The Source: A Novel

Home > Historical > The Source: A Novel > Page 23
The Source: A Novel Page 23

by James A. Michener


  “You catch me off guard,” Eliav replied.

  “The nonsense I’ve been hearing today. I’m disgusted. I’d like to bite into something solid.”

  “You’ve read De Vaux, Kaufmann, Albright?”

  Cullinane nodded.

  “Maimonides?”

  “He’s the best.”

  “There’s one better.”

  “What?”

  “Read Deuteronomy five times.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No. Deuteronomy. Five times.”

  “What’s your thought?”

  “It’s the great central book of the Jews and if you master it you’ll understand us.”

  “But is it worth five readings?”

  “Yes, because most Gentiles think of the ancient Hebrews as curious relics who reached Israel ten thousand years ago in some kind of archaic mystery.”

  “How do you think it happened?” Cullinane asked.

  “Deuteronomy is so real to me that I feel as if my immediate ancestors—say, my great-grandfather with desert dust still on his clothes—came down that valley with goats and donkeys and stumbled onto this spot.”

  “Will reading Deuteronomy give me such a feeling?”

  “Read it five times and see,” Eliav countered.

  It was in this way that Cullinane renewed his acquaintance with the old Jewish masterpiece which he had first seriously studied at Princeton. Deuteronomy purports to be the farewell address of General Moses to his Jews as they are about to leave the wilderness and enter into the land of Canaan, and at the opening line, “These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan,” Cullinane had the feeling that Deuteronomy resembled General Washington’s farewell address to his colonial soldiers; and the analogy was apt.

  At Makor there was no Douay Version of the Bible, so Cullinane could not use that Catholic translation; but this didn’t bother him. At Princeton he had become familiar with the Protestant King James Version of 1611, and now as his eyes ran down the columns they caught phrases and sentences which he had once vaguely supposed to be from the New Testament: “Man doth not live by bread only,” and “From the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy water,” and “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” He discovered concepts that lay at the core of his New Testament Catholicism: “But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.” And he came upon other phrases that jolted him regarding the story of Jesus; these made him go back for a second reading: “If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder … thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”

  When Cullinane finished his first reading he was inclined to tell Eliav that he was now refreshed and could face the next busload of tourists, but he had found the tall Jew to be canny in these matters, and so, to indulge him, he began again at the beginning of Deuteronomy. This time he gained a sense of the enormous historicity of the book: the unknown author, who had used the literary device of speaking as Moses, had been a scholar immersed in Jewish history and spoke of it as if it had happened yesterday—as Eliav had said, in the life of his great-grandfather—and this involvement began to communicate itself to Cullinane. He now read the Ten Commandments as if he were among the tribes listening to Moses. It was he who was coming out of Egypt, dying of thirst in the Sinai, retreating in petulant fear from the first invasion of the Promised Land. He put the Bible down with a distinct sense of having read the history of a real people … not the real history, perhaps, but a distillation of hundreds of old traditions and national memories. Eliav had guessed right: Cullinane was beginning to feel that a band of living Hebrews had one day come down these gullies to find Makor. He wondered what new thing he would uncover on the remaining three readings.

  At this point Eliav appeared with a book under his arm and took away the King James Version. “John, I wish you’d do your next two readings from this new English translation done by a group of Jewish scholars in Philadelphia.”

  “Why Jewish?”

  Eliav hesitated, then said, “It’s a ticklish point. But Deuteronomy is particularly Jewish in nature. It’s our holy book and it means double to us what it could possibly mean to a Catholic or a Baptist. Yet everybody reads it in Protestant or Catholic translations …”

  “To me a translation’s a translation,” Cullinane protested.

  “Not so,” Eliav retorted. “Even when the King James Version was made, it was purposefully old-fashioned. Something beautiful and poetic. Today it’s positively archaic, and for young people to study their religion from it can only mean they’ll think of that religion as archaic—clothed in dust and not to be taken as contemporary.”

  “Perhaps, but why a Jewish translation?”

  “The other thing that’s wrong with the King James Version is that it’s purely Protestant in its choice of words. You Catholics discovered that early, so you held to your Douay Version, which was just as lopsided on the Catholic side. And all the time, the book you’re wrestling over is a Jewish book, written by Jews for the instruction of Jews in a very Jewish religion. We can be forgiven if we feel that we ought to have a translation which takes these things into account … especially with Deuteronomy.”

  “So now you’ve slanted everything into a Jewish bias.”

  “We didn’t, but that’s not the point. Do you know Isaiah 7:14?” Cullinane was always impressed with the way Jews could cite the Bible, and now Eliav repeated the Old Testament words that lay at the heart of New Testament Christianity: “ ‘Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ ”

  Cullinane consulted his Protestant Bible and satisfied himself that Eliav had quoted accurately. But then the Jew said, “Now look it up in the Jewish translation,” and there Cullinane found the word virgin translated as young woman.

  “On what authority did they make that change?” he asked in some surprise.

  “Look at the original Hebrew,” Eliav suggested, handing him a third version, and in the original language of the Bible the word virgin was not mentioned. It had been introduced by Christian scholars as a device for proving that the Old Testament prophesied the New and that the New should therefore supersede the Old. “Throughout the centuries,” Eliav explained, “hundreds of thousands of Jews were burned to death or massacred because their own Bible was misused against them. I think we’re entitled to an accurate Jewish version.”

  When Eliav left, Cullinane began what was to be a startling experience. The new Jewish translation, by divesting Deuteronomy of its Shakespearean poetry, offered the reader a blunt and often awkward statement. The old and the new compared in this manner:

  Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and keep, and do them.

  Hear, O Israel, the laws and norms that I proclaim to you this day! Study them and observe them faithfully!

  He checked the modern translation against the original Hebrew and discovered the Jewish translation to be literal and the King James Version not. He tested half a dozen additional passages and satisfied himself that the Jewish translators had at least tried to render their version faithfully if not poetically.

  But gradually his critical judgment receded and he found himself reading for the pure pleasure of contemporaneous expression; and on his second run he came upon that verse which has always had such a powerful hold upon the Jewish reader: “It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, the living, every one of us who is here today.” And the point Eliav had been trying to get across was burned into Cullinane’s consciousness: Deuteronomy was a living book and to the living Jew it had contemporary force. When he came to t
he scene in which the Jews, having received the Ten Commandments, urged Moses to go back to God for further instructions, the simple idiom of the new translation gave him the sensation of being actually with the Jews at Horeb as the commandments were being delivered: “You go closer and hear all that the Lord our God says; then you tell us everything that the Lord our God tells you, and we will willingly do it.”

  When he was finished with his fourth reading he told Eliav, “I see what you mean. It has a sense of actuality. You can almost touch the Jews.”

  “Now for the last one, this time in Hebrew. Just as it was written down.”

  “My Hebrew’s too rusty,” Cullinane protested. “I’ll take your word that it’s a fair translation.”

  “I want to prove quite a different point,” Eliav said. “And for it your Hebrew’s adequate. Skip the words you don’t know.”

  It took Cullinane about a day to make his way through the Hebrew text, and it was one of the best days he was to spend at Makor, for as he dug his way into the powerful Hebrew, in almost the same way as he had to dig through the soil hiding Makor, he came upon that quiet yet singing declaration of faith that is the core of Judaism, the passage which expresses the essence of Jewish history: “My father was a fugitive Aramaean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us: they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The Lord freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

  At dinner Eliav said, “The point I wanted to make is this. The Hebrew used in writing Deuteronomy sometime in the seventh century B.C.E. is the same Hebrew that we’ve revived in Israel after it had been a dead language for a thousand years. Call over one of the kibbutzniks. Son!” A youth of fifteen ambled over, sloppy, happy, his sleeves rolled up for the job of cleaning the dining hall. Eliav asked, “Can you find me someone who speaks English,” and the boy said that he did, so Eliav handed him the Hebrew Torah, pointed to a passage in Deuteronomy and asked, “Can you read this?”

  “Sure.”

  “Go ahead.” The boy studied the words, some of the oldest written in Hebrew, and said tentatively, “ ‘My father was an Aramaean with no home. He went to Egypt. Not many. There he became a nation.’ ”

  “Good,” Eliav said, and the pleased kibbutznik returned to his work. Cullinane was impressed. “You mean … any educated Israeli today can read the Bible exactly as it was written?”

  “Of course. For us this is a living book. Not necessarily a religious book, you understand. That boy, for example. Son!” The youth came back, smiling. “You ever go to synagogue?”

  “No!”

  “Your parents religious?”

  “No!”

  “But you know the Torah? The Prophets?”

  “Sure,” and he left.

  “That’s what you must remember, Cullinane. Every Jew you see on this dig can read the original Bible better than you can read Chaucer.”

  “You’ve proved your point,” the Irishman admitted.

  “I haven’t got to the point yet,” Eliav corrected. “We Jews persisted in history … where are the Babylonians, the Edomites, the Moabites with their multitudes of gods? They’re all gone, but our tenacious little group of Jews lives on. And we do so because what you’ve been reading in Deuteronomy is to us a real thing. One crucial passage you must have noticed. It has an historic actuality, whether you Gentiles and we Jews like it or not.”

  “Which one?”

  Without consulting the Torah, Eliav quoted, “ ‘For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all the peoples on earth the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people.’ ”

  “I wish I could believe it,” Cullinane said.

  “He does,” Eliav said, pointing to the kibbutznik, “and the fascinating thing is that he believes it exactly as I do, in a non-racial sense. I suppose you’d call me a free thinker except that I believe in the spirit of Deuteronomy.”

  This was too finely drawn for Cullinane, and he pushed aside the Hebrew Bible, but Eliav picked it up. “The key to the Jew,” he said jokingly, “is my favorite passage in the Torah. Moses is being eulogized as the greatest man who ever lived, knew God face-to-face and all that. But what is the very last thing said of him as a man … as a living man? It seems to me that this is a profound insight … It’s the reason why I love Deuteronomy. I’m going to quote it from the King James Version first: ‘And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.’ ” Eliav repeated the last phrase, “ ‘nor his natural force abated.’ But in our Hebrew original this last eulogy on a great man ends, ‘His moisture was not fled.’ ” Eliav closed the book and placed his hands over it. “A man who had known God, who had created a nation, who had laid down the law that all of us still follow. And when he dies you say of him, ‘He could still function in bed.’ Ours is a very gutsy religion, Cullinane.”

  • • •

  In the town of Makor eight hundred years had passed since that memorable day when five of its citizens had been involved in tragedy, and because of poetic dirges composed at that time the men and women of the tragedy had been transformed into gods who had added spiritual richness to the religion of the area.

  Joktan the Habiru was now remembered as a heavenly stranger arriving from the east with many donkeys to give protection to the murderer, and the legend left no uncertainty as to the welcome Makor had given him. He had been quickly absorbed into the town, primarily because he had been willing to recognize the gods of Makor as superior to his own.

  Welcome the stranger, Astarte,

  Welcome the one who comes from afar,

  Who comes to worship you on donkeys.

  Later verses made it clear that Astarte had smiled upon him, making of him a principal citizen who had inherited the house of mirth once occupied by the man he aided.

  Urbaal the farmer enjoyed a more spectacular transformation, for when the local poets reviewed his tragic history they saw a great man, the owner of fields and the father of many children, caught in the grip of passions he could not master, and it became obvious that he could not have been a man. He was the god Ur-Baal, sent to Makor for a divine purpose, and through the centuries the poets had shortened his name and made him the principal god of Makor, known simply as Baal the omnipotent.

  Amalek the farmer suffered a curious fate, for although he had been in many ways the most decent actor in the tragedy, he was always remembered as the enemy whom Ur-Baal had to kill, and thus he was gradually changed into the villain Malek, and then into Melak, the god of war. When this was accomplished, what had happened on that new year’s day of 2201 B.C.E was made clear: Ur-Baal had slain Melak in order to protect Astarte, and only Ur-Baal’s courage, his willingness even to travel abroad among the donkeys, had saved Makor:

  Ride on the clouds, Ur-Baal,

  Ride on the clouds of storm.

  Behold, you shall ride the storm!

  Libamah the enticing slave girl was now seen as a manifestation of the lovelier aspects of Astarte, and her capacity to inflame Ur-Baal had come to represent the creative processes of nature.

  Timna the faithful wife also contributed to the concept of Astarte, and it was recalled that although she had loved Ur-Baal she had also been directly responsible for his death; but it was Timna’s willingness to follow her husband barefoot and pregnant into his exile that had provided Astarte with one of the most beautiful adventures in Canaanite mythology:

  The year closed and the rains came,

  Even to Makor came the rains,

  And Ur-Baal fled to the olive grove,

  Fled to the night, to the realm of Melak,

  Down to the rea
lm of Melak, god of the night.

  There Ur-Baal would have remained in banishment, depriving Makor of its spring growing season and causing it to perish of starvation, had not Astarte gone seeking him to lure him back to earth and his assigned functions:

  Pregnant she left the zigzag gate,

  Pregnant with children of tomorrow,

  Seeking tomorrow and her lover Ur-Baal.

  She had found the greatest of the gods imprisoned at the altar of Melak, and in a terrible hand-to-hand fight she had slain Melak, chopping him into small pieces and scattering his fragmented body over the fields like seeds of grain. This had brought the wheat to germination and the olive trees to blossom, and each winter since then the voyage of Astarte to the nether world had been repeated.

  So now Makor was governed by a benign trinity: El, the unseen father of the gods whose characteristics grew ever more vague as the centuries passed; Baal the omnipotent; and Astarte his wife, who was both forever virgin and forever pregnant as the mother of all. The trinity had one additional peculiarity: Astarte both loved and hated Baal, and it was this conflict that explained the world’s confusion, the contest between female and male, the warfare between night and day, between winter and summer, between death and life.

  El, Baal, Astarte. In a tightly knit and beautiful partnership they watched over Makor, guiding it through the turbulence of that unsettled age. In the last eight hundred years Mesopotamia and Egypt had often contested the great valleys to the east; strange armies belonging to neither of those powers had also swept through Canaan, gutting and burning, but the little town on its slowly rising mound had managed to survive. It had been occupied by many victors and had been burned twice, but it had always recovered, thanks to the manifest interest taken in it by the trinity.

 

‹ Prev