[TheOtherHobbes]

Shikasta is an incredible book. Completely out of left field for her, and a timely mix of politics and raw SF.

Incredibly depressing, but also unique. Neither the mainstream lit world nor the SF world knew what to make of it.

It's not so much a retelling of the OT as a suggestion that alien interference wouldn't look like flying saucers landing on the White House lawn, it would look like despicable politicians doing inhuman things.

[accidentallfact]

It doesn't need aliens. The people would have to encounter such things as the ruins of Jericho (destroyed at the beginning of the new kingdom period), or later cities burned down during the late bronze age collapse. Either could easily represent an extent of destruction incomprehensible to unsophisticated herdsmen. Later it was Greece or even Rome itself, before the area became a part of the empire. It's pretty clear that angelos was something like a courier or mailman, for example, and only later it acquired the mystical meaning.