György Spiró - Captivity

“Twenty-three judges?” asked Uri. “Even in a small town?”

“The towns are not that small!” said the one sitting under the slit, affronted. “Any place with five hundred adult males counts as a town! That means at least fifteen hundred or two thousand inhabitants, though likely much more! The towns are not so small here.”

A local patriot, Uri thought cheerily.

“Are there that many judges in a town?” he asked. “Or are some of them lawyers as well? Sometimes prosecuting, sometimes defending?”

The other two did not understand, so Uri tried to describe what was meant by prosecuting and defending counsels and by a judge. Gradually they caught on.

“There’s nothing like that here,” said the one sitting under the slit. “There are men — tailors, cooks, joiners, tentmakers, robbers, thieves, that sort of thing.” He laughed at his own wit before carrying on.

“If they need you to try a case, the master sends for you. And you go to the house of prayer to try the case. If there is no two-vote majority, they keep on calling people until there is. But twenty-three is the most, and if a verdict is still not reached, then the case is referred to the Great Sanhedrin — that’s here, above where we are now… But even they do not always sit together; they too start with three members, and so on, all the way up to seventy-one. It’s not usual to bring cases here, though; the two-vote majority system works locally, sooner or later.”

“I’ve never heard of a case that could not be settled locally,” said the one seated closer.

“And this master, the elder of the juridical tribunal… where does he get the right to call others in to pass judgment? Is he the archisynagogos?”

That was a term that meant nothing to them, so Uri explained that he was thinking of the leading member of the congregation of a house of prayer. They shook their heads.

“He’s the master, that’s all there is to it!”

“Does he make a living from doing that?” Uri asked.

“Not at all!” said the one sitting under the slit. “He’s not allowed to take money for teaching, sitting in judgment, or giving advice. He has an occupation, though, as a tiller of the soil or limeburner or furniture maker… That’s why he is a master…”

“Or he robs and steals,” said the other.

They both laughed.

This really was another world.

“Have your cases already been heard?”

“Not yet,” said the one sitting under the slit.

“Mine hasn’t either,” said the other.

“When will they be?”

The one sitting under the slit looked up toward the light.

“Well, either right away, today, or else after Passover.”

“If not today, then it will be more than a week, next Monday, in eleven days’ time. The days for juridical sessions are Mondays and Thursdays. There are no other days.”

In other words, it was the same in Jerusalem as in the country, with a court being convened only on market days. If they did not come to hear a case by sunset today, Thursday, then they would not be able to do so on Monday either, on account of Passover, nor on the following Thursday, because that was also a half-holiday, on which it was forbidden to sit in judgment. There was a lot that could be done on half-holidays that was not permitted on full holidays — burying the dead, for instance, or healing the sick, but not sitting in judgment.

He did not like the idea of killing time here for eleven days. Better they come today. Let everything be settled, then he could go home to Rome, though he did not yet know how. Of course, as long as they gave him something to eat, even eleven days would be tolerable in the end, too.

“What are you in for?” asked the one sitting under the slit.

“I did nothing,” said Uri, and he gave another laugh. “You’re not going to believe it, but nothing at all.”

“You’re right, we don’t believe it,” said the other.

“Never mind,” said Uri. “Gaius Theodorus is my name.”

The other two remained silent. Uri shrugged his shoulders.

“So why are you here?”

“We’re innocent,” the one sitting under the slit said sardonically. “But we’re accused of robbery.”

How droll: I’ve fallen in among thieves. And they can’t even rob me of anything, because I have nothing!

“That’s quite a serious charge,” said Uri.

“Are you kidding?” said the other. “The most they can sentence us to is four or five years of slavery, and when that’s over, we will be released without having to pay a bond for our manumission. We’re not petty thieves, but robbers!”

“That is to say, we’re being made out to be robbers,” the one sitting under the slit added. “But they’ll have to prove it!”

Uri thought he could not have heard that properly, or maybe they had a different way with words, so he asked what they supposed the difference was between a robber and a thief.

They looked at each other in amazement. All the same, the one sitting under the slit then took it upon himself to explain, with considerate shouting and syllabifying so that even Uri would understand: a thief stole, whereas a robber took something away by force.

So Uri had heard right.

“A robber is given a lighter sentence than a thief?” he asked in astonishment.

The two looked at each other again.

“Are you Jewish in any way at all?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then you must be slow,” said the one who was seated closer, sighing before launching into an explanation. “A thief does not just steal; he offends the Eternal One by hiding himself from His countenance. He does evil on the sly, seeking to hide his evil deeds from the Lord. A robber, on the other hand, attacks from the front, and he does not offend the Almighty, because he does not hide from Him! A thief’s crime is therefore more serious!”

A fine, clear, religious exposition, thought Uri; the laws here really are different.

In Rome a robber would receive the death penalty, whereas a thief would be sentenced to a few years or eternal servitude, and there were two grades at that: he might remain a slave on Far Side or else he might be sold off in Italia, in Puteoli for example, where there is a famous slave market because human cargo is put into its harbor from every part of the empire.

If the offender were a Jew who was a Roman citizen, the Jewish jurisdiction in principle had to run the more serious punishments by a Roman court of law, but in practice the Curia would give the nod to any Jewish verdict; it had plenty to do as it was. The Latini tended to approve even sentences of death, and if, every now and then, an appeal was heard, neither defendant nor witnesses were recalled; the decision was a formality and invariably upheld the judgment. The superfluous right of appeal was reserved by Curia, on the other hand, and there were cases where they might want to save a person sentenced to death for political reasons — because he was of great interest to an influential senator, even to the emperor himself, being a favorite actor, lover, or something of the kind — then the Curia would dig in its heels until it had been given an appropriate bribe.

“What can a thief expect here?” Uri inquired.

“He is sentenced to death.”

That must be a newfangled law.

As he had learned it in Rome, a thief was obliged to reimburse four times the value of the stolen object, and once he had done that, he was set free. On the orders of Herod the Great, thieves were sold off as slaves and so a crowd of Jewish thieves, the “new ones,” had found their way to Rome. But the Roman prefects had put an end to that practice when Herod died.

“I once saw the execution of a thief,” said the man who was seated nearer. “Not a pretty sight.”