Click Here For Christian Media's First Video Channel

Christian Media

Communiqué

Escape From Planet Egypt

Part VII

In Part VI of Escape From Planet Egypt, we connected the defeat of the Canaanite militia of Sisera at the hands of Barak and Deborah, with the massive thunderbolt of Baal/Mars, which returned to devastate Sisera's forces at the river Kishon. Joshua had already defeated the Amorites decades earlier in the "longest day" episode (see Joshua Chapter 5), and shortly after the time Sisera's army was devastated, the Midianites had risen to take the place of the defeated Canaanites.

With the backing of the Amalekites, who were still in power as the Hyksos Dynasty in Egypt, the Arabs had regrouped, and again came to dominate Israel. The LORD's people had come to believe the destruction at Kishon was evidence that Baal had intervened on their behalf. After all, they could not actually see the Hebrew deity Yahweh (anglicized as Jehovah in the KJV), and the survivors were actual eyewitnesses of "Baal's" power.

Some insisted the LORD still favored Israel, even as the divine thunderbolt which destroyed the Canaanites began to be referred to as the Sword of the LORD. However, the many Gentile people groups still remembered their longstanding traditions of Ashtaroth and Baal -- and the Israelites had come to mingle the Baal worship of their masters, with that of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Since the huge victory of Barak was over 50 years earlier, the veneration of Baal had resurfaced, and spread to prominent families of Israel, including the house of Joash.

The pattern is familiar, as the Israelites, mercilessly ruled by the Midianites, again repented and called out to the God of their fathers. Accordingly, the angel of the LORD appeared to Gideon, the son of Joash, and told him that he would lead Israel from the oppression of the Midianites and the ever present Amalekites:

"And the Lord said unto him…throw down the altar of Baal that thy father hath, and cut down the [Ashtaroth] grove that is by it" (Judges 6:25).

Gideon's obedience ignited an Israelite revolt against the Midianites, and the Arab masters of Israel assembled a massive number of troops to put down the rebellion led by Gideon.

"Then all the Midianites and the Amalekites and the children of the east were gathered together, and pitched in the valley of Jezreel. And the Midianites and the Amalekites and all the children of the east lay along in the valley like grasshoppers for multitude: and their camels were without number, as the sand by the sea side for multitude" (Judges 6:33; 7:12).

Even though many joined Gideon from the tribes of Asher, Zebulon, and Naphtali for the forthcoming battle, the LORD told Gideon he had too many men, as God wanted Israel to see the victory that was about to occur was not because of Israel's might, but was due to His divine providence. Thus, the LORD pared down Gideon's militia to just 300 men.

In this fascinating account, Gideon breaks the 300 into 3 groups, which secretly surrounded the Arab encampment as they slept. Each man had a trumpet, a pitcher, and and a torch inside the pitcher. In a coordinated move, the tiny force simultaneously blew their trumpets, and shouted out

"The Sword Of The LORD, And Of Gideon!" (Judges 7:18).

At that point they smashed their pitchers, creating the impression of many lights suddenly appearing in the darkness. Abruptly awakened by the sudden sound of trumpets, shouts, the clashing of the pitchers, and bizarre lights in the night, the huge force panicked and began swinging their swords in a chaotic frenzy – and in the ensuing chaos, the Midianites and Amalekites fled in great disarray.

Clearly, they had all heard the various versions of how the Sword of the Lord had supernaturally destroyed Sisera's 900 chariots a generation earlier. Thus, even though the celestial Sword of God never made an appearance on that fateful night, the victory belonged to Israel.

Many centuries later, ambiguity concerning the actual number of heroic defenders in the famed battle at Thermopylae between the Spartans and the Persians (in which courageous Greeks heroically defended a narrow pass from a superior force of invading Persians in 480 BC), has likely borrowed the Biblical number 300, as well as the bravery  involved.

The Greek legend has been made into two motion pictures (entitled The 300, and The 300 Spartans), and has been recounted in countless books and articles. This conflation  of elements from a Scriptural account into heathen history, has occurred on multiple occasions.

The genuine tale of Gideon's great victory has many hidden features, not the least of which is the apparent expectation of the heavenly intervention in which "the stars in their courses" (Judges 5:20) would fight the enemies of Israel.

However, when the Angel of the LORD called Gideon and told him God was about to deliver the Midianites into his hand, the young Israelite had no way of knowing the approaching event was a nighttime Planetary Passover, and the most destructive aspects of the appearance of "Baal" was actually going to occur on the other side of the world, in the Americas, where it was daytime.

The records from the American continent that long ago are miniscule, but we do know the ancient Aztecs built temples for gods and goddesses derived from Isis/Ashtaroth (seen in the Aztec world as Xochiquetzal, a goddess of "beauty, pleasure, and love," and Huitzilopochtli, who they believed was "the god of war." In other words, Venus and Mars.

Not only do anthropologists tell us these deities were based on "older Mesoamerican religions," a recurring theme says the Aztecs migrated from their original home (in an unknown locale named Aztlan) to a city named Tenochtitlan, placing them in the region of Central America, as Tenochtitlan is now Mexico City.

These traditions tell us the "great migration" was directed by the war deity Huitzilopochtli (read Mars) and, although the experts trace the Aztec Empire back about 1,000 years (to the 10^th century in the Christian era), Escape From Planet Egypt has already cast great doubt on what are believed to be established chronologies.

In fact, a very early narrative in the book of Genesis tells us that Cain (who was a son of Adam and Eve), wandered a great distance from his original home, to a land where he named a city after his son Enoch:

"And Cain knew his wife: and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch" (Genesis 4:17).

Although many of the locales mentioned in Genesis have been excavated, archaeologists have never found this city -- but Tenochtitlan of the Aztecs does carry the name Enoch.

Thus, the ancient Mesoamericans honoured two "deities" derived from the very planets Velikovsky described as prominent in the catastrophic era. These same people were known for a great migration, and Part V of the present work shows a large migration affecting multiple nations as a result of the Passover/Exodus disaster – which was generated through the incursion of the two planets Venus and Mars.

The migratory path took these ancients in the American continent to a city named after a Biblical figure in Genesis, and that massive migration could have coincided with multiple population relocations at the time of Israel's move into Canaan.

The ruse of Gideon, in which the Midianites in the promised land feared the return of the Sword of the LORD, occurred in the middle of the night in Canaan. However, the projected planetary flyby of Mars (recurring in 54 year intervals) would have been a daytime flyby in the Americas at that time.

The Biblical sequence with the 300 warriors would have occurred during the 13^th century BC, at the time of Gideon, in the generation following the daytime slaughter of Sisera at the river Kishon.

The Mesoamerican legend says that it was the Aztec "deity" Huitzilopochtli (which was surely related to the destructive flyby of Mars) who directed the ancient's migratory path to the city named Tenochtitlan.

The only thing that doesn't match is the timing of the two sequential cycles.

Unfortunately, the now well known Gideon's Trumpet episode, was only one of many cycles in which the Israelites turned back to the worship of the star gods Baal and Ashtaroth. They would then find the blessing of the LORD was removed, and the chosen of God would be overwhelmed by various branches of the Gentile nations in the promised land.

"Now these are the nations which the LORD left, to prove Israel by them…Namely, five lords of the Philistines, and all the Canaanites, and the Sidonians, and the Hivites…Hittites and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and Jebusites."

"And they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served their gods. And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and forgat the LORD their God, and served Baalim and the groves" (Judges 3:1, 3, 5-7).

After Gideon's battle and several other cycles in which the Israelites backslid (and were subsequently rescued by the LORD as documented in the book of Judges), the Israelites eventually realized they needed to obey the LORD's directives to Moses and Joshua, and unite the tribes in order to survive in the promised land.

On numerous occasions, the Israelites were brought under the dominion of the Canaanite alliances because all 12 tribes were not united. Thus, when the great prophet Samuel reluctantly anointed the warrior Saul to be their first king, the United Kingdom of Israel, comprised of "the whole house of Israel" (Jeremiah 13:11), was finally in the position where they could completely destroy the Amalekite power which was led by Agag.

As we began to show in Part IV of the present writings,  the Israelites – who were then allied with the native Egyptians who were oppressed by the Hyksos-Amalekites -- were finally freed from the tyranny of the foreign dynasty, and so the two nations rapidly prospered.

But the rest of that tale will have to wait for our next installment of Escape From Planet Egypt.

-- James Lloyd

To Be Continued

__________________________________________