Joshua Valiant (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (11 page)

Mount
Hor was a plateau several thousand feet high that overlooked the desert wilderness of Zin. Its rough red rock showed layers of sediment that were claylike at the bottom, but harder limestone on top.

Moses, Joshua, Eleazer
, and Aaron stood on the mountain looking down upon the people of Israel who filled the plains at the bottom. They were at the very border of Edom, but were not going to enter. Much to Joshua’s dismay, Moses had sent word back to King Rekem assuring him they would respect his demands and not transgress the borders of Edom.

They were here
today because Aaron was very weak and dying, and was about to be gathered to his fathers. Moses was not much younger than Aaron, one hundred and twenty years old, but was much stronger for his age.

T
he high priesthood had to be transferred onto Eleazer. This was the fortieth year of their wandering, and Yahweh had promised that Aaron would not enter the Promised Land. Moses knew his own time would be soon as well, but he did not know when.

Aaron had worn the vestments of his
high priesthood for the sake of the ceremony they were now performing before the eyes of all of Israel below them.

Joshua watched Eleazer help Aaron take off his vestment
s and then put them on himself. Then Moses decreed Eleazer as the new high priest of Israel. It was a simple ceremony, but a significant one. For God was drawing them near the time of fulfillment for his Promise.

It had been forty years since he and Caleb disagreed with the report of the other spies regarding Canaan. God had cursed that generation to
die in the wilderness, every one of them above the age of twenty.

They were all dead
now, all except Moses and Aaron, who were told they would not see the Promised Land for their arrogance at Meribah.

They waited with Aaron, placing him on a
bedroll in a cave and tending to him until he finally died. And when he did, Moses wept with a great howl of pain deep within his soul. His transfigured flesh seemed to flash like lightning with his anguish. He had shared the deepest of life’s pains and the highest of life’s blessings with his older brother.

Aa
ron had his moments of dishonor throughout his life. But he had also been an irreplaceable support for his younger brother in the most impossible of circumstances. When Moses was too fearful to face Pharaoh, Yahweh had sent Aaron to help him. When Moses fled to the desert for forty years, Aaron stayed behind with his brethren in Egypt to receive Moses back into their fold. When Moses was incapable of being a spokesman for Yahweh because of his stuttering and slow speech, Aaron became his mouthpiece, speaking for him to both Israel and Pharaoh with eloquence and sure tongue. Aaron had even participated in a miracle or two at the directions of Moses.

Aaron’s weaker moral constitution had failed at Sinai when he allowed the Israelites to make the golden calf, and later when he challenged Moses’
authority at Kadesh. But a lifetime of love, support, and obedience could not be invalidated or dismissed because of a few lapses of character so germane to human existence. Forgiveness was more pertinent than failure.

Moses,
Joshua, and Eleazer wept freely for the loss of a beloved brother, father, and high priest.

They buried
Aaron on Mount Hor.

Moses turned to Joshua and said, “The forty years are fulfilled. It is time to
enter Canaan and claim our inheritance.”

It had been six years since Arisha first found her way as a fugitive to the mighty megaliths of Gilgal Rephaim. She had collapsed inside the maze of concentric stone circles of the mysterious astrological mound, and had been discovered by one of the priests tending to the holy site.

She was brought to
the village hidden away in a cavern deep below the surface. It was at least a thousand feet wide by her best guess and there was a large lake of glassy pure water at its edge. At first it reminded her of the grotto at Banias and she was restless with bad memories. But she soon learned that it was a very different community and there were no satyrs here. They called themselves the
Nachashim
.

They
were the Clan of the Serpent.

They performed the
rites and mysteries of Ophiolatreia, or snake liturgy, which included the breeding and handling of snakes, as well as the submissive worship of the Serpent god, Nachash, from whence they drew their name.

In
many important ways, they were the opposite of her origins. The Seirim were a hairy people like their ancestor Esau, the Nachashim were mostly hairless and pale skinned. The Seirim were passionate and nature oriented. These were colder, reptilian and dwelt among the rocks and the underground. The Seirim worshipped Azazel the hot-blooded goat god of the desert, but the Nachashim worshipped Nachash, the cunning cool serpent of the underworld.

These outward differences had comforted Arisha
at first. She had been so damaged by the betrayal of her people that she wanted to start over in a world as far away from them as possible. But for all the differences between the two people groups, there were some things that just did not change in creation. And male nature was one of them. From that she could not get away.

As soon as she was brought to
the clan, she learned that there was no king or leader. It was an egalitarian community of about four hundred people. They all lived together in the one large cavern with spring fed lake. They did not believe in individual ownership. They shared all things in common, such as living quarters, food, and even each other. They even slept all together in the cavern, like a bed of snakes would. Thus, there were no families with couples as parents, but rather, the young were taken care of in one group by volunteers in turn.

They prided themselves on being different from the other peoples of Canaan who were led by kings and queens and other elitist rulers that always
eliminated equality and created a caste distinction between the poor and the rich. But not so in “The Nest,” as they called their utopian community.

They had accepted Arisha
into their midst under the condition that she shave her body of all hair and adopt their ways. She readily agreed and settled into her new identity.

B
ut she had learned quickly that all such claims to equality were a façade, because the priesthood that was responsible for the religious cult of the Nest was in reality a privileged class that ruled the people in the name of the people. The god Nachash was the ultimate authority over the Nest and the priestly class were his enforcers.

Someone always rules
the community.

Arisha had gone along with it all at first, absorbing her identity into the commune, but eventually, she could not abide the “special attention” she was getting from the men who would be lined up to use her for their satisfactions instead of
“equal access” to other women. Equality was a lie to justify the redistribution of power from those who had more to those who had less.

Her unwanted attention had resulted in several miscarriages and abortions, the first of which had been an abominable experience she taught herself to forget. But one
never fully forgets such things.

She started to stand up for herself and would not submit
to the “greater will of the Nest,” as the manipulators would call it. She got a reputation for having a fiery independent will and a selfish loner disposition. Individual worth was discouraged in favor of the will of the Nest. She became so defiant that one of the priests who knew her occasionally called her “Rahab” after the sea dragon of chaos. He saw it made her even more incorrigible, so he stopped it.

Arisha was now twenty years old.

She was preparing
food to eat in her special area that she used for herself, away from the community. It was one of those days where she sought to be left alone with her thoughts. But this was not to be for her today. She heard the sound of footsteps approaching.

She peeked out from behind the rock over in
an empty area of the cavern. She was shocked to see a dozen men arriving behind the high priest Tannin, whose name meant “dragon.”

She knew immediately what her fate was to be, and she lashed out with the food knife in her hand, slashing the first man to grab her. He screamed and pulled back his arm, a large gash across the forearm pulsing blood out onto the ground.

But it was futile. She would not be able to protect herself against the lot of them.

They quickly surrounded her and subdued her.
One punched her in the stomach and she doubled over in pain.

Tannin yelled out, “Stop! Do not damage her.”

She struggled to get loose as he came near to her. But she was held in place by a dozen hands.

Tannin got right up into her face and stared
down into her eyes with a reptilian grin. She could see his teeth that were all filed to fangs. His skin was scaly and so dry it was cracking and peeling. The priests of the Nest were humans, but they engaged in sorcery with drugs to try to turn themselves into snakelike beings. The result was ugly mutations of ophidian humanoids.

She spit in his face. His eyes blinked, but he did not flinch. Instead he
responded by sticking a forked tongue out of his mouth to lick her face with relish.

He smacked his lips with an erotic rush and said, “Tonight, you will
make a fine sacrifice.”

This evening was the annual sacrifice to the Serpent Nachash. Gilgal Rephaim was not the only place of serpent worship in Canaan. In fact, Ophiolatreia was a dominant force throughout the entire land, illustrating an underlying influence of that god behind the pantheon of deities that ruled in their various territories. Even the mightiest of gods gave homage to the Serpent.

Thus, this evening, the gods
of the area, Ashtart, Chemosh, and Molech would be at the ceremony that would include a visit from Nachash himself.

And for that visit, six female citizens must be offered in sacrifice in order to protect the community
for the coming year and appease the god’s taste for blood.

Tonight,
Arisha was to be one of those six victims. She was rounded up with the other five women in a pen and forced to wear white garments as a symbol of purity. It seemed to her a mockery of the truth, since none of them were pure, especially her.

Everything was lies
. Everything. She did not know what the truth was anymore. She had escaped from Banias after being made a nymph to be offered up for the satisfaction of satyrs and other men’s lusts. And now she was being made an offering to a serpent god to satisfy his bloodlust.

It had felt to her as if she lived in a world that was unnatural. It
made her long for an impossible purity of being. These malevolent gods made her wonder if there was a good and loving divinity anywhere on the earth. Or was existence just a brutal form of suffering until one died and entered the oblivion of Sheol?

She did
not have the luxury of pondering such self-reflective thoughts anymore. They would soon be all over. The priests led the white robed women, followed by the rest of the community out to the megaliths of Gilgal Rephaim.

The community spread out around the vast stone circle and chanted poetic verse that sounded like
soft hissing. At the front of the crowd, Arisha noticed the two gibborim kings of the area, Og of Bashan and Sihon of Heshbon. They too were here in obeisance to the Serpent.

The parade of priests led the women through the stone openings toward the circular tumulus in the center.

As she tread the pathway, Arisha considered in her mind the meaning of the serpent in Canaan. It was a powerful divine figure that symbolized many things. Its elongated nature and phallic shape made it a sexual symbol of fertility. Its shedding of skin symbolized eternal life. The image of a snake eating its tail in the form of a circle was called the Ouroboros and was a picture of the cosmos. It was a symbol of kingship, borrowed from the uraeus on the crowns of Egyptian Pharaohs.

But
the serpent was also a universal symbol of both healing and wisdom, as it was known that the Serpent had given words of wisdom and maturity to the first humans in the garden paradise so long ago. He had helped to free humankind from the unfair controlling tyranny of the Creator who sought to keep mankind ignorant and subservient to his capricious whims.

But the snake was
also the guardian of the tree of life in that paradise and the chthonic regions below.

All these and
other symbolic meanings surrounded serpent mythology with an aura of divinity and greatness shared by few other beings. But Arisha was not seeing that greatness as they lined up around the tumulus. She was seeing the fangs behind the elegance, the poison behind the beauty, the lies behind the split tongue, and the death behind the smooth silence.

But her thinking was interrupted by the presence of the visiting gods, Ashtart, Molech and Chemosh. They were all lined up before the women. For the first time ever,
Arisha had the opportunity to see these beings up close. She had always seen them at a distance. But at this closeness, she noticed something she had never seen before. She could see their eight feet tall powerful frames, their shining skin of subtle scales, and their ophidian eyes of lapis lazuli blue.

But she could also see the features of their faces, and the face that caused her shock was Ashtart. Her whole past came flooding into her mind as she stared up at the great Watcher god looking down upon her and the others.

The reason for this was that she recognized that face. She had seen it before. She had studied it. It was the face of Azazel from the statue of Banias. Though Ashtart was a female, she knew at that moment it was really Azazel in disguise.

She did
not know how to react. Ashtart noticed her stare and became curious.

S
he tried to appear more naïve than she was.

Suddenly, the sounds of eerie music echoed through the stone walls as musicians played to introduce the being rising from the tumulus:
Nachash.

He was not a formidable looking divinity. He was not muscular like
Molech or handsome like Ashtart. Only his six wings spread out behind him added a sense of glory lost on his rather undeveloped and ugly form. But his voice carried authority, he shined like burnished bronze, and the other gods seemed to defer to him with respect.

The truth was
, Nachash was a seraph, one of the highest beings in Yahweh’s heavenly court. And in that court, his ordained role was to be “the satan,” the accuser or adversary who challenged Yahweh and his law.

On earth he went by
another name, Mastema.

He was not physically imposing, but
he was diabolically cunning and a master of legal manipulation. His primeval act of temptation in Eden had plunged the world into chaos and emboldened the mighty two hundred Watchers from Yahweh’s divine council to rebel. One of the leaders of that band of rebels was the mighty Azazel, who now stood before Nachash.

But all this,
Arisha could not know. She could only discern that Ashtart was the Azazel she had worshipped back in Banias, and that all was not as it seemed.

The gods conferred amongst themselves. The six women were lined up in a row for sacrifice.

And then a bizarre creature was carried on a stretcher from out of the tumulus. Four priests held the stretcher on poles and brought it right up to the women. Some of them backed up against the wall in fright.

It was hideous. But
Arisha was not as squeamish as the others. She tried to get a closer look.

She
knew what it was. It was an Ob, a serpent seer. Obs were mediums that could talk to the dead and see the future. They were sensitive to the spirit world and were often called upon to validate the sacrifice.

The Ob was a human being that sought to transform into a serpent, through a combination of sorcery and natural body modification. This one had its arms and legs cut off so that it was only a
naked body that could wriggle and writhe like a snake. It lay on its stomach facing forward. It was bald with a white clammy skin underbelly, and a head and torso with scales. But the scales were not completely covering the body like a snake, but rather they were in sporadic patches all around, as if it was a magic spell that had failed. Its eyes were reptilian-slivered pupils and its tongue was split and three times the length of a normal human tongue.

Like a snake, it defecated at will, and another priest would come and clean up the feces behind it on the stretcher.