In the Canaanite Rephaim Texts, “Travelers” are spirits who “travel” or “cross over” from one plane of existence to another, from the realm of the dead to the land of the living—in other words, demons, the spirits of the Nephilim destroyed in the days of Noah. It’s significant because “Traveler” can be interpreted as a divine name in Ezekiel’s prophecy of the Gog-Magog war.[1]
On that day I will give to Gog a place for burial in Israel, the Valley of the Travelers, east of the sea. It will block the travelers, for there Gog and all his multitude will be buried. It will be called the Valley of Hamon-gog.
Ezekiel 39:11 (ESV)
These Travelers, the Rephaim, were also called “warriors of Baal” in the Rephaim Texts at Ugarit.[2] The reference to them in Ezekiel 39 is not just significant, but critical. The Amorite pagans of Canaan venerated spirits of the dead for centuries before Israel arrived. That’s why God prohibited consulting with mediums and necromancers,[3] and why He sent a plague against Israel for eating sacrifices offered to the dead.[4]
Ezekiel places the Valley of the Travelers east of the Dead Sea, an area where the veil between the worlds was believed to be thin. Place names along the route of the Exodus in Moab include Oboth (“Spirit of the Dead”), Peor (“cleft” or “gap,” which in this context refers to the entrance to the netherworld),[5] and Iye-Abarim (“Ruins of the Travelers”).[6] Mount Nebo, across the Jordan from Jericho, is called the “mountain of the Abarim [Travelers].”[7]
Archaeologists working at Tall el-Hammam, a site about seven and a half miles northeast of the Dead Sea, have uncovered physical evidence that strongly suggests it was the site of Sodom.[8] A thriving city with massive defensive walls appears to have been leveled around 1700 BC in a single, cataclysmic event that left it and the fertile plain around it uninhabited for the next six to seven hundred years, about the time of Saul, David, and Solomon.[9]
Just southeast of the city is a cluster of about five hundred dolmens, megalithic funerary monuments that scholars date to the Early Bronze Age, possibly as old as 3300 BC.[10] It’s estimated that as many as fifteen hundred once stood there, along with menhirs (standing stones), henges, and stone circles, the largest such collection of megalithic structures in the Levant.[11]
The site rises 75 to 150 feet above the plain. So, the stone monuments and the ruined, still-deserted city would have been easily visible to the Israelites who camped on the plains of Moab. It’s even possible that their stop at Iye-Abarim, “Ruins of the Travelers,” was among the rubble of the city that God destroyed with fire from the sky.
Dr. Phillip Silvia, the director of scientific analysis for the Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project, told me in a 2019 interview that the dolmens, unlike some others in the Jordan valley, don’t appear to be aligned with any astronomical features. Instead, they appear to be oriented toward what project archaeologists believe was the temple of Tall el-Hammam.[12]
This is a tantalizing bit of information. Consider: The east side of the Jordan valley is where the Bible places the Rephaim tribes in the days of Abraham.[13] Some twenty-five thousand dolmens have been found along the Jordan from the Golan Heights (ancient Bashan) to the Dead Sea, with the largest concentration of them just outside the walls of Sodom—the largest and most influential city in the Transjordan until the time of Abraham and Lot. Scholars date the construction of the dolmens to time of the Rephaim, the Early and Middle Bronze Ages (roughly 3300–1800 BC),[14]which coincides almost exactly with the period that Sodom dominated the region.[15] Those dolmens apparently faced the city’s temple.
That begs the question: Which of the Fallen was worshiped in that temple? Why was God compelled to destroy the city and those around it? His judgment was about more than just their choice of lifestyle.
Anyway, the Hebrew prophets, especially Isaiah and Ezekiel, were clearly familiar with the pagan cult of the dead. References to the Rephaim are there in the original Hebrew, but they’ve been obscured by translators who may not have understood the historical and religious milieu of the ancient Near East. It doesn’t help that we modern Christians have been taught to de-supernaturalize the Bible. A diverse cast of characters possessing free will—including Satan, a handful of major pagan deities, and an army of minor players in the spirit realm like the host of heaven, the “shades” (Rephaim), and demons—has been flattened into the devil and some minions. And most of us have never been taught that those minions are real, much less that they have a role to play in the end-times prophecy.
On the contrary. The prophets knew that demons and the gods who created them are real, and that they’re working toward a final confrontation with God that will draw in the entire world.
Let’s start with Ezekiel, who prophesied the return of the Nephilim at Armageddon. The spirits of the Rephaim are the Travelers, the demon warriors of Baal (Satan) who make up the army of Gog (Antichrist) at the final battle for Zion.
That may sound crazy, but consider: Since this happens on the Day of the Lord, the day of His terrible judgment on the world, the church won’t be here. We are not destined to suffer His wrath.[16] With Christians gone, those still on the earth will not be protected by the Holy Spirit from this demonic army. What the people of Jerusalem face in that final battle is an attacking force possessed by the demonic spirits of the “mighty men who were of old,” the Nephilim, following their spirit fathers into battle for one final assault on the holy mountain of God.
It will quite literally be an army of the evil dead.
This brings us back full circle to Isaiah 14, where we find the Rephaim, translated into English as “shades,” welcoming the divine rebel upon his fall from Eden.
Sheol beneath is stirred up
Isaiah 14:9 (ESV)
to meet you when you come;
it rouses the shades [Rephaim] to greet you,
all who were leaders of the earth;
it raises from their thrones
all who were kings of the nations.
The description by Isaiah matches the sense of the term in Ugaritic texts from five hundred years earlier: Dead kings of old who now inhabit the netherworld. The main difference is that the Amorites believed that those spirits of the dead would bless and protect their kings, while Isaiah described them as “weak,” sleeping beneath worms on a bed of maggots.[17]
Isaiah 14 is, without a doubt, one of the most important chapters in the Bible for understanding this long supernatural war in which you and I are deployed. It tells us about the divine rebel, Day Star (Lucifer), son of Dawn, and his fall from Eden. The five “I wills” that illustrate his destructive pride and ambition give us insight into what drives one of the key members of Allah, Inc. He may even be the mastermind of the plot.
But as often as we’ve read this chapter of the Bible, Isaiah’s report on Lucifer’s fall is even more fascinating that we’ve been taught. As Derek wrote in The Second Coming of Saturn, “Lucifer” is not, contrary to popular belief, Satan, but rather the chief of the rebellious Watchers—the “sons of God” in Genesis 6:1–4—called Shemihazah in the Book of 1 Enoch.
Second, Isaiah, who is known for his love of wordplay,[18] used an Egyptian loanword to reveal more about the final destiny of the rebel god.
All the kings of the nations lie in glory,
Isaiah 14:18–19 (ESV, emphasis added)
each in his own tomb;
but you are cast out, away from your grave,
like a loathed branch,
clothed with the slain, those pierced by the sword,
who go down to the stones of the pit,
like a dead body trampled underfoot.
What did Isaiah mean by calling the rebel from Eden “a loathed branch?”
Most English translations agree that the Hebrew word netser means “branch.” The range of adjectives chosen by translators includes “loathed,” “repulsive,” “rejected,” “worthless,” and “abominable,” but they convey the same sense—something utterly detestable. The adjective translated “abhorred” or “abominable,” Hebrew taʿab, is significant. It modifies the noun netser, which would normally have a positive connotation. In this context, taʿab means something like “unclean,” or “ritually impure.”[19]
Still, even trying to allow for differences in cultures over the last twenty-seven hundred years, calling someone an “unclean branch” is puzzling. But there is a likely explanation: Isaiah meant something other than “branch” because the Hebrew netser wasn’t the word he used at all.
[The] term is best explained as a loanword from the common Egyptian noun nṯr. Nṯr is generally translated “god,” but is commonly used of the divinized dead and their physical remains. It originally came into Hebrew as a noun referring to the putatively divinized corpse of a dead king, which is closely related to the Egyptian usage.[20] (Emphasis added)
“Divinized dead” is a description of the Rephaim, the Nephilim spirits venerated by the Amorites of Canaan, whom the prophet mentioned above, in verse 9. Isaiah used an Egyptian word that sounds like the Hebrew word for “branch” to connect the rebel from Eden to the Rephaim by calling “Lucifer”—Shemihazah—an abhorrent dead god.
It fits the context of the chapter. Shemihazah was thrown down from Eden to the netherworld, kicked out of heaven, and chained in the abyss until the end of the age. What humiliation.
[1] Klaas Spronk, “Travellers.” In K. van der Toorn, B. Becking, & P. W. van der Horst (Eds.), Dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible (2nd extensively rev. ed.) (Leiden; Boston; Köln; Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999), 876.
[2] Wyatt, op. cit., 321.
[3] Leviticus 19:31, 20:7, 20:26; Deuteronomy 18:11.
[4] Psalm 106:28–29.
[5] Gilbert, Last Clash of the Titans, 170–171.
[6] Spronk, op. cit.
[7] Deuteronomy 32:49.
[8] Bruce Bower, “An exploding meteor may have wiped out ancient Dead Sea communities.” ScienceNews(https://www.sciencenews.org/article/exploding-meteor-may-have-wiped-out-ancient-dead-sea-communities), retrieved 2/15/19.
[9] Phillip J. Silvia, “The Geography and History of Tall el-Hammam.” Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Chronology & Catastrophism Workshop (2014:1), 33–36.
[10] Khair Yassine, “The Dolmens: Construction and Dating Reconsidered.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 259 (Summer, 1985), 63–69.
[11] Steven Collins and Latayne C. Scott, Discovering the City of Sodom (New York: Howard Books, 2013), 30–31.
[12] “Dr. Phillip Silvia: The Science of Finding Sodom.” A View from the Bunker, February 3, 2019 (https://www.vftb.net/?p=7604), retrieved 2/15/19.
[13] Genesis 14:1–16.
[14] Klaas Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1986), 228.
[15] “Discoveries.” Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project (https://tallelhammam.com/discoveries), retrieved 2/15/19.
[16] 1 Thessalonians 5:9.
[17] Isaiah 14:10–11.
[18] J. Daniel Hays, The Message of the Prophets: A Survey of the Prophetic and Apocalyptic Books of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2010), 56–57.
[19] Christopher B. Hays, “An Egyptian Loanword in the Book of Isaiah and the Deir ʾAlla Inscription: Heb. nṣr, Aram. nqr, and Eg. nṯr as “[Divinized] Corpse.” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections Vol. 4:2 (2012), 18.
[20] Ibid., 17.
Very interesting