Methuselah Quotes

You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

It’s all right,” she said. “You’re through.” “Jesus,” he finally managed, pushing water off his face. “Jesus Christ and John the Baptist. For that matter, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.” Still not enough. He needed to reach back to the Old Testament for this. “Obadiah. Nebuchadnezzar. Methuselah and Job.” “Be calm,” she said, taking him by the shoulders. “Be calm. And there are women in the Bible, you know.” “Yes. As I recall it, they were trouble, every last one.

I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?

He died alone,' said Pious Dundas, old as Methuselah, unblinking. 'It don't matter a rat's ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone.

The young mouse's eyes snapped open, clear and bright. He swung the ancient sword high and struck at the giant adder. He struck for Redwall! He struck against evil! He struck for Martin! He struck for Log-a-Log and his shrews! He struck for dead Guosim! He struck as Methuselah would have wanted him to! He struck against Cluny the Scourge and tyranny! He struck out against Captain Snow's ridicule! He struck for the world of light and freedom! He struck until his paws ached and the sword fell from them!

When it don’t rain, the roof don’t leak; when it rains, I can’t fix it nohow.

It doesn’t matter!’ snapped the Metatron. ‘The whole point of the creation of the Earth and Good and Evil—’ ‘I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ’cos they act like people,’ said Adam severely. ‘Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive. If I was in charge, I’d try makin’ people live a lot longer, like ole Methuselah. It’d be a lot more interestin’ and they might start thinkin’ about the sort of things they’re doing to all the enviroment and ecology, because they’ll still be around in a hundred years’ time.

Meanwhile you just lived on and there was nothing to it. She understood perfectly well why people had cocktail parties, and jazzed, and Charlestoned till they were ready to drop. You had to take it out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But what a ghastly thing, this youth! You felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the thing fizzed somehow, and didn't let you be comfortable. A mean sort of life! And no prospect! She almost wished she had gone off with Mick, and made her life one long cocktail party, and jazz evening. Anyhow that was better than just mooning yourself into the grave.

A committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain.

IT IS STARTLING to think that all Europe once looked like this Puszcza. To enter it is to realize that most of us were bred to a pale copy of what nature intended. Seeing elders with trunks seven feet wide, or walking through stands of the tallest trees here—gigantic Norway spruce, shaggy as Methuselah—should seem as exotic as the Amazon or Antarctica to someone raised among the comparatively puny, second-growth woodlands found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Instead, what’s astonishing is how primally familiar it feels. And, on some cellular level, how complete.

You shouldn't have married an elderly man." „Virgil was four and fifty when we wed,” she [Daphne] said. „That is not exactly Methuselah.” „How old were you?” „Nineteen and a half,” she said. „"You'd have done better with two husbands of seven and twenty,” he said.

was no such thing as a “dangerous weapon,” there were only dangerous men.

Any custom is man-made and is therefore a finite attempt to describe an infinity of relationships. It follows as the night from day that any custom necessarily has its exceptions.

It’s not that easy. You can make omelet from eggs, but not eggs from omelet.

Life is short, but the years are long.

Whenever the citizens fix their attention on one issue to the exclusion of others, the situation is ripe for scalawags, demagogues, ambitious men on horseback.

I have several children—seven, to be exact—too many children for an atheist, certainly. Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say, “Shut up! I just got here myself. Who do you think I am—Methuselah? You think I like the news of the day any better than you do? You’re wrong.

That’s what I was trying to find out when we were rushed off on this damned safari. They have unusual intestinal flora and it may have something to do with that. But I think it has to do with the fact that they never stop growing.

I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ’cos they act like people,” said Adam severely. “Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive. If I was in charge, I’d try makin’ people live a lot longer, like ole Methuselah. It’d be a lot more interestin’ and they might start thinkin’ about the sort of things they’re doing to all the enviroment

Never combat any man's opinion; for though you reached the age of Methuselah, you would never have done setting him right upon all the absurd things that he believes. It is also well to avoid correcting people's mistakes in conversation, however good your intentions may be; for it is easy to offend people, and difficult, if not impossible to mend them.

One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism. — Shaw's Preface

Correct or not, he felt himself to be a useless pensioner, an impotent object of charity.

A man may live to be as old as Methuselah,’ said Mr. Filer, ‘and may labour all his life for the benefit of such people as those; and may heap up facts on figures, facts on figures, facts on figures, mountains high and dry; and he can no more hope to persuade ’em that they have no right or business to be married, than he can hope to persuade ’em that they have no earthly right or business to be born. And that we know they haven’t. We reduced it to a mathematical certainty long ago!

Look at all the resources around you before you make a decision. Look for ways to make your environment work for you. The solution to your most impossible problem might be right there in front of you. As obvious as a full Moon is on a dark night.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who re-read and those who don’t. No, don’t be silly, there are far more than two kinds of people in the world. There are even people who don’t read at all. (What do they think about on buses?) But there are two kinds of readers in the world, though, those who re-read and those who don’t. Sometimes people who don’t re-read look at me oddly when I mention that I do. “There are so many books,” they say, “and so little time. If I live to be a mere Methuselah of 800, and read a book a week for 800 years, I will only have the chance to read 40,000 books, and my readpile is already 90,000 and starting to topple! If I re-read, why, I’ll never get through the new ones.” This is in fact true, they never will. And my readpile is also, well, let’s just say it’s pretty large, and that’s just the pile of unread books in my house, not the list of books I’d theoretically like to read someday, many of which have not even been written yet.

You had to take it out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But what a ghastly thing, this youth! you felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the thing fizzed somehow, and didn't let you be comfortable. A mean sort of life! And no prospect!

It is contrary to our customs to permit scientific knowledge to be held as a monopoly for the few. When concealing such knowledge strikes at life itself, the action becomes treason to the race.

By God, master," said Sancho, "the island that I cannot govern with the years I have, I'll not be able to govern with the years of Methuselah; the difficulty is that the said island keeps its distance somewhere, I know not where; and not that there is any want of head in me to govern it.

It is not easy to make the best of both worlds when one of the worlds is preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it. — Shaw's Preface

light-months—and it was now possible to infer by parainterferometric methods that the star (ZD9817, or simply “our” star) had planets of some sort.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

The world’s oldest living tree, the Methuselah, is 4,600 years old

The Methuselah Complex The Bible tells us that Methuselah lived to 969 years of age. Issac died at 180. Do you think Jacob bemoaned the fact that his dad didn't live to a ripe old age?

Sometimes I try to imagine what my life would be like if I had grown up assuming that I could experience God only within the parameters of this present world. I wonder if I would look more closely for him in the simple, everyday things, if I would ask more questions and search harder for answers, if I would be seized by a sense of wonder and carpe diem, if I would live more deliberately and love more recklessly. Sometimes I wonder if this is why the Bible talks about Seth, Methuselah, and Jared living for more than eight hundred years. Maybe they just wanted more time with God.

According to Genesis, the flood took place only 1,656 years after creation. To give you an idea of how recent that was, the Bible tells us that Noah's grandfather, Methuselah, was 113 years old when Adam finally died, and Methuselah died the year of the flood (possibly due to the flood and a very unconcerned grandson). So someone who was personally acquainted with the first created man was still alive when the flood began!

Taking the alphabet first and learning one letter a year for twenty-six years he will be able to read and write as early in life as he ought to. If we were more careful not to teach our children to read in their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of pernicious literature upon their adolescent morals.

When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.

Citizens are urged to tolerate cheerfully any minor inconvenience this may cause them; your right of privacy will be respected in every way possible; your right of free movement may be interrupted temporarily, but full economic restitution will be made.

Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? The first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle.

She glanced to the side at a screen and smiled. “Ah. Good. The nice thing about being old as Methuselah is that you have time to get to know a lot of people. An old golf buddy works for Legal and is aboard and is not a vending machine of toad farts. Expect a call shortly.

The young activist who recycles Robert F. Kennedy’s line “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why . . . I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” has no idea he’s a walking, talking cliché, a non-conformist in theory while a predictable conformist in fact. But he also has no idea he’s tapping into his inner utopian.... RFK didn’t coin the phrase (JFK didn’t either, but he did use it first). The line actually comes from one of the worst people of the 20th century, George Bernard Shaw (admittedly he’s on the B-list of worst people since he never killed anybody; he just celebrated people who did). That much a lot of people know. But the funny part is the line comes from Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah. Specifically, it’s what the Serpent says to Eve in order to sell her on eating the apple and gaining a kind of immortality through sex (or something like that). Of course, Shaw’s Serpent differs from the biblical serpent, because Shaw — a great rationalizer of evil — is naturally sympathetic to the serpent. Still, it’s kind of hilarious that legions of Kennedy worshippers invoke this line as a pithy summation of the idealistic impulse, putting it nearly on par with Kennedy’s nationalistic “Ask Not” riff, without realizing they’re stealing lines from . . . the Devil. ​I don’t think this means you can march into the local high school, kick open the door to the student government offices with a crucifix extended, shouting “the power of Christ compels you!” while splashing holy water on every kid who uses that “RFK” quote on his Facebook page. But it is interesting.

If Hamlet indeed thought not too much but too wisely, then Borges' Homer (who is also Shakespeare) has thought not too well, but too endlessly. Partly Borges is satirizing Back to Methuselah, but he is also savaging his own literary idealism. Without rivalry and polemic between the Immortals there is, paradoxically, no life, and literature dies . For Borges, all theology is a division of fantastic literature. In "The Immortal" he observes with superb irony that despite their professed belief in immortality, Jews, Christians, and Moslems venerate only this world because they truly believe only in it and bind future states to it only as rewards or punishments.

Mass psychology is not simply a summation of individual psychologies; that is a prime theorem of social psychodynamics—not just my opinion; no exception has ever been found to this theorem. It is the social mass-action rule, the mob-hysteria law, known and used by military, political, and religious leaders, by advertising men and prophets and propagandists, by rabble rousers and actors and gang leaders, for generations before it was formulated in mathematical symbols. It works. It is working now.

He even let himself be vaccinated again rather than go back to the I Spy and dig out the piece of paper that showed he had been vaccinated on arrival Earthside a few weeks earlier.

the dream again. Methuselah fell back onto his cushion beneath the towering Father Tree and tried to recall it. It always began the same. He could see her in the distance—a woman. Tall, beautiful, long dark hair flowing. Then he heard the screams. People screaming… crying… and they kept reaching for him… calling to him… and then the water… or no was it fire?

Also, isolation leads to chronically lowered levels of the feel-good neurotransmitter serotonin.  It is one of the bizarre ironies of major depression that being depressed causes people to withdraw from the most powerful antidepressant known - rich and varied social contact.  However therein lies a rich lesson also - in some cases one of the quickest and most effective ways to reverse depression is to socialize.

On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing sucha a hodgepodge of wisdom and nonsense, truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn't disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toenails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script.

On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing such a hodgepodge of wisdom and nonsense, of truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn’t disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toenails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script.

Edna more willingly believed in Elohim's beneficence. When the river had returned to its natural southward current, she wondered how many other miracles they would take for granted with such lack of gratitude. The provision of food to fill their bellies? More salvation from the enemy's mace? The devoted love of a man with a woman? The conception of a new human life? The birth of a child? It seemed everything kept pointing back to Methuselah in her heart.

Our leaders have not loved men: they have loved ideas, and have been willing to sacrifice passionate men on the altars of the blood-drinking, ever-ash-thirsty ideal. Has President Wilson, or Karl Marx, or Bernard Shaw ever felt one hot blood-pulse of love for the working man, the half-conscious, deluded working man? Never. Each of these leaders has wanted to abstract him away from his own blood and being, into some foul Methuselah or abstraction of a man.

Griffin stripped free of his rucksack and gear, and hissed under his breath, frustrated and annoyed with his aching body for having the audacity to be such a whiny baby. He was only thirty-nine, but after the grueling morning, he felt as old as Methuselah. He grabbed two Motrin from one of the desk drawers nearby and dry-swallowed them. Back in the Army, he used to pop them like candy. But today, hell, the last two weeks, he’d been feeling more like a new recruit, and it sucked

The outer garments of to-day will become the under-clothes of some destined to-morrow, and centuries hence a man found walking on the public highways dressed as you are will be arrested by the police for shocking the sense of propriety of the community, and so on. It will go on and on until you will find human beings everywhere decked out in layer after layer of clothes until he or she has lost all semblance to that beautiful thing that an all-wise Providence has designed us to be.

No one in life, not the wartiest old dame in Aries, not the wrinkledest, stoopingest Cossack, not the pony-tailedest, venerablest old Mandarin in China, not Methuselah himself, will ever be older than a group of seniors at school. They are like Victorian photographs of sporting teams. No matter how much more advanced in years you are now than the age of those in the photograph, they will always look a world older, always seem more capable of growing a bigger moustache and holding more alcohol. The sophistication with which they sit and the air of maturity they give off is unmatchable by you. Ever.

If there is any animal in the whole category of four-legged creatures that more thoroughly deserves to be called a pig than the pig, I don't know what it is. He looks like a pig, he behaves like a pig, and he eats like a pig—in fact he is a pig, and Adam never did anything better than when he invented that name and applied it.

as I [Eve] was the only cook in all Christendom at the time, the idea of not coming home to dinner never occurred to Adam... It is true that at times he criticised my cooking, but in view of certain ancestral limitations from which he suffered, I never had to sit quietly and listen to an exasperating disquisition on the Pies That Mother Used To Make...

Obedience to Elohim is not cowardice,” said Noah. He spoke with a new wisdom. “What has changed in you, father?” asked Japheth. “You have always been a man who would die for righteousness and freedom of your soul. But now…” “But now,” interrupted Noah, “I will live for the righteousness of Elohim and the freedom of future generations.” Methuselah, Tubal-cain, and Jubal knew exactly what Noah was talking about, and they knew he was right. They fully understood that the most selfless, most courageous thing for Noah to do, the only courageous thing to do would be to save himself for his bloodline to survive. He was the Chosen Seed of Havah, through whom would come the King of victory over the Seed of Nachash.

If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of whom was past sixty.

His view of me and my ways were expressed with some degree of force to our family physician who, when at the age of a hundred and fifty-three I came down with the mumps, having summoned the whole family and said that I would burst before morning, was met by a reassuring observation from Adam that he wouldn't believe I was dead even if I had been buried a year. "It is the good who die young, Doctor," he said. "On that principle this young malefactor will live to be the oldest man in the world.

Now it is true that I could have learned without a teacher, but it would have been risky for me, because of my natural clumsiness. The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself had done. There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life - life's "experiences" - are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side. If personal experience can be worth anything as an education, it wouldn't seem likely that you could trip Methuselah; and yet if that old person could come back here it is more than likely that one of the first things he would do would be to take hold of one of these electric wires and tie himself all up in a knot. Now the surer thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask somebody whether it was a good thing to take hold of. But that would not suit him; he would be one of the self-taught kind that go by experience; he would want to examine for himself. And he would find, for his instruction, that the coiled patriarch shuns the electric wire; and it would be useful to him, too, and would leave his education in quite a complete and rounded-out condition, till he should come again, some day, and go to bouncing a dynamite-can around to find out what was in it.

One red feather for celebration. No one yet has seen it but me. When Miss Dickinson says, “Hope is the thing with feathers,” I always think of something round—a ball from one of the games I will never play—stuck all around like a clove-orange sachet with red feathers. I have pictured it many times—Hope!—wondering how I would catch such a thing one-handed, if it did come floating down to me from the sky. Now I find it has fallen already, and a piece of it is here beside our latrine, one red plume. In celebration I stooped down to pick it up. Down in the damp grass I saw the red shaft of another one, and I reached for it. Following the trail I found first the red and then the gray: clusters of long wing feathers still attached to gristle and skin, splayed like fingers. Downy pale breast feathers in tufted mounds. Methuselah. At last it is Independence Day for Methuselan and the Congo. O Lord of the feathers, deliver me this day. After a lifetime caged away from flight and truth, comes freedom. After long seasons of slow preparation for an innocent death, the world is theirs at last. From the carnivores that would tear me, breast from wishbone. Set upon by the civet cat, the spy, the eye, the hunger of a superior need, Methuselah is free of his captivity at last. This is what he leaves to the world: gray and scarlet feathers strewn over the damp grass. Only this and nothing more, the tell-tale heart, tale of the carnivore. None of what he was taught in the house of the master. Only feathers, without the ball of Hope inside. Feathers at last at last and no words at all.

I have come a long way, baby,” the Methuselah Man told himself. He laughed again, feeling as if he should be smoking a cigarette as he said that.

Methuselah.

It does not pay a man to exist until the age of Methuselah by making his days indolent and useless. The more this is reflected upon, them ore the reflector will desire to undertake meaningful and useful actions, the more they will have lived.

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.” ​— ​George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

My very favorite example of this is the story of Methuselah and Hannah,” she said, “two very special date palms. Methuselah was the first to be brought back to life—from one of a number of seeds discovered in King Herod’s desert fortress on the shores of the Dead Sea in the Jordan Rift Valley.

Carbon dating revealed that these seeds were two thousand years old! Dr. Sarah Sallon, the director of the Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah University Hospital, and Dr. Elaine Solowey, who runs the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura, got permission to try to germinate a few of them. One of the seeds grew—a male whom she called Methuselah after the character in the Bible, Noah’s grandfather, who was said to have lived to be nine hundred and sixty-nine years old.

25When Methuselah had lived one hundred eighty‐ seven years, he became the father of Lamech. 26Methuselah lived after the birth of Lamech seven hundred eighty‐ two years, and had other sons and daughters. 27Thus

The longest-lived character in the Bible is Methuselah. He supposedly lived to be 969 years old.

May your days be long upon the earth, my son, Methuselah, and may your name remind us all to turn to God so we may be saved. We have your lifetime and ours to repent and return. May God bless you and keep you and help you to walk with Him always.” Enoch kissed Methuselah’s cheek

The answer lies in an enzyme found in Methuselah. That’s the name given to a bristlecone pine tree growing in California’s White Mountains. When it was named, the tree was the oldest recorded living being. Today, it’s nearing its 4,800th birthday. For context, Methuselah had already been alive for centuries before construction of the Egyptian pyramids had even begun.

In An Enemy of the People, speaking the language of comic exaggeration through the mouth of his spokesman, the idealist Doctor Thomas Stockmann, Ibsen puts into very literal terms the theme of the play: It is true that ideas grow stale and platitudinous, but one may go one step further and say flatly that truths die. According to Stockmann, there are no absolute principles of either wisdom or morality. In this Ibsen is referring indirectly to the reception of his previous plays. For example, the commandment "honor thy father and thy mother" referred to in Ghosts is not simply either true or false. It may have been a truth once and a falsehood today. As Stockmann states in his excited harangue to his political enemies: Truths are by no means the wiry Methuselahs some people think them. A normally constituted truth lives — let us say — as a rule, seventeen or eighteen years; at the outside twenty; very seldom more. And truths so patriarchal as that are always shockingly emaciated.

Chapter 11—The Call of Abraham After the dispersion from Babel idolatry again became well-nigh universal, and the Lord finally left the hardened transgressors to follow their evil ways, while he chose Abraham, of the line of Shem, and made him the keeper of his law for future generations. Abraham had grown up in the midst of superstition and heathenism. Even his father’s household, by whom the knowledge of God had been preserved, were yielding to the seductive influences surrounding them, and they “served other gods” than Jehovah. But the true faith was not to become extinct. God has ever preserved a remnant to serve him. Adam, Seth, Enoch, Methuselah, Noah, Shem, in unbroken line, had preserved from age to age the precious revealings of his will. The son of Terah became the inheritor of this holy trust. Idolatry invited him on every side, but in vain. Faithful among the faithless, uncorrupted by the prevailing apostasy, he steadfastly adhered to the worship of the one true God. “The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth.” Psalm 145:18. He communicated his will to Abraham, and gave him a distinct knowledge of the requirements of his law and of the salvation that would be accomplished through Christ. There was given to Abraham the promise, especially dear to the people of that age, of a numerous posterity and of national greatness: “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.” And to this was added the assurance, precious above every other to the inheritor of faith, that of his line the Redeemer of the world should come: “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Yet, as the first condition of fulfillment, there was to be a test of faith; a sacrifice was demanded. [126]

You remember back in the old days when God gave out immortality all over the place like sweets?" "Not immortality, Michael. Longevity, never immortality. Methuselah clocked up nine hundred and sixty-nine years." "Adam lived for nine hundred and thirty years. His surviving son, Seth, lived for nine hundred and twelve." "But all of them died.

Often? That’s a relative concept when you’re in here.” He licked his lips. They were chapped, startlingly red against the snow white of his Methuselah beard.

Then Methuselah embraced Havah. She whispered to him, "Methuselah, you shall outlive us all." That struck him as a bit odd, out of place. Maybe she had lost some of her wits in her old age.

Anxiety was getting the better part of all of them. They had been seeking to destroy the Chosen Seed for so many generations, they had stopped counting. Ever since they and their two hundred comrade Sons of God had fallen from heaven before the Great Flood, they had sought to corrupt the human bloodline. They made Mount Hermon their cosmic mountain and base of operations. They revealed occult secrets to mankind, took on the identity of gods, male and female, and even mated with human women to create their serpentine seed, the Nephilim giants. The Deluge had imprisoned most of them, leaving the seventy and their minions to become the spiritual principalities and powers over the nations. In Eden, that detestable Creator, Yahweh Elohim, had cursed the Serpent and his seed to be at war with the Seed of Eve. And that one day, an individual from that seedline of Eve would crush the head of the Serpent. The Watcher gods had sought to kill Enoch, Methuselah, Noah, Shem, Abraham and his chosen offspring all the way up to the present. And they had failed every time. It seemed the only thing they had been successful with was their giant progeny.

Then it came to him. This was not the diversion, the battle of Gibeah was the diversion. The real goal was to capture Mikael himself, the prince of Israel. Well, he thought, they picked the wrong archangel to mess with. I have a chosen nation to protect. He pulled out his horn to call for help, but Ba’alzebul’s mace smashed it out of his hands. Dagon assaulted him with a barrage of sword slashes and strikes. Mikael kept him at bay, but almost got stung by Asherah’s javelin from the other side. He dodged and kept moving. His Karabu training was his only hope. It was the heavenly battle technique of Yahweh’s archangels developed to protect the Garden of Eden in primordial days. They had taught the human giant killers Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Caleb the Way of Karabu, but now he would need to call upon his training to survive this ordeal. He flipped, spun, and danced around the four attacking gods and their weapons. It frustrated the malevolent beings, which was to Mikael’s advantage. But archangels were still created beings. He began to grow tired. They were wearing him down. Dagon’s sword grazed Mikael’s arm, cutting through his tunic. He was not going to be able to keep it up. He would have to do something drastic. Ba’alzebul moved in on Mikael. The biggest, meanest, mightiest of the gods had been waiting for his opportune moment when Mikael was just weary enough, just worn enough, to be incapable of expecting the unexpected. Ba’alzebul took the lead and pounded Mikael’s sword with his mace and backed him up against the ledge. Mikael looked down to the chasm floor. Saul and his forces made their way through the chasm below after slaughtering the priests of Molech. It wasn’t a fair fight. And neither was this fight. But Saul was safe. He had made it through and went north toward Gibeah. But the gods were not here for Saul. They were here for Mikael. Ba’alzebul suddenly threw down his mace and rushed Mikael like a bull goring its prey. Mikael didn’t register why, until Ba’alzebul hit him. The two of them launched off into space, plummeting toward the chasm floor two hundred feet below. Angels and gods could not die. But they were not mere spirits. They were enfleshed spirits. While it was unique flesh that would heal miraculously, it was still flesh that could be hurt — as Ba’alzebul knew all too well from his own painful experience in the molten earth. They hit the ground with a powerful thud and sank several feet into the dirt. Every bone in Mikael’s body was broken in the fall. He was paralyzed in excruciating pain. Ba’alzebul had been on top of Mikael, so while he too would be somewhat incapacitated, it would not be as bad for him, having used Mikael’s body as a cushion in the fall. As Mikael slipped into a state of delirious pain, he knew that their goal had been to capture him this way. To ambush him and therefore make both Saul and David more vulnerable to human attack. But what did they plan for Mikael? He could not begin to imagine.

Methuselah sat quiet. He was stunned. Of all the crazy dreams and visions his father had experienced throughout the years, this one was different. It hit Methuselah more like the truth than anything ever had. He thought that was strange, because he was not the mystical type. But this time, he just knew it was true.

We had received word that Enoch and some archangels had entered the cosmic mountain Hermon, and stood right in the midst of the council of the gods who could not touch them. He prophesied and it was said he was translated into heaven on a fiery chariot.” Methuselah and Edna looked at each other with hope in their hearts and smiles on their lips. If this rumor was true, Elohim surely had a sense of irony. “The gods are mustering their armies for war on Eden as we speak. Inanna is the Commander in Chief, and the Rephaim Council of the Didanu are the generals.

Tebah?” said Noah. Methuselah, Tubal-cain and Jubal ran to them from the village, shouting greetings. They exchanged long overdue embraces, grabbing each other’s wrists. Noah could not keep his eyes off of the structure. “You are building the box?” he asked. “Your sons and tribe are,” said Methuselah, “in your name.” Methuselah pulled out a piece of leather with scratchings all over it. He handed it ceremoniously to Noah. “You gave me the directions before your little vacation in Sheol all those years ago. Must this old man shame your dullness of memory?

Methuselah swung the pear-shaped mace down toward the skull of his adversary, a fifteen-year old girl named Edna. She raised her shield and blocked it effectively, then parried with her own mace. He barked, “Excellent, runt!” Methuselah was a strapping twenty-year old handsome young man. His unusual blue eyes often drew the teasing of his companions, saying that he was a Bene ha Elohim, or more likely a product of their union with the daughters of men. It was not true, but he played along with it because he liked standing out from the crowd. He was a fiery lad with a passion for arguing, not the best of traits for an apkallu in training, since their order was marked by restraint and listening. But Methuselah hungered for knowledge, and loved to study and learn about everything.

Enoch embraced Adam fiercely. “It is you! I never thought I would ever meet you.” Then he hugged Havah with tenderness. “Yes, here I am in the flesh. Are you not going to introduce me to your companion?” Adam said. He could not see, but he had highly attuned his other senses to compensate for the lack of sight. “Dear, dear, Enoch,” Havah said with a loving sadness. “Oh, pardon me,” said Enoch, “This is my son Methuselah.” “That would be your great-great-great-great-great-great grandson,” retorted Methuselah. “Oh? And with a sense of humor, too. It does my heart good to hear you, my great-great-great-great-great grandson,” said Adam with what would have been a twinkle in a seeing eye. “I cannot see you, but I can smell you, and you are in need of a bath.” He grinned impishly.

Three generals galloped forward on their horses, each accompanied by an archangel. Each led a battalion of about seven hundred soldiers, Tubal-cain and Raphael commanded the left flank division, Jubal and Gabriel were over the right flank division, and Methuselah and Mikael led the center division. They met in the center to counsel. “Have you fought Nephilim?” Mikael asked Methuselah. Methuselah raised his eyebrow. “In my day, I was quite the giant killer. Now, I think I am just an archangel’s irritant.” Everyone knew he was talking about Uriel. They all smiled. Mikael said, “Well, then you should do well on this day.

YAHWEH ELOHIM! THY WILL BE DONE!” Behind him, a huge fifteen cubit high wall of water appeared, as if bidden by Methuselah. It surged over the desert of Dudael, swallowing up everything. Methuselah and his guards disappeared under the enormous wave as it crashed upon the last of the armies of the gods and drowned them all like ants in a rainstorm.

This vision gave one new piece of information they had not heard before. Enoch had been told that there was a Chosen Seed to come from the line of Seth, through Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech, one who would bring an end to the reign of the gods and bring rest from the curse of the land. Everyone recognized the reference from their time with Adam and Havah. It was the seed of the Woman, Eve, at war with the seed of the Serpent, Nachash.

How do I know this is true? I mean, this Elohim has never shown his face to me all these years, and now all of a sudden, I am told to leave everything and follow him? It is bizarre.” “Are you moonstruck, father?” said Methuselah, a common insult in the city of the sun god. “After all these years of your wild and unbelievable dreams, you question this one — now?” Enoch retorted, “And you now are the gullible true believer? Or is that just your habit of being contrary and impulsive?” “I am not being contrary. I cannot explain it. I just know it is true.” “You cannot explain it,” repeated Enoch. “Well, now you know how I feel, and what I have been trying to tell you all these years.

Enoch knew that the gods would hunt them down as soon as they discovered the family was gone. They did not stand a chance, but he had to try. He had no other choice. Stay and certainly die, or run and probably die. When Methuselah arrived at the gathering point with Edna, Enoch glared with disapproval. Methuselah stared him in the eye and said, “Would you prefer she marry the gods?” Enoch stubbornly refused to answer as they moved on through the passageway. His son was right.

Enoch, my son! What took you so long!” Enoch and Methuselah turned to see an old man and woman walk out of a side entrance. They were both at least a good eight hundred years or so old. The man’s stately but bent posture tempered the flashing white hair on his head. The woman’s hair shone white as well, but she carried herself with the grace of royalty. She led the man by the arm. They both had a sense of carrying the weight of the world upon them. Then Enoch and Methuselah saw why she was leading him. It was not that he was more frail than she, but because he was blind. His eyes were glazed over with a foggy whiteness. “Father Adam?” Enoch said. He realized his mouth hung open and he closed it. “And mother Havah,” Adam replied with a smile. “Do not be disrespectful, lad.

Methuselah continued, “Do not be so sure that revenge is a meal that will satisfy your hunger. It is more like a disease that eats away your soul. As the years go on, bitterness turns you into the very thing you detest. You begin a blessed man. But when Elohim takes away that blessing, you begin to believe you deserved it in the first place. You blame him and eventually you end up an old bellyaching ingrate without the ability to appreciate the good in anything. And you realize that you are the reason for your misery. You have become your own enemy.

You may not care what happens to the rest of the world. But I do. This is bigger than my life, than all of our lives. If grandfather Enoch prophesied the truth and Betenos and I are the lineage of the Seed, then why would you give up? Would you dishonor the faith of the one you loved most on this earth?” That got through Methuselah’s wall of silence. Lamech was right. His son was absolutely right. Methuselah had placed his faith in this world and not in Elohim’s promised world to come. He had relied on his senses for so long that he had worn them out. He had lost his taste, his smell, his touch; he had become blind, deaf and dumb. He had neglected prayer because Elohim seemed so distant and his prayers almost futile. He had come to believe that things got done because he got up and did them, not because of Elohim’s solicited favor. Since Elohim was going to do what he was going to do anyway, then why bother wasting time talking to him about it? He had become a self-made man who lifted himself up by his own sandal straps. And it was all a self-deluded lie. He had missed the whole point that his wife had been trying to tell him: he distrusted Elohim because of the betrayal of the gods. He had lived a life of self-reliance rather than a life of faith. He had sought desperately for significance in this world. But he now understood his significance would be as the protector of Elohim’s Seed, not the fulfiller of his own.

The two Ednas were nothing alike. They were as different as Methuselah and Enoch. Mother Edna was kind, sweet, supportive, and submissive. Sixteen-year old Edna was spunky, feisty, independent, and stubborn. Methuselah’s differences with his father haunted him wherever he turned. The living quarters they occupied were humble compared with other palace servants or royalty. According to Enoch, a wisdom sage was not concerned about the things of this world, but about truth, justice, and heaven.

Enoch did not care about the rebellion. He did not care about the gods. He did not care about anything anymore. His Edna was gone. Now, only his son Methuselah kept him anchored to this earth.

Methuselah had led the tribe as they grew of age. He patiently taught them the construction skills they needed to build the box. They had honed their talent by building elaborate village homes of wood that provided the added blessing of luxurious living. They found a peculiar tree of very hard wood in the valley they called “gopher wood.” It was a long process to cut down the trees and create long, cured and glued planks. The boards were then sealed with a prime coating of tree pitch. The pitch was made by bleeding the sap from pines, burning the pine wood into charcoal, grinding that to powder, and mixing that powder into large vats of boiling pine resin. They then painted the wood with the tree-made pitch to seal it with an initial coat.

built the skeletal structure for the box based on the directions of the holy writ given from God to Noah, and then to Methuselah on leather. Everything stood ready. They needed only to begin the process of final construction. It could be completed within months if things went well. They had perfected a means of holding the beams together by pounding wooden pins into them. They had found bitumen pits nearby for the final layer of pitch to cover the wood of the completed box with a one or two inch thickness. Noah drove them hard to finish quickly, but he never asked of any man what he was not willing to do himself.

The three of them lay over Edna’s body and wept. Wife, mother, servant of Elohim, she was now with her Creator.   They buried her body near a large terebinth tree by the brook. Terebinth were sacred trees that were considered places of communion with deity. Edna had been a conduit of communion with Elohim for Methuselah. She was the most powerful proof of God’s presence and goodness to him. Through her he came to understand grace, goodness, strength, perseverance, and a faith that he did not have in himself. She had been both submissive wife and godly inspiration to him, his perfect ezer. He would never have known happiness but for her. He would never know happiness again without her. They laid the stones upon the resting place as a memorial, and prayed to Elohim, and wept and sang songs of hope. Then they ate a meal together.

Enoch. “When Elohim commands, we obey. He will bring about the results that he sees fit.” Enoch told them of his latest dream-vision. Uriel had visited him again and taken him up to Mount Hermon in the presence of all the fallen Watchers, not to fight them, but to pronounce Elohim’s word of judgment. No actions, just words. And this was Enoch’s final journey to make. This vision gave one new piece of information they had not heard before. Enoch had been told that there was a Chosen Seed to come from the line of Seth, through Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech, one who would bring an end to the reign of the gods and bring rest from the curse of the land.

They could not be more different. Enoch received visions from the gods. He sought to raise his son with the same sense of piety and obedience. Unfortunately, Methuselah was too lustful for life and this earth. Enoch loved prayer, Methuselah loved reading cuneiform. Enoch barely noticed women, Methuselah burned with desire for every attractive woman he saw. Enoch loved the holy liturgy of worship, Methuselah loved a feast of food and good drink. Enoch spent hours of silence in the temple shrine, Methuselah spent hours worshipping the beauty of creation (and especially the gods’ most beautiful creation, the female body). Enoch was a holy man of heaven, Methuselah felt he was a profane man of earth.