Abraham Allegiant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 4) (32 page)

This was all very odd to Abram and Sarai, but then, El Shaddai was fond of doing odd things, so they just dropped the subject.

Abram thought that this was the sign of a long lasting regret for ever having listened to his wife and sleeping with Hagar.

And then he noticed Hagar was looking
real good again.

Both of them were looking real good.

One day, Sarai was dusting out the tent, when Abram came running in out of breath and rambling on like a madman.

“Where is a flint knife? Do we have a flint knife?”

“In the kitchen. What is wrong?” she asked after him.

Abram then let loose an uninterrupted stream as he raced around looking for the blade. “El Shaddai appeared to me again, and he told me to change my name to Abraham because he was making me a father of many nations, and that he was establishing his covenant with me and my seed after me throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, and that he was giving my seed the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and then he said to change your name to Sarah, and that he would bless you with a son, that kings would come from you!”

“Slow down, Abram!” she said.

“Abraham,” he corrected her. “And El Shaddai said your new name is Sarah.”

Sarai sighed. “Okay, master Abraham. We have been through all this before. He has told you nothing new.”

“He gave us new covenant names.”

“But did he give you any new information?”

“He said Ishmael would be a great nation, but that his covenant would be with Isaac.”

“Who’s Isaac?”

“That is going to be our son. He told me to name him Isaac. You are going to bear him next year.”

Sarah stood dead still. Isaac? She was going to have a child named Isaac? Next year?

She almost fainted. She held herself together.

“Where is that confounded flint knife?” he yelled impatiently.

She reached in a drawer and pulled out the flint knife and handed it to him. “I guess it was not jumping out at you. What on earth do you want a flint knife so badly for?”

“Because El Shaddai told me to seal our covenant with circumcision. I have to circumcise every male in the household, as a sign of the everlasting covenant with El Shaddai.”

Sarah was familiar with the procedure from their time in Egypt where some of the Egyptians did it for ritual purposes. It was a bloody ritual that entailed the removal of the fleshy foreskin sheath that covered the head of the male member. Done on infants it was virtually indistinguishable from any other pain an infant experiences in its newborn life and it healed quickly. But for teenagers and adults, it was a very different and very painful matter.

Suddenly, Hagar was now in the tent listening to their exchange. “Ishmael too?” she asked.

“Every male — son, servant, and soldier.”

Hagar fainted and fell to the ground. Sarah went to help her.

It was the heat of the day. The camp of Abraham was still, but filled with the quiet moanings and groanings of male children and adults tending the pain in their groins after having their foreskins removed by the flint knife of Abraham.

Abraham himself sat in the door of his tent. If he did not move much, the pain was less. He was turning his new name over and over to himself,
Abraham. Abraham of Mamre
.

And he was thinking about the meaning of circumcision, how it was a symbol of purification of the male member, through which the chosen seedline would come. It was part of his promise to El Shaddai that he and his offspring would not intermarry with the Canaanites of the land. They were to remain pure and untainted by the demonic religion and culture that enveloped these pagans.

He moved and groaned. “Sarah, would you please fetch me some water?”

She was already there with a goatskin for him. She whispered into his ear, “You men are so weak. Circumcision is nothing compared to childbirth.”

“Nothing? This is worse than childbirth!” he yelped.

Hagar was there cleaning up. She burst out laughing. It was one of those moments where she could not stop. She dropped her broom and was laughing so hard, she had to gulp to get breaths.

“What is so funny?” complained Abraham.

“I am sorry, my lord,” said Hagar between giggles. “It is just that you got a little cut across your precious little penis.” She looked at Sarah, and the both of them belted out laughing.

“Why is that so funny!” he bellowed. “Do you have any idea what it is like to have your privates cut?”

Hagar then barely got it out, “Yes, they have to do it to help get the baby out when born. But do you know what it is like to crap a watermelon?”

“Ohhhh! That is vulgar,” said Abraham.

“I told her she could say it,” said Sarah.

“Forgive me, my lord,” said Hagar, “but that is what childbirth feels like.”

Abraham grumbled and turned back around to peer out the tent entrance. Sarah came up behind him and whispered to him, “All my empathy goes out to you and your pain, my lord and husband. Do you want me to kiss your boo boo?”

He winced just thinking of the pain, “Owwwww! No! Get away!”

Sarah went to work with Hagar. “Never heard him turn away that offer before, did you?” They giggled.

“Heartless women,” he muttered to himself.

And then his attention was taken by the appearance of three men standing out by the Diviner’s Oak a short distance away.

He knew exactly who they were.

He struggled off his chair to go meet them.

He limped, groaning with each step as he made his way to the large oak tree. Sarah and Hagar watched him curiously, wondering if the three men would come and introduce themselves.

When he got to the oak, he recognized all three of his visitors. One was El Shaddai, the Angel of Yahweh, the second was Mikael, and the third was the huge quiet giant one he had met many years earlier at the fall of the Tower of Babel: The Destroyer.

The monstrous angel’s presence brought chills down Abraham’s spine. This was the one who brought mass destruction and death to a population. What was he doing here?

Abraham bowed to the ground, grunting with pain.

El Shaddai chuckled. “I see you have responded with rapid obedience regarding our covenant sign and seal.”

“Yes, my Lord and God. I just hope recovery is as quick.”

El Shaddai looked at Mikael and said, “Now
that
is faith.”

Mikael was a bit playful, “How is that Hagar situation working out for you, Abraham?”

“Please, do not ask,” said Abraham. “I have reaped what I have sown. And I will never second guess my Lord again.”

El Shaddai quipped back to Mikael, “I ask for faith, not perfection.”

Of course, it was all in good-natured fun. Mikael would not question El Shaddai, but he liked to tease him about his odd choices of weak or flawed heroes for his seedline.

El Shaddai concluded with lightheartedness, “I think Mikael is spending too much time around Uriel. He is picking up his biting wit.”

Mikael smiled.

The Destroyer did not. The Destroyer never smiled. He only sat and watched silently.

They helped Abraham up and he said, “If I have found favor in your sight, please do not pass me by. Allow me to wash your feet and prepare a meal for you, and after that, you can pass on.”

El Shaddai said, “Go, do as you have said. But you do not have to run.”

Abraham smiled and wagged his finger. He hobbled his way back to the tent, yelling ahead of him, “Sarah! We need some bread cakes and milk! And get a calf from the herd! Hospitality! Hospitality for our guests!”

Abraham brought the meal that Sarah prepared with Hagar’s help and stood with the visitors as they ate.

When they finished, they took a stroll with him back to the tent.

“Where is Sarah your wife?” asked El Shaddai.

“She is in the tent,” said Abraham.

Sarah was indeed in the tent, hiding behind the flap listening to every word the men spoke. She knew Abraham would probably only remember half of what they said, so it was her duty to listen in and get the full details.

El Shaddai said to Abraham, “I will return to you about this time next year and Sarah shall have a son.”

Sarah laughed to herself.
Yeah, right. I am eighty-nine years old, a generation past menopause. We are a couple of worn out old goatskins.

Suddenly, El Shaddai said, “Why did Sarah just laugh and tell herself that you are just a couple of old goatskins?”

Abraham’s eyes went wide.

From behind the tent flap, Sarah’s little voice peeped up, “I did not laugh.”

“Oh, but you did,” said El Shaddai with a wink at Abraham. “Is anything too hard for El Shaddai? Come out here, my precious Sarah.”

Sarah slowly revealed herself like a child caught with her hand in the honey jar.

El Shaddai was smiling at her.

“I did not laugh,” she said.

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I did not.”

“Did.”

“Did not.”

“Sarah,” said El Shaddai, now sternly.

“Okay, I am sorry,” she said, and bowed.

El Shaddai laughed. “I will return to you this time next year, and you shall have a son.”

“Thank you, my Lord. It has been a long wait.”

“Sarah!” scolded Abraham.

“No, it is all right,” said El Shaddai. “You are right. It has been a long wait. I have not given you much to hold on to. And do you know why I waited so long?”

Sarah thought about it. She did not want to be irreverent or flip. But she could only think of one thing: “So it would be impossible?”

“Because I really like to hear you laugh,” he replied and turned to leave with his two companions.

Sarah stood there with wonder.

And then, she laughed, but this time, with joy, and went back into the tent.

Abraham accompanied the three visitors through his land up to the hilltop overlooking the valley.

El Shaddai stopped with Abraham as the two other angels continued onward to the east.

“Where are they going?” asked Abraham.

“I have thought to myself whether I should tell you or not,” said El Shaddai. “The cities of the plain.”

“Sodom,” said Abraham, thinking of his nephew Lot. With the Destroyer going there, he knew it was serious. He knew Lot would not have a chance of surviving such a weapon of mass destruction.

El Shaddai said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave.”

“Is not this entire land full of such evil?” asked Abraham. “What makes Sodom and Gomorrah any different?”

“It is the source of the river, the hive of the hornets, the den of lions. Watchers are engaging in atrocities there that I sent the Deluge to stop. I am going down to see whether they have done according to the outcry that has come to me.”

“Would you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” challenged Abraham. “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city? Would you not spare the city for those fifty righteous, or would you kill them all? I cannot imagine you putting to death the righteous along with the wicked as if they deserved the same judgment. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”

El Shaddai continued to stare out at the two departing angels, now down in the valley on their journey. “If I find fifty righteous in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

The angels were crossing the plain and getting smaller in the distance.

Abraham broke the silence again, “My lord, I am but dust and ashes speaking to the very Creator of the heavens and earth.”

“Say it, Abraham,” said El Shaddai.

“Okay, what if there are only forty five righteous people in the city? Would you destroy the whole city for lack of five?”

El Shaddai knew what Abraham was thinking. “I will not destroy Sodom if I find forty-five there. I will not destroy it if I find forty, or thirty, or even twenty righteous there.”

Abraham winced a bit and said like a humble sheep, “Lord, please do not get angry, but…”

“For the sake of ten righteous, I will not destroy the city.” El Shaddai had now grown distant in his look.

And with that, El Shaddai went walking off in a northerly direction away from Abraham and the other two angels who were already on their distant way to the southeast.

Ba’al led Ashtart down the underground tunnel in a dog collar. It had been thirteen years since the battle of nine kings where Marduk had defeated Ashtart and became Ba’al, the king of the gods of Canaan. Ashtart’s plan had been set back generations with the devastation of her giant progeny throughout the land by Chedorlaomer’s forces. But with the addition of Ba’al as the Most High God of Canaan, the two of them together could do what she could not do alone. Ashtart had revitalized the original program of miscegenation of the Watchers. The rest of the pantheon of gods were fearful of the consequences of such a pursuit, since El Shaddai had already flooded the earth the first time such a course of action had been undertaken. But with the two most powerful divinities united, the pantheon could do little but sit back and see what happened.

Ba’al and Ashtart entered a special caged room they called “the pit,” where they had been pushing the envelope of their human experimentation.

“How is our little Blob?” said Ashtart. She grabbed a bucket of slop feed and threw it onto a bizarre naked monstrosity that filled the cage floor before them. The sounds of one hundred different human beings fused together into a “blob” of human flesh filled the chamber. They had been surgically and magically amalgamated into one large biomass of humanity, a human unity of oneness with a hundred different mouths, genitals, and anuses.

The nearest of the humans tried to lick the slop up to fill their grumbling bellies. Others cried out in misery.

“Oh, keep your yaps shut!” yelled Ashtart. “You should learn to share more anyway! You are all part of the whole, so learn to suppress your selfish individualism!”

It was a physical incarnation of their pursuit to eradicate distinctions in the created order. They had intermingled kinds such as human and divine, human and animal, male and female, and other chimerical hybrids. But this was the attempt to create a oneness of human beings that would elevate the collective above the individual. As individuals, they all pursued self-interest, which led to independent thinking and freedom of thought and division. But this would not do for a kingdom that sought to control the masses through dependency.

As an inseparable part of the collective, if one of them died, then that rotting corpse affected all those around them. This responsibility for one another ensured that everyone worked to keep the collective alive or suffer their own ultimate demise.

As a mass of fused beings, they had to help feed each other, keep each other healthy, clean each other’s defecation, or they would all get diseased and die. No room for selfish individuals in this mass of flesh and bone, in this blob of humanity.

But Ashtart was getting tired of this pet. She wanted more. She wanted to explore the limits of occultic possibilities. To her, there were no limits to the science of experimentation. If it could be done, it ought to be done. Humanity was a sacred shibboleth to be violated and the natural order, a creation of El Shaddai to be corrupted. She had been working on occultic spells that might make his Blob come alive as one giant creature of obedience to her, if all their minds could be melted into one mind, that mind could move with one accord as one creature. And that creature would do the bidding of Ashtart as her meat puppet.

She thought she had finally found the spell that would transform the blob into that solitary creature, but had not had the opportunity to try it out yet because she was beholden to Ba’al’s whims, both sexual and martial.

Ba’al was more interested in building his kingdom of power in Canaan. They were populating the land with the Nephilim seed through their breeding of giants having sent them out to start new clans throughout the land. The other gods of Canaan; Molech, Dagon, Asherah, and the others were helping to secure the region with varieties of cult practices to ensure that the god of this land would not be El Shaddai, but the Serpent. The five cities of the plain, headed by Sodom and Gomorrah, had been a dream come true for their scheme.

But it had been too excessive. Ashtart and Ba’al had become addicted to the forbidden union with the daughters of men. They had been warned by Mastema himself that the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah had reached heaven. Ba’al and Ashtart were just arrogant enough to count on the fact that El Shaddai would never flood the earth again. But a flood was not the only means of cleansing corruption.

Lot had eaten lunch with his family and was preparing to return to the gate for more adjudication. In fact, he could not wait to get away. His family had become intolerable for him. He had lost control of his headship years ago. The city was a hive of centralized thought that had much more control over its citizens than did individual families. His twin daughters were educated by the government of the city in order to ensure a unified way of thinking. They were but fourteen years old, and were convinced that the world revolved around their greatness. They were called “Ba’al Youth,” as were all children of the city. They had become so thoroughly indoctrinated in the religion of Ba’al and Ashtart that they would even inform on their own parents if they expressed thoughts that went against the state or the gods. Lot cringed every time he heard them singing their songs of indoctrination around the house about Ba’al’s new world.
He is gonna change it, rearrange it. We are gonna change the world.
Lot had lost control of them long ago. They had become little monsters out of his control.

And his two little monsters had been betrothed to young men of the city by the Ministry of Love, a government department that was responsible for taking over the matchmaking of marriages in order to ensure the continuity of the city-state. Though marriage had been spurned, even castigated, procreation was still necessary or the society would die out. Thus the Ministry of Love required all youth to engage in breeding by issuing “propagation licenses” for a period of time in order to maintain population replenishment. Of course, this was not allowed to interfere with their cult of free love with any and all beings, human, animal, or god.

Lot’s wife, Ado, did not make life any easier for him. She had been an orphan of Sodom, so from birth had been groomed to be a dependent slave upon the “good welfare” of the city. She let the children rule their lives. She let the city define her. Sodom was her true home, and the government, her true family. She had submerged her identity into the whole and found her identity as a child of Sodom.

Lot had been emasculated, as had all men of the Cities of Love. Patriarchy or male headship in the family had been stamped out long ago by reducing men to workers of the collective without individual initiative. The collective of mediocrity suppressed leaders in order to keep others from looking bad. Everyone was equal, so no one was exceptional — and therefore everyone was manageable. When the state controls the family, it becomes the true god of the people, and only one god may rule at the top: Ba’al.

Lot trudged his way to the gates of the city. He had a deadness in his eyes. He had given up. He felt helpless, a victim without the
ability to make a difference. So he survived. He became a cog in the wheel of the machine of madness. He became a bureaucrat.

He made it through another mindless day with barely a memory of what he had said or done, and now, he was going to go drinking. He wanted his family to be asleep when he arrived home so he could avoid the nagging of his wife and the selfish demands of his daughters. He just wanted to sleep. He wished he could sleep the rest of his life.

But as he was preparing to leave the gates, he noticed something that woke him from his slumber. Two visitors approached the city entrance. They did not have beasts of burden, and appeared to be all alone. One was huge and both walked with a confidence he had not seen in a long while.

And when they approached him, he knew exactly who they were: Angels. They stepped up to him and he bowed low to the ground and said, “Please, turn aside to your humble servant’s house and wash your feet, and you may rise early and be on your way out of Sodom.”

Mikael said, “We will spend the night in the town square.”

Lot’s blood ran cold.

“Trust me, please, dear sir. You do not want to do that. Sodom is not a place of hospitality for strangers — or angels.”

Mikael raised his brow in curiosity. This Lot was quite observant.

The fact was that Sodom’s inhabitants had become so experienced in copulation with strange flesh, that they could smell an angel a mile away, and some had already done so in the gate. Lot looked around nervously as some of the more surly elements began to congregate nearby, observing the strangers’ interaction with Lot.

Lot did not bother to tell his visitors that in the town square were rape chairs where the citizens would take visitors, strangers, and other unwary traveling merchants, to gang rape them before
sending them on their way. Their depravity had reached such depths of obscenity that normal sexuality was simply not arousing to these foul brutes. They had become like unthinking animals, creatures of malevolent instinct born to be caught and destroyed, waterless clouds driven by a storm. They kept seeking deeper and deeper thrills of the forbidden. And the ultimate forbidden experience of lustful indulgence was the pursuit of unnatural flesh, the sexual violation of an angel.

The gathering men were watching the large angel with particular desire. Yes, he would be a more difficult catch, but it made the trophy that much more thrilling and titillating to their lusts.

“Please, please,” said Lot to the visitors. “Come with me now. It is already getting dark, and this is no place to be after dark.”

Mikael said, “Okay. Lead the way elder Lot.”

Lot look surprised at him. “How did you know my name?”

Mikael said, “We
are
angels after all.”

Lot shrugged and led them quickly to his home in the heart of the city.