Abraham Allegiant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 4) (18 page)

Then as quickly as it had fallen upon them it was gone. The funnel cloud retracted to the sky and the storm vanished.

And everything was eerily still.

Except for the cries of pain and misery from human victims throughout the city. Countless thousands were dead, half again as many injured. They were bruised, cut, maimed, and crushed by the debris of mud brick and stone that now lay across the city.

The bridge crossing the river to the Processional Way had collapsed into the river. Some survivors were swimming across the water to get away from the cursed city.

Abram and Mikael ran down from the ridge and helped the dozen or so fleeing refugees to safety on land.

But then Abram noticed something strange. One of the refugees spoke to him, but it was meaningless babbling. Abram thought the poor fellow was in shock and speaking nonsense until he heard another refugee cry out and yell more nonsense into the air. This one sounded different from the other.

As they walked along, helping calm the refugees, he noticed that they all spoke in strange words he had never heard.

“What is going on?” Abram asked Mikael.

“El Shaddai has confused their language so that they may not understand each other’s speech,” he said.

“Why would he do that?”

“To divide their unity and disperse them over the face of the earth.”

And then it came clear to Abram what El Shaddai had done. He would not destroy the world again with water, but he would protect his plan against a world of unified rebellion. All across the city, survivors from various cities were trying to communicate with one another. But because they had miraculously been given different languages, they could not understand one another and could barely help one another.

Mankind was supposed to multiply and fill the earth. But instead they had congregated in this city of Babylon to become one in evil. But with the separation of languages would come a dispersion, a massive separation between peoples that would divide them and spread them abroad over the face of the earth. Diversity would bring chaos and separation, but in a strange way, it would save the world from becoming a whirlpool into a singularity of unstoppable evil.

Abram thought of a play on words and said to Mikael, “It is no longer Babylon the great, the eternal city, but Babel, because there El Shaddai confused the language of all the earth. And from there El Shaddai dispersed them over the face of all the earth.”

But this was not the only consequence that had occurred in heaven and on earth.

In the heavens above the waters, in the very divine council of Yahweh Elohim, the
Bene ha Elohim
, the Sons of God, had returned to surround his chariot again with glory and praise.

The trisagion was pronounced, “Holy, holy, holy, is Yahweh Elohim Almighty. Who was and is and is to come!” Their voices were like the sound of many waters. The Cherubim that upheld the throne chariot expanded their many wings and Yahweh Elohim took his seat as the Ancient of Days.

Before the council stood the rebel Watchers, still naked and awash in human blood and their own excrement, their shame dripping from their members. The satan took his position as their defense attorney across from the enigmatic Son of Man. Normally, Mastema in his role as the satan, was a prosecuting attorney. But in this case, he had become the collective bargainer for this despicable union of corrupt hoodlums.

But there would be no testimony or cross-examination. Today was a summary judgment from on high.

The Son of Man addressed the Watchers on trial, “This day, Yahweh Elohim has given over the peoples of the earth to their depravity. He has divided mankind and has given the nations their inheritance. He has fixed the borders of the people according to the number of the Sons of God, those Watchers who have remained on earth. All of humanity has incorrigibly worshipped false gods, so false gods will be their inheritance.”

Marduk thought to himself
,
Is he actually giving us the nations to rule over? What is the fine print? What is he
not
telling us?

The Son of Man continued, “Yahweh Elohim
has allotted the fallen host of heaven to all the peoples under the whole heaven. Mastema, the satan will be the designated trustee and executor of the inheritance. The nations are your allotment. Divide them amongst yourselves.”

The Watchers were shocked at the concession.

Marduk whispered to the satan, “There are seventy of us, plus some of our fallen angels. I want first choice.”

“Do not worry,” snapped the satan, “You will get yours, Mr. ‘King of the Gods.’”

He said that title with sarcastic exaggeration. Marduk could crush him, but the satan had all the legal power to cast Marduk into Tartarus if he made a wrong move. Tartarus was the lowest most impenetrable region of Sheol the underworld.

Then the Son of Man said, “But Yahweh Elohim’s portion will be his people. Jacob will be his heritage. He will have a people of his own inheritance.”

There it is,
thought Marduk.
The qualification. The tiny little print at the bottom of the covenant tablet that indicated Yahweh Elohim’s selfish grab for glory. But wait a minute. He only gets one nation of people?

The satan said what Marduk and everyone else was thinking, “Who exactly is Jacob? And what will be his people’s allotted heritage of land?”

The Son of Man said, “That will be revealed in due time. They will be a people of my choosing, a remnant who will inherit the land that they will ultimately conquer.”

“That is not fair!” squealed the satan. “You are going to give out an entitlement of land and then just take it away when you want it? That is not a fair share!”

The Seraphim bellowed out with their many-faceted voices, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell within!”

“Oh, please,” griped the satan. “Now, you are contradicting yourself. First, you allot to us peoples and lands, and then you claim
ownership over it all?” He knew full well that was not a contradiction. Their inheritance was no more than a temporary loan.

“And why will you not tell us who this Jacob is? What are you trying to hide? Do you have some dirty little secret you are afraid we will find out and use to discredit you?”

The Seraphim said one last thing, “Thus saith the Lord,” and Mastema and the entire group of fallen Watchers were sucked back down into a new funnel cloud that deposited them, not back in Babylon, but back on their Mount Hermon in Canaan. It was here where they would begin the arduous task of parceling out their allotted territories under the authority of the seventy Sons of God.

• • • • •

Nimrod had picked himself out of the debris of the fallen tower. He saw all around him that the golem army of Stone Ones that secured his power over the earth had been smashed into piles of rock. Their spells were forever useless now, locked up in the jaws of lifeless boulders.

Most of his astrologers and sorcerers and magicians were dead in the fallout, and everyone around him was now speaking different languages. He could not command those to whom he could not speak or whom he could not understand. There were dozens of different dialects and none of them could understand each other. They would disperse to start a new life all over the earth. There were a mere few hundred citizens whose language he could understand.

Babylon would not be transforming into anything soon. It was decimated; not just structurally and in human lives, but more importantly in essence. It was no longer the center of the world. There would be no mountain of the gods, no golem army.

No more empire.

Nimrod’s cosmos was shattered into a million pieces.

He knew the Creator had cursed him. He had sought to make a name for himself as a Mighty Hunter flaunting in the face of El Shaddai himself. He sought to make a tower that reached to the sky, linking heaven and earth. That tower collapsed. The city would take decades to repopulate and rebuild the ruins.

But it was cursed and he would not be rebuilding anything.

His queen Semiramis and son Mardon were still alive, which felt like the penultimate punishment to Nimrod.

Even Marduk had abandoned him. He was nowhere to be found. The mightiest king of the gods would no longer protect Nimrod.

He had lost everything but his life.

There was nothing worse for a great ruler than being demoted in rank. If he had died in the disaster, he would be remembered as a great ruler who went out in a blaze of glory. To be killed at the height of one’s power would forever burn that reputation into history like a kiln-fired brick. But to lose everything and go from world potentate to petty victim was the cruelest of all humiliations.

This El Shaddai knew what he was doing.

But Nimrod would not give El Shaddai the pleasure of committing suicide. Nimrod would fight back. He would rebuild his forces and then he would set his heart upon one and only one goal for the rest of his life: To hunt down and destroy El Shaddai’s Chosen Seed, Abram. This despicable tool of a reprehensible divinity had escaped Nimrod’s grasp when he was born, defied Nimrod’s power and glory when he survived the furnace of fire, and had become the curse that brought the downfall of Nimrod’s very own kingdom of Babylon.

Abram must die.

Twenty-five years passed since the confusion of tongues at the tower of Babel and the dispersion of the peoples. The world changed drastically. The people of many tongues spread out over all the earth and returned to their communities of homogenous language. The tower of one world governance collapsed into seventy different nations whose divided tongues heralded a variety of diverse cultures, many of them at war with one another.

Unfortunately for Abram, twenty-five years had passed and nothing eventful had happened to him. His brother Nahor and the rest of his family eventually moved up to be with them and Haran became the family home, but nothing dramatic had occurred. He had been waiting for God’s direction, but it never came. He felt he was being hung out to dry like a piece of laundry.
Why would El Shaddai do those fantastic spectacular things in Babylon, and promise me he was going to tell me where to go, and then never contact me again? I thought I was his Chosen Seed.

And that made the irony even worse, because in order to bear seed, one must be fertile. Unfortunately, that was not something El Shaddai saw fit to bestow upon Sarai.

She had been barren these twenty-five years. Abram was now seventy-five, and Sarai, sixty-five.

Was all of it just an hallucination? Even the events of the past were fading from his memory.

That overweening confidence of his was cracking.

Sarai had told him that was probably the point of it. That he needed to have less faith in himself and more faith in El Shaddai before he would accomplish his purpose.

But that was not comforting when you were already seventy-five years old, living an anonymous life in a small out of the way town in the middle of nowhere, with no children and no inheritance.

His father Terah had found his way up to Haran after the Babel incident. When the earthquake had hit, Terah was right in the middle of the avalanche of brickwork from the Tower. He had survived it, but when he removed himself from the rubble he discovered his entire army of Stone Ones had been decimated. He knew that this was the main reason he was protected from Nimrod’s wrath all those years; because they were bidden by the sorcery to obey Terah, not the king.

But now with the Stone Ones gone, there was nothing holding Nimrod back from punishing Terah for all his foolish errors through the years. He knew his future was not hopeful if he stayed around. So he immediately left before Nimrod pulled himself from the rubble.

Nimrod had assumed exactly what Terah had hoped, that he was missing because he was buried in the avalanche of earth from the Tower or fallen in the crevice created by the earthquake. There were many bodies missing from that day of terror.

Terah left for the desert with only the tattered clothes on his back and a sword in his hand. But it was freedom. Shackles were released from his soul. Terah was finally freed from slavery to Nimrod and Babylon.

When he found his son and family in Haran, he repented and converted to El Shaddai.

• • • • •

“Where is my beauty queen?” said Abram as he pranced around the house. The family was in the fields working, and Terah was playing with the children in the courtyard. Abram and Sarai had the
house to themselves. And whenever
that
happened, Sarai knew exactly what Abram would be thinking.

“My beauty beauteaous. Beautifulicious, beauticious.”

He stopped to listen. He heard crying in their bedroom.

He opened the door, “What is wrong, beautiful?”

Sarai was on the bed softly crying again. “Must you constantly use that word? Can you not think of a different one to use?”

Even at sixty, she was a gorgeous woman who turned the heads of younger men. Abram thought she was quite possibly El Shaddai’s greatest miracle. He was so absorbed by her beauty; he could not stop telling her through the years. It would come blurting out of him as he watched her cook or clean, or play with the family’s children.

“But you are beautilumptious,” he said.

“Do not call me that! I am ugly!”

Abram’s joyful countenance turned compassionate. He went and held her on the bed.

She said between her tears, “I have no children. I am useless!”

He held her tighter. “Do not say that, Sarai. You are my heart and soul. You are everything to me.”

She would have these episodes every once in a while. Her barrenness would overwhelm her and her feelings of inadequacy would rise up. And when they did, Abram’s use of the word “beautiful” became like a sick joke needling her instead of a compliment encouraging her. She knew he meant nothing but admiration and love for her, but the tragic irony was too much to face in those moments. To her, beauty meant nothing; it was children that gave life and meaning. A family was what she cared about, not her looks. Was this El Shaddai taunting her?

“I am afraid,” she whimpered.

“Of what?”

“That you will grow weary of me,” she said, “and you will find a concubine to fulfill El Shaddai’s promise of an heir.”

Abram sat back, finally getting to the heart of the issue. It was customary law in Mesopotamia that if a woman was barren, a man could legally find a concubine to sire children to maintain the family lineage.

“So that is what this is about,” he said. “You are worried that I might desire another woman.”

“Well, do you?” she sniffled.

“Of course not,” he said with a touch of anger. “Where is your faith, Sarai? El Shaddai has promised us a son.”

“He promised
you
a son,” she retorted. “He may have no use for me.”

Abram said, “Are you saying that El Shaddai is a bad creator? That he created you useless?”

“No.” She sounded like a scolded child.

“So you want me to take our future in my own hands and not trust that El Shaddai will provide as he promised?”

She stopped her crying and was only sniffling now. It was almost instantaneous. She knew he was right.

His words became firm and adoring, “Even if your stunning beauty was all you had, you would not be useless. There is nothing in this world more valuable to me than you.”

She so appreciated his solid strength in her change of life. She knew he had great patience with her dramatic mood swings and hot flashes. Some nights, she would completely kick off all the covers in bed because she was burning up. Which would make him freezing, so he would wake up, politely cover himself, and give her a kiss on her cheek.

He was such a loving strong man. She knew his overuse of the word “beautiful” came from genuine adoration of her and it encouraged her every time she heard it.

And she knew what was coming next.

His hands began to grope her. “I know of some use you can be to your husband right now, for instance.”

She giggled. He began kissing her face in a special way that amused her. He would press his lips against her cheek and give very speedy tiny little kisses so fast it made a funny little noise. He claimed he could give a hundred kisses in thirty seconds.

She smiled and turned to kiss him properly. Passionately.

Hello, there he is again
, she thought to herself as he pressed himself against her.

When they first discovered Sarai was not getting pregnant in their early years, Abram would use that as an excuse to have more sex. “Well, honey, that is why we need to have sex every night,” he would tease. “Sometimes, twice a night. God just wants us to try more often.”

He is a horny little toad
, she would think. She did not really have the drive he had. In fact, she did not seem to have any drive at all, which bothered her because she loved him so truly and deeply. She thought maybe something was wrong with her. But she loved to make him happy, and she knew it took so little of her time and effort that it would be foolish to deprive him. It would be like kicking a dog. But instead, she drew comfort from the oneness she would feel when he was inside her. And so instead, she had a happy little puppy that would do anything for her, and was always trying to lick her.

After a few years, when they realized she was barren, he would try to comfort her, “If we have more sex, it gives El Shaddai more chances to perform his miracle.” That one was a little silly, but she patronized him just the same.

But he always had a way of surprising her. She would be completely without interest in anything sexual. He would start wooing her. She would respond for his sake, and suddenly out of nowhere, his elegant wonderful hands would sweep over her body, caress her erogenous zones, and before she knew it, she was flying above the heavens and the earth in delirious pleasure. He always thought of her first and would often tell her, “Half of my pleasure is hearing your pleasure.”

As the years went on, his drive decreased somewhat with age. Down from every day to every other day, to every three days. Now, he could go for as long as a week. But eventually, she would see his beady little eyes gleaming at her like a hungry wolf. And she knew,
It is loving time
.

She knew it was a man’s way of knowing he was loved. They were so simple, so predictable, so basic. Which was why withholding it was cruelty and abuse. She never did. And he always respected her wishes, when sick or truly too tired. He would never use her compliance for selfish exploitation.

She, on the other hand, was a woman, and had so many changing needs and particularities even she lost track of how complex she was. But she gave him kudos for his efforts at trying.

But they were so tight because the only thing they had in the whole wide world was each other. True, they had El Shaddai, but even El Shaddai himself said that he was not enough for humanity’s need for community. We needed each other. When Adam was without sin and with El Shaddai in the Garden, they walked in perfect communion. But even in that perfect pastoral paradise, El Shaddai said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” One would think that El Shaddai would not consider the man to be alone if he was with his Creator. But he did. And that is why he made the woman out of his side, to be his
helper equal to him.

Sarai knew that Adam was thinking of a lot more than “bone of my bone” when he first saw the luscious naked form of his wife Eve.

“Uhhh,” she groaned in surprise pleasure. He had done it again. Abram had brought her out of her melancholy thoughts into his sensual experience of love.

She wrapped her legs around him and they became one again before their Maker.

And suddenly, their Maker was standing above them.

“Abram.”

Sarai screamed. Abram jumped off her and she pulled the sheets to cover herself.

Abram looked up at the figure in the room and knew immediately who it was.

“Mal’ak Yahweh,” he blurted out. The Angel of Yahweh. It was the same figure Abram had met in Babel. It was El Shaddai in earthly form.

Abram now covered himself up.

El Shaddai chuckled. “You are not Adam and Eve, you know. No need to be ‘naked and ashamed’ before me. You think I have not seen every lovemaking session you have ever had? I created sex.”

Abram’s head tilted.
I guess he is right
.

Sarai calmed down. Cannot argue with your Maker.

“My Lord and God, forgive us,” said Abram. “You just gave us a shock with your — unconventional choice of timing.”

“There is a closer link to sexuality and spirituality than you may realize,” said El Shaddai. “But you are right, I have kept you in the dark a bit.”

“Why are you here now, Lord?”

He said to Abram,
“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Sarai was still staring with her mouth agape and eyes of shock. A million things were running through her mind, not the least of which was how on earth a nation could come from her barren womb,
especially since she was already entering her change of life for women.

“Forgive me, my Lord,” said Abram, “but where would that land be?”

“The land of Canaan.”

“But where in the land of Canaan? That is a big country.”

“You will figure it out,” said El Shaddai.

Abram and Sarai looked at each other, trying to figure it out. And when they looked back, El Shaddai was gone.

They sat there in a moment of silence.

Then Abram announced like a victor in battle, “I have my calling!”

Sarai rolled her eyes and patted him patronizingly on the back.
Men, and their need to accomplish great tasks
.

She stopped and stared ponderously out into nowhere. “How do you think you will become a nation? I am still barren.”

Abram thought for a moment. “Well, my nearest kin is Lot. I have treated him as my own. Maybe he will inherit.”

Abram considered for a moment. Then added, “I sure wish El Shaddai would give us more details. He keeps us guessing in confusion.”