.”[4] Another LXX verse, Isa. 65:11, speaks of Israel’s idolatry: “But ye are they that have left me, and forget my holy mountain, and prepare a table for [a demon], and fill up the drink-offering to Fortune [a foreign goddess].[5]
The non-canonical book of 1 Enoch, upon which some of Noah Primeval is based, affirms this very notion of gods as demons, the fallen angels of Genesis 6: “The angels which have united themselves with women. They have defiled the people and will lead them into error so that they will offer sacrifices to the demons as unto gods.”[6]
The New Testament carries over this idea of demonic reality of beings behind the idols that pagans offered sacrifices to and worshipped: “No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons (1Cor. 10:20).” In Revelation 9:20, the Apostle John defines the worship of gold and silver idols as being the worship of demons. The physical objects were certainly without deity as they could not “see or hear or walk,” but the gods behind those objects were real beings with evil intent.
Returning to Deuteronomy 32 and going back a few more verses in context, we read of a reality-changing incident that occurred at Babel:
Deut. 32:8-9
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.
The reference to the creation of nations through the division of mankind and fixing of the borders of nations is clearly a reference to the event of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 and the dispersion of the peoples into the 70 nations listed in Genesis 10.
But then there is a strange reference to those nations being “fixed” according to the number of the sons of God.[7] We’ll explain in a moment that those sons of God are from the assembly of the divine council of God. But after that the text says that God saved Jacob (God’s own people) for his “allotment.” Even though Jacob was not born until long after the Babel incident, this is an anachronistic way of referring to what would become God’s people, because right after Babel, we read about God’s calling of Abraham who was the grandfather of Jacob (Isa. 41:8; Rom. 11:26). So God allots nations and their geographic territory to these sons of God to rule over, but he allots the people of Jacob to himself, along with their geographical territory of Canaan (Gen. 17:8).
The idea of Yahweh “allotting” geographical territories to these sons of God who really existed and were worshipped as gods (idols) shows up again in several places in Deuteronomy:
Deut. 4:19-20
And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.
Deut. 29:26
They went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods whom they have not known and whom He had not allotted to them.
“Host of heaven” was a term that referred to astronomical bodies that were also considered to be gods or members of the divine council.[8] The Encyclopedia Judaica notes that, “in many cultures the sky, the sun, the moon, and the known planets were conceived as personal gods. These gods were responsible for all or some aspects of existence. Prayers were addressed to them, offerings were made to them, and their opinions on important matters were sought through divination.”[9]
But
it was not merely the pagans who made this connection of heavenly physical bodies with heavenly spiritual powers. The Old Testament itself equates the sun, moon, and stars with the angelic “sons of God” who surround God’s throne, calling them both the “host of heaven” (Deut. 4:19; 32:8-9).[10] Jewish commentator Jeffrey Tigay writes, “[These passages] seem to reflect a Biblical view that… as punishment for man’s repeated spurning of His authority in primordial times (Gen. 3-11), God deprived mankind at large of true knowledge of Himself and ordained that it should worship idols and subordinate celestial beings.”[11]
There is more than just a symbolic connection between the physical heavens and the spiritual heavens in the Bible. In some passages, the stars of heaven are linked interchangeably with angelic heavenly beings, also referred to as “holy ones” or “sons of God” (Psa. 89:5-7; Job 1:6)[12].
Daniel 10:10-18 speaks of these divine “host of heaven” allotted with authority over pagan nations as spiritual “princes” battling with the archangels Gabriel and Michael.
Some Second Temple non-canonical Jewish texts illustrate an ancient tradition of understanding this interpretation of the gods of the nations as real spirit beings that rule over those nations:
Jubilees 15:31-32
(There are) many nations and many people, and they all belong to him, but over all of them he caused spirits to rule so that they might lead them astray from following him. But over Israel he did not cause any angel or spirit to rule because he alone is their ruler and he will protect them.
Targum Jonathan, Deuteronomy 32, Section LIII[13]
When the Most High made allotment of the world unto the nations which proceeded from the sons of Noach [Noah], in the separation of the writings and languages of the children of men at the time of the division, He cast the lot among the seventy angels, the princes of the nations with whom is the revelation to oversee the city.
