“A secret buried for two thousand years.
The rise of an ancient evil.
An invisible killer who will stop at nothing.

When a brutal serial killer defies all known methods, the police call in prolific lawyer and former homicide detective, Charlie Priest, to assist the hunt.

Working together they soon discover a link to a lost scripture that contains a secret so devastating that its custodians are prepared to die to keep it.

Tangled in a dark world of fanaticism, chaos and deadly secrets, Priest comes up against a nemesis more formidable and deranged than any he has previously encountered.

There is no Judgement Day. There is something far worse.”

Happy Friday. Welcome to damppebbles and to my stop (the final stop) on the False Prophet blog tour. False Prophet is the third book in James Hazel’s Charlie Priest series and was published by Zaffre Books in paperback, audio and ebook formats on 19th September 2019.  Today I am delighted to share both an extract from the book along with a brilliant guest post from author James Hazel.

Let’s get stuck in…

Prologue
The Snake and the Boy

There was once an angel named Samyaza. He was the leader of a band of angels known as the Watchers; the holy ones who descended from heaven to be with man.

It was propagated that, in the beginning, Samyaza changed his form into that of a snake: a copperhead serpent said to be the most cunning of all of God’s creatures. It is in this form that Samyaza took up his position in the Garden of Eden and enticed Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, telling her that the fruit’s consumption would give her the powers of God.

Like Prometheus stealing fi re to give to man, which angered Zeus because he knew that, with fi re, man would eventually find little need for gods, so the Christian God was enraged by Samyaza’s trickery. Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, but man’s ultimate punishment was to live forever under the crushing weight of his own morality.

From high above, Samyaza watched as God punished man, no longer welcome in the celestial outworld of Heaven. Resentment, anger and lust boiled within him. And something else too. Hatred of God, and the burning desire for revenge.

Then one day, Samyaza felt a cold hand on his shoulder. In his rage, he made to throw off the hand, break it, smash it, tear it apart. But when he turned, his eyes flooded with bloodlust, and he met the cool, unrelenting gaze of the only creature who still had any dominion over him. Satan. And into Samyaza’s receptive ears, Satan poured a devilish plan.

Later that day, in accordance with Satan’s plan, Samyaza proposed to his followers, one hundred and ninety-nine other Watchers, that they descend to Earth, permanently, and make wives for themselves of the humans below waiting for them. It was a dangerous enterprise, one that would draw the ultimate wrath of God himself; Samyaza would take personal responsibility if they were uncovered. But the one hundred and ninety-nine drew a pact together – they would not let their leader sacrifice himself alone.

And so a covenant was reached – each Watcher was bound to himself, his kin and to Samyaza. Together, they descended to Earth, and in so doing became the Fallen Ones. Others called them Demons. Each took a human woman as his wife. And they procreated. Their off spring, a hybrid race of demon and human, were known as Giants.

But the Giants were a blasphemy. Nothing has ever existed that was more malevolent. They were a union that was supposed to be forbidden in every sense. Soon, God’s greatest creation had become corrupted, ravaged and ruined. When the Giants began to outnumber the purebloods, they turned upon their cousins – devouring them like the monsters they really were. From his demonic castle in the clouds, Satan observed the chaos below with gleeful eyes, knowing that his tenure became safer with the death of every pureblood. He knew about the prophecy; the Bible told of it. Th e one to overthrow him will be a man. Well that can’t happen if there are no men left, can it . . .

In retaliation, God sent a flood to cover the Earth, and destroy all living things, including the blasphemous demon hybrids. But in order to preserve the purebloods, God saved Noah and his family. Noah, who was perfect in his generations. The purest of pure, whose lineage was untouched by the demons. The Earth’s last hope.

But Satan was not done yet.

Janus was the son of a farmer; honest and hardworking. The kind of man who would have lived and died in total obscurity, ploughing the oil seed fields or tending to cattle in the arid wilderness of southern Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq. That is, were it not for one fateful day.

On that day, Janus was sent by his father to recover a lost sheep, a journey which took him across the unforgiving wastelands for two days. Starving and dying of thirst, Janus was about to give up on his pursuit when he tripped and fell, a sharp pain rippling up his leg. When he looked up, he saw he had been bitten by a snake; a creature with deep crimson scales, the colour of the Arabian sunset. The same copperhead serpent that curled artfully around the Tree of Life, and who lured Eve into sin. This was God’s partisan, the wicked Samyaza.

Afraid, Janus was about to strike out with his crook, when, just as the serpent of the Garden of Eden had, the snake spoke to him, warning Janus of the forthcoming deluge. The snake advised Janus that there was no hope for his father and mother but that he, Janus, might survive if he were to stowaway on the Ark built by Noah, which was then nothing more than a wooden carcass, a giant timber skeleton jutting out of the desert.

Then the snake writhed away, and where it slithered, crops grew and water flowed. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Janus set off to find the Ark. When he did, he disguised himself as one of the labourers, but whereas those men hired by Noah to unwittingly build his vessel of survival went about blindly following Noah’s directions, Janus constructed a small, secret room below deck where he stayed until the Ark was complete.

There he remained, as the rain lashed and the wind hurled the Ark around for forty days and forty nights until the highest mountains were covered with black water and all life on Earth was extinguished, save for Noah, his family, the animals aboard the Ark and their stowaway.

When the clouds parted, and the rain relented, Janus picked his moment and crawled away, the demon bloodline pulsing through his veins.

Above him, Satan smiled. His plan had worked. It would not be long before Janus spread his demonic seed. Soon, the age of the demon would be born again.

Why the biblical story of the flood is weird on a whole other level

When it comes to religion, there’s one thing that we can all agree on, and that’s that no one can agree on anything.

Not even the data. I recently read two articles in a popular mainstream newspaper less than a year apart. The first article declared that “faith is becoming more and more popular”. The second purported to chart religion’s “continued decline”.

Both articles were peppered with carefully selected statistics and bold statements about their meaning.

Atheism may or may not be on the rise, depending on whose survey you read this week, but one thing is for sure: there are some very strange things going on in the Bible. From talking donkeys (Numbers 22:28-30) to bans on people with crushed testicles from being Christian (Deuteronomy 23:1), there is an awful lot to worry about.

It turns out that one of the strangest is also one of the most well-known.

The story of the Flood can be summarised roughly as follows: God looked upon the Earth and decided that it was permeated with evil and vice. Thus, He destroyed all living things with a deluge; all except of course for Noah and his family.

It is an early example of indiscriminate genocide.

There is, however, a part of the Flood narrative that is less well known. This is the story of a band of angels who fell from grace to fornicate with human women thereby producing a race of hybrid offspring known as ‘giants’.

It’s there: written in the Book of Genesis, hiding in plain sight, although, generally, it is omitted from the Sunday School account of Noah and the Ark.

~

To understand what’s going on here, it’s helpful to bear in mind that the Bible is not a comprehensive, flowing story. It is a collection of vaguely connected material written by multiple authors across a timespan of up to a full millennium. It is therefore not difficult to find inconsistencies in the chronicle.

Moreover, the stories in the Bible, especially those of the Old Testament, may be supplemented by other scriptures that aren’t deemed part of the canon.

In the case of the Flood, the true story cannot reasonably be understood without consideration of the Book of Enoch, an ancient Jewish work ascribed to the prophet Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. The Book of Enoch is not considered part of the Christian Bible.

Enoch tells the story of the Watchers, a band of rebellious angels led by Samyaza who decided one day to visit Earth and take female humans as their wives (whether this is a story of divine love or mass rape is open to interpretation).

The union between the Watchers and such women, who were either blessed or the victims of preternatural sexual abuse depending on your viewpoint, produced a race of half-angel / half-human hybrids called the Nephilim.

This story might have been confined to the annals of obscure Jewish history, were it not for the fact that the Nephilim are referred to directly in the Book of Genesis (Genesis 6:4). The King James version of the bible uses the word ‘giants’, which is the Hebrew translation of the word Nephilim.

Enoch then has the giants running riot, ‘devouring mankind’ and sinning ‘against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish’ while ‘devouring flesh’ and ‘drinking blood’ (Enoch Ch VII 1-6). This has led some to speculate that the hybrids might have ultimately become demons.

It begs the question: did God instigate the flood to rid the world of evil created by man, or to destroy the giants?

~

There may be some clues in the text, such as that describing the basis of God’s decision to burden Noah with the unenviable task of survival after the extinction of ‘every living thing’.

The orthodox explanation is that Noah was about the only decent soul around, the only one trustworthy enough to restart the human race after the deluge. He was a good-egg, immune from the unmitigated evil to which just about everybody else was seemingly predisposed.

That’s not quite accurate though. The actual text puts it slightly differently. Noah was chosen because he was ‘perfect in his generations’ (Genesis 6:9).

Was this a reference to Noah’s flawless character and devotion to God, or to his bloodline? Perhaps the point is that Noah’s ancestry was pure, untainted by demon DNA.

~

Whatever the truth of God’s intentions, all accounts seem to indicate that the plan (if that was the plan) failed. The giants are still around. The Bible is very clear on this (Genesis 6:4; Numbers 13:33).

Perhaps even Goliath, the Philistine behemoth slain by David, was a giant (incidentally, David’s slingshot was just about the deadliest weapon available at the time, and Goliath may have suffered from a disorder known as acromegaly, meaning he probably couldn’t see straight. Why David remains the underdog in this tale is beyond me. But I digress).

We must acknowledge that there are competing interpretations of all of this. Perhaps there were two races of giants, one pre-flood and one post-flood. Perhaps the giants were wiped out, but reintroduced by incubuses (demons that have sex with or rape women). Perhaps Noah’s son Ham was wicked, and his wife was a Pagan bearing the giants’ seed.

The latter explanation has some credence to it. Genesis gives an account of a rather strange incident wherein Noah plants a vineyard (Genesis 9:20). Pleased with himself, Noah takes to drinking an awful lot, leading to him falling asleep in a tent in a drunken stupor. During this period of incapacitation, Ham apparently sodomises him.

Even more curiously, Noah decides not to punish Ham for this act of gross indecency directly, but instead punishes (by way of a curse) Ham’s son, Canaan.

Whatever the explanation, the fate of the giants is left distressingly unresolved.

~

Given how the Bible was put together, perhaps this isn’t surprising.

The Old Testament once existed without a flood story. The account was added later by Jewish priests putting their own spin on the Sumerian / Akkadian / Babylonian cast of the same event. These additions and changes, introduced over centuries, constantly interrupted and disrupted the fluidity of the overall narrative.

Things were lost. The giants may well be part of that residue; their story was suddenly no longer relevant.

The debate about all of these matters rages on. Some people have pointed to a prophecy embroidered into the pages of Genesis: the one to overthrow Satan will be a man (Genesis 3:14-15). Perhaps it was Satan’s plan all along to contaminate the human bloodline with the divine seed of fallen angels so that there can be no pure man to overthrow him.

Perhaps the Biblical tale is just too convoluted, too confusing to make much sense of at all. It is ungraspable, like trying to catch fog in your hands.

~

None of this necessarily proves or disproves anything. All religions have an array of bewildering backstories. Many have flood narratives. Few have any cogent historical foundation. The lacuna between faith and evidence is staggeringly wide.

It’s easy to dismiss these stories as myth, the antiquated ramblings of an ancient sect. It’s easy to say that they have been misunderstood, misinterpreted by ignorant laymen who fail to grasp their deeper meaning. It’s easy to say that they have been taken out of context, ravished by flawed analysis and glossed over with misinformation. It’s easy to say that they shouldn’t be taken literally.

It’s easy to say that they’re just nonsense.

Perhaps all of these things are true to one degree or another. After all, what is proof, other than what we ourselves define it as? When it comes to matters of religion, just like metaphysics, we set our own bars.

There is a race of human-angels in the Bible; the same book that has codified the beliefs of billions of people throughout history. The same book that promotes misogyny, homophobia and a set of morals that seem utterly disconnected from a modern liberal social contract. The story of the giants isn’t proof of the Bible’s paucity when it comes to questions of credibility, but the lack of explanation does seem like an oversight when set against the vehemence with which certain Christian rhetoric is espoused, such as the insistence that God’s word is truth.

James Hazel is the author of False Prophet, out on the 19^th September 2019 and published by Bonnier-Zaffre.

Many thanks to James for such an interesting guest post and allowing me to share an excerpt from False Prophet.

False Prophet by James Hazel was published in the UK by Zaffre Books on 19th September 2019 and is available in paperback, audio and ebook formats (please note, some of the following links are affiliate links which mean I receive a small percentage of the purchase price at no extra cost to you): | amazon.co.uk | Waterstones | Foyles | Book Depository | Goodreads |

Before turning his hand to writing, James Hazel was a lawyer in private practice specialising in corporate and commercial litigation and employment law.

He was an equity partner in a regional law firm and held a number of different department headships until he quit legal practice to pursue his dream of becoming an author.
He has a keen interest in criminology and a passion for crime thrillers, indie music and all things retro.
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James lives on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds with his wife and three children.