György Spiró - Captivity

At this the three younger brothers also perked up.

“This is not the way to organize a really grand theft,” said Gedaliah, the youngest. “Let’s just suppose, purely for the sake of theory, that the priests wanted to steal. That can never happen, and there’s no record of such a thing ever happening, but just suppose.”

“So, let’s suppose,” said Uri, now curious.

“Let’s also suppose that the high priests wanted to steal,” Gedaliah continued. “Not that they ever did such a thing! It would never even cross their minds, but purely for the supposition’s sake.”

“Purely a supposition,” said Uri. “But how would a high priest steal?”

“By stealing the Almighty Lord’s property, that’s how,” said Judas. “They would set up a system like this. To start with, the priests would receive the meat — all sacrificial offerings, with rules on which parts belonged to the Levites and which to the priests, which could only be eaten in the Temple and which outside, which could go to their immediate families, and which to their in-laws.”

“The thing is, though, all the animals that make up the priesthood’s property, before sacrifice, are held by herdsmen in pens on the nearby hills. If one of those animals got injured, then it would no longer be immaculately pure and could not be placed on the altar as a sacrificial offering, but the priests are free to do with it what they wanted. They could eat it or sell the meat; it didn’t matter now because it belonged not to the Lord but to the priests.”

“Let’s just suppose that this is actually the practice. It would mean everyone in Jerusalem could guzzle themselves to death with meat, while in the provinces they’d be left without even enough for feast days.”

The tale accorded fully with Uri’s experiences. In the countryside they rarely ate meat, and there was little even for festivals, whereas people here, even they themselves, had plenty. He had seen meat being sold in the market, kept cool by goatskin bags of cold water — lots of meat, almost like in Rome. He had also seen live poultry and wondered how that could be.

He still did not fully understand how the system worked, so they explained.

“A sacrificial animal belongs either to the Lord or to the priests,” Judas said. “It was pure when brought into the process. Otherwise it would never have been picked out in the countryside, and the authorities would not have allowed it to cross the border into Jerusalem. Any declaration about the animal made by the priests is invalid because they are the owners, and the word of an owner, according to the law, is null and void. It is a fine law, a wise law; our predecessors were experienced men for setting down the law, blessed be their names. The word of a herdsman, by contrast, is acceptable by law, because he is not the animals’ owner. A fine law that too, a wise law. After all, why would anyone who was not the owner lie? Only, like any law, this too leaves some room for play. Shepherds, for instance, might swear that a ewe stepped in a ditch, and that was how its leg came to be broken, and that testimony would have to be accepted because a shepherd is not the owner of the livestock entrusted to his care, and from that moment on the priests are free to do with it what they wish.”

“But then who would instruct a shepherd as to what sort of statement he needed to make?” Judas asked with a malicious laugh. “A priest, of course. Let us say that an animal designated by a priest has its leg broken by the shepherd, hitting it in just the right spot with his staff, it immediately becomes imperfect just on that account. Or he cuts its nose, clips a bit from the ears, after which the butchers examine it and declare — for what else can they do? — that the animal has become unclean, and right away the animal is off to the market, and the priest makes money on it. He gives the shepherd a few prutahs, the butcher a few ma’ahs, but the real profit is the priest’s. Or rather: would be. He has to give a few zuz to the high priests, who head the whole shady business and do the bookkeeping. In that way it would be possible for Jerusalem to be choking in meat in while the peasants all around die of starvation.”

Only hypothetically, of course, added Yoram, another of the brothers, because nothing like that had ever happened, and Uri must have seen with his own eyes that people ate less meat than in the countryside.

“Oh, indeed!” Uri affirmed. “I was quite surprised myself!”

Judas’s brothers said that if indeed things were like that, then no city in the world would be more sinful than Jerusalem because everything the Ten Commandments forbids is sinful, and those who were the Law’s foremost servants would be committing sin first of all. It would be a miracle if rebellion did not break out on account of such ungodliness. But then there was little chance of that, with Jews being so law-abiding, and the peasants did not know what was going on. Even if they were told about it by excited rebels with wild, burning eyes, they would not believe it, so pure were their souls. It was divine luck that this was purely hypothetical and that no high priest or ordinary priest, no butcher or shepherd would do such a thing, at least not in Judaea.

Laying mosaic tiles was tiring, backbreaking work — hard on the knees but interesting all the same.

Setting the ready-made square or hexagonal sheets of mosaics alongside one another did not take any effort in itself, but to produce nice designs from the small pieces of stone was an exciting challenge, and Uri kept on badgering Menachem until he allowed Uri to join in this part of the work. He enjoyed choosing among the small, colored, square-cut chips of stone and fitting them alongside each other, smoothing some of them down to fit with the rest. Uri loved fiddling around and now he had free reign. The picture to be laid out was outlined by the painter, but he left the workers to their own devices and would only look at the end result.

Judas was quite right: the two stolen crates of tiles went unnoticed.

Uri now understood why mosaic-laying was such an expensive business; it involved the work of a huge number of people — people to hack out the variously colored stones, others to cut them down to small fragments, people to cut them into squares, people to transport them, people to sketch a design, people to lay them out… He recalled the huge number of splendid mosaics that he had seen in Rome and could not understand why he had never given this thought until now.

He had gotten used to Judith’s grouching and even made the acquaintance of her fat husband, who spent all day lying around the house and praying. His fellow workers had accepted him as if he had been living among them for years, working on the outer cladding of the Temple; they no longer stole from him and had even forgiven him for the sin of having been born in the unclean Diaspora. They had no interest in Rome; that was a long way away, whereas they could relate many tales about Jerusalem. They told stories about lodging houses where their sandals were swiped from off their feet while they slept, how they had been short-changed by foremen who were much more villainous than Menachem, how the puffed-up rich had treated them like slaves, even though they were free men, all their ancestors had been, as far back as family memories went, which was many generations back. It had crossed their minds to leave the city and join up with some band of robbers, though they had given up on that idea; it was only certain tribes that had traditionally occupied themselves with robbery, so they could only be underlings at best.

It would be nice if they could make money from smuggling, but having been born in the middle of Judaea they had no contacts with the Jews of the Parthian empire, so they had discarded that idea too. For a few years they had toyed with joining a community of the devout, which would have certain advantages, like being sure they would never die from starvation, but they would have no freedom of movement and be subject to the will of a leader. There were many such pious communities all over the place, with families in every town who made their living out of being more devout than a high priest. There were times when people would not speak to one another for weeks on end because that was what the leader had ordered. They might not be able to step outside the house for weeks or be allowed to establish contact with women outside the community. They helped one another everywhere, but they looked down on those who were less zealous. Judas and his brothers preferred to knock around as workers in Jerusalem.