Enoch Primordial (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (21 page)

The team of giants and giant killers fell asleep on the flight over the vast desert. At this height, the air was cold, but the feathers of the Anzu kept them warm. The giant birds flew smoothly.

Methuselah
awoke to the sunrise directly in front of them. He saw they were already leaving the arid environment of the desert, flying over the fertile Mesopotamian plain.

But something
was not right. They were heading into the sunrise. The sun should be to their right.

He recognized the river course below him. It was a part of the Euphrates just north of his own city of Sippar. They were
headed southeast. They should have been traveling northeast toward the Aratta mountains and Eden. But they were going southeast toward Shinar and the Zagros.

He got the attention of Edna and the others. They all recognized their change of route. But their Anzu flyers would not catch up to the two giants in the lead. It was as if the birds had been ordered to stay back and not allow the contact. Methuselah could only
assume that they were now captives of their rescuers. He could not imagine where they were being taken and for what purpose.

• • • • •

The Nephilim horde had run most of the day
. They only set up camp for a three hour sleep. Before the sun rose again, they were already up and trampling the ground. Fortunately for Yahipan, Rephaim generals rode on the new four-wheeled chariots drawn by teams of horses. Otherwise, his doubly wounded legs would have dangerously hampered him. He needed more time for healing.

They made good time
, following the Sirion Mountain range along the curve of the fertile crescent to avoid the deadly desert. The Euphrates lay a few leagues before them. They would head due east, cross the alluvial plain of northern Mesopotamia and enter the Aratta mountains just below their target point.

Inanna
calculated that if they could keep this pace up, they might shave another day off their journey. So a few hundred would die of exhaustion or dehydration. What was that to her? Countless thousands would perish in the final battle anyway. Nephilim were expendable. She expected to lose most of them in the first wave of attacks establishing a breach in the Garden. Elohim’s forces would not be fighting for their lives, they would be fighting for their eternities. It would actually be quite a relief to lose tens of thousands of mouths to feed and lusts to satisfy. These hybrid offspring were a voracious consuming mass of flesh and bone. Like a plague of locusts, they stripped bare the life of every territory where they encamped or passed through.

S
he liked to call it “the circle of life,” the way of all things on terra firma: eat or be eaten, only the fittest survive. Morality and all its self-righteous proclamations of right and wrong were reducible to the will to power. Might made right. She would have to craft that into a myth one day. It would be a useful tool to obscure the Creator and justify all kinds of atrocities.

If a man could convince himself that morality was not a matter of humanity being created in Elohim’s image, but rather was a construct of society
, in order to maintain arbitrary control over the masses, then there would be no end to the genocides and holocausts that could be unleashed when man would take that belief to its logical end. Even more devastation than that accomplished by the religions she and her fellow gods “revealed” to these pathetic mud-pies of Elohim.

That
was an idea whose time would come. But now was not that time. Inanna grinned with self-satisfaction.
I will indeed craft that myth for when ancient religion will have run its useful course
.

• • • • •

By the end of the second day, the Anzu birds arrived
in the Zagros Mountains, just northeast of Erech and the South Sea. As the giant birds descended, Methuselah saw a large ring of steep mountain buttes surrounding a plush forested valley. This secluded crater basin might have been a second Paradise. It looked just that rich, green and flowing with streams of waters. The ring of cliffs were like a wall of rock protecting a pristine lost world. It did not look like there was any way in or out, except by air. The Anzu landed inside the Edenic crater.

Methuselah, Edna, Lamech, and Betenos got off their mounts. What else could they do?
Their carriers were obviously in the service of Ohyah and Hahyah. The Anzu birds took flight to the north. They had been double-crossed by the giants they had trusted, whom they had considered to be redeemable. Methuselah was not yet sure for what purpose they had been betrayed.

“Why did they not kill us?” asked Lamech. “Drop us from the skies to our deaths over the
desert, never to be found again?”

Edna added, “And why in this lush
, beautiful, secret valley?”

It
certainly seemed safer than the rocky lands outside Eden, where war was approaching.

“Do not be deceived by appearances,” said Betenos, looking around at the trees of gorging fruit. “Poison can be as outwardly beautiful as medicine.”

“First, we must make some weapons,” said Methuselah. “Then, let us get to the walls and explore the perimeter. There may be some hidden exit through a cave or a climb.”

They
only had three knives among them, taken from the bodies of guards they overcame on their escape out of Baalbek.

“I have already addressed the partiality of the divine witnesses in this case,” said the satan. “So let me move on to my next charge.”

The trial had resumed. Yahweh Elohim had summoned the prosecution, and the satan came out with serpentine eyes and bronze body blazing. His skill as accuser was quickly prov
ing to be of the highest marksmanship.

The satan continued, “Regarding the covenant preamble, we have this difficult matter of the sovereignty of the Creator.
Really, is not the sovereignty of the suzerain the foundation of the entire edifice? If this cornerstone is rejected, do not all other bricks crumble to the ground?”

He
brilliantly used leading questions. Enoch thought to himself how he would like to see the cornerstone fall on the accuser and crush him.

The satan
’s voice rolled on. “Now Elohim’s covenant begins with a claim to sovereign jurisdiction: ‘In the beginning, when Elohim began to create the heavens and the earth, etcetera, etcetera.’ Is this not a clear case of tyranny and colonialism? Elohim claims to ‘create’ and ‘own’ all things as a tyrannical justification to colonize the land. He wants to demand a certain land goes to a certain people, in this case, the Garden to Adam and Eve, and no one else has the right to it. And then he kicks everyone out. What next? Will he claim a land that already has a people residing there as his own, and just wipe the indigenous inhabitants off the face of the earth to make room for ‘his people of choice?’ Will he ultimately claim the whole earth as his own and allow some clan of meek people to inherit it over those strong peoples who built up its richness? What kind of a suzerain does such a thing? I will tell you what kind: A despot and a tyrant.”

Zealous anger filled
Enoch. Not only was the satan making outright blasphemous accusations at Yahweh Elohim as defendant, he was also cunningly undermining his authority as Judge by deliberately using the shorter non-covenant name
Elohim
in place of the judicially proper
Yahweh Elohim
. The satan earned his name with the ability to accuse on every level of his language.

Still,
he was right about one thing: suzerains did claim their right to the land by claiming their gods as creators of it. The difference in this case was that Yahweh Elohim
really did
create all things and the gods were incomparable in his presence.
They
existed in
his
universe. But the satan was only beginning. He would build his case upon a mountain of bitterness built up over the millennia.

The satan
carried on his argument. “But this covenant maker is not merely a tyrant, he is a totalitarian puppet master who is the author of evil. What kind of creator makes earthquakes that demolish entire cities and kills the populace under mountains of rubble? Or a hurricane that drowns shiploads of sailors and devastates port cities under tsunamis of water.”

It
did not bother the satan that his comrade, the god Enki, had claimed the same powers to make the earth tremble and quake, or that Enlil claimed to be the source of hurricane storms and lightning and thunder. Consistency was not the satan’s strong suit, emotional appeal was.

“What kind of ‘loving god’ allows untold thousands of poor innocent women and children to suffer the ravages of disease and poverty?”

The satan was an actor of the highest caliber. He actually looked as if he meant what he was saying. Tears flowed from his crocodile eyes down his glistening scaly face. He did not care a whit for women and children. He actually thought poverty and disease were good ways to keep the population from expanding to unmanageable numbers that would threaten the earth’s ecosystem of life. To the satan, humans were in fact parasites of Mother Earth, grubworms of the Great Goddess. Disease was the Earth’s balancing revenge. But that belief would not stop him from using rhetoric to appeal to the sympathies and compassion of his enemy.

“But that is only ‘natural evil,’” he waxed eloquently. “What of
personal evil
?” Now his words took on the calculated righteous indignation of a politician. “What kind of god would allow the heinous evils of rape, murder, genocide,
and war
?”

Uriel snorted at the irony. A
t this very moment, the satan’s ally Inanna was leading a horde of thirty thousand unholy demigods on Eden. They were planning massive rape, murder, genocide, and war.

“I submit that if Elohim is truly ‘sovereign over his creation,’”
the satan said, his words dripping with venom, “then he is responsible for all the evil that exists in the world. If he is not so sovereign, then he is an impotent deity without the authority to back up his covenant.”

The satan took a dramatic pause
, pretending he was holding back a flood of empathetic tears. Then he finished, “A covenant is supposed to be constitutional, the very bedrock of truth and justice. This covenant is unconstitutional because its creator is a king who is a totalitarian oppressor, a cheat who makes the rules of the game to favor himself; a despotic dictator and tyrant who claims absolute ownership over creation; and worse, a genocidal emperor, who, mark my words, will soon kill everyone on earth who gets in the way of his imperialist empire!”

Enoch was stunned. He had never heard such a vile litany of invectives and hate speech
against the Creator pour out of the mouth of a mere created being, except perhaps from Inanna.

T
he satan stopped abruptly and returned to the bar with a suddenly quiet and diplomatic disposition. “May the court forgive me, I forgot one thing. If I may, I would like to propose a humble suggestion. The defendant, Elohim, appears to be obsessed with transcendence and separation. Heaven is separated from earth, land is separated from waters, angel is separated from human, human from animal, male from female, and so on. With all this talk of the creator’s transcendent distinction from his creation, all this
separation
and difference within creation, perhaps therein lies the problem. Separation and distinction breed animosity and fear of the ‘other.’ If this god would only be
one
with his creation, if all things were considered
one
instead of separated and different then maybe we might not have all the alienation and violence that such fear of
the other
creates. Of course, the Creator might know this if he actually knew what it was like to be one of his lowly creatures, to be a man rather than the omnipotent potentate of power and pious purity that he proudly preaches.” He smirked. He thought his alliteration of Ps was a nice touch of poetic contempt.

He wrapped it up, “But I contemplate that would be impossible for such a ‘high and mighty one,’ so ‘separate’ and ‘distinct’ from his creation is he.”

It was quite an explosive opener, thought Enoch, followed by a low-key false humility that had the effect of making the audience listen intently. Like dropping your speech to a whisper after yelling. Enoch wondered what was next, if this was just his opener. His adversary had engaged in so much fallacious rhetoric that he thought it would be quite easy to dismantle the argument and make a fool of the accuser. But then he thought better. He realized that he did not want to fall into the trap of emulating the fool in his folly. He decided his strategy should be to avoid matching the emotional excess. Instead, he should strip the rhetoric down to its core of absurdity with calm cool reason. Use the folly against the fool. This was, after all, a court of law where rationality served truth and justice not agenda and advocacy.

Enoch strutted before the throne. He lifted his chin high in thought. He then spoke like a scribe would speak to his students. “This Accuser has laden his argument with so much emotional invective and blind hatred that one can only wonder where he received his credentials. I am not aware of any apkallu wisdom sage on earth or in heaven who teaches insulting, appeals to pity, force, and popular sentiment, false dilemmas, slippery slopes, equivocation and question begging as actual legal strategy.”
That was good,
thought Enoch. He did not hear the expected chuckles from the divine witnesses. But then again, they did follow strict rules of sobriety in trials. All his years of being an apkallu were bearing fruit in him now. It was almost as if it were all preparation for this moment.

He continued. “I would like to strip down the satan’s so-called arguments to their bare essentials and address those sparsely few issues with that
gem so rare among the wicked; rationality. ‘Come, let us reason together,’ says the Lord. And so we shall.”

Enoch felt his confidence rising. He was much smoother than he had expected. The butterflies in his stomach
had gone. He felt like a falcon flying pretty high, his eyes focused on his prey far below him.

“It is true,” said Enoch, “
that Yahweh Elohim is sovereign over his creation and therefore the covenant.” He used the covenant name of God as proper protocol in the heavenly temple regarding covenant lawsuits.

He continued, “Our Creator works all things according to the counsel of his will. He makes nations great and destroys them. He brings both well-being and calamity upon cities and individuals. He has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil. And no purpose of his can be thwarted. In short, Yahweh Elohim is all-powerful and ordains whatsoever comes to pass. It is also true that he is an all-loving creator who cares for his creation. So if I may boil down the satan’s argument into its simplest form, void of all its emotional hysteria and libelous insults, it would look like this
--

Premise one: If
Yahweh Elohim is all-powerful he could destroy evil.

Premise two: If
Yahweh Elohim is all-loving he would destroy evil.

Premise three: Evil is not destroyed.

Conclusion: Yahweh Elohim is either unable or unwilling to destroy evil.”

Now it was Enoch’s turn to pause for dramatic effect
. He milked it with relish.

“Let us dispense with this popular sentiment of ignoramuses and mental midgets. It is really very simple. There is a hidden premise in th
at argument that is fallacious. It
assumes
that evil will never be destroyed or put to rights. Well, who says so? Is satan the god of time that he knows that evil will not be destroyed in the future? In fact, Yahweh Elohim promises to one day destroy all evil and put all things to rights. Simply because evil is not
yet
destroyed is no argument that evil will
never
be destroyed. I realize logical consistency is not a virtue to the satan, but it is a requirement of truth.”

H
is train of thought completely engrossed Enoch. His words came out like fire from heaven. His pronouncements of justice rolled down like waters. He barely stopped to take a breath.

“The satan accuses Yahweh Elohim of being the author of evil, but
creating
evil for a purpose is not the same as
being
evil. Just because we do not know his purpose or reason for the evil he ordains in this world does not mean there can be no good purpose or reason. Our finite ignorance is not a measure of the parameters of the truth. Creaturely freedom and responsibility does not logically negate the Creator’s sovereignty. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Shall the axe boast over him who hews with it, or the saw magnify itself against him who wields it? The satan complains of the Creator/creature distinction as the source of cruelty, but it is precisely the transcendent infinite God who distinguishes kindness from cruelty. If everything is one, kindness and cruelty are one and the satan’s complaint is dismissed.”

Enoch
delivered the death blow. “And so I file a motion for summary judgment to dismiss this frivolous lawsuit. Amen.”

Enoch sat down next to Mikael on one side, Uriel and the other archangels on the other. He felt like one of the angels himself. He drew in a deep breath
. He knew that he had just won the entire trial in one fell swoop of oratory.

“You may have just lost the trial in one fell swoop of oratory,” Mikael whispered to Enoch.

“Elegant delivery, apkallu,” said Uriel. “That was vanity befitting of the Serpent himself. Is that what they teach you in wisdom sage school?”

Gabriel added, “Have you switched sides?”

Enoch’s eyes stretched in terror. What had he done wrong? He had just made an iron clad rational case on behalf of the Creator. Or so he thought.

“Close your mouth,” said Uriel.

Enoch stared at him.

“I mean literally,” said Uriel. “Your mouth is hanging open like a fly catcher again.”

Enoch closed his mouth. He was dumbfounded.

T
hen he opened it again. “But I thought I was supposed to use rigorous wisdom to dismantle the satan’s position. I thought that is what truth is about.”

“Truth is a person, not a mere proposition,” said Uriel.

“So you think you fight vanity with vanity?” said Mikael. “You do not represent an idea, you represent Yahweh’s character. Of which you were evidently completely oblivious as you strode about like a pompous braying ass.”