The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven)

by Powderly Jr. , K. G.

  “E’Yahavah cursed the cosmos so that it would fit humanity’s fallen nature for a time. Evil is not the goal. Since humanity did not restrain evil when it would have been easier to do so, E’Yahavah’s wrath falls so that all whom he will recover can be born and restored in the times yet to come. For the Creator shall bring forth good even out of this deep evil humanity has chosen. He will execute his program and redeem some of his creation.”

  “Which part?” Q’Enukki lamented. “They are altogether like me—futile and empty!”

  Samuille said, “The First Mother’s conception was multiplied to include the Basilisk’s seed as well as the Divine. Neither group is full yet. All are human, none truly hybrid, despite distortions done to their creation codes. Even animal-human chimeras fall on either the human side or the animal, though men cannot often tell which, and fail even to ask the question. Our Master considers you and those like you to be worth far more than anything or anyone that might be lost in the Curse. Nevertheless, each person’s ability to choose their master becomes real.”

  “How?” asked Q’Enukki from the edge of despair.

  “Although E’Yahavah knows the outcome and has chosen those who are his, men who are trapped in the realm of space, velocity, and linear time must have the chance to demonstrate for themselves and their world which side of the struggle they are on. It is at that point—the beforehand choice made by the Divine Name in the rescue of some and the real human choice to return to him or flee—that language paradoxes between the eternal and the temporal are most felt. It is the intersection where time meets eternity. But we must stop this discussion for now,” Samuille concluded.

  “Why?”

  “Because the time has come for the end to begin.”

  THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367

  Appendix

  On Mythology, Fallen Angels and other Controversial Features of this Story

  Good fiction explores the tensions of its age and draws on conflicts universal to the human condition in all ages. This story takes place in a time so long past that we know little about it. Its basic model is contrary to evolutionary assumptions on human development for good reason.

  What if early man created in God’s image was smarter and more capable than we usually credit him? What if human abilities degraded over time; the result of sin and genetic entropy? There is evidence to suggest this, even if how I have depicted it is fanciful and probably not the way it really happened (which we have no way to know anyway, except by faith in what the Bible tells us). We think of our civilization as the height of human development, but take away our technological resources and we would fare no better than cavemen, probably far worse. We are not better people.

  Because these novels are set in such a remote time, of which we only have a mixture of distorted myth memories and what I believe to be an accurate (though abbreviated) account in the Book of Genesis, I have had to choose how to present this world. Doubtless, some will be outraged at some of my choices, a few of which were made simply to facilitate the story.

  I have tried to be faithful to the particulars and theme of Genesis as best as I understand them, though I used something like Setterfield’s hybrid of the Septuagint and Masoretic timelines rather than simply the Masoretic for timing major events. (My dating of events allows for a few hundred more years than our English Bibles do, which use the Masoretic text group version of the Genesis chrono-genealogies.) There are “ups and downs” with both text groups and variant texts within each group. (Though there are more variants in the older Septuagint group and the later Masoretes used much tighter copy rules.) A hybrid Masoretic-Septuagint timeline seemed to solve certain problems in the story, which is fictional. I would never teach from a pulpit that the Septuagint timeline is right and the Masoretic necessarily wrong—or that there is anything but a speculative basis for how to hybridize them.

  Of course, we tend to assume that the ancient Hebrew’s divinely inspired use for chrono-genealogies (genealogies with lifespans and other data expressed as quantities of years) would exactly mirror our own use of them. While they would have used them much as we do for approximate historic chronologies, there may have been other factors and assumptions in play that we are unaware of and that our worldview would not think of. Such factors might have made their having both a long and short count chronology non-contradictory in their minds if they had some kind of dual purpose.

  The Hebrews also sometimes rounded not only to even numbers, but to the nearest symbolic number (7 or 777, for example). The difference between the longest and the shortest chrono-genealogy version is only about 1000 years, total, so we’re not talking about age-long creation days, simply about variant time lines between Adam and Abraham. The historic sequence-of-events is never in question, nor are the variant dates too far afield.

  Scholars who translated the Bible chose the Masoretic texts because they were the earliest Hebrew version of the Old Testament still available at the time, the assumption being that the earliest Hebrew text is preferable to a Greek translation—even if the Greek Septuagint is far older.

  The Masoretic group are descended from Hebrew texts preserved by the Rabbinic School at Yevneh or Jamnia, circa 65-135 AD, in a historic context that was hostile to the way early Christians used the Greek Septuagint to show that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. That this hostility motivated a wide-scale recension of the texts during this time is unlikely, as the only evidence for such is in Deuteronomy 32:43. Most other variants already existed BC. The Masorete copyists who guarded the texts from about 500-900 AD were extremely careful to preserve what they received.

  I am not a scholar or translator, so I am content to go with the hybridized line only in a fictional work. I hold to the doctrine of Plenary Inspiration, which says that the books of the Bible are without error in their original autographs and that the range of translations available today is more than adequate to preserve an accurate history and presentation of God’s redemptive plan for the ages.

  While I have taken care to be biblically faithful (though I likely stumbled a little over my head in the chronology department), I have opted to work outside certain stereotypes. Scripture tells us less than our curiosity demands about the pre-Flood world—perhaps for our own good.

  Many opinions and theories about the nature of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men” with their “giant” offspring mentioned in Genesis 6 and later in Numbers and Joshua, have intrigued theologians, prophecy buffs, and mythologists for centuries. Such passages provoke questions that have no easy answers, as well as some that are unanswerable due to the lack of surviving information. I have deliberately left certain aspects of this topic ambiguous in the story, though the sheer weight of ancient commentary prior to the 5th century AD agrees with the footnote made by William Whiston in his 18th century translation of Josephus:

  This notion, that the fallen angels were, in some sense, the fathers of the old giants, was the constant opinion of antiquity.

  On the other hand, some well-studied Christian scholars have rejected this idea as absurd. They see an epistemological problem with the idea of angel-human hybrids in theology—not entirely without some legitimate concerns. Such teachers denounce the idea of the “sons of God” being angels as a reading of pagan myth into biblical text.

  We should never use mythology as a filter through which we interpret Scripture; however, the developing Hebrew worldview before Moses’ time did not arise within a cultural or historical vacuum. Moses imposed a needed isolation of Hebrew spiritual ideas from the myths of the surrounding peoples. This isolation was not complete before that time, nor was it perfect afterward. Also, the implications of the Babel account in Genesis 11 are clear that all humanity is descended from a common root.

  My approach, far from being an attempt to “introduce paganism” into the Flood account, is rather a natural outgrowth of the implications of the Genesis text itself—that even pagan theological and historic revisionism leaves some trace of the very
truths that it tried to edit out. By calling attention to this process, my story does the truth of Genesis and the rest of Scripture a service—even if it is impossible to really know all the details this far down the millennia from Babel.

  Rather than reading Genesis through the eye-glasses of pagan myth, the Hebrew ancients like Josephus more likely saw whatever happened in Genesis 6 and later passages when “giants” walked the earth, as the germ of historical truth around which legend and later myth grew. The “giants” were “men of renown” in conquest and violence, not simply victims of random genetic mutation and deformity like many unfortunates who have been unfairly stigmatized throughout history. A moral and spiritual transgression in this case produced genetic and social consequences in following generations—one can hardly write on a more 21st century theme than that.

  While my story, as speculative fiction, depicts the ancient giants in fanciful ways as having bizarre chimerical and deformity-driven “stigmata” and advanced technologies, that is not the same as claiming that the “sons of God” are “aliens from space” or magical. Our own 21st century mythos of extraterrestrials (who also seem strangely attracted to human females) seems to be just another manifestation of repeating themes in mythology. We are not above myth today—it just requires quasi-scientific terminology to gain access to our cultural imagination. Consider the Raelians and the “Heaven’s Gate” UFO cults.

  The Old Testament term bene elohim or “sons of God” is a historically well-established name for divinely created angels in the literature of the Old Testament and of the Hasmonean era. The term “sons of…” is also used in other senses, however, such as allegiance and for emotive connection, as in “sons of Belial” and “son of sorrow” respectively. We in the New Testament Covenant can only be “sons and daughters of God” by adoption, when we are born again into God’s family by faith in the gospel of Christ.

  The Bible depicts many forms of angels, mostly in spiritual, but a few in material terms. The “three men” who came to Abraham before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah ate with the patriarch before two of them went down to rescue Lot. This implies that at least some of the angelic orders, under certain conditions, can take material form. While Scripture is clear that the angels of heaven do not marry, it does allude to certain fallen angels that “left their first estate” and “went after strange flesh” in 2 Peter and Jude. This brings the question of whether such beings could have sexual relations with human women capable of procreation.

  My story only hints at an answer, though it depicts a popular culture that believed, as the ancient world did, that so-called “gods” and humans did co-mingle. That, of course, does not mean they actually did, or that Genesis means that fallen angels and women procreated in a biologically viable reproductive sense.

  It is also possible that the language used in Genesis 6 to describe the “sons of God taking wives from the daughters of men” is phenomenological in a sociological way similar to how the description of the sun standing still on Joshua’s long day is astronomically phenomenological. That is, it describes events and relationships as that society perceived them.

  Joshua, for example, prayed for the sun to stand still and from the point of view of those who observed what followed, the sun indeed stood still. The Book of Joshua is not a treatise on orbital mechanics, but a book of history that describes events as they appeared to the eyewitnesses.

  Likewise, Genesis 6 may describe a situation similar to what existed in several ancient polytheistic societies, where certain cultic priestesses were legally considered “wives” of the god of their particular temple and any children born to them were thus legally “sons” born to that god. The Hebrew term bene elohim is plural and can be translated sons of God or sons of the gods according to context. We may not know the exact historical context in Genesis 6 due to the skeletal nature of the account. We do know the theological one.

  Although the literary and historic context and commentaries of the ancient Jews of Jesus’ day (and before) uniformly interpret Genesis 6 as referring to fallen angels in some way “taking wives,” it would not be necessary that the “giants” be anything other than genetically human given the above scenario. The idea of the god-human hybrid was a main basis for legitimizing power among the “god-emperors” of the ancient world. The whole thing may well have been the template of “the Lie” Satan used. Genesis 6:4 may even suggest this was true after the Flood as well as before:

  “There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”

  Something perverse went on, but it need not have been capable of producing natural offspring. Priests and priestesses, under demonic influences, did what men and women do “in the name of their god.” The offspring would have been raised to believe they were supernaturally conceived and the use of hallucinogens (many of which are also mutagens) on the women would cement the lie in emotionally experiential stone. In terms of phenomena, the society viewed it as a “marriage” and the children as being “born to the sons of God” by their “wives.” There are animist cults in West Africa that do exactly this very thing today.

  This possibility would not imply that Noah or any of the Bible patriarchs or authors considered such marriages valid; anymore than biblical Christians consider a homosexual marriage to be valid simply because they might refer to it as “Gay marriage” in describing the history of our times.

  Of course, none of us was there. Could fallen angels tamper with the human genome? Who knows? That possibility creates many theological problems for us today—we don’t see reality as the ancients did. I think the best we can do is to word our discussion of this subject carefully, as did William Whiston, who used the phrase “in some sense” when he said, “that the fallen angels were, in some sense, the fathers of the old giants, was the constant opinion of antiquity.”

  In what sense, we have no way to know for sure. I depict various forms of tampering on the part of the “sons of God” to pull off procreation, though all require both male and female human genetic material—even for my more fanciful chimeras like “Typhunu.” Some of this tampering is quite sophisticated in the story, while other forms are primitive and rely more on mutagenic and hallucinogenic potions and altered states of consciousness. Either way, the antagonists of this story cross divine limits they should not cross, manipulating human beings in dehumanizing ways to do so. This is the theological substance of Genesis 6, even if I’ve gotten the particulars all wrong (which I probably have, since I wasn’t there to witness things).

  This approach has opened the door for this story to make pertinent statements about current bio-ethics, particularly the abuses of genetic engineering and neuro-pharmacology—which is a rightful and necessary province for any Christian fiction writer in the 21st century. Thus, I make no apologies. For our culture, like that of the pre-Flood world, is also crossing many divine limits that it should not.

  No doubt, the consequences will eventually be just as devastating.

  THE PALADIN’S ODYSSEY | 367

  Glossary of People & Terms (Updated for Book 2) The definitions are often in relation to the story – some are fictional, others connect with either biblical history or ancient mythology.

  A’Nu-Ahki –Prince of Salaam-Surupag and Akh’Uzan; the biblical Noah.

  A’Nu – The person of the Creator God E’Yahavah residing in the Heavens; which describes God in his most vast, beyond human ability-to-know sense. The contraction A’Nu loosely translates as heaven, and so the name of A’Nu-Ahki (in the story) means Heavensent Comfort. The biblical name Noah means simply rest or comfort. My attempt to fictionally reverse-engineer Sumero-Akkadian theo-historic revisionism (their “sky-god” was called Anu or An) may prove incorrect—though it is reasonable, as scholars with far more qualification than I have suggested it as a hypothesis. Nor is it an attempt at mix paganism with
Judeo-Christian theology, since the Sumerian Anu is revisionism, and my story clearly defines its own terms on this matter. Since I view Genesis as history, and the implications of Babel are that we all come from common stock, it is not unreasonable or blasphemous to expect Sumer to have revised the meaning of earlier names to misuse them in their polytheistic mythology. History is full of such examples. The dignified El Elyon of Melchizedec and Abraham was 500 years after Abraham depicted by Ugaritic Canaanite inscriptions in less-than-flattering terms. The Canaanite tablets still presented El Elyon as the in-name-only head of their pantheon even in redefined form, nevertheless. In no way do my novels imply that the Sumerian Anu and the Hebrew YHWH are the same divinity. Rather, they suggest that maybe the polytheistic Sumerians (or perhaps their immediate predecessors) corrupted earlier names and terms from an entirely different Noahic theological tradition. It would have been easier than trying to use divinity names that people found foreign.

  Abyssu – The original massive water sphere from which all other elements and compounds were formed through gravity compaction-induced nucleosynthesis on creation days 1 and 2. The etymology of the English word traced back through Greek to the Sumero-Akkadian word Absu. In Sumero-Akkadian myth, the absu was the subterranean fresh water abyss that housed their earth god Enki. The Sumero-Akkadians personified the absu as the consort of the ocean-water abyss monster—goddess Tiamat.

  aerodrone – A fixed-wing aircraft that functions by the same aerodynamic principles as modern airplanes. At first fueled by alcohol burning air-cooled internal combustion engines, but later by a more efficient turpentine-like distillate of an extinct conifer.