13 Hours: THIS is What Difference it Makes.

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13-hours-movie-posterCombat Action. The true story from the perspective of the military contractors who rescued Americans in the terrorist attacks on the American embassy and CIA facility in Benghazi on 9/11 2012.

Woah. Michael Bay, you are forgiven of Transformers. In fact, all Michael Bay haters will have to stand down and admit that this phenomenal action movie is a well-told and entertaining story of American valor. No vain empty action, this is rich and full heroism. I think Bay is probably the only one who could get this movie made because no one can accuse him of political agenda in his filmmaking. He makes big action, and this is big action with a deep and human twist.

I guess other Hollywood directors couldn’t find a way to spin the story to make it George Bush’s fault.

13 Hours captures not only the fighting spirit of the warriors who stand for American values in a world of external totalitarianism and internal political corruption, but the human heart of those men, not perfect, but human, whose families and children also sacrifice for our safety. The moments we see of these hardened soldiers talking to their families over Skype are both enlightening and heartwarming. We see the goodness behind these bad asses. The entire story, they seek to do what is right even though they had an impossible task of discerning friend from foe, because of the chaos around them (a metaphor for the politics of the region). They are not heartless inhuman fighting machines, they are men with families who try their best to do what is right and suffer for their sacrifice. Yeah, sure they chose to do it. But they chose to do it, as one of the characters says, “To give myself something bigger to believe in.” Then he sadly admits the revelation of this decade, “That something bigger is gone now.” That is understated poetic indictment. Great writing.

The filmmakers, along with the original authors of the book, have said that they wanted to make an apolitical movie about what happened on the ground. A story of the heroism and courage of those 5 men and assorted others who helped them. It is true. This is as apolitical as you can get. And considering that most of Hollywood is rooting for Hillary Clinton, I can’t imagine a major studio willing to make a movie that revealed her political crimes that would deep six her. We’ll have to wait for a Republican administration for them to do that.

I admit, sometimes the truth gets through, and I want to be the first to trumpet that when it happens. Thank you, Paramount. You told some truth with 13 Hours. (for all those cynics who didn’t like me pointing out that they F’ed up with Noah, see? I don’t hold grudges. I’ll support you if you tell the truth.)

So the storytellers kept out any references to what was going on in the Obama administration and State Department in order to be apolitical. Ah, but herein lies the most subtle and brilliant subversion of all. By not showing what was going on in the administration, it reinforced the image of complete and utter silence and lack of response. They were nowhere to be found. They left these people to die. The fact that the movie shows complete silence on the part of Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton, and any of their inferiors when it came to the cries for help is of course the most morally damning of all. That ain’t political, folks, that’s moral.

We see that Chris Stevens and the CIA chief kept calling for help, any kind of help. F-16s 45 minutes away, rescue 20 minutes away, A Blackhawk helicopter, even a lousy flyover, dammit. But all we see in response from Obama and Clinton is silence. We don’t even hear their names. Apolitical in a way because no one is referenced. But in a way, a moral indictment of the worst kind. Even to the very end of the story, where those remaining three heroes were the last to be flown out of the country, even THEN, it was a Libyan transport plane. “Still no Americans” to help them. And which Secretary of State is responsible for that heartless cruelty?

One brief statement in the film tells us that POTUS was briefed, and then we hear that State thinks it was Al-Sharia. We see that it is an orchestrated terrorist strike on the ground, yet we see the soldiers hear that the State Department told the public it was “protests about an anti-Islamic film.” Now, with Clinton’s criminal felonious emails uncovered, we know that she knew it was terror, and she deliberately denied it as terror in order to secure the second election of Obama.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton let those people alone to die.

Madamn Secretary, THAT is what the hell difference it makes.

Godawa’s Quibble Corner

There was one small element that I thought had big implications and worked against the theme of transcendence in the film, that belief in something bigger than ourselves. One of the soldiers reads a book by mythologist Joseph Campbell and quotes the phrase which becomes a tagline repeated in the story with thematic intent. “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you.” Though this may seem to the storytellers to be profound wisdom that illustrates the grandeur of the human spirit, it actually undercuts any transcendence that this great story could have had. That statement illustrated Campbell’s relativistic worldview of immanence that actually denies transcendent purpose, destroys the human spirit while promising greatness within. Because you see, it rejects all transcendence of deity, all “higher purpose” or “something bigger than ourselves,” and replaces it with ourselves as our own gods, our own source of good and evil (“heaven and hell”). Hey, kinda sounds like the Serpent in the Garden, don’t ya think? (“You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”). This is the problem with Hollywood storytellers who seek transcendence for their stories, because they know in their souls there must be, but because they don’t believe in God, they create a substitute in humanity itself. Famous mythologists like Campbell aid the deception with their influence on the storytelling community, and you get that hunger for transcendence with an unsatisfactory tripe to fill that hunger.

But don’t let that ruin the movie for you. If you want to see the truth that the news media is hiding in order to help elect Hillary Clinton, then you must go see this movie. And even if you don’t like the truth, then see it cause it’s a kick ass action flick with real heart and soul. The best of all worlds.

Oscar Watch • The Hateful Eight: A Love Affair with Hate, Racism and Misogyny?

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Western Mystery Thriller. In the post Civil War period, an infamous bounty hunter, bringing a female criminal to a town for hanging, stays at an outpost during a storm. While there, he encounters a group of dubious characters who will complicate his quest.

Watching a Tarantino movie is watching a 90 minute film stretched out to almost 3 insufferable hours of long rambling scenes with trivial dialogue that should have been cut in half. It was a clever trick in the long table scene of Reservoir Dogs, but now it seems like its every scene in every movie of his.

Along with gratuitous racism, excessive and irrelevant profanity (His romance with the N-word continues with this film), and an erotic fetish for violence.

I watch this crap, so you don’t have to.

Now, keep in mind, I am not against the accurate depiction of evil in a story. I do it myself, and some of my favorite movies do as well. It’s all in the context. And one gets the impression watching this guy’s movies that his “signature” or voice is that of a video store clerk’s obsession with shock because it’s the only thing that interests his numbed conscience from watching too many movies.

Tarantino tries to mimic the spaghetti westerns of the 60s and early 70s, complete with Cinerama widescreen and 1960s western titles and music. The movie starts with an excruciatingly indulgent “Overture” of music over a flat graphic — like they had for epics in the olden days. The movie is an homage that illustrates his own nostalgia for old movies more than an actual creative take on the subject. The whole nostalgia thing worked once in Pulp Fiction. The metaphor that I think best describes this director is that of a young dinosaur that is unaware of the concept of extinction.

The first shot is a long, meandering dolly out of a stone crucifix of a suffering Christ, apparently a gravestone, covered in the blistery snow of dead winter. Yes, foreshadowing the violence to come (as all Tarantino movies end in an orgy of violence), but could it also be a visual cue of the “death of God” in the story he is about to tell, or rather in his own worldview?

The rest of the movie watches like a play that has been adapted to the screen. The bounty hunter, (Kurt Russell) brings along a captured female outlaw (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who the director enjoys getting laughs out of beating up and calling “bitch.” It seems the only word Tarantino loves as much as the N-word is the B-word. Back to the story. So these two end up at the outpost lodge with another bounty hunter (Samuel L. Jackson) and the new sheriff of the destination town. There are several other dubious lodgers already there. As they wait for the snow storm to subside, some subterfuge occurs and the whole thing is a mystery to figure out if any of the other lodgers are hostile and waiting for their moment to free the female prisoner.

There is really nothing special here. Just a murder mystery play, with a few good twists, good performances by the actors (I will always watch any movie with Kurt Russell in it). But certainly nothing worthy of Oscar nominations.

Before the inevitable Tarantino bloodbath ending, there is one good moment of insight. Tim Roth plays the hangman of the town who is also on his way to the same destination. He has a discussion with one of the other characters about justice. He explains that the rule of law is what civilized society calls justice. While lynching or vigilanteism is frontier justice, which is just as apt to be wrong as right. He then says that the only real difference between the two is the hangman, because dispassion is the essence of justice. Justice delivered with passion is always in danger of not being justice. So for a moment, it appears that Tarantino may actually be supporting the rule of law as the means of civilized justice.

Which is really an odd thing, considering his own recent real life involvement with racist anti-cop protestors in New York. A few days after a NY cop is murdered, he pronounced cops as murderers who engage in alleged institutional “police terror.” Of course, he would argue that he is standing against corrupt authority, not good cops, but the problem is that the whole racist police narrative is itself a corrupt racist conspiracy theory, whose purpose is to incite racial hatred and uncivilized rage that results in lawlessness, mob violence and inspires more cop killers. Hey, what happened to that rule of law?

But when you consider the character who says those lines about dispassionate justice in the movie, along with Tarantino’s own passionate hate speech, maybe he’s really spitting on the whole concept of dispassionate rule of law in favor of his passionate hate. Maybe he really believes in the frontier lawlessness he so often celebrates in his movies like a religion of violence.

Oscar Watch • The Revenant: Vengeance is God’s, and God Ain’t No Pacifist

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Though we don’t have the Oscar nominations yet, I labeled this as one of my 2015 Oscar Watch commentaries because after seeing it, I am confident of two things: 1. The Revenant will receive an Oscar nomination for best picture and best director, and 2. Leonardo DiCaprio will win best actor for his gut wrenching performance as the frontiersman Hugh Glass.

Alejandro Inarritu directed this vast, weighty, sprawling epic that tells the story as much through visual and visceral filmmaking as through its dramatic exploration of the primal urge for revenge. Yes, it is brutal, but it is also beautiful. And I don’t mean “beautiful brutality” as in a Tarantino film. I mean the fearful symmetry of life that is the fallen splendor of creation.

Inarritu interweaves words, visual, audio and emotional drama into a masterpiece of storytelling tapestry. This is the kind of movie that shows you the real fullness of what film can do that other media cannot. Something I have not seen in a while. As you watch the brutality of winter trappers fighting with local American native tribes over pelts, you sense, you feel the power of man against the elements and man against man, that these early Americans had to overcome. The bear attack is at once truly terrifying and yet profound in its incarnation of man vs. nature.

In the world of filmmaking, you have the “arthouse” movies that are so obsessed with being “creative,” that they result in boring pretentiousness. And you have the “Hollywood machine” movies that seek to be a drug fix of action adrenaline that can be empty and shallow. Inarritu manages to transcend both and bring it all. Action, beauty, art, human depth and story. He did it with the Oscar winner Birdman last year, an existentialist exploration of our search for significance, and this year, he just might do it again with The Revenant.

The reason I am so impressed with Inarritu is because he is like Terrence Malick with a good story. Although I don’t often agree with his worldview, I do appreciate his filmmaking as a unique and creative voice in cinema (See my commentaries on his thoughtful films 21 Grams, and Birdman).

In The Revenant, he wrestles with the universal moral dilemma of revenge vs. justice. Bad revenge movies celebrate vigilanteism – or retribution outside the law (see my reviews of on The Punisher, Walking Tall, Sin City, A Time To Kill) Good revenge movies sympathize with the universal human desire for justice against criminals, especially murderers, but also deal honestly with the spiritual reality that revenge destroys the soul of the vigilante. (see my commentaries for Man on Fire, The Equalizer).

The Christian worldview proposes that God achieves justice, or in other words, his vengeance against criminals, legally through the state, not through personal vengeance outside of the law (Romans 12:19-13:5). Capital criminals deserve to die, but by the hand of the state and within the law. Of course, self defense is also a legitimate means for righteous violence (Exodus 22:2-3). But the main point is that certain evil men deserve to die, but if you do not achieve that justice through legal moral means, it will destroy you, and turn you into the very monster you seek to punish.

The Revenant brings in this spiritual dimension into the discussion in a way that other revenge movies sometimes miss. Hugh Glass is a man between worlds, a white man with a child from his marriage to a Pawnee woman, now dead. Don’t worry, no spoiling yet. This cinematic world has a fairly good balance of viewpoints within it. Yes, the Indians think the white man stole their land and their animals, but they also steal land and animals from each other, as well as from the white man, and the Indians kill each other as well. So there is no pristine “noble savage” nor thoroughly evil European here. All flawed, all human, too human.

At one point in the film, Hugh meets a Pawnee Indian whose family was wiped out by the Sioux. Hugh cannot understand why he is seeking to find more of his people to settle with rather than seeking revenge on the offending warriors. The Pawnee tells him, “Revenge is in the Creator’s hands.” This becomes a thematic challenge to Hugh’s own personal journey of revenge. And the moral issue that is addressed with thoughtful poignancy through the movie.

The villain, John Fitzgerald, played masterfully simple and real by Tom Hardy is an atheist, and fellow trapper who is guilty of atrocities. At one point, he tells a story about a fellow who found God. That fellow looked up in the air, and then climbed a tree, and found God. And God was a squirrel. So he “shot and ate the son of a bitch.” This is a brilliant encapsulation of the mockery of the atheist worldview and it is villainous pretentions.

Keep reading to find out how the ending embodies the moral theme of the movie… Continue reading →

Star Wars VII: Star Wars IV Redo with Female Feminist Luke

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The Empire of the galaxy is trying to crush the rebellion and destroy the Republic, unless a droid can get a message to the only one who can help them.

Wait, isn’t that the original Star Wars? (episode IV for you fanatics)

Yep.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is like one big homage to the original Star Wars. Or is it a remake?

Uninspiring.

And that’s coming from a fan of the original and Empire Strikes Back (except for the godless worldview :-).

All the other four movies were horrible boring pedantic wastes of precious time.

Oh, yeah, I know, I’m “an idiot” because this one will be the biggest box office phenomenon in movie history, so what do I know?  But I think there are two main reasons why it is a hit:

#1. And pretty much the biggest reason. All of us want to see Han, Chewy, Luke and Leia again. Period. That alone will draw gazillions. But that doesn’t make it a great story.

#2. The original story was successful, so Abrams ditched the dead end self-indulgent narcissism of Lucas’ prequels and remade the original. Cleverly and ruthlessly calculated for marketing formulas.

The sad and ironic truth is that much of Hollywood’s success in sequels is simply retelling the same exact original story in a new context. People want more of the same, over and over again. And that is why many tentpole movies and other mainstream movies recycle the same stuff over and over again.

It’s not always bad. I mean that’s why genre movies work: formulas. Formula isn’t always bad. And I could give a million examples of great stories in history that are refurbished or rewritten versions of previous stories (Empire is arguably better than IV). So, I’m not saying it doesn’t work or that it’s all wrong. The goal is to reinterpret and add unique twists that clothe that success with a fresh take. Disguise the homage, don’t trumpet it.

In this case, I thought the redux was uninspiring and forgettable. Okay, I loved to see Han and Chewy again. Even though poor Han at his age can barely fight anymore. And a few lines were kinda funny. And I do love a story pitting a Republic against an Empire.

So, this movie replays so many things that were reminiscent of the original. And I’m sure Star Wars religious fanatics could list off more than these:

Spoiler Alert (But not really, because I already revealed everything in the headline)
Enjoy… Continue reading →

The Dragon King is Coming

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A new book by Brian Godawa and Charlie Wen (past visual director of Marvel Studios).

Part of a new series, Chronicles of the Watchers. Coming January 2016 on Kindle and paperback.

LOGLINE: It’s 220 B.C. The ancient Western Empire is crumbling. In a desperate bid to save his throne, the Greek king over Babylon sends his son, a dishonored warrior, into the mysterious land of the Far East to capture a mythical creature that will give him absolute power: a Dragon.

it’s mixture of historical fact, spiritual truth, and magical realism.
Action adventure and romance.

Sign up for the newsletter at ChroniclesOfTheWatchers.com to get insider information on the release, as well as all things Watchers, and special discounts and deals.

In the Heart of the Sea: Greenpeace Whale Rights Blubbering

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The so-called “true story” behind the fictional tale of Melville’s classic Moby Dick. White whale crashes evil human fishing party and hunts them down to teach them animal rights and earth worship.

Well, he’s at it again. Christophobe Ron Howard, the guy who made the hate hit piece on Jesus (and the Roman Catholics), The DaVinci Code, has just offered up a new sacrifice to the earth goddess, Gaia.

Howard and his writers bookends his tale with young Herman Melville tracking down a survivor of the whaleship Essex that was destroyed by a huge white whale, for the sake of research for his new novel. The monster whale is full of crusty sea barnacles and whaling wounds and has a preternatural ability to attack whaling ships out in the deep sea, thousands of miles from land.

The survivor being interviewed is a drunk who can’t live with himself because of the “abominations” the survivors had done. He tells his scary story and we see it all in flashback.

So, obviously, the whalers go awhaling, the white whale shows up and destroys their ship, casting them adrift, which forces them to become cannibals and thus shows them how evil it is to eat meat. But the privileged white “big Nemo” also shadows their lifeboats like an angry deity waiting to teach them a lesson.

And that is what the metaphor is all about. The white whale in this story represents the revenge of the animal world upon evil mankind that is slaughtering them for their oil. For whale oil fuels the lamps of the evil white Europeans.

This is earth worship versus the Judeo-Christian worldview, quite literally with a vengeance.

Before they launch off to their whaling expedition, we hear Christians praying that God will provide his blessings upon their industrial revolution (Of course, a demonized villain in Hollywood). So Christianity is One with the exploitation of energy resources to the storytellers.

At one point in the story, the captain, a young inexperienced blueblood jerk, tells the hero of the story that man is created as the pinnacle of creation and it is our calling by God to take dominion of the earth and bend nature to our wills. So, much like the idolatrous Noah movie, the two worldviews in conflict here are the Judeo-Christian ethic of dominion and the environmentalist/animal rights/earth worshipping ethic of pristine nature, unsullied by human interference. Or more accurately, human exceptionalism versus anti-humanism.

Can you guess which one wins?

Of course, in the end, the hero of the story, who became obsessed with killing the white whale, finally has his “come to Gaia” moment and refrains from his last chance to harpoon the leviathan. And of course, the ever-loving monster, who is apparently a fair and square kind of mammal, stops attacking them. You see? The poor whales just want to be left alone. They are more moral than us, and can teach us a lesson.

I am amused by how earth worshippers like to humanize animals (and nature) as if they are equally moral sentient creatures. That is because they really do believe that humans are NOT created in God’s image as the pinnacle of creation. But notice, they have to HUMANIZE the animals, because the reality is more like the documentary Grizzly Man, where the naïve animal rights activist gets eaten by the very bears he is deluded into thinking that he is the guardian of. Watch Grizzly Man. THAT is the ironic truth, folks.

At one point, the storyteller is talking of whale oil and he simply calls it, “oil,” an obvious connection with the so-called “evil” of fossil fuels. In fact, at the end, he says something like, “I hear they have found oil in the ground in the United States. Imagine that.” So the evils of the industrial revolution will move on from whale oil to crude oil.

Oh, Lordy, will man ever stop utilizing the earth for his own greedy survival? Why don’t we just lay down our energy needs and die? Let that pristine nature take over and eat us all in the wonderful circle of life that is survival of the fittest? It’s okay for sharks to eat whales, but we humans aren’t allowed to? After all, bending nature to benefit mankind is speciest, right?

Whale sh*t.

Earth worship has been eeking into Hollywood movies for some time now and it is going to be more ubiquitious as a theme. The rising god of Hollywood is the earth, and if the ancient history of earth worship is anything to go by, these idolaters are violent and will not stop until they have enslaved or destroyed everybody. (This same antihuman theme of the earth as a divine being “getting revenge” on humans is in The Happening. But in other movies, it’s localized in a substitute deity, like aliens in The Day the Earth Stood Still, or in a subverted Biblical Creator in Noah, Evan Almighty, and others)

Hollywood social justice warriors rant about how evil oil is, while burning a thousand times what normal people use, and spewing out more carbon emissions than anyone else with their huge mansions and private jets. It’s more than hypocritical. It’s despicable. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with riches. And I don’t believe carbon is pollution (if you do, you are a science denier). But these mostly white, all privileged, aristocratic fascists love to force others to suffer while they live “above the morality” of the plebeian class. Where is Bernie Sanders when you need him?

Environmentalist policies are already murdering poor black people by the MILLIONS in third world countries, precisely by keeping oil from them (as well as other policies). Earth worshippers believe in saving the whales, but let those poor people of color die to maintain their crusading fanaticism. Paul Driessen is blowing the whistle on this genocidal environmentalism. By liberal standards of outcome distribution, environmentalism is racist to the core.

It is the Judeo-Christian ethic of dominion that desacralized nature and allowed man to rise up out of the depraved self-destructive barbarism of earth worship and other idolatries. It allowed us to harness nature for the good of mankind, which resulted in science and technology that advanced civilization and brought about everything that the earth worshippers rely upon, from medicine to travel to safe living to their smart phones. Check out the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and get educated. The computer screen you are reading this on is because of fossil fuels.

And no, I am not now, nor have I ever been a card carrying member of the oil cartel, nor have I ever been knowingly paid by oil interests (but if they want to pay me for telling the truth, I’ll gladly take it).

But, boy, there sure are billions and billions of dollars in the pockets of those paid by Big Green and Big Government to deny science and suppress the facts (There are many reputable scientists and researchers who are exposing this Big Green corruption: Climate Change Dispatch, Climate Audit, Dr. Roy Spencer, Science and Public Policy Institute, Climate Depot, Climate Etc, Watts Up With That? And others.

Cornwall Alliance is the best in providing a Judeo-Christian approach to a balanced proper conservation of the environment with human interests.

Yes, we must be careful to regulate our energy usage and waste. But don’t be a fool. Energy consumption is not inherently evil, it is scientifically axiomatic to existence. All living systems create waste as a by-product of the conversion of energy into life. So the only way for us to achieve the ultimate end of a pristine nature untouched by human waste is of course to extinguish all of humanity.

Of Myth and the Bible: Part 10 The Lion Men of Moab

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Another strange legendary creature shows up in the Bible that made it into my novel David Ascendant: Lion Men of Moab. In Hebrew, they are called Ariels. They are kind of like werewolves – but more like werelions.

 In 2 Sam. 23:20 Benaiah, a valiant warrior, strikes down “two ariels of Moab.” The word “ariel” is a transliteration because scholars are not sure what it means. The King James and Young’s Bibles translate these opponents of Benaiah as “lion-like men of Moab,” which captures the strangeness of the creatures but fails to express the religious or supernatural connotation of the word.

Some translators translate the phrase “ariels of Moab” as “sons of Ariel of Moab” after the unlikely LXX Greek translation,[1] or “lion-like heroes of Moab.” But there is no Hebrew word for “sons of” in the sentence, no indication of ariel being a personal name, and no Hebrew word for warrior used in the sentence. The Hebrew word for mighty warrior, gibborim, is used frequently throughout David’s narrative and that word is not here. The text says “two ariels of Moab.”

Some suggest it may be a reference to killing two lions. But the very next sentence states that Benaiah, the killer of the ariels, then killed a lion in a pit.

2 Samuel 23:20
And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was a valiant man of Kabzeel, a doer of great deeds. He struck down two ariels of Moab. He also went down and struck down a lion in a pit on a day when snow had fallen.
The Hebrew word for “lion” is not ariel, but aryeh. Adding the suffix “el” to the word adds a religious dimension of meaning that transcends mere lions. This is why Hebrew lexicons explain the most likely meaning as “lion of god.”[2] El was not merely a name used of Yahweh in the Bible, it was the name of the figurehead deity of the Canaanite pantheon as well as a general reference to deity in Mesopotamia.[3]In 1 Chronicles, some additional warriors from Gad join David when he is at Ziklag, and they are described exactly like ariels as “lion-faced warriors” with preternatural skills:
1 Chronicles 12:8
8 From the Gadites there went over to David at the stronghold in the wilderness mighty and experienced warriors, expert with shield and spear, whose faces were like the faces of lions and who were swift as gazelles upon the mountains:

Though animal-like abilities is a common metaphor used to describe extraordinary warrior skills, having faces like the faces of lions could mean more in light of the existence of these ariels, or Lion Men of Moab. Since the tribal location of Gad was precisely all the land of Moab across the Jordan, I decided to make the Gadite lion-faced men be those very Lion Men of Moab who converted to Israel and joined David. Two of these hybrid warriors then become the two traitors who face down Benaiah.

Psalm 57 was written when David was on the run and hiding out in a cave from Saul’s bounty hunters. Verse 4 says, “My soul is in the midst of lions; I lie down amid fiery beasts— the children of man, whose teeth are spears and arrows, whose tongues are sharp swords.” Though a surface reading of this text appears to be an obvious figurative expression of David’s enemies, scholar B. Mazar suggests it may be a reference to a mercenary military corps of archers whose emblem was the lion-goddess.[4] Could they have come from Moab?

So what if these ariels are hybrid creatures reminiscent of the Watchers’ miscegenation in Genesis 6? What if they are elite warriors with hairy bodies and lion-like faces that only one of David’s own gibborim Mighty Men could slay? After all, the exploits of those Mighty Men in the passages we have been looking at are supernatural slayings of giants and hundreds of soldiers by single warriors. If these ariels were mere warriors, then the feat accomplished by Benaiah in slaying them would be the only one in the entire passage that was banal and without significance.

These ariels were something more than men, something supernatural.The ancient understanding of ariel as a lion-like hybrid humanoid finds support in a later Nag Hammadi text that speaks of a gnostic deity, Yaldabaoth, who was an ariel (spelled slightly different): “Ariael is what the perfect call him, for he was like a lion.”[5]

The Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible says of this possible religious mythical interpretation of ariel:

This interpretation could be supported by a recently found bronze-silver figurine from Tell Abū el-Kharaz in Transjordan representing, according to the excavator’s opinion a male lion-faced warrior(-god?), which can be viewed, because of its appearance and its attributes, as a male pendant.[6]

The author then reveals that the word ariel shows up in the Mesha Stele, a Moabite stone inscription not too long after the time of King David.[7] These are the very Moabites from which 2 Samuel says the ariels come. The line of text in question could be translated, “the lion figure [ariel] of their beloved (god)’ which was dragged before Chemosh after the fall of the Israelite city.”[8]

Bible scholar B. Mazar notes this Mesha Stele connection and adds that the word ariel became a synonym for the lion-headed cherubim at the base of kingly thrones.[9]

So in David Ascendant, I created a special unit of these Ariels, lion-headed warriors of Moab, to explore that supernatural dimension with imagination that fit the thread of the cosmic War of the Seed.

The ancient Book of Jasher was a source text for both Joshua and David’s stories (Josh. 10:13, 2 Sam. 1:18). The extant version we have of the Book of Jasher, though dubitable, tells of two different stories that contain hybrid creatures that may be similar to the lion-men of Moab or the satyrs of Banias. In Jasher 36:29-35 we read of Anah, one of the sons of Seir the Horite, (remember the Seirites’ connection to satyrs) during the days of Abraham. There is a large storm that the writer says caused a group of about 120 “great and terrible animals” to come out of the forest by the seashore to be witnessed by Anah feeding his asses.

Jasher 36:29-35
And those animals, from their middle downward, were in the shape of the children of men, and from their middle upward, some had the likeness of bears, and some the likeness of the keephas, with tails behind them from between their shoulders reaching down to the earth, like the tails of the ducheephath, and these animals came and mounted and rode upon these asses, and led them away, and they went away unto this day.[10]
Another chapter in Jasher tells the story during the youth of Balaam son of Beor, about a strange animal that was devouring the cattle of the people of Chittim. A man named Zepho went in search of this creature and…
Jasher 61:15
he came into the cave and he looked and behold, a large animal was devouring the ox; from the middle upward it resembled a man, and from the middle downward it resembled an animal, and Zepho rose up against the animal and slew it with his swords.[11]

Were these creatures mere legends or were they genetic hybrid remnants of the miscegenation of the Watchers?

Read about the Lion Men of Moab in the novel, David Ascendant, Book 7 of Chronicles of the Nephilim.

[1] “Although the LXX interferes seriously in the text, presupposing a double haplography in the Hebrew text, this reading points into the right direction. As a matter of fact NKH Hiphʿil in the historical books never means to strike upon an object (cf. also E. Jenni, ErIs 24 [1993] 114–118), but to strike down, i.e. to kill somebody… Consequently, Ariel here designates some kind of person, best translated as ‘lion of God’: S. Münger, “Ariel,” ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Leiden; Boston; Köln; Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), 88–89.
[2] Francis Brown, Samuel Rolles Driver and Charles Augustus Briggs, Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, electronic ed., 72 (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, 2000).
[3] W. Herrmann, “El,” ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Leiden; Boston; Köln; Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), 275.
[4] B. Mazar, “The Military Élite of King David,” Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 13, Fasc. 3 (Jul., 1963), 312.
[5] James McConkey Robinson, Richard Smith and Coptic Gnostic Library Project, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 4th rev. ed., 173 (Leiden; New York: E. J. Brill, 1996).
[6] S. Münger, “Ariel,” ed. Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Leiden; Boston; Köln; Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), 89. Münger refers to the Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan (P. M. Fischer, ADAJ 40 [1996] 101–110, esp. 103–104 with figs. 3a-b).
[7] 850 B.C.
[8] S. Münger, DDD, 89. Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament translates ariel as the name of the king of the city, and Hallo’s Context of Scripture translates it as the more unlikely object, fire hearth. James Bennett Pritchard, ed., The Ancient Near East an Anthology of Texts and Pictures, 3rd ed. with Supplement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 320; William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Context of Scripture (Leiden;  Boston: Brill, 2000), 137.
[9] B. Mazar, “The Military Élite of King David,” Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 13, Fasc. 3 (Jul., 1963), pp. 316.
[10] Johnson, Ken (2012-01-09). Ancient Book Of Jasher (p. 129).  Kindle Edition.
[11] Johnson, Book Of Jasher (p. 223).