The Source

by James A. Michener

  “His whole family does, and for him to go to Jerusalem, or for his daughter to dance at the festival, is offensive.”

  “Are you warning me against Mikal?” he asked abruptly.

  “Yes. Our town has many excellent Hebrew girls, loyal to Yahweh.” She was strongly impelled to advise him that he had been chosen by Yahweh for some austere purpose, that it was imperative for him to make his peace in all ways with Yahweh, but she could not do this, for she had no conception of what mission he had been called upon to serve. She therefore gave the limpest of all arguments: “Have you considered marrying Geula? She comes from an old priestly family.”

  At that moment they were heading through the worst part of the swamp, and at the mention of Geula’s name Rimmon made an ugly face, which angered his mother and she berated him: “Geula may not be beautiful, but she knows virtue, and it is not proper to make faces at a girl of marked devotion.” Rimmon stopped this argument by saying, “I was making faces at the water snake that slipped from the rock,” and his mother grew silent and moved closer to him, for the nearness of a poisonous snake was frightening when she knew that her son had been singled out for some austere purpose.

  When they cleared the swamp and climbed to higher ground they saw ahead of them the broken walls of Makor, and each compared that poor town with the grandeur of Jerusalem, and they saw for themselves what a miserable place it was; the invading armies had destroyed so much. Where eight hundred people had lived inside the walls in comfortable houses during King David’s time, fewer than five hundred now lived in near-poverty. The rich fields outside, which had supported nine hundred farmers, had now only a hundred peasants who never knew when the next marauder would burn their crops and carry them off to slavery. These were dreadful years in Galilee, during which Makor sustained the smallest population of its long history, but Gomer suspected that evil of greater magnitude lay ahead. It must have been for this reason that Yahweh had spoken to her in the tunnel, charging her with the task of preparing her son for the trials that faced the Hebrews, and now, as she returned to the town which had brought her such little happiness, she clutched his hand and headed for the main gate, unaware that the test would fall not upon him but on her.

  Against his mother’s wishes Rimmon married Mikal, and against Gomer’s own wishes she soon had to confess what a pleasing girl the governor’s daughter was: laughing and beautiful, Mikal quickly proved that she was going to make Rimmon an excellent wife; she brought him a dowry larger than he could have expected and she prevailed upon her father to let him run the olive grove, not as foreman but as co-owner. She moved into the bleak house by the postern gate, sewed the necessary clothes, and then gave testimony of her love for Rimmon that no governor’s daughter was required to give. One morning as Gomer lifted the water jug onto her head preparatory to the long descent and longer walk through the dark tunnel, Mikal took down the jug and said, “From now on I shall fetch the water.”

  The tired old woman looked down at the bright face, so hopeful in the morning light and so satisfied with the child that was growing near her heart, and Gomer said, “Today you have brought me rubies,” and she bent down and for the first time kissed her daughter and continued, “The only remaining thing I can do for my son is going to the well.” She carried the jug herself, but each morning young Mikal would watch for the moment when her mother started for the well, and she would lift the jug and say, “Now I shall fetch the water,” and each morning old Gomer would refuse the offer, but her heart was overcome that her daughter had again volunteered.

  Then came the days of terror. Out of the south, eastward of Megiddo, appeared the great army of the Pharaoh Necho, with men by the thousands and chariots whose dust obscured the sun, with generals in pleated tunics and foot soldiers burdened with spears. Fanning out swiftly in all directions the army occupied crossroads and villages and even walled towns.

  “We are going north to crush Babylon forever,” the armed emissaries told Governor Jeremoth, “and from Makor we require two hundred men and their supplies. By sunset tonight.”

  A cry of protest went up from the town, and when Jeremoth was reluctant to identify which men must go, the Egyptians did the job for him. Throwing a cordon about the town they first marched off everyone living outside the walls. When Jeremoth protested that these were the farmers who fed the town, the Egyptian general shouted up at him, “When you begin to starve, your women will find the fields. You have five daughters. You’ll eat.”

  They then searched the houses and picked every man who looked as if he could walk a hundred miles. At Gomer’s they grabbed Rimmon as a prize soldier and told him on the spot that he was to be a captain of the Hebrews, and before he could say good-bye to his mother or his wife they had him outside the walls, where they began immediately to give him orders. He started to protest that he would not lead his Hebrews against the Babylonians, but he did not finish. An Egyptian soldier—not even an officer—struck him across the neck with a war mace and he fell unconscious to the ground.

  From the wall his mother saw her son fall and she thought he was killed. Like an ordinary woman struck with terror she wanted to whimper softly, but an outside power took possession of her throat and from the walls she pointed with a long right arm and an extended forefinger. Her hair blew in the evening wind and her figure seemed to increase in its gaunt height, losing its stoop, and from her throat came for the first time a voice of extraordinary power, echoing across the town and into the hearts of the Egyptian invaders:

  “O men of Egypt! Too long have you tormented the children of Yahweh, too long. You march north to battle which hyenas and vultures will long celebrate as they tear at your bones. You proud generals in pleated tunics, at the great battle your eyes will be put out and you will spend your years in darkness, toiling for the Babylonians. You insolent charioteers in armor, your horses shall drag you through cinders, and rocks of the field will clutch at your brains. You priests who accompany the mighty force to give it sanction, how you will dream of Thebes and Memphis”—if Gomer could have heard her words she would have been perplexed, for she knew nothing of Thebes or Memphis—“how you will dream of Egypt when you toil in the slave pits of Babylon. And you, Pharaoh Necho, ride north with your banners flying and the wheels of your chariot churning dust. But you ride in vain, for Egypt is lost.”

  Her words shattered in the air like spears striking rock, and an Egyptian captain, seeing their effect on his troops, shouted, “Silence that foolish woman,” so that Governor Jeremoth himself ran to her and shook her; and when she regained her senses she saw that Rimmon was not dead but had risen and was doing as the Egyptians wished, and thus the army moved northward, picking up whole towns and nations as it went, preparing itself for the day when it must face the Babylonians. As an ordinary woman Gomer watched her son disappear, then sought the consolation of her daughter Mikal, and they joined the other bereft women along the wall, looking eastward to where eddies of dust marked the latest desolation to visit Makor.

  • • • THE TELL

  In the kibbutz mess hall Cullinane was always amused, when the subject of women arose, to see how vigorously his Jewish friends argued that in their religion women were treated as equals. One night before Vered left for Chicago she had said, “No religion in the world treats women with more regard than Judaism,” and Eliav added, “Our religion reveres them.”

  “If there ever was a case of protesting too much,” Cullinane said, “this is it.”

  “What do you mean?” Vered snapped.

  “I can only judge by four things,” the Irishman said defensively. “What the Torah says. What the Talmud says. What I see. And what I hear.”

  “What have you seen?” Vered asked.

  “I’ve been going to synagogues a good deal,” Cullinane replied, “and in the new ones, if women want to attend they have to sit in a balcony behind a curtain. At older ones, like the Vodzher Rebbe’s, there’s no place for them at all.”

  “Women p
refer it that way,” Eliav insisted.

  “Not from what I overhear from the tourists at the dig,” Cullinane said. “American Jewish women tell me, ‘I’d refuse to be tucked away in a balcony behind lattices.’ And even the men say, ‘When I go to worship I want to sit with my family.’ ”

  On this matter the testimony of the Torah was clear. Women under Judaism were treated no worse than Near Eastern women in general: deplored at birth, endured in adolescence, married off as soon as possible, discriminated against in law and subjected to misery if they became unwanted widows. Numerous were the Biblical texts in which some Old Testament hero rejoiced at the news he was the father of a son, and one of the morning prayers recited by men included the passage: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast not made me a woman.”

  The sixty-three tractates of the Talmud developed each of these themes: “Happy is he whose children are male and woe to him whose children are female.” In passage after passage this massive body of Jewish teaching admonished against the dangers of the female. “Talk not overmuch with women, even with one’s own wife,” read one passage, to which Maimonides himself added the gloss: “It is known that for the most part conversation with women has to do with sexual matters, and by such talk a man brings evil upon himself.” The Talmud specifically directed that women must not be taught to read religious works, and often during the dig Israeli religious newspapers carried reports of resolutions drawn up by one group of fanatics or another: “It is the function of Jewish girls to marry at seventeen and have children as quickly as possible.”

  One night the English photographer appeared at dinner with a passage from the Talmud which summarized the ideal Jewish wife. “She was married to the famous Rabbi Akiba. She found him when he was forty years old, an illiterate peasant. She married him and sent him to the yeshiva, where he lived apart and studied while she worked to earn their living. At the end of twelve years he returned home one night to tell her that he must do more studying, so she sent him back for another twelve years and kept her job. After twenty-four years he finally came home, but she was so old and decrepit that his followers tried to throw her aside as a beggar and, I quote, ‘the great Rabbi Akiba allowed her to come forward and kiss his feet, saying to his followers, “All that is mine or yours comes from her.” ’ ”

  Vered was angry. “Don’t forget that when the judges were weak, Deborah rallied the Jewish people in battle against General Sisera.”

  “When was that?” the Englishman asked.

  “1125 B.C.E.”

  Eliav said with more restraint, “And there was Huldah the Prophetess, who was of critical significance in getting Deuteronomy accepted as the core of Jewish faith.”

  “When did she live?” the photographer asked.

  “621 B.C.E.”

  “Isn’t it strange,” Cullinane asked, “that whenever we get on this topic you cite two women who lived more than twenty-five hundred years ago …”

  “What about Beruriah?” Vered cried. None of the Gentiles had heard of her. “Or Golda Meir?”

  “My point,” Cullinane said, “is that the Catholic church showed real capacity in finding places for women like Saint Theresa and Catherine of Siena. A sect of Protestants did the same with Mary Baker Eddy. In Judaism this doesn’t happen.”

  Vered was eager to reply. “As little girls we play a game in which we ask, ‘Why were women made from Adam’s rib?’ ” And she could still recite the answer: “God deliberated from which part of man to create woman. He said, ‘I must not create her from the head that she should not carry herself haughtily; nor from the eye that she should not be too inquisitive; nor from the ear that she should not be an eavesdropper; nor from the mouth that she should not be too talkative; nor from the heart that she should not be too jealous; nor from the hand that she should not be too acquisitive; nor from the foot that she should not be a gadabout; but from a hidden part of the body that she should be modest.’ ”

  “I am impressed,” Eliav said, “that in religions which do as Cullinane wants, female unhappiness is so great, whereas we Jews go pleasantly along with little divorce, little prostitution and less neuroticism.”

  “Everyone knows that a Jew makes the best husband in the world,” Vered said.

  “You have no feeling of being left out?”

  “We Jewish girls get what we want,” she insisted. “A home, a family, a secure haven. Public praying in the synagogue? That’s for men.”

  The more Cullinane heard on this matter—and it came up at many dinners—the more correct he found Vered to be, in a thirteenth-century sense. In primitive societies it was man’s job to placate the gods and woman’s to keep the home, but this was dangerously close to the Germanic ideal of Kaiser, Kinder, Küche. He was willing to concede Eliav’s point, that one of the reasons why Judaism had been so strong internally was its subtle relationship between the sexes, but he could not forget that Christianity overwhelmed Judaism partly because of its emotional appeal to women. Judaism was a religion for men, Cullinane said to himself. Christianity for women.

  Now, with Vered gone, he thought increasingly about women and it was often he who raised the question in the dining hall. Tabari held that Arabs had the best attitude: “My father once said he never wore a new shoe until he had limbered it up three times over the head of his fourth wife. You Americans have ruined the relationship between the sexes, and Israel would be ill-advised to follow your example.”

  “Actually,” Eliav added, “Israel has an excellent approach. You’ve seen our bright young girls in the army.”

  “I’ve also seen the statements of the religious groups. ‘Every honest girl is married by seventeen.’ ”

  “The nutty fringe,” Eliav commented.

  “Do you also dismiss the desire of American Jews for their women to join them in synagogue?”

  Tabari interrupted. “It’s the same in Islam. Women are free to enter the mosque if they sit apart and shut up. I think they prefer it that way.”

  “Wait till some kind of reform Judaism hits this land,” Cullinane forecast. “You’ll find one million Israeli women behaving just like Russian women and American women.”

  “You forget two points,” Eliav said. “Have you read any recent studies on circumcision? How it eliminates some kinds of female cancer? How it insures better sexual relations in that it decreases man’s sexuality somewhat but increases his ability to perform well when he does?”

  “I never found that circumcision slowed me down,” Tabari reported.

  “Are Muslims circumcised?” Cullinane asked.

  “Of course. Besides, we Arabs are Semitic.”

  “My second point,” Eliav continued, “is an ugly one to bring up. But throughout two thousand years the religious loyalty of Jewish women has been tested many times, in the most horrible ways men can devise. They’ve been burned alive, thrown into ovens, torn apart … Invariably the most faithful Jews have been our women. They like their religion as it is.”

  “And they’ll continue, until a reform movement hits the land,” Cullinane said.

  “Don’t you believe it,” Eliav replied. “Judaism has always provided a special place for women. You take Deborah …”

  “Please! Not somebody three thousand years old.”

  “All right, Golda Meir.”

  “Making her Foreign Minister was one of the smartest things Israel has done,” Cullinane granted. “Gives the men an example to point to for the next three thousand years.”

  • • •

  In the long months of the dry season when the Egyptians were moving into position to crush the Babylonians permanently, so that the land between the rivers might know peace, Gomer and her daughter Mikal managed to construct a life for themselves which, if not pleasant, was at least endurable. As the Egyptian general had predicted, with the farm families gone and all men of working age conscripted, it did not take long for the women of Makor to find their way into the fields, where they worke
d like animals to gather what little food had been left by the marauders. Mikal, as the daughter of the governor, could have escaped this drudgery—her four sisters did—but even though she was pregnant she felt that she must work with Gomer.

  Each morning she volunteered to fetch the water, and each morning Gomer refused her offer, for two reasons. She knew that if she were ever to hear the voice again it would come to her within the depths of the tunnel; she therefore climbed down the dizzy spiral, along the damp passageway to the well, where a small clay lamp reflected its light from the surface of the water, and then back up the slope, waiting for the voice. But the more important reason was that she wished to protect Mikal. This fetching of water was not easy, for the stone steps which the slaves of Jabaal the Hoopoe had dug three hundred and sixty-one years before had been used each day by at least a hundred women—which meant that more than thirteen million trips had been made so far—and these had worn pockets in the stones so that every step had to be taken with care lest the woman slip sideways, lose her balance and pitch headlong down the shaft. Old women and pregnant ones ofttimes lost their lives in this way, and Gomer felt that she, as one who had trod the tunnel for fifty years, could better protect herself than a pregnant young girl whose father had never required her to draw water. So each day Gomer went to the well, praising Yahweh that he had sent her absent son such a wife.

  Only one thing disturbed her about Mikal: the girl followed the traditions of Canaan and often climbed to the high place where she worshiped Baal. And as the time approached when her child must be delivered, she stopped working the fields and consulted with the priestesses of Astarte, asking them what she must do. In the little temple which stood over the site of the original monolith to El, three sacred prostitutes lived, their services rarely needed in these mournful days when men were gone. They were pleasant girls and they knew the sacred rites for delivering babies, so that when the days of Mikal were completed she went not to Gomer and the Hebrew midwives but to the priestesses, who delivered her of a fine boy whom she named Ishbaal, signifying that he was a man of Baal.