The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  Jehu opened his mouth and bellowed, “Who is on my side?”

  Jezebel felt the presence of four servants in her chambers, eunuchs. She smelled them. They wore a delicate calamus. “Who is on my side?” Jehu bellowed, and the eunuchs stepped up behind the queen of Israel, two on her left, two on her right.

  “Throw the woman down to the dogs!” the man commanded. She felt the soft hands of her servants. They lifted her bodily, tilted her from the window, and dropped her. She fell without a sound, turning once in the air and striking her skull on the pavement below, where she died.

  II

  AS SOON AS POWER was in his hands, Jehu destroyed the entire house of Ahab.

  He commanded the people of Samaria to slaughter Ahab’s children. They obeyed and brought their commander a prize of seventy heads in seventy baskets—all the sons of Ahab. Next Jehu annihilated the dead king’s servants, his counselors, his administrators, his policies, his structures of government, his leadership.

  When Jehu the son of Nimshi was anointed king in Israel, the kingdom itself was nearly dead from retribution.

  Hazael of Damascus took advantage of the weakness. He attacked Israel east of the Jordan, seizing Ramoth Gilead, the king’s highway, and all the territory as far south as Moab. Likewise, he attacked west of the Jordan, across the plain of Esdraelon and down the coast of the Great Sea, enclosing Israel in a Syrian grip.

  By the time King Jehu died, his son’s armies were reduced to ten chariots, fifty horsemen, and an internal force of ten thousand foot soldiers.

  Israel suffered a poverty worse than ever since kings ruled the land.

  But during the next generation, the whole world began to shift and the fortunes of Israel and Damascus were reversed. A new, more massive enemy emerged from the east, fighting with a cruelty so unspeakable that cities capitulated even before they were attacked. Assyria, from the Tigris River east of the Euphrates, was consolidating an empire. Assyrians cut open the wombs of pregnant women as a matter of course. They tossed living infants into the air and caught them on the points of their spears.

  Assyria laid siege to Damascus, now ruled by the son of Hazael, Ben-hadad II.

  In the open field these armies fought from enormous four-cornered chariots with wheels of eight spokes, wheels as high as a man. Their soldiers rode horses. This was Assyria’s peculiar reach and speed, that they were the first to field great cavalries of mounted lancers and archers who shot while riding.

  Their leaders plaited the hair on their heads and the beards on their faces, taking upon themselves the image of a thundercloud bearing down. They were bulls. Assyria trampled the fields like a bull enraged, goring and shaking its victims to tatters.

  And they had also perfected methods of siege.

  In the hills north and east of Damascus they felled great trees and constructed three huge engines of war. One was a platform on eight wheels, as high as the city walls. From this elevation they shot dead ahead at the enemy.

  The second weapon, built on six wheels, was a tower in whose belly swung a battering ram and on whose shoulders crouched the archers of Assyria behind shields.

  Slowly they rolled their siege machines down newly graded causeways toward Damascus. At the same time their soldiers were digging tunnels to weaken the walls from beneath.

  When, after three months, the city was judged ready to fall, soldiers on the platform sent a furious hail of arrows into Damascus while the tower was trundled directly to the city gates. And then the third machine was swung into place. The Assyrians called it nimgalli, the hurler of “large flies”: a catapult.

  At a cry from their commanders, every weapon groaned to life. Boulders beat the city walls. The great timber in the belly of the tower battered the city gates again and again. Armed troops rushed forward under shields, carrying light ladders. They swarmed up the walls on all sides, and by night Damascus had fallen to Assyria.

  The king of Assyria required tribute from Damascus thereafter.

  Tyre and Sidon and Edom and Israel also paid an annual tribute, but they had not been plundered or defeated.

  Israel, therefore, strengthened the military, rebuilt fortresses, reclaimed territories as far north as Hamath and all down the east side of the Jordan: Ramoth Gilead, the king’s highway. The economy improved.

  Thirty years after Jehu had died, a new king reigned in Israel: Jeroboam II, cunning, educated, alert to the great and delicate balance of powers throughout the world. Copper came into his kingdom and tin from lands east of Assyria; spices and perfumes arrived by caravan, purple linens, combs and brooches, precious stones, luxuries.

  The walls of Jeroboam’s palace were paneled; his furniture was inlaid with ivory; he slept on a bed of ivory.

  Such good fortune persuaded the people that God approved of them again. The priests of the shrine in Bethel taught Israel that wealth was a sign of divine favor—and they themselves grew rich in the practice.

  A grateful people brought constant gifts of sacrifice. The golden calf placed here by the first Jeroboam more than a hundred and fifty years ago now proved its power in the sunny reign of the second Jeroboam.

  The population of Israel increased. The number of pilgrims journeying to Bethel also swelled. These were a confident people. Their sacrifices were born of a glad self-satisfaction. The altar in Bethel produced a delicious smoke daily—a sweet scent, surely, in the nostrils of God. Loud and beautiful was the music in the court of the calf, lutes and harps and strings and pipes, loud clashing cymbals.

  Amaziah, the priest of that place, stood at the altar in royal colors, presiding with a dramatic flair and courtesy. He was beloved by this people. He was also beloved by his king. All was well!

  Amaziah the priest reached to turn the meat broiling on the altar. He spilled its juices to the hot coals, creating a great spitting billow of white cloud. He threw his arms up, preparing to chant a blessing upon the heads of his people—

  —when a sharp voice like an ax blade split the air, screaming:

  I hate, I despise your feasts! I take no delight in your solemn assemblies! Even though you offer me burnt offerings, I will not accept them!

  III

  IN THE REGION of Tekoa, six miles south of Bethlehem and ten miles south of Jerusalem, there lived a shepherd who had also been observing the elemental shifts of power in the world. But his interpretation did not favor Israel. He saw punishment on the horizon.

  Amos was a plain man. In the higher Judean hills he pastured a flock of sheep. In lower valleys he maintained a grove of sycamore trees, the fruit of paupers. When it was small and green, each fruit had to be pinched. Amos broke the husk, opening it to sunlight so that the insects inside would die and the fruit would ripen to an edible softness. Even so, it never achieved sweetness. But it fed the belly and it nourished the peasant and it was very cheap.

  Amos knew poverty firsthand, though his own shape tended to corpulence no matter how little he ate. He was fat. He puffed hard and turned red when he labored.

  Amos dressed in a leather jerkin older than his father. His hut was stone and grass. His friends were indentured to the wealthy, working all their lives for someone else’s benefit and watching their children enter the same unseemly life. Amos, too, was poor. But a poor man need not lack intelligence. And a poor man’s God need not be poor.

  In the eyes of Amos, Assyria moved within the designs of a mighty God—and Assyria, therefore, was not the salvation of Israel. Unless attitudes changed and faithfulness returned, Assyria would become the natural consequence of sinning!

  It distressed him that the people of God could be so ignorant of God.

  But he would have suffered his distress alone and in private, if the Lord had not driven him into public places, speaking.

  Amos never wanted to be a prophet. He had contempt for prophets: so many wanted fees for their oracles.

  But in the spring of the year, twenty years after Jeroboam II had been anointed king of Israel, Amos looked down into t
he soil and saw locusts hatching. This was when the tender shoots were just appearing. He saw newborn locusts, rosy-white like worms. He saw them split their early skins and begin to hop about.

  Then the Lord God caused this brood to rush into maturity. Five times the locusts molted while Amos watched, swelling ten times over and sprouting wings. They swarmed upward. Their wings made a dead-dry whirring. They went forth to consume the green grass, all the grass of the land, and Amos understood the prophecy, but he could not tolerate the horror of its meaning.

  “O Lord God,” he cried, “forgive Israel! How can Israel stand if you do not forgive?”

  The Lord repented of the thing he had revealed, and he said, It shall not be.

  But in the summer of that same year the sun grew hot on Amos’ shoulders. So fiercely did the heat beat down on him, that he heard the Lord God calling, and he saw a flaming fire, and the fire was devouring the ancient deeps of creation, the source of all waters in heaven and on earth, and he saw that the fire had begun to eat the land, too, and he cried, “Cease, O Lord God! I beg you, cease! How can Israel stand if you do not cease?”

  And again the Lord repented, saying, This also shall not be.

  But yet a third time, while he was gazing at a wall which the builders were building, Amos saw a plumb line hanging for the straightness of the corner.

  And the voice of the Lord said, Amos, what do you see?

  Amos said, “A plumb line.”

  Then the Lord caused him to see that it was God who held the plumb line in his hand, and the Lord said,

  Behold, I have set a plumb line

  in the midst of my people Israel:

  I will never pass by them again.

  This time Amos could not answer the Lord. He could no longer beg for mercy. He could not pray for Israel.

  And the Lord said: Their high places shall whistle with desolation. Their sanctuaries shall fall into a stony waste. I shall with the sword cut off their kings.

  Amos could not stay home after having had these visions. They drove into his bones a holy restlessness. He knew. He knew what the Lord required of him, and he hated it. But he could not refuse it.

  Therefore, he pulled his leather jerkin down over his round body, and left his flocks and his sycamore grove, and traveled north to Bethel.

  The city astonished him. On the one hand, its luxury was a killing thing, like rot in summer fruit; but on the other hand, these people were grinning and congratulating themselves for many successes.

  The Lord said, The songs in the palace shall be wailings, and the bodies in the silent streets shall lie, fly-blown, in heaps, and Amos looked around to see whether anyone else had heard the horrible declaration. No one had.

  Amos, puffing for all his exertion, walked through the city to the altar raised upon its highest hill of Bethel. He pressed through the crowds until he saw a priest above all. But Amos was a short man. He climbed the base of a pillar, grabbed the pillar in his left arm and swung outward, just as the priest caused a white plume of smoke to explode before him.

  Then the Lord God was crying out in Bethel: I hate, I despise your feasts! I take no delight in your solemn assemblies!

  But the words issued from Amos’ own mouth. His heart hammered so hard against his ribs, that he thought he would die.

  The Lord said, Even though you offer me burnt offerings, I will not accept them! Take away from me the noise of your songs!

  The priest had seen Amos.

  “Sir!” he called. An affable voice. “Sir, why don’t you and I go apart and talk together?”

  But the Lord cried out: Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream! You shall take up your abominable thing, your gods and your images which you made for yourselves, or I will take you into exile beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts!

  The priest turned pale. “Guard!” he called. The Israelites, gathered before this altar and the calf, were becoming skittish, covering their ears to block out the words uttered against them.

  Amos felt a genuine pity. He understood very well the affliction which was being prophesied. He was sweating; his heart hurt as if from spasms; he wanted to go home, but the Lord had not yet ceased his outcry:

  For three transgressions of Israel and for four I will not revoke the punishment—because you sell the righteous man for silver, and you buy the needy woman for a pair of shoes! You trample the heads of the poor in the dust, and you turn away from the afflicted—

  Suddenly Amos was seized from below. Soldiers tore him from the pillar and dragged him after the priest into a small private room. There the door was shut upon them, Amos and the priest alone.

  The priest fixed the shepherd with furious eyes. “My name is Amaziah,” he said, “priest of God in Bethel.” He began to remove the sacred articles of his clothing. “You may believe thatyour ranting is of God. I don’t. We keep absolutely every ritual God commanded Moses to keep: sacrifices, offerings, feasts, memorials, festivals. Shame on you! Shame on you, Judean, for playing the false prophet before me—”

  “Amaziah, priest in Bethel,” Amos interrupted, “swallow the spit of your accusations and let it burn within you. I did not want to come. It was the Lord who took me from the flock and drove me here! And you, keeper of every ritual—what you do not keep before the Lord is his covenant!”

  Amos was sweating and puffing and miserable and despising the fact that he had no stature in his struggle on the Lord’s behalf. He was short and fat, and his voice sounded like a whine.

  Amaziah said, “The firstfruits of everything go to God. There is a continual offering of thanks for the goodness he has showered upon—”

  “What do all the right words matter,” Amos shouted, “when people are wrong with their neighbors? It isn’t how you sacrifice, but how you behave that proves you righteous.”

  “This land is bathed in the goodness of God! Look about you. How can you suggest that God does not love and reward us?”

  “Oh, God has loved you. But you do not love in return, neither the Lord nor his people. These blessings have turned to rot in you. They divide the nation, and those who keep riches unto themselves hurt the others! Amaziah, priest in Bethel, your rich lords loan money to the farmer in order to foreclose! I have seen it. They use false weights when they pay. They sell a poor man for a pair of sandals, and then they build for themselves summer houses of hewn stone. They sleep on ivory beds—and they thank God for their reward!”

  While Amos poured forth his words, Amaziah had grown very calm. He sat down at a small table, took tablets from a shelf, and now was writing on them.

  Amos said, “Therefore Israel shall be the first of those to go into exile. The revelry of those who stretch themselves on couches shall pass away—”

  Amaziah snapped the tablets shut, rose, opened the door, and handed it to the guard who stood outside.

  “Take this to the king,” he said. “Come back immediately with his answer.”

  When the door was closed he faced Amos and spoke in unctuous, mannered tones:

  “You’d better flee, you seer, to the land of Judah. Eat bread in Judah. Prophesy in Judah. But never again return to prophesy in Bethel. It is the king’s sanctuary, the temple of the kingdom. Fat little man, for your own sake I counsel flight. For this is the message I just sent the king: ‘There is a man here conspiring against you. He says that Israel must go into exile and that Jeroboam shall die by the sword.’”

  Amaziah never realized the enormous relief he had granted the shepherd from Tekoa. For the Lord fell silent in that very moment, and Amos was indeed free to go home again.

  IV

  What shall I do with you, O Israel?

  I desire steadfast love, not sacrifice!

  Yet your love is like a morning cloud,

  like the dew that goes early away—

  Once more the Lord tried by love to draw his people back again.

  There was in Israel a prophet named Hosea wh
o married a woman named Gomer. In the early years of their marriage she bore her husband three children.

  The first was a son whom they named Jezreel.

  When the second child, a daughter, was born, the Lord said, Call her name Lo-ruhamah, Not Pitied, because I will no longer have pity on the house of Israel to forgive them.

  When Lo-ruhamah was weaned, Gomer conceived again and bore a son.

  And the Lord said, Call his name Lo-ammi, Not My People, because Israel is no longer my people.

  She raised her children quietly for several years. But after they had grown into stout youths, Gomer suddenly gathered her things and ran away from her house, her husband, and her family

  . She took a lover. She descended into harlotry. Soon she was possessed by another man as a slave is possessed by a master.

  THEN THE LORD said to Israel:

  When you were a child, I loved you. And I called you, my child, out of Egypt.

  But the more I called you, the more you went away from me. You burned sacrifices to Ba’al. You burned incense to idols.

  Yet it was I who taught you how to walk. When you grew tired, I carried you in my arms. I healed your weariness. I led you with cords of compassion. With bands of love I drew you through the wilderness to myself. Where you chafed with your burdens, I eased you. When you were hungry, I bent down to feed you.

  What shall I do now, O my people—now that you refuse to turn back to me?

  I will send you back to Egypt!

  I will let Assyria rule over you!

  I will send a sword to break the bars of your gates and to rage in your cities!

  I will ignite war inside your fortresses, and war will devour you!

  Oh, Israel!

  Oh, my child!

  How can I give you up? How can I hand you over to destruction? My heart recoils within me. My compassion grows warm and tender.