Caleb Vigilant (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (9 page)

Joshua was prostrate with his face on the ground before the Holy of Holies. Outside the Tent of Meeting, the elders lay on the ground, their clothes torn in anguish, and dust thrown over their heads in despair. The judges and prophets were beside them in the same posture.

Joshua cried out, “Adonai
Yahweh, why? Why have you brought us over the Jordan at all, if you are only going to give us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us? If only we had dwelled beyond the Jordan. Do you not care that all the inhabitants of Canaan will hear of this defeat and will surround us and cut off our name from the face of the earth? Do you not care for the reputation of your own name? Is this not what Moses himself had begged from you?”

Suddenly, the voice of Yahweh broke Joshua out of his weeping. “Get up, Joshua. You sound more like the pathetic Israelites wishing they could go back to Egypt than
their leader Moses in pleading for them.”

Joshua was terrified. He
did not get up.

“Joshua, get up, will you.”

Joshua got up.

“Israel has sinned. They have violated my covenant and taken some of the devoted things of
herem
. They have lied and taken them for their own possession. Therefore the people of Israel have become
herem
, and devoted to destruction. I will be with you no more unless you destroy the devoted things in your midst.”

“Who, my lord and god?” said Joshua. “Who is it who has taken these devoted items?”

• • • • •

Caleb entered Rahab’s tent. She and all her family were bald shaven and in their thirty day period of
lamenting. Her mother and father were there, as well as her sisters and brothers. They had been in bed for a short time already, but few were sleeping. And certainly not Rahab.

When she saw Caleb at the tent entrance, she instantly knew the fate of her betrothed Salmon.

She rose from her bed, approached Caleb and embraced him with trembling.

Then she stepped outside and bowed low to the ground and began to wail. It was the tradition of women’s response to tragedy. She also threw dirt upon her head and tore her bedclothes. But it was her wailing that would be heard throughout the camp,
blending into the wailing of the dozens of other women who had lost their husbands, fathers, and brothers.

Caleb noticed Donatiya, her head also shaven, get out of her bedroll and make her way out to the side of Rahab.

She knelt with her, tore her bedclothes, and threw dirt on herself as well. Donatiya did not fully understand the Israelite ways, but she sought to be beside her mistress.

•
• • • •

The next morning, Joshua had called all Israel to meet
just outside the camp in a large open area.

He
shouted to the masses, “Thus says Yahweh Elohim of Israel! You cannot stand before your enemies unless you rid yourselves of the devoted things in your midst!”

The people murmured with anxiety, not knowing
whom amongst them had done so.

He then proceeded to call before him each tribe by name and drew lots. Yahweh
would show him, by means of the lots, which household, in which clan, in which tribe was the offender.

When he had come to Judah, and the clan of the
Zerahites, the lot fell to Achan, son of Zabdi.

Joshua said, “My son, give glory to Yahweh Elohim and tell me what you have done.”

Achan was a simple man, stout with full beard, and mostly kept to himself. His wife, three sons and two daughters stood behind him trembling with fear.

Achan fell to his knees and spoke with a shaking voice, “I have sinned against Yahweh, Elohim of Israel. I saw some spoils that I coveted, and I took them and hid them in the earth in my tent.”

“What did you take, Achan?”

“A cloak. A beautiful cloak of Shinar, two hundred shekels of silver and a bar of gold. But that is all. I have nothing else. I will return them.”

“There is no need for that,” said Joshua.

A group of men
were sent to his tent to dig them up.

Joshua turned to Cal
eb and said, “Take them to the Valley of Achor, stone the entire family and burn them with all his possessions and animals.”

“But my Commander,” said Achan. “Please have mercy.”

“We are to have no mercy on the
herem
. By disobeying Yahweh’s holy commands, you have made all of Israel
herem
. You have endangered all of Israel by your selfish action.
You
are
herem
. Yahweh has spoken.”

Achan screamed and his family
begged for their lives as they were dragged away.

•
• • • •

Caleb stood before Achan and his family, tied to poles in the Valley of Achor.
Thousands of Israelites came to the stoning. Hundreds participated. It was a gruesome affair. Caleb could barely watch the family crying out, and ultimately dying under the crushing blows of hundreds of stones hitting them all over their bodies. They became bloody pulps surrounded by a pile of rocks.

And then wood
was stacked around their dead bodies to burn them along with all their sheep and oxen.

They were burning the
evil from their midst.

Caleb’s mind wandered to the cloak of Shinar
that Achan had stolen and was one of the causes of this entire tragic scene before him. Shinar was in Mesopotamia, the land of Babel. The cloak had been traded or stolen as war spoils and found its way all this distance to Canaan. Caleb had seen it spread out when the men brought it from Achan’s tent. And it was a truly beautiful cloak.

The image
haunted his mind. It was a colorful tapestry dominated by lapis lazuli blue, like the bricks on the walls of Babylon. It had golden thread interwoven through it with expert craftsmanship. It was a depiction from the scene of the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish. A glorious kingly figure in bright colors, the god Marduk, carried his weapons of bow and mace. He stood on the neck of the fleeing sea dragon of chaos, the goddess Tiamat, ready to cut her in two to create the heavens and the earth.

He
was captivated by its beauty. He had never seen anything so colorful and artistic since he left Egypt so many years ago. Desert living was not conducive to the fragility of beauty.

And yet,
in this somber justice before him, that beauty became hideously ugly. It was like a smooth and graceful serpent that reared its head to bare its fangs and bite. A flood of terror came over him and he understood, like he had never before, the true nature of beauty without holiness.

It w
as the seduction of the gods.

It was the lie of the Garden.

And it was evil. Monstrous evil.

The
meaning of the tragedy before him became clear. The judgment Achan was receiving was not an extreme punishment for a minor misdemeanor. It was not the significance of the criminal act that warranted the consequences. It was the significance of the one against who the act was committed that made it so serious. This puny created man defied the everlasting creator of the heavens and earth, and threatened the lives of thousands of his countrymen, and the existence of his nation.

The
final thought that struck Caleb was that humanity does not consist of isolated autonomous individuals unconnected to others. We are all connected to our communities in inextricable consequences. Our choices and actions affect not only ourselves but also all those around us.

It was time to get back to camp. Joshua had planned
an immediate second attack on Ai.

As it turned out, the city of Bethel must have heard about Israel’s victory over Jericho and had fortified the ruins of Ai with their forces as a buffer from the approaching Israelites.

Joshua had made a mistake he would never make again.
He had let his pride blind him into trusting in his own military strength. This time, he would use his full force. But this time, he would also inquire of Yahweh before moving hastily ahead with his human plans.

H
e called upon the high priest and used the Urim and Thummim to discern Yahweh’s response to his strategy. The unearthly glow of the Lights and Perfections fell upon Joshua’s form like lightning.

Yahweh approved.

In the dark of night, an advance force of thirty units of warriors, several thousand strong, were sent ahead to lie in wait at the rear of the city of Ai in a wooded valley. Another five troop units were sent in between Bethel and Ai in case more forces would arrive from that city.

The morning of the attack,
Othniel led about a thousand warriors out onto the open plain before the elevated city on the hill. It drew the Commander of Ai out from the protection of the ruins. He had a few thousand soldiers and led two thousand of them out onto the field to smite the Israelites.

Seemingly o
verwhelmed, the Israelites retreated and the Bethelites chased after them, followed by the thousand other soldiers from the ruins. They had seen this as the opportunity to end the Israelite invasion of their land with one swift tidal wave.

But it had all been a ruse, because when
Othniel had drawn them far enough away, Joshua signaled from a hilltop with his javelin to the ambush forces behind the city Ai. They entered the city and torched it to the ground.

The flames and smoke ro
se high enough for the Bethelites to see that they had been fooled. But it was too late, for they were already in the steep gorge of a wadi before they realized that Joshua had the rest of his forces waiting there.

Othniel’s forces
turned around, joined by their fellow warriors in wait, and fought the Bethelites. They pushed them back toward the other Israelite forces that had burned the city and were now attacking them from the rear.

The Bethelites were surrounded on both sides by the Israelites and were
crushed by the ambush.

They struck everyone in Ai with the edge of the sword and hung the Commander of Ai on a tree until morning because of Yahweh’s own words that anyone who was hung on a tree was cursed. Joshua took his body from the tree and threw it at the entrance gate of the city, another defilement by not burying the body properly. Then he piled a great heap of stones upon it as a memorial sign of its devoted destruction.

The
Israelites returned to their home base in Gilgal.

The funeral of Salmon ben
Nahshon was a somber affair. Salmon had been a positive beacon of faith in his family, and a faithful warrior of Israel who had fought heroically beside Caleb ben Jephunneh, the Right Hand of Joshua.

He had many mourners for his ceremony in the desert, more than
all the others who had been killed in the fight against Ai. Joshua and Caleb even showed up to pay their respects and honor to this fallen warrior.

Rahab wore sackcloth and covered herself with ashes.
For seven days she mourned. According to custom, Caleb paid some female mourners to accompany her grief with wailing and their own sackcloth.

Because the Israelites were not settled in the land and could not
engage in proper burial, they improvised by digging simple shafts in the ground to bury the individual soldiers near the cities where they died in battle. It was a way to honor them and to plant their hope as a seed of victory in the land. Their deaths were not in vain.

But at this moment, Rahab could not see it that way. It was the seventh day, the end of her grieving process, and she could not but fear what her future would be with Israel, now that her covering was gone. Salmon was her redemption. His marriage to her would
have legitimized her as an Israelite according to their laws. Her days of isolation from the camp would soon be over, but she would no longer have that hope for inclusion. Would she remain forever at the periphery of the very people with whom she had chosen to identify? She had finally found the first real man who would have taken care of her instead of using her, and he too had abandoned her. She had finally found the god she could trust and worship, and he too would keep her at arm’s length like a leper.

It was too much to face.
She began to contemplate her options of running away yet again. It was her way of avoiding the pain of a life of rejection and abuse at the hands of others. She wondered if she should find a sorceress to get rid of the life in her womb through forced miscarriage. She had done it before plenty of times. Why not again to protect herself? It was a battle of confusing voices within her heart and soul.

She decided instead to end it all. She would stop her endless wandering of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. She would stop the pain that she could not seem to escape in every moment of her existence.
Despite all the suffering she had experienced, she had maintained the hope that there was a love that could redeem her, that could set her free. But she now gave up all hope of ever finding it.

She left her small mourning tent and entered her own tent to find her personal dagger within her belongings.

She grabbed it in her fist. She looked at her belly, just barely beginning to show. She had stopped her flow weeks ago. She felt bloated, and was having morning sickness.

She put the point of the dagger to her belly.

She said goodbye to her child within her.

She started to cry.

But she could not do it.

She dropped the knife.

And she left the tent with a new plan.

There was a ridge not far from her location outside the camp, with a deep ravine of about fifty feet that she had often visited to be alone. She would spend hours there looking out onto the Israelite camp below and wondering about this god Yahweh who had changed her life.

When she found herself looking down at the rocks below, she
felt dizzy. Her breathing got shallow. She was going to cast herself to her death, but it was harder than she thought it would be. She had lived with such hunger for life. It was almost impossible to deny that zeal right now.

But she had to. There was no other option left to her.

And then a voice interrupted her thoughts. “Rahab.”

It was such a shock that she slipped a bit on the rocks but caught herself.

Was that the voice of Yahweh?

No, she knew exactly whose voice it was. She turned to face Caleb, standing a mere ten feet away with Donatiya by his side.

“Donatiya saw you leave and led me to find you. Are you praying out here or are you just getting away?”

Of course he meant it innocently as in getting away from everyone to have some time alone. But it had so much more meaning to her right now.

“What do you want, Caleb?” she said. She sounded almost scolding to him.

“I want to talk to you.
”

Donatiya be
gan her descent back to the camp to leave them alone.

He approached her. B
ut she noticed him looking away. It annoyed her.

“Caleb, why
can you not look me in the eye?”

He gestured to
her chest.

She looked down and noticed that one of her breasts had been showing through the torn sackcloth. She had not realized it. She covered herself up.

But the thought had struck her that this man had such integrity. Any other man she had ever known would have stared until she discovered what they were gawking at and covered up. But not Caleb. He treated her with such honor. Honor she did not deserve.

“What do you want to talk about?” she said, softening.

“I am sorry for your loss, Rahab. Salmon was an honorable man and a mighty warrior of Yahweh.”

“Yes. Yes, he was. But not
anymore. And my family must suffer.”

“No,” he said. “You
do not have to suffer.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were going to marry him. You carry his child.”

“Yes. So?”

“Well, in our law, we have what is called ‘levirate marriage.’”

“What is that?”

“When a woman’s husband dies, if she has not borne him children, his next of kin is obligated to marry her so as to provide for her the safety of the tribe, that she would not suffer exclusion from the community.”

“What are you saying?” she asked.

“Salmon has brothers,” he said.

“So you are saying that I could marry one of them because of this ‘levirate’ rule?”

“Yes.”

“But I am already with Salmon’s child.”

“The Law has been interpreted not to include a situation like yours. And the first born would be considered the son of the deceased brother anyway.”

“I
do not like any of his brothers.”

Caleb smiled. “Me neither. And the law is only a provision, not a requirement. The brothers can legally choose not to do so. And that is another complication.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I have spoken with his brothers, all three of them, and…” he paused sadly. “None of them want
s to marry you.”

Her head swirled. She started to consider casting herself to her death right in front of this man mocking her very existence.

“But that is actually good news.” He continued.

“
How can that be ‘good news’?”

“Because that allows anyone within his tribe to step up and take his place.”

“So? His whole tribe is going to reject me and exile me into the desert wilderness?”

“No. That is not what it means.”

“It might just as well,” she said, looking back down the cliff.

Caleb stepped forward closer to her. It was as if he began to understand her true intentions of being here.

“Rahab, his tribe is Judah.”

“So?”

“I am in the tribe of Judah.”

Her entire body flooded with a tingling shock.
Her eyes filled instantly with wetness. She knew what he was going to say, but still it shocked her.

“Marry me, Rahab.
I know I am an old man more than twice your age. But I am one of the mightiest of warriors in Israel. And I will love you. I will take care of you and be a husband to you. I will treat you as the precious treasure that you are. You deserve a lifetime of adoration because you…”

She interrupted him. “No! I
cannot.”

S
he tried to get away from him. To leave his presence that burned in her soul like a bonfire.

He went after her.

“What do you mean, you cannot?” he said. “Am I unsightly?”

“
No!” she yelled.

He grabbed her arm to stop her.

She pulled away and kept going.

“Am I undesirable
to you? Am I too harsh?”

“No, no, no!” She collapsed and wept with deep
sobbing that made Caleb’s heart melt with pain for her.

He held her. “Tell me Rahab. I want to know. I am not afraid. Am I undeserving of you?”

She stopped her sobbing, and looked up into his eyes. He was serious. She could not believe what she was hearing.

“Are
you
undeserving of
me
?” she said with incredulity. “No. A thousand times no.” And she broke into tears again.

She managed to get it out through her sobs. “It
is I who am undeserving of you. I am an abomination.”

He said sternly,
“No, you are not.”

“
You do not know what I have done. You do not know the evil.
”

“Rahab!” He gripped her tight in his hands.

She suddenly felt safe. It was strange to her. Like all her fears melted in his strong grasp of concern.

She looked into his eyes. She could see his heart was torn in two for her.

And finally, she told him.

“
I was born in the caves of Banias at the foot of Mount Hermon
.”

“I am familiar with the area,” he said.

“They are ruled by the goat demons of Azazel. Satyrs who took me when I was but a child and groomed me to be a nymph.”

She looked into his eyes for a sign of rejection that would justify her feelings. But she could see none.

“When I was of age, I was initiated.” She stopped. It was starting to rise up in her again. The pain that she had kept so suppressed. It was all coming back. But she kept on.

“My initiation was to be gang raped by satyrs and patrons of the shrine. One of them was
a giant from the area.”

Caleb’s heart was stabbed with a giant’s dagger.

“
As soon as I was well, I ran away and never went back. But I discovered I was pregnant. I stumbled upon Gilgal Rephaim and I was taken in and cared for. But eventually I had to do something about the fruit of the crime that was growing in my womb. The sorcerers of Gilgal Rephaim gave me herbal potions to drink and I aborted the baby
.”

Caleb would still not show an ounce of rejection in his look.

“When it came out, I saw that it was large and had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. It was a son of Anak.”

Caleb
closed his eyes tight and held her with all his strength. He pulled her away to look at her again.

He said, “Is this why you think you are unworthy? Is this why you
were considering ending your life and your baby’s life?”

So he had figured out why she was there. This man was in tune with her like no one had ever been before.

“How can you marry someone so unclean, so stained by such—evil? Yahweh is a holy god who detests abominations.”

“
Yahweh is a god who atones,” he replied. “Whatever was done to you is not your sin. And whatever you have done can be removed from you as far as the east is from the west. If righteousness were based on our own goodness, none of us would stand. None of us are worthy of his presence. We are all stained by evil. We are made clean by blood atonement.”

She protested, “But I am not
of Abraham’s seed. I was born under the cursed flesh of Edom.”

“
So am I. I was born a Kenizzite, a descendant of Edom as well. But Yahweh accepts those of any nation who turn from their idols to the living God of all flesh. It is faith that Yahweh wants, Rahab, not flesh
.”

A sudden silence penetrated their conversation. Rahab felt as if a great weight had lifted from her soul. The dark cloud that had followed her ever since she became a follower of Yahweh was dissolved in the cleansing of a spring rain.

She smiled and said softly, tenderly, “Yes, I will marry you, Caleb ben Jephunneh.”

He smiled broadly and kissed her.

Her heart came alive. It had taken her by surprise. She had only known Caleb to be prudish and judgmental of her sexuality. Even moments earlier, he had avoided a look at her naked breast. How could this passionate sensual kiss come from such a being?

He released her.
She almost fainted at his gallantry.

“You are surprised?” he said. “
Woman, there is a lot more passion where that came from. I suggest we get married immediately or I might explode.”