Джеймс Миченер - The Source

During the last years of the reign of King David in Jerusalem, the town of Makor had an engineer whom its citizens called Hoopoe because he, too, hurried about most of the day, peering into holes. Like the bird for which he was named, this short, dumpy fellow was regarded with affection, partly because he made the citizens laugh and partly because he was known to be a man without a single malicious intent. He was so amiable and generous that the governor, in a rare moment of clarity, said of him, “Hoopoe is the happiest man in this town, because he loves his work, his wife and his gods, in that order.”

Hoopoe’s work was the building of the new defense wall around the town of Makor, a task on which he had been engaged for some years. His wife was the inquisitive young woman Kerith, whose father had been a priest and who had once taken her to Jerusalem, where she had actually seen King David in his grandeur. And his gods were the traditional ones of Makor. There was Baal, the old familiar watchman of the Canaanites, who still lived in the same monolith on the same high place, watching over mundane activities like water supplies and the building of walls; and there was Yahweh, the god of Moses, a new Hebrew deity who had developed step by step from El-Shaddai, a god now so mighty that he controlled both the high heavens and the deep heart of man. In Makor there were a few Canaanites who worshiped only Baal, a few Hebrews like Kerith’s father who worshiped only Yahweh, and the great mass of people like Hoopoe who had accepted Yahweh as the awesome deity of the outer heavens while continuing to worship Baal as the local deity for day-to-day problems.

Hoopoe was thirty-nine years old, the father of two lively children by his attractive wife, and of several others by his slave girls. In spite of his humorous appearance he was a man who had conducted himself with courage in his younger years while fighting for King David, and it was because of this loyal service that he had been given the job of rebuilding the wall of Makor.

He was a short, stocky man with broad shoulders, big muscles and an oversized bottom which wiggled when he walked. His bald head was overlarge and on it he wore no covering. He had a pointed nose for probing into corners to detect where builders had tried to substitute crumbling earth in place of solid rock, and he wore a square-cut black beard which quivered when he laughed, and he had blue eyes. In fact, he looked much like a chubby version of his well-remembered ancestor, Governor Uriel, who had perished four hundred and fifty years ago while trying to keep Makor from being burned by the Hebrews, as related in a group of clay tablets stored at Ekhet-Aton in Egypt. In the decades following that disaster the great Family of Ur, like many Canaanites, had accommodated itself easily to Hebrew rule, becoming nominal Hebrews. Hoopoe’s parents, hoping that their son might win the confidence of the ruling group, had given him the chauvinistic Hebrew name of Jabaal, which meant “Yahweh is Baal,” trusting that this would imply that he was more Hebrew than the Hebrews, and this mild deception had worked, for Jabaal was accepted not only as an honest Hebrew, but also as the son-in-law of a priestly family.

These were the exciting years when Hebrews controlled for a few brief decades a well-knit empire which King David had put together from fragments left scattered around by Egypt and Mesopotamia when their vast holdings fell apart. David’s kingdom reached from the Red Sea on the south to Damascus on the north and provided the Hebrews with unexpected wealth, since it sat athwart most of the major caravan routes and derived much profit from them. Even Aecho, that constant thorn in the flank of the Hebrews, had been captured from the Phoenicians, although it was not held long; and this rapid growth of empire meant that Makor, key to a fluid frontier, was now of more significance than before, and the judges and kings were interested in keeping it a Hebrew bastion if it could be maintained without too much cost to the central government. King David and his generals had therefore been pleased when they heard that in the little town there was an engineer who acted as if he were in charge of the empire’s main city: he worked ten and twelve hours of hard labor each day and spent additional time in planning the schedule for others. As a user of slaves he was unusual, for he treated his men well and few had died under his custodianship. Moabites, Jebusites, Aramaeans, Philistines and Amalekites all found it tolerable to work for Hoopoe, for on the job he fed them well and allowed them to rest when they became sick. In fact, they enjoyed seeing him come paddling along the ramparts, sticking his sharp nose into this area or that and joking with them as he encouraged them to speed the construction.

In the evenings he came to their miserable camp outside the walls, bringing them scraps of food or dregs of wine, and often he raised the subject of their accepting the Hebrew god Yahweh, always on the reasonable ground that if they did so they could become Hebrews and thus regain their freedom. He carefully explained that they were free to maintain their former gods, as his own name proved, and he was an effective missionary, for he spoke in the language that practical men could understand. “My god Yahweh is like your god Dagon,” he assured the captured Philistines, “only greater.” And he made it both easy and honorable for his slaves to become Hebrews. In this way his corps was constantly diminished, but from it went converts of good character to serve in other parts of the Hebrew empire, and it was one of these former slaves who finally carried the good name of Jabaal the Hoopoe to Jerusalem, where General Amram, in charge of fortifications in the empire, heard of the master builder in the north.

“One of these days I must see what the man has accomplished,” the general said, marking the name of Makor in his memory.

The new wall which Hoopoe and his slaves had finished was made necessary by the gradual submersion of the old Canaanite wall. Alternate burnings and rebuildings had piled an additional eight feet of rubble on the mound, bringing it level with the top of the walls, so that something had to be done; but as the mound grew in height its crown of usable land contracted in size, which meant that the new walls could only be built inside the old ones, and when Hoopoe did this, the area available for the town was sharply diminished. In Governor Uriel’s day fourteen hundred Canaanites had lived inside the walls, but now only eight hundred could do so; however, the tranquillity brought to the area by King David’s good government permitted nine hundred farmers to live outside the walls, the largest number who had ever done so. This was the golden morning of Makor, the glorious apex of the town; it was also the period when Hebrews were demonstrating their ability to govern a kingdom, and if Makor were to be taken as the criterion, they governed well.

Hoopoe, for example, lived in a comfortable house in the west portion of the town, and now as he walked homeward along the curving street he could see a visual summary of Makor’s affluence. The governor’s quarters were substantial and from then he dispensed an impartial justice which protected men in their ownership of fields and property. According to the ancient laws of the Hebrews the weak had rights, the pauper had a claim upon the charity of his neighbors, taxes were allocated fairly and punishment could not be capricious. The shops that lined the first part of the curving road were filled with materials imported from many parts of the world: faïence from Egypt, brocades from India, silk from Persia, delicate bronzeware from Cyprus, beautiful pottery from Greek islands and marvelous ironware from the nearby Phoenician city of Aecho, plus the ordinary trade goods brought by regular caravans from Tyre, Sidon and Damascus. In back of the shops stood the spacious houses, built of stone for the first two or three feet, then finished in wood and lime plaster, with strong wooden ceilings and lovely courtyards. To the left as Hoopoe started home stood the ancient temple of Epher, now an inconspicuous building where men worshiped Yahweh, and across from it the little shops that sold the day’s necessities: wine and olives, bread and wool, meat and fish brought inland from the sea.