Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Two characteristics marked Makor in these days. Almost none of the shops were run by Hebrews, for they had originally been a desert people, unused to commercial ways, and they instinctively avoided occupations like shopkeeping or moneylending, partly because they had no aptitude for such ventures and partly because they had leapfrogged from nomad life to farming, and their love was for the land and the seasons. “Let the Phoenicians and the Canaanites run the shops and deal in gold,” they said. “We will tend the flocks, and in the end we will be the better off, for we shall stand closer to Yahweh.” The second distinguishing mark was that culturally Makor remained pretty much a Canaanite town. For example, it held to the ancient calendar of Canaan, which was divided into two seasons, the hot and the cold, and in Makor the new year began in ancient style at the end of the cold, but certain other parts of the Hebrew empire had begun to favor a year beginning at the end of the hot. The temple building and its rituals were of Canaanite origin, for on that spot El and Baal and Astarte had long been worshiped, and it was only logical that when the grandson of Epher introduced Yahweh to the town, the new god’s temple should have consisted merely of a refurbishing of a building dedicated to the old. In fact, when the average citizen of Makor prostrated himself before Yahweh he could scarcely have explained which god he was worshiping, for El had passed into Baal and he into El-Shaddai and all into Yahweh, the god of Moses our Teacher.

These were the great formative years of the Hebrew ritual, for from Jerusalem, King David and his priests were endeavoring to impress upon Israel one clearly defined religion, but these reforms were slow to be adopted in Makor; its little temple continued to function as the focus of an ancient community ritual rather than as a surrogate of the unified national religion.

Near the end of the street stood the house of Hoopoe, built many years before by his ancestors and occupied by a succession of decent men who had tried to live decent lives. As Canaanites they had often had to dissemble regarding their allegiance to Baal, but that was about as far as their duplicity went; in recent generations they had become outright converts to Yahweh, circumcising their sons and marrying their daughters into the best Hebrew families. This process of assimilation had reached its climax when Hoopoe had become betrothed to the only daughter of Shmuel ben Zadok ben Epher, the Hebrew priest, and now this couple had taken over the family residence.

It was built mostly of stone, plastered on the inside to a cool white finish. Two of the rooms bore murals in red and blue paint, not showing particular scenes but indicating the desert from which the Hebrews had come and the hills which had been the homes of the Canaanites; but the principal adornment was Kerith, Hoopoe’s lovely wife of twenty-seven. She was slightly taller than Hoopoe and much slimmer. Her face was better proportioned, too, with a shapely nose, blue Hebrew eyes, ivory skin and dark hair. Her husband loved her to the point of foolishness, and since he knew that she cherished jewelry, not acquisitively but as works of art, he often bought her bits of glazed ware made in Egypt or enamel from Cyprus; but these minor treasures she kept in small rosewood boxes and wore only a large pendant made of silver from Persia into which had been set a rough oval of amber brought down from the northern countries. Against the gossamer woolen gowns which she preferred, this golden amber shone with a radiance matched by the wide bands of yellow cloth with which she often hemmed her robes. She was a tensely perceptive woman, intelligent, devoted to her children and an adornment to her fat little husband. Between them there was a genial relationship, for if in Makor there were more handsome men—and Kerith could see many in a ten-minute stroll through the streets—there were none who would have adored her so. Only one significant difference existed between them, and this was vital: Kerith was the daughter of an austere religious man who had almost known Yahweh face-to-face and from whom she had inherited her commitment to that deity; Hoopoe as a builder who had to work with the earth was willing to acknowledge Yahweh, but he also knew from hard experience that Baal ruled the soil and it would be folly for an engineer to ignore or denigrate the permanent deity of the earth in which he had to work. In many Makor families this dualism existed, but usually it was the man who inclined toward the Hebrew god while his wife held superstitiously to the old familiar deities; in Hoopoe’s case it was the Family of Ur’s timeless preoccupation with the land that had reversed the process, but he and his wife lived in harmony, for each was tolerant of the other’s spiritual attachments.

Now, in the month of Abib in the spring of the year 966 B.C.E., when spring rains marked the day and floods filled the wadi, when barley was ripening in the fields and anemones and cyclamen were reappearing along the swamp, nodding to that strange flower which people of another religion would later call jack-in-the-pulpit, in this month of Abib when the rebuilding of the walls had ended, Hoopoe walked home along the curving street in some dismay, and when his wife greeted him at the door of their home he fell heavily onto the earth-and-tile bench.

“I’m worried, Kerith,” he said.

“I saw your new walls and they seem very solid.” She brought him some barley cakes and a drink of hot wine mixed with honey, and he relaxed.

“When I was inspecting them today I looked down upon the richness of this town. In back of this street, the best dye vats in the north. Outside the walls, the resting places for the camel caravans. And these good houses. Kerith, this town is a temptation to all our enemies to the west. It’s the gateway to Jerusalem.”

“But isn’t that why you built the wall?” she asked.

“The wall will hold them off. Of that I’m sure. But do you know how we’ll lose this town?”

She knew. Like all the young women of Makor she had often placed her water jug upon her head and walked through the postern gate and down the dark waterwall to the well. One day during the siege four years ago, when she was pregnant with her youngest son, she had made the dangerous journey and had heard Phoenician warriors trying to pierce the fragile protecting walls, and the people of Makor knew then that if the Phoenicians had brought their siege engines against the well instead of trying to reduce the old town walls they would have captured Makor. It was illogical to suppose that in the next invasion, when the new town walls would appear so formidable, the invaders would again fail to hit upon the obvious strategy of knocking down the waterwall. Kerith well knew that whenever the Phoenicians really wanted to capture Makor they could, and she acknowledged that her husband’s new wall represented not security but an additional hazard; but in the tentative discussions that would recur in the weeks ahead she would refuse to admit these facts because of the complex reasons which now kept her silent. She loved her dumpy little engineer and supported him against men like the governor who viewed him with amusement, but she also knew that if Hoopoe launched some extensive new building project in Makor she would be held prisoner in the town and thus her dream of the future would be destroyed.

Therefore it was with apprehension that she heard him say, “I’ve made up my mind. The Moabite and I have a plan that will save this town. Today the governor wouldn’t listen, but tomorrow he must.”

Convinced that she was doing right, Kerith placed her hand on Hoopoe’s arm and said quietly, “Don’t make a fool of yourself, Jabaal. If the governor doesn’t agree with you, don’t argue. You can find work elsewhere.”