Persia took nine,
The rest took one.
Ten measures of magic were given the world.
Egypt took nine,
The rest took one.
Ten measures of lechery were given the world.
Arabia took nine,
The rest took one.
Ten measures of folly were given the world.
Greece took nine,
The rest took one.
Ten measures of drunkenness were given the world.
Ethiopia took nine,
The rest took one.
Ten measures of lousiness were given the world.
Media took nine,
The rest took one.
The First Doctor continued : “But especially, as I read the Holy Book, the lamb is chosen on that tenth day in honour of the Ten Commandments. On each day of the ten the pious man reads and ponders one of the Commandments, and on the tenth his heart is ready and aware of his duty towards God and his neighbour ; and he is sanctified, so that he may choose the unblemished lamb with a pure heart and eye. This is the practice in my house and we do not consider the Passover properly performed otherwise. Let any man dispute my words who has the hardihood !”
There was silence for a while and then, though the challenge was only a rhetorical one, Jesus could no longer restrain himself, but cried out : “Learned man : is your roll of the Law arranged in the same chapters as the roll which is fixed in the Chamber of Copyists ?”
Everyone looked round in surprise, and when it was seen that the interrupter was a mere boy, the surprise was greater still.
The Doctor frowned and asked : “What impudent voice asked me that question? Let the speaker come forward and show himself boldly. Then I will answer him.”
Jesus slipped through the crowd and stood before him in the front rank.
The Doctor said : “Little red-locked creature with the pale face, tell me why you have asked me this shameless question and then you shall have your answer. Though we are instructed not to turn away those that wish to hear, we are also instructed to correct folly and lay the rod to the fool’s back.”
“Learned teacher,” Jesus answered, “I do not wish to be impudent, but being a stranger in Jerusalem I thought it possible that your roll of the Law differs from those that I have studied elsewhere. For I have read that the Passover was celebrated before the Ten Commandments were given. The Ten Commandments may be said to have existed from the sixth day of Creation, having been immanent in the mind of the Almighty—if it is true that he then created the Alphabet and the Two Tables—but they were not committed to the Tables or delivered to Moses until after he had brought the Children of Israel out of Egypt into Sinai. Until that time, as I read the Scriptures, no commandments had been given to man of a general nature, but only particular ones, such as the commandment not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or the commandment to build and stock an ark, or that which is now in question, which is the commandment for the eating of the Passover. For that this commandment was to eat a particular feast, rather than to inaugurate a sacrificial festival, the prophet Jeremiah plainly affirms. He prophesies in the name of the Lord : “In the day that I brought your fathers out of Egypt I spoke not to them, nor commanded them, concerning burned offerings and sacrifices.’ ”
The Second Doctor, who did not wish his colleague to be confounded by so young a child, interposed : “You do not understand these matters. If the learned Doctor chooses to think that the ten days were appointed by the Lord in anticipation of the Ten Commandments, what is that to you ?”
Jesus said : “It troubles me that he considers the first Passover feast to have been improperly conducted : for how could the Children of Israel while in Egypt have read and pondered commandments that had not been committed to writing and existed only in the mind of the Lord ?”
He would have said more, but the Second Doctor broke in again : “In my opinion, the tenth day is chosen because the tithe, the tenth part, is sacred to the Lord, not because of the completeness of the number ten, for it goes without saying that seven is a number of greater completeness than ten. The world may have been created by ten commandments but the Lord hallowed the seventh day when he had done. That the Sacred Candlestick has seven branches, that seven clean beasts went into the ark, that seven times seven days separate the Passover from the Feast of Weeks, that seven times seven years make the Year of Jubilee—all these examples may be instanced, yet where is Perfection, where is Completeness, but in the Holy One? And there are seven elements to his Unspeakable Name. Tithes were instituted before Moses saw the light. Our Father Abraham gave tithes to Melchizedek King of Salem, as priest of the Most High God ; our Father Jacob imitated the piety of his grandfather when he vowed to the Lord a tithe of all the substance that he should acquire in Mesopotamia ; and later Moses ordained the tithing of all the fruits of this land. Let any man dispute this who has the hardihood !”
Jesus spoke up again : “Learned Doctor, though to give tithes is good, how is the Paschal lamb a tithe? If a man has ten lambs let him choose out one as a sacrifice to the Lord ; but what if he has five, or twenty? And where is it written that tithes should be gathered on the tenth day of the month ?”
Everyone present was astonished at the boldness and fluency of Jesus’s argument, and the Second Doctor said to the First : “Brother, what shall we do with this child? Shall we turn him away ?”
The First Doctor said gruffly : “Not until you have answered his argument, which indeed was on the lips of every man in the company ; and I think it not unfitting that a mere child should have advanced it.”
The Second Doctor vented his wrath on Jesus. “Are you of the bandits of Galilee who cut a man’s throat and leave him wallowing in his blood? Are you of the Galilean bandits who tear down but never build up again ?”
“No, though I live with my parents in Galilee I was born in Judaea, and if you have cut your own throat with a word indiscreetly spoken I beg that you will not charge me with murder. As for building up : if you ask me why the lamb was chosen on the tenth day, I will answer that the Children of Israel were preparing to depart on the fourteenth day when the moon is at its fullest, so that they could put as much distance between themselves and the armies of Pharaoh as possible. They chose the lamb and set it apart from the others as if for fattening ; and this was to deceive the Egyptians. For when lambs are set apart to be fattened, a process which takes a month or more, nobody will expect them to be suddenly slaughtered and eaten unhung four nights later. But the ten days which are in question have not necessarily any greater significance than this, that ten days was a measure of time of frequent use among the Israelites during their bondage : for ten days made an Egyptian week then, as now. Ten days were allowed them by Moses for settling their affairs, and with the choosing of the lamb they made final preparation for their flight. The feast was in the evening, and by the time that it was finished the Egyptians were asleep, and away they stole, well fed and heartened with wine, by the narrow unguarded track which skirts the Lake of Reeds ; thus avoiding the well-guarded highway to Philistia. Indeed, an Egyptian week of ten days, an asor, is still of repute in Israel. Is not the Day of Atonement celebrated on the last day of an asor? And for a less awful instance, did not Daniel and his three companions choose ten days as a testing period during which they were to subsist only on pulse and water ?”
The Second Doctor smiled in quiet triumph : “You build your house on quicksand, Little Doctor,” he said. “Our Israelitish month may, by a figure of speech, be described as divided into decades ; but these decades have no reality in themselves, for, as you are not yet scholar enough to know, asor does not mean the decade itself. It means the tenth day of a decade. And so I come to the confounding of your previous argument. The month is tithed of its days, each tenth day having a certain sanctity—not equal to that of the seventh day, but still a sanctity—to remind us of our duty in tithing everything of use to our Lord.”
“True, Great Doctor, the word asor means the tenth day, but it also means a decade. For the brother and mother of Rebeccah in the four-and-twentieth chapter of Genesis said to our father Isaac : ‘Let the damsel abide with us for an asor at least’, which is to say a week of ten days.”
At this a little gasp of wonder arose among the Galilean visitors who sat together at one side. It was like the scene in a fencing-school when a novice by dexterous play not only parries every blow aimed at him by the master of fence, but with a quick turn of the wrist sends his sword spinning across the gymnasium so that the master stands disarmed and glaring foolishly. How the bystanders applaud! So now, forgetful of good manners, the Galileans clapped their hands for joy and began to laugh aloud, and someone cried out rudely : “A second David who has killed his lion and his bear !”
Affronted by this unseemly noise, the two Doctors rose as one man. They offered up the prayer that brought the debate to a close, and walked coldly away, dismissing their disciples.
The First Doctor said to the Second : “That boy is extraordinarily impudent. How has he not learned to hold his tongue and listen to his betters? I wonder who he is? I am convinced that he is a bastard. You can tell bastards by their shambling gait and by their reluctance to salute their elders.”
“Surely that cannot be? For a boy so well grounded in the Law would know that no man born in bastardy is admitted into this Court, not until the tenth generation. Besides, he saluted us respectfully as we came away, and since you have not seen him walking, how can you know that he shambles ?”
“It may be that he is not yet aware of his bastardy, but I am convinced that a bastard he is for all that.”
“I deny it. If he were a bastard, though the fact might be hidden from him out of kindness, his teachers would know of it and he would not be so well instructed in the Scriptures : for what profit would it be to teach a bastard what only a member of the congregation can profitably learn ?”
“Let us go back and discover his name, and then we can make inquiries.”
When they returned to the place of the lecture, they found that it was occupied by another group of debaters who had moved there from the hot centre of the Court. They could not see Jesus anywhere but stayed to listen to what proved to be less a debate than a meeting of protest by certain Pharisees against what they took to be a clear breach of the Law by the High Priest. The question was, whether the High Priest had done right to accept a present for the Temple Treasury from a Jewish prostitute. She had repented of her ways and made a sin-offering to the Lord of all the money that she had earned by her profession. The Pharisees were arguing that the money should not have been handled by any priest at all, let alone the High Priest, and should have been distributed to the poor, not added to the Treasury funds. For in the twenty-third chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy it is distinctly laid down :
Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore into the house of thy God.
This prohibition, by the way, though ascribed to Jehovah’s servant Moses, is said to date only from the time of King Josiah. For he put an end to the ancient Jebusite custom by which the girls of Jerusalem prostituted themselves to strangers at the City gates and laid their earnings at the feet of Anatha, Jehovah’s consort.
Each speaker vied with his fellows in denouncing the impropriety of the High Priest’s action, and when all had said their say, the President of the debate asked : “Is any son of Israel hardy enough to dare speak on the other side of the question ?”
Jesus rose and begged the President’s permission to ask a question. (“Ah, there he is again !” said the First Doctor.)
“Ask on, hardy boy !”
“I have heard talk in the City about this gift. Was it not devoted by the High Priest to a particular object—namely, the building of a house of easement to the retiring chamber where he is required to pass the last week before the Day of Atonement ?”
“It was so devoted, and the retiring chamber is, beyond doubt, a part of this Temple.”
“Nevertheless I hold that the money was well spent.”
“How? What is that? What is this child of Belial saying ?” every one cried.
“Is it not written by the prophet Micah in the first chapter and the seventh verse of his book : ‘Of the hire of a harlot has she gathered them, and unto the hire of a harlot shall they return’? This text the learned Hillel has expounded in the sense that as clean things naturally consort with clean, so unclean consort with unclean. Would any man cry aloud with horror if he saw a swine-herd fondling his swine? No, but only if he saw the swine-herd fondling the child of a pious Israelite, or this child fondling a swine. Let like mate with like. A house of easement is an unclean place. It is an enclave of uncleanness in a clean Temple ; it is not in the Temple, nor of it. If the woman has repented, all Israel should rejoice and the High Priest should not refuse her gift, which is of repentance. The house of easement, though unclean, is a necessity : let it therefore be bought not with clean money but with unclean.”
The Doctor asked scornfully : “And is harlotry also a necessity if, as you say, like must mate with like ?”
“A harlot sins for necessity, for no woman of Israel would make a harlot of herself for choice and be lost to her family and friends. Hunger and misery drive her to the trade. Every harlot in Israel, as my teacher the learned Simeon of Alexandria told me, is a virgin seduced and cast off by her house. From which I judge that so long as deceitful men must seduce virgins, and fools must company with harlots, harlotry is a necessity ; equally, so long as High Priests do not fast, in preparation for the Day of Atonement, a house of easement is a necessity.”
No one had a reply to this argument, which followed the soundest Pharisaic principles : it was generous, practical and based on a sound text. “Good, good !” murmured the Second Doctor, and quoted to his companion : “ ‘Regard not the bottle, but what is in it. Some new bottles are full of old wine, and contrariwise.’ ”
Jesus added boldly : “Let any man dispute this who dare !”
There came an unexpected interruption from the fringe of the crowd. A voice cried out : “At last, at last! My son! We had thought you lost !”
Jesus slipped through the crowd and saluted Mary and Joseph reverently. Mary continued : “We have all been distraught with anxiety these last three days. Why did you not tell us that you were remaining behind at Jerusalem? Had you no thought for your mother ?”
“I am no longer accountable to a mother for my goings and comings ; I am engaged on the Father’s business. Nevertheless, forgive me for the grief I have caused you. I told my cousin Palti to let you know where I was ; the message has gone astray.”
The First Doctor nudged the Second, drew him aside and said in a whisper : “You will see that I am right. Had that man been the boy’s father, he could not have allowed the woman to do the talking. You will remember the judgement of Solomon : it is in moments of danger that parentage is proved.”
“Oddly enough,” said the Second Doctor, “I recognize the man, though he has aged greatly since we last met and his beard is cut in a different style, and his garments are poorer. He is one Joseph, son of Heli, of the House of David. Everyone supposed that he had been killed in the Bethlehem massacre, but he turned up again in Galilee last year.”
“Joseph—Joseph of Emmaus? The Joseph who used to be in the timber business ?”
“That is the man.”
“I remember some talk, about ten years ago, or it may have been longer, of his marriage to a daughter of old Joachim the Heir, who died so miserably when Athronges made his last stand at Cocheba. I forget the exact circumstances of the marriage, but they were most unusual. I know that he arrived with the bride-money and found that the girl had been kidnapped by bandits. But what I cannot recall is whether she was restored to him. I was out of Jerusalem at the time, but I will wager you my old cloak against your new one that the girl was seduced by the kidnappers and that old Joseph made an honest woman of her. I know him to be a m
an of the greatest humanity.”
“I will accept your wager. It cannot be so. Joseph would never allow the boy to enter the Temple if he knew him to be a bastard.”
“No? Then perhaps that is why he let the boy’s mother do the talking : he was scandalized to find him here.”
“Well, we shall see.”
“How? It is no use trying to consult the family records of the House of David. The Wicked One and his son destroyed them all.”
“The boy’s mother, if my theory holds—if, that is to say, she was the girl whom the bandits kidnapped—was a Temple virgin, and the payment of the bride-money will have been recorded in the Temple Accounts. My son is a chief accountant. Let us go to him at once !”
An account of Jesus’s intervention in the debate about the prostitute’s gift was brought to Hillel on his sick-bed by his disciples. He approved it in this judgement, one of the last that he gave the world : “The generous heart will always find a door to open for those who seek the Lord ; the niggard will always find a bolt to bar them out.” The judgement was later reported to Jesus, who treasured it as proudly as a Roman soldier treasures his Civic Crown of gallantry.
That winter Hillel died, and never was a private citizen so widely mourned in the history of the Jewish nation. In every hamlet of Judaea and Galilee, in every synagogue of the Dispersion from Cadiz to Samar-kand, from the outflow of the River Don to the Cataracts of the Nile, eyes were wet, heads were shrouded, shoulders heaved with sobs, mouths abstained from food and drink. “Hillel is dead, Hillel is dead !” the people mourned, “Hillel the sage, who first taught Israel to love.” It was indeed Hillel who had first used the noun “creatures” in conjunction with the verb “to love”. Such was the greatness of his heart that he preached love not merely to his fellow-Israelites, not merely to all Sons of Adam, that is to say his fellow-men in general, but to all living creatures of whatever sort, clean and unclean ; justifying this apparent absurdity by the injunction given in the psalm to all things with breath in them—including whales, beasts, birds and creeping things—that they should praise the Lord. Even among the Sadducees of the Temple the sage’s loss was felt keenly. “His word was always on the side of peace,” they said.