The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (57 page)

Seti had
also
symbolically tied this planet to E’Yahavah’s
Curse upon all of Nature—the decay spun out as a judgment against the Basilisk and Atum’s rebellion—disruption of the original created order—death.

Q’Enukki remembered the account from his second voyage through the Ten Heavens
, when his guide had revealed
to him that after E’Yahavah
had cast Shining One
down, the Rebel had briefly nursed his hatred on the planets of Tiamatu and red L’Mekku. From these, he had launched hi
s stealth assault against newly-revealed
Earth. He had descended secretly into the Holy Orchard to become the Basilisk. What was unknown at the time was that the Basilisk was to be the instrument of humanity’s great test.

It was no coincidence that nearly every human civilization to look up at the stars would later associate the red planet with war—the planet of blood. Yet the planet named for L’Mekku the Warlord
represented
a mere pawn of the greater evil
, f
or Tiamatu
was
the instigato
r
.

The planet was dead
—
devoid
of the elements upon which life depended. The banished rebels of the First Insurrection had looked jealously over the small void to newly-flowered Earth. These beings fermented in dregs of ancient bitterness, existing partly in the rapid time flow that had passed outside the event horizon of the Creation Singularity. Only a few short days had passed on Earth during those ages, because it had remained inside the white hole’s horizon through the early part of
the
creation week.

The aging embittered Rebels envied the new life they saw, the culmination of E’Yahavah’s work, the capstone of his favor. Unfathomed rage festered in those who had fallen, only to begin their wait for judgment on the frigid worlds of War and Chaos.

The open gate of man’s willful participation in the Insurrection provided the envious spirits a way to shift their place of confinement to one more suitable to their leader’s designs. The bleak vision of an Earth as cold and barren as the prison world these beings had deserted filled Q’Enukki’s eyes and forced him to turn away.

“Don’t fear,” said Samuille. “E’Yahavah has promised you that Earth shall not become a completely dead world, though it will be close.”

Overwhelmed by the implications of what he saw, Q’Enukki clenched his teeth and screamed
at the
torment
ing vision
of humanity’s long despair. “E’Yahavah could have stopped all this at any time! What could possibly be worth subjecting an entire universe to such
drawn
-
out agony at such an unthinkable cost?”

There! I
ha
ve said it! The thing that has haunted my nightmares ever since I became involved in this business!
For a moment, he feared his outburst would earn him the contempt of his benefactor. Then a warm hand gripped his shoulder and all Q’Enukki could feel as he broke down into convulsive weeping was the Watcher’s empathic sadness.

“
You
are worth it, my friend—you, and
all
others like you.”

“How can that be?”

Samuille answered, “When faced with the choice between
expressing
his love through creation and no expression of love outside his own continuum, E’Yahavah chose to create others with the potential to share his love. Yet love has no meaning without choice. Although the Creator knew his sentient creatures would choose to reject him and bring horrendous consequences upon themselves and their cosmos, he deemed that the greater evil would be for him not to create.”

“How can that be the greater evil? It is not as
if
E’Yahavah
needs
the likes of
us!
We create nothing that does not twist into something hideous!
”

“It is true that
E’Yahavah
does not need. That does not mean he has no love beyond the continuum of
A’Nu
,
El-N’Lil
, and the Word-Speaker.”

“Please explain.”

Samuille spoke gently, “The
E’Yahavah
Eluhar
built into
creation
a mysterious aspect of
their
own nature that my order does not understand completely—the ability to bring good out of evil, in spite of evil’s intent.
E’Yahavah
did not directly create evil, nor was it programmed into sentient creations—
only
created others
could choose it
. But
E’Yahavah
kne
w
the
self-evident
:
that once other beings are created with the capacity of real choice, it is only a matter of time before some of them will make the wrong one and bring devastating consequences into the
entire
created system.
”

Q’Enukki said, “Death and decay.”

“
Yes.
That is why
E’Yahavah
limited the choices of created
ones
and built into the system a restorative program based solely on his own promise
to pay the ultimate price
. I have only limited knowledge
of this program
, but I assure you it exists. You have already
seen
select parts of it.
”

“I do
n
o
t understand.
I do not wish to accuse the Divine Name, but i
f this is so, then isn’t creating
any being with the ability to make real choices effectively the same as creating evil?”

“
Only if
creating
evil is the goal
. A
man may do great good, knowing his good will be taken advantage of by
many
to
do
evil.
Should he therefore do no
good
?
A father provides good gifts for his children, who then may build on that good or use their benefits to evil ends.
Should fathers give nothing to their children?
F
or a creature to choose against the nature of the Great God is for that creature to create evil and to take on
its
nature. It
has
real consequences that eventually reach a point of no return.

“
E’Yahavah cursed the cosmos so that it would fit humanity’s fallen nature for a time. Evil is not the goal
.
Since humanity did not restrain evil when it would have been easier to do so, E’Yahavah’s
wrath falls
so that all whom
he
will recover can be born and restored
in
the
times yet to come
. For the Creator
shall
bring forth good
even
out of th
is
deep
evil humanity has chosen. He will execute his program
and
redeem some of his creation.”

“Which part?” Q’Enukki lamented. “They are altogether like
me
—futile and empty!”

Samuille said, “The First Mother’s conception was multiplied to include the Basilisk’s seed as well as the Divine.
Neither group is full yet.
All are human
,
none truly hybrid
, d
espite distortion
s done to
their creation codes.
Even animal-human chimeras fall on either the human side or the animal, though men cannot often tell which
,
and fail even to ask the question.
Our Master considers you and those like you to be worth far more than anything or any
one
that might be lost in the Curse. Nevertheless, each person’s ability to choose their master becomes real.”

“How?” asked Q’Enukki from the edge of despair.

“Although E’Yahavah knows the outcome and has chosen those who are his
,
men who are trapped in the realm of space, velocity, and linear time must have the chance to demonstrate for themselves and their world which side of the struggle they are on. It is at that point
—
the beforehand choice made by the Divine
Name in the rescue of some and the
real
human choice to return to him or flee—that language paradoxes between
the eternal and the temporal
are
most
felt.
It is the intersection where time meets eternity.
But we must
stop
this discussion for now,” Samuille concluded.

“Why?”

“Because the time has come for the end to begin.”

THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY
|
367

Appendix

On Mythology, Fallen Angels and other Controversial Features of this Story

Good fiction explores the tensions of its age and draws on conflicts universal to the human condition in all ages.
This
story takes place in a time so long past that we know little about it. Its basic model is contrary to evolutionary assumptions on human development for good reason.

What if early man created in God’s image was smarter and more capable than we usually credit him? What if
human
abilities degraded over
time
; the result of
sin and genetic entropy? There is evidence to suggest this, even if how I have depicted it is fanciful and probably not
the way it
really happened (which we have no way to know anyway, except by faith in what the Bible tells us). We think of our civilization as the height of human development, but take away our
technolog
ical
resources and we woul
d fare no better than cavemen
,
probably
far worse
. W
e are not better people.

Because these novels are set in such a remote time, of which we only have a mixture of distorted myth memories and what I believe to be an accurate
(
though abbreviated
)
account in the Book of Genesis, I have had to choose how to present this world. Doubtless
,
some will be outraged at some of my choices
,
a few of which were made simply to facilitate the story.

I ha
ve tried to be faithful to the particulars and theme of Genesis as best as I understand them, though I used something like Setterfield’s hybrid of the Septuagint and Masoretic timelines rather than simply the Masoretic
for
timing
major events
. (
M
y dating of events allows for a few hundred more years than
our
English Bibles do
, which use the Masoretic text group version of the Genesis chrono
-
genealogies
.)
There are
“
ups and downs
”
with both text groups and variant texts within each group. (Though there are more variants in the older Septuagint group and the
later
Masoretes used much tighter copy rules.) A hybrid Masoretic-Septuagint timeline seemed to solve certain problems in the story, which is fictional. I would never teach from
a
pulpit that the Septuagint timeline is right and the Masoretic
necessarily
wrong—or that there
i
s anything but a speculative basis for how to hybridize them.

Of course, we tend to assume that the ancient Hebrew’s divinely inspired use for chrono-genealogies
(genealogies with lifespans and other data expressed as quantities of years)
would exactly mirror our own use of them. While they would have used them
much as
we do for
approximate
historic chronolog
ies
, there may have been other factors and assumptions in play that we are unaware of and that our worldview would not think of
. Such factors
might have made
their
having both a long and short
count
chronology non-contradictory in their minds if they had
some kind of
dual purpose.

The Hebrews also sometimes rounded not only to even numbers, but to the nearest symbolic number (7 or 777, for example
)
.
The difference between the longest and the shortest
chrono-genealogy version
is only about 1000 years
, total
, so we’re not talking about age-long creation days,
simply about
variant
time lines between Adam and Abraham.
The historic sequence-of-events is never in question, nor are the variant dates too far afield.

Scholars who translated the Bible chose the Masoretic texts because they were the earliest Hebrew version of the Old Testament still available
at the time
, the assumption being that the earliest Hebrew text is preferable to a Greek translation—even if the Greek Septuagint is far older.

The Masoretic group are descended from Hebrew texts preserved by the Rabbinic School at Yevneh or Jamnia, circa 65-135 AD, in a historic context that was hostile to the way early Christians used the Greek Septuagint to show that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.
That this hostility motivated a wide-scale
recension of the texts
during this time
is
unlikely
, as the only evidence for such is
in Deuteronomy 32:43
.
Most other variants already existed BC.
The Masorete copyists who guarded the
texts
from about 500-900 AD were extremely careful to preserve
what they received
.

I am not a scholar or translator, so I am content to go with the hybridized line only in a fictional work. I hold to the doctrine of Plenary Inspiration, which says that the books of the Bible are without error in their original autographs and that the range of translations available today
is
more than adequate to preserve an accurate history and presentation of God’s redemptive plan for the ages.

While I have taken care to be biblically faithful (though I likely stumbled a little over my head in the chronology department), I
have opted to work outside certain stereotypes. Scripture tells us less than our curiosity demands about the pre-Flood world—perhaps for our own good.

Many opinions and theories about the nature of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men” with their “giant” offspring mentioned in Genesis 6 and later in Numbers and Joshua, have intrigued theologians, prophecy buffs, and mythologists for centuries. Such passages provoke questions that
have no
easy answer
s
, as well as some that
are
unanswerable
due to the lack of surviving information. I have deliberately left certain aspects of this topic ambiguous in the story, though the sheer weight of ancient commentary prior to the 5
th
century AD agrees with the footnote made by William Whiston in his
18
th
century
translation of Josephus:

This notion, that the fallen angels were, in some sense, the fathers of the old giants, was the constant opinion of antiquity.

On the other hand, some well-studied Christian scholars have rejected this idea as absurd. They see an epistemological problem with the idea of angel-human hybrids in theology—not entirely without some legitimate concerns. Such teachers denounce the idea of the “sons of God” being angels as a reading of pagan myth into biblical text.

We should never use mythology as a filter through which we interpret Scripture
;
however,
the developing Hebrew worldview before Moses’ time did not arise within a cultural or historic
al
vacuum. Moses imposed a needed isolation of Hebrew spiritual ideas from the myths of the surrounding peoples. This isolation
was not complete
before that time, nor was it
perfect
afterward. Also
,
the implications of the Babel account in Genesis 11
are
clear that all humanity is descended from a common root.

My approach, far from being an attempt to “introduce paganism” into the Flood account, is rather a natural outgrowth of the implications of the Genesis text itself—that even pagan theological and historic revisionism leaves some trace of the very truths that it tried to edit out. By calling attention to this process, my story does the truth of Genesis and the rest of Scripture a service—even if it is impossible to really know all the details this far down the millennia from Babel.

Rather than reading Genesis through the eye-glasses of pagan myth, the Hebrew ancients like Josephus more likely saw whatever happened in Genesis 6 and later passages when “giants” walked the earth, as the germ of historic
al
truth around which legend and later myth grew. The “giants” were “men of renown” in conquest and violence, not simply victims of random genetic mutation and deformity like many unfortunates who have been unfairly stigmatized throughout history. A moral and spiritual transgression in this case produced genetic and social consequences in following generations—one can hardly write on a more 21
st
century theme than that.

While my story, as speculative fiction, depicts the ancient giants in fanciful ways as having bizarre
chimerical
and deformity-driven
“stigmata”
and advanced technologies, that is not the same as claiming that the “sons of God” are “aliens from space” or magical. Our own 21
st
century mythos of extraterrestrials (who also seem strangely attracted to human females) seems to be just another manifestation of repeating themes in mythology. We are not above myth today—it just requires
quasi
-scientific terminology to gain access to our cultural imagination. Consider the Raelians and the “Heaven’s Gate” UFO cults.

The Old Testament term
bene elohim
or “sons of God” is a
historically
well-established
name
for divinely created angels in the literature of the
Old
Testament
and
of the
Hasmonean
era.
The term “sons of
…
” is also used in other senses,
however,
such as allegiance and
for
emotive connection, as in
“sons of Belial” and “son of sorrow”
respectively.
We in the New Testament
Covenant
can only be “sons and daughters of God” by adoption, when we are born again into God’s family by faith in the gospel of Christ.

The Bible depicts many forms of angels, mostly in spiritual, but a few in material terms. The “three men” who came to Abraham before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah ate with the patriarch before two
of them
went down to rescue Lot. This implies that at least some of the angelic order
s
,
under certain conditions
, can
take
material
form. While Scripture is clear that the angels of heaven do not marry, it does allude to certain fallen angels that “left their first estate” and “went after strange flesh” in 2
Peter and Jude. Th
is brings the
question
of whether
such beings
could
have
sexual
relations
with human women
capable of
procreation.

My story only hints at an answer
,
though it depicts a popular culture that believe
d
,
as the ancient world did
,
that so-called “gods” and humans did co-mingle.
That, of course, does not mean they actually
did
,
or that Genesis
means
that
fallen angels and women
procreated
in a biologically viable
reproductive sense.

It is also possible that the language used in Genesis 6
to
describe the “sons of God taking wives from the daughters of men” is
phenomenological in a
sociological way similar to how the description of the sun standing still
on
Joshua’s long day is
astronomically
phenomenological. That is, it describes
events
and
relationship
s
as
that society
perceived
them
.

Joshua, for example, prayed for the sun to stand still and from the point of view of those who observed what followed
,
the sun indeed stood still. The Book of Joshua is not a treatise on orbital mechanics, but a book of history that describes events as they
appeared to
the eyewitnesses.

Likewise
, Genesis 6 may describe a situation similar to
what
exist
ed
in
several
ancient polytheistic societies, where certain cultic priestesses were legally considered “wives” of the god of their particular temple and any children born to them were
thus
legally
“
sons
”
born to
that god.
The Hebrew term
bene elohim
is plural and can be translated
sons of God
or
sons of the gods
according to context. We may not know the exact
historical
context in Genesis 6 due to the skeletal nature of the account.
We do know the theological one.