Nobody argued. Eric didn’t try. When you were sitting on a discovery that matched Tut’s tomb and the Dead Sea Scrolls put together, you did things by the book. If people had any reason to think you weren’t legit, plenty would.
Plenty would anyhow. The soldiers brought news along with food, water, coffee, cigarettes, and that outhouse on wheels. Eric had known Gabriela and Brandon were in Israel since the dirty bomb hit Tel Aviv. Now they’d come to Jerusalem. If anybody could whip hysteria into frenzy, they were the ones.
Eric wasn’t sure the Israelis understood that. If Yoram didn’t, it wasn’t because Eric didn’t tell him. Yoram shrugged. “What? You don’t think a miracle should be on television?” he said. “The more people who see, who know, the better.”
“A miracle.” The word, in English or in Hebrew, made Eric want to run.
After Yoram’s first astonishment, he took it in stride. “What do you call it?” he asked. “If you’ve got a rational explanation for how the Ark’s been floating for the past 2,600 years, I’d like to hear it.”
“We don’t know it was floating all that time,” Eric said.
Yoram raised an eyebrow. “Of course not. Maybe it sat there till we got that stone out, then jumped in the air to confuse us.”
“Right.” Eric’s ears burned. It wasn’t any less a miracle if it happened a second before that stone came out than if the Ark had floated there since before the Babylonians took Jerusalem and wrecked the First Temple. “Yoram…what are the rabbis saying?”
“Everything—depending on who you listen to. What else are rabbis for?” Louvish said. “Some say wait and see. They remember Sabbetai Zevi, I suppose.”
“I hope so,” Eric said. Sabbetai Zevi was a seventeenth-century Sephardic Jew, born in the Ottoman Empire, who’d proclaimed himself the Messiah and attracted a large following, Christians and Muslims with Jews. He grew prominent enough to alarm the Sultan, who threatened to make him a head shorter if he didn’t convert to Islam. He did, whereupon his movement collapsed—though a stubborn handful still believed he’d been genuine. For most people, he was an object lesson: you shouldn’t commit too soon.
Yoram wasn’t finished: “Some want to start building the Third Temple yesterday.”
“Like the Reconstruction Alliance,” Eric said.
“Yes, like them,” Yoram agreed.
The Reconstruction Alliance gave Eric the willies. It bothered Yoram less. Eric snapped his fingers. “You had Orly and me visit their museum. How come?”
“To see what Temple implements are like,” Yoram answered.
“They have a model of the Ark there.” Eric waited. The Israeli nodded, his face a poker player’s mask. Eric plowed ahead: “You wanted us to see that stuff because you expected the real Ark was down here.”
“Expected? No.” Yoram shook his head. “You never expect…this. I hoped. I prayed, too. But when it happened…No, you don’t expect such things.”
“Okay. But you thought there was a chance. Why? Stories put the Ark everywhere from Chartres to Ethiopia. So why’d you think it was still here?”
“Because this is the logical place. No one found it and took it away after it got hidden in Josiah’s reign. It’s so big and fancy, there’d be a record if somebody carried it away. I thought it would be around, if we could find it.” Yoram hesitated. “Rabbi Kupferman felt the same way.”
“Kupferman?” After the way the other archaeologist had sneered at rabbis a moment before, Eric blinked to hear him praise one now. Then the name registered. “Oh. Him.” Shlomo Kupferman was the leading theologian connected with the Reconstruction Alliance. He headed the Pious Bloc, one of the little religious parties in the Israeli Knesset.
Yoram Louvish looked embarrassed. “I don’t care whether you like his politics. He’s a learned man, and he’s spent years researching the Ark.”
“If you say so.” Eric sounded uncomfortable. He felt uncomfortable. Rabbi Kupferman gave him the willies. Kupferman had black eyes, a fierce expression, and a long, tangled white beard. If he’d worn a turban, not a kippah, he would have looked like an ayatollah.
“I do,” Yoram answered. “Have you seen any of Nechshat’s articles?”
“Sure,” Eric said. “He’s a sharp guy. But what’s he got to do with…?” His voice trailed away. Nechshat was Hebrew for copper. Kupferman was Copperman in German or Yiddish. “Oy!”
“See? You’re not as smart as you think,” Yoram said. Eric was thinking the same thing. He liked it less when the Israeli spelled it out. He’d always felt Nechshat—whose first initial was Sh. (one character in Hebrew)—knew his business. Did that mean Rabbi Kupferman knew his religious business? Eric still didn’t believe it.
He didn’t want to quarrel with Yoram, so he sidestepped: “Why did he think the Ark was still under the Temple Mount?”
“There’s no evidence it ever left Jerusalem,” Yoram answered. “Some hints in the Talmud imply it stayed here, too. Nobody knows more about those than Shlomo.”
Eric knew he didn’t. You had to be a rabbi to fight through the Talmud and the Gemara—the commentaries—that had accreted around it like nacre ’round irritating grit.
“Does he know how it’s floating above the ground?” Eric asked.
“Nobody does.” Yoram spread his hands. “The physicists say they don’t understand it. Those are the honest ones. The others say it isn’t floating, no matter what they see.”
“Ha!” Eric said. Cautious probing with a long, thin pole had proved no wires held the Ark up. He asked, “Is there anything in the Talmud about that?”
“Not that I know,” Yoram answered. “Some Freemasons are saying they knew it all along. Maybe. Or maybe they’re crazy.”
“Or maybe they did and they’re crazy,” Eric said. “When it comes to that thing”—he nodded toward what lay behind the wall—“crazy is all that makes any sense.”
“Now that you mention it,” Yoram said, “yes.”
* * *
—
Cleaning out Rosie’s stall was an honor. It was one Chaim Avigad couldn’t win, because it would have left him ritually impure. He’d put up with so much. Somehow, that seemed the crowning insult.
“They’ll kill her, and I can’t even take care of her!” he complained to his mother.
“It’s part of God’s plan,” she answered. “Everything is happening the way He intended. Look how the Ark is found at last, so it can go in the Holy of Holies after they rebuild the Temple.”
“Yeah.” Chaim showed less enthusiasm. Everybody at Kibbutz Ha-Minsarah was excited about the rediscovery of the Ark. Chaim wasn’t. Finding it made the Third Temple likelier to go up. To him, that wasn’t all good. Before they rebuilt the Temple, they’d sacrifice the red heifer so its ashes could make everything ritually pure.
They’d slaughter Rosie!
Most boys Chaim’s age fixed on sports stars. A few had already started mooning over girls. What about him? What about me? he thought. The most important thing in his life that wasn’t family was a cow from America. If that wasn’t weird…
They’d always been bound together. He’d been kept away from religious pollution so he would be fit to serve in the Temple from the start. And Rosie could confer purity on others—but only dead. It felt wrong. What was God thinking?
“Now that we have the Ark, too, I don’t see how the Knesset can do anything but let us rebuild—especially the Knesset coming after the new elections,” his mother said.
“We don’t have the Ark yet,” Chaim said. “It’s in that room behind the wall.” It could stay there, for all of him. If it didn’t come out, nobody would do anything to the red heifer.
Rivka Avigad smiled. “You’ll make a fine rabbi someday, the way you can split hairs.”
He didn’t want to be a rabbi. Being a farmer looked great. So did ditch d
igger. Anything that let him mess around in the dirt. He’d never had the chance to get dirty. What kind of life was that? On TV, he’d watched kids grinning from mud puddles. It looked wonderful. He was probably the only boy in Eretz Yisrael who didn’t know what playing in the mud was like.
Well, not quite. There were others like him here at the kibbutz, here in this miserable tent. But they were the way they were for the same reason he was. They had to stay ritually unpolluted, too. It didn’t seem right.
And he’d found something he cared about, and what would happen? Rosie’d be sacrificed. All the signs pointed toward it. The horrible bombing in Tel Aviv. The rediscovery of the Ark. His mother was right. How could the Third Temple not go forward now?
No wonder everybody at the kibbutz was so pumped. Chaim had never felt this out of step. He’d seen plenty of ordinary animals slaughtered. He had no trouble imagining that happening to Rosie. The blood would spurt, her legs would get wobbly, and she’d fall.
She wouldn’t understand why the people who’d been nice were cutting her throat. How could she? She was a special cow, but she was only a cow.
Why the ashes of a red heifer? Because it was in the Bible. But what was God thinking of when He made the rule? Chaim didn’t ask his mother. She’d tell him not to worry, or she’d say that wasn’t the right question to ask. She’d say people shouldn’t ask about why God did things.
She’d said that before. And Chaim asked, “What about Job?”
He remembered the odd look his mother gave him. He didn’t understand why. If the Book of Job wasn’t one long scream of, Why are You doing this to me?—what was it?
Chaim had asked Uncle Yitzhak the same thing—Uncle Yitzhak knew the Bible with his head, not with the heart like Mom. Talking about Job made his uncle nervous, too. “Job is…a special case,” was as much as Yitzhak Avigad wanted to say.
“Why?” Chaim asked. “What about Psalm 8: ‘What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?’ Wasn’t Job asking that, too?”
“It’s a good question.” Uncle Yitzhak looked uncomfortable. “It makes people think about what the answer should be.”
“Well? What should it be?”
“God should be mindful of you because you do what He says and follow His commandments.”
“Job did all that. Look what happened to him.”
“Because he kept following the commandments, it worked out for him in the end.”
“But God let Satan kill Job’s sons and daughters. He had more in the end, but he’d never get back the ones he lost. It didn’t work out all right for them, and Satan killed them to make Job sorry. They didn’t do anything to deserve it.”
Uncle Yitzhak didn’t want to talk about the Book of Job after that. Everybody quoted the Bible when it suited his purpose. When it didn’t…you were an annoying little kid.
There were times when he resented his family more than he knew how to say. They’d made him so different from everybody else, and on purpose, too! But they’d also explained why, and their teaching made him believe they were doing the right thing. How could you usher in the Messiah without the Temple or have the Temple without people to serve it?
He was, in short, a messed-up kid. But how many kids his age weren’t messed up? Damn few, especially if you asked them.
* * *
—
Gabriela had done interviews that seemed tougher than Rabbi Shlomo Kupferman. She’d talked with men who could incinerate the world by touching a button. A couple of them looked eager to do it while the cameras rolled. That would have made a ratings coup, but not one she could have enjoyed long.
Kupferman owned the most intimidating eyebrows Gabriela’d seen, and she’d interviewed Russians. Maybe the difference was that the Russians disapproved of her for being a prominent American. The rabbi disapproved of everything and everybody.
“The excavators are right to be careful with the Ark. Anyone not properly pious would throw away his life if he touched it,” Kupferman said. “Are you acquainted with the sad fate of Uzzah son of Abinadab?”
“As a matter of fact,” Gabriela answered, “no.”
Rabbi Kupferman’s sniff said he’d expected no better from a goy like Gabriela, who also had the presumption to be of the female persuasion. “This is in Second Samuel, the sixth chapter,” he said. “The Ark was placed on a cart, and the oxen shook it. Uzzah son of Abinadab put his hand on the Ark to steady it. The Lord struck him dead.”
“Do you believe that?”
This time, Shlomo Kupferman looked at her as if she were roadkill. “Of course,” he said. “It is in the Holy Scriptures, and they are God’s word. If they weren’t true, how would we have found the Ark, which is described in great detail there, after so long?”
Since Gabriela had no answer, she tried something else: “What other things is the Ark supposed to be able to do, Rabbi?” As soon as she asked the question, she wished she had it back. That supposed to be would tick Kupferman off.
She got another scorching glare from the old rabbi, but he just said, “Do you know of the time when the Philistines captured the Ark?”
“No, and many of my listeners won’t, either. Please tell us.” Gabriela knew about Goliath. She knew the Philistines gave Palestine their name, though they’d long since vanished. Past that? Not very much.
“They captured the Ark and brought it to Ashdod, their city,” Shlomo Kupferman said. “This is in First Samuel, chapters five and six. They put it in the house of Dagon, their idol. And Dagon’s statue fell on its face before the Ark. The Philistines set it up again. The next night, its head and hands were cut off: the Lord was mightier than any idol. He smote Ashdod with emerods, and many died.”
“What are emerods?” Gabriela asked—the people who watched would wonder at the archaic word.
“Hemorrhoids, you would say in modern English,” Kupferman replied, his face perfectly straight. “And the Philistines moved the Ark to Gath, and the plague followed it. Then they moved it to Ekron, and the same thing happened—and they were also plagued with mice.”
“I see.” Gabriela fought back the urge to giggle. “That’s…quite a plague.”
“The Philistines thought so.” Kupferman sounded grave as a tomb. No, he wasn’t swallowing laughter. “They made golden images of the mice and others of their emerods, and sent them back with the Ark to the children of Israel—and their plagues ceased.”
“Golden…emerods?” Gabriela had trouble imagining that. “Are they still in that chamber with the Ark?”
After considering, the rabbi shook his head. “I doubt it. The Babylonians took the gold associated with the Temple, and the emerods and mice would have been part of that.”
“So everything was all right from then on?” Gabriela persisted.
“No,” Kupferman said. “The Ark came to the town of Bethshemesh. The people there dared look inside. And the Lord slew some 50,070. And the people there lamented—”
“I’ll bet they did!” she broke in.
She might as well have saved her breath. “—and the men of Bethshemesh said, ‘Who is able to stand before this holy Lord God?’ ” Shlomo Kupferman sent his ferocious stare Gabriela’s way once more. “So you see, this Ark is not just a very holy thing. It is a very potent thing, one that deserves respect.”
“You believe this happened because it’s written in the Bible?”
“Yes,” Kupferman said simply. An Alabama fundamentalist preacher or a mullah from Qom would have sounded the same way. He went on, “All these years ago, the scribes wrote of the Ark, and now we see it as they wrote of it, and undamaged. Why should I not believe?”
“But you believed the same things before the Ark was found.” Gabriela made that sound like an accusation.
“It’s called faith,” Rabbi Kupferman said. “You might try it one day.”
Enoug
h screwy things had happened lately to make Gabriela wonder about that herself. She’d never admit it on the air, though. She asked, “How does the Ark keep floating?”
“By the will of God,” Kupferman answered. “Nothing may be accomplished any other way.”
“But why is it God’s will that the Ark should float?”
“I have no idea,” Shlomo Kupferman said placidly. “Ask Him, in prayer. He may tell you.”
“Thank you very much, Rabbi Kupferman,” Gabriela said. They were out of time—not soon enough for her.
* * *
—
Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Rahman poked the remote’s power button. Gabriela Sandoval and Shlomo Kupferman disappeared. The screen went black, but less black than his mood.
Jamal Ashrawi scowled at the TV, too, for a different reason. “That Jew was born lying, and he’s got better at it since,” the Grand Mufti said.
“What if he’s not?” Haji Ibrahim said. “Harder to lie when you quote from the holy books.”
“Not for Jews or Christians,” Ashrawi said. “Their books are distorted. Only the Qur’an tells all of God’s truth.”
“Of course.” The head of the Waqf didn’t like Haji Jamal telling him things he already knew. The two fugitives had shared tight accommodations ever since they escaped from the room above the souq. Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Rahman was sick of it.
“What are you worrying about, then?” Ashrawi said.
“Why would the people who wrote the Jews’ and Christians’ holy books falsify things that have to do with the Ark?” Ibrahim asked. “It was long lost. The scribes had to think it would never be seen again. They had no reason to distort what it could do. And if it is that strong, the Jews have a new weapon!”
“God wouldn’t allow it.” But the Grand Mufti sounded less certain now.
“God has allowed so many things we never dreamt of,” Haji Ibrahim said gloomily. “That the Western infidels should learn so many things Muslims did not grasp. That they should defeat us whenever we fought. That the Jews should beat Syria, Jordan, and Egypt again and again. That they should take Jerusalem and the Haram al-Sharif. Who could have imagined God would allow that?”
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