“I fear for the child. I know that I have no cause, but the fear steals over me in spite of myself.”
“I do not blame you. He is far too young to undertake spiritual burdens as great as these.”
“Have you told him that the Camp of Lost Souls is no place for him ?”
“When I told him so this morning, he asked me : ‘What of Job with his boils and blasphemies? Was Elihu the Jebusite at fault when he reasoned with Job?’ I replied : ‘Elihu was a grown man ; you are a child. You are not yet of lawful age to read family prayers in your father’s absence, and do you undertake to preach to those wolves and hyaenas?’ He said : ‘If I have sinned from presumption, may I be pardoned. Yet unless you forbid me, I will continue at the task that I have set myself, since it is one that no other Jew of Leontopolis is impelled to undertake.’ I could not forbid him to go there again, and, indeed, I felt his words as a deserved reproach ; for, may the Lord forgive me, preaching to the Shame of Israel is a task from which my own soul shrinks.”
When Jesus was twelve years old, Joseph awoke from sleep one morning and said : “Once at Emmaus, just before we set out on our journey to Bethlehem, I dreamed that I was reading in the Book of Genesis : ‘Arise and get you into the land of Egypt!’, but the remainder of the verse was hidden by the finger of the priest who held open the scroll. To-night in my dream I have read the same verse of the same chapter, but this time the priest’s finger moved and covered up the first part of the verse, so that it read : ‘For those who sought your life are dead.’ Soon I expect to hear news.”
They waited for a few days, and then news came, not of the death, but of the deposition, of Archelaus—for dreams are not always accurate—and of the conversion of Judaea, with Samaria, into a Roman Imperial province. In the division of his father’s kingdom Archelaus had chosen unwisely. He should have been content with the tetrarchy that he had bestowed on his brother Philip : for in Upper Transjordania Philip had no political problems to handle comparable with those of Judaea, where three times a year the passage through the countryside of foreign pilgrims, including bands of wild, proud Edomites, excitable tribesmen from Lower Transjordania and Galileans with knives concealed in their long sleeves, made the country seethe with unrest and spill over like an untended cooking-pot. In Philip’s tetrarchy Jews were greatly outnumbered by Greeks and Syrians : he could even dare to strike copper coins with his own head on them.
Everything had gone wrong for Archelaus from the very start : first came the Passover disorders, next the poisoning of his Samaritan mother, and then, while he was still at Rome purchasing the goodwill of leading Senators, Imperial secretaries and Livia’s maids-of-honour, and showing the utmost obsequiousness to Livia herself, rioting had broken out all over the country. The immediate cause was the return of the High Court embassy with the news that their plea had been rejected by Augustus. Varus, foreseeing trouble, had moved a regular regiment down into Judaea from Antioch, but unfortunately its regimental commander decided to overawe the civil population by the violent methods sanctioned in other provinces under direct Roman rule ; and in a few weeks piled up a very large fortune by the loot of public buildings. At the Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost, which falls fifty days after Passover, the Roman garrison at Jerusalem was suddenly attacked by three large bodies of armed men, recruited from the pilgrims that had come up from the provinces, who besieged them in the Tower of Phasaël, the fortress adjoining Herod’s palace. The people of Jerusalem took little part in this revolt, having more cause than the pilgrims to fear reprisals, but the Romans made no distinction between metropolitan and provincial Jews and killed a great many innocent people during sorties from the Tower. They also plundered the Temple Treasury of an enormous sum, a thousand talents or more, which was robbery of Jehovah and incited the insurgents to greater fury than ever. The beautiful gilded cloisters which enclosed the outer Courts of the Temple were burned to the ground and a great number of Jews perished in the flames.
Herod’s private army went over to the Romans, three thousand of them standing a siege in the Royal Palace, and this action so divided the insurgents’ forces that both the Romans and the Herodians were able to hold out until Varus, marching down from Antioch with two regular regiments and a large force of irregulars, raised the siege. He had paused on his way to crush a simultaneous revolt centred at Sepphoris in Galilee, which was destroyed in the course of the fighting, and another in the Judaean hills to the west of Jerusalem, and when his leading patrols reached the City, the insurgents broke camp and fled. His cavalry pursued and captured a great many of them, of whom he crucified some two thousand. His troops, for the most part Syrian Greeks from Beyrout and Arabs from the eastern desert, behaved with a savagery and indiscipline that disgusted Varus, who disbanded them as soon as possible : they had sacked and burned villages and farms by the score.
When Archelaus returned to his ethnarchy, he found everything in disorder : the Romans had plundered not only the Temple Treasury but several of the Herodian ones—for Herod had divided his great wealth into many packets disposed among his various fortresses. By the time that the legacies to Augustus, Livia, Salome and others had been paid from what moneys remained, Archelaus’s purse was lean indeed. Besides, his royal residences had all been either destroyed or damaged, his private army was in revolt, he had quarrelled with his half-brother Antipas, the Jews hated him, and almost every mountain village in Judaea was occupied by bandits, some of them commanding considerable forces. Among the most troublesome insurgents was a Transjordanian Jew named Simon, a member of Herod’s bodyguard, who had the boldness to crown himself King of the Jews ; it was some months before he was surprised and killed by a flying column of Romans. A Judaean named Athronges, who lived near Modin the home of the Maccabees, also crowned himself King ; he was more dangerous, because he set himself up as the Messiah, the Son of David, and happened to be a shepherd. His claim to be of the House of David could not be disproved, because during the massacre of Bethlehem Archelaus had seized the Davidic register and all the family records brought there by the heads of houses and made a bonfire of them in the courtyard of the inn—an act which he now heartily regretted. Athronges and his brothers were for three or four years in full possession of a wide region of hills west of Jerusalem, took toll of all merchandise that came through, and massacred all foreigners. They were victorious in several skirmishes with the Romans, and if they had only been men of education and piety might well have united the nation under one banner, as the four Maccabee brothers had once succeeded in doing. But they were bandits at heart and the problem that they set Archelaus was a military rather than a religious one.
The only alleviation of Archelaus’s distresses was that the Samaritans had kept quiet all this time, and that Augustus generously made over to him the greater part of the enormous legacy left him by Herod ; the remainder went to Antipas and Philip. He instituted military law throughout Judaea and managed to govern in some sort of a way for more than nine years ; then he unwisely quarrelled with the High Court. They had upheld a decision of the Captain of the Guard to refuse him entry into the Temple on the ground of ceremonial uncleanness : Archelaus had married his brother Alexander’s widow Glaphyra. This marriage would have been his Levirate duty had Alexander died childless, but Glaphyra had borne him children ; which made the new marriage technically incestuous. Archelaus’s refusal to put her away had the surprising effect of uniting the Jews and the Samaritans in a temporary alliance against him, and it was the arrival at Rome of their joint embassy which persuaded Augustus to banish him : for when Samaritans and Jews made common cause, Livia reminded him, the Jewish problem had become critical.
However, even with Archelaus banished to Vienne in Gaul, Joseph did not think it safe to return to Judaea ; and when he made inquiries from refugees he learned that his farm at Emmaus had become the headquarters of a bandit company, and that the Romans when they captured it had not only burned the buildings to the ground but also felled the orchards an
d rooted out the vines, broken the cisterns and blocked the wells. His two sons, he gathered, had escaped. Probably they had migrated to Galilee to become guests of their two other brothers. If he went to Galilean Cana, where the family sawmill was, he might find them all safe and well.
He invited Simeon to come with him to Galilee, but Simeon regretfully declined : he was too old for so lively a climate, and new wine should not be bottled in old skins. “Without you, dear friends, I shall be lonely, but I shall go to the Essene College at Callirrhoë by the Dead Sea, where the Overseer is an old acquaintance of mine. I shall become a member of that God-loving sect and find comradeship there, and friends to close my eyes when I die.”
Joseph’s business was sold to advantage and the family said goodbye to their friends and neighbours ; but when Jesus went his last rounds of the village, collecting and paying small outstanding debts, he was told the same thing at each house : “Perhaps we shall meet again. Drink of the Nile once, drink of it twice !” Indeed, Egypt is a queen whose beauty exercises a powerful pull on the heart : as the Israelites in the wilderness learned when they sighed for her green gardens, the leeks, the cucumbers and the garlic, forgetting the cruelty of their Ramasid task-masters.
They glided down by boat to Alexandria, where they chartered passages in a packet-galley bound for Tyre : she would sail in a week’s time with mail for all intervening seaports. Joseph had decided that the sea-journey would be less fatiguing and not more expensive ; also, they could bring their tools with them, and their clothes, and their books and household utensils, which it would be a pity to sell at a loss ; and he would prefer to enter Antipas’s tetrarchy as an Egyptian Jewish immigrant, not as a Judaean exile. This was a courageous decision, since the Jews, like the Egyptians, have an innate horror of the sea. Most of them would rather travel overland for five hundred miles through sandstorms or thick forest than travel fifty by sea in the calmest weather. They regard the sea as their lifelong enemy, and seafaring for them is almost the most despised trade of any ; but this is because they associate the sea with the Great Goddess in her erotic character of Rahab the Harlot—the Fish-tailed Aphrodite, in fact, of Joppa and Beyrout and Ascalon.
But to Jesus the sea, which he now visited for the first time, was the most beautiful sight that he had ever seen. It filled him with greater amazement than all the wonders of Alexandria, at that time the first city of the world after Rome, though he visited the docks and the Royal Library and the colonnades of the philosophers, and watched the enormous, mad crowd pouring out of the hippodrome and instantly engaging in bitter faction fights, blue against leek-green, with stones and clubs. An old business-acquaintance of Joseph’s, met by chance, won him admission to the lighthouse on Pharos Island, where the famous steamengine of Ctesibius was displayed, though no longer put to practical use ; and he was allowed to ascend to the lantern-house to wonder at the optic device which enabled ships to be distinctly viewed at no less than twenty miles’ distance. But the sea and the salty smell of the sea, and the sunset over the waters glowing with more royal colours (it seemed to him) than the desert sunset, and the sudden land-breeze as the stars came out, and the planet Venus brilliant in the west : these stirred his spirit in an extraordinary manner.
The roar of the city came confusedly down the wind, like moans and groans, the small waves frothed white along the reefs, and as the glory faded from the sky and the moon rose he repeated softly the words of the Psalm in which David praises God for the creation of the great, wide sea with innumerable fish concealed in it, besides the ships and the whales that proudly drive along its surface. He silently stretched out his hand to Mary and each had a perfect understanding of what was in the other’s mind : “The sea is our mother. From the sea the dry land was delivered at the Creation as a child is delivered from the womb. How beautiful is our mother’s face !” But old Joseph wrapped his cloak more tightly about him and shivered at the waste of waters.
They embarked the next morning in cloudless weather. Joseph said : “We shall have a view of the Promised Land from a distance, like that granted to Moses from Pisgah.” But first they rowed along the coast of the Delta through seas already discoloured by the Nile mud, for the floods had begun, and counted the seven principal mouths of the Nile ; the Canopic first, and then, in order, the Bolbitinic, the Sebennytic, the Pineptimic, the Mendesic, the Tanitic and the Pelusiac—and anchored that night at Pelusium, formerly named Avaris, the gateway out of Egypt and the city from which the Israelites under Moses had begun their flight to the promised land. The next day, after taking bales of raw linen aboard, they coasted past the narrow spit of sand dividing the Lake of the Reeds from the sea. There the Egyptians in pursuit of Moses had been checked when a sudden north-east wind swamped the track. Numbers of them were swallowed up in the quicksands still prevalent there.
The ship laboured under oars along a low sandy coast, made dangerous by shoals, with Mount Seir, the great mountain of Edom, showing far away to the south-east through gaps in the white sand-hills ; and they presently could make out, directly ahead of them, the long bluish range of the Judaean hills. That night they anchored off Rhinocolura, at the mouth of the Torrent of Egypt which is the desert boundary between Canaan and Egypt ; but the torrent flows only in the winter and spring. Jesus asked permission to swim ashore and set foot for the first time in his life on the soil of his forefathers : for in the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Joshua this river is mentioned as the southern boundary of the territory of Judah. The master consented, and he swam ashore and offered up a prayer from dry land ; then plucked a sprig of rosemary from a hedge and swam back again, and gave the sprig to his mother.
The next day mail was put ashore for Gaza, but the town of Gaza, where Samson took the gates off their hinges and walked away with them, was hidden from the sea. Ain-Rimmon and Beersheba lay a day’s journey inland. They coasted along the fertile plain of Philistia and some ten miles inland the hills rose in gentle slopes, dotted with villages. Soon they came to Ascalon, the former seat of the Herods, a beautiful city in the Greek style built in the shape of a theatre facing the sea, with the two horns of the semicircle abutting on bold cliffs, and by the sea a magnificent temple of the Goddess Aphrodite and another of Hercules-Melkarth, where Herod’s great-grandfather had been a priest. On the next day they came to Joppa, on its well-walled conical hill, another seat of the worship of Aphrodite and Hercules ; from here Jonah had, in the allegory, sailed on his famous voyage to Tarsus, the end of which was that he found himself in the belly of a whale. Joppa was the nearest port to Jerusalem, and the peak of Mount Mizpeh, four miles to the north of Jerusalem, could be clearly distinguished from the ship. The anchorage here was very uncomfortable because of the swell. Then on they went past the red cliffs which bordered the Plain of Sharon, with the hills of Ephraim behind ; and Joseph pointed out Mounts Ebal and Gerizim and said : “Shechem lies between them.”
The colossal statue of a man now appeared on the coast to the northward with white buildings at its feet. Mary began to weep silently when she learned that this was Caesarea, where King Antipater had been arrested on his return from Rome. They rowed by the ancient tribal territory of Manasseh, and ahead of them loomed the great table-ridge of Mount Carmel. Joseph pointed out the peak to the south-east, saying : “The peak of Elijah, where he put the prophets of Baal to confusion.” Soon they anchored in the port of Sycaminum where the River Kishon flows into the sea. Joseph paid the passage-money, they went ashore, bought an ass-cart and an ass, heaped their possessions on it and drove off eastward through the fruitful pomegranate groves.
Upper Galilee is a broad mountain-ridge jutting south from the Lebanon. The inhabitants distinguish it from Lower Galilee, a continuation of the same ridge, by its ability to produce sycomore figs, and by the greater excellence of its olives. But the olive is a tree that grows rank and yields little oil in rich and stoneless soil, and sycomore figs are not to be compared in flavour with true figs ; and these are Upper Galilee’s
only two claims to superiority, except for an extraordinary richness in wild game. Old Herod loved Upper Galilee for the sport that the rugged hills and deep glens of its eastern districts afforded him. Panthers, leopards, bears, wolves, jackals, hyaenas, wild boars and gazelles —all fell to his lance and arrow. The summit of the ridge is undulating table-land, a former possession of the Kenites, who a thousand years ago were robbed of its rich pasture by the tribe of Naphtali ; to the west the olive-land of Asher slopes down to a plain, called the Plain of Acre, through which Joseph now led his family towards Lower Galilee.
The hills of Lower Galilee, covered with evergreen oak, slope gently ; the valleys, famous for their wheat, spread wide. In Egypt Jesus had seen no eminence higher than the pyramids, and it was some time before he could accustom his eye to recognize the mountains that towered in the distance as solid masses of earth and rock ; they seemed like clouds. The forests also astonished him : he had never before seen trees that were not planted by man, and found it difficult to believe Joseph’s assurance that these dense forests were sown by the hand of God alone.