Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Messengers come to the gate! Shelomith moves to my side, her right hand in mine. We watch the important men in short military skirts stride down the street and swing into the forum. Between the columns they march, not looking at our prison, and they head for the governor’s palace. We watch them disappear with their fateful news and observe, almost against our will, that the four guards stiffen in preparation for the deed ahead.

Shelomith kneels to pray, and some old Jews who knew her father begin rocking back and forth outside the temple, wailing prayers that I do not understand.

I cannot pray. I joined with Herod when I was nineteen and with him I rode to power and to triumph. If his insanity has now enveloped me in death, I cannot decently complain. My ancestors lived in Makor for countless generations, and they studied always how they must adjust to the invading armies, and usually they made the right decision. They were Hebrews or Greeks or Babylonians as occasion demanded, and years ago I decided to be a Roman. I have been a good Roman, and I leave this part of the world—not only Makor but all of Judaea and Syria as well—more beautiful than when I found it, and having offered this as my benediction I am ready to die.

The governor leaves his palace, the one I built, and strides along the forum I erected. He comes to the prison which I built for myself, and the German guards unleash their swords—those fearful short swords that do the king’s work. The governor and the messengers stand erect before the temple columns and Shelomith stands bravely beside me as a voice begins to speak.

“King Herod is dead. The prisoners are set free.”

Shelomith’s hand falls from mine, and all I can think of is that somehow I must seek out the new king to see if he plans the building of new edifices. But Shelomith has dropped to her knees and I hear her praying, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

LEVEL

VIII

Yigal and His Three Generals

Brass coin, a Roman sestertius worth about 4¢ when issued. One fourth of a denarius, the penny of the Bible. This notable design, celebrating the conquest of Judaea launched by General Vespasian in 67 C.E., was used repeatedly during the reign of the Flavian dynasty: Vespasian emperor 70–79; his son Titus, 79–81; and his second son Domitian, the persecutor of the Christians, 81–96. This specimen issued in Rome 72 C.E. by Vespasian to honor Titus, who had destroyed Jerusalem 70 C.E., thus ending the Jewish War. Obverse: T(itus) CAES(ar) VESPASIAN (us) IMP (erator) PON(tifex) TR(ibunicia) POT(estate) CO (n) S (ul) II. (Caesar Titus, son of Vespasian the Emperor, the Great Priest, Owner of the Tribunician Power, Consul for Two Times.) Reverse: IUDAEA CAPTA S(enatus) Consulto), (Judaea captured. With the approval of the Senate.) Similar coins were struck in Caesarea, but on these the legends were in Greek. Such coins issued until the assassination of Domitian. Lost in the ruins of Makor by a Roman traveler, October 18, 74 C.E.

Throughout its long history Makor’s fate was usually determined by what happened in remote capitals like Memphis, Babylonia, Antioch and Rome; and citizens listened for distant rumors that might affect them.

Thus in 14 C.E. they heard that great Caesar Augustus had died and that his place had been taken by the tyrant Tiberius, a man so debauched and craven that he fled Rome and hid on small islands until 37 C.E., when he was finally smothered in a heap of dirty laundry. Tiberius was succeeded by the even worse tyrant Caligula, who, like others before him, insisted upon being worshiped as the only god. Crazy with lust and abominations, he ordered his statue to be placed in all temples throughout the empire, and to this fatuous command the various nations acceded—except one.

The Jews of Judaea refused to accept Caligula as their god, and they likewise refused to allow his statues to enter their territory; and when the emperor heard of their obstinacy he left off his immoralities long enough to announce that if the Jews alone, of all his subjects, refused to acknowledge him as their god, he would force them to do so with armies, after which he would sell the lot into slavery—every man and child throughout the Jewish nation. This ominous edict was delivered in the year during which Caligula caused his horse Incitatus to be elected a full consul of Rome, and not long after that day on which, having grown surfeited with ordinary killings in the arena, he ordered hundreds of casual spectators in the stadium thrown to the wild beasts so that he might enjoy their sudden agony as the lions and tigers sprang upon them.

Caligula sent his edict for disciplining the Jews to a trusted veteran of Roman wars, General Petronius, who was stationed with two full legions in Antioch, and that wise, daring military man took immediate steps to subdue Judaea and impose the emperor’s will. Importing a third legion from Italy and gathering three auxiliary groups from Syria, he waited for a Roman ship that was bringing twoscore huge statues of Caligula, and when all were assembled he marched his men southward with startling speed and ordered the ship to Ptolemais, from which seaport he proposed to subdue Judaea.

Eight miles east, in the little frontier town of Makor, which as so often in the past would have to engage the first onslaught of the invaders, lived a young Jew named Yigal, neither priest nor merchant, to whom the simple precepts of his religion were more sweet than the sound of children’s laughter. He worked at the olive press south of town and owned no property, not even the house in which his wife and their sons lived. His was a frugal family and the children were never wasteful of the meager drachmas he earned. At the Feast of Tabernacles they begged a few coins so that they might build the booth in which they and their parents would live during the holy days. At Passover they pestered their father to buy a kid, and at the feast celebrating Queen Esther’s triumph over the Persian persecutor Haman they required a few additional coins to buy the sweets and trinkets customary on that occasion.

In the year that General Petronius bore down with his legions upon Judaea, Yigal was only twenty-six years old, and he was one of the least important men in Makor, but by some intuitive sense it was he who foresaw with shimmering clarity what would happen to the Jews if the Romans succeeded in erecting their statues to Caligula in local synagogues and in desecrating the great temple in Jerusalem. What was more remarkable, it was Yigal—this undistinguished olive-grove worker—who discovered the only tactic whereby the Jews could halt the Romans; so one morning, to his own surprise, he assembled what Jews he could in Makor’s Roman forum and, standing on the steps of the Venus temple, harangued them as follows:

“Jews of Makor, our fathers have told us of that day long ago when the tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes sought to violate our holy places with his image as that of the only true god. Then our forefathers rose against him and drove him from this land. I know we cannot duplicate their feat. The Romans are many times stronger than the Syrians ever were. They march with dreadful legions that have never been defeated, and we poor Jews are powerless to oppose them. Our leaders Simeon and Amram are correct when they advise us not to take arms against the Romans, not to harry or molest them in any way, for if we do so we can be sure that the Romans will destroy this town and Jotapata and every other, even to Jerusalem. Our synagogues will not only be profaned, they will be razed to the ground, and we shall be sold into slavery as we were in the days of Babylon. We are powerless, and the enemy is upon us.”