Goliath Was Not Alone

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Goliath has gotten so much attention when it comes to the story of David that some people think he’s the only giant spoken of in the Bible. But there are two other passages in 1 Chronicles, with parallel passages in 2 Samuel that explain the giants defeated by David and his Mighty Men.

1 Chronicles 11:22–23

22 And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was a valiant man of Kabzeel… And he struck down an Egyptian, a man of great stature, five cubits tall. [7 1/2 to 8 feet] The Egyptian had in his hand a spear like a weaver’s beam.

1 Chronicles 20:4–8

4 And after this there arose war with the Philistines at Gezer. Then Sibbecai the Hushathite struck down Sippai [or Saph: 2 Sam. 21:18], who was one of the descendants of the giants... 5And there was again war with the Philistines, and Elhanan the son of Jair struck down Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam. 6 And there was again war at Gath, where there was a man of great stature, who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in number, and he also was descended from the giants. 7 And when he taunted Israel, Jonathan the son of Shimea, David’s brother, struck him down. 8 These were descended from the giants in Gath, and they fell by the hand of David and by the hand of his servants.

2 Samuel 21:16–22

16 And Ishbi-benob, one of the descendants of the giants, whose spear weighed three hundred shekels of bronze, and who was armed with a new sword, thought to kill David. 17 But Abishai the son of Zeruiah came to his aid and attacked the Philistine and killed him.

So in addition to Goliath, we have five other giants being killed by David’s men. 1) Benaiah killed an Egyptian giant, 2) Sibbecai killed the giant Sippai [Saph], 3) Elhanan killed the giant Lahmi, brother of Goliath, 4) Jonathan killed an unnamed giant, and 5) Abishai killed Ishbi-benob the giant.

But these are not mere chronicling of random deaths of a few tall bad guys. There is meaning and deliberation behind these facts. There is deliberate intent by the author to link these giants to the Nephilim of Genesis 6 whose diabolical plan was thwarted by God with the Flood.

Firstly, most are summarized in the same context, indicating a literary and theological purpose behind combining them together. Secondly, except for the Egyptian, they are all Philistines fighting Israel. In Joshua 11:21-22 we read that Joshua deliberately sought out the Anakim giants in Canaan and cut them off everywhere in the hill country. But then it gives this qualification: “There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain.”

So, some giants were left by Joshua – in the land of Philistia. The very cities from which came the giants David would fight, including Goliath. It was almost as if God was deliberately keeping the last of the giants in order to finally destroy them through his messianic king. They were the leftover giants from Joshua’s conquest, and they were linked back to the evil Nephilim before the flood (Num. 13:32-33).

And there is strong indication that the giants were trying to kill David specifically as well. Ishbi-benob is said to explicitly have been trying to kill David (2 Sam. 21:16); another one “taunted Israel” (1Chron 20:7), the same phrasing used of Goliath; and of course, Lahmi, Goliath’s brother, would no doubt have revenge against the slayer of his sibling on his mind.

But there is still more to this picture.

The English phrase used of the giants in these passages is that they were “descendants of the giants.” It is used three times in 1 Chron. 20 and four times in 2 Sam. 21. The authors go out of their way to stress these warriors as connected to that special group of giants that were theologically tied to the Nephilim of Genesis 6.

This narrative theological thread of giants from the Nephilim of Noah’s day to the Rephaim of David’s time conspires to imply a deliberate summary of climactic conflict between the titan Seed of the Serpent in Canaan and the Seed of Abraham from Eve.

But a closer look at the original Hebrew behind the translation “descendants of the giants” in 1 Samuel and 1 Chronicles reveals much more then merely being linked to those oversized warriors left alive by Joshua in Philistia.

Biblical scholar Conrad E. L’Heureux examines this Hebrew phrase, yalid ha rapha, that translates as “descendants of the giants.” He explains that the word rapha, is the specific word for the Rephaim giants and warriors in the Bible. But the word yalid, “never refers to genealogical lineage. Rather, the yalid was a person of slave status and dedicated to the deity who was head of the social unit into which he was admitted by a consecration.”[1]

DavidCoverMedResThis religious devotion indicates that the “descendants of the giants” can be translated as the “devotees of Rapha.” L’Heureux concludes that this was probably some kind of reference to an elite cult of warriors religiously bound to their Rephaim code. What was that code? Was it to hunt down and destroy the Seed of Eve, the messianic king?

The discoveries of Ugarit in relation to the Bible shed light on the Rephaim as deified dead giant warriors,[2]. Thus, the origin of my elite corps of giants in David Ascendant called the Yalid ha Rapha or my colloquial adaptation, the “Sons of Rapha,” bound by oath to their own Seed (of the Serpent) to destroy the messianic Seed of Eve, David.

Click here to pre-order your Kindle version of David Ascendant
Click here for the book trailer, author interview, artwork.

 

 

[1] Conrad E. L’Heureux “The yelîdê hārāpā’: A Cultic Association of Warriors,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 221,(Feb., 1976), pp. 83-85.

[2] See Brian Godawa, Enoch Primordial Appendix on the Rephaim,( Los Angeles, CA, Embedded Pictures Publishing, 2012), pp 364-366.

 

 

The Equalizer: Cathartic Violence in an Unjust America

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Equalizer

Maybe The Equalizer is just a violent guys vigilante revenge flick.
But I doubt it.

I saw this a week or so ago. But it’s been on my mind a bit because it was such a good story. It got me thinking about vigilante movies and why they are so emotionally moving.

The story is about Denzel Washington as Robert McCall, an ex-CIA killer, who has gotten out of the Company, and is trying to live a normal life as a blue collar worker at a Home Depot like company. He lives alone and has OCD, which makes him a little too orderly, but without losing his friendliness for people. Denzel meets a young hooker, played my Chloe Grace Moretz, at the diner where he reads a book. Of course, he is an honorable guy and tries to inspire her to leave her world and live a better life. He tells her something to the effect of “We can do anything we choose to do to make our lives better.” She is abused by her pimps, who are Russian mob and so Robert tries to “buy her freedom.” He goes to the headquarters of the Russian mob and offers them all the money he has, $9800 to let her go. They laugh at him, and then attempt to put him out of his misery.

They should not have done that.

Robert kills them all, which starts a hunt by the big boss of those bad guys, and well, you know the rest. It’s all very formulaic. But it’s fantastic. I have written about revenge movies and vigilante violence as being immoral in posts on The Punisher, Walking Tall and Sin City, and my most detailed in reference to A Time To Kill. In Man on Fire Denzel’s character learns that he can only save the innocent with self sacrifice not revenge, which is also an ironic challenge to vigilanteism.

But what makes this a great moral movie is how they play Robert’s approach. He is not a vigilante killer who goes around and kills people he thinks deserves to die outside the law. He actually offers evildoers a face to face opportunity to right their wrong or to repay their victims. He confronts them with their sin and challenges them to repent. Then he only takes them out, when the bad guys, who obviously laugh at him and never repent, then try to hurt or kill him. So he is actually acting in self defense, which is completely legal and morally justifiable.

At one point we see that Robert is reading Don Quixote, and he says something like, “it’s about a knight in a world without chivalry,” which is clearly the theme of this movie. We have lost our heroic chivalrous nature because of our corruption.

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It got me thinking: Why are vigilante stories so powerful? Why do they draw us in with such a strong cheer for the hero? It’s not because we just like to see violence. I believe it is because they are cathartic in giving us stories of justice in a society where justice is blocked by corruption. When our own society becomes so corrupt and unjust, normal law abiding citizens become so saddened and frustrated with the evil that goes unpunished. We long for justice that is not being served. So vigilante movies (And again, The Equalizer is not the immoral vigilante type) serve to satisfy that desire that evil will be punished.

And then I realized why this movie is so timely and resonant. Right now, we live in a society of widespread injustice and increasing polarization. Liberals say we have an unjust racist society, conservatives say we have a society that is peddling false racism as a dog whistle that creates reverse racism and justification for racist knockout games, flash mobs and riots. Liberals say we are denying global warming, conservatives that we are denying Islamic terrorism. Liberals say we need Big Government because we are so unjust, conservatives say we have a corrupt unjust Big Government with a president who is violating the constitution with Executive Orders, and using the IRS and FBI to persecute his political enemies and influence elections. Liberals would say our laws are unjust regarding immigration and gun control, conservatives would say we have a corrupt Department of Justice and a criminal racist Attorney General who violated the laws he swore to uphold with racist policies, defiant non-enforcement and criminal conspiracies like Fast and Furious. Both sides warn of increasing militarized police.

What do you think?

Maybe The Equalizer is just a violent guys vigilante revenge flick.
But I doubt it.

Gone Girl: Cynical Feminism Come of Age

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Maybe Gone Girl is just a twisty “artistic” thriller.

But I doubt it.

Watching the first half of this movie has all the hallmarks of a good David Fincher directed thriller. Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne arrives home to discover his wonderful wife, Rosamund Pike as Amy is missing and there is little evidence of it being foul play. Ah, but there is a little evidence and it begins to mount in the direction of Ben’s guilt. We hear the thoughts of Ben Affleck as he caresses his wife’s head in a flashback with the double entendre allusions to him wishing he could crack open her head so he could understand the way she thinks. Okay, pretty on the nose, but makes the point of a good thriller that we must not be sure of the hero’s innocence.

It is not until the midpoint big twist of the movie that we begin to see this is not a standard thriller, but a “statement” about modern marriage, because characters begin to make unbelievable choices and the plot conveniently twists in additional unbelievable ways, all in the support of the storyteller’s “message” they are apparently trying to make.

SPOILER: Okay, look, I’m not interested in writing movie reviews. I want to talk about worldviews and meanings of movies and how they affect our lives. So I have to spill the beans. So don’t read me for movie reviews anyway.

Amy is a trust fund princess and Nick, the fast talking alpha male to replace her controlling parents. At the halfway point, we discover that Amy has constructed the entire scenario to look like a murder, so that she could punish Nick for losing his job and therefore self-worth and for his secret adultery on the side. Amy is on the run hiding her identity and even plans to kill herself originally, all to get back at Nick for ruining her life (a common feminist interpretation of how male dominance leads women to self-destruction). Nick gets a hot defense attorney and they begin to play the media image as they try to find Amy. Meanwhile, Amy ends up at the hideaway of a past stalker who was obsessed with her and is now rich himself. He is still obsessed with her and seeks to “help her” by controlling her and turning her into his puppet of pleasure, barefoot and lingerie laden at home. She finally plots another frame up of this creep and murders him.

There is a truth that Dennis Prager writes about and talks about on his Male/Female Hour on the radio. Feminists, egalitarians, leftists, metrosexuals, and other Christophobes will HATE me for saying this truth. But it is how God made us: What a woman most wants is to be loved by a man she admires, and what men most want from the woman they love is to be admired. What is a simple truism for those of us happily married (and not), becomes a kind of natural law against which this story struggles with all its soul like a rat trying to claw its way out of a cage.

Watching this movie, one can feel the palpable hatred that the storytellers must have for traditional marriage, seeing it as an oppression of women under the thumb of men who use them for their own pleasure and prop up of worth, while it smothers their own self worth. It depicts a marriage that starts out like all marriages, happy and blissful, but then over time, it dies down and crumbles. In this worldview, men are simple pigs who see women always in sexual terms and can’t pick their own ties. Women ruin themselves, just like Amy, by their desire to have a man to admire, so they try to create that man by picking his ties and put aside their own worth to try to prop him up. Can anyone blame Amy’s lack of choices by running from the slouch loser of Nick to the help of her past stalker, who is himself a cliché of controlling women through a patriarchal protection that is actually sick and twisted?

Like all good stories, Gone Girl tries to throw in some opposites for good ambiguity. So a male/female pair of grifters rob Amy when she is on the run, and they appear to be led by the woman, not the man. But then again, the man is a lowlife male who is easily manipulated into such things, another cliché of feminist narratives, just like Nick and just like the stalker. Men are easily manipulated because they are driven by their little heads. We also discover that another guy was unjustly indicted for rape charges by Amy in college because he didn’t turn out to be what she wanted. So she is a sociopath, but a sociopathic expression of a value in our society. But in this story, it seems that is what it takes to make the marriage “work.”

Families don’t get a good shake in this film. Amy’s parents use her as their story source to make millions writing children’s stories. And then borrow away the trust fund money they saved for her out of their guilt. The local woman with multiple children is the “stupid pregnant woman” that Amy manipulates to achieve her deception. And in the end, Amy comes back to Nick and offers him the opportunity for them both to stay together. She does this because she “falls in love” with him again when he pleads with her on national television with a secret message. He becomes that man that she can admire again.

The obvious absurdity that the storytellers have to get us over: Who would possibly reunite with a murderer sociopath? You’re right. No one in their right moral mind would.

In the end Nick chooses to stay with Amy and live the lie! The fact that she is a deluded scheming murderer is overridden by the fact that their marriage gives them both what they need, for her, an alpha male to admire, and for him, a woman who would do anything for his acceptance. I think this is a black comedy of sorts because that choice is CLEARLY NOT the right choice morally and therefore unsatisfying for those who want justice to prevail in a story. But that is the point of black comedies that show darkness win, I think the storytellers are trying to make the point that staying together in marriage with these beliefs requires the subjugation of a woman’s identity to a man’s strength that will drive her to do evil things to maintain that value.

It’s possible that the author is trying to show that our male and female natures taken to an extreme can become self-destructive. But if that is the case, then I think the story fails because it does not depict a proper balance of those natures against which to judge the extreme. The result of this kind of one-sided depiction is a generic statement about those natures as being all bad.

I am a sinner who needs God’s grace daily, and I don’t have a perfect marriage. But I can say that a happy marriage is not achieved by turning men into women (ie: metro girly men), or by demanding egalitarian equality of power (which is itself power-driven), or by denying our male and female natures (which is self-delusion). Rather, it is achieved through self sacrifice and dying to one’s self. It comes from a woman being loved by a man she admires and by a man being admired by the woman he loves.

Maybe Gone Girl is just a twisty “artistic” thriller.

But I doubt it.

 

Goliath1

In King David’s story there are five passages that contain giants in the narrative. The most famous one is 1 Samuel 17 that tells the story of Goliath. In fact, that story is so famous, it seems that some Christians think he’s the only giant in the Bible! Others say he wasn’t much of a giant at all. That’s because there are textual problems with the sources we have for the English text of the Old Testament.

In 1 Samuel 17:4, Goliath is described as being “6 cubits and a span.” Scholarly consensus describes the “cubit” as being approximately 18 inches, measured by the distance between an average man’s elbow and forefinger. A “span” is about half of that length, which is about the distance of an outstretched hand, or 9 inches. So by these standards, Goliath’s “6 cubits and a span” was about 9 feet, 9 inches tall.

But there is a problem with that measurement. The 6 1/2 cubit dimension is taken from the Hebrew Masoretic Texts (MT), which are not always the most reliable in their transmission history. Some scholars point out that the Septuagint (LXX), the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Josephus after them describe Goliath at only “4 cubits and a span,” which would make him more like 6 feet, 9 inches tall. According to archeological estimates of discovered remains in Canaan, the average Jew was about 5 feet, 6 inches tall.[1] This shorter version of Goliath would still be a tall man compared to the average ancient Jew, but not at all the supernatural monstrosity of 9 feet, 9 inches tall.

But scholar Clyde Billington has pointed out that the DSS and Josephus may have taken their cue from the LXX, which was translated in Egypt. Egypt’s royal cubit was consistently at 20.65 inches.[2] It is entirely reasonable that the LXX translators would adjust the Biblical numbers to coincide with their own definitions of measurement. Using the Egyptian cubit would make Goliath’s height from the LXX come out to just over 9 feet tall – the same height as in the MT 7 feet 9 inches, not as tall as the MT, but a giant nonetheless. (Update: 7/8/15 thanks to Andy Doerksen).

A further complication arises when one considers the fact that Moses had been raised and educated as royalty in Egypt. So he and the Exodus Israelites no doubt used the Egyptian royal cubit in their measurements. The question then is whether or not the original Hebrew text translated that cubit measurement to the smaller Mesopotamian/Levantine common cubit.

There is an indication in other Biblical texts of the awareness of this cubit difference. The writer of the Chronicles (written much later in Israel’s history during the exile) makes this distinction when describing the dimensions of Solomon’s temple. He writes, “the length, in cubits of the old standard, was sixty cubits, and the breadth twenty cubits” (2 Chron. 3:3). Ezekiel describing the measurements of the temple in his vision also makes this distinction of cubit difference as well when he writes, “the altar by cubits (the cubit being a cubit and a handbreadth)” (Ezek. 43:13). He later calls this a “long cubit” (Ezek. 41:8). So these parentheticals written by authors around the time of the exile indicate that during that time, there was still an awareness of the older longer Egyptian royal cubit as if they had been still using it up until that date.[3]

If we apply this longer cubit measurement to Goliath’s 6 cubits and a span, we get a height of about 10 1/2 feet tall![4] And the Egyptian warrior that was killed by Benaiah (1 Chron. 11:23) 8 feet 6 inches tall. Remember Og of Bashan, whose bed was 9 cubits long? (Deut. 3:11). That might make his bed approximately 15 1/2 feet long and Og about 13 to 14 feet tall (The longer cubit however is most likely not being used in reference to Og’s height since the text says it is measuring “according to the common cubit” as opposed to the royal cubit).

Whichever way one measures a cubit, Goliath was a giant.

You can read my novel about Goliath and the five other giant Rephaim assassins who sought to kill King David. I kid you not. It’s in the Bible. Check it out below.

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 PRE-ORDER THE NEW NOVEL DAVID ASCENDANT

The War of the Seed continues with the Philistines vs. the Messiah King of Israel.

Click here to pre-order your Kindle version of David Ascendant
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This is available for Kindle purchases only. Paperbacks and audio are not available for pre-orders.

 

[1] G. Ernest Wright, “Troglodytes and Giants in Palestine,” Journal of Biblical Literature 57:3 (Sept 1938): 305-309.
[2] Clyde E. Billington, “Goliath and The Exodus Giants: How Tall Were They?” JETS, 50/3 (September 2007) 489-508.
[3] Conservative scholars claim that Moses wrote the Pentateuch during the time of the Exodus, so that would most likely mean that the older longer cubit was used in those texts. Critical scholars claim that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, but that it was mostly written and/or compiled during the time of the Exile which would mean they most likely used the newer shorter cubit in the Pentateuch, but then made some reference to that older cubit in Chronicles and Ezekiel to remind their readers of the changeover. However, this does not change the fact that the longer cubit was still being used long past the time of the exile.
[4] If this is the case, then the Septuagint translators misunderstood the cubit of the Hebrew text as being the smaller cubit, when in fact it was the larger Egyptian cubit. They would then be translating the number incorrectly downward.

How To Make it in Hollywood

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I had a great interview on the new and way cool podcast The Doorpost Podcast Project by Duane Barnhart:

http://bit.ly/1vlnbXE

The Doorpost Podcast Project is a weekly entertainment business podcast, hosted by Duane Barnhart, interviewing some of today’s most successful and inspiring Entertainment Entrepreneurs. It was Milton Berle who said, “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” We help our audience learn to build doors of opportunity. Each episode shines a spotlight on our featured guest as they share their journey of successes and failures, hard work and big breaks, lessons learned and the steps taken to turn those lessons into accomplishments.

Transcendence Movie: The Idolatry of Transhumanism

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transSci-fi Thriller about a scientist who uploads his consciousness to the internet and threatens humanity with the next step of evolution.

This movie, starring Johnny Depp as the scientist Will Caster, starts as a promising Michael Crichton type warning of the danger of AI technology, but ends like a bad TV show about unbelievable eternal love with his wife Evelyn, played by Rebecca Hall, and a ludicrous non-battle with government armed forces of about ten men.

The first half of this movie is fascinating and thoughtful as the spectre of AI and Transhumanism is raised for debate. AI is Artificial Intelligence and it is the belief that consciousness as self-awareness can be achieved by a sufficiently complex machine such as a computer. In this view consciousness is simply a property of matter that “emerges” out of a complex system. In other words, when a machine or biological organism becomes sufficiently complex, it becomes self-aware and therefore conscious.

Transhumanism is a currently fashionable “movement” that believes we can transcend our humanity by hybridizing ourselves with machines such as computers. One such way of achieving transcendence is to upload our consciousness into a computer. Both of these beliefs are based upon the materialist assumption that there is no “spiritual” component or soulishness to humanity that transcends our material bodies. Consciousness is ultimately reducible to brain synapses and chemicals.

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In this story, the antagonists are a Luddite type technophobic terrorist group who fears the tyranny of machinery to steal our humanity and ultimately control us as slaves. So they engage in terrorist attacks, which includes attempted murder of Will Caster, as one of the heroes of AI research. They don’t kill him right away, but the discovery of a radiation affected bullet means Caster will die in weeks. So he does the untested: He and his wife, with the help of Max Waters (Paul Bettany), do the first uploading of a human consciousness to a computer – Will Caster’s consciousness.

Max becomes the questioning character, our stand-in for the troubled person who sees the dangers but also sees the potential good that technology accomplishes. He becomes captured by the technophobe terrorists and soon joins them in their quest to shut down Al Gore’s wonderful internet.

But what soon becomes manifest is that when Caster’s consciousness is uploaded to the internet, he gets access to the world of information and “evolves” quickly into the god that he sought to become.

And this was the one thing I liked about an otherwise poorly executed movie. It illustrates the very universal nature of mankind to seek godhood. As Max says, “Survival isn’t enough.” AI Caster will seek to gain control of all information by his very nature, and ultimately end “primitive organic life” by replacing it with eternal machinery. This “next step of evolution” is clearly genocidal.

Early in the film, an anti-techy says to Caster, “So you want to create a god. To make your own god.” Caster replies, “Isn’t that what mankind always does?” And of course, the god that Transhumanism seeks to create is the godhood of the human. And this reveals the ultimate and inescapable religious nature of atheist humanism. That is, man is a religious being in need of worshipping the Creator God. But when he denies that god, he replaces it with himself, and he seeks to achieve eternal life through his own “transcendence,” of his finite humanity. But such godhood always requires control over the more “primitive humans” who do not agree with such enlightened wisdom. (Talk about a Scientific Inquisition). When the AI Caster gets his wife to buy a small town and build a huge scientific research center underground to expand his “power,” it is no coincidence that the town’s name is “Brightwood.” “Bright” is the nomer that the dull-headed new atheists have called themselves.

The film shows this religious atheism in full swing when Caster evolves in his intelligence to the point where he can use nanotechnology to heal people from their sicknesses almost instantly, like Jesus. In other words, “miraculous.” One of his healings is of a “man born blind,” which brings to mind the famous story of Jesus healing a man who was born blind in John 9. So he gets a following of such people to become his willing followers, who have become “networked” to Caster’s AI system and can operate independently, but can also act collectively as one. And the ultimate goal of such godlike power is expressed in creating life through 3D printing technology, which is what Caster seeks to do.

But the temptation for omnipotence with such “transcendence” becomes clear. And no matter what someone does in the name of “helping humanity,” absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so it does with Caster. But in a “nice” totalitarian way. He never becomes a “monster” like a Hitler, he just goes about his plans to abolish and replace human organisms in his amoral quest for so-called evolutionary perfection. It actually reminded me of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, where the villain had the same goal of scientific purification of humanity. It is our Brave New World that appears to be amoral which is actually immoral in cloaking genocide in scientific terms of forcing a humanity that doesn’t know better, to become better against it’s own wishes. But of course, the better is defined by the one in power.

Paul Bettany’s character begins as a great foil as he struggles with the realization that he had believed all those years that consciousness was reducible to electrical brain impulses. And he then realizes that the illogic of human emotion can reconcile what a machine cannot reconcile. (Rather than “human emotion” the storytellers should have used morality to counter logic without restraint. This was a wasted powerful moral moment) He tries to get Evelyn to realize that whatever the AI Caster is, it is NOT Will Caster. It never was.

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SPOILER ALERT: Unfortunately, then the movie breaks down into ridiculous plot elements and unbelievable character choices that makes it lose steam. Instant self-sacrifice by Evelyn occurs, which no matter how noble in itself, is not believable when it is not precipitated by a believable motivation and cuts against everything that was being shown in the character. The worst of it is the ludicrous government force that is marshaled to stop Caster’s little scientific complex that will rule the world. It was like 10 mercenaries, with a few canons lobbing shells onto the solar panels that powered Caster’s scientific paradise, and the pacifist mind-controlled followers of Caster who are accompanied by scary music but who never to do anything other than just walk up to the violent mercs and just look at them. It was so ridiculous, I was thinking, did they lose 10 million from their budget at the last minute, so they couldn’t do the big battle finale?

And then worst of all, this threat to the entire world is stopped by a little virus that worked instantly to make all the power in the world go dead, except for the lights in the underground complex until the good guys could get out. A little virus that this amazing AI that has evolved way past all computers in the world had no protection against. Just ridiculous.

Oh, no, wait, there was one more worst of all. After this entire story of proving that the “singularity” notion of humanity without limits leads to tyranny and destruction, it all ends with a contrary ending that negates everything before it. We are shown that the AI Caster “always was” Caster after all (thus reversing Max’s belief and reinforcing the discredited notion that consciousness is uploadable and reducible to 1s and 0s). But also the absurdly Romantic notion that “everything Caster did, he did so he could be together with his beloved wife.” Awwwww, he wasn’t a bad dictator, he was a loving dictator!

Such good potential story lost.

This movie proves that mankind should not transcend itself because we do not deserve godhood, and do not have the requisite goodness of nature to handle it. (No, we need a God for that). but it also proves that a poorly executed story can ruin an excellent idea.
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The Subversion of the Serpent in Aronofsky’s Noah

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In my previous post, I explained how subversion in movies and other storytelling works. The storyteller basically retells someone else’s story, but does so within his own worldview and thereby changes the meanings of otherwise familiar memes and themes of the received cultural narrative. I then explained how Aronofsky subverted the Judeo-Christian Biblical God with his movie Noah into a humanistic metaphor of a “silent god” who has no real existential difference from a nonexistent god. I shared my conclusion that Christian defenders of the film were guilty of autobiographical projection of their own meanings onto the movie and therefore neglecting to address the director’s actual vision.

One may argue therefore that Aronofsky’s atheist subversion doesn’t work on them! Aha! Well, I wrote all about how storytelling in movies and TV works on us whether we know it or not by bypassing the intellect and connecting through emotional dramatic incarnation. That was in Hollywood Worldviews. No time to repeat all that. I’m interested in trying to exegete the director’s intent, because we owe that to the artist before we decide what we personally draw out of the movie.

But also, remember, Aronofsky is drawing from an eclectic mixture of Kabbalah, humanism, environmentalism and other sources so he is not going to have a systematic one-for-one correspondence with any one system. He carries the influence of those ideas, and about the only consistent connection between them all is their intent to subvert the Judeo-Christian sacred narrative.

“I’m Godless. And so I’ve had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is — ultimately what my God becomes.”
– Darren Aronofsky

Another way of saying this is that his religion is storytelling, another perspective shared by many in Hollywood who have been deeply influenced by Joseph Campbell’s mythological worldview.

Serpent Ho!

One of the things that rubs the viewer confused while watching the movie Noah is the positive image of the Serpent in the story. We see the Serpent shedding his bright green skin to come out a black snake with extra eyes (Reminding me of the mystical “third eye” crows in Game of Thrones). The Serpent’s skin then becomes the magical talisman birthright of Adam passed down to Noah. Then this Serpent skin is wrapped around the arm of the right person, it glows with presumable enlightenment and blessing. Tubal-cain, the villain, takes the skin away before Noah can receive it from his father. But it brings no glowy favor to him. Ham steals it and it disappears until the end of the movie where he gives it back to Noah. Noah then wraps the skin around his arm and it glows with favor as he touches the two little granddaughters. So the skin of the Serpent in this movie is clearly a positive image.

Defenders of the movie have lined up to try to explain away the positive image of the serpent by saying the skin represents the original goodness of the serpent’s creation before he became evil. But I think they may be projecting their own interpretation onto the imagery.

First, there is no reference at all in the Genesis text to the Serpent as being good before the Garden. It is possible, though not probable because it is deliberately not addressed in the story. It just describes him as more cunning than the other animals created (Genesis 3:1). All imagery of the Serpent throughout the Bible is always negative. Even the bronze serpent on the pole in Numbers 21 that healed the stricken was still the image of the deadly snakes hung in judgment (healing through judging the serpent). And Christ’s death on a cross likened to that serpent on a pole is also a visual metaphor for Christ taking on our sin (John 3:14) or “becoming sin for us” (2Corin. 5:21). That’s negative serpentine imagery.

[New addition in response to Peter Chattaway’s apologetic for the Serpent] Genesis 1:6 says “God created the great sea monsters.” That Hebrew word for “sea monsters” is actually tanninim, which means sea dragons. In Canaanite and other Mesopotamian creation stories, the sea dragon or sea serpent represents chaos that the chief gods overcome to create the world. So in Genesis, God is subverting that image by “defanging” the standard negative power symbol into a mere creature created by God and under his sovereignty.

In other places, this sea dragon is also called “Rahab,” but is the same sea serpent monster of chaos that the writers describe as symbolic of God’s covenantal power over the chaos (Job 9:13; 26:12; Psalm 89:10; Isaiah 30:7; 51:9)

But later, in other poetic texts, Leviathan the sea dragon takes up this personification of the serpentine negative power of chaos, only to be described as easily controlled or overpowered by Yahweh (Job 3:8; 41:1; Isaiah 27:1; Psalm 74:14; 104:26)

This negative symbolic Serpent imagery concludes in Revelation 12:9 when Leviathan is recast as the Dragon trying to kill Messiah. Here we see the description: “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world…” (Revelation 12:9)

Mr. Chattaway tries to create a more diluted negativity of the Serpent in other Biblical texts but never quite does the job. Jesus telling his disciples to be shrewd as serpents, innocent as doves still reinforces the negative image of the serpent, tying it to the “cunning” we heard about in the Garden. But in ironic poetic fashion, Jesus plays an extreme counter to that image with the innocence of doves to communicate that we are not to have the evil of the serpent.

The Egyptian staffs turning into serpents is also a negative image, but Moses’ staff transformation into a snake that eats the others is simply another ironic mockery of God saying that he is sovereign over evil and can overcome it with its own negativity. Remember the sea dragon domestication? Similar thing here.

The Dan reference in Genesis 49 is a bit more interesting, but suffice it to say that the tribe of Dan resided in the area of Bashan which meant “place of the Serpent.” So the use of viper imagery there plays off that original pagan notion, but describes Dan’s fighting like a serpent biting a heel, which is another poetic play of saying Dan will be to his enemies like the evil Serpent of the Garden is to the offspring of the Woman” (Genesis 3:15).

There actually is one very powerful positive image of serpents in the Old Testament, but I’m going to make Mr. Chattaway find it for himself. And if he does, it won’t change the fact that the serpentine imagery related to the Serpent in the Garden and extended into Rahab, Leviathan and Satan is always negative. In the Bible the Satanic Serpent is never thought of in positive terms.

OMG, I almost forgot: Jesus stressed that the devil or Satan, the “serpent of old,” “was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” (John 8:44–45). There is no Biblical notion of the Serpent being good at the beginning. That is for a very theological purpose of identifying the Serpent with evil, and ultimately with the people of Canaan who would be dispossessed from the Land.
[End of new addition]

In the pagan ancient Near East of Israel’s day, however, the serpent had far more positive imagery than negative. Here are some of them as listed by scholar James Charlesworth in his book, The Good & Evil Serpent: Life, wisdom, magic, health, fertility, transcendence, creation and light, divinity, earth-lover, energy and power, immortality. (1)

Remember, Aronofsky is a self-proclaimed atheist with mystical mythical dalliances. So his spin is going to express his worldview through the narrative. And what does he do with that “Serpent of old,” that bringer of temptation to Original Sin? That Father of Lies? He inverts the Serpent from a negative image to a positive one of life, enlightenment and blessing.

This illustrates another worldview influence of cosmic humanism which has affected many in Hollywood through Joseph Campbell’s mythological mish mash and mystical monism, a kind of atheistic theology (contradictory, I know, but very relevant to Aronofsky’s view).

(Excerpt from The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell)
MOYERS: In the Christian story the serpent is the seducer.
CAMPBELL: That amounts to a refusal to affirm life…
CAMPBELL: Why was the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to Adam and Eve? Without that knowledge, we’d all be a bunch of babies still in Eden, without any participation in life…The serpent, who dies and is resurrected, shedding its skin and renewing its life, is the lord of the central tree, where time and eternity come together. He is the primary god, actually, in the Garden of Eden. Yahweh, the one who walks there in the cool of the evening, is just a visitor. The Garden is the serpent’s place. It is an old, old story.(2)

So the Serpent was not influencing man to fall into sin, but rather opening his eyes to enlightenment and autonomy from God. You see, in this scheme, God is either a bully who wants to control man and is foiled by the wise Serpent, or is secretly desirous for man to disobey so he will learn to make his own decisions! In other words, God wants man to grab the control of defining or “knowing good and evil” for himself and not rely upon God. So in this revision, the Serpent is actually a pathway to maturity of humanity, NOT sin.

Thus, the Serpent is a positive image. And this is why at the end of the movie Noah, Illa tells Noah that God wanted Noah himself to decide if mankind was worth saving. Because it is up to man to decide good and evil and to define his fate (NOT God). Sssssound Ssssssimilar to Sssssomething?

In fact, in the beginning of the movie, when Lamech is about to give Noah the Serpent skin, he wraps it around his arm all glowy-like, and their hands are about to touch in an obvious homage to the creation image of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. The creation image of God’s hand about to touch Adam to give him the breath of life. The Serpent is a “creator of life” in this story, not the bringer of death as he is in Genesis. Also, the snake skin is wrapped around the arm in the same way that modern Jews wrap phylacteries or tefillin around their arms. The symbolism of the tefillin wrapping is that they contain little boxes with Scripture in them that is meant to represent God’s Word as the binding source of everything they do (Deut. 11:18). So in the movie Noah, the life-giving Word of God is replaced with the skin of the Serpent. More creepiness.

The heart-like pulsating fruit on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Noah movie most likely represents the life that Adam and Eve would receive upon eating it. Again, life instead of death.

This could also explain the odd notion that in the film the Watchers are banished by God for wanting to help mankind. That never seemed to make sense in the story. Why would God punish angels for helping mankind? Isn’t that their M.O. after all? But it does make sense if the meaning of this mythological remake is that God wants man to “do it on his own.”

Ironically, the idea that man would become mature by choosing his own destiny (against the pettiness of a jealous angry controlling God) is exactly what the Serpent suggested in the Garden to Eve: “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5).

This humanistic interpretation can be found in critical Biblical scholarship. Liberal scholar James Charlesworth suggests that to “characterize [God] as villain is not impossible, in view of 3:8 (the Garden is for his own enjoyment), and vs. 23 (where he feels ‘threatened’ by the man!) As villain, he is the opponent of the main program.” (3)

Charlesworth then concludes that, “The story of the serpent in our culture is a tale of how the most beautiful creature [the serpent] became seen as ugly, the admired became despised, the good was misrepresented as the bad, and a god was dethroned and recast as Satan. Why? It is perhaps because we modern humans have moved farther and farther away from nature, cutting the umbilical cord with our mother earth?” (4)

Earth worship here is linked to the Serpent as good guy. Ssssssomething Sssssounds Sssssimilar again!

Yes, I do admit that I am engaging in interpretation in this post. More than in my previous ones. And I acknowledge the possibility that I may be wrong in some ways. Is this any different than the projection I am suggesting is going on with defenders of the movie? Not quite the same thing. Because I am not importing my own Judeo-Christian interpretation upon the images of Aronofsky’s in trying to justify it. I am trying to make sense of those images with Aronofsky’s own self-proclaimed worldview.

And that is a subversive worldview indeed.

Or as Genesis would put it, “cunning.”

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Buy the novel Noah Primeval, here on Amazon.com in Kindle or paperback. The website www.ChroniclesOfTheNephilim.com has tons of way cool free videos, scholarly articles about Watchers and Nephilim Giants, artwork for the series, as well as a sign-up for updates and special deals.

[UPDATE] So Mr. Chattaway has sought to debunk the critique of the positive Serpent imagery that I and others have pointed out. He goes to great length and detail in a crafty defense of the “positive Serpent” as I will call it. His beef is mostly with the “Noah is Gnostic” meme that he thinks is an unfair description of the movie, and he spends most of his energy addressing Brian Mattson’s post that first made that argument.

He then addresses this post of mine as one of the culprits of the “Noah is Gnostic” meme and says that I “referenced Mattson’s “Noah is Gnostic” theory repeatedly in a post two days ago [… and then] drops the subject in his most recent post,” — this one you are reading.

Well, not really.

Because I like Peter, I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt that he has mistakenly identified my arguments with Mattson’s and then confused my own arguments in this piece as “dropping the subject” as if I saw the weakness of it and tried to change the subject.

I never dropped the subject. I didn’t raise it to begin with. I said that Mattson made some brilliant points, but then I carefully explained my own interpretation of what was going on, which was of a different focus of concern than Mattson’s. I never argued that Noah was Gnostic. Reread my words above and in the previous post. I argued that Aronofsky is most like Joseph Campbell in his drawing from many sources including Gnostic and Kabbalah and other Rabbinic sources. I’ll say it again, for Peter and those who missed it, “Noah is not strictly gnostic or strictly humanist or strictly atheist, and obviously does in fact traffic in Judeo-Christian imagery. Indeed. Aronofsky, like most people does not liturgically follow the dogma of ancient sectarian philosophies and religion. Mattson was not suggesting that. Aronofsky does what most modern modern westerners do: He picks and chooses elements of things he likes from a variety of ultimately incongruous systems of thought.” And then, “Mattson’s claim about the influence of Gnosticism is largely right. No, Noah isn’t a dogmatic or consistent reproduction of one of the various strains of ancient Gnosticism. But in the same way the 2nd and 3rd century Gnostic Gospels subverted the Biblical Gospels by retelling the story of Jesus through a twisted unbiblical paradigm of inversion, so Noah is doing the same thing.”

Like Campbell, one of his influences, Aronofsky picks and chooses from different traditions to create a confusing mixture of ideas that nevertheless happen to have one consistent theme: The subversion of the Biblical Serpent from a negative into a positive image, along with the Serpent’s temptation that man take control of his fate and moral decisions away from a silent and harsh God. (Illa: “The choice was put into your hands because he wanted you to decide if man was worth saving.” –This is the equivalent of the Serpent’s offer of being like God in “knowing good and evil” Genesis 3:5)

Chattaway becomes confused when he relativizes and denigrates the Christian interpretation of the Serpent and then privileges Aronofsky’s Rabbinic Jewish interpretation. He says, “I think part of the problem here is that Christians have been brought up to assume that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was really Satan in disguise. The actual text of Genesis never says this — it simply says that “the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made” — but in this, as in so many other areas, Christians read the Bible through the filter of later traditions rather than reading just what the text actually says.”

Now Chattaway is usually a rather sharp mind, but his blade gets dull here when he completely misses the inherent negativity “of what the text actually says.” The text describes the Serpent as “cunning” or “crafty,” which scholars explain is a word play in Hebrew as an opposite of Adam and Eve’s “naked” innocence. And then of course, we have his temptation and lie. Yes, he is a nasty being and that is what I was arguing. I actually didn’t argue that the Serpent was “really Satan in disguise.”

But then Chattaway dismisses the Christian interpretation as a “later interpretation” without apparent textual basis, while simultaneously avoiding the fact that Aronfsky’s Rabbinic interpretation is also a “later interpretation.” “What the text actually says” is that the Serpent was cunning and was the tempter and deceiver. It doesn’t say that he was good and became evil. THAT is the later tradition that changes the text.

The fact is that everyone is interpreting through a tradition. The question is which is the most Biblical? While Chattaway lists an impressive amount of examples from Rabbinic and other ancient Jewish extra-biblical sources to justify the “Positive Serpent” spin, he fails to address the Biblical argument itself as I have illustrated. Namely that the Serpent has an unbroken inter-Biblical “tradition” of negativity from the Serpent in the Garden to the dragon imagery throughout the Old Testament (Hebrew: tannin), to Rahab, and Leviathan the sea serpent with multiple heads (again, OT), to the seven headed dragon of Revelation. Yes, the New Testament calls the Serpent Satan, but the bigger point is that the meaning of the Serpent from Old to New Testament is as an incarnation of chaos and/or evil. (Read my paper on Leviathan here). That ain’t some “later tradition,” like the Rabbinic one he quotes.

Lest I need to remind Peter that the Christians who wrote the New Testament were in fact Jews, steeped in ancient Jewish tradition. It is a common fallacy to denigrate “Christian interpretation” as if it is something non-Jewish or “anti-Jewish” when in fact, it is the most faithful JEWISH interpretation of the Old Testament.

Bottom line: The Apostle John kicks Rabbi Eliezer’s and Pseudo-Jonathan’s butts when it comes to Old Testament hermeneutics. Canon over fodder. As I said before, Aronofsky’s Noah has surely drawn from Rabbinic and (gnostic influenced) Kabbalah sources, but my argument has been that they are antithetical to Biblical meaning.

Thus when Chattaway quotes writer Ari Handel’s statement about the shed skin of the snake being “a symbol of the Eden that we left behind. It’s a garment to clothe you spiritually,” while this certainly ties in with the sources Chattaway quoted, it doesn’t justify it as a Biblical notion but only as ancient Jewish speculation. And it doesn’t change the creepy fact that in the movie Noah, the Serpent has been transformed into a positive image through the film. Granted, it’s the skin of the Serpent. But the skin is the symbol of the Serpent. And the Serpent is the symbol of lost Eden.

Not in the Bible. The Serpent is the symbol of the enemies of God. What does God actually say of the Serpent? Not that the Serpent is a symbol of what Adam and Eve lost. But rather, “I will put enmity between you [Serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Genesis 3:15. This is a War of the Seed of the Serpent with the Seed of Eve that I am writing about in an eight volume series of novels called Chronicles of the Nephilim. (Shameless act of self-marketing. Yes, I am a capitalist. Call me Tubal-cain.)

When Chattaway defends Aronofsky’s Kabbalah and Rabbinic interpretive framework over against the Christian Jewish interpretive framework, he merely makes my argument, that the movie Noah and its God and Serpent are not Biblical.

So for a simple summary of the issues:

The Bible: Serpent bad, God good. God decides Man’s value.
Aronofsky’s Noah: Serpent good, God bad (and silent). Man decides Man’s value.

That’s subversion.

FOOTNOTES
1 James Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent: How a Universal Symbol Became Christianized, New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 220.
2 Campbell, Joseph; Bill Moyers (2011-05-18). The Power of Myth (p. 54). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
3 Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent, p. 309.
4 Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent, p. 419.