Caleb Vigilant (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (26 page)

The army of Israel stood in the field before Kiriath-arba
. The city was secured, all life was devoted to destruction. The Anakim received no mercy as the Seed of the Serpent. The bodies of the brothers Arba—Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai—were impaled upon poles on the city walls. Their rotting carcasses were testimony to their infernal destiny.

Joshua stood proudly with Caleb as he offered him the ownership of the city and its area for his inheritance.
Caleb renamed the city Hebron for future generations. Of course, he would not be able to settle in until they had completed their conquest of the land. But Rahab, Achsah, and Rahab’s family were more proud of him than anyone could be of a man who obeyed Yahweh and followed him faithfully.

Joshua proclaimed, “Warriors of Yahweh,
you have been strong and courageous! We have achieved mighty feats of faith in overthrowing the Transjordan! King Sihon of Heshbon and King Og of Bashan!”

The men cheered.

“By faith, Yahweh toppled the walls of Jericho! And by faith, we defeated the Anakim of Kiriath-arba, our most difficult enemy in the land of our forefather, Abraham. And we have captured the hill country!”

The men cheered
again.

“
But our conquest is not yet complete! I am old and very advanced in years. But there is still much land to possess. Before we can apportion out the territories to the tribes of Israel, we must strike down the Anakim city of Kiriath-sepher just south of here! I need a leader to take a force and capture the city!”

There was a hesitation in the crowd. They had just been through so much, and now they were being asked to jump into the fire again?

Caleb saw his precious Achsah in the crowd watching with pride. Then he glanced over and saw Othniel standing like a miserable lonely rock. Caleb knew he desired Achsah but was so emotionally incompetent, that he could not declare his love these past five years of war. So Caleb decided to give him one last chance or lose it all. He yelled out to the soldiers, “He who attacks Kiriath-sepher and captures it, I will give as an inheritance.”

He paused, then added, “
As well as my daughter Achsah in marriage!”

Before anyone else could even consider the offer, Othniel stepped up and shouted, “I will take
Kiriath-sepher! I will grind it to dust!”

Othniel’s men cheered.

And Othniel could not believe he did it. He finally did it. After all these years of fear, he finally did what it took to get Achsah’s hand in marriage.

Othniel looked over to see Achsah beaming with an ear to ear grin. She had known he was in love with her for so long, but he
had never had the liver to say so. He would face death against a thousand giants in battle, but he did not have the courage to proclaim his love for her. It had taken years of patient waiting for him, years of lonely unfulfilled desire. Oh well, if it took a battle of giants to get him to win her hand instead of just asking for it, then so be it. She knew he was a good man. More than that, he was the best man she had ever known after her father.

She
burst out into tears of joy.

Caleb
smiled with his own satisfaction.

Finally
, thought Caleb,
My daughter will find happiness. And finally my high strung young brother will find happiness and release from his pent up humility.

Othniel was already busying his mind with how he might take
Kiriath-sepher as quickly as possible, so as to marry Achsah as quickly as possible, and therefore unite with her flesh as quickly as possible.

Rahab and Achsah stepped up to Caleb
. Rahab was carrying baby Boaz in her arms. The three of them embraced and kissed.

Little Boaz looked up into their faces.

Othniel stood next to them staring at Achsah, who smiled back at him. She reached her hand out to him. Timidly, he reached and grabbed it.

Her soft small hand
in his felt like a treasure of silk. Caleb’s precious turtle dove would soon be his turtle dove.

Rahab glanced over
Caleb’s shoulder and saw Joshua watching them with a grin. Their eyes locked and they knew they had made the right choices in their hearts; choices to stay their passions, choices to obey their Lord, choices to suffer and sacrifice rather than take and indulge.

Caleb approached his commander. They clasped wrists. They stared into
each other’s eyes with a friendship deeper than lovers, for they had faced life and death—and resurrection together. Were there any words that could express their commitment to one another? Words that could carry the thankfulness that filled their souls?

“I am old and tired,” said Joshua.

“You?” said Caleb. “I am your elder by twenty years and I am ready to finish this. Are you backing out on me after all we have been through?”

Joshua smiled. “No, I just need to find what it is I lost in all this bloodshed and carnage. I want to retire in the hill country of Ephraim, a place without much significance to our enemies.”

Caleb
said, “Joshua, I have been a fool. Yahweh has kept me alive, just as he promised forty-five years ago when you and I first gave our spying report of the land. Now, behold, I am eighty-five years old and I am as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent us. But now that I have the land of our forefather Abraham’s grave, I must confess I am unsatisfied.”

Joshua said, “
You strove for an identity you already have.”

Caleb said, “All my life, I have felt like an outsider. And no matter how much I proved myself, I was still an adopted child in a family of natural born sons.”

“Caleb, was it not you who taught me that faith is what Yahweh desires?”

Caleb was listening, but it was difficult as his own words now came back at him.

Joshua continued, “I have always envied you. My quest for a perfect holiness broke me, and only then I saw a glimpse of what you had all along: Beauty and grace.”

Caleb chuckled, “And I have always envied you for what you have had: Your chosen status, your holiness and justice.”

Joshua said, “We covet in each other what we do not have.”

Caleb said, “Then the one thing we both
have lacked—is faith.”

He paused
, then added, “We are both men of flesh.”

“And spirit,”
added Joshua.

He placed his arm on Caleb’s shoulder
. “Caleb, you have bested me in this life. In trust, in grace, in family, and in battle. I am proud of you. I am proud to be your friend. And proud to have learned the true value of faith as the Seed of Abraham.”

“You broke the Seed of the Serpent’s backbone,” said Caleb. The hill country that traversed the center of Canaan was truly the backbone of control of the land
and Israel now owned it.

Joshua
suddenly got serious. “This people are not able to serve Yahweh. He is a holy and jealous god. Even after all the deliverance he has brought, after the Red Sea, the water from the rock, and Jericho, and every other miracle, they will still worship foreign gods and will not put away the idols of the land. They will fail to drive out the Canaanites.”

“Is this a prophecy?” said Caleb.

“No,” replied Joshua. “It is merely my knowledge of their nature—of the nature in all of us. We need a king who can bring final triumph. Until then, the Seed of Eve will never find rest.”

Caleb said, “When he comes, he will be like you.
Only perfect.”

They both chuckled at it.

“Indeed,” said Joshua. “Something I could never be.”

“Yahweh saves,” said Caleb. It was the meaning of Joshua’s name.

The four archangels
arrived at the camp of Joshua outside of the newly named Hebron. Othniel was consulting Joshua and Caleb for his plan of attack on Kiriath-sepher.

When the angels entered, the generals saw a grim look on their faces.

Caleb said, “You are late as usual, archangels. But do not worry, we do not need you for our next campaign. Feel free to take a vacation, get some rest.”

“For your information, jester,” said Uri
el. “We were binding Ba’al the Most High and demolishing his high place in the northern regions of Mount Sapan.”

Gabriel jumped in, now defending Uriel with unusual favor, “
No rest for the righteous. And you are welcome.”

Caleb drew down. He knew that if Ba’al would have been fighting against them, they might have doubled their losses and maybe not have won at all.

Joshua could see the solemn look on Mikael and Raphael’s faces.

“What news do you bring?”

Mikael said, “On our way back we discovered that the nations of the north country have formed a massive coalition of armies from north, east, and west, led by King Jabin of Hazor. The Amorites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, and even the Hivvites from under Mount Hermon. They are assembling their armies at the waters of Merom to launch a joint attack on you.”

Gabriel said, “You have not faced this many before.”

Joshua said, “How many?”

Mikael said, “Forty thousand.”

That was six times the number of Israel’s army. That was like the sand on the seashore to them. But Joshua had learned to have faith in such situations since Yahweh had promised them ultimate victory.

But that
victory was given a stab to the kidney when Mikael added, “But they also have something you have never faced before.”

Uriel threw in, “
You might want to ask us to delay our vacation.”

“What is that?” said Joshua.
“What do they have?”

“
Iron chariots. A multitude of them.” …

It is here that the Chronicle is broken off and lost to history. One may read more about the incident from
the Book of the Wars of Yahweh.
If new archaeological discoveries bring to light this small missing segment of manuscript, we will publish it as a novella available for devoted readers of
Chronicles of the Nephilim
.

Otherwise, the Chronicles continue with the next book,
David Ascendant.

Canaanite Ba’al
and Old Testament
Storytelling Polemics

For many Christians, the word
apologetics
conjures a picture of defending the faith with philosophical arguments, archeological evidence, historical inquiry, and other rational and empirical forms of discourse. Apologetics also involves
polemics
, which are aggressive arguments against the opposition. Sometimes a good offense is the best defense. But what is often missed in some apologetic strategies is the Biblical use of imagination. This is illustrative of a distinct imbalance when one considers that the Bible is only about one-third propositional truth and about two-thirds imagination: image, metaphor, poetry, and story.
[3]

With the discovery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of pagan religious texts from ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cultures such as Babylon, Assyria, and Ugarit, Biblical scholarship has discovered many literary parallels between Scripture and the literature of ancient Israel’s enemies. The Hebrews shared many words, images, concepts, metaphors, and narrative genres in common with their neighbors. And those Hebrew authors of Scripture sometimes incorporated similar literary imagination into their text.

With regard to these
Biblical and ancient Near Eastern literary parallels, liberal scholarship tends to stress the similarities, downplay the differences, and construct a theory of the evolution of Israel’s religion from polytheism to monotheism.
[4]
In other words, liberal scholarship is anthropocentric, or human-centered.

Conservative scholarship tends to stress the differences, downplay the similarities, and interpret the evidence as indicative of the radical otherness of Israelite religion.
[5]
In other words, conservative scholarship is theocentric, or God-centered. Both liberal and conservative hermeneutics err on opposite extremes.

The orthodox doctrine of the
inspiration of Scripture states that it is composed of “God-breathed” human-written words (2Tim. 3:16). Men wrote from God, moved by the Holy Spirit (2Pet. 1:20-21). This is a “both/and” reality of humanly and heavenly authorship. While I affirm the heavenly side of God’s Word, in this essay I will illustrate how the authors of the Old Testament used the imagination of their enemies as a polemic against those enemies’ religion and deities. In my book,
Word Pictures: Knowing God through Story and Imagination
, I describe the nature of this subversive storytelling as the act of entering the opposition’s cultural narrative, retelling it through their own paradigm, or worldview, and thereby capturing the cultural narrative. God used literary subversion in the Bible as a means of arguing against the false gods and idols of that time.

Baal in Canaan

In 1929, an archeological excavation at a mound in northern Syria called Ras Shamra unearthed the remains of a significant port city called Ugarit, whose developed culture reaches back as far as 3000 BC.
[6]
Among the important finds were literary tablets that opened the door to a deeper understanding of ancient Near Eastern culture and the Bible. Those tablets included Syro-Canaanite religious texts of pagan deities mentioned in the Old Testament. One of those deities was Baal (alternate spelling of Ba’al).

Though the Semitic noun
baal
means “lord” or “master,” it was also used as the proper name of the Canaanite storm god.
[7]
In the Baal narrative cycle from Ugarit, El was the supreme “father of the gods,” who lived on a cosmic mountain. A divine council of gods called “Sons of El” surrounded him, vying for position and power. When Sea is coronated by El and given a palace, Baal rises up and kills Sea, taking Sea’s place as “Most High” over the other gods (excepting El). A temple is built and a feast celebrated. Death then insults Baal, who goes down to the underworld, only to be defeated by Death. But Anat, Baal’s violent sister, seeks Death and cuts him up into pieces and brings Baal’s body back up to earth where he is brought back to life, only to fight Death to a stalemate.
[8]

The
Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible
explains of Baal:
“His elevated position shows itself in his power over clouds, storm and lightning, and manifests itself in his thundering voice. As the god of wind and weather Baal dispenses dew, rain, and snow and the attendant fertility of the soil. Baal’s rule guarantees the annual return of the vegetation; as the god disappears in the underworld and returns in the autumn, so the vegetation dies and resuscitates with him.”
[9]

Baal in the Bible

In the Bible, Baal is used both as the name of a specific deity
[10]
and as a generic term for multiple idols worshipped by apostate Israel.
[11]
It was also used in conjunction with city names and locations, such as Baal-Hermon and Baal-Zaphon, indicating manifestations of the one deity worshipped in a variety of different Canaanite situations.
[12]
Simply speaking, in Canaan, Baal was all over the place. He was the chief god of the land.

On entering Canaan, Yahweh gave specific instructions to the Israelites to destroy all
of the places where the Canaanites worshipped, along with their altars and images (Deut. 12:1-7). They were to “destroy the names” of the foreign idols and replace them with Yahweh’s name and habitation (vv. 3-4). God warned them, “Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them” (Deut. 11:16).

Yet, turning to other gods in worship is exactly what the
Israelites did—over and over again. No sooner had the people settled in Canaan than they began to adopt Baal worship into their culture. The book of Judges describes this cycle of idolatry under successive leaders.
[13]
In the ninth century BC, Elijah fought against rampant Baal worship throughout Israel (1 Kings 18). In the eighth century, Hosea decried the adulterous intimacy that both Judah and Israel had with Baal (Hos. 2:13, 16-17), and in the seventh century, Jeremiah battled with an infestation of it in Judah (Jer. 2:23; 32:35).

Baal worship was so cancerous throughout Israel’s history that Yahweh would have to
intervene periodically with dramatic displays of authority in order to stem the infection that polluted the congregation of the Lord. Gideon’s miraculous deliverances from the Baal-loving Midianites (Judges 6-8) and Elijah’s encounter with the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18) are just a couple examples of Yahweh’s real-world polemic against Baal. But physical battles and miraculous signs and wonders are not the only way God waged war against Baal in ancient Canaan. He also used story, image, and metaphor. He used literary imagination.

Yahweh Vs. Baal

Literary subversion was common in the ancient world to affect the overthrow or overshadowing of one deity and worldview with another. For example, the high goddess Inanna, considered Queen of Heaven in ancient Sumeria, was replaced by her Babylonian counterpart, Ishtar. An important Sumerian text,
The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld
, was rewritten by the Babylonians as
the Descent of Ishtar into the Underworld
to accommodate their goddess Ishtar.
[14]
The Babylonian creation epic,
Enuma Elish
tells the story of the Babylonian deity Marduk and his ascendancy to power in the Mesopotamian pantheon.
[15]
And then when King Sennacherib of Assyria conquered Babylon around 689 BC, Assyrian scribes rewrote the
Enuma Elish
and replaced the name of Marduk with Assur, their chief god.
[16]

Picture this scenario: The Israelites have left Egypt where Yahweh literally mocked and defeated the gods of Egypt through the ten plagues (Exod. 12:12; Num. 33:4). Pharaoh claimed to be a god, who according to Egyptian texts
, was the “possessor of a strong arm” and a “strong hand.”
[17]
So when Yahweh repeatedly hammers home the message that Israel will be delivered by Yahweh’s “strong arm” and “strong hand,” the polemical irony is not hard to spot. Yahweh used subversive literary imagery, which in effect said, “Pharaoh is not God, I am God.” Nothing like an arm wrestling match to show who is stronger.

But now, God is leading Israel into the Promised
Land, which is very different from where they came, with very different gods. “For the land that you are entering to take possession of it is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sowed your seed and irrigated it, like a garden of vegetables. But the land that you are going over to possess is a land of hills and valleys, which drinks water by the rain from heaven” (Deut. 11:10-11). And the god of rain from heaven in this new land was believed to be the storm god, Baal.
[18]

Now the Biblical text begins to reflect that storm god language in its reference to Israel’s god, Yahweh.
Let’s take a look at some Ugaritic texts will give us a literary description of the Baal that Israel faced in Canaan. A side-by-side sampling of those Ugaritic texts with Scripture illustrates a strong reflection of Canaanite echoes in the Biblical storytelling.

Like the usage of Yahweh’s “strong arm” to poetically argue against the so-called “strong arm” of Pharaoh, Yahweh inspires His authors to use water and storm language to reflect God’s polemic against the so-called storm god
, Baal.

Comparing the texts yields identical words, memes, and metaphors that suggest God is engaging in polemics against Baal through
scriptural imagery and storytelling. It is not Baal who rides his cloud chariot from his divine mountain Saphon (Sapan), it is Yahweh who rides the clouds as a chariot from mount Sinai. It is not Baal who hurls lightning flashes in wrath; it is Yahweh whose lightning flashes destroy His enemies. It is not Baal whose dew-drenched brow waters the land of Canaan; it is Yahweh who drops dew from heaven to Canaan. It is not Baal’s voice that thunders and conquers the waters resulting in his everlasting temple enthronement; it is Yahweh whose voice thunders and conquers the waters resulting in His everlasting temple enthronement.

Psalm 29 (quoted in part above) is so replete with poetry in common with Canaanite poetry that many ANE scholars have concluded it is a Canaanite hymn to Baal that has been rewritten with the name Baal replaced by the name Yahweh.
[21]
God was not only
physically
dispossessing Canaan of its inhabitants; He was
literarily
dispossessing the Canaanite gods as well. Old Testament appropriation of Canaanite culture is a case of subversion, not syncretism—overthrowing cultural narratives as opposed to blending with them.