War Scrolls (ePub)

Introduction

It was thought that the Garden of Eden is somewhere in Iraq which was known in the bible as Mesopotamia. But recently there was a discovery in the Red Sea (North West) of Saudi Arabia, south of Iraq. A friend of my father's Mannesh (who has passed) was originally from India, but his work took him all over the world, and he spent considerable time in the middle east.

Shortly after he had returned to the United States, he visited my father and told us that his company (during an excavation), had accidentally uncovered a burial ground, near a waterway, in Aqaba, where several ancient scrolls were well preserved.

To be clear, these were not the same scrolls found in the Dead Sea further North, in 1947. He did not say how many of these "Red Sea" scrolls were found, nor did he have the originals, but he had taken pictures and had that language (one he did not recognize) translated while he was there.

I just happened to overhear their conversation when I walked in on them one day after school. After listening to Mannesh for a short while I asked him if I could take some notes.

He just nodded politely and continued speaking. Now I knew Mannesh, and his wife had even babysat me and my siblings, while I was growing up, and he was not the type of person to exaggerate or perpetrate some kind of elaborate joke (hoax) at my father's expense.

And he was certainly no storyteller. He spoke from what he called the "Scrolls of Creation," which I renamed the "War Scrolls," because they speak about the rebellion in Heaven and the fall of Lucifer.

Allegedly these War Scrolls were written by Adam and Eve, themselves after they were exiled from the Garden.
And until recently, I had not seen these notes which (at the time of this book) were almost 35 years ago.

At that time, the notes meant nothing to me, other than a fantastic story that could not be easily dismissed. And after a few hours, we had dinner, Mannesh had said his goodbyes and I never saw him again.

Recently, my mother was cleaning out her closet, and (like most women who never throw anything out), she had found many old artifacts: pictures, letters, clothing, report cards, and other things she stored away, long after I graduated.

My parents eventually divorced, and my father passed. And after he did, my mom started cleaning out her closet and she called me because she discovered a bunch of small wire-bound notebooks, -that I don't think they even make anymore.

And she didn't know if they belonged to me or my brother because they were that faded. Regardless, she didn't want to throw them out until after I had looked at them. My mom is old, frequently confused, and very sensitive, so I humored her.

And that was when I found the notes inside one of them, that I had scribbled on over three decades prior. Sudden something that was meaningless to me as a child, had become priceless to me as an adult, as I chose writing (after communications) as a second career.

-Jason Kondrath