David Ascendant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 7)

Other books by the Author

Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom
and Discernment
(Intervarsity Press)

Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story and Imagination
(Intervarsity Press)

Myth Became Fact: Storytelling, Imagination
& Apologetics in the Bible

Chronicles of the Nephilim

Noah Primeval

Enoch Primordial

Gilgamesh Immortal

Abraham Allegiant

Joshua Valiant

Caleb Vigilant

David Ascendant

Jesus Triumphant

Jerusalem Judgment

Chronicles of the Nephilim For Young Adults

Enoch Primordial: Young Adult Edition

Noah Primeval: Young Adult Edition

Gilgamesh Immortal: Young Adult Edition

Abraham Allegiant: Young Adult Edition

Joshua Valiant: Young Adult Edition

Caleb Vigilant: Young Adult Edition

David Ascendant: Young Adult Edition

Jesus Triumphant: Young Adult Edition

Jerusalem Judgment: Young Adult Edition

When Giants Were Upon the Earth:
The Watchers, Nephilim, & the Biblical Cosmic War of the Seed

For more information and products by the author:

www.godawa.com

www.ChroniclesOfTheNephilim.com

David Ascendant

Chronicles of the Nephilim
Book Seven

By Brian Godawa

DAVID ASCENDANT
First Edition

Copyright © 2014 Brian Godawa

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

Embedded Pictures Publishing

Los Angeles, CA

310.948.0224

[email protected]

www.embeddedpictures.com

ISBN: 978-0-9911434-6-7 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-9911434-7-4 (ebook)

Scripture quotations taken from
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version
. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001.

Dedicated to

culture giant slayer John H. Walton,

Whose scholarship has helped me to read Israel’s storytelling through ancient Near Eastern eyes.

Special thanks to my wife, Kimberly, who remains my muse and co-lead in the romantic comedy of my life. To Doug Van Dorn for his giant encouragement and theological input, including the Septuagint reference to the giant Dan ben Joah, and other sundry things Nephilim. And much thanks to Sarah Beach for her excellent editing. And to Michael Gavlak for his brilliant and ruthless story feedback. Faithful are the wounds of a best friend.

David Ascendant
is seventh in the series of novels,
Chronicles of the Nephilim
about the Biblical Cosmic War of the Seed.
Though it can be read as a standalone novel, the reader should advisedly consider reading it within the series. There are so many characters, motifs, storyline histories, artifacts, and themes that have been carried over from previous novels in the series, that the true depth and riches of the story can best be appreciated and understood within that context.

However, if you really want to just read this story about King David, you won’t regret it. You will be shocked at the material you’ve missed from the lines of the Bible — and in between — but you won’t regret it.

Based on the true story

that is stranger than fiction.

It was a magnificent civilization of excellence, virtue, and strength. They had managed to rule over the Greek islands and parts of the continent, from the pillars of Heracles to the pyramids of Egypt in the south and Tyrrhenia in the west. It had risen from humble beginnings to become an empire. It had a military and navy of unparalleled might; a ruling elite of philosopher kings with unapproachable wisdom; and such advanced culture that could only have come from the beneficence of the gods.

It was Atlantis, the city of wonder and mystery on the isle of Thera within the Aegean archipelago. It was rumored that the gods had chosen this location to reveal oracles of occultic knowledge as they had done on Mount Hermon of Syria in the primeval past. This explained the advanced architecture, engineering, and technology that it produced.

The capital city was laid out in the gulf of the island as a series of concentric circles of land separated by channeled waterways. At the center of the ring was an acropolis on a hill that housed the majestic temple of Poseidon, god of the sea.

The city was engineered like no other before it. Buildings contained running water, a complex sewer system, as well as unprecedented technology for heating resident interiors in the winter and cooling them in the summer. Word had spread around Greece that they had also discovered how to harness energy in a form that would enable them to power mechanical devices without the aid of human slaves.

But such engineering and technological advancement were only symptoms of a much more significant pursuit of the ruling class of Atlantis: godhood. Though some humans had been known to live as long as one hundred or so years, the average life span of most Aegeans was about forty to fifty years. Aristocrats would often reach seventy and eighty. The hygiene created by Atlantean technology and medicine had increased that expectancy. But in their collective memory, they knew their primeval ancestors had lived many centuries. Before the Great Deluge, they had heard of the oldest antediluvian reaching nine hundred and sixty nine years!

The patrician class had concluded that if the nobles could mate with deity, the resultant demigods would not only become gibborim warrior rulers, but their hybrid flesh would return to the longevity of lives once enjoyed by the antediluvian fathers.

They could not understand the reticence of Poseidon to partake in their plan of uniting heaven and earth with a Sacred Marriage rite between deity and humanity. He had mumbled about the Gigantomachy and the Titanomachy, and about some unknown pentapolis called Sodom and Gomorrah. But he did not explain himself beyond the simple declaration that the Deluge of water and the fire of heaven was the response to such unholy hubris.

As the Greeks remembered the Flood story, Zeus had sent the Deluge as judgment but saved Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha by having him build a chest that brought them safely through the waters.

But this story did not sway the Atlanteans in their quest for eternal life. They would stop at nothing to achieve godhood, and eventually, their constant pleas prompted Poseidon to give in and reinstitute the Sacred Marriage.

The gods would once again mate with humans.

              • • • • •

It was a warm and sunny summer day on the chain of Aegean islands when all Hades was unleashed.

There had been an increase in frequency of earthquakes on Thera that had caused the more superstitious citizens to leave in ships for the western sea. But everyone else went about their business, having become familiar with such rumblings throughout their entire lives. All across the island, people were trading in the marketplace, farming their land, performing matrimony, and coupling together in marriage beds of love and adulterous beds of lust. There were aristocrats ruling, buyers trading, thieves stealing, liars lying, thousands living their normal lives.

In the temple of Poseidon, the priests were engaging in their liturgy of worship when the first sinkhole opened up beneath them and swallowed them all alive. A huge crevice split the concentric isle circles, reducing the buildings instantly to rubble, and crushing a multitude of Atlanteans.

What followed next was unthinkable.

The capital city completely disintegrated in a massive explosion of a magnitude that had never before been seen on earth. The expanding rush of debris and smoke choked all life, instantly engulfing people on the far side of the island. A pile of ash buried everything. A blast of rock and magma spewed out from the center of the caldera as the force of pressure built up over millennia finally released itself from the earth.

The ancient volcano of Thera had awakened.

An enormous pillar cloud of sixty cubic miles of rock, ash and pumice rose into the sky and spread out for hundreds of miles around, choking the life out of everything in its way. The uplift of the earth, created an offset of the sea that released a tsunami wave pushing its way at hundreds of miles per hour away from the explosion.

              • • • • •

The Minoan island of Crete lay a mere hundred miles away. Its inhabitants could see the plume of smoke darkening the sky, and many sought the higher mountainous regions as safety from the oncoming wave. But most did not escape the crushing wall of water that washed over the island and wiped out every city in mere seconds. Hundreds of generations of civilization built upon the wisdom of its ancestors were completely decimated by billions of tons of seawater.

This incapacitation of the great Minoan culture of Crete would completely cripple its defenses, making it vulnerable to conquest by the maritime forces of the Mycenaens who would follow in the wake of the tsunami.

What happened this day would become the stuff of legends about the glorious achievements of a magical civilization mysteriously swallowed up in a day by the largest volcanic eruption in history.

But rock, ash, and lava were not the only things vomited out from the belly of Sheol that day. Within the debris that flew miles into the air and landed in the sea was a humanoid form. It was severely burned by its encasement in magma, but alive because of its divine being.

When he hit the ocean and was released from the hardened lava rock, the salt water burned his flesh with stinging pain. But this was nothing compared to the blazing heat of the river of magma he had been entrapped in miles beneath the surface of the earth.

But now he was free. And he was set on revenge against the malicious Creator and his archangels who had trapped him there to await the final judgment. That wait would be delayed as he began to swim westward with strong plunging strokes of charred black arms.

He had been incarcerated in the earth for generations. But he didn’t care. He was a god of power and storm. He would work his way back up the hierarchy of gods to claim his rightful status as the Most High god. He would get his revenge on Yahweh Elohim and his pathetic offspring of worms, the sons of Israel.

He was the storm god, Ba’al. And he was back.