Chapter 1
Preface
It was once thought that the Garden of Eden may have been somewhere in Mesopotamia, a region that included parts of modern-day Iraq.
Recently, however, I heard a different account.
A friend of my father’s named Mannesh, who has since passed away, was originally from India. His work took him all over the world, and he spent considerable time in the Middle East.
Shortly after returning to the United States, Mannesh visited my father and told him that his company, during an excavation, had accidentally uncovered a burial ground near a waterway in Aqaba, close to the Red Sea. According to him, several ancient scrolls had been preserved there.
To be clear, these were not the same scrolls discovered near the Dead Sea in 1947.
Mannesh did not say how many of these “Red Sea scrolls” were found, nor did he have the originals. He claimed, however, that he had taken photographs and had the language translated while he was there.
I knew Mannesh. His wife had even babysat me and my siblings when I was growing up. He was not the kind of man who exaggerated or created elaborate hoaxes at my father’s expense.
And he was certainly no storyteller.
He spoke of what he called the “Scrolls of Creation.”
I happened to overhear their conversation one day after school. After listening to Mannesh for a short while, I asked if I could take notes.
He nodded politely and continued speaking.
According to Mannesh, these scrolls were allegedly written by Adam and Eve themselves after they were exiled from the Garden of Eden.
Until recently, I had not seen those notes in almost thirty-five years.
Fantastic coincidence?
Hardly.
At fifteen years old, those notes meant little to me beyond being a strange story I could not easily dismiss. After a few hours, we had dinner, Mannesh said his goodbyes, and I never saw him again.
Years passed.
My parents eventually divorced. My father later died. After his death, my mother began cleaning out her closet, sorting through things that had belonged to both of them during the marriage.
Then she called me.
She had found a stack of small wire-bound notebooks, the kind I’m not even sure they make anymore. The covers were faded, and she did not know whether they belonged to me or my brother. She did not want to throw them away until I looked at them.
My mother is very old now, often confused, and deeply sensitive, so I humored her.
That was when I found the notes.
There, inside one of those notebooks, were the pages I had scribbled more than three decades earlier.
Suddenly, something that had meant almost nothing to me as a child had become priceless to me as an adult.
By then, writing had become my second career, and I had been working on this book, on and off, for many years.
I decided to call this novel War Scrolls, based on the notes I took that day, because they dealt with the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Lucifer.
—Jason Gabriel Kondrath
