High Priest and magistrate Aeli my colleague, partner, and hopeful collaborator in vision of a better Canaan,
I write to you in peace under a flag of truce. Please first permit me to give you whatever small words I can express for your bereavement of Pinkhas and Khafni. There are no words that elucidate the grief of losing both your sons. May their memory be for a blessing. It is a grief many Philistines knew in our shared battle, a grief every parent in Israel/Phillistine fears on either side and now I fear for my own children and kin, and that is why I write you.
Your god is clearly more powerful than our gods. We've long known that. We thought that by capturing the ark of your covenant we would be able to worship Yahweh properly and enlist him upon our side. While we're not willing to convert because we don't want to tempt the wrath of our gods either, there are a number right now who are sorely tempted. I know you would welcome them with open arms, but as they possess state secrets, we cannot allow them to leave, and in certain cases we had to imprison them, and to my regret, still may have to put them to death, but when I explain further, I'm sure you will understand the delicate nature of our situation.
I write you what follows in a position of maximum vulnerability. You could, in fact, kill us all with this knowledge. I therefore trust you will not do this, as I suspect, though I could be wrong, that it would be an offense to Yahweh.
We thought by opening The Ark of the Covenant we were enlisting your god in our fight. We thought that by your defeat, we had proven that the Yahweh was in fact on our side.
Yahweh is clearly still on your side, and the Ark wants to return to what is clearly its rightful owner. Over these seven months we've opened the Ark of the Covenant once a month, and during all seven experimental procedures, it caused an outpouring of angels and fire that caused the faces to melt of every staff member present, the fire then reached to the heavens and your god seemed to swallow it up in a cloud opening, which then closed upon receiving the entirety of the blaze. Some unsuspecting Israelites may have seen unusual activity of that nature every so often and reported it. If so, that was the reason.
I was fortunately warned by priests that this was a possibility and therefore not to attend the openings, but every time, the priests, the soldiers, certain wealthy Philistines who donated to see the opening, were all fleshless bones before some dying priest seems to have managed to close the ark in spite of having been incinerated and boiled. Obviously this presents a problem because there is no guarantee that a priest will be able to close the ark before the fiery angels leave the premises zoned for experimentation and begin their evisceration process on our unsuspecting population.
As this is a terrible national security threat to the Philistine population, I would like to return the ark to you with all due haste. Obviously, given the delicate nature of this exchange, you could probably use this knowledge to annihilate us all. I would very much like you to view this as a confidence building measure for any future negotiations for settlement between our valued peoples.
Best regards with hope of peace and friendship,
Akhshish, King of Ekron, Mayor of Gath, Honorary Citizen of Ashdod
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