Chronicle 47: RetroStar Chronicles, #2

By R.D. Ginther

   Chronicle 47 begins with a review on Yosef and what he did for the his people in Mizraim. It continued with the inauguration of Ahmoseh II as ruler, a Pharoah that did not know about Yosef and his deeds. This lack of knowledge of Yosef was felt with determination even amongst the common people of Mizraim and its leaders. So much so that they conspire against the Israelites. Nevertheless, there arose a leader, a deliverer from amongst them, who was spared a most gruesome death due to the intervention of FC. Mosheh, spent his earlier years as prince in Mizraim and later a shepherd in Midian, until he stepped into his true calling as a deliverer of his people, the Israelites. Mosheh's journey up until this point was that of a series of divine incidences, starting from his birth. And now on Earth II, FC instructed Mosheh on varying accounts of history, that appeared out of place with the current environment he and his people were living in. A new name Nor was introduced, along with the sky chariots to bring a long distant past with its future technologies into their present time of sheer wilderness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: K.A.Edwards
• Release date: Oct 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201572631

Book preview

CHRONICLE 47

ANNO STELLAE  6286,

ANNO STELLAE  6307,

ANNO STELLAE  6366,

ANNO STELLAE  6368

1    Waters of Blessing

WINDS OF  CHANGE CUTTING  with a pruning hook’s  sharp, cold edge had swept the world.  The Power Centre had shifted from the East to the civilization on the banks of  the Ioteru, thanks to the genius of  the Grand Taty Yosef.

Ahmoseh I, the Ibbathan-born and bred savior of  Mizraim,  figured as savior solely for that nation and people.  To the Hebrews he was the dynastic sire of  a line of wicked and deadly dragons, serpents, scorpions, and bloody leaches as he  drew down upon them the beginning of  the deepest night they had known in their long sojourn on foreign soil.

The Hebrew people deserved none of this oppression and exploitation and enslavement in Mizraim, (though they were certainly guilty of the massacre of the Shechemites in Ken’an).

They had kept to themselves on the preserve of Goshen granted them in perpetuum by the Hyksos king, and had not imposed their vastly different Most High God and their ways on the Mizraimites, when they had the upper hand while Yosef lived and ruled as second in command in Mizraim.

Yosef had even been given a Mizraimite wife, not a Hebrew wife, and remained true to her and did not take a Hebrew wife, nor did he ever took a concubine, since he knew how his father and his grandparent Isaac and his great-grandparent Abraham had suffered from their taking extra wives and concubines to increase the family’s stock of sons and heirs.

Yet none of this mattered to the Ibbathans or made them think more kindly or favorable toward the Hebrews.  They looked upon the Hebrews as rivals and they must be subdued or expelled forcibly.  Since they could provide a wonderful pool of unpaid labor for the vast building projects of the Ibbathan  Per-aas,  they were not expelled but they were forcibly subdued.

After all he and the FC  had done, Wally was dismayed to find when the rare and happy conditions of  life for the Hebrews in Mizraim declined gradually to outright oppression.  He had just seen OP vanish abruptly from centerstage on the gameboard and expected things to get better and better—and so they did for a brief time—then the so-called Eye of Pher appeared in the northern part of the two kingdoms and turned everything upside down.

Soon after,  Prince Ahmoseh of Ibbatha rose up and with his armies assailed the Hyksos and pushed them out of the Two Kingdoms and as far as northern Ken’an.  Ahmoseh I  was the first of the Mizraimite Per-aas after the expulsion of the Hyksos, and succeeding Per-aas became even more warlike and imperialistic and anti-Hebrew.

But the night of slavery and oppression did not immediately descend on the Hebrews.  During Ahmoseh I’s long, long  tenure—he ruled seventy years—the Hebrews, meanwhile, resided in out-of-the-mainstream Goshen Enclave and continued about their business being shepherds, cattlemen, and breeders of  big families.

With boundaries at the Delta on the west and the Bitter Lakes, Reed Sea, and high desert on the east, grassy, well-watered Goshen was a little world unto itself, a well-watered, grassy marchland better suited to shepherds and flocks than to river-dwelling Mizraimites who were mostly all adverse to living in those conditions. 

Few Hebrews  were military men and served with  armies, so it was not really their war when the Ibbathans attacked the Hyksos.   They appreciated the favor of the Hyksos when they first received it, and appreciated it thereafter, particularly when the Ibbathans won the war and finally threw the Hyksos out of the country—no doubt wondering if they would be allowed to go on living peaceably in Goshen.  After Ahmose I died, they realized they had the answer to that question, and it was a most sobering one.

Yet even before that happened, certain signs appeared in Mizraimite society that told him how the wind was blowing—blowing against them!

With a native Mizraimite Per-aa, things resumed much as they had before, but the people changed.  They began to draw back from the Hebrews, even while the Hebrews, needing more space for their huge numbers, encroached on some cities in the Delta and along the river. 

The springing cobra Ahmoseh I died and Ahmoseh II stepped into his father’s gilded sandals.  Following his father’s lead,  he showed he did not trust Hebrews and stationed troops near the Hebrews and even sent spies among them for information.

Forty years of  his reign ended with his death, and Ahmoseh III ascended the throne, continuing the anti-Hebrew pogrom.  When he died after thirty two years of  rule, Pher-enath I took up the crook and the mace of  royal power.

Knowing nothing of  the Grand Taty Joseph (no counselor who wished to keep his head would dare to mention to him now the glorious acts of  Hebrew ruler in court),  who had ruled during the hated Hyksos period.

Pher-enath I  judged the times ripe to proceed and  with the backing of  his counselors, he levied taxes on Yacob and Yosef’s people, the first they had known.  Taxes increased until the Hebrews had to give up their herds to pay, reducing the most wealthy to poverty.  Finally, the livestock gone,  they had to offer their bodies as payment;  thus, they fell into enslavement, the entire people, though this was not at all a time or dearth and famine in Mizraim.

Fair is fair in love and war?  Or,  Fair is fair in love and peacetime?  What if it is peacetime and you find yourself in the crosshairs of rulers in power who regard you as such a threat to their power and position they must wage relentless war against you?   If war is being waged against you in peacetime, it cannot be peacetime, it is wartime. 

It could be said  this was the same fate that befell the Mizraimites under Yosef’s overlordship during the Years of the Hyena, but it was actually quite different.  The Hebrews never waged war, as a minority people, against the majority people, the Mizraimites.

The Mizraimites suffered no terrible oppression and injustice as a result except from their own Mizraimite rulers.

Under the Hyksos rulers, the Mizraimites were required in the time of Yosef during the seven years of famine to pay for the corn, the wheat grain, and when they had spent all their money, and sold their houses and possessions for food for the remainder of the famine years, and when that did not suffice, sold themselves to the Hyksos Per-aa, what evil did that produce.

No evil at all in that! Most all succeeded in buying back themselves and their houses and possessions from the Throne after several years of renewed good harvests, so that their days of  servitude were few (contrary to what the princess, Asenath the wife of Yosef,  strongly opposing his policy, had feared would happen to her people).

If not for Yosef and the Most High God, they would have all starved to death, and their cattle too, and so it all worked out well for them in Yosef’s system.

Now, for no reason other than they were hated by the Mizraimite Per-aa who did not know Yosef, that is, he came years after Yosef’s death and knew nothing of him, the entire people of  Israel was subjected  by him to extreme servitude, persecution, and hopeless poverty.

Appointed by the government,  Mizraimite taskmasters took charge of  the tribes and rode them hard at their allotted tasks—various projects of  new cities and border fortresses  the Per-aa’s architects designed.

Mizraimites enjoyed exemption from  menial work; that was reserved for the Hebrews.  Made shackled  beasts of burden, the people cried day and night to their tribal  elders and patriarchs, particularly after the Per-aa,  fearing the ever-growing numbers and might of the Hebrews,  decreed that Hebrew midwives dispose of newborn males in the River.

Doing away with the children at birth was to him a double safeguard, since  the promised savior might come again according to old Hebrew lore (related to him by cunning temple priests who wished to see no rival to their power such as another Yosef,  rise from the Hebrew priesthood).

Wally watched all this  and knew enough about FC  by now to wait for the morning and ride out the boiling, black storm Per-aa Pher-enath I had stirred up against Yosef’s people. 

But he waited.  And waited.  Which is not say he was idle!  He was too full of questions.

It was relatively easy for him to solve problems on the physical plane, as he did in safeguarding Atka island and the people there and his facility at Tutasix from glaciers, but trying to solve the problems the Hebrews had in Mizraim? 

For example, what had happened to the Holy Writ, the Torah starting with the first five books by Mosheh,  much later forming the basis of the Bible that in the canon was composed of 80 books (the ages later Bible would contain 80 books, 39 in the Old Testament, 14 in the Apocrypha, and 27 in the New Testament).  

He investigated and found a most sorry state of  affairs, when compared with the wealth of revelation that would later come to be included in the sacred writings.

Virtually all of the Torah was lost or unknown, but they had the Oracles of Enoch and the book of Jobab the Edomite and some of the Genealogies of Adam’s descendants on a fragment of the original Torah preserved by Adam Coxie’s Jewish wife,  but that was about the extent of it.

Was that actually so bad?  No, it was not.  Jobab’s account alone was the most magnificent book ever written or would ever be written in the ages to come.

If the counselors could be held to account for false counsel given by Jobab’s friends to him in his worst state, their theology could not be the problem as they knew more about the Most High God and his ways than the greatest theologians knew in all ages after them.

Proscribed and banned by the Per-aa,  no Hebrew wanted to be caught with these accounts, so they were hidden away.

One hideout was a communal dovecote in Goshen, a huge, many-celled,  wooden structure filled with feathers and droppings, the kind that is commonly seen in  village after village as a convenient collection point for pigeon fertilizer, eggs, and the tasty pigeons themselves.

What government spy would ever think of looking there, unless he wished to be covered with pigeon droppings when the whole flock of them fled at the same time from him poking around with a stick in their giant nest.  Mizraimite as they were, with all the phobias they had regarding contamination by foreigners, being defiled by  Hebrew pigeons posed the greatest affront and filthy disgrace imaginable to them.

Another hiding place was a cracked jar in a unused room of  an old brewery.  Yet another was a dry well, purposely blocked and kept waterless to protect the writings lowered into it by long ropes in covered earthenware jars.

Taking no interest in sacred things of  their forefathers, the people were ignorant of  the books’ contents because they made no effort to read them, either before the ban or after.  It was simple tradition to safeguard the sacred books, and anyway they attached more spiritual efficacy to wrapping gravestones of  supposed holy men and powerful magicians  with rags and sticks provided or sanctioned by an accommodating  rabbi than they did to God’s Word.

These collections were everywhere in the Hebrews’ homes.  If  a child fell sick or broke a limb,  on went the rabbi-blessed rags and sticks.  If a woman experienced hard birth or other complications, on went the rags and sticks.  No one thought it worthwhile to pray to the God of  Abraham, Isaac, Yacob, and Yosef for help and healing anymore.

Where was HE anyway?  Abraham’s God had led them down to Mizraim and then left them in the lurch, or so it seemed to them.  They blamed Yacob,  forgot Yosef’s miraculous life of  provision, and heaped their resentment and anger on the God of  Israel who had,  apparently, stuck them in a foreign land and left them there utterly helpless and cruelly unaided.

So, in the state of  dire need and bitter distress, they turned to blessed rags and sticks.  Rags and sticks supplanted the Almighty’s power!

To Wally’s mind, the state to which Hebrew piety had fallen  was a  disgrace—a spiritual night every bit as deep as the actual one in which the Per-aa had cast the fortunes and lives of  God’s Chosen People.

Oh no, they’re going round the mountain again, and they don’t know it!  Wally observed.   

What lessons they could draw from Mosheh I’s  lost  books for their present predicament!  It would change everything if they knew the truth, if they knew how Israel’s Rock had once delivered them from their mightiest foes—but their eyes are closed, shut tight!  All they can see and choose to see is the deep, miry ditch they’re in, and they blame their Most High God for abandoning them there!

And about that Hebrew penchant for national purblindness, Wally was right;  there really was no way out for the self-blinded Hebrew people—except for one thing,  the creative instinct in an individual. 

One man was all that was needed to re-invent something that used to be called the internal combustion engine and the automobile. 

Even though his people were too beaten down to do anything but gather and mix straw with mud and then make bricks for the Per-aa from the concoction,  one of  them was under no such bondage—therefore, he was free to think and exhibit his people’s  God-given genius for making wonderful things. 

Unwittingly, both Hebrew and Mizraimite societies were fated to repeat the whole account,  just as Wally feared it would happen,  since they could not remember what they had not bothered to read. 

Truly, the Mizraimites feared and hated the Hebrews all the more after getting wind of  a promised deliverer who would free their Hebrew slaves one day—but the Hebrews themselves knew virtually nothing about it.

Deliverer?  When their own God had forsaken them, what man among them could possibly set them free?  No, they would much rather rely on something real, something you could hold in your hands, like magic fetishes of  sticks and rags. 

Fortunately for them, not all thought that way.  Here and there a pregnant Hebrew mother dared to hope that her coming child might be that great deliverer the Mizraimites feared and the Hebrews disbelieved.

Jokabed was one of those few, choice women.

A married woman of the Hebrew tribe of  Levi arose before daybreak,  in the land of Goshen.  Not daring to carry a lamp, Jokabed made her way toward the River as quickly as she could, a cumbersome bundle clutched in her arms.

She was fortunate no roistering army charioteers off duty or  just low rank patrolling soldiers from Ain Pher, or Eye of Pher the Moon God, a nearby city and fortress,  crossed her path.

She would have furnished them much cause for cruelty, especially when they looked inside her basket.  Reaching the cover of  tall, thick bulrushes along the river bank, she knelt down with gasps for breath, and fumbling in the basket drew out a vessel from which she smeared the basket with water-proofing bitumen imported from Babelen.   This was the same pitch the Hebrew brick-layers were made to use to cement the bricks together into walls of the buildings, despite the way it coated their hands like gloves and they could not get it off to be ceremonially clean for religious duties.

Putting her tarred fist in her mouth, she tasted the terrible, acrid bitterness that she has tasted all her life as a bondswoman, but her act made sure she would not cry out as she looked into the basket to see the infant.  It was too dark to make out his features of the one she had named for their first deliverer, Yosef.

Just recently fed at her breast,  he was fast asleep.  Glancing out at the dark, rushing water, she lifted her face imploringly as she pushed the little craft toward the current.

At that moment a verse from the holy word flashed into her mind,  Pie of cow is the help of  man. 

Knowing a few more bits of  scripture than her compatriots because of her priestly tribe, she could agree.

Yes, yes, trusting in man’s help is the same as standing with both feet planted in cow pies!  All you will get from that is stinking feet for your trouble!

Even her kinsmen, fellow Israelites, would refuse to entangle and  endanger themselves with her trouble.  In acute adversity themselves, they wanted no more burdens.  Besides she was Levite, and they, perhaps, of  Ephraim or Manasseh, who counted themselves better than the tribe of  Levi and loved to recount how treacherously her father Levi had treated their father Yosef once upon a time.

Would they commend her for naming her son after Yosef?  Probably not!  They might well claim she was covering up her tribe’s misdoings by making Yosef her son’s namesake, which couldn’t work with them, since they knew he was still Levite even with such an exalted, stolen name!

Silently as a spirit of  Ain Pher’s  necropolis,  a  little Hebrew maid glided to a spot close by where she watched a dark figure whom she knew was her mother wading into deeper water before she bent over in a silent, convulsive movement.

Miryam  was hardly able to keep from bawling aloud.  She was terrified to think her little brother was in the water with crocodiles.  It was hard to understand though her parents had carefully explained that the mighty Per-aa had ordered Hebrew midwives to slay all male babies and that only the River now offered a way to save the baby’s life.

She saw her mother give the basket a final push.  Then a sister’s tears streamed into the dark, muddy horror that had just engulfed her brother like the black maw of  a crocodile. 

Yet she couldn’t just stand there and let him go like that.  Straining to keep sight of the drifting basket through dense vegetation, she crept amidst ankle-catching roots of  rushes in dangerous, crocodile-infested shallows.

At that same time Hetepheres,  eldest daughter of the Per-aa  nearing her thirtieth birthday,  left Ain Pher’s  New Palace with slaves and ladies-in-waiting  to go down to her marble-paved bathing place at the riverside.

There was supposed to be a blessing in the waters of the life-giving river, and she desperately wanted it. 

She left her husband sleeping in a warm bed, and hoped it was true what an aged servant-woman had told her.  She said any who went early to bathe before the light broke stood a good chance of the sacred waters blessing her with a child.

O Princess!  cried a Kushan slave-girl whose duty was to wade in first to made sure there were no lurking crocodiles that might snatch the royal-blooded. 

Unheard of,  being addressed directly by so low a servant!  Infractions like that invited a hard thrashing with a knotted rope by a burly palace eunuch.  But the princess looked where the girl was pointing and saw an odd shaped thing floating toward the bank—not a crocodile, surely, but what was it?

It’s only  some dirty, old rubbish a Hebrew laborer has thrown in!  a lady-in-waiting laughed as she turned to  admonish the girl with a stiff rebuke.  Hebrews are always defiling our sacred waters that way.  Or maybe its their promised deliverer out taking a nice swim!

No, it’s a basket, I swear by the gods!  And well-made so that it will float and not sink! 

And it was!  Even so, what good was it?  The princess was not particularly interested.  She wanted her bath and the possible blessing of her barren womb that it could bring, and the incident had put her behind.

Even now light was breaking and the charm was being spoiled.  She was annoyed, to the point where she might have ordered the girl punished  for distracting her from her royal ablutions and the blessing of her barren womb to make it fruitful.

A cry burst from the incoming basket,  long and wailing like an infant’s!  It was so lusty a squall that there was no doubt how healthy this baby was!

Immediately, the women  forgot  court dignity’s loftiness of  demeanor and rushed to draw it out,  laughing and joking. 

Never had anything so amusing happened at a customarily solemn royal bath back at the palace. 

They dragged the basket up to the very feet of the astonished princess.

Though jeweled, scented hands were spotted with a strange, black substance that would not rub off, the women laughed because it was an infant,  a naked male child,  squalling in the basket and kicking its legs and flailing its arms as if to knock somebody around.

The aging  princess’ sad and beautiful eyes—by far her best feature—widened as she looked at it.  Then she stepped forward and bent over the basket, laying her hand gently against the infant’s cheek.

"I can trust the waters to give me a child by making my womb fruitful, which may not ever happen, or I can take this child now  the waters have brought