Ahab at Ezion-Geber

As I was falling asleep, I thought of a scene from Flight of the Gargoyle in which a girl had an improbably large percentage of her body eaten by a demonic creature (a razor-toothed "mermaid" with the lower body of a leech rather than a fish) while the girl herself remained alive and conscious. I thought, In real life she would have died from blood loss. There must have been something in the monster's saliva to stop the flow of blood. And with that train of thought, I segued from hypnagogic musing into dreaming proper.

I saw a large primitive amphibian -- like an Ichthyostega but much larger -- emerge from a swamp and bite off a man's right leg at the knee.

Ichthyostega

The beast immediately withdrew into the water. The man did not bleed. The stump of his leg was pink and bloodless like uncooked chicken.

I then saw this same man, supporting himself with a crutch, organizing a group of people he called "the assembled Firstborn." There were roughly a hundred of these people, all blond, all very young -- ranging from toddlers to twenty-somethings. They were sitting down in the grass near the seashore, waiting for a ship that was coming to take them to safety. The one-legged man was telling everyone where to sit. Some of those who had sat down first had to scoot over a little bit to make room for the others. The place where they were was called Ezion-Geber.

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Upon waking, I asked myself who the one-legged man was and though, "Ahab, I suppose. Or Peg Leg Pete." (My thinking wasn't very clear, as I had just awoken, and I had a vague idea that Peg-Leg Pete was a character from Peter Pan who had lost his leg to the same crocodile that had eaten Hook's hand. Looking him up now, I see he's a character from old Mickey Mouse cartoons, with no backstory as to how he lost his leg.) I though about how Ahab means "uncle" and connected him with Uncle Jay in the singing and dancing telegram (see "Mr. Johnson, ho, ho, ho"). I also remembered that Ahabb means "more beloved" in Arabic and appears in the Quran referring to how Joseph and Benjamin were more beloved than their ten elder brothers.

I then turned my attention to Ezion-Geber. I recognized it as a biblical place name but couldn't remember anything about it. I was surprised to find that it is associated with ships, and that Ahab is mentioned in the next verse:

Jehoshaphat made ships of Tharshish to go to Ophir for gold: but they went not; for the ships were broken at Eziongeber. Then said Ahaziah the son of Ahab unto Jehoshaphat, Let my servants go with thy servants in the ships. But Jehoshaphat would not (1 Kings 22:48-49).

The Vulgate spelling of the place name is Asiongaber. I have been rereading Daymon Smith's Words of the Faithful, in which he twice renders the Tolkienian name Yozayan ("Land of Gift," i.e. Numenor) as Azoyan and connects this with the name Zion. In Mormonism, both Zion and the "assembly of the Firstborn" are associated with Enoch, so there may be some connection there.