The Book of Remembrance — The First & Second Book of Achee

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Achee, the Brother of Jared, opens this account with a vision received through the Urim and Thummim, transporting him to a sunbathed hillside in the Garden of Eden where Eve sits with her feet in clear water. A meteorite streaks across the heavens and crashes near her, frightening her in what is described as her first experience with fear. This falling star is Semihazah, later known by many names — Devil, Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Belial — the leader of the fallen watchers and instigator of the first Great War in Heaven. Originally created to herald the authority and legitimacy of Messiah, Semihazah rejects his true vision of created purpose out of jealousy, invents a lie of self-glory in its place, and becomes known as the father of lies, corrupting one by one the visions of any watcher who will listen to him.

The narrative traces how this corruption spreads into Eden itself: Eve, drawn by curiosity to a many-colored, iridescent serpent named Nachash — a gentle, holy watcher whose appearance echoes Semihazah’s own — experiences a subtle pollution of heart, an attraction based on appearance rather than truth. This small shift becomes the opening through which greater evil enters the world. Achee’s vision follows the escalating war as Semihazah gathers one third of the hosts of heaven, some two hundred watchers, into open rebellion against God, forming the ranks of the Decadarchoi, the fallen order that stands opposed to the Eerkodeshoi, the righteous watchers of holiness.

The account moves into the generations following Eden: Cain, instructed by Semihazah in the secret use of element for evil — the same power that once caused a star to fall in Eden — prays a falling star down upon his brother Abel, killing him through sorcery rather than by his own hand. Cain believes the deed can be hidden, but is called to account before God and is later killed in turn when an earthquake, caused by the rejoicing of the Eerkodeshoi at Adam’s return to Eden, brings his stone house down upon him. From Cain’s line comes Lamech, “instructed by darkness,” who under Semihazah’s direct guidance becomes the first man to take more than one wife, deepening humanity’s descent into the wickedness that will bring about the flood.

The vision then turns to Noah, described as an albino, shunned and feared, who withdraws in grief to a mountain range as the War in Heaven rages and the sins of the Decadarchoi multiply. His son Shem, gentle and mild, is profoundly shaped by his father’s decades of mourning over the violence in the valley below. It is Shem who, after the flood has bound the fallen watchers and buried the Decadarchoi’s power in the earth, receives the Urim and Thummim, glimpses the Heavenly Tablets, and undertakes the establishment of Shabuwa — the great covenant with all the Eerkodeshoi that builds into the Holy Ones of Heaven a lasting resistance to evil and corruption. This covenant, renewed year by year at the Feast of Shabuwa upon Mount Pethach, becomes the foundation of the Holy Order of the priesthood after the manner of Melchizedek, through which the intervention of the righteous begins, for the first time, to turn the tide of the war against the Decadarchoi. Achee himself, as a boy, is taught these things by his grandfather Shem, viewing the sacred tablets and learning the order that he himself will one day carry forward.

Achee closes the account by describing his own reaction to the vision: he walked in astonishment for two hundred and thirty-two days before he dared approach the Urim and Thummim again, so desirous was he to understand all that the Lord had shown him in preparation for the work set before him. The chapter thus functions as a cosmic prologue — establishing the origin of evil, the nature of the first Great War in Heaven, and the priesthood lineage that carries righteousness from Eden through the flood and into the generations that will one day prepare the way for Messiah.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 1 opens in the aftermath of the flood, when Shem — gentle, mild, and profoundly marked by his father Noah’s decades of grief over the wickedness of the pre-flood world — withdraws with his wife Sedeqetelebab to Mount Pethach, the peak the fallen watchers know as Hermon. There, over forty-nine days spanning seven Sabbaths, Shem sounds the Trump of Summons and calls the Eerkodeshoi forward one by one to enter a sevenfold covenant: to forever serve as the Language of Repentance and the Language of Glory, to resist evil, and to war against the Decadarchoi across all generations of the earth. This covenant, Shabuwa, binds the Holy Ones so firmly that thunder rolls and hills shake in witness — while Semihazah and his fallen band refuse to take part. Having established Shabuwa, Shem retires south to a city he calls Mabunachash, the fountain of the serpent, leaving young Achee behind in the care of his father Lud.

The chapter then turns to Achee himself, tracing his genealogy back through Lud, Shem, Noah, Lamech, Methuselah, Enoch, Jared, Mahalalel, Kenan, Enos, and Seth to Adam. Achee, whose name means “the Brother” for he was brother to all the living, lives much of his life among the Eerkodeshoi, so set apart from ordinary society that the wicked call him a wild man and fear him, even as the righteous find his word carries great power over the elements. It is by a well of water that Achee’s path crosses with Tipharah, granddaughter of Sedeqetelebab, whom he takes to wife; she proves a woman of great faith and courage, unafraid of the wicked, who stands beside her husband in all his doings much as her grandmother once stood beside Shem.

The narrative’s center of gravity shifts to the great tower being raised in the land of Shinar, built by those who reject the ancient religion of Enoch and set out, under the influence of Nimrod — a childhood acquaintance of Achee’s, aligned with Semihazah’s rebellion — to make themselves a name and a home for their own idols, reaching toward heaven. Slavery takes root at the tower as overseers begin to enslave workers they deem inferior. Jared, remembering Shem’s old prophecies that the builders’ language would one day be confounded and their work scattered, seeks out Achee to pray on his behalf and on behalf of the more righteous among the laborers, that they might escape bondage. Achee’s prayers protect Jared from enslavement, and word spreads among the frightened workers, who likewise seek Achee’s intercession.

As the tower rises across some forty years of building, the Lord withdraws His Spirit from the wicked exactly as Shem foretold, and human speech — once pure, unified, and patterned after the wordless Heavenly Tablets — grows confounded, so that workmen can no longer understand one another’s instructions. Achee, meanwhile, continues his family life at a distance from the tower’s camps: Tipharah bears him sons — Pagag, meaning “to be separated by water,” and Nezara, meaning “rustling north wind” — and later a third son is quieted at birth by Tipharah’s dance and song of Eve before the altar, and is named Nachash, meaning serpent, in reference to that song. Word circulates among the people that Shem’s departure and Achee’s evident displeasure with the tower’s construction are ill omens, stirring unease that the great work will come to nothing and that Shem’s prophecies will be fulfilled in full.

The chapter closes as it began — at the altar — with Achee inquiring of the Lord on Jared’s behalf, seeking to know whether God will lead the righteous out of the land of the tower as He once led Shem and Sedeqetelebab away from the ruined pre-flood world. This vision before Achee’s altar becomes the hinge on which the rest of the First Book of Achee turns, setting in motion his call as spokesman for the righteous and previewing the pattern of covenant, confusion, and deliverance that will recur throughout the record of the twenty-four High Priest communities still to come.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 2 carries Achee up the mount for a sweeping vision of the first six of the twenty-four High Priest Communities — the succession of righteous men through whom mankind, by the exercise of its own agency, helps to define and beget the very being of Messiah. The Lord tells Achee plainly that He Himself was ordained after the Order of Melchizedek, the same holy priesthood Achee’s own grandfather carries, and that each High Priest stands as brother to one of the Eerkodeshoi, bound to him by the ties of Shabuwa, and each gives the coming Messiah a new name drawn from the righteousness that community establishes.

The vision opens with Adam, brother to Shemael and the animals, whose community establishes repentance itself — the reconnection of man to the Father after the Fall. Achee watches Adam and Eve rejoice at their rock of witness, giving thanks that a happy and eternal life remains possible through forgiveness, and sees Adam institute sacrifice as a covenant, naming the coming Son of God “the Lamb of God” for His purity and innocence. Next comes Seth, brother to Ebedel and the rocks, who as a priest after the Order of Melchizedek writes the Tablets of Elda — a pure, wordless, inspired language kept as a Book of Remembrance — thereby establishing human written language itself and giving Messiah the name “The Word.”

The third community is Enoch’s, brother to Kayal and the fountains, and it receives the vision’s longest and richest treatment: Enoch calls Adam and Eve to pass before a great altar as living element of righteousness while seven women, led by Eve, dance and sing before it, and the mountains, hills, and grass rejoice with them. Through this ceremony Enoch establishes the sanctity of holy marriage — modeled on God’s own compassionate creation of Eve for Adam’s loneliness — as the central element of righteousness that joins spirit and element, defends against the lies of Semihazah, and gives Messiah the name “Word of His Power.” Achee is shown that sexual purity and holy marriage are simultaneously humanity’s greatest vulnerability to sin and its surest protection against it, since Semihazah has decreed that every kind of wickedness will first attack the sanctity of marriage before it can spread further.

From Enoch, Achee’s vision turns to his own grandfather Noah, brother to Chafetiel and the fruit of trees, whom the Lord credits with defining the limits of divine suffering and sorrow — the very conditions under which the wicked, once fully ripe in iniquity, are swept from the land by flood, and under which Messiah Himself, taking on human flesh, would not be asked to bear more than He could endure. For this, Noah names the coming Messiah simply “The Man.” Achee then inquires after Shem, brother to Malakiel and the mountains, whose establishment of Shabuwa upon Mount Pethach — already recounted in Chapter 1 — earns Messiah the title “The Prince of the Host.”

Finally the vision arrives at Achee’s own community, sixth in the succession, brother to Sarahel and the oceans, whose defining virtue is humility and whose gift to Messiah is the name “Friend and Brother.” Overwhelmed by all he has witnessed, Achee returns from the mount transformed — walking now in a quiet dignity and childlike charity that unsettles even those among his people who have resisted the Lord’s call to cross the great deep, so that Tipharah must stand as his protector against their unease. The chapter closes with Achee’s heart full of gratitude for his wife and for the wisdom of his grandfather Shem, and with the promise, soon to be fulfilled in Chapter 3, that the remaining eighteen High Priest Communities — beginning with Abraham, Israel, and Joseph — still wait to be unfolded before his eyes.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 3 opens with the Lord reminding Achee of a truth that governs the entire vision: Messiah is not some mysterious, remote figure but a gift whose very being is co-authored by the righteous agency of the men and women who beget Him across history, community by community, so that one day all mankind, wicked and righteous alike, will affirm Him as belonging to them. With this framing, Achee’s vision unfolds the seventh, eighth, and ninth High Priest Communities — Abraham, Israel, and Joseph — each moving the story further from Eden and closer to the nation through which Messiah will one day be born.

Abraham’s account opens in sorrow: as a young man tending his father Terah’s house of idols in Ur, Abraham secretly sets fire to it by night rather than see the Lord dishonored by his family’s worship, only to watch his uncle Haran rush in to save the idols and perish in the flames. Believing the tragedy a sign of the idols’ displeasure, the people drive Terah out, and the family resettles in Haran, where Terah relapses into idolatry despite his son’s pleading. Achee sees Abraham fall to the earth in grief, and the Lord comforts him directly, releasing him from guilt over his uncle’s death and inviting him to pray and have it done according to his word — the same promise later extended to Israel. Years later, when Sarah’s handmaid bears Abraham a son outside the bounds of faith, the Lord will not credit that child as the true element of righteousness; but in Sarah’s old age Isaac is born, and the whole fate of mankind hangs on him. Achee is shown the binding of Isaac at Gulgoleth, beside the very encampment of Melchizedek, where Abraham’s willingness to give his son back to God becomes the pattern that sets the outer bounds of a father’s love, uses a lamb from Melchizedek’s own flock as the covenant token, and causes Semihazah himself to shrink back, unable to touch what Abraham’s obedience has consecrated. For this, Abraham is named brother to Oreiel and the sun, and gives Messiah the name “The Only Begotten.”

The vision then turns to Israel (Jacob), whose youthful shame forces him to flee his father’s house in haste and grief. Resting on the Sabbath in the midst of his flight, brokenhearted at leaving his mother, Israel receives the same invitation Abraham once did — to pray and have it done according to his word — and he sets up a stone, naming Ebedel as his witness that he will one day return in peace. Moved by this, the Lord draws near and hails him as grandfather, astonishing Israel, and opens to him a vision of two columns of twelve faces rising upward: on one side the twelve sons of Adam, called Jeshurun, the foundation of the Law for the whole human family; on the other, the twelve sons of Israel, whose names he does not yet know, both columns leading up to the Lord’s own face. Israel is named brother to Regel and the hills, and gives Messiah the title “The Prince of Peace.”

Finally the account reaches Joseph, sold into Egypt yet risen to become overseer of Pharaoh’s treasury. Rather than delegate the task, Joseph insists on personally collecting payment from every traveler seeking grain during the famine, hoping to recognize his own family among them — and so he does, reuniting with the brothers who wronged him and bringing word to Israel, who has grieved his loss for fourteen years. Joseph’s steadfastness in this small, self-imposed duty becomes the means by which his father’s household is preserved and his father’s vision of Jeshurun is affirmed and established. Joseph is named brother to Bawrakel and the rain, wielding the same power over the Heavenly Tablets that Noah once held, and gives Messiah the name “The God of our Fathers.” The chapter closes having carried the High Priest lineage from a father’s grief in Ur to a family’s reunion in Egypt, each generation adding another name and another dimension of righteousness to the Messiah still being formed across the generations of the earth.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 4 turns to Moses, the tenth High Priest Community, opening with the House of Israel settled for centuries as hirelings among a far country’s people — herders of the king’s flocks, kept apart by language and custom from a settled, garden-tending people who consider shepherds undisciplined and unclean. Semihazah, never forgetting his grudge against Israel’s vision, works through the hearts of successive kings to scatter the people through intermarriage and trade, and by the time three hundred and fifty years have passed, a warlike new king presses many of the strong young men, the brickmakers among them, into his armies. Into this world Moses is born, raised in the courts of the king; the book gives no reason for what follows, only that one night Moses flees with whatever provision he can carry, his mother left behind to weep and later go searching among the people for word of him. (The companion Book of Remembrance of Moses gives a fuller account of Moses’ upbringing and flight into the wilderness — including his own distinct version of events, different again from both this book and the Bible. See the Moses page for that separate account.)

Exhausted and lost near the Oasis of Midian, Moses collapses and is revived by a small, quick, timid maiden who washes the sand from his eyes; he asks if she is an angel of the Lord, not understanding her language. She is Zipporah — “a happy little bird who skips about” — daughter of Jethro, a priest of God descended through Midian, son of Abraham, who still carries a memory of the Heavenly Tablets and the righteousness of Shem’s line, though the renewal of Shabuwa was lost when Shem and Sedeqetelebab were translated. Jethro rehearses to Moses the works of the High Priests from Adam onward, and Moses, filled with the Holy Ghost, kisses his feet and calls him father, begging to remain among his people forever. Moses marries Zipporah, learns Jethro’s language, and the two live in a happiness Achee recognizes as like unto his own marriage to Tipharah; two sons are born, Gershom first, and it is here, keeping Shabuwa, that Moses first glimpses a vision of Messiah and begins to yearn toward the day of His birth among men.

The burning bush follows: Moses’ son Gershom first spots the flame that will not consume its bush, and days later Moses approaches alone, calls out to the angel he addresses as Debariel, and is commanded to remove his shoes on holy ground. The Lord commissions him to free Israel from bondage, and when Moses protests that he cannot speak the people’s language and doubts they will heed a nobody, the Lord promises him that the rivers, clouds, wind, and mountains themselves will obey his word, and instructs him to give His name as The Great I Am Loving Kindness. Moses and Zipporah return to the far country, where Moses discovers a brother, Aaron, born Nahaben, meaning Son of the River, and a sister, Miriam, and rehearses to them everything he has learned of Shabuwa and the Eerkodeshoi; word spreads through Aaron, who becomes Moses’ mouthpiece to a people whose language Moses himself cannot speak.

Moses’ confrontation with the king unfolds through a season of plagues turning the river to blood, frogs, and finally the death of the king’s own firstborn son in the night; broken, the king comes at dawn through mud and rain to kneel at Moses’ door and whisper his surrender to “the God of slaves.” Some twelve hundred souls flee, mostly brickmakers, old and young together, and encamp at the Sea of Reeds; Achee weeps to see how few of them go out of love rather than fear, much as his own people once fled the tower more from fear than faith. The sea closes on the pursuing warriors, and on the far side the freed people immediately begin to murmur against Moses and Zipporah, neither of whom can speak their language; Miriam is openly rude to Zipporah, calling her a foreigner, until Zipporah finally departs with her children to her father’s household, and Moses, grieving, withdraws to encamp apart from the very people he leads, reachable only through Aaron. It is in this season that Moses ascends to establish, at the Lord’s instruction, the Law of Virtue among a people already called Jeshurun by their father Israel.

Zipporah eventually returns with Jethro, who advises Moses — worn down by the people’s hunger and complaints to the point of begging God to let him die rather than carry them alone — to appoint twelve elders as judges to share the burden; the Lord commends Moses as a good and faithful servant and grants him peace. Soon after, Moses departs from the people entirely, and Achee’s vision loses sight of him for thirty-eight years while a wandering, undisciplined generation passes away, Aaron and Miriam among them. When the Host of Israel finally comes upon Moses’ encampment again in the thirty-ninth year, only a few elders remain who can still understand the old language, and what Moses rehearses to them of the Lord’s dealings becomes remembered by the people as the Book of Debarim. At the Lord’s command Moses writes his account onto plates of brass in the language of the king, but the elders, unable to read it, cast the book at his feet in contempt; his son Eliezer quietly retrieves it and hides it in the tabernacle’s treasury, where it will lie unseen for eight hundred years, a silent testimony against the very generation that spurned it. Moses, brother to Pawnel and the rivers, gives Messiah the name “King of Kings,” establishing through his selflessness the holy identity of nations and the possibility of covenant between the Lord and a holy people — and with this, Achee’s vision of the tenth High Priest Community comes to a close.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 5 covers the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth High Priest Communities — Jonah, Elijah, and Isaiah — beginning with Jonah as a shepherd boy troubled by his father’s court declaring that the God of Israel belongs to Israel alone. Praying at his Rock of Comfort, Jonah is told plainly by the Lord that all people everywhere are His children, that every man of every nation must die and therefore all must be raised from the dead, and that Messiah must be the first of all men resurrected in order to raise the rest. Jonah carries this message of repentance and universal resurrection to the judges, who mock him as an unwashed shepherd; wounded, he withdraws, but the Lord confirms his call and sends him toward a great foreign city to preach repentance, giving him no element of righteousness to carry except a crocus bulb he gathers on his own initiative and wears as an amulet.

Here the text departs sharply and self-consciously from the familiar Bible story, and the book’s own footnote says as much directly: the author admits that what Achee saw regarding Jonah is unlike any traditional account and initially seemed too strange to include, but was kept in for its importance. In this telling, Jonah boards a ship whose sailors, terrified in a storm and blaming the sleeping stranger for their misfortune, throw him overboard; he swims until his strength gives out, and the Lord sends a great fish that swallows him, immediately dies, and washes ashore with its mouth still open. Jonah survives three days inside the beached, dead whale, working an arm free to frighten off children who discover him before men pry the mouth open and find him alive, reeking, and treated as one risen from the dead. Brought before the king, Jonah delivers his warning of an approaching Assyrian army; the king commands citywide repentance, the threat passes, and Jonah is sent home in honor with two freed servants as a living sign that God belongs to bond and free, Israelite and stranger alike. This mercy toward outsiders becomes, in Achee’s vision, the founding impulse behind the land of Samaria — a place that will come to be hated by Israel precisely because it embraces all peoples, in violation of the narrower Law of Jeshurun. Jonah, brother to Chadashel and springtime, names Messiah “The Firstfruits of God in the Resurrection.”

Elijah’s account follows a path closer to familiar tradition, though told through this book’s own vocabulary of prophetic power. Called “the Tishbite,” a name meaning “recourse,” Elijah is a circle drawer — one entrusted with the ancient Water Tablet — who confronts an Israel gone wholly after the idol Baal by shutting off the rain for three and a half years. Hunted by the king, he finally calls the whole nation to Secacah for a public contest: two altars, two sacrifices, and a single test of which god can answer with fire. The priests of Baal plead all day to no response; Elijah has the people exhaust their last drops of water pouring it over his altar four times as an offering of hope, then prays once, and fire falls from heaven to consume the sacrifice as the skies break open in rain. The priests of Baal are cast out, and Elijah, having secured Israel’s future, fasts forty days and is shown the full sweep of history’s coming way-preparers, understanding at last that men of power like Isaiah and Moses and Benresheph will carry the work forward after him. Elijah, brother to Rachaphiel and the stars, names Messiah “The Messiah of Israel” and establishes the principle of restoration — the reason it would later be asked whether John the Baptist was Elijah returned, since the spirit of Elijah must go before the Lord in every age.

The chapter closes with Isaiah, born late in life to a man named Amoz who had fled a divided, idol-worshiping Israel in search of a place where the Lord alone was God, only to find the same idolatry waiting for him in his adopted home. Isaiah is named “God has saved,” and as brother to Rachatsel and the grass — the element that feels Messiah in all things and so represents cleanliness — he begets a Messiah who will be personal to every individual man across the earth. Isaiah names this coming Son of God Immanuel, meaning “God with us,” and through his ministry establishes the conditions under which Israel will later come under the dominion of the Kittim (the Romans) during Messiah’s own lifetime, so that Isaiah’s words, Achee is told, will carry particular weight for the Gentiles when the days of judgment and tribulation finally arrive.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 6 covers the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth High Priest Communities — Josiah, Abinadi, and a man the text calls Achab, whose priestly title is Goker Harim I — and this is where the record begins openly weaving in figures more familiar from the Book of Mormon than the Bible. Josiah’s story opens with a maiden named Dowd, meaning Beloved, secretly called Jedidah to hide her purpose from the wicked; the murderous, idol-worshiping King Manasseh forces her into marriage, but the Lord comforts her beforehand with a promise that she will bear a son who will rule Israel in righteousness. That son, Josiah, becomes king at eight years old under his mother’s guidance, surrounded by a court of children — a twelve-year-old scribe, a fourteen-year-old steward, a ten-year-old herald. In his court’s search of the temple treasury, they rediscover the very brass plates Moses wrote and his son Eliezer hid away some eight hundred years earlier (as recounted back in Chapter 4) — and reading them convicts the whole court, revealing that Israel has been living under a corrupted “Law of Babylon” instead of the true Law of Jeshurun.

Josiah tears down the altars of idolatry and sorcery across the land, including altars used for human sacrifice by his own father, and burns the bones of the dead upon them so thoroughly that no sorcerer will dare use them again. Among the prophets in his court are Lehi, Ishmael, and Jeremiah; when wicked princes move against them, Hilkiah and Shaphan are killed, Ishmael is slain by sorcery in the wilderness, and Lehi and his companions flee for their lives, eventually escaping to a distant “Holy Land” — the text’s own bridge to the Nephite civilization of the Book of Mormon, whose descendants build a temple of their own but fall into the more subtle sin of worshiping the work of their own hands. Josiah, brother to Adahiel and Enoch’s calendar, names Messiah “The Redeemer of Israel,” though his own people ultimately refuse to embrace Shabuwa despite his lifelong effort.

Generations later among these transplanted people, Abinadi rises as the fifteenth High Priest — a tree-sap healer and herbalist married to Nethiniah, with three children. He preaches repentance in disguise among a drunken, harvest-season crowd, is arrested by a wicked king, and while imprisoned converts a young courtier named Alma, who secretly flees with fellow believers to the waters of Meorihah, a place Alma renames Mormon, to join Nethiniah and the community already hiding there. Abinadi is put to death for his testimony, having told Nethiniah in advance through the Lord’s own comfort that his life would become the element of righteousness that establishes Messiah as God Himself. Abinadi, brother to Emethiel and the moon, names Messiah “God the Father” and defines the relationship between Father and Son — that Messiah would not receive a fullness at first, but would grow grace upon grace until He held the full power and glory of God.

The chapter’s final community belongs to a man the narrative names Achab, whose priesthood title is Goker Harim I. He and his community are discovered at Secacah when spies of a hostile high priest in Jerusalem observe them dancing toward their tabernacle altar; the following year, the spies return prepared, seize Achab, and beat him to death in a chamber beneath the temple, triggering rebellion among his people that the king must forcibly suppress. Achab, brother to Abariel and the clouds, names Messiah “The Son of David,” defining the conditions under which God is bound to intervene in human affairs to restore His Church — and in this way, Achee’s vision shows the actual founding of the wilderness Community, the Yahad, into which Messiah will one day be born and raised, which the chapter that follows takes up directly.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 7 steps back from following individual High Priests to describe the wilderness Community itself, called the Yahad, beginning ninety years before Messiah’s birth. Their body of Law is laid out in careful detail: the Community Rule for daily living, the Temple Rule for purity and preparation interpreted through the Urim and Thummim, the Book of Enoch on sacred timekeeping, the War Rule governing an elite rotating priestly clan called the Merari, and the Book of the Division of Days, a version of the Torah Jeremiah reconstructed from memory after the brass plates were destroyed, considered more reliable than other versions in Israel. Outwardly, their settlements in every city are called Nazareth, since outsiders mistake them for the ancient Nazarite order, and their enemies call them the Sect of the Nazarenes; for secrecy, the Community refers to their gathering place of Secacah by the code name Damascus, hiding the doings of the Merari from the authorities in Jerusalem. They live under Roman (Kittim) rule but prosper quietly, since Messiah and Shabuwa are the true nation and church that sustains them regardless of political oppression.

A great deal of this chapter concerns Goker Harim II, seventeenth High Priest, a young man identified as the son of Simeon whom the Eerkodeshoi themselves are heard to call by name during his covenant ceremony at Secacah, fifty-eight years before Messiah’s birth, after the Community had gone without a High Priest for some years. A circle drawer and brother to Anahiel and the dew, he establishes water and prayer as a central practice of the Church and interprets the Tablet of Jeshurun to formalize the Community Rule. In his old age, Goker Harim II is present for the birth of Messiah himself, naming the infant Joshua — a common name among the poor, chosen deliberately so His true identity could remain hidden from the wider world. Through Urim and Thummim he also interprets the Law of the King from the Temple Scroll, decreeing that the Men of Renown at Secacah will oversee the Community’s conduct throughout Messiah’s earthly life: that Messiah must be chosen from within the Community rather than sought from outside it, that He will own no possessions or wealth, that He will not marry, and that all things will remain held in common among the people during His ministry. Goker Harim II dies at seventy-eight, the same year he names the child.

The chapter closes with the calling of John the Baptist, eighteenth High Priest. In the twenty-eighth year since Messiah’s birth, the men of the Merari call a great council of the Community, women included as equal participants, to resolve a delicate problem: how Messiah, raised privately within a Community that must remain hidden from Jerusalem’s authorities, could begin a public ministry to all Israel without violating the Law’s prohibition on revealing the Community’s holy things to the wicked. Zabdee, the High Priest who succeeded Goker Harim II, brings the matter before the council and declares that John was conceived and raised for exactly this purpose — to go before Messiah, given twelve princes of his own, so that the manner and boundaries of Messiah’s public teaching would be set safely in advance by John’s example rather than risk Messiah’s own exposure to disobedience or sin. John submits to the council’s charge, and in that same year goes forth to preach repentance to all who will hear him, offering baptism openly to rich and poor, ruler and workman alike — a practice that had been kept privately within the Church for nearly two centuries before John made it public.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 8 opens with the marriage of Joseph and Mary within the Community’s own custom of holy chastity, a practice by which a man could marry his wife and yet keep her a virgin for a time until she formally took the Covenant. It is during this period of chastity that Mary conceives; Joseph, knowing he is not the child’s father, wrestles with the matter until an angel of God meets him in his struggle. Achee reflects that Messiah, more than any man, needed to be joined to the Eerkodeshoi through the pattern of marriage itself, since the earth is the embodiment of His own feelings within Shabuwa. The birth takes place where watchers from the settlement of Netophah can see across the land toward Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Mount Pethach, and for the first years of His life only the Men of Renown at Secacah know the daily particulars of the child’s circumstances; the wider Community simply knows Him as a son of Mary and keeps careful discretion, even as excitement quietly builds among them that Messiah now walks the earth in the flesh.

The chapter then departs sharply from the familiar Nativity story: rather than wise men bringing gifts of worship, Semihazah sends three sorcerers by way of a comet, bearing gifts meant for burial and for the dead, intending that their sorcery should curse the infant and kill Him. The prayers of the Community prove stronger, and the Lord warns Joseph in a dream to flee with the child into a far country. Word reaches Secacah before sundown the same day; Zabdee, only three months into his service as the nineteenth High Priest, consults the Lord by Urim and directs the whole Community to pray that the Eerkodeshoi themselves protect the child from the schemes of the king, Herod — whose name, the text notes, ironically means to behold the hero. In answer, gruesome afflictions fall upon Herod: his lungs shrivel, his skin erupts in scabs and itching, his food will not nourish him, and his body decays from within until he dies, described by those close to him as the living dead, though only the Community understands which of his many sins truly brought the judgment. With Herod’s death, Joseph brings the family home to the settlements of Nazareth, where the Merari continue to keep quiet, dedicated watchers near the family at all times, disguised as ordinary members of the Community.

The remainder of the chapter follows Messiah’s education. Unlike most of Israel, where only the sons of the rich and powerful receive formal schooling, the Community teaches both male and female children equally from the Heavenly Tablets, so that all might grow in vision, virtue, and holiness. Messiah learns under his parents until age seven, then enters a ten-year youth curriculum taught in turn by hand-selected Men of Renown, each honored to have a hand in instructing Him. In one formative episode, young Messiah breaks away from His mother’s side toward the shouts of a crowd and witnesses a woman being stoned to death under a law Mary herself cannot identify as coming from Moses, attributing it only vaguely to what the wicked call the Laws of Aaron; deeply moved, He presses His mother afterward to understand by what authority such violence is done, previewing the concern for the Law’s true meaning that will mark His adult ministry.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 9 opens with Messiah, at twenty-eight, mourning the death of Joseph and then withdrawing to walk alone among the Eerkodeshoi for two years — talking with them, hearing their love for one another, and unfolding to them the full purposes of their own creation. This period seals a bond so complete that afterward, whenever He needs any element of righteousness — colored earth, feathers, plants, stones, fish — it simply comes to Him wherever He is, the Eerkodeshoi nourishing and speaking to Him much as Adam and Eve were once fed in Eden. Achee marvels that even Enoch, who could command the Eerkodeshoi and move mountains through his compassion, only ever reached the Father through them; Messiah alone knows the Father directly, without that intermediary step, since He and the Father are one and the same in a way no other High Priest ever was.

Throughout, Messiah deliberately imitates John’s example in both manner and audience, matching His approach to each class of person exactly as John had — calling religious leaders to repentance the way John did, counseling soldiers against violence the way John did — and He crosses into public ministry only once John’s example is fully set. His baptism unfolds in the crowd at the Jordan crossing, among warriors setting aside their weapons to be washed; John, startled to see Him there, exclaims “Behold the Lamb of God” and baptizes Him into the same water as everyone else, a personal covenant of obedience layered atop the many private baptisms He had already undergone within the Community. Soon after, following John’s practice of feeding people from the fruit of the Community’s labor, Messiah turns water into new Bacca wine at a wedding, extending that same generosity to those outside the Church who do not yet keep the Law.

Two healing episodes stand out. At the pool of Mabuesda — where custom holds that whoever enters the water first after the Eerkodeshoi stir it will be healed — Messiah encounters a man crippled for thirty-eight years and heals him immediately rather than waiting on the pool’s timing, declaring that the Living Water is already present; the miracle draws an entire family, including a woman named Layome whose father had refused to let her join the Community, into the Covenant. Separately, a child’s dirtied eye is washed clean at Messiah’s hand, and the boy leads his astonished mother straight to the house of Mary to identify his healer. Later, when a storm strikes the disciples’ ship, Messiah walks out to them across the water; Cephas asks to walk out to meet Him and briefly succeeds by drawing on Messiah’s own oneness with the Father, only to sink once he becomes self-aware of the storm around him, and is raised up again — a lesson, Messiah tells him, in what full obedience makes possible.

The chapter closes with John’s death, described briefly as being killed “for sport” by his captors. John, brother to the wind, is credited with naming Messiah “The Son of God” and with using his own life as the element of righteousness that makes possible Oneness between Messiah and His Father — the last and seventh of the communities the Lord earlier told Achee (back in Chapter 5) must each contribute their part before Messiah could be born and then walk His path to the end. Achee notes that in Messiah’s own hour of obedience in the garden still to come, it is the memory of John’s example that strengthens Him to complete what John’s death first modeled.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 10 opens with the theological heart of the whole book: Messiah’s mission was never only to model holiness for those who already love Him, but to go, in Achee’s words, “below all things” — down past ordinary human sin to reach even those whose wickedness, worked upon by the agencies of the wicked, has placed them beyond the ordinary boundaries of human weakness. Messiah did not need to suffer and die in order to gain the power to forgive; He forgave freely all through His ministry. What the suffering and death accomplish instead is different: they let Him reach those who do not love Him, conquer death on behalf of both the righteous and the wicked, and bring everyone — willing or not — before the Father to be judged through His resurrection.

Before the end, Zabdee places the breastplate and Urim and Thummim upon Messiah Himself so that He can see, through His own Father’s eyes, exactly what going below all things will require of Him; He returns the Urim quietly and thanks Zabdee, and Zabdee in turn instructs the Men of Renown that their entire task now is simply to obey Messiah’s every desire without question, since none of the Eerkodeshoi have suffered so much since the creation of the world. Achee tells the reader plainly that witnessing what follows by Urim was the most heartbreaking experience of his life, one he could not bear to revisit for years, and for elements of it he defers to the fuller account already written elsewhere in the Book of Remembrance of Achee.

The crucifixion itself takes place at Gulgoleth, the very quarried hill — by the spring of Mabunachash, where Melchizedek once dwelt — to which Abraham brought Isaac many centuries before, a deliberate echo the text lingers on. The cross is old, black Acacia wood, worn smooth by the deaths of many before Him; Messiah grows sick at heart merely to touch it, since it embodies the very opposite of His Father’s loving kindness, and another prisoner carries it for Him instead. Mary, Cephas, James, and Messiah’s sister Naome come to the base of the hill; when Mary sees her son on the cross she cries out and collapses, and Cephas has her carried home in a cart. John, still young and tender-hearted, cannot bring himself to come at all and stays home with a fever. The repentant thief beside Messiah turns out to be a lad Messiah once met and ministered to on the road to Ophrah; the hirelings cast lots for his shoes just as they do for Messiah’s. Ruath, the high priest’s scribe, mocks Messiah at the foot of the cross, telling Him to heal Himself if He is truly the Son of God.

Achee is shown that the Father Himself hates the cross as an instrument of cruelty, yet sees it always through Elda — the place where every future moment of every person’s repentance is already visible to Him — so that the sorrow of the crucifixion is overshadowed by the joy of all the forgiveness it will make possible. At the moment of death, the earth shakes, the hills mourn, and every one of the Eerkodeshoi grieves as one united body, feeling as though God Himself had died; even they are not present to greet Messiah at the resurrection, still bound up in that shared grief. Meanwhile the wicked, who know the prophecy that He would rise on the third day, station guards at the tomb anyway, feeling no dread at His death, only satisfaction — a blindness Achee says will recur among the wicked again at the time of the Tribulation, when the same calamities of storm, earthquake, fire, and plague will fall on them as the earth’s grief on behalf of the righteous plays out once more.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 11 opens with Achee overwhelmed by what he has witnessed of the crucifixion and resurrection — weeping first in sorrow, then in joy, understanding at last that he has seen the very secret and source of all life. From his altar by the sea, where his people are building the ships that will carry them to the Promised Land, the Lord tells him that the remaining four High Priest Communities will only be revealed to him once he arrives there. When Achee and Tipharah return from that altar radiant with light, their own people shrink back in fear and cannot speak to them for days, until their children and grandchildren finally draw near.

The sea voyage itself is eventful: a storm forces them to abandon their last ship, stranding Shema’s family aboard with Achee and Tipharah, and Achee despairs that the sacred altar stones have been lost — until Shema reveals she has kept them safe in a bag the whole time. Later, in calmer waters, Achee discovers two of the Tablets of Seth have gone missing, apparently stolen; Tipharah and Shema, who had taught from them so often, are able to help him restore the lost content from memory. Among the sacred records Achee carries to the new land are the Trump of Shem (given to him at age twelve on Mount Pethach), the Tablets of Elda, the Tablet of the Holy City written by Enoch (later a source for the prophet Ether’s knowledge of a New Jerusalem), and the Urim and Thummim itself — though Shem’s own Water Tablet and Language Tablet reach the Promised Land separately, carried north by refugees fleeing Kephsaba generations later, in the days of Benresheph, and are ultimately buried by Shem where Goker Harim I will one day find them.

They land on the fifteenth day of the twelfth month, and two children born during the voyage — who have never touched dry land — are named Benyamime, meaning children of the sea. The people encounter a small, peaceable native population called Ooma, meaning simply the people, who join them once they see the newcomers can grow food; Achee’s own people take the name Ooma for themselves, and the settlement becomes the Land of Ooma. Before formally establishing Shabuwa, Achee receives a vision from the angel of the north, Nahookis, who shows him the land’s future: refugees will arrive from Jerusalem after Josiah’s controversy, among them one righteous son and two others corrupted by pride, who will build a temple modeled on Solomon’s and crown themselves king, planting the same wickedness Achee fled the tower to escape.

Warned, Achee sounds the Trump of Summons for seven weeks; on the appointed day he calls the Eerkodeshoi by name, and Tipharah leads the women in the dance of Eden once more, this time upon Promised Land soil. Using bread as the element of righteousness, Achee declares Shabuwa the religion of the land forever, and every one of the Eerkodeshoi joins him in a solemn vow: whenever the land’s inhabitants become fully ripe in iniquity, they will be swept from it, and those who practice sorcery and secret combinations will be cast off as an abomination whose fate is never explained — language that echoes the Book of Mormon’s own “swept off the land” theology directly. The chapter closes on Benresheph, the twentieth High Priest, whom Achee reveals is better known by another name: John the Beloved, translated rather than killed, who lives on inside the thunder itself and can still be spoken with, as one man speaks to another, by anyone who loves Messiah enough to seek him out — a companionship the text says will become especially real to many in the last days.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 12 opens on the day of Messiah’s crucifixion, felt across the entire Promised Land: the earth groans and shakes for three days, the wicked lose the familiar patterns of their lives, but the land of Ooma is spared, its people simply weeping and mourning alongside the Eerkodeshoi rather than suffering destruction. When life returns on the third day, a young man named Malatsar cannot find his mother Ohad and rushes to the altar of Nachash, where he discovers her seated on the ground speaking with Messiah Himself, newly resurrected and visiting the Promised Land. Overcome with joy, Malatsar falls to the ground before he can even reach them; Messiah touches him, and Achee describes their meeting of souls as beyond words — Malatsar’s eyes are opened, and he sees Messiah as kindred to every person and every one of the Eerkodeshoi at once. Messiah teaches the gathered people of Ooma using a simple plant as an illustration of how the love of repentance gives life to all things, and promises that all who long to live with Him may one day dwell with Him in the flesh for a thousand years — the fulfillment, He says, of everything Shabuwa was ever meant to build toward.

When the gathering ends, three of the men present — evidently sons of the same household as Malatsar — are discovered to be missing; their father declares that Shabuwa has taken them, translated to remain with Messiah among the Eerkodeshoi as keepers of all the sacred records upon the Promised Land, a role the text explicitly compares to becoming part of the Eerkodeshoi’s own spirit rather than dying an ordinary death. Malatsar himself remains and becomes the twenty-first High Priest, brother to Osherel and summer, naming Messiah The God of Zion and establishing, through his witness of the resurrected Messiah, the assurance that no soul who repents and longs for Him will ultimately be left alone.

The chapter’s second half turns to Goker Harim III, the twenty-second High Priest, a herald born into a world of war and wickedness who is given no righteous name at birth, yet whom the Lord says He has called and known from childhood. He grows to interpret the Law and to be entrusted with sealed writings destined to come forth specifically in the days of tribulations — language the text’s own footnote ties to Dead Sea Scroll traditions about a herald of Melchizedek. As Goker Harim III confronts the Decadarchoi’s claim that they alone are worthy to order the lives of all mankind, the righteous who resist that claim are persecuted, rejected, and despised in every nation. His prayers eventually call upon God to visit the earth in judgment, beginning in the east; the wicked and their secret acts are exposed before all people, even as wickedness continues to spread and violence multiplies elsewhere. Achee witnesses the collapse of the kingdom of Melchiresa — the Decadarchoi’s shadow-counterpart to the Order of Melchizedek, a term the text footnotes directly to the Dead Sea Scrolls’ own Melchizedek-and-Melchiresha tradition — and weeps for joy alongside the Hosts of Heaven and the twenty-four elders of the Eerkodeshoi in Zion. Goker Harim III, brother to Kabodiel and the trees, names Messiah The Lion of Judah, establishing that Messiah’s righteousness alone makes Him worthy to bring down what remains of the ancient kingdom first raised at the great tower.

From The First & Second Books of Achee

Chapter 13 closes the First Book of Achee with the Second Great War in Heaven and the last two High Priest Communities. Achee’s record elsewhere identifies four Great Wars in the eyes of God: the first, the original War in Heaven among the Watchers; the second, fought specifically over the vision of Israel and whether Messiah, coming through Israel, would become a blessing to every nation; the third, a war of truth against a false prophet that runs all the way through the doings of Melchiresa in the end of days; and a fourth and final war, Armageddon, still to come after Messiah’s thousand-year reign is fulfilled. Chapter 13 concerns itself with the second of these wars reaching its climax.

Melchiresa, the Decadarchoi’s dark counterpart to Melchizedek, calls forth what the text names the Abomination of Desolations: Semihazah’s presence made so overwhelmingly terrifying in every place where two or three of Israel gather to worship that remaining to worship at all invites calamity. Yet the scheme backfires. Rather than destroying Israel, it strips away every last remnant of the corrupted Law of Babylon that had crept in since the days of Nimrod’s tower, purifying the nation and readying it, at last, to receive what the text calls the Arm of the Lord. In a scene the narrative deliberately likens to Noah calling forth the flood, someone anointed to sound the Trump of Shabuwa summons Messiah to appear “in the midst of all element for all eyes to see”; the kingdom Nimrod first established falls, the man possessed by Melchiresa falls with it, and the fire that consumes the wicked is described as being of the very same kind and manner that once overcame the wicked in Noah’s day.

Standing at the center of this reveal is Goker Harim IV, the twenty-third High Priest, given a name at birth deliberately meant to conceal his true calling and protect him, much as earlier heralds were shielded. He is described as a man who clings to every word of God, loves the people of Israel with deep compassion, and calls forth the Gathering of the elect; brother to Gavahel and the season of fall, he names Messiah The Truth of God. His ministry unfolds against a backdrop of mounting darkness: Semihazah, sensing the tide turning, devises a scheme to corrupt the righteous through their own children, a plan the text describes only in the vaguest and most guarded terms as an act of dark deception rather than detailing its workings.

The chapter, and the First Book of Achee, close with Elisheba, the twenty-fourth and final High Priest Community, whose name means the God of Shabuwa. His wife Karoseaed, meaning herald of kindness, was orphaned as a small child and raised from her eighth year by an angel named Edni who appeared to comfort and nourish her in her most desolate hours. Elisheba stands chief among the fifty-two Merari and, in the record’s final and most triumphant scene, prepares a pure white altar in Zion; Karoseaed leads four hundred and ninety dancers before it, fire descends, and Elisheba brings forward, one by one, an uncountable multitude of the forgiven — those once broken by grievous sin who now stand whole and clean — offering their transformed lives themselves as the final element of righteousness. When the moment of completion arrives, the whole of Zion cries out the word Selah seven times, and the people declare with one voice, We are ready. Elisheba, brother to Debariel and fire, names Messiah The Savior, closing out the twenty-four-community cycle that began, many centuries earlier, with Adam’s first sacrifice at the rock of witness.