Джеймс Миченер - The Source

During these turbulent years the stubborn Family of Ur managed to maintain Makor as a minor outpost in no way comparable to its predecessors. Even the town wall, built by Jabaal the Hoopoe in the reign of King David, existed only in fragments, while the principal street, if it could be called such, ran from the main gate to the postern past a miserable collection of buildings. Where a score of enticing shops had once flourished, offering wares from all parts of the Mediterranean, two now offered little. Citizens eked out a frugal existence, for the luxury that had characterized the days of David and Solomon was no more.

At opposite ends of the Water Street stood two houses which summarized the new Makor. By the main gate, in a low, poorly built establishment that rambled over a considerable area and was kept to one floor because Makor could no longer afford timber, lived Jeremoth, scion of the Family of Ur and willing to serve as governor for whatever empire ruled the valleys. He was fifty-two years old, a resolute and crafty man whose ancestors, by one trick or another, had kept the town intact through the civil war that had destroyed the empire of King Solomon and through two hundred years of unremitting Phoenician, Aramaean, Assyrian and Egyptian pressures. In the mournful chaos of those years the Family of Ur had trimmed its banners to each new conqueror marching up to the battered walls. In siege, in pestilence and in terror the determined men of Ur had somehow managed to hold on to their olive trees south of the town and to some kind of governmental residence near the main gate.

Jeremoth, black-bearded, wiry and courageous beyond most of the men in his town, was governed by one fixed idea: this continuity of occupation must be preserved. If the erupting power of Babylon made war against Egypt inevitable, there would have to be war, and Makor would again be trapped between the armies; but if guile and persuasion could preserve the little town, then he was prepared to temporize with anyone. He had five daughters, four of them married to leading merchants and farmers, and he also had a group of brothers who were just as tough as he. Like many families in Makor they had relapsed into being Canaanites who worshiped Baal on the mountain back of the town, and as a well-disciplined unit they relied on the hope there would always be some trick whereby they could keep their holdings intact, diminished though they might be.

At the other end of the Water Street, cramped into a corner near the ruins of the postern gate, stood a small one-room house made of unbaked clay bricks. It had an earthen floor, no furniture, only one window, and the clinging smell of meanness and poverty. It was the home of Gomer the widow, a tall, gaunt woman of fifty-eight who had known a difficult life. An ugly girl, she had married late as the third wife of a miserable man who had derided her in public for being childless and who used her as a slave. After many years, and as the result of a scene she had tried to erase from her memory—Egyptian soldiers rioting inside the walls—she had become pregnant, and the wretched old man had suspected that the child was not his. In public he was afraid to challenge her lest he himself look foolish, but in the privacy of their mean home he had abused her; yet when he died it was she and not his earlier wives who tended to his burial.

She had only this one child, a son whom she had named Rimmon, after the pomegranate, hoping that like the seeds of that fruit he might have many children to send her line forward, and Rimmon had grown into a handsome young man of twenty-two whom the young girls of the town admired and who now held the job of supervising Governor Jeremoth’s olive grove. He and his mother were staunch supporters of Yahweh, the Hebrew god, but as a man who worked in the fields for a Canaanite, Rimmon found it prudent to worship Baal as well—a fact which he did not discuss with his mother.

Gomer was a gawky, forbidding woman. Her hair was not even a clean gray, which would have brought her respect; it was a muddy gray. Her eyes were not clear nor was her skin attractive. She had worked so hard that she walked with a stoop which made her seem older than she was, and the only thing about her that was appealing was her soft, quiet voice, hushed through half a century of obeying first her father, then her abusive husband, and finally her handsome son. She spoke quietly, as if she were still in the fields, living in the harvest booth with her father as he guarded the barley and the vines. In her long life those were the only days she remembered with affection, the happy days of harvest time when men built booths so as to be near the produce of their lands.

Now, in the year 606 B.C.E., in the days before Ethanim, the month of feasts—when heat from the desert spread over the land, when late grapes were ripening for the wine presses, and when great Egypt and Babylonia were getting ready to tear at each other while Greece gathered strength in the west—Gomer left her mean house by the postern gate, balanced a clay jug on her head, and descended the gaping shaft that cut into the earth not far from her home. By a considerable margin she was the oldest woman lugging water, and her long spare figure in tattered sackcloth looked out of place as she patiently went down the familiar steps in the company of young wives and slave girls. But since she had no slave or daughter-in-law to help her she was forced to fetch the water for herself.

She had descended to the well, had filled her jug and started her return journey, when she came to a section of the David Tunnel where the oil lamp that hung over the water could no longer be seen, yet where the daylight coming down the shaft brought little illumination, and in this dark passage she heard a voice saying to her, “Gomer, widow of Israel! Take your son up to Jerusalem, that he may cast his eyes upon my city.” She looked around to find who had spoken, but there was only darkness, and she thought that one of the younger women had hidden to taunt her, for often they made fun of her; but again the voice surrounded her, and this time she was certain that it could not belong to any woman. It said, “Gomer, let your son see Jerusalem.”

Not in fear but in bewilderment she left the tunnel and climbed the shaft, ignoring the calls of younger women who were descending by the other stairs, and in a kind of trance she sought for her son, but he had already gone to the olive press, so she put her jug down, went to the main gate and crossed the Damascus road, entering the olive grove belonging to Governor Jeremoth. After a few moments she saw her son working at the press, that ancient system of square stone pits cut into the solid rock and connected by lead pipes so that the settled oil could fall and filter of its own weight. Fortunately, she stopped before coming upon her son, for he was kneeling by the press and she realized that he was saying his morning prayers to Baal, pleading for a good run of oil. She waited until he was finished, disturbed that he should be trafficking with Baal on this particular morning, then went to him.

As always, when she came upon him suddenly, she was impressed anew with what she could only call his radiance: like many of the Hebrews he was blond and freckle-faced, tall and with a quick intelligence. As the son of a widow who was almost a pauper, he had worked in the fields all his life and could neither read nor write, but he had learned from his mother the cherished stories of his people, particularly the steps whereby Yahweh had revealed himself to the Hebrews. At twenty-two he was a young laborer in charge of the one operation which brought surplus money into Makor, so he prayed to Yahweh for moral guidance in the conduct of his life and to Baal for success in his daily work.

Under the fruitful trees Gomer asked, “Rimmon, have you made any plans for going up to Jerusalem?”