The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  In 167 came the inevitable climax to any religious persecution. The instructions from the outrageous emperor were so brutal that the Greek officials of Makor were loath to read them, and the edict was handed to a common soldier, who caused the Jews to be marched to the public square, where they stood sullenly to hear what their punishment was to be. In harsh, guttural tones the soldier shouted, “Jews of Makor, approach in single file and kiss the god of Asia,” and the recalcitrant ones were moved inside the temple to the monstrous head of Antiochus, where they were made to stand on their toes to kiss the great stone neck below the protruding Adam’s apple. Then, in the awesome silence of the holy place, the soldier rasped, “You Jews of Makor, having disobeyed the law of our emperor by continuing to circumcise your sons, and having offended our god by refusing to sacrifice swine in your synagogue, have surrendered any claim to mercy. Hear and obey! From this moment on, any Jew who refuses to accept Antiochus Epiphanes as the sole god, supplanting all others, including your god known as Yahweh”—the Jews shuddered—“any Jew who persists in following the law of your prophet called Moses, any Jew who circumcises his son, or any Jew who refuses to place his hand upon the sacrificial pig, shall be arrested and dragged before the temple of Zeus. There he shall be scourged with fifty blows, after which he shall be placed upon the ground so that his skin may be pulled away while he still lives. Thereafter he shall be slain, his body cut apart and thrown to the dogs. Hear these penalties and obey.” The astonished Jews were then herded back into the square where a large pig had been brought for sacrifice, and as it squealed and twisted in the sunlight they filed past and each placed his hand firmly on the forbidden beast. But there was one old Jew who had had enough of spineless leadership, and of his own will he refused to honor the emperor’s pig. The Greek soldier started to manhandle him, but the captain of the guard intervened gently and said, “Old man, you have not obeyed our god Antiochus.” The old Jew, his beard testifying to the years he had studied Moses, drew back in disgust, but again the captain warned him in a low persuasive voice, “Dear friend, it will go hard with you if you do not obey the law”; but again the old man refused, whereupon the captain had one of his men produce the lash—a club containing several dozen leather thongs. “They are tipped with lead,” the captain explained, rustling the dreadful pieces. “Do you think you could stand up against such punishment?” The old man spit on the sanctified pig, and the soldiers quickly proceeded as they had been instructed, should such an emergency occur. They stripped the old man till he stood naked; they then tied him to a pillar, where ten swift blows of the lash tore at him terribly. The speeding lead tips caught at his face and ripped out one of his eyes. They tore away a corner of his mouth and laid bare the muscles of his neck. “Will you now acknowledge the pig?” asked the captain, and when the old man refused, the man with the lash directed his blows lower on the body, where the lead tips tore away the old man’s testicles and laid open his loins; and at the fortieth blow the humane intention of the captain became apparent: he hoped that the scourging alone would kill the old man that he might be spared the agony of being flayed, but the old Jew had within him some profound source of resistance and he survived the hailstorm of pellets, so that he was finally thrown to the ground, where he lay quivering as men with sharp knives came to cut away the mutilated skin. And when it seemed that he must surely be dead, he raised his head and called the permanent prayer of all Jews: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” And on the long, wailing pronunciation of the last word he died.

  Among those who watched with anger this first of the afflictions were two men of dissimilar inheritance who were partly to blame for the tragedy. They had been born in Makor of families with ancient antecedents, and their friendship explained why the Jews had accepted one after another of the preliminary restrictions without comprehending what was occurring or what the end must be. The more important of these men was Governor Tarphon, the thirty-five-year-old gymnasiarch, a clean-shaven, handsome, red-haired athlete who affected the short dress of a Greek army officer. He was an attractive man, forthright and generous in his impulses and doubly appreciated as a public official because he had a beautiful wife who had been born in Greece and who added dignity to his public appearances and intelligence to his private entertainments. Tarphon had come from a middle-class Canaanite family, but he had enjoyed a spectacular leap to prominence with the arrival of the Seleucids, for they had recognized him as a child with potential and had sent him to Athens for his education. Upon his return he was made assistant to the governors of Ptolemais, as the ancient seaport of Accho was now called, and it had been he who had persuaded the governors to build a summer palace along the northwest wall of Makor, where cool breezes came from the wadis and where the afternoon sunsets were so entrancing. Tarphon had also shown his governors how to invest in olive groves, and as they prospered he prospered. Only a few Seleucid officials had seen Athens, and although all could speak the Koine, not many could speak the classical Attic which Tarphon had learned and in which he had read the principal authors. His Greek education, his Greek wife and his athletic prowess were bound to make him conspicuous, and when Antiochus Epiphanes came to dedicate the little temple to Zeus he said of Tarphon, “It is amazing to find in this small town a young man who is not only Greek in speech and Greek in manner, but also Greek in spirit.” Encouraged by these words Tarphon had proceeded with a venture which had brought him increased praise from the emperor: he organized a group of local citizens to put up the money for building along the southern wall of the town an impressive gymnasium with hot baths, statues, a small arena for games and stone seats for spectators. At the dedication Tarphon gave all credit to the local businessmen, pointing out, “It must be admitted that a small frontier town like Makor, only recently taken over from the Egyptians, can lay no claim to an outdoor stadium. Not even Ptolemais has one. But we do have a right to our own gymnasium. How could we be a Greek community without one? And you men are to be thanked.” No one in Makor was surprised when Antiochus Epiphanes selected young Tarphon to be his next district governor, and although his duties took him to Ptolemais much of the time, he spent as many days as possible in Makor, the comfortable little town which his ancestors had helped to build. Each afternoon when he was in residence he would report to the gymnasium for exercise, a hot bath and some cool drinks with friends who enjoyed watching the younger men of Makor prepare for the regional games that were held in larger cities like Damascus and Antioch. Tarphon remained a fine athlete; in his student days at Athens he had represented the Seleucid empire in both running and wrestling, and in the latter sport he could still defeat most of the younger men in his district, while as a runner he was locally famous. Each year he donned athletic sandals, placed a small cloth about his loins and raced the eight miles from the main gate of Makor to the assembly in Ptolemais, inviting runners in the area to compete against him; and if he could no longer outrace the swiftest, he never finished poorly. It was partly due to the misguided efforts of this good man that the Jews of Makor had stumbled into the trap as they did, for he had in his heart a special fondness for them. For many centuries his family had worked with them, and some of his ancestors had actually followed the Hebrew religion, so when the first of the repressive laws arrived in Makor it was Tarphon who reasoned with the Jews, proposing the concessions that made the laws endurable. By force of his generous personality he diminished the initial impact of the restrictions and thus prevented them from having the effect they should have had. He and his wife Melissa were always ready to entertain Jews, to listen to their grievances, to help if papers or certificates were required. They liked to talk with young Jewish boys and to get them started in their studies. They gave money to build a roof over the synagogue, and it had been Tarphon who contrived the evasion whereby Jews made their customary obeisance after sundown so as to avoid breaking Shabbat. Thus, unwittingly, he helped pull the teeth of Judaism, leaving it defenseless when the persecutions began in
earnest. Then Tarphon could no longer protect his friends, and the tortures had to proceed. Unable to believe what was happening in his peaceful world, Tarphon had watched the first hideous flaying while hidden behind a pillar on the temple porch.

  Now the inadequacy of the Jewish leadership began to exact its toll. Someone among them should have sounded a rallying cry, but no one did. Gone were the days when a patriarch like Zadok was willing to fight even with his god over matters of policy, risking his life and that of his clan in the process; now men avoided such dialogue. Nor was there among the Jews a Gershom with a seven-stringed lyre, speaking directly from his heart to the heart of his god; now men preferred evasion or the oblique reference. And certainly there was not in Makor any old gray woman like Gomer who was personally willing to confront the general of the Egyptians and the might of Nebuchadrezzar. Now there was only Jehubabel, a pudgy, bearded man of forty-five, who made his living from a string of dye vats and was therefore principally worried about getting enough purple dye from the cities to the north or red dye from Damascus. It was by default that Jehubabel had become leader of the Jewish community, for he was not a forceful man nor was he particularly religious. In fact, he had only two qualifications for the job into which he had been thrust: he lived next door to the synagogue and he was what was known as a man of wisdom; that is, he had read the great Jewish classics and had forgot them, but he remembered several score of pithy sayings accumulated by the Jews over the centuries when they were trying to protect their identity from absorption by either the Egyptians or the Babylonians. Jehubabel was a master of this commonplace knowledge, and as he moved from his dye vats to the synagogue he often stopped to converse with his Jewish neighbors, who comprised about one third of Makor’s population. If they invited him to their homes he said, “Keep your foot from your neighbor’s house lest he weary of you and so come to hate you.” The aptness of the proverb and the ponderous manner in which he delivered it, his round face beaming as if light were upon his inner mind, convinced his friends that he was a wise man. When an acquaintance said something appropriate, Jehubabel might quote, “ ‘A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.’ ” And when news reached him that his precious dyes had reached port in Ptolemais he often cried, “ ‘As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.’ ” In this pedestrian manner Jehubabel moved about his daily tasks, and if Antiochus had not appeared on the scene his store of familiar proverbs might have sufficed to guide him through an uneventful life. But against the brute force of the emperor, Jehubabel’s homely wisdom availed little and against the sophisticated Greek schooling of Governor Tarphon he was powerless.

  His name Jehubabel summarized his history, “YHWH is in Babylon,” for the men of his family had borne that name since the days of captivity. When the time came for the Jews to return to Israel, a group formed under the leadership of the charismatic prophet Rimmon, then in his nineties, who led them from the canals of Babylon to the hilltop of Jerusalem—about which he had been preaching for fifty years—but when he delivered his people to that city, to everyone’s surprise he gathered his own family about him, including his son Jehubabel and his old wife Geula, and these he had led onward to Makor, where he re-established his line. The present Jehubabel was descended from these valiant people, and if the fat dyer had lost most of their fury, he had lost none of their dedication to YHWH. For him to kiss the stony neck of Antiochus Epiphanes was profanation, but when Governor Tarphon assured him that this was a minor requirement that could do no harm, Jehubabel told his Jews, “Rivers send forth mist so that the sun will take that offering and not dry them up.” And for the sake of peace he obeyed. For him to acknowledge Antiochus as a god was abhorrent, but when Tarphon argued as an old friend that the Jews could do this and at the same time worship YHWH in their synagogue, he did not see the essential conflict. And for him to caress the sacrificial pig was an abomination, yet he had complied because the governor had convinced him that to do so would save lives. He was willing to trust Tarphon, for he liked the red-headed Greek and had never known him to abuse their friendship; yet the tremendous differences that existed between Greek and Jew, between paganism and Judaism, seemed to have escaped him. He could see that Tarphon loved athletic contests and theater, while the Jews clung to a plainer life. He knew that at the palace there was avid discussion of books and plays of a profane nature, whereas the Jews in their homes lived simple and uncomplicated lives. Most of all, he could see that Greek life centered on the temple of Zeus, which no one took seriously, and on the gymnasium, which everyone did, whereas the Jews clung to their plain old synagogue; but he did not appreciate the fact that these differences were fundamental. Therefore, when the final edicts came against which the Jews of any other age would have rebelled, Jehubabel was prepared to believe Tarphon when the governor reasoned, “I better than most men know Antiochus, for does not my preferment stem from him? He is vain but never stupid, and when he sees that his new laws are repugnant to the Jews he will climb down from his arrogant position. Believe me, Jehubabel, the only sensible tactic for you Jews is to humor him now, even to the extent of the pig, and then to make formal protests through me. You can be sure he’ll rescind the laws.”

  So as a result of Jehubabel’s fumbling acceptance of the pig, when Antiochus later struck at the very heart of Judaism with his persecution of Makor’s three hundred and fifteen Jews, all but one accepted the new rules; but one old man who could see things for himself refused to do so, and as this stubborn martyr died he stared at Jehubabel with his one remaining eye, charging him with having betrayed his people, so that long after the old man’s death Jehubabel would be haunted by his accusing, bloodstained face.

  Governor Tarphon, after having watched the obscene execution—so alien to things truly Greek—left the porch of the temple and wandered slowly down the broad avenue that led to his gymnasium, at whose main doors stood two handsome statues of Heracles as a wrestler and Hermes as a long-distance runner. The gods were tall and white and naked, bespeaking the divinity that lay in any man who trained himself to physical perfection. It was Tarphon’s custom, as he passed between the statues, to turn left to Heracles and flex his shoulder muscles as if he were wrestling with that god, then right to Hermes, testing his own leg muscles, which were still firm and resilient. But this day the gods seemed to accuse him, and he lowered his eyes, muttering, “I must advise Antiochus how wretchedly his laws were received.”

  Ashamed of what he had been required to witness, Tarphon entered the gymnasium, where he was greeted with the reassuring smell of men sweating at games and washing themselves clean with scented oil and steaming water, and he was about to undress and enter the games room at once, but he rejected that idea and turned toward a small room which he maintained in the spacious building; and when he did this he was brought before a towering white statue of Antiochus Epiphanes in his assumed role as discus champion. The emperor had never been good at games, but it pleased his fancy to be depicted as one skilled in sports, so here he stood gigantic and naked, posing not only as the man who had supplanted Zeus but also as one who had defeated ordinary mortals in discus throwing. Tarphon had to recognize how unenforceable the new laws were, and he muttered, “This time Antiochus must retreat.”

  He went to his room, where he spent some time drafting in classical Greek a report which advised the emperor of how the old Jew had resisted the law to the point of death and of the probable effects on the community. Then, looking into the future with unusual clarity, he added a brief section in which he predicted that if the new laws against the Jews were rigidly enforced they might provoke an armed rebellion; but when he was finished with this unsolicited analysis he considered it presumptuous and pushed it away. Closing his eyes he tried to visualize what had frightened him, and he came remarkably close to seeing the revolution that was about to explode among the Jews, but he refused to come to grips with the problem; for although he sensed the terrible forces that had
been ignited that day in Makor, he was not willing to trust his own judgment, and he could not decide whether or not to send the report. Seeking to compare his ideas with what others might think, he summoned one of the slaves who served the gymnasium and directed him to fetch the Jewish leader Jehubabel, and when the slave was gone he undressed and went into one of the smaller game rooms where for some weeks he had been coaching a group of Makor boys in wrestling, it being his intention to send them to a series of regional competitions later in the year; and in the wholesome conflict of the wrestling room he forgot that day’s ugliness.