Naomi Alderman - The Liars' Gospel

Bar-Avo slams the heel of his hand onto the table.

“We do not negotiate,” says Bar-Avo, “with the occupying force. The whole of the land is ours.”

Ananus will not give up. No one who longs for peace can ever give up. Not even now, with the knife on the table before him.

“There will come a better day than this,” he says, “there will come a better way. God has promised us this land. Don’t you think it’s for Him to fulfill His promises in the time and in the way He sees fit?”

The storm whips up again and around Ananus’s little chamber the wind moans and the great gouts of rain like the blood of the lamb scattered to the four corners of the altar splatter in through the open window and the thunder crashes and the lightning cracks because God is angry with the land though Ananus does not know how he could have done differently.

He has lived his whole life under the words of his father, the same words the whole family lived by: keep the peace, keep the Temple working, keep the sacrifices which allow us to speak to God every day. It is he who has oiled the relationship between the new governor and the Temple, who has maintained his father’s old relationships with Syria and Egypt, with informants in Rome and along the coast. Every man must choose what to dedicate his life to and he has chosen this: only peace. Not justice, because peace and justice are enemies. Not vengeance, not loyalty, not pride, not family, not friends, not — on occasion — dignity. Only ever peace, which demands the full load of a man’s life. But his life has not been enough.

He is calling out loudly for his guards as they approach, although he knows his guards are dead, although the wind whips his words away and the thunder drowns them out.

Bar-Avo touches the spot on the man’s forehead, between the eyes, but it does not calm him. He places a restraining hand on the forehead and their eyes meet.

“I dedicate your death to God,” says Bar-Avo.

“You condemn all of us to bloody war,” says Ananus.

“Rather everlasting war,” says Bar-Avo, “rather everlasting flight and battle and flight again, than surrender now.”

And he remembers the crowd shouting, “Barabbas! Barabbas! Barabbas!”

There is that Roman game called “one of two will die, and the crowd will decide which.” If that game had fallen out the other way round, he would not be here now to complete this task, and that other man, Yehoshuah, would have continued his own curious work. And everything would have been different. But the world continues as it is and it is not given to us to see the contrary outcome. And Bar-Avo does not play that Roman game. It is he who decides who will live and who will die.

Ananus begins to say, “You are wrong,” but he does not complete the sentence.

And Bar-Avo puts the knife to Ananus’s throat and bleeds him like a lamb.

“I should not mistake if I said that the death of Ananus was the beginning of the destruction of the city, and that from this very day may be dated the overthrow of her wall, and the ruin of her affairs.”

— Josephus, The Jewish War, V, 2

THERE IS A way to break a city, if a city needs to be broken. It is not a magnificent spectacle. It is no swift victory with an easy triumph to be taken in Rome before proceeding to greater glory in other lands. The people will be so ruined that they will have little worth even as slaves. The treasures of the city may be destroyed before you can parade them in glory. Nonetheless, sometimes there is no other way.

First, encircle the city with a great host of men — this kind of victory is expensive, also. One should attempt it only on a city, like Jerusalem, which has rebelled so flagrantly and with the spilling of such a quantity of Roman blood that no other option is available.

The people of Jerusalem had killed the High Priest whom Rome had set over them. They had appointed their own High Priests and minted their own currency and made every appearance of becoming again a sovereign nation with her capital in Jerusalem. Titus, the son of the Emperor Vespasian, was dispatched to deal with Jerusalem, along with four legions — that is, twenty-four thousand men — and in addition double that number of auxiliaries.

The honor of Rome must be preserved. Once Rome owns a city, that city cannot simply declare that it is free. It has to be retaken with such force that the news will echo around the world. Titus, the son of the Emperor, therefore, with a force of seventy-two thousand men.

Second, see that no man can leave or come into the city. Even if the city is encircled by men, you must take care to guard the high mountain passes and the places that seem impassable. It is these people’s native land. They know its secret passageways.

Allow no food in, no wagons delivering grain, no fresh-pressed oil from the northern olive groves. Take those wagons to feed your own soldiers with. It will be a slow process. Stocks take a long time to run down. Hunger takes a long time to build. Be sure to keep your soldiers occupied, well fed and entertained. You would not want them to think of mutiny. Remind them often of the treasure that awaits them inside the holy city.

Then it is wise to build a high wall around the city. It will be your sentry if your lookouts are overwhelmed by attackers. Hunger makes men desperate and mad. They say that during the siege of Jerusalem women stole food from their children, men killed each other over a handful of barley. Stop up the watercourses into the city. The siege of Jerusalem lasted from March to August, the hottest months of the year. When hunger comes, it is without mercy. They say that men ate the dead. They say that a woman’s house was found by the smell of roasting flesh and they discovered that she had cooked her baby in an oven and was eating its leg daintily.

If you are lucky, wise heads will prevail, urging surrender on the people before destruction comes. The zealots of Jerusalem had killed their wisest heads. Men attempting to desert were killed. Some flung themselves off the walls, preferring to die quickly rather than suffer the agonizing slow torture of starvation.

Your soldiers will be bored. Allow them their head a little, to release their energies. Soldiers building the platforms which would allow them, in time, to scale the walls of Jerusalem used to enjoy showing their food to the starving prisoners of the city. They allowed the sweet scent of roasted lamb to drift across the walls, so that every person in the city looked hungrily at every other one. Titus, a wise leader, also gave his soldiers captured escapees from the city to crucify in a variety of amusing positions. This one upside down. That one as if dancing. Another two nailed together as if locked in an embrace. Such simple entertainment will occupy them usefully.

Do not underestimate your enemy, however. The Jews were cunning. They dug tunnels under the wall surrounding them and hollowed out the earth under the soldiers’ platforms, propping them up with timber. When the works were complete, they sent men in with bitumen torches to set the timber struts on fire and the first the Romans knew of the whole operation was when their platforms suddenly collapsed into the tunnels and pure flames burst through the ground and consumed them utterly. This lengthened the siege considerably.

Do not be concerned about setbacks, however. Hunger will eventually destroy the people. In Jerusalem, after a few months, they ate even the sacred wheat set aside for the Holy of Holies, and the sacred oil for the holy lamps. When they asked people to swear they had not a handful of barley, they used the very name of their God, Yahaveh, as the binding seal of the oath, that same name which had been so sacred to them that any who uttered it was put to death. Very few men, it turns out, love God more than they love their own aching hungry belly. They will sink to such degradation of themselves that you will scarcely believe it possible.