Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Which one?”

Without consulting the Torah, Eliav quoted, “‘For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all the peoples on earth the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people.’”

“I wish I could believe it,” Cullinane said.

“He does,” Eliav said, pointing to the kibbutznik, “and the fascinating thing is that he believes it exactly as I do, in a non-racial sense. I suppose you’d call me a free thinker except that I believe in the spirit of Deuteronomy.”

This was too finely drawn for Cullinane, and he pushed aside the Hebrew Bible, but Eliav picked it up. “The key to the Jew,” he said jokingly, “is my favorite passage in the Torah. Moses is being eulogized as the greatest man who ever lived, knew God face-to-face and all that. But what is the very last thing said of him as a man … as a living man? It seems to me that this is a profound insight … It’s the reason why I love Deuteronomy. I’m going to quote it from the King James Version first: ‘And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.’” Eliav repeated the last phrase, “‘nor his natural force abated.’ But in our Hebrew original this last eulogy on a great man ends, ‘His moisture was not fled.’” Eliav closed the book and placed his hands over it. “A man who had known God, who had created a nation, who had laid down the law that all of us still follow. And when he dies you say of him, ‘He could still function in bed.’ Ours is a very gutsy religion, Cullinane.”

An the town of Makor eight hundred years had passed since that memorable day when five of its citizens had been involved in tragedy, and because of poetic dirges composed at that time the men and women of the tragedy had been transformed into gods who had added spiritual richness to the religion of the area.

Joktan the Habiru was now remembered as a heavenly stranger arriving from the east with many donkeys to give protection to the murderer, and the legend left no uncertainty as to the welcome Makor had given him. He had been quickly absorbed into the town, primarily because he had been willing to recognize the gods of Makor as superior to his own.Welcome the stranger, Astarte,

Welcome the one who comes from afar,

Who comes to worship you on donkeys.

Later verses made it clear that Astarte had smiled upon him, making of him a principal citizen who had inherited the house of mirth once occupied by the man he aided.

Urbaal the farmer enjoyed a more spectacular transformation, for when the local poets reviewed his tragic history they saw a great man, the owner of fields and the father of many children, caught in the grip of passions he could not master, and it became obvious that he could not have been a man. He was the god Ur-Baal, sent to Makor for a divine purpose, and through the centuries the poets had shortened his name and made him the principal god of Makor, known simply as Baal the omnipotent.

Amalek the farmer suffered a curious fate, for although he had been in many ways the most decent actor in the tragedy, he was always remembered as the enemy whom Ur-Baal had to kill, and thus he was gradually changed into the villain Malek, and then into Melak, the god of war. When this was accomplished, what had happened on that new year’s day of 2201 B.C.E was made clear: Ur-Baal had slain Melak in order to protect Astarte, and only Ur-Baal’s courage, his willingness even to travel abroad among the donkeys, had saved Makor:Ride on the clouds, Ur-Baal,

Ride on the clouds of storm.

Behold, you shall ride the storm!

Libamah the enticing slave girl was now seen as a manifestation of the lovelier aspects of Astarte, and her capacity to inflame Ur-Baal had come to represent the creative processes of nature.

Timna the faithful wife also contributed to the concept of Astarte, and it was recalled that although she had loved Ur-Baal she had also been directly responsible for his death; but it was Timna’s willingness to follow her husband barefoot and pregnant into his exile that had provided Astarte with one of the most beautiful adventures in Canaanite mythology:The year closed and the rains came,

Even to Makor came the rains,

And Ur-Baal fled to the olive grove,

Fled to the night, to the realm of Melak,

Down to the realm of Melak, god of the night.

There Ur-Baal would have remained in banishment, depriving Makor of its spring growing season and causing it to perish of starvation, had not Astarte gone seeking him to lure him back to earth and his assigned functions:Pregnant she left the zigzag gate,

Pregnant with children of tomorrow,

Seeking tomorrow and her lover Ur-Baal.

She had found the greatest of the gods imprisoned at the altar of Melak, and in a terrible hand-to-hand fight she had slain Melak, chopping him into small pieces and scattering his fragmented body over the fields like seeds of grain. This had brought the wheat to germination and the olive trees to blossom, and each winter since then the voyage of Astarte to the nether world had been repeated.

So now Makor was governed by a benign trinity: El, the unseen father of the gods whose characteristics grew ever more vague as the centuries passed; Baal the omnipotent; and Astarte his wife, who was both forever virgin and forever pregnant as the mother of all. The trinity had one additional peculiarity: Astarte both loved and hated Baal, and it was this conflict that explained the world’s confusion, the contest between female and male, the warfare between night and day, between winter and summer, between death and life.

El, Baal, Astarte. In a tightly knit and beautiful partnership they watched over Makor, guiding it through the turbulence of that unsettled age. In the last eight hundred years Mesopotamia and Egypt had often contested the great valleys to the east; strange armies belonging to neither of those powers had also swept through Canaan, gutting and burning, but the little town on its slowly rising mound had managed to survive. It had been occupied by many victors and had been burned twice, but it had always recovered, thanks to the manifest interest taken in it by the trinity.

The town looked different. The mound had grown fifteen feet higher and now stood thirty-five feet above the surrounding plain. This meant that the original wall had long been submerged in rubble, but the wall itself still stood, locked in earth and providing the solid base from which subsequent walls had risen, as strong and as wide as before. Also, when the savage Hyksos had appeared out of the north to conquer the area, they had adopted Makor as a fortress city and had imported slaves to surface the slope with smooth stones, thus forming a glacis which protected the approaches to the wall. Makor was now practically unassailable.

Inside the walls other changes had occurred. The rising level of the town had quite obliterated the four monoliths, over whose heads rested a small temple consecrated to Astarte. No longer was there a Baal-of-the-Storm or of the water or of the sun; these attributes were now concentrated in Baal himself. The big temple was no more, for Baal resided on top of the mountain in the back of town, but there were homes for his priests, whose principal job was to guard the underground silos where grain was stored and the water cisterns where emergency supplies were kept in case of siege. Makor now contained more than one hundred and eighty houses and the greatest internal population it would know—nearly fourteen hundred persons. Another five hundred farmers lived outside the walls, which were broken by two large gates built of oak imported from Tyre. The first, preserving the original approach from the south, was much wider than before and was marked by four square towers, two abutting the outside wall and two inside. In the various times that Makor had fallen to enemy troops the main gate had yet to be forced.