The Source

  “Would you like to visit the girls?” the Cypriot singer asked.

  “Me? I’m married,” and he began to describe his wife while the innkeeper and the guards listened. “She is about this tall and more gentle than a breeze blowing in from the sea. All things that are beautiful she cherishes, so today I bought her this.” With fumbling fingers he unwrapped the length of braided glass and in the flickering light the eighteen multicolored strands were as beautiful as the woman for whom they were intended.

  “I have the best wife in the world,” he said with maudlin sentiment, “and the best friend, too, even though he is a Moabite. And let me tell you this! A lot of you people say unkind things about Moabites. They fight. They’re hard to govern. They attack you when you’re not … But let me tell you this. I trust my Moabite so much that on the day …”

  The two groats merchants from Makor came looking for him, and the Phoenicians said, “Better take the little fellow home.” And the Hebrews steadied him while he tried to straighten his legs.

  As the merchants walked him along the waterfront where ships rode at anchor in the bay, Hoopoe looked with poorly focusing eyes and knew only that the night was beautiful. “I was digging in that tunnel a long time,” he mumbled to the merchants, and he began to resent the fact that Meshab the Moabite had not been allowed to visit Accho with him. “He should be here,” he began to shout. “He did more than half the work.” He was willing to defend the merit of all Moabites, but his knees crumpled and he spoke no more.

  During the week that Hoopoe lingered in Accho work in the tunnels progressed, and in some ways, Meshab thought, it was providential that the fat little builder was absent, for Meshab could now go first to his own rock face and listen for sounds from the well end, then around to the well, where he was free to enter Hoopoe’s tunnel and listen to echoes coming from the shaft, and because the sounds grew stronger he was able to determine his location exactly and to modify slightly the direction of Hoopoe’s tunnel so that the two would meet as planned. Had Hoopoe been present it might have been embarrassing when it was discovered that his tunnel was definitely off target. However, when the Moabite saw again the short distance between the guide strings at Hoopoe’s end, he marveled that the Hebrew had been able to orient his tunnel at all. “The man’s a little genius,” Meshab told the crew. “He must be able to smell his way through rock.” And each day the sounds from one tunnel to the other became more distinct and the sense of excitement in the dark spaces increased.

  It had been Meshab’s custom, when his day’s work was done, to climb out of the shaft, check the tree to be sure it was still in line, flick the two strings to see that they hung freely, then climb the parapets to inspect the waterwall, which would soon be torn down when the silent tunnel that lay beneath was functioning. Then he would wipe his face and go to the house of Jabaal the Hoopoe that stood beside the shaft. There, in a rear room separated from the rest of the building, he would wash away the dirt and put on a robe which he had salvaged from the disaster in Moab. In heavy sandals he would sit for a while, contemplating the day when the tunnel would be finished and he would leave it a freedman. The years of his captivity had been tedious, but he had discharged them with dignity, remaining loyal to his god and dedicated to the future of his people. Often, when night was upon the town, he would walk in his Moabite robe slowly through the streets, out the gate and across the road to the slave camp, where he shared the noisome scraps served his men, trying by his example to keep the slaves inspirited; but on the morning Hoopoe had left for Accho, the little engineer had said, “Meshab, I want you to take your evening meals with Kerith,” but this the slave was unwilling to do, lest it bring Hoopoe in ridicule, and on the first evening he ate in the slave camp.

  On the second evening a slave girl came knocking on Meshab’s door, with the message: “The mistress has more food than she can consume and wonders if you would care for some.” Putting on his Moabite robe he went forward to the main part of the house, where Kerith greeted him kindly and they shared the evening meal.

  In Moab he had been a man of some importance, owning fields and wine presses. “In not too many months I shall be back with my own people,” he told Kerith.

  “How much more digging is there to do?” she asked.

  “The little tunnels should meet … this month perhaps. We’ll see how they match up and then enlarge them into the real tunnel”—he showed her how their system would permit adjustments in any necessary direction, up, down or sideways—“unless we’re too far apart in some direction, and I don’t think we are.”

  “It’s very clever,” she said.

  “Your husband is the clever one,” Meshab informed her. “I could go elsewhere now and dig another tunnel like this one, but I could never have foreseen the many little problems …” He laughed. “I’m telling you things you don’t need to know,” he added.

  “When you go back to Moab, will your family …” She hesitated.

  “My wife and children were killed during a Hebrew raid. That’s why I fought so desperately. In a way, I’m surprised that your people let me live. Do you remember when General Amram saw me …” He noticed that she blushed shyly at the name of the Hebrew general and he recalled the contempt he had felt when he thought her involved in some way with the visitor, but he said nothing. He was forty-eight years old now and had seen much of life. He had learned that among the hot-blooded Hebrews it was a rare family that did not in the course of years experience some violent cascade of emotion; the stories men told at night of how their ancestors had lived, or of what King Saul or King David had done in his youth summarized the Hebrews. They were a mercurial people, running through a man’s hand like quicksilver, never fully to be grasped, and if Hoopoe’s pretty wife had been somehow engaged with General Amram, that was her problem. Hoopoe and Kerith were contented now, and he liked them both.

  “Do you think that when the tunnel is finished …” Kerith interrupted herself. “Well, you’ll be a free man then and you can go back to Moab. But Hoopoe … Do you think he might be invited to Jerusalem?”

  So that was it! Now Meshab understood what had happened. Kerith had longed to go to the capital. Why? Was it because Jerusalem was where decisions were made and where men and women of importance gathered? She had ingratiated herself with General Amram in hopes that he would further her wish, and the man had been killed in battle, ending that approach. The big Moabite smiled. It was nothing very serious when a woman wanted to be where she wasn’t, nor was it permanently reprehensible if she tried to further her own and her husband’s ambitions in the one practical way she had at her disposal. He had always liked this good-looking Hebrew woman, and now he appreciated her even more—but with a touch of amused condescension.

  “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

  “You remind me so much of myself,” he said.

  “I?”

  “As a boy I longed to see other lands. The deserts of Moab were quite dull and I used to dream about Egypt or the sea or Jerusalem, the Jebusite capital. Finally I got to see Jerusalem.”

  “You did?” Kerith asked eagerly, bending forward across the low table.

  “Yes. On a rainy day I was marched up a steep hill with a yoke about my neck, and if the king had recognized who I was, I would have been killed. I saw Jerusalem. Kerith, be careful you don’t see it at the same expense.”

  “Are you saying that I ought not to long for such things?”

  “I’m saying that after I had seen Jerusalem with a yoke about my neck I realized that if the second part of my dream had come true, my wish to be on the sea, it would have come only if I were a slave chained to some Phoenician ship. A man can see Jerusalem any time he wishes. It depends upon the kind of yoke he’s willing to accept.”

  “I will see it. On my terms,” she said.

  On the third night Meshab was again invited to have his supper in the front part of the house, and on each succeeding night. He and Kerith discussed many things and he a
wakened to the fact that she was an exceedingly intelligent woman. Some of her chance remarks about General Amram—his arrogance, his vanity regarding victories over tribes that had owned few weapons—led him to believe that she was now able to assess her former actions, whatever they had been, rather honestly. But he also discovered that if any stranger were now to enter Makor with a more visionary attitude toward life, he could surely win this woman, for in a sad and passive kind of way she was weary of Makor and he guessed that she was weary of her good-natured husband, too.

  “If Bathsheba succeeds in making Solomon your next king,” he told her on the fourth night, “it’s supposed that he’ll try to build Jerusalem into a rival of Tyre and Nineveh. I’m sure that if that’s the case, a builder as diligent as Hoopoe will find a welcome.”

  “Are you?” she pleaded, and after a while she turned the conversation to Moab, asking Meshab if life there was similar to Makor’s, and he described the beautiful upland valleys that lay to the east of the Dead Sea.

  “We always fought with the Hebrews,” he explained, “and I’m sure we always will.” He told her the enchanting story of his countrywoman Ruth, who had left Moab to become the wife of a Hebrew. “This made her the great-grandmother of your King David,” he added.

  “I didn’t know that!” Kerith said, leaning her head back as she tried to visualize this unlikely story.

  “So David’s really a Moabite,” Meshab said, “and at the same time our most cruel enemy.”

  “David? Cruel?” A slave had spoken disparagingly of her king and she felt insulted.

  “Have you not heard? When he first conquered the Moabites he caused all prisoners to kneel before him on the battlefield and we were numbered One, Two, Three, each man with one of those numbers.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then David sent his soldiers among us, unarmed as we were, and all prisoners numbered One and Two were slain.”

  In the silence Kerith asked in a kind of fascinated horror, “And you were Three?”

  “No, I was Two, but as the soldiers were about to slay me David stopped them and asked, ‘Is this not Meshab the leader of the Moabites?’ And when he found that I was, he said, ‘He shall not be slain. He is brave and shall become my general,’ and he asked me, ‘Will you accept Yahweh and become a freedman?’ and I said, ‘I live and die with Baal.’ His face grew dark with rage and I thought he would kill me then, but he ground his teeth and cried, ‘No matter. He’s a brave man. Set him free.’ And with my freedom I rallied my defeated people and during an honorable foray I tried to overwhelm the tents of the Hebrew generals. It was then I killed the brother of Amram.”

  “That first day Amram said he had wanted to destroy you with his own hands. Why didn’t he?”

  “Because David had once offered me sanctuary. Instead of death, Amram gave me slavery.”

  She sighed and turned to other matters. “The other day the governor said that David might come north to see the water system. Tell me, is there a chance he would take Hoopoe south with him?”

  “Possibly.” The Moabite wished he could say something that would calm this impatient woman, but all he could think of was, “Jerusalem with a yoke around your neck is nothing to yearn for.”

  “I shall not be going with such a yoke,” she said firmly.

  “You’re burdened with it already,” he said. “A far heavier one than I wore that day.”

  On the fifth and sixth nights they met again, talking till the middle watch, and the big Moabite again felt a desire to remove the hunger that was endangering Hoopoe’s wife, and on the last night he said, “Kerith, is it possible that you fail to see what a great man your husband is, no matter whether he stays here or goes to Jerusalem?”

  “No one thinks of Hoopoe as a great man,” she replied.

  “I do. When it looked as if our tunnels were not going to meet, he took the blame upon himself. Even though he was the master and I the slave.”

  “He’s honest,” she granted. “But his name Hoopoe tells the story.” She laughed pleasantly, and not in derision. “He’s a dear man, and we all love him. I, too,” she added. “But in the past three years I have discovered that he is not the kind of man kings call to Jerusalem. And I am afraid.”

  “Remember the story of what your god Yahweh said not far from here? ‘Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature. Yahweh seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but Yahweh looketh on the heart.’ ”

  Kerith accepted the rebuke but did not respond to it, for the slave’s mention of Yahweh diverted her attention and caused her to ask, “Meshab, why not accept Yahweh now and become a freedman?”

  “I will not turn my back on Baal of the Moabites,” the slave said, and this reiteration of faith, evoking in Kerith’s mind the misery of the slave camp, had a profound effect upon her and she asked in a hushed voice, “You would endure that camp?” She shivered at her recollection of it. “For how many years?”

  “Seven.”

  She bowed her head in recognition of a man who would accept such humiliation and filth rather than deny his god, but next evening toward sundown her thoughts were brought back to Hoopoe, for he came stumbling home at the end of a six-day drunk. He had walked the distance from Accho and was unkempt, dusty and chuckling to himself, He had walked because the Phoenician officials had become so attached to him that when he left Accho they gave him not only all the iron tools he had paid for but another portion as well, and he had deemed it preferable that the donkey haul these tools rather than himself. At the guard post he had forgotten to reclaim his dagger, for there he and the guards had finished his last jug of beer and had sung songs from Sidon, but in its place he had a beautiful Cypriot sword, given him by the governor of Accho, and two iron spearheads. He was relaxed and happy, and when he pushed his donkey through the gate he dumped off the cargo in front of the governor’s quarters, bowed to that official and staggered home to his wife. But as soon as he had washed up and cleared his head he called for Meshab, and the two men climbed down the shaft, where Hoopoe scrambled into the face of the rock to hear with startling clarity the night crew at the other facing, and he looked back at the Moabite with joy showing across his bearded face.

  “You were on the exact heading!” he said with generous approval, but when they climbed down into the well and started into that tunnel he saw at once the sharp correction Meshab had made in his absence. He crawled to the facing rock, listened to the hammers in the other tunnel and realized how far off course he had been and how Meshab’s intervention had protected him from what would have been a conspicuous error. He embraced the Moabite and said, “As we broaden the tunnel we can smooth out the bump and no one will ever know,” and when they had retreated back to the well he pledged his gratitude: “When your chisel penetrates that last rock, you’re a free man.” And he scrambled out of the well and ran home to tell Kerith, pointing to one of the baked tablets and saying, “What we scratched on clay three years ago we’ve dug in solid rock.” Pushing the tablet aside he hugged Kerith and cried with sheer joy, “Jerusalem is yours.” He kissed her many times and whispered, “It was for you I dug the tunnel.” He was about to lead her to their bedroom when he thought of an important responsibility, and he banged on the wall to attract Meshab’s attention.

  “Let’s take the new tools down to the men right now. That’s why I went to Accho,” and before he went to bed he saw to it that his slaves got the sharp new tools for cutting away the last of the intervening rock.

  Late in the month of Ethanim, at the end of the hot season in the third year, when early rains began and plowing and sowing were possible, it became obvious that within a few days the two teams would meet, but the relative positions of the approaching tunnels could not yet be determined; almost certainly one would be higher than the other, or off to one side, but there seemed little doubt that at least part of the two openings would coincide and that subsequent corrections could be easily made. Excitement
grew and even the governor got into old sandals and crawled along the little tunnel, gaining for himself a sense of the wonder that had been accomplished: each man had dug for nearly a hundred and forty feet through solid rock, relying upon the most primitive surveying equipment, and were about to meet as planned, within a tolerance of two feet in any direction.

  On what would be the last day Hoopoe tried to mask his excitement, and he refused to be the man at the facing when the puncture was made. He chose an ordinary slave who had done good work and sent him crawling in with his sledge while he remained in the well cave, looking at the sweet water which would bubble quietly to the surface for the next two thousand years as women came along with their water jars. His work had made the future existence of Makor possible; and since he was deep in the earth, working with the earth, he prayed to the god who controlled that earth: “Sweet Baal, you have brought me face to face with my friend Meshab. Hidden from the eyes of others, you have brought us together, and the triumph is yours.”

  “Hoopoe!” the men in the tunnel began calling. Shouts of joy echoed through the cave and reverberated across the surface of the water. “Hoopoe!” The voices became confused and men backed out of the tunnel, their eyes filled with tears.