And a portion to her maidens …
She makes sure that her merchandise is good;
Her light does not go out at night.
She puts her hands upon the distaff,
And her hands take hold of the spindle …
Her children rise up and declare her blessed,
Her husband also, and he praises her:
‘Many daughters have done virtuously,
But you have excelled them all.’
Mere grace is delusive and beauty is empty;
The woman who is reverent toward God is worthy of praise.”
He stayed with his children for some hours, talking with them about the various countries to which they might be taken, after which he gathered all the elders of the family and formed them in a circle about the young ones. The older Jews held hands as Yigal said quietly, “Wherever you go in slavery, remember this moment. You are surrounded by the love of God. You are never alone, for you live within the circle of God’s affection.”
He put the children to bed, then went through the streets of the little town, reassuring all who were awake and encouraging them to behave with dignity on the morrow. At the beautiful forum, now demolished by the Roman ballistas, he talked with the hungry men, and on the ramparts he could see in the moonlight that escape hole which the Romans had not yet found. In the marble-faced gymnasium, where the wounded lay, he comforted them, and at the synagogue where a few old Jews prayed through the night he paused to participate in a discussion of God’s law as laid down in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and the men argued like Jews, as if tomorrow were an ordinary day.
Then dawn began, and he called his men to their positions. To an onlooker he would have been an amusing little man that bright morning, an ordinary Jew making believe he was a general, but he sustained his men as if he had been a Caesar fresh from triumphs along the Rhine. When the Romans moved forward, when their great machines creaked and groaned with power as they bore down upon the walls, he went from spot to spot encouraging his men as he had seen Josephus do, but by the midmorning the walls began to crumble. Nothing that the Jews could do prevented the crunching force of Rome from triumphing, and by midday the assaulting legions occupied the forum.
Early that afternoon Vespasian gave a command which he would often regret in his later years when as emperor he knew the responsibility that adheres to casual commands. He ordered the crucifixion of Yigal and his wife Beruriah. Tall poles were brought to a point outside the town, at the edge of the olive grove in which the little Jew had worked. Crosspieces were nailed roughly to the poles, and eight long spikes were produced. Yigal and his wife were laid upon the crosses, and their extremities were nailed down with the great square spikes. Then the crosses were raised in the air, but before the bodies of the two Jews were pierced so that they might bleed to death, a scene of horror was paraded before them.
The nine hundred surviving Jews were herded to a spot beneath the crosses, and as Yigal and Beruriah looked down in their own agony, shrewd judges from among the Romans cried, “That one’s of no use to us,” and swords would hack an old man or woman to death. In this way four hundred were disposed of, after which two engineers coldly studied the younger men to judge whether or not they could survive work on the ship canal that Nero had ordered to be dug at Corinth. With practiced eyes they spotted any deformity: “This one has a bad arm.” And swift swords would slash away both the arm and the head, but some of the sturdier Jews were reserved for transportation to the isthmus. Then the hard-headed slave traders who accompanied all Roman armies stepped forth to appraise the women; only a few were found worth saving and more than three hundred rejects were slain in a few minutes. Finally the children were led before the slavers, and all under the age of eight were automatically killed, for it had been found that these rarely survived the slave camps. An older boy with a harelip, a girl with a limp … these were cut down at once, but any who might bring a fair price were thrown into great iron cages for transportation to the slave market at Rhodes.
“O God, preserve them!” Yigal moaned, and then he saw the special hell that Vespasian had decreed for the man who had poured boiling olive oil upon his Romans. The seventeen members of Yigal’s family were led forth, and his three sons were cut down as their mother screamed in agony. Then their wives were slain. And finally the eleven grandchildren were taken one after the other to the foot of Yigal’s cross, where they were pierced by Roman swords. Eight, nine, ten, they died. The last child was a little boy who could not understand what was happening. From behind two soldiers struck him and he fell a mutilated thing.
The seventeen corpses were then tossed into a pile, after which General Vespasian, arms akimbo, stood beside them, calling to his adversary, “Observe, olive worker, the fate of Jews who resist Rome.”
His body numb with pain, Yigal found strength to call back, “But they will resist.” With wonder and contempt the bull-necked Roman stared for the last time at his twisted victim, then left abruptly to supervise the final destruction of the town.
Only then were soldiers with long lances permitted to pierce Yigal’s belly and Beruriah’s neck. It was obvious that she would die first, and she turned her eyes to gaze with love upon her frightened, retching husband. Her lips moved but made no sound, and as the two Jews looked at each other across the sunlit space, she expired. Yigal, watching her, whispered:
“Many daughters have done virtuously,
But you have excelled them all.”
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 i
t 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 from 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 wails 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 wa
s 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.
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