The Portent

by Michael S. Heiser

  Malcolm thought for a moment. “Those were three Philistine cities,” he replied. “There were some others, too …”

  Brian nodded. “Ashkelon and Ekron were the others. But those three are most important. The books of Joshua and 1 Samuel list those as Philistine cities, but Joshua 11:22 tells us something else: that toward the end of Joshua’s wars, the remnant of the Anakim lived in those three cities. It’s a clear link between the Anakim and the people Goliath lived among.”

  “And, therefore, between the Anakim and Caphtor.”

  “Yep. The Philistines settled in Canaan—in serious numbers, anyway—in the early twelfth century BC. The Hebrew name for them was peleshtim—the modern term ‘Palestine’ comes from that word.”

  “Keep going; I’m with you.”

  “Philistine pottery has been found in those cities that bears a striking resemblance to styles on Crete and other parts of the Aegean. Most everyone who studies the archaeology of ancient Israel knows that. Less obvious are things like the term Anak. It has no known Semitic etymology, but it has a precise Greek equivalent, Anax. That might seem odd, but Greeks—people from the Aegean islands and the Greek mainland—were in Canaan long before the Bible was put into writing.”

  “What does the Greek word mean?”

  Brian smirked. “ ‘Lords,’ ‘gods,’ ‘masters,’ that sort of thing. In some texts it’s found in the phrase ‘lords of the oar,’ which refers to sea migration. Basically, it’s a term used of dynastic rulers and some of the Greek gods, a few of whom were Titans.”

  “Great. Them again. That connection would be easy to exploit.”

  “That it would.”

  “Wow, all these links. It’s a lot more than just Goliath.”

  Brian looked up. Melissa was approaching the couch. “Here you go,” she said and took a seat. Brian carefully took the hot cup of tea and placed it on an end table. “Where are you guys at?” Melissa asked.

  “Goliath,” Brian answered.

  “Oh, haven’t even gotten to the weird material yet.”

  “Not yet.” He took a sip and looked at Malcolm. “We’ve gone through it all a few times together. I wanted Melissa to hear all the potential hooks into the esoteric philosophies.”

  “No shortage there,” she said.

  “Goliath is a good pivot point. The name isn’t Semitic. It’s probably either Lydian in origin—which would take us back to the Aegean sea and Crete—or Luwian, which is one of the Hittite languages.”

  “Which takes us back to Anatolia,” Melissa added, “the point of origin for the people who settled in Crete and were part of what we know as the Minoan civilization.”

  “There are so many threads the Colonel could use,” Brian said. “They’re right under the noses of Bible readers, hidden in plain sight. Take the Hittites. How many people who say they study their Bible would know that the Hittites were here and in control of good chunks of Canaan even before the Philistines?”

  “Not many. I didn’t even realize that,” admitted Malcolm.

  “In Genesis 23, when Sarah died, who did Abraham buy land from—in the promised land of Canaan, no less—to bury her?”

  “The Hittites?”

  “Yep. By the time the Torah was written, the specific name of that place was Kiriath-arba, ‘City of Arba.’ It was later called Hebron. Is the name ‘Arba’ familiar?”

  “No.”

  “According to Joshua 14:15, he was the greatest of the Anakim.”

  “No way.”

  “Look it up. Later in Genesis 27, the Isaac and Rebekah story, the Hittite women are called ‘women of the land.’ That shows they’d long been settled in the area. That’s part of why Ezekiel 16 says what it says.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I’ll read it to you.” Brian reached for his laptop and quickly produced the passage. “Listen to these first three verses carefully. Think about them against the backdrop of what we’ve been talking about this past week.”

  Again the word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations, and say, Thus says the Lord GOD to Jerusalem: Your origin and your birth are of the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.”

  Malcolm looked at himuncertainly. “It’s no surprise that Jerusalem was ‘born’ in the land of the Canaanites. But the line about Jerusalem’s father being an Amorite and her mother a Hittite—what’s up with that?”

  “A lot of Bible readers don’t realize Jerusalem wasn’t always an Israelite city. David conquered it from the Jebusites, but it had an even earlier history. Joshua 10 says that the king of Jerusalem in Joshua’s day was a fellow named Adonizedek. After he heard how Joshua had conquered Jericho and Ai, he formed a coalition force with—get this—the other four Amorite kings. That means Jerusalem was Amorite territory. The kicker is that Amos 2:9–10 describes the Amorites as being as tall as cedars.”

  “Man, it’s like you said—the threads are hidden in plain sight.”

  “Trust me, he’s just getting started,” Melissa said grimly.

  “Think about what the Colonel could do with what you’ve heard so far. The Amorites are the people God mentioned in His covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15—the ones whose ‘iniquity was not yet full.’ The Old Testament tells the story of the Israelites, the people of Yahweh, moving into Canaan, the promised land, specifically to take it away from the giant clans by conquest. Those giant clans have a traceable heritage back to Anatolia and Minoan Crete, or Caphtor.”

  “Right to the place where the occultists have the Atlantean giants,” Melissa reminded him. “It would be painfully easy to cast the Israelites as not only the enemies of the giant clans, but the enemies of the Aryans. The roadmap of ideas is all right there.”

  “Believe it or not,” Brian continued, “this also creates a clear path to an Aryan Jesus.”

  “Come on,” Malcolm said skeptically.

  “If you can remember your seminary Hebrew, think through the name Adonizedek with me.”

  “Well, Adoni, that’s ‘my lord.’ … Zedek would be ‘righteous.’ ”

  “Correct. The most obvious meaning of the name is ‘my lord is righteous.’ ”

  “I take it there’s a less obvious meaning?”

  “Zedek could also be a proper noun—specifically, a deity name. That would produce the meaning ‘my lord is Zedek.’ The name would be paying homage to the god Zedek, who appears in Semitic texts outside the Bible. Most of the evidence for that deity comes from the old Babylonian kingdom of Mari.”

  “Mari?” Malcolm paused, trying to remember. “Didn’t that name come up when Melissa was going through her research?”

  “It did,” Brian confirmed. “Some of articles the police found in Weston’s briefcase mentioned Mari. One of them talked about some tablets connected to Minoans and a place called Kabri. After the phone confrontation with the Colonel, we asked Ward to contact the police in Nevada handling Weston’s case to get scans of the articles. I was able to find all of the articles he cites in the journal databases. We know exactly what Weston was reading—and why. We’ll get to that in a minute.”

  “Okay, back to Adonizedek. Why is he important?”

  “Well, what other biblical name ends with Zedek?” Melissa asked.

  Malcolm had to think for only a second. He frowned. They could see by the look on his face he had the answer. “Melchizedek.”

  “Precisely. In the scenario I’m developing here, that name means ‘my king is Zedek.’ Now who was Melchizedek?”

  “He was king of Salem, which is the shorter name of Jerusalem in Abraham’s day.”

  “So let’s connect some dots. Abraham, the Israelite—or, to the Aryan occultist, the Jew—paid tithes to Melchizedek as a superior.”

  “But that has to fit into Israelite theology,” Malcolm said. “The priestly lineage of Jesus is the line of Melchizedek. Psalm 110 is absolutely clear on that.”

  “Of course it is,” B
rian acknowledged, taking another sip of tea. “But you’re not thinking like the Colonel.”

  “Or nineteenth-century anti-Semitic occultists like Rosenberg or von Liebenfels—people who want to divorce Jesus from the Jews,” Melissa added. “Try this plotline on for size: The Bible is clear that Melchizedek was not an Israelite—he was no descendant of Abraham. He occupied territory that the Jews would later take by force from the peaceful Hittites—people who had befriended Abraham. But Abraham’s descendants were treacherous. They attacked and killed the descendants of the Atlantean kings, among whom lived the vestiges of the earlier giant lineages.”

  “Sounds like something I’d see on YouTube.”

  “Then you get the picture,” Brian replied. “It’s the evil Jew against the Aryan ancestors descended from the master Atlantean race. A clever propagandist would say that’s where all the strife over the land of Palestine begins. Jerusalem originally belonged to the Aryans by means of the Amorites, descendants of the master race. Like Ezekiel 16 said, Jerusalem’s father was an Amorite.

  “Our propagandist would also say that Jesus’ own priestly lineage is Aryan; His god was Zedek, the Righteous One. His association with Melchizedek distances him from a Jewish priesthood lineage. It’s a Nazi occultist’s playground …”

  Malcolm sat speechless before them, his jaw slightly open.

  “We’re not done,” Melissa said, nodding to Brian.

  “Zedek shows up in the writings of Philo of Byblos, who is most known for his ‘Phoenician History,’ a work he wrote in Greek using fragments of a Phoenician source by someone named Sanchuniathon. Philo’s work contains a theogony, an account of the generations of the gods. One of those gods is Zedek, spelled Sydyk in Greek. Sydyk was a descendant of the Titans, who are identified with the Watchers—the sons of God—in Jewish literature.

  “And we already know that, for the occultists, the sons of God were the Atlanteans. So we have yet another ancient connection between the enemies of the Jews and the master race through Zedek. Again, what could the Colonel say? Melchizedek was loyal to the Watchers’ descendants, the Amorites. Jesus inherited the priesthood of Zedek. He wasn’t a Jew. He was their enemy, and they killed him.”

  Malcolm’s expression became sullen. “I almost hate to ask, but what else is there in all this about Jesus?”

  “Let’s talk about Haupt,” Melissa coaxed. Brian nodded.

  “Paul Haupt was the leading Assyriologist of his day. He taught for many years at Johns Hopkins University—my undergraduate alma mater, ironically. He died in 1926, so what he wrote can’t properly be called Nazi, but he fueled the fire and the scholarship of people like Alfred Rosenberg.”

  Melissa picked up the discussion. “Haupt poured his scholarly abilities into the idea that Jesus was not a Jew, but an Aryan. His most famous essay, ‘The Aryan Ancestry of Jesus,’ was published in 1909.”

  “How did he argue something that seems so clearly wrong?”

  “Basically,” Melissa replied, “Haupt focused on Galilee. Jesus was from Galilee, since Nazareth is in Galilee.”

  “But he was born in Bethlehem.”

  “Well, Haupt believed that the tradition about Jesus being born in Bethlehem was added later,” Brian explained.

  “Seems contrived.”

  “I’d say so, but he based it on John 7:40–41 and Mark 12:35–37. John 7:40–41 is one of the scenes where people are arguing about whether Jesus is the Christ. Part of the verse has some people in the crowd saying, ‘Is the Christ to come from Galilee?’ That, of course, sounds like the expected answer is ‘no.’ ”

  “Of course,” Malcolm replied, “since Micah 5:2 has the son of David being born in Bethlehem, the city of David.”

  “The Greek text of John 7:41 has a negator in it—a word for ‘no’ or ‘not’ that doesn’t get reflected in most translations. But if you translate the negator, the statement changes: ‘Is not the Christ to come from Galilee?’ Then the expected answer is ‘yes.’ ”

  “Which one is right?” Malcolm asked, some uncertainty in his voice.

  “The first one. The negator isn’t supposed to be translated. That particular negator in Greek communicates that the statement expects a negative answer. Everybody who works in Greek knows that. All the grammars discuss it.”

  “So how does anyone get away with translating it the other way?”

  “Simple: They just do it. And if you’re someone like Haupt, it becomes an argument from authority.”

  “Malcolm,” Melissa said, “think about what you just asked. You’re a priest. If this sort of thing inserts a seed of doubt into your mind, think about the average Christian.”

  “I am.”

  Brian continued. “In Mark 12:35 Jesus asks, ‘How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David?’ Haupt argued that Jesus asked the question to cast doubt on the idea. Sure, that ignores lots of other things, but it’s a good example of interpretation by suspicion.”

  Melissa put down her cup. “Haupt also taught that Galilee was not Jewish territory—or, maybe more precisely, that Jews didn’t live there.”

  “He argued that it was a Gentile region?”

  Brian nodded. “Galilee is in the northern part of Israel. Haupt played off the Assyrians’ destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel way back in 722 BC, long before the time of Jesus. Assyrians held the policy of deporting the people they conquered and then moving foreign people into a region to replace the population. That’s what happened when Assyria conquered the ten northern tribes. Haupt argued that Galilee was therefore not populated by Jews. For sure, the northern parts of the country had mixed populations—as evident in the racism toward the Samaritans. But it’s a hopeless case to argue that it was basically free of Jews and that no one from Galilee was Jewish.”

  “Again, how could other scholars let that ride?”

  “They didn’t. They published rebuttals. The point is, though, that there is a scholarly breadcrumb trail that the Colonel can use. He can use the work of a leading Semitics scholar from the turn of the twentieth century to revive and prop up Aryan mythology—in this case, a mythology that includes the giant clans, which includes Genesis 6, which is part of the occult philosophy that bleeds into Nazi ideology courtesy of people like Miguel Serrano.”

  “The Colonel is building a matrix of ideas, Malcolm,” said Melissa. “And Weston was part of that at precisely the point we’re talking about. We know that because Ward noticed that article in his briefcase about Kabri.”

  “What’s Kabri?”

  “It’s an archaeological site that’s known for its frescoes—paintings on plaster, usually on walls or ceilings,” Brian answered.

  “What’s so special about the ones at Kabri?”

  Brian looked at Melissa. “They’re Minoan,” she answered. “Now guess what region of Israel Kabri is located in.”

  “Judging by the way these conversations go, I’d say Galilee.”

  “Bingo.”

  “This is nuts.”

  “Welcome to Crazytown,” Brian agreed. “But don’t miss the point—the web of ideas. It doesn’t have to pass peer review or be real. It doesn’t have to go uncontested. It’s just a set of data points from real scholars, not eccentric Internet trolls. The Colonel could use all of it to build his case, and we suspect he will do just that.”

  “Have you thought about his logic?” Malcolm asked. “Why does Ferguson care to make people believe in ET life only to turn around and make Christians resist it by staining it with all this garbage? Maybe he really is insane.”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out,” Melissa responded, “but he clearly stated that he wants Christians to forsake their faith. He thinks this will make that happen. Talk about a God complex.”

  Brian added, “He doesn’t care if anyone else buys it. He wants that specific group to rise up against his alien myth just so he can manipulate them to embrace the last part of his hi-tech fairytale.”

  “Any idea what that is?”<
br />
  “None,” Melissa replied.

  “But we know it has something to do with Jesus,” Brian said. “I’m still troubled about his mention of a Jesus who was but wasn’t Jesus. What’s that supposed to mean? How are the other parts—his alien disclosure and then turning that into something evil—supposed to lead to his endgame?”

  Their attention was suddenly arrested by a chime that signaled the freight elevator hidden in the house above them had been activated.

  “They’re here!” Madison shrieked excitedly and bolted from the couch. Everyone stopped what they were doing and made their way toward the door. Brian mentally replayed the moment of their own arrival barely a month earlier. While he and others had been topside and back any number of times since, this occasion had special import. He took Melissa by the hand and helped her from the couch.

  “Oh, come on!” Madison groaned. The ride took only a couple of minutes, but every second was excruciating. She began to bob expectantly at the click of the lock.

  Neff entered first, followed by the others. Madison clapped and ran straight for Cal, the only figure Brian didn’t recognize, and hugged him tightly. Cal enthusiastically returned the gesture. Brian saw him lean over to whisper something to Madison with a smile. He looked a little younger than Brian, probably around thirty, and was six feet tall and had sandy-brown hair. Brian couldn’t help being reminded of Matt Damon. He smiled as Cal was introduced to the familiar hugging ritual. It was nice that the frightful circumstances could bring another good memory to the surface.

  As Cal moved through the round of familiar faces, he caught a glimpse of Brian, Melissa, and Malcolm. His mood perceptibly changed as he approached. He stood before Brian, seemingly unsure of himself.

  “Dr. Scott?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well …” He hesitated.

  Neff interrupted, speaking loudly enough for all to hear, “Cal’s been saying he has a message for you … and for all of us. The Colonel gave something to him, but he hasn’t told us what it is.”