Zepho Fled West and Planted the Seed That Became Rome

The ox was gone, and Zepho went after it alone, up into the broken hills of Koptiziah where the people of Kittim had hidden themselves from an African king. He was no longer a prince in Seir. He had fled west years before, and now he was a man chasing a missing animal across stone, which is how the grandson of Esau came to find a cave with its mouth sealed by a single enormous rock.

Most men would have turned back. Zepho put his shoulder to the stone and shoved until it cracked and rolled, and the dark inside breathed out at him.

The Beast in the Cave of Koptiziah

Something was eating his ox. He could hear the wet work of it before he could see it, and then he saw it whole and wished he had not. It was a man from the waist up and a he-goat below, hunched over the carcass, jaws red. For years this thing had been dragging the cattle of Kittim into the dark, and the people had learned to count their losses and stay out of the hills.

Zepho did not bargain. He killed it in the cave where it fed, and he walked back down to the camp with the news that the terror was dead.

They could hardly believe him. The people of Kittim, who already held him in high regard, now treated him as something more than a captain. They set aside a day of the year and called it by his name. On that day they brought him gifts and offered sacrifices, and a wandering Edomite stood in the middle of a foreign people who looked at him the way men look at a god.

The People of Kittim Beg for a King

They had wanted him before the monster. Now they would not let him go. They heaped riches on him, they pressed honors into his hands, and they begged him to stay and lead their armies. A people without a strong man at their head had found one, and they were not about to release him back into the hills.

So Zepho stayed, and a seed was planted in the western ground without anyone naming it. A son of Esau at the head of the warbands of Kittim, a pagan people learning to win, a city by the western sea beginning to imagine itself as more than a refuge. Long before there was an empire, there was this. A grateful crowd, a dead ox, a man who would not turn back at a sealed cave.

Eighteen Years of War at Sea

Victory does not stay where it is poured. Latinus had tasted it and lost it almost as fast. His successor Hannibal took up the wars of Kittim and carried them out onto the water, eighteen years of fighting from deck to deck, until the sea around Kittim was full of the dead.

The numbers in the telling are monstrous. Eighty thousand of Kittim cut down, princes among them, nobles among them, whole houses of the western people ended in salt water. Then Hannibal turned his ships toward Africa and went home and ruled his own people in quiet, as though he had spent all his violence elsewhere and had none left for his own.

Edom was bleeding too. Under Hadad, who came after Baal Hamon, the Edomites reached again for their old mastery over Moab, and a new Moabite king with the Ammonites behind him broke their grip and threw them back.

Seir Becomes a Province

Then it was Edom's turn to be the prey. Abimenos of Kittim, the same Kittim that Zepho had raised up, marched into Seir with an army too large to stand against. The sons of Seir were crushed. Hadad was taken alive, and then he was not alive. The mountain country of Esau's children became a province with a governor set over it by Abimenos, a vassal answering west.

Kittim conquered and Kittim was conquered. Edom rose and Edom fell. The alliances knotted and tore and reknotted, and underneath the whole bloody arithmetic something steady was happening that none of the kings could see from inside their own wars.

The Crown Pried From the Children of God

For a long age the rule of the world had rested with the children of God. He had been patient with them. One righteous leader balanced a wicked one, one good deed answered a bad one, and He let the account run, because the account was theirs.

Then it stopped balancing. The malkhut, the kingship, slipped out of their hands, and God did not simply let it fall. He spoke the rule that turns the whole story. "It shall at least revert to its original possessors." The power would go back to whoever had held it at the very beginning.

And the beginning meant Elam, eldest son of Shem, son of Noah who had walked off the ark into an emptied world. Elam's line would be given the rule, and Shushan his city, the place later tongues called Susa, became a seat of government far to the east, while the dead piled up in the western sea and Seir wore a foreign governor's chain.

None of the men knew they were moving pieces. Zepho only knew he had wanted his ox back. The crowds of Kittim only knew their cattle were safe and their armies were strong. But the crown of the world was being lifted, quietly, out of one set of hands and set down in another, and the warbands that a runaway Edomite had agreed to lead were already learning the trade they would one day practice on Jerusalem.