The Source

by James A. Michener

He turned his head away from the carnage to look once more upon that small town on the hill where he had been so happy. The walls were coming down and in all quarters there was flame.

  LEVEL

  VII

  The Law

  Originally a stone lintel above the west door of the entrance to a synagogue, with decorations as shown on top: two groups of vines, leaves and bunches of grapes, beside two date palms, all symbolizing the richness of the Galilee; in the center a small four-wheeled flat wagon bearing the holy Ark of the Covenant, an acacia box containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. The ark was carried by the Jews on their forty-year march from Mount Sinai to the promised land. Captured in war by the Philistines, it brought them only evil until they voluntarily returned it. Brought by King David to Jerusalem, finally placed by King Solomon in the temple, from which it vanished at the time of the Babylonian destruction. Carved in white limestone, Makor, 335 C.E., reused in 352 C.E. as part of the southwestern façade of a Byzantine basilica and recarved in that year by the original artist with three Christian crosses. Deposited at Makor March 26, 1291, during the destruction of the Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene.

  Jesus Christ was born, so far as we know, in the summer of 6 B.C.E., that being sometime before the death of King Herod the Great. Jesus lived his early life in Nazareth, only sixteen miles south of Makor, and conducted his principal ministry, which covered a span of one year and nine months, along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, only eighteen miles to the east. He never came to Makor and about April 7, 30 C.E., was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman who then served as Procurator of Judaea.

  It may be surprising, therefore, to know that it was not until the year 59 C.E. that the name of Jesus Christ, the good neighbor of Makor, was first mentioned in that little town; but upon reflection this is not so remarkable. In the turbulent years of Christ’s mission on earth there were many young Jews wandering up and down the Galilee. Some, like General Josephus, tried merely to rally their people to resistance against Rome, and their motives were military. Others sought to convince the Jews that an independent government was needed, and their intentions were political. Some wandered from one community to the next, preaching stern systems for the redemption or reconstruction of Judaism, and their dreams were religious. And some went from town to town prophesying the coming of one messiah or another. A few of these latter had reached Makor, on the edge of the Jewish lands, but the rabbi Jesus was not among them.

  Nor was it unusual that the town had not heard about His crucifixion on a hill outside Jerusalem, for that event was in no way unusual; one Jewish king had crucified eight hundred of his subjects on one afternoon while getting drunk with his concubines on a public platform in the middle of Jerusalem, to which his guests had been invited to enjoy the spectacle. In recent years King Herod had crucified a multitude of Jews, while lesser Roman officials had also used this traditional punishment with harsh frequency. Furthermore, the major contacts of a frontier town like Makor were never with Jerusalem or Nazareth, nor even with the settlements along the Sea of Galilee; they had to be with Ptolemais, that alien port so near at hand yet almost always in the grip of strangers who followed exotic religions. Thus, when Makor was Egyptian, Akka had belonged to the Sea People. When Makor was part of David’s kingdom, Accho was Phoenician. When Makor was ruled by Herod, Ptolemais was held by Cleopatra. And in the time of Christ, when Makor was governed by the procurators of Judaea, Ptolemais belonged to whatever Roman puppets controlled Syria. Makor had to worry about Ptolemais, not Jerusalem.

  Yet it was because of Ptolemais, that ancient, ancient seaport to which triremes from Athens and hippos from Tyre had always sailed, that Makor finally heard of Jesus Christ. In the spring of 59 C.E., when the crucified prophet had been all but forgotten even in areas which had known Him well, a Roman corn ship came down from Puteoli and Piraeus to drop anchor in the fish-hook harbor of Tyre, where the captain gave deck space to a frail, baldheaded man in his sixties seeking passage to Caesarea; and next day, when the vessel had wandered down the coast a short distance to the snug harbor of Ptolemais, the traveler took advantage of the unexpected layover to go ashore and harangue any Jews who might be lounging along the waterfront. And among his chance audience at the port that day had been that same Yigal of Makor who had some years before offered his life in this city to halt the advance of General Petronius and the Roman statues, and it was by this accident that Yigal became the first resident of Makor to hear the message of Jesus Christ.

  In heavily accented Hebrew the speaker had said with some pride that he was Paul of Tarsus, “a city of more than half a million lying to the north,” and he explained to the Jews of Ptolemais that although he was a free Roman citizen he was also a Jew, a Pharisee of strict education, but that a greater Jew than he had taught in Galilee and had shown men how the old preaching must give way to the new, how the law must be fulfilled outside the synagogue, and how the salvation of the human soul could be attained by following in His steps.

  Paul spoke with clarity, relying upon reason to persuade his listeners. As he stood in the open air, a small man with bandy legs and a great hooked nose that sprang from the point where his thick eyebrows met, he showed signs of nervous exhaustion, as if time were slipping through his fingers; he had much to relate that day in Ptolemais, and the dull indifference of Jews like Yigal, who stood with his hands folded behind his back, trying to calculate what the visitor was trying to say, seemed to infuriate the baldheaded stranger, and he spoke with terrible persuasiveness. He explained to the Jews that they had a chance now, on this sunny day in Ptolemais, to receive into their hearts the man who had been crucified to save the world.

  “Was not this Jesus a rabbi?” a Phoenician Jew asked.

  “His disciples called Him such,” Paul replied.

  “Our rab is good enough for us,” the indifferent man said, and Paul did not bother to argue with him. Instead, he turned his back upon the Jews, and looking toward the sea as if he were addressing the world, explained in tempestuous Greek phrases the tenets of the new religion: “Why is there evil in the world? Because we are born in sin. How can we be saved? Because Jesus Christ, through His crucifixion, takes our sin upon His shoulders.” For some moments he addressed his impassioned oratory to Yigal, who felt a tingle down his spine as this Jewish convert to Jesus spoke of the new world of Christ in which the law of Moses was fulfilled. But Yigal mastered his excitement. He could not be attracted permanently to any religion that had abandoned Judaism, heading for new directions which he could not foresee, so he left the meeting in Ptolemais and returned to Makor. For some few days the words of Paul of Tarsus disturbed him, and for a while he thought of discussing them with Rab Naaman, but he did not do so; and as we have seen, eight years later in 67 C.E. he was caught up in struggles against the might of Rome and was himself crucified not far from Nazareth—at about the time that Paul was being beheaded for somewhat similar reasons in Rome.

  But if Makor was slow to acknowledge the reality of Jesus Christ, the time came when His presence reached the little town with persuasive grace. In the year 313 the Roman emperor Constantine had seen on the eve of a vital battle near Rome a fiery cross bearing the promise “In hoc signo vinces,” and when that prophecy proved true, he had by decree ordained Christianity to be the religion of the whole Roman empire, one of the most fateful single acts ever performed by one man. And in 325 he encouraged his mother, an extraordinary woman, to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to see if she could identify the places where Jesus had lived three centuries earlier.

  Queen Helena had known an uneven life: a free-and-easy waitress in a Bulgarian inn, she had married a passing soldier, and when he was later offered the Caesarship it was on condition that he abandon his wife and find another more suitable, and to this he agreed. In her loneliness Queen Helena had discovered the consolations of Christianity and had encouraged her pagan friends to do the same; and when her son assumed the purple she moved fro
m obscurity to prominence, so that her pilgrimage to the Holy Land was an event of significance. While sleeping in Jerusalem she had a vision much like her son’s: she saw the precise location not only of the cross on which Christ died but also of the sepulcher in which the body of Jesus had lain for two days. In subsequent visions she identified most of the other sacred spots, and over each one her son caused a basilica to be erected, which would serve as the focus of pilgrimages for as long as men loved Christ.

  In 326 Queen Helena disembarked at Ptolemais to begin the overland trip to the Sea of Galilee, hoping to identify there the scenes where Jesus had preached, and once more her visions supplied the answers. “This must be the place where our Lord fed the multitude with two fishes and five loaves,” she announced, and a basilica was built. “I feel sure that on this spot Jesus must have delivered his Sermon on the Mount,” she said, and a second church was ordained. From oblivion she rescued those places that would become cherished throughout Christendom, and on her way back from her discoveries she stopped over at Makor, a town without walls perched on a mound, and there as she slept beside the mean little Byzantine church she had a final vision: she saw that Mary Magdalene, following the Resurrection of her Lord, had found refuge in Makor, and Helena rose next morning in great excitement to announce, “Here we shall build a fine church so that pilgrims on their way to Tiberias and Capernaum may break their journey.” Guided by her vision, she led the townspeople to the exact spot where Mary Magdalene had lived, and in accordance with the curious fate that governs such matters she chose the holiest place for ten miles in any direction, that sacred point where the cave men had erected their monolith to El, where the Canaanites had worshiped Baal and the early Hebrews had prayed to El-Shaddai. Here the priests of King David had offered sacrifice to Yahweh, while Jews rescued from Babylon had prayed to YHWH. Zeus, Antiochus Epiphanes and Augustus-Jupiter had all been worshiped on this slight rise of earth, and now the great basilica of the new religion would follow in its appointed course. Queen Helena knelt on the holy spot and, when she rose, indicated where she wished the triapsidal structure to rest, unconsciously placing her altar directly above the ancient monolith.

  It was some years before the rulers in Constantinople got around to building the basilica of St. Mary Magdalene in Makor. By then the saintly old queen was dead, and she never knew whether her church of pilgrimage had been completed or not. Nor did Constantine, who died in 337, only nine years after his mother. But in the family the tradition was kept alive, and even though the descendants of Constantine warred among themselves, brother slaying brother in Roman fashion, it was always intended that their grandmother’s wish for a pilgrims’ church at Makor should be honored, so early in the year 351 the Spanish priest Eusebius convinced the rulers that the time was ripe. Consequently two ships set out from Constantinople laden with architects, slaves, stone masons and Eusebius himself. They landed at Ptolemais, and like thousands of pilgrims before them and hundreds of thousands later, started the overland march toward the Sea of Galilee, but unlike the others, when they reached the halting point at Makor they stopped permanently, which placed them within the dominion of Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi.

  In these centuries when God, through the agency of preceptors like Augustine of Hippo, Origen of Caesarea, Chrysostom of Antioch and Athanasius of Alexandria, was forging a Christian church so that it might fulfill the longing of a hungry world, He was at the same time perfecting His first religion, Judaism, so that it might stand as the permanent norm against which to judge all others. Whenever in the future some new religion strayed too far from the basic precepts of Judaism, God could be assured that it was in error; so in the Galilee, His ancient cauldron of faith, He spent as much time upon the old Jews as He did upon the new Christians.

  To build Judaism into its normative form, God had at His disposal the four great planks which His people had hacked from their desert experience and their battles with the Canaanites: the Jews finally accepted Him as the one God, supplanting all others; they worshiped His Torah; they were uplifted by the lyric outbursts of religious poets like King David and his chief musician Gershom; and periodically they reconstructed their society according to the flaming cries of true prophets like Jeremiah and the woman Gomer. But to preserve His Jews during the trials that loomed ahead, God required two additional planks, one common to many religions and one totally unique, and He was now about to create those necessary supports.

  On that sunny morning in the year 326 when Queen Helena knelt on the earth of Makor, preparing it for the spectacular growth of Christianity, the leadership of the Jews rested in a remarkable little man named Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi, known through the region as God’s Man. From the age of three he had dedicated himself to the service of YHWH and at nine had memorized the Torah; by fifteen he knew by heart the wisdom literature of his people. At sixteen, obedient to the wishes of his parents, he married a country girl whom they had selected, and although in conformance to Jewish tradition governing holy men he restricted himself to sexual intercourse on Friday nights, he quickly fathered a string of five daughters, for whose support he worked diligently. As his name ha-Garsi indicated, he made his living by the purchase of wheat which he boiled, dried and broke into small pieces, producing the cereal so much appreciated by the city residents of Ptolemais. Groats-making was hard work and involved financial risk, for the cost of raw grain could rise or fall suddenly while the price of finished groats might be moving in the opposite direction. Better than most men, Rabbi Asher the Groats Maker understood the pressures of life, and the disappointments too, for he had always wanted a son to project his name and help him in his business, but none came and his two oldest daughters had married men who would not have been helpful in any occupation other than resting; his succeeding daughters were showing no signs of doing much better.

  So the little rabbi sweated in the groats mill, worried about his hungry family, and tried to appease the Byzantine tax collectors; but his principal occupation was serving Makor as its unpaid rabbi, for in these years the Jews of the district were not rich, and it was in his conduct of this office that Rabbi Asher had gained the name God’s Man, for when members of his congregation came asking him to adjudicate their problems he first smiled at them with his sad blue eyes, which seemed to say, “You don’t have to explain about trouble to me,” then tucked his hands under his black beard, and finally said, “Before we discuss this matter, let’s agree between ourselves as to what God’s will is. If we know what He wants, we will know what we want.” In his own life he accepted without question the law as laid down in Leviticus and Numbers—Deuteronomy he held in some suspicion as being both modern and revolutionary—and he wished that his community were willing to imitate him. “It would be better if all followed the Torah,” he told his people, “but men and women are weak, so some of us Jews must set the pattern for the rest.” His gentleness had won many to a closer observance of the law, and it was recognized in Makor that in any argument which disrupted the town, if Rabbi Asher the Groats Maker could be brought into the discussion the interests of God would be represented, for even among the Christians he was known as God’s Man.

  Now, as Queen Helena prepared to leave Makor, Rabbi Asher at the groats mill wiped his hands and looked with compassion at a huge, dark-skinned man with beetling eyebrows and hulking shoulders who had come to consult him on a difficult matter. At first the little rabbi was irritated by the interruption, but he smothered these feelings and said to the big man, “We’d better talk at my house, Yohanan.”

  He led the way to a mean building where his younger girls were playing noisily. As he appeared they withdrew, leaving him a small room crowded with parchment scrolls rolled in the ancient manner and others whose leaves had been cut and bound in the new style. Shooing the children’s rooster from his alcove he took his position behind a small table while the hulking visitor, his prognathous jaw jutting out belligerently, waited.

  “Yohanan,” the groats maker said gently,
“we must first try to find what God’s will is in this matter.”

  “I want to get married,” the big man mumbled.

  “My reply must be what it was last week. Tirza is a married woman. No man may ask her to marry until we have proof … proof.”

  The big stonecutter growled, “Three years ago her husband ran off with the Greeks. He’s dead. What more proof do you want?”

  Almost as if he understood the symbolism of his act the little rabbi took his hands from beneath his beard and placed them upon a scroll of law. “In cases where the husband’s death can neither be proved nor disproved, we require fifteen years to pass before the woman can be declared a widow.”

  “He used to beat her. Must she wait fifteen years for him …”

  “Until the fifteen years have passed, Tirza remains a married woman. The law says …”

  “The law! The law! Fifteen years for a woman who’s done no wrong?”

  “So far she’s done no wrong. But if she lives in sin … outside the law …”

  “We don’t care,” the big man shouted, rising to his feet so that he towered over the little rabbi. “I’m going to marry Tirza today …”

  “Yohanan, sit down.” Without touching the stonecutter Rabbi Asher forced him back onto the chair, saying quietly, “Remember Annaniel and Leah. He went to sea and the boat foundered. Six witnesses swore that he must have drowned, so against my counsel Leah was permitted to remarry, and five years later Annaniel wandered back. He was still her husband and because we had broken God’s law two families were destroyed.” The little scholar replaced his hands beneath his beard, lowered his voice and added ominously. “And Leah’s lovely children were declared bastards. You know what that meant.”

  Silence lay upon the small room as the stubborn workman stared at the man who had brought God into the discussion, and Rabbi Asher, thinking that he had convinced the stonecutter, decided to offer consolation. “God is not selfish, Yohanan. He forbids you Tirza but He has placed here in Makor many fine Jewish women who would be happy to marry a man like you. Shoshana, Rebecca …”