by Brian Godawa
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
When Giants Were Upon the Earth:
The Watchers, Nephilim, & the Biblical Cosmic War of the Seed
For more information and products by the author,
see the back pages of this book or go to:
www.ChroniclesOfTheNephilim.com
www.godawa.com
Gilgamesh Immortal
Chronicles of the Nephilim
Book Three
By Brian Godawa
Copyright ©2012 Brian Godawa
All rights reserved.
2nd Edition
Embedded Pictures Publishing
Los Angeles, California
310.948.0224
www.embeddedpictures.com
Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001.
Dedicated to
the memory of
Sinleqiunninni of Babylonia.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to the wife of my youth, Kimberly, who is my life, my muse, and my grounding; to Gilgamesh scholar Andrew George for his magisterial critical commentary The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic; to Don Enevoldsen for his editing; to Mark Tapson for his helpful comments; to Rich Knox, my agent and lifelong buddy for his insightful theological suggestions; to Shari Risoff my sister-in-law for her excellent proofreading; to Amazon.com that has empowered me as an author; and to the God who is sometimes hidden, but always near, Yahweh Elohim.
This is what really happened to Gilgamesh.
Prologue
In the time before the Great Flood, the War of Gods and Men raged in the desert of Dudael. Methuselah ben Enoch had led the armies of man, undefiled by genetic miscegenation and idol worship, to gloriously defend a last stand of righteousness against the rebel Sons of God called Watchers and their demonic minions of hybrid soldiers and giants called Nephilim. And then the Deluge came and washed the land clean of the corruption that had infested it.
Noah ben Lamech and his family of eight were spared by Elohim in a large box of a boat, along with a multitude of animals, to repopulate the land. Everyone else and every land animal perished. This floating barge carried Noah and his wife Emzara, and their sons, Shem, Japheth, and Ham. Shem’s wife was named Sedeq, Japheth’s wife was Adatanes, and Ham’s wife was Neela. Neela had been pregnant on the ark and had given birth to the first child of the postdiluvian generation. He was named Cush.
The Nephilim were giant preternatural hybrid offspring of the Sons of God and the daughters of men. Though these chimeras died as mortal flesh in the Deluge, their divine element remained as demonic spirits that now roamed the earth with an insatiable hunger to inhabit human flesh.
The lead Watchers, Semjaza and Azazel, and their two hundred defiant Watchers had taken upon themselves the identities of a pantheon of gods to accomplish their scheme. Semjaza became Anu, the high god, and Azazel was Inanna, his consort, the goddess of sex and war.
During the War of Gods and Men, Anu and Inanna, and many of their fellow immortal Watchers were bound by archangels and imprisoned in the heart of the earth until judgment.
But not all of them.
Seventy leaders of the Watchers avoided capture, along with a contingent of their subordinate mal’akim insurgent angels. Just how many, no one was sure.
• • • • •
The ark had come to rest on Mount Nimush near the river Tigris in the mountains of Aratta that are now called Ararat. After the flood waters receded, Noah left the boat and offered a sacrifice of thanksgiving to Elohim known by his covenant name of Yahweh. Yahweh made a covenant with Noah and his descendants to never again kill all life on the land with water as he had done. The rainbow in the sky was his signature of that covenant promise.
Yahweh commissioned Noah with the original calling of Adam, to multiply and fill the land. Yahweh had started all over with a new creation and new human race. Humanity was created in God’s image and as such was a holy representation of that ruler over creation. The first murderer, Cain, had violated that sacred image by slaying his own brother, and thus starting an evil spiral of violence that dragged the original creation into the very depths of Sheol. Now Yahweh gave Noah the charge to uphold the sacred image of God in man through just recompense. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.
After some time, Noah and his family descended from the mountainous region into the Mesopotamian plains to start anew. It was a horrible sight to behold. The waters had washed over everything, burying the once beautiful alluvial terrain in layers of mud and silt. The land was wiped away, leaving a vision of barren ugliness and death. The cities were piles of flooded rubble. The thought of so many people drowned to death was sickening to the stomach. Noah would often say that all of humanity had been turned to clay.
But even so, life had already begun to break through the graveyard before them, as vegetation quickly sprouted from the seedlings buried in the soil. Elohim had created a resilient earth.
The family of Noah began to multiply and fill the earth and to rebuild civilization by passing on their acquired knowledge to their descendants. It would take some time before cities, culture, and technology were reconstructed to the level they were before the Flood, but just like the vegetation, it would return speedily because the seeds of such knowledge lay in their accumulated experience in the world before. City building, irrigation, agriculture, metallurgy, writing, shepherding, would only be temporarily set back as the growing population pushed forward with a hunger to pick up where it had left off.
Noah had been a warrior before the Deluge. But now he started anew and became a tiller of the soil. He felt weaker, and he was not getting any younger. He set his mind to develop agricultural growth that Emzara his wife had explained to him from her time at Erech. His crowning achievement was a vineyard that sported a vast array of grapes for the fermentation of wine.
But in his heart, Noah was not at peace. He felt the depression of despair over him like the shadow of an Anzu thunderbird. He could not shake it. He had been the Chosen One to end the reign of the gods, bring rest to the land, and bear the Seed of Eve that would war with the Seed of the Serpent. He had faced death too many times to count, fought with gods, survived torture, and even looked into the Abyss of Sheol. It was terrifying to experience such frightful extremes, but it was also invigorating. It had charged through his veins like a drug that fueled intense awareness of every living moment. It made him know he was truly alive.
But now, he had been relegated to an old patriarch in the background as his children spread out and built cities and history. Grandpa Noah, Great-Grandpa Noah, Great-Great-Grandpa Noah, and so on seemed now his only identity. He wondered if anyone would even remember his great journey and exploits in the hands of Elohim. And what of the adventures of his Grandfather Methuselah and Enoch the giant killers? Already fading into the mists of legend. He would have to write down what he remembered if he could only get around to it. In the meantime, he kept telling his stories to the little grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren at his feet. In these were
the future.
Emzara was not so sadly disposed. She had been a slave of the priest-king of Erech and had been so long without her husband that she was just happy as a pomegranate to have the rascal finally settled down and with her every day. She determined to make up for the lost years. And that making up was not merely friendly companionship and functional interaction, it was oneness.
Noah was a physically passionate man, but unfortunately, his current melancholy had become an impediment to their union. He had pulled away from her physically and verbally and her heart was breaking. She had led a palace staff, raised a family, defied the gods, but she still found her sense of identity and personal security in being loved by the greatest and truest man she had ever met. If he was in pain, she was in pain. If he was unsettled, she was unsettled.
The thing that concerned her most was his drinking. Noah had begun to imbibe too much of the fruit of the vine to wash away his sorrow. He would get drunk and stumble into their bedroom weeping and fall asleep. At least he never got violent. He was too morally upright for that. She knew he had to wrestle with Elohim in his own way, and she trusted he would find his way as he always did. Noah was not a sinless man, but he was a faithful man, a man who had stood righteous in a wicked generation. And now he was wrestling with his feelings of unworthiness of such a privilege, and inadequacy as patriarch of the new creation.
What concerned her as much as Noah’s drunkenness was her grandson Cush’s oddity. He had been born to Neela and Ham. The firstborn of the new world. He had come out normal and healthy enough. But as he grew up, she sensed a difference in him. He was not like all the other grandchildren or great-grandchildren that were multiplying. He was a bit tall for his age, and had sparkling blue eyes. He was a little rascal who always seemed to get into trouble with his curiosity. But it was not the curiosity of a naïve child. It seemed cold, detached, and calculating. One time Cush sat on the edge of a river bank watching with intense interest as another child was drowning not a few cubits off the bank. He did not run for help, he did not yell for help. He simply watched the child gasping and flailing as the other children were screaming for someone who could swim to help the poor thing.
As he got older, Cush became more distant from the family. He was the first to leave the greater tribe and start a new people of his own. The first of his cities was called Kish as a self-tribute alteration of his own name. It was called “the first kingship that came down from heaven” after the Flood.
But Cush was ambitious and travelled to the south to help rebuild the other cities wiped away by the Flood, including Erech. When one of his children had been born a giant he secreted him off to protect Cush’s own identity as a Nephilim born of the union of the god Anu with Neela. Neela had never told a soul that she had been raped by Anu and that the child in her womb on the ark was its diabolical seed. She was too afraid.
Since Cush was not a giant, the thought had not occurred to anyone that he was anything other than Ham’s offspring. Only Emzara had asked digging questions that Neela barely escaped with her half-truth answers. The Watcher gods had achieved their goal of suppressing the giantism as a recessive gene that would only articulate in succeeding generations. Their plans of conquest were not over yet. Neela knew none of this. She was simply a violated and damaged woman who hid her shame from her tribe.
But the dishonor of Cush was surpassed by the horror of Emzara’s own son, Ham.
Before the Flood, Ham was born and raised within the pagan world of Erech because Emzara had been captured and enslaved when she was pregnant from Noah. Ham had been taken from her, renamed Canaanu, and bred to be a priest of Inanna. His head was elongated according to royal custom under the pressure of wooden slats; he was shorn of all hair from special herbal concoctions; and he had been tattooed with the mark of Inanna that would prove a regret the rest of his life. He looked strangely unlike his own brethren and felt even less like them. He never truly fit in.
Though he repented and embraced his true father in Noah when he was rescued from the city, Ham had always harbored a grudge against the man that was not there to protect him from the corruption of evil. Ham had converted to Noah’s god Elohim, a god who saved him and his immediate family, but had drowned every other living thing in the land to accomplish that elective purpose. How was this any different from Anu’s wrath, Inanna’s capriciousness, or the oppressive tyranny of the other gods of the pantheon? He had lost more than a dozen close friends and confidents from the palace and temple. These were not cruel or evil people to him. They were innocent. They were born into their position just as he had been. And now they too were gone, and he felt all alone in a family that sought to care for him, but ultimately did not understand him. He wished his mother had never taught him about his past. He wished he had just been completely separated from her to spare him the tension of two opposing worlds in his soul. He wished he had just been drowned with all his friends.
But he was not drowned. And his contempt for his pathetic father and doting mother grew with each passing year. He saw Noah’s increasing drunkenness and weak resignation to be the worst form of cowardice. Ham considered his father unworthy to lead their growing clan as patriarch. Whatever heroic deeds Noah may have done before the Deluge were now but distant memories, phantoms of legend that meant nothing to a new generation that had to move forward into a progressive future of change. Their task was a monumental one. They had to carve, hack, and dig their way through a harsh new world sprouting from the clay and mud of the old. Noah was a symbol of that old clay world, but he would not abdicate his leadership to make way for bolder progressive visions.
In order for the collective to advance, Ham thought, Noah must be deposed. Who else would have the forward looking ideas to carry them into the future? Who else would have the courage and the power to bring change? He remembered Anu’s intent of fundamentally transforming humankind. That was what they still needed: Hope, change, transformation. Not the old ways of thinking.
Emzara determined to help shake Noah out of his depression. It crushed her to see him so sad and dispirited of late. She knew it was bad because he had even lost his sexual drive. He was a hearty man who worked hard, fought hard, and played hard. He often said that his favorite place to be in the whole world was wrapped in her legs on their marriage bed. Of course increasing age had brought with it diminished capacity, but he still hungered for her, just a little less as his body became less responsive. He would often tell her she was lucky he was not a young two hundred-year-old anymore, and that it must be Elohim’s way of protecting her from exhaustion. But of late, he had not advanced upon her. She felt as if his wine was another woman stealing his vitality and smirking at her.
So she resolved that tonight, she was going to surprise him with an offer that was too delicious to ignore. She never forgot that his favorite dress had always been a bright red dye linen dress from Egypt she had procured when they were younger. It would drive him wild with desire the way the folds fell across her curves. It was long gone now, so she set about carefully recreating it from the cloth supplies they had accumulated. She used red dye made from a madder plant and stitched together a very flimsy garment that she was sure would please his starving eyes with titillation. Her body had declined in its beauty with her age, but his love for her had filled in the gaps. A little heavier make up and some bold jewelry would make him putty in her hands. But she would not manipulate him. She would fulfill his every desire.
She made his favorite meal: Steak from a steer’s flank, fresh bread, onions and fruit, topped off with a gourd of wine. He was a simple man with simple needs and easily pleased.
When Noah stumbled into their tent from a day in the fields, her spirit deflated. He had been drinking, and more heavily than usual. He could barely stand up and almost took down the whole table of food when he caught himself from falling to the ground.
He saw the food, looked up at Emzara, and blurted out, “You are so — gorgia — gorgiaya — gorge...” He was t
rying to say the word gorgeous.
Emzara started to cry. She did not know what else she could do, what else she could be for him.
Noah noticed her tears and gurgled, “Oh, do not worry, I may be jrunk, but I can still get it… I can still get it, uh, get it going. Do not you worry, you little love angel, you.”
Noah started to tear off his clothes, which made him stumble more. He finished off his gourd of wine and threw it to the ground.
Emzara walked over to the bed and sat down with deep sadness.
Noah’s garments ripped as he struggled to get them off. At last he stepped out of this last tunic, stumbled and fell to the ground completely naked and mumbling incoherently.
And then he passed out.
Emzara broke down weeping and cried out to Elohim, “Lord, bring me back my hero. Give him back his hope.”
A rustling sound drew her attention to the entrance of the tent. She looked up to see Ham step inside and close the flap.
“Ham ben Noah, your father is naked in shame. Leave this moment.”
But Ham did not leave. He walked over to Noah and looked down on him with disgust.
“Is this my father?” he said.
“I told you to leave this moment. You shame his name,” she barked.
“I shame him?” he responded. “No, mother, he shames himself. He shames the family name. He shames the clans, the future. He shames his god.”
“How dare you!” she said, standing angrily, ready to throw him out with her own hands.
Ham slithered over to her and stood inches away from her face. She tried to stand up to him, to counter his defiance with her own. But he was too powerful. His reptilian glare chilled her. She shrunk inside and sat down on the bed, defeated. She could not look him in the face any longer.
“What have I birthed? Have I so completely failed Elohim?”