by Brian Godawa
Though he focused on fulfilling his duty of slaying Nephilim, Lamech often dreamed of being a priest of Elohim for the clan. In this spiritual aspect, he found himself identifying more with his grandfather Enoch than with his father, Methuselah. That brought testy moments of tension between them.
Methuselah would tell Lamech he needed to stop being so sheepish and see himself as the seed of Havah, the special line of God’s own choosing. But Lamech just wanted to serve God in the temple of Sahandria and minister to its people, whom he loved dearly. One thing was certain, he would not die a wandering nomad. If he could not go back to Sahand, he would build his own city somewhere on the plain. But first, he had to have a family. That was something he did not think much about in his pursuit of piety. What was a mere human family compared to fellowship with the mighty Creator Elohim? There had not been much of a comparison in his mind until now. He had not thought much of females in his youthful interests — until now. Now, he stared at the most vivacious and beautiful of all Elohim’s creatures that he had ever seen. And she was traveling with them to Nippur: Betenos bar Barakil.
Now I am becoming more like my father, thought Lamech. It confused and frustrated him. He felt he had two men inside him battling for control: his father, Methuselah, man of earth; and his grandfather, Enoch, man of heaven. Would he forever be tormented by two opposing natures? If this was the burden he had to shoulder to have a family, then he would seek every way possible to avoid it.
Betenos was no helpless victim, nor would she go down without a fight in this world. She loved life too much. When the Nephilim attacked her, she fought back with the ferocity of a nomad, no matter how futile it had seemed. On this journey, she helped everywhere she could, cooking or cleaning, or even moving the dead giant corpses when necessary. She could drive the wagon or ride an onager free-back. She seemed willing to do just about anything. She was driven to prove her worth to everyone, to demonstrate she was not just another helpless waif in need of saving. Even though she thought the young man Lamech was certainly handsome and strong, she was determined not fall in love because she knew where that would lead her. And she did not want to go down that road again.
Everyone saw the attraction between Lamech and Betenos. Enoch did not like the idea because Betenos was not a follower of Elohim. She spoke often of the Great Goddess Earth Mother, the World Tree, and had a hard time grasping the incomparability of Elohim over all other gods. She would argue with Lamech for hours on end about Elohim and his excessive demands of exclusivity against the gods. Lamech seemed to enjoy the challenge. The young man’s fanatic commitment to Elohim was the one thing that comforted Enoch. He knew Lamech had no interest in marrying an idol worshipper. But what if she converted? What then? He knew it was not right, but he secretly hoped she would not convert to save them all the pain and suffering. Enoch could not wait to get to Nippur so they could end this distraction and get moving on without her.
Edna knew that it was too late. They were already in love. They were all only observing the discovery process. When Methuselah expressed caution at her youth, Edna reminded him how young they had been when they fell in love. When he brought up Betenos’ gods, she told him it was only a matter of time before Betenos would step over to Lamech’s side. She knew it. Call it women’s intuition or Elohim’s insight. But she prayed for Elohim’s will to be done.
The other women victims of the Nephilim attack were brought along with the team to be dropped off at Nippur with Betenos. They asked to stay with Enoch’s nomads. Enoch had to inform them that the four of them were a band of warriors on a mission. They were simply not available for protection, and their tribe was too far in the opposite direction for the team to escort them there. The women would journey with them to Nippur and remain there to find a new life on their own.
Edna’s heart shivered. The circumstances of these women made her long for her own family back at Sahand. During their years of residence with the Sahandrians, she had borne sons and daughters for Methuselah. She missed them terribly. They were taken care of by the extended family when the team was away on their missions, but her longing for them persisted.
Their years of training had granted her the blessed privilege of complete and focused attention from her husband Methuselah. Or rather, almost complete attention. The training called for an arduous schooling in heavenly weapons and spiritual discipline with high demands. It was not easy to become a giant killer. Once Methuselah fixed on a goal, he would devote his heart and soul to its completion. But at least in the caves, they had been spared the distracting complications and responsibilities of survival on the surface.
Now, their missions took them away for longer and longer periods of time. She felt guilty about it. Conflict tore at her because she also knew that sometimes holy callings involved a sacrifice that was not required of other servants of Elohim. Still, she sometimes longed to live an uneventful and happily boring life with a stable family and clan in the comfortable caves of Sahandria. She just needed to be attached to someone or some community that would give her purpose. Her parents had provided that for her until she became a sacred virgin dedicated to the gods. When they murdered her parents, she found Methuselah to give her that purpose. The nomadic calling now displaced raising a family in Sahandria. Her identity was constantly being shaken up. She clung to the closest thing Elohim gave her, Methuselah. She sometimes wondered if she was being too needy with him. Whatever the case, she loved to make him happy.
For Enoch, the sacrifice of being a wanderer was not so great as for Edna. He remarried at Sahand and they had five sons and three daughters. But it had never been the same after he lost his Edna. A part of him had died with her and it changed him forever. He was more otherworldly than the rest of the clan. He spent hours in prayer, and treasured his dream-visions. He would talk for hours about spirit and heavenly bodies with a thoughtless disregard for the human bodies right in front of him, including his own wife and children. Edna often felt that Enoch’s grandiose prophetic elevation of spiritual reality resulted in the neglect of his own family.
Methuselah seemed to be his father’s very opposite. Though he loved Elohim with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, Methuselah’s affections were more this-worldly. It placed him at odds with his father more often than not. He remembered one time when Enoch was pontificating at the dinner table about the need for more mundane food and less preparation, so that they might have more time to devote to the pursuit of their spiritual disciplines. Methuselah got angry and retorted by asking if Enoch was saying Elohim was too worldly, since the Creator devoted too much time to crafting the Garden with its beatific multitude of tastes and exotic foods. It was one of the few ways that Methuselah could actually force Enoch into silence.
Methuselah had let the silent pause sink in, then took a deep bite of roasted meat and with his mouth full, spluttered out the words, “I am worshipping Elohim as I enjoy this mutton’s glorious heavenly juicy flesh. As I do when I pray or when I hunt or when I make love to my wife. So, I ask you, who spends more time in spiritual discipline, the one who worships in some of his actions or the one who worships in all of his actions?”
Enoch had left the table and charged Methuselah with dishonoring him. Methuselah apologized in front of the family for his disrespectful provocation. They both realized that spiritual arrogance was just as sinful as fleshly intemperance.
Edna believed it was Elohim’s sense of humor to place such contrary personalities of extremes within the same family and then use them for his purposes. He had provided Lamech as a kind of hybrid of them both as a further picture of their tension and a rebuke of their imbalance. It indicated to her that Elohim was somehow in control, and not their puny little human wills.
If it were up to us, she thought, we would be in hot bitumen.
Chapter 20
The city of Nippur lay on the Euphrates just downriver from Sippar, Enoch’s home town. They had passed by Sippar without stopping to avoid being recognized by
the god Utu and so thrown into prison. Even though their escape had been hundreds of years earlier, and though Enoch had grown out his hair and beard, Utu would certainly recognize him. The god would certainly remember his original intent for Enoch’s family, and would certainly not be merciful.
Enoch and his traveling band of warriors and women pulled up to the Nippur river wharf on their boats with their dead Nephilim cargo. They hauled the bodies to the Temple Guard command post just outside Inanna’s temple, called E-anna. Though Utu was the patron god of the city, his temple, E-Babba, was not as large as E-anna and was overshadowed by its administrative duties, another visible sign of Inanna’s usurpation of his priority. A saying had developed amongst the Nippurians, “It matters not he who rules, but she who counts the money.”
It was bothersome bureaucratic protocol to register the details of the abduction and execution of the fugitives, with exact times, locations, descriptions and names of everyone involved. Enoch did not trust this procedure. It created an accessible record of their comings and goings that could make them more easily tracked. It typified the kind of centralized control by the gods that Enoch despised. He had been raised within its clutches, but his years with the Adamites had changed him. He and his band of free spirits now roamed through Elohim’s creation without the gods’ oversight. But unfortunately, he could not violate this protocol if he wanted to collect the bounty for their wages.
It had not been the usual protocol, however, for the gods to be involved in this petty administrative procedure. It surprised Enoch when Inanna herself showed up at the command post to meet with Enoch’s raiding party.
She stepped into the room, leaving two Nephilim Guards at the door. Methuselah glanced at Enoch. Lamech and Edna tensed. Would she smell their fear? Would she recognize any of them? Edna remembered Inanna with crystal clarity. She was abominable — intemperate, violent, and unpredictable; the worst combination in any leader let alone a god.
Inanna glanced over the tabletwork. She looked at Enoch and the others with a suspicious pause. How could these four worms have overcome four formidable Nephilim? She stared long at Enoch. He looked familiar, but she could not place him. He was rodent-like with his long tangled hair and filthy ratty beard. They all looked the same to her. These rural types would have to be cleansed from the earth someday to maintain ethnic purity. The younger sinewy one was acting a bit skittish. Maybe he was lusting after the goddess and was having difficulty hiding his excitement from the slavish whore next to him. She smirked to herself. Their obvious son was handsome. She thought about the pleasure of raping him, but had to return to the task at hand.
“What is your name?” she queried.
“Enoch ben Jared,” he said.
She did not know the name. It was foreign to Shinar. Enoch was grateful he had taken on a Shinarian name when he was an apkallu of Sippar. Had he used that name of Utuabzu now, Inanna would mentally place him at Sippar and might recollect his escape from their heinous scheme all those years ago.
“How did you defeat these giants?” Inanna inquired with her annoyed impatient tone.
“Good Queen of heaven,” — Enoch hated faking respect — “most of our tribe were wiped out in the battle. We have a few survivors staying at a hostel in the city.” The most convincing lie was the one that was mostly true.
He continued, “We were concerned about the armor and branding on the giants, my lady. It appears they might be congregating in packs of organized militia.”
“Or hordes,” added Lamech.
Inanna looked at the young man with surprise. Enoch broke out into a cold sweat.
“You think there may be hordes of Nephilim?” Inanna asked Lamech. “That is a rather bold claim, human. Hordes of Nephilim would indicate a rebellion of serious concern. How do you come by this intelligence?”
“The child speaks thoughtlessly, your majesty,” interrupted Methuselah. “We have only seen pack-like activity.”
“I am speaking to the young man,” snapped Inanna. She knew if she had an opportunity to draw out anything incriminating on these foul vermin, it would be through this stupid brick head of an offspring.
“How is it you are so well trained in recognizing such militia activity?” she asked Lamech. Perhaps they were not telling her everything about their background. Maybe they had their own revolutionary connections. She had heard rumors about some kind of secret order of giant killers somewhere in the Havilah territory, but could never verify them with any certainty. Even torture had not revealed any secrets. Subterfuge might be a better tactic.
“Does not their soldier’s uniforms and special armor indicate military affiliation?” asked Lamech. He was no brick head. He knew that turning it around and asking it as an obvious question would make him look much less educated and more of a speculator.
Inanna surprised them by turning to Edna. “Have there been any rumors of where these hordes may be?” Whores and wenches were even easier to trip up than young men.
Edna played her ignorance well. She added an uneducated rural accent. Her theatrics made Methuselah anxious. “Well, mylady, can they hide inside volcanoes?” She said it without a trace of guile. She sounded spectacularly naïve.
Inanna rolled her eyes and shook her head with contempt. She would not even dignify that remark with an answer. Instead, she turned back to Enoch. “We have had some military uniforms stolen from caravans,” she said. “Several other packs have shown up wearing them as well. Your ‘hordes’ are merely a pack of thieves.” She turned to the administrator and snapped, “Give them their bounty.” She whisked herself away without a farewell.
“Thank you, mighty queen,” Enoch called after her.
She did not even acknowledge it. But as she exited the room, the Naphil guard who accompanied her caught Enoch’s eyes in a long stare before he turned to follow the goddess.
It bothered Enoch. He collected their reward, thinking that they had better leave the city as quickly as possible.
Inanna sensed something askew with the bounty-hunters, but she also knew she would not get anywhere with her questioning. These humans were too smart to be so stupid. So few survived a tribal slaughter and killed four trained Nephilim warriors? And yet these survivors did not even know that volcanoes were inhospitable to animal life? She did not believe it. There was only one way she was going to get any information out of these wily travelers.
“Shadow them,” she ordered the Nephilim.
Ohyah, the Naphil who had been watching Enoch, responded, “I will send my best tracker, your worship.”
“Good. If he discovers a conspiratorial hideout of more of these giant-killers, we will hunt them down,” Inanna said. “If not within the week, have him kill them as quickly as possible. We cannot have any of these nasty little gadflies getting under our skin with their revolutionary tendencies.”
“Yes, my queen,” said Ohyah.
She knew she could trust him. As a captain of the bodyguard, he had proven himself worthy by foiling an assassination attempt on Inanna some years before. It had happened when she began to usurp Enlil’s status as patron god of Nippur. She simply outshined the unexceptional and mediocre Lord of the Air. She drew more followers through her bold leadership, and he had clearly become jealous.
She suspected the attempt had been masterminded by Enlil, but found no connections that led back to him. Though, as an immortal, she could not die, she could be wounded and impaired, which would weaken her status in the pantheon of power. Enlil had become so impotent that he locked himself in E-babba for weeks on end, not showing his face to anyone. When she went on her strategy trips back to Mount Hermon, he was too incompetent to take back his rightful glory. It made her smugly proud. She would eventually orchestrate his imprisonment so she could assume the throne physically, to complement her spiritual influence. But imprisoning a god was tricky. They could not be killed and had to be bound and entrapped into the heart of the earth, or better yet, a volcano. She grinned to herself. It requir
ed just the right sort of opportunity. She would wait for her moment.
She was engrossed in her planned rise to power. She had no idea that Ohyah, this most trusted of servants, had secrets of his own that had been haunting him. Secrets he could not reveal without losing his head.
Chapter 21
Enoch and his party, with the six rescued women squashed themselves into a city dwelling that only housed a family of four. They slept, some on the floor and some on the roof under the night sky. The patriarch of the home, Egibi, was a good friend of Betenos’ father Barakil. They had traded with each other through the years and had become more than mere acquaintances. Egibi felt honored to give shelter to Betenos’ tribe in this time of mourning.
Enoch explained to the women that Egibi would help them all find shelter and training for employment in the city. It would be difficult for these nomads to adjust, but they needed to do so. Enoch could not take care of them.
Betenos, however, was another story.
She pleaded with Enoch to take her with them. She pointed out that she had already helped them in many ways since they rescued her, not the least of which was finding this much needed shelter.
Enoch was set against it.
“This is a holy calling, Betenos. You do not even know who Elohim is.”
“Lamech is teaching me,” she answered.
“We cannot afford the time for Lamech to teach you,” said Enoch. He doubted she would ever convert to Elohim.
Lamech butted in. “I will not shirk my other responsibilities and I will carry her weight if I must.”
That brought a raised eyebrow from Betenos.
Enoch said, “She is not a giant killer.”
Betenos retorted, “Giant killers need healing shamans for their battle wounds and cooks for their strength.”