Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Are you still afraid of war, Zadok?”

“Yes. When I was a boy and we were besieging Timri …”

“I remember Timri.”

“You ordered my father Zebul to destroy the town for its abominations, and he forced me to stand beside him as he slaughtered men and women and children. And my ankles were red with blood. And I got sick and wanted never to see a spear again. And I hated you, El-Shaddai, for you were cruel.”

“I remember that night,” the god said. “You were seven years old, and you cursed me, and was it not then that I spoke to you for the first time? On the morrow of Timri when your father was sleeping near the serpent that would have bitten him?”

Zadok recalled that remote midday, fifty-seven years ago, when he had first spoken with his god, and not once in the intervening years had it occurred to him that El-Shaddai had chosen him that day precisely because of his opposition the night before to the massacre of Timri. El-Shaddai could have elected older men and wiser as his voice, but he had chosen the child Zadok because even as a boy of seven he had been willing to judge the questions of mercy and humanity with his own conscience.

“I have not spoken to you of war or peace,” the deity continued, “because these are matters which I alone determine. To you they are of no concern. Occupy the lands, and whether there shall be war or peace I will decide—according to how the children of Canaan receive me.”

“Then I must approach the town without knowing?”

“You man of little faith! Did you not live in the desert on those terms? Who can be certain that when he approaches a town the walls will open to his command? Yet I have promised you that the walls of Makor shall do so, and you ask—in war or in peace? Remember your grandmother Rachel, who went to the well of Zaber eight hundred days without event and on the next day she went and was killed by a scorpion. Could she have prevented this by taking precaution? Remember your son Zattu, who passed through the pit where a hundred men had died of serpent stings, and he came out alive. Could he have arranged this by taking thought? I am El-Shaddai, and I have promised you that the walls of Makor shall open to your command. Can you, by taking thought, increase that promise?”

The old man humbled himself before his god, but when he returned to his sons he interpreted El-Shaddai’s words to his own liking: “Tomorrow there shall be no war.” The Hebrews, content that this was the will of their god, slept that night without fires and in the morning girded themselves for the final march to the walled town.

… THE TELL

On one unhappy day three different groups of tourists came demanding to see the Candlestick of Death, and after Cullinane had explained three times that it was on display in Chicago he felt depressed. He locked his office door and sat inside brooding about the problems of the dig. It happens every time, he reflected. You start what looks like a simple dig. Historical fragments hiding in earth. And before you’ve filled the first basket you find yourself digging into your own understanding of the civilization involved. He leaned back and recalled his days in Arizona. He had begun that excavation knowing as much as most experts about the American Indian, but had ended by spending two years of concentrated research into their mental processes, reviewing everything written on the subject and venturing far afield for collateral suggestions from the Ainu in Japan or the Eskimo in Alaska. Now he spent his days digging physically into the earth of Makor and his nights probing the spirit of the Judaism that had been responsible for building so much of the tell.

When he was satisfied that the last tourists had gone, he unlocked his door and wandered into Eliav’s office. “Have you any new material that I could read about the Jews?”

“You catch me off guard,” Eliav replied.

“The nonsense I’ve been hearing today. I’m disgusted. I’d like to bite into something solid.”

“You’ve read De Vaux, Kaufmann, Albright?”

Cullinane nodded.

“Maimonides?”

“He’s the best.”

“There’s one better.”

“What?”

“Read Deuteronomy five times.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. Deuteronomy. Five times.”

“What’s your thought?”

“It’s the great central book of the Jews and if you master it you’ll understand us.”

“But is it worth five readings?”

“Yes, because most Gentiles think of the ancient Hebrews as curious relics who reached Israel ten thousand years ago in some kind of archaic mystery.”

“How do you think it happened?” Cullinane asked.

“Deuteronomy is so real to me that I feel as if my immediate ancestors—say, my great-grandfather with desert dust still on his clothes—came down that valley with goats and donkeys and stumbled onto this spot.”

“Will reading Deuteronomy give me such a feeling?”

“Read it five times and see,” Eliav countered.

It was in this way that Cullinane renewed his acquaintance with the old Jewish masterpiece which he had first seriously studied at Princeton. Deuteronomy purports to be the farewell address of General Moses to his Jews as they are about to leave the wilderness and enter into the land of Canaan, and at the opening line, “These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan,” Cullinane had the feeling that Deuteronomy resembled General Washington’s farewell address to his colonial soldiers; and the analogy was apt.

At Makor there was no Douay Version of the Bible, so Cullinane could not use that Catholic translation; but this didn’t bother him. At Princeton he had become familiar with the Protestant King James Version of 1611, and now as his eyes ran down the columns they caught phrases and sentences which he had once vaguely supposed to be from the New Testament: “Man doth not live by bread only,” and “From the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water,” and “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” He discovered concepts that lay at the core of his New Testament Catholicism: “But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” And he came upon other phrases that jolted him regarding the story of Jesus; these made him go back for a second reading: “If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder … thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”

When Cullinane finished his first reading he was inclined to tell Eliav that he was now refreshed and could face the next busload of tourists, but he had found the tall Jew to be canny in these matters, and so, to indulge him, he began again at the beginning of Deuteronomy. This time he gained a sense of the enormous historicity of the book: the unknown author, who had used the literary device of speaking as Moses, had been a scholar immersed in Jewish history and spoke of it as if it had happened yesterday—as Eliav had said, in the life of his great-grandfather—and this involvement began to communicate itself to Cullinane. He now read the Ten Commandments as if he were among the tribes listening to Moses. It was he who was coming out of Egypt, dying of thirst in the Sinai, retreating in petulant fear from the first invasion of the Promised Land, He put the Bible down with a distinct sense of having read the history of a real people … not the real history, perhaps, but a distillation of hundreds of old traditions and national memories. Eliav had guessed right: Cullinane was beginning to feel that a band of living Hebrews had one day come down these gullies to find Makor. He wondered what new thing he would uncover on the remaining three readings.