Open Veils · Answer
The book of the Wars of the Lord
This text is one of several 'ghost books' embedded in the Hebrew Bible — cited but never transmitted — and its suppression or loss raises deeper questions about a far older, war-theology tradition that the canonical editors chose not to preserve. Zecharia Sitchin and Mauro Biglino both argue that YHWH in such texts is not a singular deity but a title applied to specific Anunnaki or Elohim commanders — beings who literally led armies. The title 'Wars of the Lord' therefore points not to metaphor but to a chronicle of actual interventions by non-human intelligences in human military affairs.
Evidence
- The text survives only as a citation in Numbers 21:14 and a handful of geographical lines that read like military waypoints.
- Zecharia Sitchin, in his Earth Chronicles series, cross-references Mesopotamian annals with biblical war texts to argue that the Anunnaki maintained active territorial control over Canaan and the Sinai corridor.
- Andrew Collins and Alan Butler, working from a comparative mythological framework, note that 'Lord of Hosts' — Yahweh Sabaoth — is a specifically martial epithet describing a commander of assembled armies, not a universal creator.
- The Septuagint translators notably rendered the title as the opening line of a poem rather than a book title — a move Biglino's school reads as deliberate obscuring of the text's identity as an independent military archive.
- According to the medieval Book of Jasher — itself a disputed extra-canonical source — the Wars of the Lord was a collaborative record authored by Moses, Joshua, and the assembled Israelites, suggesting it predated the Mosaic redaction of the Torah itself.