William Guy is the author of The Last Nephilim, published in 2013 by Tate Publishing and its sequel, Caphtorim, published by Outskirts Press in 2015. He is a practicing psychiatrist in Michigan and his educational achievements include a medical degree from The University of Michigan and a PhD in experimental pathology from Wayne State University. Before his training in Psychiatry he did residency training in diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine. Prior to practicing medicine he served as a genetics professor at Eastern Michigan University.
Dr. Guy has been a regular contributor to the radio program Family Life Perspectives on WMUZ. He has also been invited as a guest on several local television programs because of his ability to make complex information more comprehendible to average English speaking audiences.
In The Last Nephilim series, Dr. Guy sought to create a compelling drama to describe an historically plausible theory.
Modern Christians are often confronted with these particular challenges,
"Sure, God demonstrated his love to man by coming a dying for our sins and inspiring the Bible, and sending his Holy Spirit to guide us from the inside; but where was God for those poor people that lived thousands of years before Christ? Did he simply ignore those folks until Jesus showed up? And why did God allow polytheism to get so popular so soon after the flood? And did God ever reveal himself to any gentiles before Christ?"
These issues deal with the matter of God's fairness. The author contends that God has always been fair and just. And there is some evidence that He has presented himself since the days of Adam to a myriad of non-Hebrew tribes around the world with varying degrees of success.
Consider the non-Hebrew prophet called Balaam. In an unprecedented discovery, an ancient text found at Deir Alla, Jordan, in 1967 tells about the activities of a prophet named Balaam. Could this be the Balaam of the Old Testament?
The text makes it clear that it is. Three times in the first four lines he is referred to as “Balaam son of Beor,” exactly as in the Bible. This represents the first Old Testament prophet to be dug up in Bible lands—not his tomb or his skeleton, but a text about him. The text also represents the first prophecy of any scope from the ancient West Semitic world to be found outside the Old Testament, and the first extra-Biblical example of a prophet proclaiming doom to his own people.
Balaam was not an Israelite. He was hired by Balak, king of Moab, to curse the Israelites. They were camped on the east side of the Jordan river, about to make their historic entry into the promised land. Through God's intervention, Balaam was obliged to bless the Israelites rather than curse them (Num 22-24).
Afterwards, Balaam seems to have been the cause of the Israelites' sin in Numbers 25 when they took Moabite and Midianite women and worshipped the Moabite god Baal-peor (Num 31:16).
Balaam was eventually killed when Moses sent the Israelites against the Midianites (Num 31). He is further condemned in Scripture in 2 Peter 2:15 (he loved the wages of unrighteousness), Jude 11 (ungodly men ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward) and Revelation 2:14 (he taught Balak to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to commit fornication).
The remarkable text found at Deir Alla consists of 119 fragments of plaster inscribed with black and red ink. It was among the rubble of a building destroyed in an earthquake. It seems to have been one long column with at least 50 lines, displayed on a plastered wall. According to the excavators' dating, the disaster was most likely the severe earthquake which occurred in the time of King Uzziah (Azariah) and the prophet Amos in about 760 BC (Amos 1:1; Zec 14:5). The lower part of the text shows signs of wear, indicating that it had been on the wall for some time prior to the earthquake.
Written in Aramaic, the text begins with the title “Warnings from the Book of Balaam the son of Beor. He was a seer of the gods.” It is in red ink, as are other portions of the text where emphasis is desired. The reference to the “Book of Balaam” indicates that the text was part of a pre-existing document and therefore the original date of the material is much earlier than the plaster text itself. Balaam goes on to relate a vision concerning impending judgment from the gods, and enters into a dispute with his listeners.
Balaam evidently was well known as a “cursing prophet,” for Balak specifically summoned Balaam for the purpose of cursing Israel (Num 22:6). Much of the Deir Alla text was given to curses uttered by the prophet. The term “shadday-gods” is used on two occasions in the text. Shadday is one of the names for God in the Old Testament, used mainly in the book of Job. Since the account of Job is set in Transjordan (Job 1:1-3), it seems that Shadday was a name used for deity in this region. Balaam used the name twice in his blessing speeches where it is translated “Almighty” (Num 24:4, 16).
So what can we conclude from this? God used Balaam to send messages to non-Israelite people, but he never took away the prophets free will. And ultimately the former "man of God" turned his back on God. How many other times and how many other races did God try to reach with limited success because of the free will of his subjects? Dr. Guy believes that God has tried to reach many peoples and cultures through imperfect prophets and this is why there are such vast moral similarities amongst so many religions. When Jesus was born, the Magi were following the star that had been foretold by the Hebrew prophet Daniel or one their ancient prophets.
The ancient Magi were a hereditary priesthood of the Medes (known today as the Kurds) credited with profound and extraordinary religious knowledge. After some Magi, who had been attached to the Median court, proved to be expert in the interpretation of dreams, Darius the Great established them over the state religion of Persia. It was in this dual capacity, whereby civil and political counsel was invested with religious authority, that the Magi became the supreme priestly caste of the Persian empire and continued to be prominent during the subsequent Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian periods.
One of the titles given to Daniel was Rab-mag, the Chief of the Magi. His unusual career included being a principal administrator in two world empires--the Babylonian and the subsequent Persian Empire. Daniel apparently entrusted a Messianic vision (to be announced in due time by a "star") to a secret sect of the Magi for its eventual fulfillment.
In the apocryphal book of Enoch, God uses Enoch as a prophet not only to men, but to the Nephilim as well. In The Last Nephilim series God's love is never dormant. In book one, we follow Persus, a faithful young Nephilim who comes to faith in God and struggles with his gifts as he goes through a painful spiritual maturation process. In the second book, Caphtorim, we learn of the fates of Persus' siblings and we follow their fight against the growing influence of Baal and his sisters in the Nephilim dominated post flood world.
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