Blurry Creatures - EP: 79 The gods of Egypt with Brian Godawa

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

Author and filmmaker Brian Godawa makes his return to the show to talk about his new book and the world of ancient Egypt. Brian takes into the life of Moses, the Exodus, and the dynastic Egyptian culture that provided the backdrop for this epic. How was Moses directly influenced by the Egyptians? What supernatural and creature encounters do we find in the story of Moses and the Exodus? We take an unconventional journey into a familiar story with context from ancient historians, extra-biblical texts, with an emphasis on how the gods of Egypt and the God of Abraham did battle over the people of Israel.  guest: www.godawa.com [e-mail] blurrycreatures.com Socials instagram.com/blurrycreatures facebook.com/blurrycreatures twitter.com/blurrycreatures Music Kyle Monroe: tinytaperoom.com Aaron Green: https://www.instagram.com/aaronkgreen/ Outro Song: TimeCop1983: timecop1983.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luke so often people email us and they have this story. They're out in their woods and they're looking in the bushes and they go, what's that? And when you are pouring your dog food and your dog's bowl, that's the last thing you want to say. What is that? What is this stuff coming out of this bag? You know, I don't think a lot of us think about maybe what we feed our dogs. And that's why we partner with rough greens.

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There is a place in Arabia, not far from the town of Buto, where I learn about winged serpents. When I arrived there, I saw innumerable bones and backbones of serpents. This place adjoins the plain of Egypt. Winged serpents are said to fly from Arabia at the beginning of spring, making for Egypt. The serpents are like water snakes. wings are not feathered, but like the wings of a bat. Welcome back to blurry creatures.

Thanks guys for tuning in and subscribing and sharing the show with your friends. Luke and I are looking at each other on a Zoom call. Yeah, we are, Nathan. And we really need to be together in one room podcasting. We do. You're just so close yet so far away, my friend. Tell them how they can make it happen, Luke. Well, you get in your car, you drive about 45 minutes north or south,

Depending on which way he wants, whose house you want to come to? And you too. That's right. That's right. You two can be in Middleton C. That's right. Hope you had a good holiday season. We had our Christmas show with Judd.

Hope you like that one. And today we have Brian Gadabwe on the show. He's written a ton of books and brings more that fantasy element to the Nephilim story. He kind of writes novels with historical characters and weaves the Bible in and out of his stuff. But we're going to learn some things about the blurry world that we often talk about, you know, the creators of these nephalum creatures and the giants and the pyramids and all the stuff we talk about with guys like Derek and Judd. I love going back and unpacking familiar stories in the context of what we know now.

The context of Genesis 6 and the context of the megalithic stuff we know. And also in the Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 82 Heiser, Divine Counsel. I think Brian's going to put a really cool spin on. on stories that we are, most of us should be very familiar with. And like everything, it's good. Yeah. I expect us to get blurry. So once again, if you want to support the show, blurrycreatures.com slash members.

Just can't say thanks enough to everyone who sponsors this show. We've had just a great season on the show. People sending us messages. Luke, I mean, I don't even know how to say thanks sometimes some of the messages we get. It's just, oh, it's, it's mind-blowing sometimes. You start a Bigfoot podcast. You get weird. and people are, you guys are just great.

The community is awesome. We'll be doing a member's chat soon in January. So if you want to become a member and support the show and kind of help us get this blurry content out there and produce more content, you guys are all amazing and helpful. And it keeps the show flowing. We don't want to throw any ads on this thing. We want to keep it kind of pure and raw.

So that's my spiel. That's my stick. Not as good as Godawa. No, but you're learning, Nathan. For only $6.99 a month, you can get. yourself a blurry or love gift of five dollars get some holy water all right and let's get Brian on the show the history of our earth is so different from what we can imagine joy to join the Smithsonian that if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere was to go get it I'm going to

assume at least one person is right because if one person's right it bust the paragraph It all goes back to the fallen chair. And the problem with the modern day church, they had a very truncated view of the supernatural. This backdrop is just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Hermann event. And this guy defects from the kingdom. That's a big deal. All right, welcome back to the show. Brian, thank you for coming on the show.

You have a brand new book about Moses, and we're excited to hop into that and get more details about why you wrote it and what it's about. There are so many things in ancient Egypt that we talk about all the time on our show, how it relates to the Megaliths, how it relates to ancient construction, and just the idea that there were multiple gods in the Old Testament influencing culture, and Moses would have been directly influenced by the Egyptian gods and all the things going on during that time that Christians sort of kind of don't want to talk about or acknowledge. It's just a strange paradigm that we're getting ourselves out of on our show. But yeah, excited to learn more about ancient Egypt and what was going on. Right. And Nate, we just got done talking to Dr. Judd Burton about

Mount Herman. And we cover that location, that locale, the Genesis 6 phenomenon. That that hits at a core, a core space in what we do here. And so this is great, Brian. I'm really excited to talk about what you're doing in the context of the watchers, which really predicates, you know, almost all of the creature things we cover as well as all of the theology we get into here, Nate. And we're always trying to sort of give people a, if we had a poster with all the creatures on them, where their origins are, what they are. And one of the things you do on our show is try to get better answers for the creatures that people still see today, where they come from and how it relates to the ancient world in order to understand modern day, basically demonic

creatures. And that's kind of where we land is that they have some sort of roots of satanic, demonic, whatever. They're just, there's too much weird paranormal stuff associated with sightings and things like that. So we go back to the Old Testament all the time and we're happy to have you on the show. I don't know. What do you have, what are your thoughts on Bigfoot? What do you think about that creature that we can launch into your, into your book?

Well, I'm not a Bigfoot guy. I don't, I don't follow it. So I don't know. There's a couple of cool movies on Bigfoot. Yeah. Yeah. Which one? Tell us.

People always ask us. I've seen one of these like horror movies, you know, the found footage stuff, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Harry Anderson's about found footage. I did see that one when I was a kid. Well, do you think, do you think it has some like Nephilim ties or Nephilim roots? I mean, obviously you research that at a time. Do you think it's related?

Yeah. Personally, no. I'm not the guy to talk to about that stuff because, nah, I just don't. Yeah. It's fine. That's cool. Sorry. Hey, we do plenty of speculating for everybody else on here. Yeah.

I'll let you guys speculate about that. Take us back to ancient Egypt. Just some framework to understand the ancient world and maybe some things in your book that you feel like are fresh and new that other people haven't covered or tackled. Yeah, no, absolutely. So the book is called Moses Against the Gods of Egypt. And what it is is it's a novel. And I'm retelling the story of Moses.

But I'm telling it within the watcher paradigm, what I call the watcher paradigm, which is Deuteronomy 32 versus 8 through 10 is a good encapsulating passage that describes this idea that at the Tower of Babel, God separated the nations, and he also placed the Gentile nations who rejected God under the authority of these sons of God. Sons of God are these beings from heaven, from God's heavenly throne, particularly these were fallen from God's throne, and the Gentile nations were fallen. it was like God was saying, okay, if you're going to keep worshipping idols, I'm going to place you under their authority. The ancient belief was that, and this is the Jews as well as most all the ancient Middle Eastern, you know, ancient near eastern nations, believe that there was a over every nation or big city like Babylon or something like that. There would be a territorial power or principality or power. And in the book of Daniel mentions the watchers.

and just think of it as watchers over the nations, you know. And but they're also called princes. And in, you know, chapter 9, I think you hear about the prince of Greece and the prince of Persia. In other words, in the same way, there are earthly authorities. They felt that there were heavenly authorities over them, and they were linked. So that if there's a war going on on earth, there's a war going on in heaven. So you have the example where Elisha's servant, Elisha the prophet, you know, this nation's coming down to, I can't remember if it was, Syria or not, but they were coming against Jerusalem, and Elisha's servant was all worried,

where we're going to be wiped out. And he says, oh, God, open the eyes of my servant. So he opened his eyes and he could see up in the heavens that there was heavenly armies that were protecting them, meaning there's this connecting or there's a connection or link between earthly authorities and heavenly authorities. Now, what that exactly looks like, the Bible doesn't really reveal much. So my novel series attempts to sort of speculate and say, what might that look like in one way? You know, what might that spiritual world look like? And so a lot of my novels have been about the Canaanite world,

Canaanite gods like Bail and such and how they interact with Yahweh and Israel. You know, I've written a lot of those novels and Chronicles of the Nephilim. But what's so unique about the Moses one is now we're all, we're in Egypt. It's a completely different world than the, the Canaanite world that a lot of Israel is rooted in, right?

Because that became their promised land. But nevertheless, I thought, well, this would be a fascinating story to retell because it's a completely different world, Egyptian worldview. Yet there's a lot of commonalities between everyone in the ancient world. And Israelites were there for over 400 years. And the Bible talks about how they became very much like that nation, Egyptian. So they've been very infected by it.

Just like when they went into Canaan and worshipped the king. and at gods of Bail and Asherah, they became affected as well. And so I thought, well, what might it look like with these watchers over Egypt? And I thought, well, what if the gods of the ancient world, like Horace and Seth and, you know, Isis and Osiris, what if those were these watchers, these fallen sons of God over Egypt? And so they had that demonic reality that Moses writes about in Deuteronomy 32. And so that's sort of my attempt to make theological sense of that concept. So, you know, we all know the 10 plagues, right? And the 10 plagues is a fascinating thing. But what really struck me, what sort of inspired me to write this particular novel is that

in Exodus 1212, Yahweh says, I will execute judgment on the gods of Egypt, on all the gods of Egypt. What does that mean? Well, it's probably the plagues. And your first thought is, oh, the plagues, like the frogs, maybe there's a god of frogs, and he's judging that god by the plague of frogs, and there's a god of locusts, right? And there is a god of locusts and a god of frogs. But the problem is, is all the ten plagues don't, they don't all match up with specific deities. And secondly, the deities that do match up, like the frogs and the locust gods, they're very, very minor gods in the pantheon. And so they don't really have importance like Osiris and ISIS does, you know? And so there isn't that connection

between the most important God. So what could that really mean that he's judging these plagues are judging the gods? Well, we're really quick, but you kind of talked about something I wanted to talk about a little bit more before we kind of go to the next level is this connection between heaven and earth, warring on earth, mirror warring in heaven. And it kind of reminds me of like when you do video editing, your audio is connected to your video, sort of, and when you, you know, cut it around, it kind of all moves together as one. And we've also heard weird stories, Brian, on our show about how sometimes these UFO creatures are dismantling atomic bombs or something.

And people have made suggestions that if we rip a hole in like, you know, if we mess with atomic nuclear bombs, it could rip holes in other dimensions. And there is this connection between different realms. levels of heaven. Can you talk a little bit more about that before we kind of hop into the plagues? I'm curious about your thoughts on the connection. I think that the biblical view is similar to ancient pagan views in that if you had like a, they thought that particularly the kings, but sometimes whole nations or, you know, sometimes even cities would have a guardian over it, right? But if there was a king like, you know, Nebuchadnezzar or something in Babylon, right, or in my case,

Pharaoh, that they believe that there was a spiritual power over them. And they were linked such that whatever happened on earth was happening in heaven. This is where Jesus makes that statement on earth as it is in heaven. That's part of that belief that they believe that the worlds were connected and linked, right? So, you know, like I said, when Persia, you know, if you look at the Daniels story, Greece came after Persia in terms of worldly powers. And, and And Daniel's all about how these Gentile kingdoms are sort of controlling Israel, you know, unjustly, right? And he talks about, he predicts all these progressive empires.

Well, you know, at the time that Persia was world power and had Israel in its powers, Greece was coming down the pike, right, in terms of history, and they would ultimately take power away from Persia. So that's where you read in Daniel about these, the Prince of Persian, the Prince of Greece fighting, you know. So there's this heavenly fighting that mirrors the earthly fighting. What exactly that looks like? I don't know. And I speculate about it in my novel. And

the Bible doesn't reveal a lot. It just sort of mentions it. You know, I mean like, oh, you know, or it mentions, you know, these heavenly chariots. But you don't, there's no description about what actually goes on beyond those glimpses. So I don't know exactly. I don't have a strong, biblical sense. So I just speculate, okay, well, if it's, you know, if there's a war going on heaven and there's a war going on in earth, why wouldn't the leaders of these nations also have petty, tyrannical goals just like the earthly, you know, authorities do, right? So they're going to be jockeying for power as well. So the pantheon in Egypt, all these different gods, well, maybe some of them are real and they're really jockeying for power with each other. So I try to, you

tell a story that sort of makes sense of that. Sometimes it feels like when you get that phone bill, it's like the crash site document. You can't read it. There's a bunch of numbers, random fees, vague language, stuff's blacked out. You're like,

what am I actually paying for? I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. I like to be simple. I like to be easy. I'm going to be thrown away money on big wireless carriers.

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five-gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full-price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mintmobile for details. Do you think that they're directly influenced by the dragon, Satan, or are they independent doing their own thing? Yeah, that's a good question.

Satan's one of them actually and and you know interestingly in the Bible or in the Old Testament there's really there's really no individual character named Satan now the word the Hebrew word satan ha satan is used but it's really most scholars will say that it's more like the title of a of a particular responsibility not an individual's name it means the name ha satan means the adversary roughly. And so he was part of God's, actually, he was even part of God's divine counsel in heaven that he would be the one that would accuse. Like, you know, he would accuse Israel before God's heavenly throne in, you know, books like, what is it, Micah or Zechariah and such. So whether

or not he's the king of them all, I don't know. But in the New Testament, there is, somewhat more of a clarification, right? In the book of Revelation, we read about, oh, maybe he's connected to the serpent of the garden. So some people believe that he's more of a motif of this rebellion against God, or maybe he is an individual. I suspect there is an individual reality to him because Jesus has that encounter with him

with desert and stuff. She's gonna say. But what I'm saying is that this idea of the dragon, like you read about the dragon and dragon Satan, well, the dragon is actually a very common ancient Near Eastern motif as well as a biblical motif of chaos. So if you look the precursor to that dragon you read about in Revelation, if you want to understand the meanings of the New Testament things, you have to go back to their Old Testament origins. And so, for example, the sea dragon of chaos, the dragon in

Revelation comes out of the sea, right? Well, the Sea Dragon of Chaos was called Leviathan in the Old Testament. And I don't think he was a literal creature. I think he was a symbolic creature that was used to refer to the chaos. Now in my novels, I have them as a real spiritual creature embodying that chaos as part of the sort of part of the dramatic narrative to, you know, make it interesting. Like, what if he does exist in the spiritual world, right? But I think biblically speaking, he represents the chaos out of which the gods or, in the Bible's case, the God, our God, creates order. And he's connected to the sea. The sea and the ancient mindset was chaos, you know. It You know, the tossing waves, they didn't know what was under it, and plus it's vast and all that.

So they would often use the sea as the symbol of chaos. In fact, that's how God creates in Genesis 1. You've got that chaos waters, and he creates out of that. He brings his order out of that chaos. That's a very, very common ancient motif. It wasn't like Satan trapped in the waters, too, they say? Under the water. A lot of people have suggested that.

And we have heard that on our show that Satan, you know, or. is a god of chaos. Yeah. And, you know, God is a god of order. And that he's fully interested in the twisting of the gospel. And obviously, if one is orderly, the other one is disorderly, you know, and we've heard this in a million different ways described on the show. So, I mean, what if the Leviathan is, do you think it could have been a creature, maybe?

And then it died out and then became this legend, just like a lot of things that you know, kind of attached to maybe an animal that once existed and then didn't anymore, and then that, you know, something like that. Yeah, that's a common thing that does occur in history. I don't think so, personally. I don't after studying in the Bible and other nature, cultures and stuff. Because just when you study the mindset of the ancient world and you become engrossed in it, you start to see how they understand things. And the reason why I say that is because If you do a study on Leviathan in the Bible, he's connected to chaos. Like in Psalm 74, when God parts the Red Sea and brings his people through it,

it says he crushes the heads of Leviathan. Well, what he's doing is he's holding back the chaos. He's crushing chaos because he's going to bring them to Sinai and give them his order, the law, the Torah. That's God's order. That's his new covenant of, not new covenant. That's his covenant of the new world that he's creating. So the ancient mindset saw the cosmos as involving their covenant and their worldview.

It's not like we think of cosmos as in the physical planets and all that stuff, but their cosmos involved the world in which their God worked. But the problem is, is crush the heads of Leviathan, yet Leviathan shows up later. Yeah, he gets... In fact, it always describes God, you know, Rehab, is another word, by the way, that is synonymous with Leviathan. I'm not sure exactly where the name comes from, but scholarship will tell you that it's the same.

It's talking about that Sea Dragon of Chaos, so it's maybe another way to name it, Rahab, right? But nevertheless, it's the same creature that God keeps slaying over and over again. And then Isaiah talks about, well, he, in the future, God, he will slay Leviathan. So what's the point? He keeps slaying him and coming back to life? No, no. I think that it's symbolic, and it just represents that,

the ancient mindset saw the world as chaos out of which they sought to create their orderly society and their gods in particular, including Israel, believe that their God created that order. And so that was his creation of the heaven and earth, so to speak, was creating his order out of chaos. So, yeah, I don't personally, that aren't creatures that may be referenced in the Bible that became legendary, but I don't personally think Leviathan is one of those. He starts up in Revelation. We talk about how the beast is going to return and there's this Leviathan creature that, yeah, like you said, it comes back again and it comes back again. Yeah. I mean, could that just be the dragon? Couldn't that, couldn't it be like, just like a

metaphor to Satan himself? It could be. I mean, you know, there's one verse in the New Testament that does link that dragon to Satan and the serpent of old, connecting him to the gardens. So that's the only verse, though, in the Bible that does that. I'm not saying that discredits it, but I'm just saying, I think that's why it's probably more symbolic than literal in that sense. I think that. And Satan, though, he would be, and you could consider him an individual beings in some way. You know, why he exists as an individual being in some way. Ezekiel called Pharaoh Hoffra, you know, he referenced him as using that same reptilian serpent of the waters. You're like a tanning, a dragon in the waters, right? In other words, the Hebrew mindset connects evil with

serpals. Yeah. Well, and that's what they're making. I mean, they're making serpent mounds, you know, thousands of years later here in America. And it always goes back to that snake imagery. and it could be their fiery serpents are sort of fallen angels that I mean it gets tricky but I want to talk about specifically the gods of Egypt because like how many gods of Egypt do you think there were and what's the hierarchy here are they yeah yeah I want to know your opinion on how many they're actual watchers right because you talk about a pantheon of gods there's not all probably maybe they are all fallen angel entities or something but yeah and I think this chaos thing is a great play into it because I know you want to talk about the plagues, but yeah, you have Horace and you have

raw and... There were hundreds of them. You have these, all these gods, and then God says I'm going to execute my judgment upon the gods of Egypt. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think that there's as many watchers as there are deities. I certainly, you know, deities of, you know, of Egypt. The only thing I say is that I think there's demonic reality to some of them, because Moses writes about that in Deuteronomy, you know, when he says, they worship the demons. He's talking about the gods of Canaan in particular. He says, you know, they worshiped demons, meaning Israelites came into Canaan, and they worshipped demons when they worshipped these gods. So does that mean there's a one-to-one demon for every god? I don't think so. I don't know.

Who knows? You know what I mean? So I don't think so. The Pantheon did have a kind of a hierarchy, but there was a king of the gods, Ra and then Amun Ra, but it was a lot of evolution over the millennia. And the irony about it, you know, I studied the Egyptian gods a little bit, and it's a chaotic mess, to be quite frank. I don't think there's any consistency. They made up stuff, and, you know,

they'll talk about one god as being one thing, and then another god's that thing, and then they'll swap gods, and some gods will swap their identities like Sekmet, the goddess of plague can become ISIS. You know, it's just like, what's going on here? You know? So the king of gods is supposed to be Ra or Amun Ra later. But Horace was the son of Ra, and he was Pharaoh on earth.

And that was, you know, in other words, Pharaohs wanted to be the God on earth. So they claimed to be Horace on earth as the son of God, you know. But other than that, it's just a pantheon of varying deities with varying power and such. And there's, you know, it gets tricky on. our show because we talk about this all the time of like do some of these ancient kings have nephalum roots where they part demigod themselves and then they're interacting through idolatry with other entities as well so we have you really need a chart of here's the flow chart of hierarchy of beings but but something you said earlier we kind of triggered a thought in my mind if

if if persia is battling Greece then they are against each other there is no harmony there is no unity it is chaos it is literally just straight up chaos all the time. And then it would take something like 10 plagues, maybe to bring it all down. But this idea is like, you think about, when we think about Satan and his minions,

it's always this unified army of, you know, and Satan is leading them, but they're all in unity. And yeah, you're absolutely right. That was, when I started writing my crownicles in the Nephilim series, that's what I started to address.

I thought, where does it say that? You know, and like you said, if they are varying authorities over varying nations, and they're battling each other, well, then they're not all unified,

and they're all vying for power, which makes sense because if you think about it, that's how the mafia is, right? That's how gangs are. It's like, that's how evil really works. It's not unified against good. So, yeah, that's the approach that I take. Yeah, it gets complicated, obviously.

There's, I still think there's one entity above it all, but obviously there's, I don't know. I mean, look at, look at human beings. I mean, look at the way we run our nations. I mean, sometimes we're allies with other nations. And then the next minute, next year, we're selling weapons to the nation to fight that nation, right? And we mirror, like you said, on earth as it is in heaven. And so a lot of people have suggested on our show that's where earthly kingdoms get it from.

Where do we get it from? We got it from heaven. We got it from. Yeah. Yeah. So. Liberals would say that, no, you know, we have our earthly kingdoms. and so then we create the idea of heavenly kingdoms to reflect what we believe on Earth.

Because if you look at the biblical pattern, there is a heavenly host, there's archangels, and so there is a governmental scenario that does reflect the ancient world as well. And that's not the only thing. I mean, the temple that God gave is very much influenced by Egyptian and, Canaanite temples. So it's like, so I think though that what you're getting at is what's more the case is that earth will tend to reflect things that are in heavenly, in the heavenly realm. Yeah, I don't think we, I don't think we got that technology just by discovering it. I think it was given to us. And I think, I think along with the technology was other secrets that we shouldn't

have known. And the ancient, and the ancient world had more knowledge. And now we're just, we don't know I mean, we're so far removed. We don't know why we do things. We don't even know the origin of words. Why do we say the words we do? And if you follow them all the way back, you're like, oh, this is, this goes all the way back to some pagan thing. And you're saying these words, you don't even know. And so, yeah, I just don't think that humans are that.

I don't think we're that brilliant to come up with all the things that we've come up with. I think we got it from something, some source, some lost technology that was given to us. And I think it goes back to the watchers, obviously. So watcher tech. Yeah, that's the narrative of the book of Enoch, you know, and that's a very fascinating narrative. And I write about that in my novel, Enoch primordial. But, yeah. Brian, how does that play then with Egypt and then the plagues and the pantheon of gods?

So one thing I think is interesting that you said was that they had this Pharaoh who was the son of God who ruled on earth. And it's like this weird twisting of Father God and Jesus, right? where you have this, this God that rules on earth, who is the son of, and that's why, maybe one of the things I hear, too, is like, yeah, like, all these things we have on earth are reflection, feel it seem to be reflections of heaven or whatever's going on there. But everything that we have on that that's not of God is a really bad counterfeit or at least trying to replicate in a nefarious way, the ways of God, the ways of Yahweh, the ways of

that were set set out. It's like this twisted gospel and this, I mean, everything is this, this, you know, it's this false society. It's this, it's all a bad, it's really just a bad, like, a B-movie version of what God does. Yeah, I do think that that's how things work out. That's why you've got commonalities between all the religions and, you know, because I think that there is some primal truth of something and godless men. then separate upon the earth, and they take what they, what really happened, and they

warp it into their own justification for their own beliefs. So, you know, there was a flood. All the different nations have different stories of what that flood is like, right? And, well, that's because they are spinning it within their own attempt to justify the rebellion against God. So one thing we've heard a lot on our show, and we really spend a lot of time with Tim Alvarino, is abdicating. authority via idolatry to the gods. That a god still needs a human being to do his bidding here on earth. Right. So these kings would have to have performed idolatry to give them authority over their principality, their territory. Like they weren't just walking around taking areas.

Humans were actively abdicating their authority to the deities. We spent a lot of time talking to Tim about how, you know, he thinks that idolatry is how a principality got power in an area. If a king was doing idolatry, then the entity could possess that territory. If he wasn't, you needed a human being to give up their authority here in this area, a city, a throne, somewhere. That these, these entities don't just roll into town and take over. They can't do that. Right, right.

Actually, that is the premise of my stories as well. They draw from the worship, the idolishers worship. Absolutely. That's how I tell my stories. Absolutely. That's what the fall is all about, right? At the end of the day, these watchers of the fall and wanted to be worshipped. They wanted to be worshiped like God was worshipped.

And so then, of course, in Deuteronry 32, when they're set up, it's no, when you're saying this, it makes sense to me, Brian. It's no mystery that they fought against each other, right? Because you kind of, these different principalities had these names. that worship them. And you had the ability to lose that, correct? Like to not be the top dog anymore. And so, of course, you fought your other rebellious watcher because you didn't want to lose the worship of you, the idolatry of yourself, of self. Yeah. They all wanted power. And Paul even kind of alludes to that. Thrones, dominions. It's not throne. It sounds like a whole host. That's a good way to put it.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, the point of this, though, is what is it? What are they doing what's what are they after and i think salm 82 is a um is a good explanation of that which by the way i've also written a book called psalm 82 uh there you know it's amazon uh anyway and in that you know where god has taken his place in the divine council in the midst of the gods yields judgment oh okay and and he goes on to describe how you know these gods have not been just you know and the idea here is that I've given you this authority, but you are ruling unjustly, you are showing partiality, you know, not rescuing, you're not, you're doing evil, you're not doing good. So somehow, in some way, these authorities, these principalities over the nations in the heavens,

they have a responsibility, and they didn't. They sought idolatry and worship, and they didn't rule justly. And he said, therefore, you will die like men, you know, even though your gods, you're going to die like men. That's the judgment that they're going to, that they're going to have. And now, there are different views on what that occurs, but I think so many too says it very clearly in verse eight. Arise, O God, judge the earth, for you shall inherit all the nations. That word arise is the resurrection of Christ, which is what Paul always, he always uses that. He always refers to the Old Testament word arise, Aneste, is a reference to the resurrection of Christ. at Christ's resurrection, he becomes the judge of all the earth, and he inherits the nations at his

ascension into the heavens. And so that's when he judges those beings. Now, I know that there are different views of that on your other hosts, but my understanding is that the, that Jesus, the Messiah is the one who would come back and disinherit those territory powers. Makes sense to me. You know, when Jesus, the Messiah is enthroned upon the throne of David, heaven over all creation as king of creation right and that happened in the first century then boom that he takes the power away he disinherits them and that's what enables the gospel to actually go forth that's why it says now people from every tribe and tongue a nation are coming into the kingdom of god that's the gospel and so the gospel actually is the disinheritance of the he of the principalities

and powers and that was that was achieved through christ in that first century i know that that's very different from probably what most of your hosts say, but that's what I think the scriptures clearly say. We've talked about this in some extent, Luke. The world almost goes back to human beings are just ruling over human beings again, and we're sort of slowly figuring out because the ancient world and the modern world are very different, or it's just gone more underground, because we still hear rumblings of that on our show all the time, but weird stuff that goes on. So I was going to say, Brian, your new book is about Egypt, and this is a story we're all familiar with, right? I think it's fascinating that this Exodus story we've all heard, have heard a hundred times you grew up in

church all the time about Moses and the plagues and the part of the Red Sea and then God rescuing his people. And yet there's so much context to that in light of Nate what we talk about. And we've kind of covered some of it. But I wanted to, excuse me judgment on the gods, right? And these are actual things. At least the big ones are actual, you know, we believe you guys would say they're actual watchers. So yeah, I think that what's going on there in the Exodus is, is breaking down the he's judging the Egyptian pantheon because the the Egyptians believe that the their cosmos what was an operation of multiple deities interacting with one another with many responsibilities so there's not just one God of

one thing you know there's they all work together to to to to bring about the water to bring about the the fruit of the land for the Nile and for the air and the stars so they're all working together in an integrated pantheon that's the word integrated pantheon and so um and that pantheon was believed to have been the creation of the world and because their their life was rooted in the nile and in the in agriculture and therefore the nature was their dominant paradigm in a sense um not nature like we know it but you know the relation the interrelationship of nature right like the The relationship, the cycles, the cycles.

Exactly, exactly. Thank you. So because of that, they were claiming to have that kind of authority and power. But when Yahweh's doing is, he's breaking down, he's decreating the world, he's reducing Egypt to chaos, which is sort of saying, all your gods are just a joke. They have no power. They don't have power over these things. I do. I am the God who brings forth the floods.

I am the God who brings forth the locusts. In fact, I'm going to eat up all, you know, let's have one of your gods. you know, replace all the grain that the locust that I sent the locust to eat up. You know, it's this sort of, it's a mockery, but it's also what theologians call decreation. So God is returning Egypt to a state of decreation so that he can pull his people out of chaos and create his new order of Israel, right, at Sinai, with his Torah, the law. And so the decreation notion is what I think. is kind of what's going on there. And,

theologically speaking, what might that look like in the spiritual realm? Well, I had to speculate. So I do have these specific gods being affected by these judgments. You'll have to read the novel to find out because I think it's kind of cool the way I did it. But so I do have these gods being humbled and destroyed in some time, in some ways and stuff, to show that spiritual equivalent of what's going on in the physical world. I think it's fascinating too, Brian. Like you think about, if you were an Egyptian and you you believe that this God causes the Nile to flow and brings us life. And this God causes the sun to rise.

And this God causes the livestock to multiply. And this God brings the crops out of the ground. And then the King of Kings is saying, now I'm going to control the Nile. And I'm going to control of the livestock. And I'm in control of the frogs and the pestilence. And I will destroy your crop. And I can do X, Y, Z. And these guys are powerless.

And watch me. It really, it's like, it's almost like he has a hit list. He's like, let me just end all of these things. that you've got numerous of gods that's supposed to control and have power. I'm going to pull, it's like a jenga tower. I'm going to start pulling out these pieces until the whole thing collapses. The jenga tower. You know, what's interesting, though, to the Egyptian mythology,

it's not even necessarily like, oh, the sun is raw and he's in the sky. No, actually, they would have a story that explains it. So they're understanding, not their understanding, because they knew they could see with their eyes what was occurring. But what they did was they described the sun across the sky as raw in his solar boat on the ocean above the sky. And the sun going across the sky was raw in his solar boat. And he has various other gods with him on that boat. And then when he sets in the west, the west was the netherworld or the unbearable.

which they called duat. You know, Hebrews call it shale, but Egyptians call it duat. And they said that the underworld was in the west. So when the sun set, it's set in the west because it was going into the underworld to go around underneath, go through the underworld to come back up to rise the next day. So there's a whole story and mythology of Ra on his boat with his fellow deities. and then he gets attacked by Apophis, the sea serpent of chaos, trying to keep him down there and kill him and all that, but he has victory over him, and then he rises. So this is, they can see what's happening.

They're not idiots, right? So mythology is their way of describing the deities and how they work and interact together, but it's a narrative, it's a picture that helps them make sense of the world, if that makes sense. It's not this sort of... Like literally, they think that there's a boat, like there's this... Yeah, no, they know there's not a boat, you know?

Right. It's like, obviously. But they describe it in those... Because that's how they make sense of the spiritual world that they cannot see, I guess, is the way to put it. It's a metaphor allegory for what... Obviously, the cultures are being seduced by the gods. So I guess it's just this line of they have power. They have more power than human beings.

They have influence. And the human tendency is to think... When we idolize heroes, we make them into gods. We make them bigger than life. We make, we fantasize. And so, you know, the Israelites are being seduced to the dark side, so to speak. And you said they were there for 450 years, right? Yeah.

And so, you know, when God tells us, don't, you know, don't have any other gods before me, they're being seduced by them because they're manifesting. And they're obviously providing some value to be worshipped, right? It's not just this stone statue. that we were told growing up. Yeah. So where's the line you think, how much power do they have and how much power do we give them in our minds

versus what they actually, the actual, you know, ability that they had to do anything? Could they make crops grow, for example? Could they? I don't believe so because I think that, you know, God's clearly indicating through the plagues that they don't. You know what I'm saying? Like they literally don't have that.

Yeah. So, yeah. But they just think they can. They think they can. Yeah, and certainly that's the way I depicted in my novel. Like, I depict them as being sort of like, you know, I am the god of, you know, whatever, you know, of, of the Nile, you know, and yet he actually is afraid of water because demonic entities have problems in being weakened in water.

So, you know, so, so, so yeah, it's a disguise that they're playing because no, I mean, And, theologically speaking, yeah, biblically speaking, there are other gods biblically, right, but they have no creative power. There's no one like Yahweh, no one who creates. They can't create, but they can manipulate, right? Maybe, yeah. Yeah, sure, yeah, because they're in another dimension, so they have some, some ability to, sure, absolutely. But I think biblically speaking, those gods can't create like God can't. I mean, create from nothing. So, for instance. fake it till you make it

but they can't make it they're just faking it yeah exactly they are faking it but they're never making it yeah yeah that's what I'm saying so but you're right I think that but they're seducing people doing something and they do have some abilities

there's some reality occulted to occultic power absolutely but it's not a creative power I guess is what I'm saying well that's a good question right there Brian so one of the famous things is the Moses turns the staff into a snake it's a serpent yeah and then what Pharaoh calls out his

of magicians, and they do the same thing. Yeah. But then I think in God's, you know, in Yahweh's sense of humor or just his display of power, it eats all of them, right? But there's a lot of serpent stuff in this story, too. Yeah. There is. Go ahead.

I think that's a fascinating part of the story, too. Well, yeah. No, so the magicians can only replicate three, the first three. And then it's like, this is the finger of God. We can't do this. You know, like the gnats. I think by the time they got the flies and stuff. But even the frogs, you know, it's.

like turning the Nile of the blood, okay? The whole river's blood, right? So if they pick up a pot and make it turn a blood, that could be a trick very easily. What they couldn't do is turn the blood back to the river, right? So it's like they had no power over it. They could do, so I actually think those first few replications of the magicians were probably tricks.

I don't think they could do exactly what God was doing, but they could make it look like they were. And that's how I depicted it myself in the story. So, oh, and then the serpents thing. Well, there's a well-known trick within that tradition of the magicians, the lector priests. They were actually called in Egypt. They could hypnotize snakes to make them stiff

and make them look like their staves, and then they would do that actual magic trick. So I think that's probably what happened, because there's actually evidence of that, that has a known trick amongst them. So what happened was they, you know, but Moses was actually really truly a staff that became a snake, right? Right. But they lay these, their staffs down, but, oh, you know, they become snakes, right?

But then the fact that Moses' staff eats them up is that is that mockery, total humiliation. Like, you know, whatever trick you can play on the people, nope, I'm going to eat you up and you can't, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. Well, that kind of reminds me that, you know, the, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, of Bail and when they call down fire of heaven, right? It's consumed all of the... By the way, I wrote another novel called Jezebel, Harlot, Queen of Israel.

Then we're going to find something you have written on, Brian. I don't get you here eventually. That's one of my favorite instances. I described that whole world and what's going on in the spiritual realm. No, the priest of Bail in Asherah... They called all day. Yeah, all day and all night,

and they cut themselves and nothing happened. And see, here's my point. Bail was the storm god of Israel, see? And my whole point in that story was, I actually depicted Bail as a demonic entity, right? And he was so wrapped up into his power, because he was the storm god of Canaan, and they worshipped him.

I depicted him as starting to believe his own lie, that like, I am the storm god. I can bring fire from heaven and he can't do it because he doesn't have that power. He doesn't have power. Sure, he could do some spiritual things that we can't do, but he can't do the things that God can do. And so I show him doing that.

He's like, he can't bring it forth. And he realizes, I'm a fool. I believe my own lie, you know? And I'm not the, I'm not the power. I don't have the power of the storm. In other words, I know I don't believe watchers or angelic beings have power over storms and stuff. That's a God thing.

That's only something God can do, you know? Yeah. However, I do think they can do things that would look, that would be supernatural to us. Like, you know, right? Like angels can go through walls and stuff. So there is some things they can do. I don't know exactly what, but. I mean, if their offspring could build some of these temples that we see around the world that are, we can't build now.

I mean, just their offspring could build these things. Obviously, the parents of these creatures that could perform and do and build and have this knowledge that we don't have. Yeah, I mean, obviously the Israelites are being seduced by something. I don't think they're just wandering away from God because they're bored. And that's kind of what we were taught too. Yeah, the Israelites got bored. And I'm like, no, they're performing sorcery and magic. And they're seducing them because God has more of a humble way of manifesting and declaring who he is.

It's not this, like, look at me. I'm so, it's more in the shadows. It's more in the love. It's more in the humility. And it's harder to understand. Then he parts the Red Sea, right? But yeah, but in the moment, it's like you have to trust God in the last minute, the last second, boom, he shows up. You have to get up against a wall, no way out, looks like everything's going to, you know, which is classic story telling, which is awesome.

And then that's how he delivers just to prove that it's him. Yes. And by the way, let me explain something else about Moses. So, you know, you know the passage where, you know, God tells Moses to go to Egypt and he says, I'm a, I'm not eloquise. of speech. I'm slow of tongue, right? Why, don't send me. I can't do it. Well, what was that? Well, there's a couple elements of that that I bring out in the novel.

But I also wrote a companion book called The Spiritual World of Moses and Egypt, and it has all my biblical and historical research. For 99. Yeah, it is. 995, actually. At episode. You ever shot that one, Nate.

I lose the prices right, dude. I should have bid a dollar. But anyway, so what was they talking about now? The companion with the spiritual, the spiritual. So did you know that Moses actually had a stuttering problem? I did. I did know that. Yeah.

And in the actual text of stuff, I do a whole study on that from other scholars where they explain that the language he's using. They're like, you know, I'm a man of uncircumcised lips and I'm slow of speech. That language is used in reference to stuttering in other parts of the Bible and stuff. So that's something I have my novel that knowing, I have a Moses who stutters, right? And so that's kind of unique and interesting. But there's another element to it. He says, I'm not eloquent of speech.

Well, here's the thing. Egyptian magic was a word-oriented magic. In other words, they believed that if they reproduced the proper word formulas, that it was like formulas that would force the gods to do what they asked, right? Like spells? So they had a lot of incantations, a lot of spells. But they had and they all written out in fact they the the Egyptian book of the dead That is literally a book of spells but what the spells means is I'm cast a spell on you no no it was when you meet these creatures in the underworld

You say these lines and then you'll be they'll let you pass or if you gave them their secret name They have to let you pass right so they they believe in the power of words and therefore Egyptian magicians were considered eloquent of speech right So when God is saying, I'm going to go, I'm going to send you back. I'm going to do signs. Moses is thinking like in Egypt, he's like, you're, you're having me do magic. I can't do magic. I'm, I'm not eloquent of speech, see?

I think that's interesting, Brian. Like, sometimes we forget that Moses grew up in Egypt. So he was like very, he had to kind of unlearned that when he left. And then he goes back and he still is, that's all he knew, right? Like, yeah. And we forget that, that he's going back to the world he knows. And so when God's telling him to do stuff, like you just said, I never really put that in kind of context to be like...

I tried to depict what might that be like with Moses, who's thoroughly Egyptian being, meeting Yahweh for the first time, it was just like, it's, whoa, this isn't the movie The Ten Commandments, you know? Now, there is debate over how much did, what was it, what did Moses know and when did he know it in terms of his identity? But the problem is, is that there's, the early part of Moses' life until the Exodus is so sparse, you know, it's one little piece about his birth, one little piece about him until he murders the Egyptian, and then goes to Midian, then one little piece about Midian,

and then the rest of it is the Exodus, right? So there's just not much to it, but, so therefore, the way it's the way the text is, it's not clear if, like, by the time Moses kills the Egyptian, He has an idea of his identity as a Hebrew. But people say, oh, you know, he was taught, he was secretly taught it by his mother when he was a young kid. And I'm like, no, I really don't think so. I don't think he knew. I don't think he knew. He may have learned about the Jews, but, and then by the time he's 40, he learns that he is a Jew.

So we need to rewrite the Christmas song to Moses, did you know, not Mary, did you know? Yeah, there you go. It's that time of year, Nathan. Oh, yeah. But what that means is, that means he's 40 years old, a 40 year old Egyptian royalty, man. He's got a complete different mindset than most Jews would have. And I tried to depict that in the novel and have it make sense. But I mean, imagine like having that space and having been raised in this pantheon of gods.

And then you have the King of King, God of Gods, show up and be like, I'm going to burn this bush. I mean, it's like, I mean, no wonder you walk, no order you walk back. you put your sandals back on, you walk back to Egypt, man. There's a real power showed up, right? I mean, think of this. You know, when he meets Yowie in the burning bush, he doesn't even know who he is, and he doesn't know his name. So that means no matter what he learned about his identity as a Jew in Egypt,

he never learned about Yahweh. I think many of them probably didn't even remember Yahweh. There were obviously some Jews who were still faithful. But the point is, is he doesn't know anything about Yahweh until that burning bush. And that's 80 years. That's amazing. By the way, he's in Midian for 40 years and he doesn't even meet Yahweh until the 80th year. Who are you?

What's your name, right? Isn't that wild? That's crazy. That just speaks to like the character of God. Yeah, it's powerful. Right? That it's just this patience and waiting. And like, I'm going to show you who I am and I'm not offended by your culture and I'm not

offended by what you were raised in. what's interesting is, you know, we as American Christians, for example, oftentimes, you know, we view the lens of Christianity via American culture of consumerism. And we have no idea. We have no idea. I had no idea. That you can't read the Bible with that lens and it's such a blinding. And, you know, it took me 38 years to understand. Yeah.

Okay, I'm reading this totally wrong and I have no idea. You have to go back in a time machine almost and completely divorce, divorce yourself from all that you. you know. And until you're willing to humble yourself and have that view of like, okay, everything I know it could be a lie or wrong. So that happens at Moses when he's 80 years old, you're saying. Yeah, that's when he meets the burning bush. And he asked him what's your name? He didn't know him in the name. And he never heard it before. It's like, what? That's wild. That's wild. And you know, I write about this in my book. There he is. This is crazy. No, what you're talking about, the ancient, like understanding the Bible through the paradigm of the ancient mind.

Sure, sure. That same thing happened to me and, you know, over a decade ago. And it sort of helped me to start to relearn seeing things. By the way, you know, if I can... For me, it was Bigfoot. It's a little bit weird of a journey. Fair enough. There's coops and all in every crowd.

Hey, come on, Brian. Come on, Dan. We'll get you in the believer box. We'll get you there. If I can point your people to something that is not mine and I don't make any money off of it, It's called the Bible Project. It's all free. It's online.

And they do these little videos that teach a little scriptural truths. And a lot of them are in this motif of the divine counsel. And also understanding the Bible through that ancient mindset of imagery and all that kind of stuff. Hey, now is the time where we get to do an ad because we're bringing the guy on the show next month. That guy? Tim Mackey's coming on. Tim Mackey. Oh, cool.

Yeah. So tune in next month for Tim Mackey on Blurry Creatures. But in the meantime, read Brian Goddegadow's book, God Against the Gods, which talks about everything you're talking about there. For a one-time love gift, $9.95. 95 to Amazon. Just messing with you. So let's get back to Moses. You want a blurry creature? Yeah. Oh, yeah. All right. So first of all, there's, you know about in numbers when it talks about numbers 21, 6, the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people. and they bit the people, and many people of Israel died.

And that was the point where they were in the wilderness, already free from Egypt, but their hearts are going back to Egypt, right? And so God starts to strike him down with this plague with these serpents, you know, and then that's when he builds the Nahash, Nakhash, which is that bronze serpent on a pole, right? That becomes a symbol of Christ. Anyway, the fiery serpents, that word is seraphim Nakhash. And there are many different words for snakes and serpents and stuff. scholars who could do better than I can do about that,

but I found some very interesting connections. And so seraphim is the word that is used of the serpentine beings in God's throne. It's also a reference to serpents, but it's a particular one that's used for those, and they're winged serpentine beings in God's heavily thrown. And the fieriness of that is that they are, you know, these fiery light beings type of thing, right?

Nechash is the traditional, is one of the words for serpent, and it's also the word that was used of, you know, this nekhash of the garden, right? Right. But this idea is other scriptures that make reference to fly. Now that says fiery serpents, but there's references that say that they were flying fiery serpents. So Isaiah 1429 and Isaiah 30, verse 6 refer to this flying fiery serpent in the wilderness. all right so what are these creatures right what are they well what's interesting is that i found some some legends you know the that medical famous medical symbol of the serpents ripped around the pole and sometimes they have the wings on them well that's what nekhash was or i'm sorry not nekhash

i was saying nekhash earlier but nekhustin was the bronze serpent on the pole and that that's probably where they got this idea for the medical world of, you know, healing and stuff, right? Because they looked at this bronze serpent and they were healed. Well, interestingly, the bronze serpent on the pole was what's called, actually, that's an example of God, Yahweh, using, working, they're just out of Egypt, so they're thinking Egyptians, right? They had what's called sympathetic magic, which they believe that if you did a replication of a creature, you could use it to protect yourself.

So now it didn't really work in the real world, but God makes it work for this case. And he uses something that's very Egyptian to free them from their plague of these flying, fiery serpents. What did they look like? We don't know, but there's some other references I'll point you to in a second. But the idea there is that that becomes the symbol

of Christ on the cross. We look to Christ on the cross. he becomes that serpent for us in the same way that he becomes sin for us, right? He doesn't become Satan or anything like that, but he takes on the evil. That's the point, right? So we've got this notion, and is that mythical? That's the point, right? Well, interestingly, there are other historical references to flying fiery serpents.

Oh. For instance, there is a story about Moses that's not in the Bible, but Josephus, the famous Jewish historian, wrote about. possible he had he had access to other ancient documents that we don't have and he writes about this and what it was was when moses was in egypt he was a general in the army and josephus describes this case where he's leading the army to go down to kush because he's a general moses is a general right this before he left and He's leaning the army to fight Cush, and they come upon these flying fiery serpents. The notion of fiery was not that they're on fire.

It was that they're venomous, right? It's fiery stinging, right? That's kind of what it is. But they supposedly had wings, right? And here's what he writes. He goes, and he describes that Moses brings some baskets. And in the baskets, he has hundreds of these ibises. And ibises were Egyptian birds.

they were snake hunters. They were snake eaters. So he comes upon this valley that is known to have a lot of these flying serpents. He brings these bags of these ibuses and releases them, and the ibuses fly ahead, and they go and take out all these flying serpents so that his army could go through without getting stung. And I just thought that was so cool that I just had to bring that into the novel, right?

Yeah, the original falconry, Father of falconry, Moses out there. Totally. Yeah, right. But here's something else, though. There's another ancient writer. So, okay, Hans Vilderberger, okay, flying fiery serpents is not only Egyptian. There was an Assyrian king, Eser Hayden, in the 7th century BC. So that's around 600 BC, right?

He describes flying serpents on his 10th campaign into Egypt. So here's an Assyrian king, not Jew, not, right? And he's describing his campaign in Egypt. So in other words, what I'm getting at is the likelihood of this being made up is not high. Because, you know, he's describing just what happened on this campaign. He's not going to need to make mythical things up, right? Anyway, he's describes a distance of four double hours. I don't know what that means.

Maybe that's eight hours. Who knows? I marched over a territory. There were two-headed serpents who, his attack spelled death. That's weird. But I trampled upon them and marched on a distance of four more double hours. In a journey of two days, there were green animals. That's what one English says, but another translation says, serpents whose wings were batting. Now, that means like probably leathery bat wings, right? But those are the stats that reference in Egypt he's describing,

and he has that same single experience. He's not the only one. We're not done yet. The Greek historian Herodotus, who's a famous Greek historian, writes of sacred winged serpents in his histories, he writes, there is a place in Arabia, not far from the town of Buto, where I learn about winged serpents. When I arrived there, I saw innumerable bones and backbones of serpents. This place adjoins the plain of Egypt. Winged serpents are said to fly from Arabia at the beginning of spring, making for Egypt. The serpents are like water snakes. Their wings are not feathered, but like the wings of a bat. I have now said enough concerning creatures that are sacred. So is that fascinating? So in other words, this isn't just in one location, like several different ancient authors from all

different cultures reference and experience with these creatures. So wow, we don't have any examples of them. And, you know, I don't know. And are these legends? You know, oh, yeah, we did. Moses was fighting just bat snakes. Yeah, isn't that cool? Stinging, yeah, that's crazy. No, I mean, this is straight out of, like, all the weird stuff we talk about on our show. I mean, it goes back to the chimerical creatures, the defilement of creation that we always talk about. I mean, it would make sense. I mean, you see pictures of these crazy creatures all over the ancient world, and we just assume you grow up, you think, oh, these are just mythical creatures.

They didn't actually exist. But flying snakes, I mean, why couldn't there be flying snakes? Yeah, why couldn't there be? And, you know, and here's the thing. Are they demonic? I don't know. Maybe they're just creatures because, you know, I once heard a scientist say, you know, 99% of all species in the history of the planet are extinct. In other words, what exists now is a very small... Well, if 99% are extinct, well, then why couldn't there be flying serpents? You know, it's possible. Absolutely.

No, I love it. I love it. But that's not the only cool, occultic thing. Oh, yeah. So in the Bible, or in the Old Testament, we read about the magicians, but none of them are named. And in the book, one of the books, First or Second Timothy, I can't remember where, but Paul, 2 Timothy chapter 3, Paul is condemning false teachers as evil. He says, just as Janus and Jambris opposed Moses. So these men also oppose the truth. Second Timothy 3, men correct. in mind and etc. And what? Where's Janice and John Briss? There's no mention of those names in the Old Testament, right? But there is an actual book, an ancient book that exists called Janice and

Johnbrus. And which means maybe Paul got it from there. Part of what's called the pseudapagrapha, these are ancient documents that are claiming to be, you know, written by certain characters and they probably weren't, but this is the literature that Paul may have been drawing from. And it tells the story of Janice and John Bras as two of the main magicians of Pharaoh confronting Moses. What's cool is one of them, Janus, has an experience of death, and he repents. He calls back to, actually, he dies, and he calls back to Jambras to repent, but he won't. And so it's really cool how it's like one of them repents and one of them doesn't, so to speak. So it's a fascinating story about, from their perspective, interacting with Moses.

So I thought that was so interesting. I wanted to integrate that with my Moses novel. So I bring Janice and Jambras as two major characters in the novel. We follow their journey and as magicians and such. And I show how one of them turns and one of them starts to see the lies that are going on. And he has this vision of the Egyptian underworld as he thinks he's dead. and he's going through it and I introduce the reader to what the concept of the Egyptian underworld looked like you know and it's just fascinating experience as he thinks he's dying and

facing the judgment throne of Osiris who is supposed to be Lord of the Dead Egyptian Lord of the Dead right so so I have all that depicted in the novel and it integrates into their storyline but in that ancient Egyptian literature is a notion of something that doesn't appear in any other ancient literature, and that is the lake of fire. Now, the lake of fire we know is in the book of Revelation, right? Where did they get that from? It's a distinctly Egyptian concept, and it was, you know, where the dead are judged and burned up, you know. Obviously, it's not the same exactly as it works in the Bible, but the concept of the lake of fire. It's literally called the lake of fire, right? And I found that to be another fascinating Egyptianism that we find in the Bible

as well. So there's a lot of that stuff to learn. The giants show up anywhere in the stories of the Exodus or in encounters with Moses or anything to do with the Egyptians? Well, that's one of the reasons why I skipped it at the first time when I was writing my series Chronicles of the Nephilim.

I wanted to write stories where giants appeared. And so I skipped the Moses story because there's nothing mentioned in there. But now that I're realizing that, well, I want to tell stories of the watchers too, obviously, because they're part it right well that i do think the watchers notion is in there but in my research of for the novel i came

to realize that when the israelites get to midian they've escaped through the red sea they're on their way to sinai they come to a place called refidim and they have an encounter with amalekites moses would raise the staff and the jews would be winning and then when you lower the staff the the Amalekites would win, right? And those Amalekites, or they call them Amalek, they have a very distinct character in the Bible. After that event, God says, I will war with Amalek unto all generations. He has a particular despising of Amalek. And if you look up Amalekites throughout the rest of the Bible, they are one of the tribes that has some giants in them. But there's another element that I found in my research, and that was that, how can I put

this? In terms of historical research, it's possible that one of the biblical Anakim giants named Sheshai, he appears in some Egyptian stories as one of the Hixos kings who invaded Egypt. and he has a scarab that has been found in Jericho within his name as a ruler, Sheshai, right? So Sheshai is one of the three sons of Arba in the book of Joshua that are famous Anakim giants. We don't know anything about them.

We just know that they're famous because they're mentioned like three times. So I bring that Sheshai into my story as one of the working with the Amalekites because the Malachites were a nomadic, brutal tribe. I depict them as being cannibals, because they were really monstrous. And they were in the Negev and around in Midian. And so I have them as some of the tribes who invaded Egypt once the Israelites left.

Because don't forget, God just decimated the entire country with plagues, right? Then he kills Pharaoh and all his army and his chariots in the Red Sea. So Egypt is completely and utterly vulnerable. has no power. And then according to the historian that I'm following the Egyptologist, David Roll, he's a controversial historian, but I'm following his work. He argues that the Hixos then invaded Egypt after that all happened because, and they took it over without a fight, because there was nothing left in Egypt to fight. And that's how the Hixos rule started for a few years until the Egyptians rose up and kicked them out. So God wipes out the Egyptian army,

the giants or armies led by giants come in and occupy Egypt for a little for a short bit of time but then sheshai goes back to canaan because sheshai is there when Joshua is conquering the land shushai is there so remember Israelites were wandered for 40 years before they entered the promise line so during those 40 years where they're just out that's when sheshai goes with some of his anachim guys, but then they end up coming back. So they're there in the land when Joshua actually enters. So that's how it all works together. Historically, too, that's based on some historical stuff. Fantastic. Well, it's funny, Luke, because you said that the place that they rolled into Moses was Raphidim. Yeah. And we did a whole episode about how all the

giants, the word Rafa is connected with Dr. Judd Burton with all the giants and the giant tribes. And it goes through these languages. is. Those are called refame. I think, is that what you're talking about? Well, Repha is like, it's the god kings of the Nephilim. That, that term goes all over the world. So Dr. Judge said that there's these options. Did he say that Raphidim is connected to that?

We don't know. That would not specifically. Just the syllable Repha. Maybe we were just saying that this, it sounds familiar to when we did this, the Rafa refa, root word. The root of the word is, connected to the giants, basically. So you think Moses encountered

giants in the wilderness? Possibly. Flying snakes. Which is wild. Possibly. If he just held his hands up the whole time, they could have just won everything. You need to just have like a shirt that kept his hands up. Yeah, really. You just walk around and just win all their battles. Now, there's no mention of them, right?

Right. Which is why I don't think he would have, he would have encountered a tribe of them or anything. But it's not until they actually get to Kadesh Barnea. and they spy out the land. But that was within the first, you know, a couple years, I think, of the Exodus. And they spy out the land, and the giants are there, and they come back, right?

And they're giants in the land, right? And then because of that, they wander for 40 years. So they spied the giants within the first few years of the Exodus, first couple years, I think. And then it's Christmas time. What do you think about the magi of Egyptian times? And the magi that come to witness the birth of Christ.

Is there a connection there between these? There actually is. There actually is. I've only done a little bit of research on that because I write about the magi in my novel, Chin, the, the dragon emperor of China. We're going to keep asking questions, Brian, until we find something you haven't written on. I have Babylonian magi show up in there. But in short, yeah, actually, magi is the same word as the,

magicians of Babylon during the time of Daniel. And here's what I think is happening. Daniel had such an impact that his teaching of the coming Messiah was held on to and cherished all the way until the coming of Jesus so that the Babylonians at the time of Jesus, the Babylonian magi, still had Daniel's influence. Now, were they committed Jews? No, I don't think so. But, you know, I think, I suspect they were just as Babylonian, but they still had that tradition of Daniel in their heritage. So that's why they were coming to find, to find Messiah, which is really wild. That's crazy.

Right, right. We talked about that on this week's episode. We're doing a Christmas episode specifically, but I just thought there might be something connected there. And I guess one of my last questions is, did you discover anything about Moses? Did you dig up anything that you've never heard before or thought? thought about before that maybe transformed your view. I mean, obviously you said, you know, interesting things that I haven't heard about of like, you know, he's 80 years old and doesn't

even know who's talking about in the Burning Bush, things like that. A lot, you know, I had heard of most everything, but I was never sure of any of some of it until I did the research and found out. And so it was still enlightening. And all of it together gave me a different picture of Moses. And so one example would be the stuttering. I'd heard of that. But before, but I never looked into it, right? But that was still jarring, so he was stuttering. You know, it was like, wow, that changed the picture. But it's in combination with several other things.

Also, I think as I studied it, I think he had an anger problem. I think that Moses had an anger problem. And I think he had a lot of doubt and skepticism. And you read this when he first encounters God in the burning bush, and he keeps saying, no, not me, no. But like, and then God keeps giving him answers. And he keeps saying,

No, but send someone else. You know, it's like the gall in the face of this God, you know what I'm saying? Like, he has a lot of self-confidence in a way, but also doubt. Because even after he's been told that, he goes to Egypt, and even then he still has doubt with God when God tells him to do things, right? So that made me comforted to know that even the man who spoke face-to-face with God, he had problems with doubt. Not problems, he lived with doubt.

And so my doubt that I live with is more tolerable because of that. But also, you know, I heard that there's this one Bible verse that just is weird and you never know what the answer is, you know, it's in numbers, I think. And it basically says Moses married a Kushite wife. And Kushite was in Ethiopia. So he married a black woman. And that's pretty cool because in the ancient world in that time period, there wasn't there wasn't the concept of racism.

There was no such thing as racism. And skin color was just simply skin color. It didn't mean anything. What they really hated were other nations or other religions, right? They didn't care what color skin people had. So in that world, I don't think it was scandalous to marry a black woman, right? But it's also interesting that he marries this woman from a world that's not Israelite and who was that? Where was she? Was she? We don't hear anything about her. We only hear about Zippora,

and Zipporah was a Midianite. And there's some, you know, Midianites weren't black, right? And they're not Kushites. That's a different world. Cushites are way over underneath Egypt. Midianites way over on the other side of the world. So it's like, was this a second wife? Well, anyway, I did research into it. And there's a strong possibility that Zippor could have been, could have been easily a Cushite. She could have been. have been adopted or she could have been you know midianites were traitors and and they had multiple wives so he could have a midianite jethro could have married a black woman and had a black child there's you know that it's easily and and that black child could have been sapora who Moses then married right or he could have had a second

wife but there's no reference to her so i had to come up with a way that that would make sense and be consistent with the bible and i came up with some fascinating things because there's another legend in Josephus and Artapanus, another ancient Jewish historian, that talks about Moses as a general in Egyptian army, he conquered Cush, and he married a princess of Cush as part of the treaty. So she would have been black. And some people think that that was a legend created to answer that Bible verse because it was such a weird Bible verse.

But I don't know. And so I actually incorporate that into my story as well. So I try to incorporate a lot of these ancient, you know, stories or legends about Moses, as long as they fit within the biblical paradigm and they're not contradictory, you know, that's my goal. So, yeah, so there's all these things, you know, his problem with anger, the stuttering problem, all these things made him a more human man. And quite frankly, less like Charlton Heston.

And I must admit. Yeah. I must admit. Charlton Heston was my favorite actor when I was young, when I was young. And that movie was imprinted on my mind. And, you know, this. let my people go you know like no he wasn't like that

at all that that that's that broke me of that concept he also wasn't the president of the NRA it's really unfortunate right he was just wandering in the wilderness listening to limp biscuit you know just getting real angry yeah and carrying and carrying his revolutionary rifle

Brian these Egyptians can take it out of my cold dead hands hey crazy thought do you think that possibly that Ethiopian connection that's the pathway for Enoch to end up in Ethiopia? I don't know. Through Moses? That is a thought.

I mean, and then we know it somehow got there. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. This is also something that I wasn't quite aware of. If Moses was raised as royalty, because this is also connected to, like, you know, there's a, you know, liberal scholars argue that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch and, you know, and it was written after the Babylonian exile, like, you know, hundreds of years later, you know,

as a made-up story type of thing. That's what most, many people believe. And even many Christians scholars have problems with it. But if Moses raises royalty, that means he would have been very well taught about other cultures, because Egypt was a world power. Egypt, by the way, this happened shortly after Hamarabi, right?

So you have Hammurabi and his laws in Babylon. So Egypt also had libraries. And so therefore he probably got learned about Babylonian culture, Assyrian culture, Canaanite culture, through his education in Egypt, which explains why there's a lot of these connections in the Pentateuch. So I found it kind of fascinating that Moses, he might have gotten a lot of literary education about other cultures. and that's where a lot of these, there's a lot of Egyptianisms in the Pentateuch, but there's also a lot of Babylonianisms and other, you know, references to other cultures. And it makes sense if he was an Egyptian that had access to all those cultures at a time where they loved, they prided themselves on the knowledge of these other worlds.

So that explained him writing the Pentatook with some knowledge of all these different cultures. He was learned. He was a learned doctor, Nate. Yeah. You kind of need a jack of all. trades. Yeah, to do what he did. Yeah, and we hear about that often on our show that sort of have to go through your own wilderness in order to be used by God. Yeah. If you don't know anything, you haven't been through any trials and tribulations. You haven't suffered much. You're not very useful to the kingdom of God because it requires you to do so many odd and crazy things. And it would

make sense that he would be a useful tool for the kingdom later on in life. Absolutely. In fact, that's another element that I did sort of, oh, it made more sense to me was, okay, so he's royalty, he's taught to be a leader, and he may have been a general in the army, right? That's the kind of man, and like you said, also learned and educate, that's the kind of man who would have to lead a nation like he did, right? But he also had to learn the graciousness and shepherding of God, right? So he spent 40 years in Midian becoming a shepherd. So we had both shepherd and king.

You know, he had a whole life as a shepherd, a whole life as royalty. So like you said, God was preparing, giving him the skills to be able to lead a nation that he would need, because they were an unruly nation, right? Yeah. And sort of like just discovering those and how they all fit together. And, oh, that's why. And the staff of Moses' staff. That was a shepherding staff that he got from, from mid-eastern.

is it sort of a cheap shot at their magician staffs? Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, yeah, I think there's definitely a play on that in the text. There are also beliefs that the gods had, by the way, the gods would hold snakes as staffs in their hands. So I think that the whole snake as a staff thing is God using their imagery and mocking it, absolutely, but also Pharaoh held a staff and a crook. I'm sorry, a crook, which is a shepherding crook, and a mace as a symbol of his authority.

And so that shepherding crook is part of the play on that as well, I think. Yeah, there's a lot of that. In fact, and I wrote about that in my book, The Spiritual World of Moses, I do write about how there's a cult scholar who brought up this connection that he also thinks that Moses' story is being told in a way. to make Moses look like Horus and Pharaoh to look like set. Because in the ancient stories of Egypt, set, I'm sorry, Horace was the son of Osiris,

was set to rule Egypt. I said set, okay. He was supposed to rule Egypt. Set was his uncle. and he wanted to rule Egypt. So he wanted to kill Horace. So he sought Horace out. And he was hid in the bulrushes by ISIS.

And anyway, and then he grew up and he became appointed. And Set was cast into the wilderness to become the god of chaos, right? And so the scholar has pointed out, like, you know, not in the liberal. The liberals would say, oh, yeah, see, this just, the story of Moses came from the story of, you know, set Osiris and Horace. No, no. The writers trying to say, you guys that worship Pharaoh, he's actually the set, the chaos monster. And the true Pharaoh is Moses, even though he's not Pharaoh. You know what I'm saying? So they're using the Egyptian story concept to retell Moses to make him out to be the superior to Pharaoh, because it was

all about Moses versus Pharaoh, right? And obviously it's Yahweh versus Pharaoh, but Moses was the conduit for Yahweh. So there's a lot of these cool Egyptianisms that I came across that are in the text to show and indicate how Egyptian that original writer was of Moses's story. Fascinating. Yeah, well, when you talk about this, it just, it just reminds me as Christmas time, this humbling, sort of the humble roots of Jesus being born in the manger and this very, very, It's like, you know, you think about Moses and the staff and the sheep and this shepherd imagery that just goes throughout and how you see these simple narratives throughout the Old Testament in the midst of all this God language and this sorcery.

And yet the story of the gospel sometimes is just finding this lost sheep. Right? It's this very, very simple, beautiful, natural story in the midst of this just perverted, twisted, dark, sorcery driven, occultic. Amen. I'm with you on that because that's how I felt writing the story was this. In fact, you know, you read this and there's a lot. I mean, the plagues. And then God cast plagues on Israel.

He kills a bunch of them. You know, there's just idolatry, the golden calf, and then a plague after that. And it's just this brutal, brutal world, you know. And it's, you know, you could see how God has to be that way to deal. in that world. But like I said, but then he went, he went into Midian to teach him to become a shepherd because you can't just, the ruler cannot just be power. He has to be loving. And that's how Moses had to learn loving shepherding. But it's not just about Moses. To me, that's about God. Yeah, yeah. And God was using that to say he is the shepherd of his people, really. And the

shepherd is the loving side that, you know, atheists look at them. What a cruel, what a cruel God who kills all those people. It's like, well, first of all, it's actually the opposite. God, God should have killed everybody, but he didn't. So that makes him merciful. I'm surprised he didn't slaughter everybody who deserve to die. Instead, he does slaughter some, but he holds back by his grace and he chooses some, right? And that's God's salvific choice. and all this, so it's a loving, shepherding Yahweh. That is as much who he is, not just the power side of him. And that's a beautiful picture of God that I felt I had to get.

Oh, that was another element of Moses that I got too. That's right. The whole father-like thing, you know, I realized as I studied, it's like, you know, Moses had a father issues, his whole life. Think about it. His original father doesn't abandon him because they're trying to save him, right? But his mother saves him by putting him in the river, but there's no mention of his father. So his father, you know, and the father's supposed to raise and protect their sons, right?

And he must have felt really horrible, right? But his father's not even mentioned. He gets adopted. He's an adopted of a Pharaoh who then, who's the son of a Pharaoh, who then Pharaoh tries to kill him. He runs away. And then he meets Jethro, who becomes a father figure for him in Midian. But it's not his real father. then he comes back to Egypt, and by the way, his father was named Amram.

His father lived to be 137 years old. His father went with the Exodus, right? So he was there all along, and nothing's ever mentioned of him. And so Moses goes back, and I can imagine just how miserable his father must have felt like, you know, I failed you as a father, right? You know, and all this time Moses is without a real father, and he's adopted, then he's abandoned, then he's attempted murder, his father tries to kill him.

So it's just like, what kind of, you know, and then God reveals himself to him as his true father in heaven. And I think that that's, you know, we all struggle with father issues in different ways. And I think that's the point of Moses' story was,

he was a man who never had a true earthly father that that was to him what he needed to be because he needed to learn Yahweh was, God was his father. And I, you know, I kind of had a similar experience of my own life. So I get that, you know, not being adopted and all that stuff. Well, no. I mean, it makes sense that he might have been got a late start, might have had some development issues.

And then he has, and then he has anger problems later in his life. He's hitting rocks to get the water out instead of just tapping it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. He's just raging against the machine. Sounds like a golfer. Just hitting things with his club.

Yeah, no, seriously. And even like the way he talks at times, I don't have any references right here, but if you read the story of Exodus, there are sometimes the way he talks, it's just like, really? You know, it's like, that sounds mean, you know? So, yeah, I think he does have that anger issue as well. Yeah, so. It's funny, the people that God uses, right? All the pains and the problems.

But it really, I think, encompasses kind of what we try to talk about on this show a lot, Brian, is that our battle isn't flesh and blood. We are at a war with entities. We can't see, and they manifest in weird ways in our world, and we talk about the creatures, and that's the vehicle that we use to talk about the spiritual world. I hear you.

That these things are, people see them, and they manifest, and it's, we often think that we have to be perfect to approach God, or that we have to have all of our crap together. And clearly, I think there's, God is using, human beings to fight against the darkness, and she's got to be available. So it's just, it's great to hear these new fresh takes and talk about everything from flying snakes. Thanks for having me on, man. Yeah. I write about all of this in my two books. I love it, dude. I love.

Brian, you come back anytime. This is great. Are you still, do you still live in California? Oh, no, dude. I, I escaped a year ago to Texas. There you go. Good, man. So he doesn't have to pay as many taxes. We're trying to make up for a lost time. We're in Tennessee. Freedom. Freedom. Oh, yeah.

Good man. Well, thanks, Brian. Appreciate it. Yeah. What's your website? Gawah.com. Gaudawa.com. Gaudawa.com.

All my books are in, almost all my books are in e-book, paperback, or audiobook on Amazon exclusively. But if you want to find out more information about, you know, you can also go to my website. I have a lot of cool stuff on there about all my novels and, you know, free stuff and or just go right to Amazon and there's a lot of good book discreet. In the book descriptions, you'll see everything you need to probably learn to. All right. To decide to buy a book or not. That's awesome. You should. You should buy one of them. Yeah, we should. You should.

My new book. That's right. We'll make you come back for BlurieCon when we do BlurieCon one of these days. We're going to do it. We're going to do something crazy. We'll, uh, we're talking about doing some, some sort of because people are like, oh, we got to do it. We got to get everyone together. I don't know. We've created this weird following of, of, People who like this community with all this stuff. So we were thinking about maybe doing like a long day event. So maybe we're kind of spreading the gospel, the word of maybe next year sometime.

We'll do some sort of event. But go check out Brian's stuff. Brian, thank you so much. Hit up his website and tell him Blurry sent you. Thanks, guys. That's right. Yeah. Brian, thanks to give it.

Thanks a much for the time. All right, guys. All right, man. Appreciate it.