Abaddon

Binah

Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.

Psalm 2:8

Before the story continues, I should explain a little more about the area.

There are four major towns around Mount Abaddon: Abaddon, Jordan, Chamad, and Binah.

My family came from the nearby town of Binah. Binah has been Jewish before the Europeans came, or so it was said. Legend has it that the people of Binah received their names long ago. They were Hebrew slaves who had escaped Egypt. They had stolen one of the Pharaoh’s boats and sailed down the Nile into the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic and into legend. They had arrived in the shadow of Mount Abaddon when the destruction of the volcano was fresh in human memory. The natives believed that a vengeful demon had made the mountain rain fire upon them. When the people came from the east, the native people were slowly beginning to come back to the area and rebuild. The refugees from Egypt were hoping to build anew. Together, they found a mutual need and worked together as they built their homes around the mountain.

The refugees coexisted in peace with the natives, built their new, united community, and called it Binah, for they were builders. The mountain was named Abaddon, for the legends of the Hebrews spoke of a fallen angel who was known for destruction. The story of the volcanic eruption had sounded similar to the stories from Job and the images Job had of the great destroyer. A volcano was certainly a great destroyer of everything and everyone. The native people decided that the best way to ensure it never happened again by caring for the world around them, leaving it better than it was when they had been born, leaving a better world for those who followed. To the natives, giving the destroyer a name helped them come to terms with it, wonder what could be done to ensure it never happened again.

The Hebrews were willing to learn the skills of the native people to live from the earth and not waste anything that came from it.

Places from around the world have legends about a great deluge and people from far away who came in to civilize and that age was foretold to end by fire. The Hebrews fulfilled a prophecy of the indigenous, and the volcano fulfilled a prophecy of the Hebrews, of an age ushered in by fire. Binah and its area have legends of people who came from far away after the fire to usher in that new age. The newly formed Binah civilization believed the eruption and vengeance of Abaddon fulfilled that prophecy and believed a new age had begun. The natives viewed the Hebrews as their salvation and the Hebrews viewed the natives as their salvation. The people saved one another and lived in peace for millennia. It was easy to live with one another because the native people and the Hebrew shared each other’s visions of creating a better world, a world where slavery did not exist and people did not waste. The Hebrews knew waste too well, breaking their backs for Pharaoh’s latest building whim such as building large temples where only one room was used yet many slaves died during the construction. The days of working in the hot desert sun for some distant person’s fancies turned to days of working in the mild weather of the mountains for the benefit of all.

Life for the Binah civilization was happy and tranquil, and the mountain was silent. They believed they had appeased the vengeful spirit inside by respecting all that surrounded the mountain. No one wanted to live too close to the mountain, in case Abaddon decided to wake up again. The mountain and lake were safe enough for brief excursions, but deemed too unsafe for habitation.

Then the Europeans came and the Binah had to coexist with them to survive. Part of their coexistence was purchased at a high price. The price was to ignore their heritage and conform to what history expected them to be. They were to forget, at least on record. Our history became oral tradition, passed on in our area tucked among the Black Hills of South Dakota. The legends of demons were forgotten among the Europeans, as we call them. The Hebrew refugees were forgotten by them. We were just another strange group of Native Americans to any who would listen. After all, the story of the Hebrew refugees was too far-fetched to be true. It disrupted all they knew about “In fourteen-hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and the almost whimsical story of how the Americas were discovered. Whimsy that concealed a dark, violent history. The Binah story was non-violent and too eccentric to be accepted easily by the people who were convinced the Europeans were the first from across the waters to land on these shores despite the legends that spanned the American continents of people coming from across the waters long before a fifteenth-century Italian trod on the land.