Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Menelaus! You are one of us!”

An old man who had once been champion in Tyre shouted, “He is a Greek! He is a Greek!” And young women who saw with interest the transformation began to applaud and call the name, “Menelaus!”

At first Jehubabel had refused to look at the entrance of the athletes, but when he heard his son’s name being shouted with approval he had to look up, and he saw his son standing not far from him, relaxed and marvelously handsome, his skin lightly rubbed with oil. At first Jehubabel could not understand why the people of Makor were applauding him, and then the baker Zattu, who might at any moment be flayed for having consecrated his son to YHWH, nudged Jehubabel and pointed to the result of the operation. The Jew’s eyes rested with astonishment upon the visible proof of the boy’s disgrace, and he was so appalled at what Menelaus had done that he pressed his hands over his face, and as the crowd called the boy’s name Jehubabel heard the words of YHWH himself saying as of old: “And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant …” and it seemed to him a commandment, and he leaped from his seat, grabbing the walking stick of a crippled Jew, and with this knotted club he struck his son with such force that the boy fell to the ground. With four crushing blows he beat his son about the head, shattering his skull. Then with a loud cry, “The pledge! The pledge!” he ran from the gymnasium and without halting dashed through the main gate, shouting, “The pledge! The pledge!”

As planned, he headed for the swamp, and by nightfall a few Jews had joined him. Some of the leaders had managed to flee the gymnasium. Lesser ones, hearing the battlecry, had lowered themselves over the town walls with ropes, and there were undoubtedly others who had escaped but who had not yet joined up with the fugitives. Jehubabel’s wife had not received word in time, and she would be lashed to death, but Zattu, his wife Anat and their son had escaped.

They were a sorry lot, a handful of unarmed Jews hiding in a swamp without food and led by a man who had just murdered his son. They could hear the heavy splattering through mud of Greek soldiers trying to seek them out, and they could catch words of the Koine as the Greeks passed by, but at dusk the sounds halted and they were left alone. When they were satisfied that their persecutors had gone, Jehubabel assembled them in prayer, and without recourse to the tedious proverbs of his commonplace life, said, “Adonai, this day we place our lives in your hands. We are nothing. We are a miserable, lost group of Jews with no food and no weapons. But we are convinced we shall prevail against the madman who dares to call himself God-Made-Manifest. Adonai, show us what we must do.”

And this prayer brought to the huddled Jews such an honest realization of their plight that no man spoke, but they clung each to the other, and in the silence of the swamp they heard anew the splashing and whispered, “The soldiers have come back,” and Jehubabel prayed, “Adonai, if the Greeks capture us tonight, let us die in your arms.”

The searchers came closer and might have passed on, except that the child of Zattu began to whimper, and this betrayed them, and the retreating sounds returned, bringing terror to the swamp, and in Hebrew a voice whispered, “Jehubabel! We know you are here. Present yourself, for we have been in the swamp for six days. All over Israel, Jews have risen against the oppressor. In Jerusalem. In Modi’im. In Beth-Horon.”

No one spoke. It could be a trap planned by the clever Greeks, but with a desperation he had never known before Jehubabel wanted to believe. He wanted to believe that his pitiful remnant was not alone in that swamp. And then the voice came again: “Jehubabel, we know you are here. If you are zealous for the law, if you stand by the covenant, come out with us, for we are not a rabble. We are an army, obedient to Judah the Maccabee.”

LEVEL

IX

King of the Jews

Glass phial, hand-blown at Caesarea, 20 B.C.E., by a Roman artisan. Erroneously known as “a tear glass” and supposedly used for collecting tears at the death of a loved one, it was actually a phial for the storing of expensive perfumes, since the narrow opening delayed evaporation. Of clear glass when blown, now beautifully tinted by amber, green and aquamarine discolorations. Deposited at Makor in the spring of 4 B.C.E.

Ihave always held the town of Makor to be one of the most charming Roman colonies in our Jewish kingdom, and I do not speak from any narrow provincialism, for I have worked in all the great cities of the east. It was my good fortune to supervise the adornment of Jericho and I spent three years at Antioch rebuilding that well-regarded street first laid down by Antiochus Epiphanes. I paved it with marble and roofed it with an arcade resting on colonnades so extensive that the eye could not follow them to their end. My happiest period came, of course, when I constructed Caesarea, that admirable city, and I also assumed responsibility for rebuilding the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, but frankly I never derived much pleasure from that assignment, for I am no more a Jew than the king himself and I cite the temple merely to prove that I was involved in some fairly important projects.

If, therefore, I say that in my opinion our frontier town of Makor combines the best of Roman architecture with an exquisite physical setting commanding both the mountains and the sea, I am comparing my little town with the finest of Jericho and Antioch. I am even bold enough to discuss it in terms of Caesarea itself, and that’s saying much. When I rose, a few moments ago, in the cool dark hours before dawn on what will probably be my last day on earth, I looked out upon the beauty I had helped create here in Makor, and although I am not a sentimental man I cried involuntarily, “If we could only preserve this as it now stands! We’d have a memorial of the best that Rome accomplished.”

From my prison in the Venus temple I can see in the darkness the white façades that have brought a kind of perfection to this forum. To my right stands the small Greek temple erected, I am told, to honor Antiochus, the benefactor of this area. It stands low against the earth, with six flawless Doric columns, reminding us of how much we owe the Greeks. In the Roman plan for Makor, I retained this gemlike structure as the focal point, but converted it to our Jupiter temple. Local citizens claim it stands upon a spot that was sacred for the past three thousand years, and this I am ready to believe, for the little building has an inherent poetry that could not have sprung entirely from the hands of an architect.

Facing this Greek edifice, which I altered in no detail, stood the sprawling palace of the governors, which I rebuilt completely, adding a new façade with sixteen niches in which the king placed statues of the great men of Rome. When the impressive marble heads were put into position the Jews of Makor rioted, for statuary was an offense to their belief, and my wife Shelomith, who is a member of their religion, wept. But the king came, and against my judgment and my wife’s tearful pleading, assembled in the old gymnasium all Jewish dignitaries, and when he had them trapped, coldly sent his mercenaries among them with naked swords, and the Jews were hacked to death until the floor of the gymnasium was red and slippery.

I remonstrated with the king, telling him, “This slaughter is not required,” but he replied, “I have learned how to control Jews, and you have not,” And he was right, for after that first killing our Jews of Makor behaved, even if those in the rest of the kingdom did not.