“This is bad news.”
“They were evil men, and news of their death is good news.”
“It is bad news, I say, for last night in my dream I saw the lamps of Zabidus lighted again and heard his idolatrous spells chanted within the very Courts of the Temple. I saw Sacrilege, Blasphemy and Idolatry, three loathsome hags, at a merry-making in the blessed Sanctuary, so that the whole congregation of Israel was defiled—may the Lord God defend his servant Israel from all those that seek to do him harm.”
“You foresaw the deaths of Alexander and Aristobulus and the succession of Antipater. What do you foresee now ?”
“Answer me this one question and you shall have your reply—and it is no grand baffling riddle, such as those that Solomon and Hiram of Tyre exchanged in ancient times, but a simple question. Why has Herod shown such great kindness to the people of Rhodes, rebuilding the temple of Apollo, their abominable Sun-god ; and to the people of Cos, another place sacred of Apollo’s ; and to the Phoenicians of Beyrout and Tyre and Sidon ; and to the Spartans and Lycians and Samians and Mysians, all of whom worship the same abomination under one name or another? Why did he, by great presents to the Elians, persuade them to make him Perpetual President of the Olympic Games ?”
“I cannot explain why these things have been done,” said Cleopas. “I can only condemn. It is written : ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods but me.’ ”
Chapter Five
The Heiress of Michal
KING HEROD’S first choice of a High Priest after the destruction of his predecessor, King Antigonus the Maccabee, had been an obscure Babylonian Jew of the House of Zadok, named Ananel. He soon deposed him in favour of Mariamne’s brother, the Maccabean heir, who was only seventeen years old ; but the ill-timed enthusiasm of the mob when the boy officiated at the Feast of Tabernacles was a warrant for his execution. He was drowned one evening in the public Bath at Jericho, after a merry ducking match between two teams of Herod’s courtiers in which he had incautiously joined. Ananel was restored to the High Priesthood, but not for long. The office had changed hands several times more before Simon son of Boethus was appointed, when Herod considered it to be in safe hands at last.
Simon was an Alexandrian Jew and, though a Levite, not of High-Priestly family : a small, shrewd, diffident man, the soundest scholar in Alexandria, idealistic, upright and apparently without prejudice in religious matters. Herod had employed him to check the genealogy of a certain candidate for the priesthood whose family had been settled in Armenia for some generations ; and Simon in his adverse report had frankly revealed the flaws in the pedigrees of several members of the Sanhedrin who happened to be related to the man. Among them were one or two active critics of Herod’s own pedigree, which Simon obligingly undertook to prove more illustrious by far than he had himself supposed. Herod decided that Simon was wasted at Alexandria. He pretended to be so passionately in love with Simon’s daughter that he could not live without her ; yet how could he decently marry the girl—he asked his brother Pheroras—except by raising her father to a position of such dignity that she would not be despised by his other wives? He deposed Jeshua the Zadokite, who was then High Priest, and appointed Simon in his place. Simon’s daughter happened to be sufficiently good-looking for the world to believe that he owed his office to her royal marriage, rather than the other way about.
Simon, bound to Herod by the strongest ties of gratitude, for Herod treated him with respect and generosity, became his faithful servant. His family, the Cantheres, were named after the scarab-beetle, the Egyptian emblem of immortality, and were Pharisees of a sort, but had become so soaked in Greek philosophy that they regarded the original Hebrew Scriptures as the quaint relics of a barbarous age. They kept the Law scrupulously, but only because they wished to remind the unilluminated mass of the people that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—by which they meant that conformity even in a barbarous religion is preferable to atheistic anarchy or the clash of competitive cults. They privately regretted the conservative Jewish view of Jehovah as a solitary who would have no dealings with any other gods and whose people were unique—a view that excited scorn or jealousy in foreigners according as the national fortunes declined or prospered.
To the Cantheres, Jehovah was merely an anomalous local variant of Olympian Zeus, and they heartily wished that the differences which distinguished him from Zeus, and from the corresponding gods of Rome, Egypt, Syria, Persia and India, could be smoothed out for the sake of international peace. Their own conception of the Deity was so grandiose and abstract that Jehovah seemed a mere tribal demon by comparison. The Jews, they held, must somehow come to terms with the Greeks who were their neighbours. Ah, if only the Greeks were not so childish, laughter-loving and irreverent even when they had arrived at mature age, and if only the Jews were not so grave and old-mannish and devout even while they were still children, how happy everyone would be! Young people should be allowed to enjoy life to the full and think of gods and goddesses, in the popular way, as tall, shining-faced men and women gifted with supernatural powers, though of gross human passions, who plagued the race of men and one another by their headstrong fancies. As they grew to maturity, they should gradually be initiated into the moral and historical meaning of the ancient myths, until they knew at last, in their old age, that gods and goddesses were merely figures of speech, and that God was what transcended physical nature—immortal wisdom, the answer to all questions that could ever be asked.
They followed Hillel, one of the two joint-Presidents of the High Court and the most revered theologian of the day, in treating the Scriptures as oracular in their phrasing : with hardly any text meaning precisely what it seemed to mean. For example, Hillel generously laid down that the old law “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” did not mean what it means in barbarous codes—that if a man blinds his neighbour even accidentally he must himself be blinded ; if he knocks out his neighbour’s teeth he must suffer the same inconvenience. Hillel said : “The loss of one man’s eye or tooth is not repaired by the loss of another man’s. The Lord in his wisdom ordained, rather, that the compensation in money or goods or land, paid to the injured man, should be equivalent to the loss suffered.”
Simon was no typical member of his family. He agreed with them that, in theory, the works of Homer and Hesiod, regarded as inspired religious texts, would serve as well as those of Moses ; for a true philosopher can hang his grey cloak on a peg of any timber. But he also held that in practice the Jewish Scriptures, the prophetic books especially, had one overwhelming advantage : he found them alive with a faith in the future, a steady belief in the perfectibility of mankind. Of what other national literature could the same be said? And even the solitariness of Jehovah was commendable : he could be regarded as a type of the original Singleness of Truth everywhere confused by contradictory local truths. Again, the Jews were indeed unique in one sense : they were the only people in the world who carried the thought of God continually in their hearts.
Herod was neither philosopher nor poet. He made fun of Simon’s divided devotion to Plato and Ezekiel the prophet. He put his faith in the crude exercise of power—in power won by the capture of a national oracle, power then extended by compelling neighbouring nations to serve the god whom, as king, he had made the instrument of his own greatness ; but he also secretly held the mystical belief that by a splendid propitiation of Jehovah he would one day renew his youth and achieve a sort of immortality. He was not a man to shrink from any deed, however desperate or unnatural, that would make his name as glorious as those of Hercules, Osiris, Alexander and other mortal rulers who had become gods by the greatness of their feats.
Simon did not know the full extent of Herod’s ambitions but was aware at times of a presumptuous spirit in him, which, when he allowed his mind to dwell on it, troubled him as grossly irreligious ; however, he was never troubled to the extent of offering his resignation. What was the need? Did Herod perhaps fancy himself as the promise
d Messiah? But the military strength of the Roman Empire was sufficient guarantee against his undertaking any rash war of religious conquest ; and though he might overbear the Temple lawyers in many cases where the Law admitted of more than one interpretation, there was no question of his defying the Law as a whole. And however oppressive he might feel the constriction of his royal spirit, he must remain all his days a humble servant of the many times conquered Jehovah ; and at the same time acknowledge himself a mere petty king, a client of the Roman Empire ; and must eventually die like any other man. Surely Herod did not consider that his virtues entitled him to be caught up alive into Heaven like an Enoch or an Elijah? Yes, between the power of the Roman legions and the authority of the Mosaic Law, the field for the exercise of Herod’s ambitions was a narrow one.
With Antipater, as soon as he was preferred to Mariamne’s sons, Simon formed a close friendship. Antipater had studied at Alexandria under a relative of Simon’s. He took the Law more literally than the Cantheres, and though prepared to accept Hillel’s liberal interpretations of its harsher articles, was averse to Greek philosophy, in which he saw a danger to the authority of the Scriptures. He had been married by his father to the daughter of King Antigonus, but she was now dead. There were two children by the marriage, a boy and a girl. The boy, Antipater the Younger, was being educated in Egypt with the Cantheres family ; he was quiet and studious. The girl, Cypros, was betrothed to the son of Aristobulus who afterwards became famous as King Herod Agrippa, but was still a child. Antipater himself was betrothed to Aristobulus’s infant daughter, but had no wife. He felt lonely without one. His father hinted that he had some other match in view for him and that meanwhile he should amuse himself with mistresses ; but to keep a mistress went against Antipater’s conscience. He took the Pharisaic view that to lie with a woman except with the intention of progeny was displeasing to the Lord, as was exemplified in the history of Onan. Yet he did not wish to beget children on a Jewess or an Edomite woman, for as bastards they would be cut off from the congregation of Israel ; and the Law forbade him any sexual traffic with Greek or Phoenician women or other foreigners.
One early spring morning, a few months before his brothers’ execution, Antipater visited Simon in his luxurious Temple apartments overlooking the Court of Israel.
“You are troubled, Prince,” said Simon, as soon as they were alone. “You seldom seem to be untroubled nowadays. Your frown grieves me.”
Antipater barely wetted his lips with the wine which Simon offered him. He took up a handful of milky new almonds and began absentmindedly breaking them into pieces which he arranged on the broad edge of a golden salver in geometrical patterns. “Yes, Simon, I am troubled,” he said with a sigh. “For a man to be King in Israel, or the King’s son and deputy, is a poor thing when all his subjects despise him as an upstart. The orders which I give in my father’s name are obeyed, but without alacrity except by the baser sort of people, and by the governing classes with studied surliness. Just now, as I crossed the Court, the ironical salutations with which I was greeted by the grandees were like whips across my face. I knew what they were thinking : ‘What title has his father to the throne except that granted him by our enemies, the heathen Romans? And he himself is not even half Maccabee. He is the son of a heathenish Edomite woman, a grandniece of the accursed Zabidus.’ If I am stern with them, they hate me as an oppressor ; if indulgent, they despise me as a weakling. I know in my bones and blood that I am of their own race, and Jerusalem to me is home and the most wonderful city in the world. What I have come to ask you is this : how can I ever hope to earn the love and confidence of my people ?”
Simon might have been expecting the question, so readily came his answer : “I will tell you, Prince. Royalty lies in a consciousness of royalty, as liberty lies in a consciousness of liberty. Know yourself royal, and royalty blazes golden from your forehead. Believe yourself an upstart, and you defeat yourself with that leaden belief.”
“Cold comfort,” said Antipater. “I cannot alter my condition by wishing that my mother at least had been a Hasmonean Maccabee.”
Simon laughed dryly. “Prince, who are these royal Maccabees? Their ancestors were village joiners of Modin not more than a hundred and fifty years ago ; Maccabee, as you know, means ‘mallet’ and was the nickname of Judas, son of Matathias, who led the rebellion. His brothers were all similarly nicknamed by their father after tools in his joiner’s chest—for example, Eleazer was called ‘Avaran’, the awl. The Maccabee pedigree, if one searches back two or three generations beyond Matathias the joiner, is as full of holes as a sieve. It is not even established that he was a Levite. Certainly he was not of the House of Aaron.”
“Nevertheless,” said Antipater, “by their courage and virtue the Maccabees advanced themselves to royal dignity.”
“Your father has done the same.”
“Yet the Temple grandees sneeringly call him ‘Herod of Ascalon’, and ‘Edomite Slave’, rejecting him as a foreigner and usurper. ‘The Maccabees,’ they say, ‘freed us from a foreign yoke. The man of Ascalon has fastened another yoke securely across our shoulders.’ ”
“Has your father never told you, Prince, that you are a thousand times better born than any Maccabee? That you stand in a direct line of succession from Caleb son of Jephunneh, who conquered Hebron in the days of Joshua ?”
“He has hinted that we are Calebites, but I took this for one of his fancies. When he has dined well his mind teems with strange fancies.”
“It is the truth, and he had it from me. Your great-grandfather’s grandfather was a Calebite of Bethlehem who took refuge at Ascalon ; as a child your great-grandfather was stolen from Ascalon by the Edomites, who honoured him as their prince.”
“You did not tell my father this merely to please him ?”
“Prince, I would even rather displease the King than forfeit my reputation as a scholar among my fellow-scholars.”
“I did not accuse you of lying. I wondered whether you were perhaps retailing an old legend without troubling to test it historically.”
“That is not my habit.”
“Forgive me !”
“I forgive you. But, before you can follow my argument, you must disabuse your mind of the notion that your ancestor Caleb was a Judaean —a great-grandson of Judah himself through the bastard Pharez. Caleb was a Kenite of Hebron, and Hebron in ancient times was the hearthstone of Edom. The genealogical table that is given in the Book of Chronicles, the second chapter, is an interpolation of recent times. The more reliable myth, which we have preserved in Egypt, is that Hur son of Caleb, who was the son of Hezron the Kenizzite, married Miriam the sister of Aaron, though she was “neither fair nor healthy” and died in the desert soon afterwards ; Hur assisted Moses in the Battle of Rephidim. Caleb was one of the ten champions sent to spy out Canaan before Joshua’s invasion ; passing through Hebron, then occupied by the Anakin, he visited Machpelah, the tomb of his ancestor Abraham, where he received encouragement from the priestess who interpreted the utterances of Abraham’s oracular jawbone. When the invasion began he conquered Hebron, drove out the Giants and married Azubah Jerioth, ‘the deserted woman of the tent-curtains’. Later he also married Ephrath of Bethlehem.”
“How do you read this account ?” asked Antipater.
“I read it as meaning that the Calebites were Kenites of Edom—the Kenizzites are a branch of the Kenites—who originally possessed Hebron but when driven out by an invading tribe of tall Northerners took refuge with the Midianites of Hezron, at the border of the Sinai desert, who like themselves worshipped the Goddess Miriam. Miriam, also known as Rahab, was the Goddess of the Sea, whose sign is the scarlet thread. On the arrival of the Children of Israel from Egypt under Moses, the Calebites became their allies and later joined with them in the invasion of Canaan ; but the Midianites would not share in the adventure and the alliance with them was dissolved. After reconnoitring the ground, the Calebites reconquered Hebron, and once more intermarried wi
th the priestesses of Abraham’s oracle, whom the Giants deserted in their wild flight. Eventually they extended their rule a few miles northward to Ephrath, which is the region about Bethlehem. I hardly think that you will dispute the common sense of this explanation ?”
Antipater looked troubled.
Simon continued : “But just as the Calebites of Ephrath were later swallowed up by their allies the Benjamites, so were those of Hebron by their allies the Judaeans ; and a century or two after Hebron had been incorporated in the Jewish Kingdom by David the Calebite—for David traced his descent from Hur—the tribal genealogy was adjusted to make Caleb a descendant of Judah, and by a further interpolation Kenaz, the eponymous ancestor of the Kenizzites, was absurdly reckoned a son of Caleb. The Calebites, however, still obstinately regarded themselves as Kenizzites, and Children of Edom. The unfavourable Judaic view of this tribe’s history is expressed by the Chronicler in the names of the children begotten by Caleb on Azubah Jerioth : namely, ‘Upright’, ‘Backsliding’ and ‘Destruction’. It is clear that they resisted all attempts to make them conform with changes in the Jewish faith, and being still a tented people they avoided the Babylonian Captivity by escaping in a body to Edom, whence they soon afterwards returned with an armed following of Edomites. Moreover, one of their clans, that of Salma, went on to reoccupy Ephrath. The Salma chieftain married the priestess of Bethlehem, and you, Prince, are lineally descended in the elder line from this chieftain.”
Antipater took another handful of almonds and began arranging them in five-pointed stars. He said slowly : “I cannot disprove your argument, but I am loth indeed to think that there are interpolations in the Scriptures.”