Noah Primeval (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (31 page)

Og of Bashan (Deut. 3:10-11)

The ubiquitous presence of giants throughout the narrative of the Old Testament is no small matter. When God commanded the people of Israel to enter Canaan and devote certain of those peoples to complete destruction (Deut. 20:16-17), it is no coincidence that most of these peoples we have already seen were connected in some way to the Anakim giants, and Joshua’s campaign explicitly included the elimination of the Anakim/Sons of Anak giants. Could these giants that were from the lineage of the Nephilim
(who were the offspring of the Sons of God) be the very Seed of the Serpent that would be at enmity with the promised messianic Seed of the Woman (Gen. 3:15)? You will have to read the sequels to
Noah Primeval
to find out.

Appendix C

Leviathan

In my novel
Noah Primeval
, I have a sea dragon called “Leviathan” that is crucial to the plot of the story. While it is a monster of the waters, a symbol of chaos, it nevertheless is providentially used by Elohim and tamed for his own purposes. I found this character in the pages of the Bible itself and had always been befuddled by its presence. It kept popping up in strange places like the book of Job and the Psalms. Was this a mythical creature in holy writ? Was God’s power over Leviathan as described in Job just a poetic way of saying God is in control and nothing is too powerful for him? I would soon find out that this recurring sea dragon was so much more.

Job 41 is devoted to this strange creature. Here is that chapter in its entirety:

“
Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook

or press down his tongue with a cord?

Can you put a rope in his nose

or pierce his jaw with a hook?

Will he make many pleas to you?

Will he speak to you soft words?

Will he make a covenant with you

to take him for your servant forever?

Will you play with him as with a bird,

or will you put him on a leash for your girls?

Will traders bargain over him?

Will they divide him up among the merchants?

Can you fill his skin with harpoons

or his head with fishing spears?

Lay your hands on him;

remember the battle—you will not do it again!

Behold, the hope of a man is false;

he is laid low even at the sight of him.

No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.

Who then is he who can stand before me?

Who has first given to me, that I should repay him?

Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine.

I will not keep silence concerning his limbs,

or his mighty strength, or his goodly frame.

Who can strip off his outer garment?

Who would come near him with a bridle?

Who can open the doors of his face?

Around his teeth is terror.

His back is made of rows of shields,

shut up closely as with a seal.

One is so near to another

that no air can come between them.

They are joined one to another;

they clasp each other and cannot be separated.

His sneezings flash forth light,

and his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn.

Out of his mouth go flaming torches;

sparks of fire leap forth.

Out of his nostrils comes forth smoke,

as from a boiling pot and burning rushes.

His breath kindles coals,

and a flame comes forth from his mouth.

In his neck abides strength,

and terror dances before him.

The folds of his flesh stick together,

firmly cast on him and immovable.

His heart is hard as a stone,

hard as the lower millstone.

When he raises himself up the mighty are afraid;

A
t the crashing they are beside themselves.

Though the sword reaches him, it does not avail,

nor the spear, the dart, or the javelin.

He counts iron as straw,

and bronze as rotten wood.

The arrow cannot make him flee;

for him sling stones are turned to stubble.

Clubs are counted as stubble;

he laughs at the rattle of javelins.

His underparts are like sharp potsherds;

he spreads himself like a threshing sledge on the mire.

He makes the deep boil like a pot;

he makes the sea like a pot of ointment.

Behind him he leaves a shining wake;

one would think the deep to be white-haired.

On earth there is not his like,

a creature without fear.

He sees everything that is high;

he is king over all the sons of pride.”

As this chapter describes, this is no known species on earth. From the smoke and fire out of its mouth to the armor plating on back and belly, this monster of the abyss was more than a mere example of showcasing God’s omnipotent power over the mightiest of creatures, it was symbolic of something much more. And that much more can be found by understanding Leviathan in its ancient Near Eastern (ANE) and Biblical covenantal background.

In ANE religious mythologies, the sea and the sea dragon were symbols of chaos that had to be overcome to bring order to the universe, or more exactly, the political world order of the myth’s originating culture. Some scholars call this battle
Chaoskampf
—the divine struggle to create order out of chaos.

Hermann Gunkel first suggested in
Creation and Chaos
(1895) that some ANE creation myths contained a cosmic conflict between deity and sea, as well as sea dragons or serpents that expressed the creation of order out of chaos.
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Gunkel argued that Genesis borrowed this idea from the Babylonian tale of Marduk battling the goddess Tiamat, serpent of chaos, whom he vanquished, and out of whose body he created the heavens and earth.
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After this victory, Marduk ascended to power in the Mesopotamian pantheon. This creation story gave mythical justification to the rise of Babylon as an ancient world power most likely in the First Babylonian Dynasty under Hammurabi (1792-1750 B.C.).
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As the prologue of the Code of Hammurabi explains, “Anu, the majestic, King of the Anunnaki, and Bel, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, who established the fate of the land, had given to Marduk, the ruling son of Ea, dominion over mankind, and called Babylon by his great name; when they made it great upon the earth by founding therein an eternal kingdom, whose foundations are as firmly grounded as are those of heaven and earth.”
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The foundation of Hammurabi’s “eternal kingdom” is literarily linked to Marduk’s foundational creation of heaven and earth
.

Later, John Day argued in light of the discovery of the Ugarit tablets in 1928, that Canaan, not Babylonia is the source of the combat motif in Genesis,
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reflected in Yahweh’s own complaint that Israel had become polluted by Canaanite culture.
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In the Baal cycle, Baal battles Yam (Sea) and conquers it, along with “the dragon,” “the twisting serpent,” to be enthroned as chief deity of the Canaanite pantheon.
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Creation accounts were often veiled polemics for the establishment of a king or kingdom’s claim to sovereignty.
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Richard Clifford quotes, “In Mesopotamia, Ugarit, and Israel the
Chaoskampf
appears not only in cosmological contexts but just as frequently—and this was fundamentally true right from the first—in political contexts. The repulsion and the destruction of the enemy, and thereby the maintenance of political order, always constitute one of the major dimensions of the battle against chaos.”
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The Sumerians had three stories where the gods Enki, Ninurta, and Inanna all destroy sea monsters in their pursuit of establishing order. The sea monster in two of those versions, according to Sumerian expert Samuel Noah Kramer, is “conceived as a large serpent which lived in the bottom of the “great below” where the latter came in contact with the primeval waters.”
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The prophet Amos uses this same mythopoeic reference to a serpent at the bottom of the sea as God’s tool of judgment: “If they hide from my sight at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent, and it shall bite them” (Amos 9:3). One Sumerian text,
The Return of Ninurta to Nippur
, refers to “the seven-headed serpent” that must be defeated by the divine Ninurta to illustrate his power to overcome chaos.
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Perhaps the closest comparison with the Biblical Leviathan comes from Canaanite texts at Ugarit as John Day argued. 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 B.C.
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Among the important finds were literary tablets written in multiple ancient languages, which opened the door to a deeper understanding of ancient Near Eastern culture and the Bible. Ugaritic language and culture shares much in common with Hebrew that sheds light on the meaning of things such as Leviathan.

A side-by-side comparison of some Ugaritic religious texts about the Canaanite god Baal with Old Testament passages reveals a common narrative: Yahweh, the charioteer of the clouds, metaphorically battles
with Sea (Hebrew:
yam
) and River (Hebrew:
nahar
), just as Baal, the charioteer of the clouds, struggled with Yam (sea) and Nahar (river), which is also linked to victory over a sea dragon/serpen
t.

Baal fights Sea and River to establish his sovereignty. He wins by drinking up Sea and River, draining them dry, which results in Baal’s supremacy over the pantheon and the Canaanite world order.
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In the second passage, Baal’s battle with Sea and River is retold in other words as a battle with a “dragon,” the “writhing serpent” with seven heads.
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Another Baal text calls this same dragon, “
Lotan
, the wriggling serpent.”
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The Hebrew equivalents of the Ugaritic words
tannin
(dragon) and
lotan
are
tannin
(dragon) and
liwyatan
(Leviathan) respectively.
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The words are etymologically equivalent. Not only that, but so are the Ugaritic words describing the serpent as “wriggling” and “writhing” in the Ugaritic text (
brh
and ‘
qltn
) with the words Isaiah 27 uses of Leviathan as “fleeing” and “twisting” (
bariah
and ‘
aqalaton
).
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Notice the last Scripture in the chart that refers to Leviathan as having multiple heads
just like the Canaanite Leviathan
. Bible scholar Mitchell Dahood argued that in that passage of Psalm 74:12-17 the author implied the seven heads by using seven “you” references to God’s powerful activities surrounding this mythopoeic defeat of Leviathan.
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The Apostle John adapted this seven-headed dragon into his Revelation as a symbol of Satan as well as a chaotic demonic empire (Rev 12:3; 13:1; 17:3). Jewish Christians in the first century carried on this motif in texts such as the
Odes of Solomon
that explain Christ as overthrowing “the dragon with seven heads… that I might destroy his seed
.”
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Thus, the Canaanite narrative of Lotan (Leviathan) the sea dragon or serpent is undeniably employed in Old Testament Scriptures and carried over into the New Testament as well.
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