by Brian Godawa
Job 9:13
God will not turn back his anger;
beneath him bowed the helpers of Rahab.
Psalm 89:10
You crushed Rahab like a carcass; you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm.
Behemoth
Speaking of Rahab’s monstrous “helpers” of chaos, we come to Behemoth, another creature who finds his way into Enoch Primordial and Noah Primeval. The one place in Scripture where this huge beast shows up is in God’s discourse with Job about God’s unapproachable incomparable powers of creation:
Job 40:15–24
“Behold, Behemoth,
which I made as I made you;
he eats grass like an ox.
Behold, his strength in his loins,
and his power in the muscles of his belly.
He makes his tail stiff like a cedar;
the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
His bones are tubes of bronze,
his limbs like bars of iron.
“He is the first of the works of God;
let him who made him bring near his sword!
For the mountains yield food for him
where all the wild beasts play.
Under the lotus plants he lies,
in the shelter of the reeds and in the marsh.
For his shade the lotus trees cover him;
the willows of the brook surround him.
Behold, if the river is turbulent he is not frightened;
he is confident though Jordan rushes against his mouth.
Can one take him by his eyes,
or pierce his nose with a snare?
The most common interpretations of the identity of this monster by Biblical scholars is a hippopotamus, a crocodile, or a water buffalo. Young earth creationists argue that it is a sauropod dinosaur.[53] All of these seek to understand the creature as a real beast that existed in Bible times. Ancient Near Eastern scholar John Day dismisses these naturalistic interpretations in favor of a mythological picture of a chaos monster. There is no paleontological evidence of dinosaurs coexisting with humans. Hippopotamuses and water buffalos do not have strong bones, sinewy muscles, or tails like a cedar. Crocodiles are carnivores and do not eat grass.[54] But more importantly, unlike Behemoth, all of these animals are easily caught by man in contrast with Job’s emphasis that only God can do so. And lastly, none of them hold pride of status as “the first of the works of God.”[55]
Day argues that Behemoth is a mythological chaos monster that represents the Jewish demonization of pagan deities and symbolizes the subjugation of creation by God. He points out that Behemoth in this Job passage is coupled with the mythical chaos monster Leviathan in the verses following Behemoth (Job 41).
Later Jewish texts also understood Behemoth to be coupled with Leviathan as chaos monsters of creation with eschatological references to future judgment:
1 Enoch 60:7-8, 24
On that day, two monsters will be parted—one monster, a female named Leviathan, in order to dwell in the abyss of the ocean over the fountains of water; and (the other), a male called Behemoth, which holds his chest in an invisible desert whose name is Dundayin, east of the garden of Eden...“These two monsters are prepared for the great day of the Lord (when) they shall turn into food.[56]
God is using these symbols of creative power over Chaos to close the mouth of Job’s complaints. Leviathan and Behemoth were “the first of the works of God” (40:19) and “the king over all the sons of pride” (41:34) because “the powers of chaos were primeval in origin.”[57] But fear not, God created them, God subjugated them, and God will turn them into a feast at the end of time.
Day then shows where this coupling of Leviathan and Behemoth has its origin, in two Canaanite texts of Ugarit where the goddess Anat is described as defeating Leviathan, “the dragon,” “the crooked serpent, the tyrant with seven heads,” and “El’s calf Atik” also called Ars (the ox-like Behemoth of Job 40:15).[58] Kenneth Whitney shows an established 2nd Temple Rabbinic tradition of Leviathan and Behemoth as companions of destruction in this same manner, thus the bovine nature of the amphibious creature in the Chronicles of the Nephilim.[59]
Day then concludes, “The reason for the inclusion of the sections on Behemoth and Leviathan in Job 40-1 is to drive home the point that, since Job is unable to overcome them, how much less can he hope to overcome in argument the God who defeated them.”[60]
In Enoch Primordial, I took liberties to alter this monster’s description somewhat in order to make him more ferociously carnivorous, but he remains a monster of chaos that is held at bay by the mountainous gates of a hidden valley of God’s creation.
Mushussu
Another mythological creature that shows up in Enoch Primordial is the mushussu chimera that is well known from its tiled depiction on the Babylonian Ishtar Gate and many other seals discovered throughout Mesopotamia. It was a lion’s body with a dragon’s head, taloned back feet, and a tail that was a snake.
Robert Koldeway, an amateur archeologist of the 19th century, wrote a book about the Gate of Ishtar and noted that this mythical creature, called a sirrush at the time, was one of the few animals that were depicted remarkably consistent in Babylonian art over time. He thought that this might be because they had actual specimens of them. His thoughts were that they were dinosaurs misinterpreted as dragons. Ancient astronaut authors like Joseph Farrell suggest they were examples of actual genetic splicing by extraterrestrial aliens.[61] I used it as the first hint of the dark arts that the Watchers were just beginning to perfect in their own miscegenation project. We would see their advancements in Noah Primeval, but it represented the notion of the violation of the natural order of separation that seemed to be an important element of God’s creation.
Scholar Theodore Lewis explains regarding the mushussu genetic combination of lion and dragon, “The common denominator for associating these two creatures seems to be that they could both inspire paralyzing, heart-stopping fear when encountered.”[62] He concludes that this is the creature used as a metaphor for the Pharaoh who had oppressed Judah rather than the “crocodile of outdated scholarship.”[63] Yahweh was going to capture and cast that beast of a ruler onto the ground for the nations to gorge on its flesh.
Ezekiel 32:2
You are like a lion among the nations, You are like a dragon in the seas.
The literary pairing of a lion and serpent also occurs in Psalm 91:13; Isaiah 30:6; and Amos 5:19 and may come from the cultural awareness of this mythopoeic creature the mushussu.
Cherubim
Some of the critical characters that come to play in the narratives of Noah Primeval and Enoch Primordial are the Cherubim. The Mesopotamian version of this creature is the aladlammu, the bull-man and lion-man who guarded the thrones of Anu and Inanna. These large sphinx-like monsters were made famous by their presence on the huge stone Ishtar Gate of Babylon and other statues in museums around the world. But they are also ubiquitous in artifacts all around the ancient Near East, from Phoenicia to Syria to Egypt.[64] They were chimeras, hybrid creatures with the body of a lion or bull, the head of a man, and the wings of an eagle, and they protected the thrones of royalty and divinity throughout the Ancient Near East.[65]
It is not surprising then, to discover that they were also the creatures that guarded the throne of Yahweh, a throne that some explain was a commonplace Mesopotamian motif of a divine “throne chariot.”[66]
Psalm 80:1
You who are enthroned upon the cherubim.
Psalm 99:1
The Lord reigns; let the peoples tremble!
He sits enthroned upon the cherubim!
Psalm 18:10
He rode on a cherub and flew;
he came swiftly on the wings of the wind.
When Ezekiel has his vision of the cherubim in chapters 1 and 10 as “living creatures,” their usual sphinx-like morphology is expanded into a multiplicity of four wings, and four faces of human, lion, eagle and ox. But its e
ssential nature remains the same.
The cherubim guarding the ark of the covenant with their outspread wings was crafted by pagan Phoenician artistry for Solomon (1Kings 8:6-7), and an ivory artifact discovered in Megiddo, Israel shows an Israelite king, possibly Solomon, seated on his throne guarded by a lion-bodied, eagle-winged, human-headed sphinx cherubim.[67]
In contrast with this imaginative art, the living cherubim guarding the way to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden were no sedentary statues (Gen 3:24), but they were the sphinx-like cherubim.
Genesis 3:24 says that these cherubim guard the Tree of Life with “the flame of the whirling sword.” Scholar Ronald Hendel has argued that “the ‘flame’ is an animate divine being, a member of Yahweh’s divine host, similar in status to the cherubim; the ‘whirling sword’ is its appropriate weapon, ever-moving, like the flame itself.”[68]
Scholar P.D. Miller appeals to passages such as Psalm 104:4 where “fire and flame” are described as “Yahweh’s ministers” to conclude a convergence of imagery with ancient Ugaritic texts that describe “fire and flame” as armed deities with flashing swords. He writes that “the cherubim and the flaming sword are probably to be recognized as a reflection of the Canaanite fiery messengers.”[69] Thus the Biblically strange, yet strangely Biblical presence in Enoch Primordial of the Cherubim and their divine fiery beings beside them brandishing whirling swords of flashing lightning.
Whence all this commonality between pagan and Hebrew cosmology? Did the Biblical writers draw from their ancient Near Eastern neighbors for their concepts of the cherubim or were pagan depictions distorted memories of the “myth that was true”?
Archaeologist David Rohl argues that the cherubim may have been a mythological spiritualization of a very human tribe of sentinels called the Kheruba who guarded the Edenic paradise.[70] I decided to incorporate all these interpretations into Enoch Primordial. How subversive of me.
Seraphim
The prophet Isaiah had an exalted vision of the Lord sitting on his heavenly throne high and lifted up with the glorious train of his robe filling the temple. But there were also some other chimeric creatures in his presence:
Isaiah 6:2–7
Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”… Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal.
The meaning of the Hebrew word for seraphim is “fiery serpent.”[71] It was used to describe the fiery serpents in the wilderness whose poisonous burning venom was God’s punishment for Israel’s grumbling and complaining (Num. 21:6). God’s balm of healing forgiveness was obtained by looking to a brass serpent (seraph) image raised on a pole called Nehushtan (Num. 21:8).
But this is not the only use of seraph that sheds light on the meaning of the angelic seraphim. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew Lexicon points out that Isaiah 14:29 and 30:6 refer to a “flying fiery serpent” (seraph) in the wilderness that originated in mythically conceived winged serpent deities.[72] The term is unavoidably serpentine in all its cognates.
Some deny this serpentine essence by pointing out that the Isaianic seraphim are described as having human heads, wings, hands and feet. But Karen Randolph Joines has persuasively argued that the Egyptian winged ureus (upright cobra) that guarded the Pharaoh’s tombs and thrones with its “fiery” venom is demonstrably the equivalent of the Hebrew seraph. Like the seraphim in Isaiah, the ureus was also commonly described as having a human face, wings, hands and feet when it was necessary for it to accomplish tasks like those of Isaiah 6.[73] But it remained a winged serpent.
ANE scholar Michael S. Heiser goes one step further and provisionally considers a literary overlapping of all these elements of fiery serpents, flying, humanoid features, and divinity to be variations of descriptions for the “Watcher paradigm”:
“Seraphim, then, are reptilian/serpentine beings – they are the Watchers (the “watchful ones” who diligently guard God’s throne, which is carried [cf. Ezekiel 1, 10] by the cherubim, who may also serve as guardians). There are “good” serpentine beings (seraphim) who guard God’s throne (so Isaiah 6’s seraphim), and there are fallen, wicked serpentine beings (seraphim) who rebelled against the Most High at various times, and who became the pagan gods of the other nations.”[74]
He supports his view from Isaiah 14:29, a prophecy about Philistia (the city of Goliath and other giants) that references the messianic war of the seed of the serpent (nachash) that brings forth the fruit of the flying fiery serpent (seraph).
Isaiah 14:29
29 Rejoice not, O Philistia… for from the serpent’s [nachash] root will come forth an adder, and its fruit will be a flying fiery serpent [seraph].
Could this be a literary reference to the Watcher paradigm?
A text fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls affirms the ancient Jewish understanding of Watchers having this reptilian presence and ruling over specific peoples:
4QAmram (4Q544) lines 10-14
[I saw Watchers] in my vision, the dream-vision. Two men were fighting over me…I asked them, “Who are you, that you are thus empowered over me?” They answered me, “We have been empowered and rule over mankind,” They said to me, “Which of us do you choose to rule you?” I raised my eyes and looked. One of them was terrifying in his appearance, like a serpent, his cloak many-colored yet very dark… And I looked again and… in his appearance, his visage was like a viper.[75]
Rephaim
The Rephaim that appear in the Chronicles of the Nephilim are based upon Biblical and ancient Near Eastern references to giants or deified kings that ended up in the underworld. A buried library of cuneiform tablets was excavated at Ras Shamra from the ancient city of Ugarit during the years 1940-47. They yielded tablets that have been crucial to understanding the development of Syrian and Canaanite religion. One of the corpus of texts unearthed there was what came to be known as the Rephaim Texts. These texts and others talked about a marzih feast, like that in Enoch Primordial, that involved royalty traveling distances in their chariots to participate in this feast, wherein the “most ancient Rephaim of the netherworld” are summoned to assemble as the “council of the Ditanu, (or Didanu).”[76] Some names of these deified royal ancestors were given as Ulkan, Taruman, Sidan-and-Radan, and Thar, the eternal one.[77] This is where I drew the names for my council of Didanu that meets in Baalbek for a diabolical plan. The names of the infamous Rephaim Thamaq and Yahipan, the Rephaim targets of Methuselah’s revenge in Enoch Primordial, were drawn from these ancient texts as well.[78]
As Ugaritic scholars Levine and Tarragon sum up, “the Rephaim are long departed kings (and heroes) who dwell in the netherworld, which is located deep beneath the mountains of that far-away eastern region where the Ugaritians originated.”[79]
While creative license and speculation drives Enoch Primordial, even the names of the Nephilim brothers, Ohyah and Hahyah, as well as the giant General Mahawai, were taken from the ancient manuscript The Book of Giants that was part of the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran.[80] In these texts the giant brothers are described as the giant offspring of Semjaza, one of the Watchers, and they have dreams of God’s judgment coming upon them in the form of tablets being drowned in water and a garden being uprooted. As in the novel, so they seek out Enoch to explain their dreams and allow them repentance.[81]
The Bible also reinforces this ancient Ugaritic understanding of Rephaim as dead royal or heroic ancestors who reside in the underworld, but with a twist. In Isaiah 14, the prophet pronounces an oracle of judgment upon the king of Babylon whose arrogance leads him to consider himself a god (v. 13-14). Isaiah concludes with an ironic mockery of the Rephaim, these exalted dead kings and heroes, including The Babylonian king in their ultimate impotence.
Isaiah 14:9–11
Sheol beneath is stirred up
to m
eet you when you come;
it rouses the shades (Rephaim) to greet you, all who were leaders of the earth; it raises from their thrones
all who were kings of the nations.
All of them will answer
and say to you:
‘You too have become as weak as we!
You have become like us!’
Your pomp is brought down to Sheol.
To the Hebrew prophet, these proud kings were humiliated in the underworld of Sheol. Their glory became as “shades” in the light of God.[82] Apparently, the prophet transforms ancient Canaanite mythology into a polemical emasculation of pagan pride.[83]
But there is another element that the Biblical text adds to these royal “divinized” Rephaim: Gigantism. The very land of Canaan around Mount Hermon that was called Bashan was described as the “land of the Rephaim” (Deut. 3:13), whose inhabitants were described as tall giants like the Anakim (Deut. 2:11, 20) and were related to Goliath the giant (1Chron. 20:4-8). When Joshua was wiping out the tribes and cities of giants in Canaan, one of the last ones to go was the mighty Og of Bashan, the “last of the Rephaim” (Joshua 12:4) whose bed (or sarcophagus) was thirteen and a half feet long (Deut. 3:11). The reader will learn more about Og’s exploits later in the series The Chronicles of the Nephilim.
The satan
A familiar character that shows up in Enoch Primordial but not in a familiar way is Satan — or rather, the satan. The typical Evangelical mythology surrounding Satan is that he was the highest cherub in God’s heavenly host, a worship leader with the name of Lucifer, who before the Garden of Eden, rebelled by trying to usurp God’s seat of authority in heaven. He wanted to be “like God.” He was then cast out of heaven with a third of the angels and fell to earth, where he tempted Eve in the Garden as a snake, and now he is “Lord of the air” over the earth.
