Joshua Valiant (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (31 page)

Aerial view of Gilgal Rephaim

But the connections are all there between a cult of the serpent in the land of the Rephaim and Bashan, the place of the serpent. Thus, the Serpent Clan of Gilgal Rephaim, from which Rahab the prostitute originates in
Joshua Valiant
.

Winged Fiery Serpents

In
Joshua Valiant
I tell the infamous story of Nehushtan, the bronze serpent, from Numbers 21. As Moses leads the people of Israel through the Negeb desert on their way to enter the Transjordan, the Israelites grumble and complain yet again about their lack of food and water. Yahweh responds by sending serpents to punish them.

Numbers 21:6–9

Then the
Lord
sent
fiery serpents
among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.
7
And the people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the
Lord
and against you. Pray to the
Lord
, that he take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.
8
And the
Lord
said to Moses, “Make a
fiery serpent
and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.”
9
So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live.

The Hebrew word for “fiery serpents” used in this text is
seraph
, which is the same word used for the winged serpentine guardians of Yahweh’s throne in passages like Isaiah 6:2.
[28]
There are several different Hebrew words that can be used for serpents, so the choice of this word here should clue us into the deliberations of the writer. While the notion of “fiery” can refer to the venomous sting of a desert snake such as a viper or cobra, there may be more going on here than a mere poetic description of snake bites.

The picture of
seraph
snakes having wings shows up in two other passages from Isaiah.

Isaiah 14:29

29
Rejoice not, O Philistia, all of you, that the rod that struck you is broken, for from the serpent’s root will come forth an adder, and its fruit will be a
flying fiery serpent
.

Isaiah 30:6–7

6
An oracle on the beasts of the Negeb. Through a land of trouble and anguish, from where come the lioness and the lion, the adder and the
flying fiery serpent…
7
Egypt’s help is worthless and empty; therefore I have called her “
Rahab
who sits still.”

Both of these prophecies against Philistia and Egypt respectively use the idea of a “flying fiery serpent” as a poetic description of the evil or dangerous nature of those nations. Though they are not required to be literal existing creatures for the prophecy to be legitimate, they nevertheless use the same Hebrew reference to fiery serpents that was used in the more historical passage of Numbers describing the “fiery serpents.”

Additionally
, the Isaiah 30 passage describes these flying fiery serpents as the beasts of the Negeb, the same location for the fiery serpents of Numbers 21.

Jacob
Milgrom argues that the bronze or copper snake that Moses put on the pole was a winged serpent. He concludes this from the link of the Hebrew
seraph
to the Egyptian
uraeus
serpent.

Egypt is the home for images of winged serpents. For example, the arms on the throne of Tutankhamen consist of two wings of a four-winged snake (uraeus), which rise vertically from the back of the seat. Indeed, the erect cobra, or uraeus, standing on its coil is the symbol of royalty for the pharaoh and the gods throughout Egyptian history. Winged uraei dating from the Canaanite period have been found, proving that the image of the winged serpent was well known in ancient Israel.
[29]

Schol
ar Karen Randolph Joines adds more to the Egyptian origin of this motif, by explaining that the usage of serpent images to defend against snakes was also an exclusively Egyptian notion without evidence in Canaan or Mesopotamia.
[30]
And Moses came out of Egypt.

But the
important element of these snakes being flying serpents or even dragons with mythical background is reaffirmed in highly respected lexicons such as the
Brown, Driver, Briggs Hebrew Lexicon
.
[31]

The final clause in Isaiah 30:7 likening Egypt’s punishment to the sea dragon Rahab lying dead in the desert is a further mythical serpentine connection.
[32]

But the Bible and Egypt are not the only places where we read of flying serpents in the desert. Hans Wildberger points out Assyrian king Esarhaddon’s description of flying serpents in his tenth campaign to Egypt in the seventh century B.C.

“A distance of 4 double-hours I marched over a territory… (there were) two-headed serpents [whose attack] (spelled) death—but I trampled (upon them) and marched on. A distance of 4 double-hours in a journey of 2 days (there were)
green [animals] [Tr.: Borger: “serpents”] whose wings were batting
.”
[33]

The Greek historian Herodotus wrote of “sacred” winged serpents and their connection to Egypt in his
Histories
:

There is a place in Arabia not far from the town of Buto where I went to learn about the
winged serpents
. When I arrived there, I saw innumerable bones and backbones of serpents... This place… adjoins the plain of
Egypt
.
Winged serpents
are said to fly from Arabia at the beginning of spring, making for
Egypt
... The serpents are like water-snakes.
Their wings are not feathered but very like the wings of a bat
. I have now said enough concerning creatures that are sacred.
[34]

The notion of flying serpents as mythical versus real creatures appearing in the Bible is certainly debated among scholars, but this debate gives certain warrant to the imaginative usage of winged flying serpents appearing in
Chronicles of the Nephilim
.
[35]

Giants in the Land

There are some monsters that I want to address here that are not as mythical as the ones we have looked at, but they are nevertheless as demonic and worthy of comment. These are the giants of Canaan: the Rephaim and the Anakim.

A cursory reading of the conquest narrative certainly results in the discovery of giants in the land of Canaan, but a closer look at the sacred text brings out just how important they are t
o the cosmic storyline of the Wars of Yahweh.

In
Joshua Valiant
we see two kings of the Transjordan that must be overcome in order for Israel to secure a safe entry point into the Cisjordan to begin their conquest of the Promised Land: Sihon of Heshbon, and Og of Bashan.

These are not fictional characters. They are from the text. But Sihon is not described as a giant, only as a mighty king of the area
whose colonial ambitions were so well known that he had a ballad penned for him about his subduing of the Moabites under his power. A ballad that finds its way into the novel as well.

Numbers 21:26–29

For Heshbon was the city of Sihon the king of the Amorites, who had fought against the former king of Moab and taken all his land out of his hand, as far as the Arnon.
27
Therefore the ballad singers say, “Come to Heshbon, let it be built; let the city of Sihon be established.
28
For fire came out from Heshbon, flame from the city of Sihon. It devoured Ar of Moab, and swallowed the heights of the Arnon.
29
Woe to you, O Moab! You are undone, O people of Chemosh! He has made his sons fugitives, and his daughters captives, to an Amorite king, Sihon.

Last of the Rephaim: Og of Bashan

Og of Bashan is another Biblical story in need of a closer look. The Bible says that he reigned in the northern region of the Transjordan and ruled out of Ashtaroth over sixty cities of Bashan (Deut. 3:4; Josh. 9:10).

These two kings, Og and Sihon are depicted in the
Bible as the enemies to overthrow in the Transjordan, so God gives Israel their victory over them (Num 32:33; Deut 1:1–8).

But then the text adds an important note about Og. It says that he was the “last of the Rephaim,” a species we have seen elsewhere to be giants (
Deut. 2:10–11, 20–23). It says that his territory, Bashan was called “The land of the Rephaim” for its population of giants (Deut. 3:13). It says his bed, or sarcophagus was at least thirteen and a half feet long. His size was so impressive that the bed had become a museum trophy piece in Israel years later.

Deuteronomy 3:11

11
(For only Og the king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. Behold, his bed was a bed of iron. Is it not in Rabbah of the Ammonites? Nine cubits (13.5 feet) was its length, and four cubits (6 feet) its breadth, according to the common cubit.)

In the original Hebrew, Og’s “land of the Rephaim” is an ambiguous wording that could equally be translated as “the ‘hell’ of the Rephaim.”
[36]
Bashan was a deeply significant spiritual location to the Canaanites and the Hebrews. And as the
Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible
puts it, Biblical geographical tradition agrees with the mythological and cultic data of the Canaanites of Ugarit that “the Bashan region, or a part of it, clearly represented ‘Hell’, the celestial and infernal abode of their deified dead kings,” the Rephaim.
[37]

Mount Hermon was in Bashan, and Mount Hermon was a location in the Bible that was linked to the Rephaim and ruled over by Og (Josh. 12:1–5), but it was also the legendary location where the Sons of God were considered to have come to earth and had sexual union with the daughters of men to produce the giant Nephilim.
[38]

As I explained in previous Chronicles’ appendices, the Rephaim have an extra-Biblical tradition in Ugarit that is also tied to the land of Canaan. One of the corpus of texts unearthed at Ugarit just north of Canaan within the last century was what came to be known as the Rephaim Texts. These texts and others talked about a
marzih
feast that involved royalty traveling distances in their chariots to participate, wherein the “most ancient Rephaim of the netherworld” are summoned to assemble as the “council of the Ditanu, (or Didanu).”
[39]

As Ugaritic scholars Levine and Tarragon sum up, “the Rephaim are long departed kings (and heroes) who dwell in the netherworld, which is located deep beneath the mountains of that far-away eastern region where the
Ugaritians originated.”
[40]

There are two places in the Bible that hint at the Rephaim being warrior kings brought down to Sheol in similar language to the Ugaritic notion of the Rephaim warrior kings in the underworld:

Is. 14:9

Sheol
beneath is stirred up

to meet you when you come;

it rouses the
shades [The Hebrew word
Rephaim
]

to greet you,

all who were leaders of the earth;

it raises from their
thrones

all who were
kings of the nations.

Ezek. 32:21

They shall fall amid those who are slai
n by the sword… The
mighty chiefs [
Rephaim
] shall speak of them, with their helpers, out of the midst of
Sheol
: “They have come down, they lie still, the uncircumcised, slain by the sword.”

Hebrew scholar, Michael S. Heiser concludes about this connection of Rephaim with dead warrior kings in Sheol and Bashan: