The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  So the marriage was solemnized before the small red tent of the Hebrews, and a kind of peace, engineered solely by the good will of the leaders, settled over Makor. But Leah had lived in the town only two weeks when one of the Hebrew women reported that they had seen her and her husband in the public square praying openly to Astarte. There was protest in the Hebrew camp, but Zadok silenced it by reminding his people that he himself had given the young man permission to continue worshiping his old gods so long as he acknowledged that El-Shaddai was superior. But two days later other Hebrew water carriers saw Zibeon patronizing the temple prostitutes and word of this also reached Zadok. Again he explained to his people that the young man was entitled to worship his gods in the accustomed manner, but he was apprehensive about what might happen next.

  And then his attention was taken away from his daughter, for Epher and Ibsha asked him to go with them to the top of the mountain, and as he reached the high place of Baal he saw that stubborn Hebrews had rescued their monolith to El-Shaddai and had hauled it back to the crest of the mountain, where once more it stood close to Baal. Father and sons tried to dislodge the evil thing, but they could not, and Epher spat upon it many times, crying, “Father, your laxity has encouraged this,” and a bitterness grew up between them.

  Now Zadok was alone. His daughter was surrounded by gods of the basest sort. His Hebrews were worshiping stone idols. His brilliant son, Epher, was drifting away from him, and he felt contamination oozing out of the town, but he did not know what to do. At the foot of the mountain he walked alone for many hours, calling upon El-Shaddai for guidance.

  “What shall I do with my stiff-necked people?” he pleaded. “I have told them of you. I have instructed them in your ways and I have thrown down their heathen altars, but they have gone whoring after false gods. What can I do?”

  In the rocky fields he found no answer, and in the plowed fields near the oak trees there was no reply. At the tabernacle there was no voice, and among the tents no echo. “What shall I do?” the old man begged. He muttered, “I’ll lead my clan to some other spot,” but he knew that if this was required El-Shaddai would have advised him. Furthermore, would not the next location contain the same kinds of temptation? Was it, perhaps, intended that the Hebrews be submerged into the corruption of Makor? “El-Shaddai, what shall I do?”

  For several days no answer came. Then, as the critical period of the growing season approached, when the collaboration of the gods was essential—and this even Zadok acknowledged, for in the portentous days he prayed repeatedly to El-Shaddai for good crops—three of his water-women came running into camp, their eyes wide in wonder and horror, to tell him of the other god that Makor worshiped. “He is fiery,” they gasped, “and has a mouth of flame into which little children are thrown while men and women dance naked.”

  “Children?” Zadok asked, his hands trembling. Once when his people were traveling to the north he had heard of this god.

  “And at the end of the dance women like us run to embrace the male prostitutes while their husbands go into darkened rooms with the female whores.”

  Zadok staggered back, and the water-women concluded, “Many of the Hebrews are there now, sacrificing to the strange gods.”

  “Abomination!” Zadok cried, uttering again the fearful word that condemned, the ultimate charge that could not be withdrawn once it had been invoked. He left his tent and wandered for many hours till night fell, and from the town walls he heard the sounds of revelry and the beat of drums. He saw the smoky fires. But after midnight, as he stumbled exhausted through the olive grove, he became aware of a presence speaking to him from behind an olive tree, and softly an admonishing voice said, “It was you who uttered the word, Zadok. That town is an abomination.”

  “What shall I do?”

  “It was your word. It is your responsibility.”

  “But what must I do?”

  “The abominations must perish.”

  “The town, the walls?”

  “The abominations must be destroyed.”

  Zadok fell on his knees before the voice, bowing to the olive tree that hid the terrible countenance, and from this position of surrender the old man expressed his trembling pity for the condemned ones inside the wall. “If I can make the abominations cease,” he pleaded with his god, “may the town be saved?”

  “It shall be saved,” the compassionate god replied, “and not a single rock will be unseated.”

  “Praise be to El-Shaddai,” the old man sighed, and the presence was gone.

  Without consulting anyone the patriarch threw his robe about him, took up his staff and walked through the night, his heart ablaze with love for the people he had been permitted to save. At the town gate he pounded with his staff, shouting, “Awake and be saved!” but the guards would not permit him to enter. He hammered again, crying, “I must see the governor now!” and Uriel was routed from his sleep; and when he looked through an arrow slit to see that the messenger was his colleague Zadok, he said to the guards, “Let him enter.”

  Like a bridegroom rushing to greet his bride the old man swept into the governor’s room and shouted, “Uriel, Makor can be saved.”

  The sleepy Canaanite scratched his beard and asked, “Old man, what are you talking about?”

  “You have only to halt the abominations.”

  “What is this?”

  Joyously the old man explained, “You must destroy the temple to Astarte and the fire god.” Then generously he added, “Worship of Baal you may continue, but you must accept El-Shaddai as the one god above all.” His eyes were ablaze with the fire of zealotry that Uriel had seen that first day.

  Uriel sat down. “You never demanded this before.”

  The Hebrew, seeming not to hear the governor’s logic, ranted, “Divert this sinful city into the ways of the true god.”

  Rahab was awakened by the noise and entered the room, wearing a nightrobe. “What is the old nomad saying?” she asked.

  Zadok ran to greet her as if she were a beloved daughter. “Tell your husband to accept El-Shaddai’s will.”

  “What frenzy is this?” Rahab asked her bewildered husband.

  “Makor can be saved,” Zadok explained ecstatically, “if you halt the sacred prostitution and stop feeding babies to the fire god.”

  Rahab laughed. “It is not prostitution,” she said. “Those girls are priestesses. And your own daughter Leah sent Zibeon to lie with them, the way I sent Uriel when I was pregnant. To insure an easy delivery. Old man, these rites are necessary, and your daughter has more sense than you do.”

  Zadok did not hear what Rahab was saying. He was so ecstatic over El-Shaddai’s offer to save Makor that he expected others to react as he had done, and when they did not he became confused, but before he could react to the introduction of his daughter’s name, Zibeon joined the meeting, bringing Leah with him. When the girl saw her father, bewildered and looking very old with his unkempt beard, she ran to him with compassion and would have kissed him, but when he saw her the words of Rahab took meaning and with his staff he fended her off, asking, “Did you send your husband to the prostitutes?”

  Zibeon answered, “I went to the temple to protect your daughter in childbirth.”

  The patriarch looked at his son-in-law with pity and said, “You have committed an abomination.”

  “But you agreed that I was free to worship Astarte,” the young man protested.

  Then Leah interrupted: “I asked him to go, for my sake.”

  Leah’s voice, uttering such words, startled the old man and he leaned forward to study her face, while a hideous fear took possession of his mind. “Leah,” he asked, “did you also take yourself to the male prostitutes, consorting with them in the same manner?”

  “Yes,” his daughter replied with no shame. “It is how the women of Makor worship.”

  “And if you have a son, will you give him to the fire god?”

  “Yes. It is the custom of this town.”

 
Zadok drew back from the four Canaanites, for after this confession his daughter could no longer be a Hebrew, and he was struck by a dizziness that almost felled him. But he managed to focus his weary eyes upon the four doomed faces, and when he saw them clearly, uncomprehending and obstinate in their sin, he realized that El-Shaddai had arranged this night to exhibit the true abomination of the town. Yet even in that moment of discovery he remembered the god’s promise that if the Canaanites should repent they could still be saved. Raising his right arm he pointed a long bony finger at Uriel and asked, “For the last time, will you order these abominations to cease?” No one spoke. Directing his finger at Leah and her husband he asked, “Will you abandon this doomed town, now?” Neither spoke, so he fell to his knees and knocked his head three times upon the tiles, and from this position looked up at the governor, pleading, “As the humblest of your slaves, can I beg you to save yourself?” The Canaanite made no reply, so the old man pulled himself back to his feet.

  At the door he turned back and pointed to each of the four in turn and then to the town. “This shall all be destroyed.” And he was gone.

  It was too late to go to bed, so Rahab called for some food and said, “Your father sounds like an old fool.”

  “In the desert he often talked to himself,” Leah explained.

  “I warned the governor to destroy him at the beginning,” Rahab muttered. “Now it is he who speaks of destroying us.”

  “We may have to turn the Hittites upon him,” Uriel said, and when Leah was gone Rahab directed her son not to let her wander from the walls, “For she is a Hebrew and cannot be trusted.”

  “You think there may be war?” the young man asked.

  “He talked like a madman,” Uriel replied, “and madmen bring war.” In the early dawn he went to the north wall to consult his Hittites.

  Zadok, as soon as he reached his tent, summoned his sons to ask what plans they had devised for the capture of Makor, and they asked, “Is it to be war?”

  “Last night El-Shaddai commanded us to destroy that town,” he replied.

  To his surprise Epher and Ibsha laid before him a detailed plan for investing the powerful town and forcing its surrender. “It will cost us many lives,” they warned, but in his growing fury the old man refused to consider losses. Taking his sons with him to the tabernacle he dedicated them to the work of El-Shaddai, and the three prayed in silence.

  That morning, as soon as the gates were opened, four Hebrew women went to the well while a detachment of men crept through the wadis until they were close to the waterwall. Of the four women, two walked with an awkwardness that should have been detected, but they were allowed to slip through the postern gate and into the dark passageway, where they hurried to the unoccupied guardhouses. There the two awkward ones slipped quietly into the retreats, throwing off their women’s clothing and unleashing long bronze knives. The two real women walked quietly forward, found two Canaanite women at the well and killed them. With rocks they signaled to their Hebrew brothers on the outside, and these troops started breaching the wall that surrounded the well. Canaanite soldiers from inside the town, belatedly aware of the danger, rushed through the postern gate and into the tunnel, where they were intercepted by Epher and Ibsha, who had constructed from pots and benches a kind of barricade. The way was narrow and the two Hebrews were courageous, so that the Canaanites were held back, and after a quarter of an hour the Hebrews on the outside had broken through the wall and taken possession of the well. They ran forward to relieve the two sons of Zadok, but when they reached the barricade they found Ibsha dead and Epher sorely wounded.

  The Hebrews had won the first encounter. They controlled the well and would try to strangle the town with thirst. Governor Uriel appreciated the significance of this move, but in spite of the fact that five of his soldiers had been killed in the waterwall he still hoped that any honest grievances the Hebrews might have could be adjudicated, and to this end he sent messengers to Zadok asking what might be done. But the patriarch refused to meet with the Canaanites, and they returned knowing that complete war was upon them.

  When Governor Uriel heard their report he decided to recapture the well at once and summoned his Hittite captain from the stables. Together they climbed a tower from which they studied with satisfaction the unmilitary manner in which the Hebrews were gathering before the town walls. “We can massacre them,” the Hittite boasted, rubbing his hands with pleasure.

  “Ride back and forth and kill as many as possible,” Governor Uriel directed. “We’ll end this war quickly.”

  The Hittite ran to the stables and ordered his men to harness their horses, two by two, to the war chariots which up to this time Governor Uriel had kept hidden. Few citizens of the town were aware that these ultimate weapons had been smuggled in at night from the seaport of Akka, and none of Zadok’s Hebrews had encountered such machines of war. Into each driver’s bucket stepped a Hittite whose left hand would control the horses while his right was free to swing a chain to which was attached a huge bronze ball studded with spikes. One swipe of this weapon would break a man’s back. Behind each driver stood two soldiers lashed to the chariot so that their hands were free to wield swords and heavy maces. And from the wheels of the chariot projected scythes that revolved as the wheels spun, cutting down anyone the chariot brushed against. They were horrible instruments, calculated to terrorize and kill, and Governor Uriel now moved them to the main gate.

  When they were in position, and when the maximum number of Hebrews were milling aimlessly about the walls, he directed trumpets to sound and foot soldiers to rush forth as if this were to be an ordinary sortie. The Hebrews, surprised by the daring of the Canaanites, began massing at the exact spots Uriel had anticipated, and when they were most vulnerable he ordered the gates to swing open and the chariots to gallop down the ramp and into the midst of the stunned Hebrews. The Canaanite soldiers, instructed as to what was coming, slipped deftly aside, leaving a clear path for the terrible chariots, whose drivers lashed their horses directly at the milling Hebrews while the mounted riders ripped and cut at them.

  It was slaughter, for if the Hebrews stood to fight, the horses trampled them; if they sought retreat, armed riders chopped them down from the rear with maces that broke their necks; and if they merely stood, the whirling scythes on the wheels cut them to death. Zadok, seeing the carnage, cried aloud, “El-Shaddai, god of hosts! What have you brought down upon us?” But Epher broke away from the women binding his wounds and leaped onto the neck of one of the Hittite horses, cutting its throat and toppling the chariot onto the rocks. The red-headed warrior thus proved that the vehicle was not invincible nor the horses immortal, and his Hebrews rallied, driving the Hittites back with stones and flint-headed arrows.

  Judged numerically, the first day’s battle represented a clear defeat for the Hebrews. They had captured the well, but when Zadok mustered his forces before the tabernacle he could count thirty-four dead, and as he moved among the fallen he recited their names: “Naaman, my son. Joktan, my son. Aaron, my son. Zattu, my son. Ibsha, my son.” Not many generals could walk a battlefield at dusk and count as one day’s loss five sons and twenty-nine relatives, and when he reached the last corpse, “Simon, son of Naaman, son of my loins, son of Zebul who brought us from the desert,” he was possessed by a consuming rage and he stood before the tabernacle, swearing, “This town shall be destroyed. Not one roof shall rest upon its beams, not one man committed to the prostitutes shall live.” In this manner the peace-loving old man finally surrendered himself to the accomplishment of El-Shaddai’s will, but at the moment he could not know that his submission had come too late.

  In his determination to crush Makor he became like a young warrior; in moral ardor he was again the primitive man of the desert facing the corruption of the town. But gradually he had to see that the effective decisions regarding the war were now being made by Epher, who, in spite of his wounds, led his father and his brothers to the mountaintop, where this
time they succeeded in throwing down the offensive monolith which their Hebrews had erected to El-Shaddai. As the group was about to leave the high place Epher cried, “Let us throw down Baal as well.” The old man tried to stop his sons as they rushed toward the remaining rock, warning them, “No! It is only the abominations we fight. Baal rules here and El-Shaddai approves.” But Epher was headstrong and shouted, “Our war is against Baal, too,” and he brushed his father aside. Leaping at the monolith he called for his brothers to join him, and they toppled it down the mountainside.

  It was a revolutionary moment. For it would be more than a hundred and fifty years before El-Shaddai, in his later manifestation as Yahweh, would deliver to the Hebrews in Sinai a commandment requiring them to abandon all other gods. It was this evolution that Epher was anticipating when he acted upon the principle that El-Shaddai was not only the supreme god of Zadok’s clan but of other peoples as well. When Epher made this arrogant extension of definitions Zadok knew that the boy was wrong.

  “That was not the will of El-Shaddai,” the old man thundered, but Epher ignored him, as if through a vision he had foreseen the direction in which El-Shaddai must grow. And that night when the wounded young leader laid before the others his final plan for capturing Makor, Zadok realized that he had had no part in the building of this plan. It is the daring of a young man, he told himself, one bold enough to throw down the rock of Baal. And at that moment he was forced to acknowledge that the grandeur of leadership had slipped from him.

  While others planned the forthcoming battle he walked alone through the olive grove, seeking to talk with his god, from whom he needed guidance. It would be difficult to penetrate the meaning of the words he talked with his god. Certainly El-Shaddai was no lackey to be summoned at will, as oracles were summoned by the witches of nearby En-dor; many times Zadok had needed advice from El-Shaddai when none was forthcoming. On the other hand, Zadok was certainly not an insane man, as his daughter had suggested, who heard demonic voices; he was never more clearly in control of his faculties than when he conversed with El-Shaddai. Perhaps the explanation was that when the Hebrews faced moments of decisive crisis, especially those involving moral impasses where decision could not be deferred, they found guidance coming to them from the lonely places. A voice cried out from unexpected quarters, the voice of accumulated reason; it could not be conjured up, for El-Shaddai appeared only when he was ready. But the voice could be relied upon, for the god delivered a consistent message; and now as the patriarch sought him among the trees, El-Shaddai did not take refuge in burning bushes or flaming rocks. Like a father he walked beside Zadok, conducting the last great conversation he would offer the old man.