On that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples: all who lift it shall grievously hurt themselves. And all the nations of the earth will come together against it.
On that day, says the Lord, I will strike every horse with panic, and its rider with madness. But upon the house of Judah I will open my eyes. Then the clans of Judah shall say to themselves, “The inhabitants of Jerusalem have strength through the Lord of hosts, their God.”
On that day I will make the clans of Judah like a blazing pot in the midst of wood, like a flaming torch among sheaves; and they shall devour to the right and to the left all the peoples round about, while Jerusalem shall still be inhabited in its place.
On that day the Lord will put a shield about the inhabitants of Jerusalem so that the feeblest among them shall be like David, and the house of David shall be like God, like the angel of the Lord, at their head.
And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that, when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.
On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness.
On that day there shall be neither cold nor frost. And there shall be continuous day.
On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea, half to the western sea, and it shall continue in summer as in winter.
And the Lord will become king over all the earth. On that day the Lord will be one and his name one.
III
And the Psalmist sings for all the people
I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait,
and in his word do I hope.
My soul waiteth for the Lord
more than they that watch for the morning—
I say, more than they that watch for the morning.
PART EIGHT
The Messiah
THIRTY
Zechariah
I
AN OLD MAN with powerful forearms walked five steps from his little house to the workshop behind it, a low stone shed soot-darkened on the inside. It was built of three walls, the fourth open to the south. Interior shelves held hammers, tongs, dies, small smelting pots, ladles, and clay jars containing nails. The workshop was filled with nails of every kind.
Fixed to a stone foundation, in the center of the shop, sat a solid block of metal etched along one edge with grooves of various sizes, but shining and flat on the face of it. Here was an anvil that had served three generations of nailsmiths. More than fifty years ago, it had been bequeathed to this old man by the master who had taught him his craft.
Against the back wall was a brick forge already burning. The old man began to pedal a leather bellows, bringing the fire to white heat. With tongs he introduced a narrow bar of metal into the fire. The bar was squared down its shank. From end to end it was the length of a span. When one end glowed red even to the heart of the metal, the man brought it forth and laid it on the anvil. He raised a hammer and struck so hard that the shed and his body and his face were sprayed with sparks.
This is how he kept burning his beard away. Zechariah the nailsmith had a rough, toughened complexion. His cheeks were mostly scarred. He had no eyebrows nor hair on his forearms; his fingers were perpetually curled and thick, but his upper body was as powerful as it had been fifty years ago when he was nineteen—when his master died and he established his own shop.
With regular, mighty strikes of his hammer, Zechariah tapered the entire length of the metal bar, then shaped its end to a point. He himself had cast six such bars. Today he was beating them into spikes.
Lately there had been a rebellious spirit in Jerusalem. The children and the grandchildren of King Herod were fomenting riots in order to strengthen their own positions against the day when the old king died. Caesar Augustus, therefore, had commanded that several of Herod’s sons should be tried in an imperial court—and since Rome executed her criminals by crucifixion, Herod himself had ordered six new spikes from Zechariah the nailsmith. Each spike he required to be the length of a span, which is the distance from the tip of a grown man’s thumb to the tip of his fifth finger when he has spread his hand as wide as he can.
II
HEROD WAS AN IDUMEAN, a descendant of the Edomites who had moved into Judah centuries ago and had taken up dwelling around Hebron. In the last hundred years the Idumeans had converted to Jewish traditions, but the Jews could not completely accept them as kin and members of the same congregation. They were never persuaded that these con-versions—or that of this king in particular—were anything but expedient.
In fact, Herod had taken control of Jerusalem by laying siege to the city. This scarcely inspired love or loyalty. Worse, he came with the favor and the power of Rome: Marc Antony, master of Roman holdings in Asia, and Octavian, soon to be Caesar Augustus, had persuaded the Roman Senate to crown Herod king of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea. He came not kindly, but conquering.
While the siege of Jerusalem was in progress, Herod sought to mollify his new subjects by a wedding. He married a Hasmonean, a woman whose family had produced priests and rulers in Judea for the past one hundred years. Her name was Mariamne. She was of pure Jewish blood. Her father was the high priest.
In an extravagant flourish Herod purchased for his bride a necklace of elegant pearls; they came by elephant all the way from India. He placed them in a shining ebony box which came from upper Egypt. But the box lacked hinges and nails. Because of the siege, he was encamped in the hill country of Judea, and he was forced to use the artisans of that region. Thus King Herod found an obscure nailsmith, a poor man thirty-six years old, who fashioned twelve tiny nails of bronze for him. Moreover, he covered the delicate nails in a golden foil so smooth and beautiful that Mariamne was charmed and the king did not forget Zechariah.
In the years after the siege, Herod used force and manipulation to consolidate his rule in the kingdom. When he had established a grim peace in the region, he began to rebuild Jerusalem on a grand scale. Much of this work was offensive to the Jews. He built a pagan theater in the city and an amphitheater nearby. He inaugurated athletic games in honor of Caesar Augustus, at which the young men competed naked. He began to build for himself a magnificent palace—and he sent two sons of Mariamne to Rome, “To enjoy the company of Caesar,” he said. There his boys were raised in a manner befitting his own importance, more Roman than Jew.
But King Herod also did one glorious thing for which no Jew blamed him. He tore down the small, functional temple that had stood for five hundred and ten years—ever since the end of the exile—and he doubled the size of the platform on the temple Mount. He surrounded the huge new space with great colonnades on four sides. On the east was the porch of Solomon. Along the entire south side the royal porch was built of four rows of columns, creating three aisles beneath a ceiling a hundred feet high.
Herod began to rebuild the temple of the Lord. The brilliant white edifice that now arose outshone anything Solomon had imagined. The Jewish teachers who followed the progress of this marvel said, “He is atoning for his sins.”
And on the day when the new temple was dedicated—though the project would not be completed for many years yet—Jerusalem was filled with teachers and pilgrims and priests, rejoicing!
Herod himself offered three hundred oxen as a sacrifice. He stood high on a royal pavilion and watched the rich, religious commotion with satisfaction. The Levites blew on their ram’s horn trumpets and sang; musical instruments clashed and thumped and cut the air; the great altar spat grease, consuming the fat portions of the sacrifice, sending up a white smoke and the sweet smell of roasting meat. And all day long priests were slaughtering beasts on the pavement in front of the altar.
One priest in particular caught the king’s attention, an older man, but a powerful one noneth
eless: with his left hand he took hold of the ox’s horn and pulled back the great head, exposing throat; with the knife in his right hand he deftly sliced one artery; and with perfect accuracy, then, he sent the first spurts of blood into bowls. The rest of the blood ran over the pavement in grooves to a system of drains which carried the blood down to the Kidron Valley.
Herod noticed that this priest was crying. Beast after beast he slaughtered for the sacrifice, never seeming to grow tired while tears kept streaming down his face. It was a ravaged face, thick with scars and wounds; a scraggly beard; mighty forearms—and this most tender weeping!
“Who is that?” Herod asked the priests who stood beside him.
They looked and said, “Zechariah, a priest of the division of Abijah.”
The king looked more closely at the weeping priest, who seemed vaguely familiar. “Zechariah?” he said. “Isn’t he a nailsmith in the hills of Judea?”
“Yes, the same man.”
KING HEROD MURDERED MARIAMNE, his wife.
Her younger brother had been appointed high priest in Jerusalem without his approval. The boy was a Hasmonean barely sixteen years old: clearly, his elevation had been a political move, undermining Herod’s personal authority. And when the young fellow presided at his first Pentecost there was such a roar of admiration from the people that Herod decided to end both his popularity and his life.
He invited his brother-in-law to accompany him to the pools of Jericho. The summer was hot. The water was cool. And the king knew how to entertain his friends in a noble style. The boy accepted.
One afternoon a swimming party was organized. Many people filled the pools with games and laughter. King Herod swam toward the young high priest and playfully ducked him under the water. The lad never emerged alive.
In the months that followed, Mariamne’s mother refused to accept the death of her son. She accused Herod of murder. She sent her accusation to Cleopatra and to Marc Antony in Egypt. Herod was summoned to make an accounting of himself; and though he succeeded by eloquence and bribery in keeping the friendship of Rome, he bitterly resented the Has-moneans. He despised his mother-in-law, and he was much inclined to believe every rumor brought to him concerning his wife.
On the slightest provocation he had his mother-in-law murdered. But then jealousy grew violent within him. Mariamne was a beautiful woman. Jews and Romans alike were drawn to her. One day Herod’s sister Salome whispered to him of his wife’s adultery, and on the next day he had her murdered.
But the death of his wife never lay easily upon his heart.
It was not the crime that troubled him, but her absence, because he never could stop loving her.
THE SONS OF MARIAMNE were named Alexander and Aristobulus. They were not, in fact, the oldest sons of King Herod; but they were his only offspring with Hasmonean blood—and that, they believed, granted them the real right of succession to their father’s throne. They returned from Rome to see to their own interests.
During the same year when Herod’s new temple was dedicated, Alexander and Aristobulus strove openly for power in Jerusalem. They plotted among the other children of Herod; they lied and acted treacherously; they intrigued with people of power, and all the while their ambitions seemed to grow more and more immediate. Herod feared that they wanted more than succession, that they were planning rebellions by which to tear the crown from his living head.
Therefore, with instructions from Caesar Augustus, he arrested both his sons, the children of Mariamne. He imprisoned them and had them tried in a Roman court.
The trial lasted more than a year, at the end of which King Herod ordered spikes.
Perhaps he was recalling times more innocent between their mother and himself, when he gave her gifts from India and Egypt. Perhaps his heart was dark with irony. Or maybe it was a mere accident of memory. Whatever the motive, Herod sent an order to Zechariah the nailsmith for six new spikes, each a span in length, by which to crucify his sons.
III
IN THE MIDDLE of the morning, in the district of Galilee, in the village of Nazareth some three days’ journey north of Jerusalem, a middle-aged man crouched at the door of a small stone house. He was running his hand up and down the right jamb, grunting to himself, “Uhmmm.”
The jamb was old. The wood was ravaged where past hinges had been torn from it. The door itself was a poor fit, having warped long ago, having suffered the chewings and the kickings of animals and the expansion and contraction of various weathers. All its gaps were blackened. Clearly, household smoke blew out around the door as well as through the windows when the lattice had been thrown open.
Poor little house. It had but the one door and three rooms: the central room immediately within the door, where the family gathered and cooked on a low hearth and kept warm, a room to the left where the sheep and the goats were bedded, a room in the back for sleeping. Here outside, where the man crouched at its door, there was a small walled yard and a garden for vegetables.
“Uhmmm,” he murmured, stretching himself to touch the wooden lintel above the door.
His thumbnail was gnarled and black. The palms of his hands were as hard as the handles of old tools.
Suddenly the door was snatched inward and another man stepped out, equal in age to the first man, but smaller, balder, and blinking with a tiny eye.
“Joseph, explain yourself!” he said.
The man named Joseph stood back and lowered his head. Now his hands hung hugely at his thighs. A wild explosion of beard concealed his face beneath the eyes.
The smaller man said, “Last week you were at my lattice. The week before I heard you creeping on the roof. And I waited, didn’t I? I waited for the knock. Like any respectable householder, I waited for the greeting and the explanation, but none came to me, no.” The little man, finding no response in the hair before him, now addressed the air with vigorous gesticulation: “Joseph comes and Joseph goes and Nazareth says the fellow is odd,” he roared. “I myself am a just man. I am willing to listen to explanations, but none do ever come. Joseph! Why are you so interested in my house?”
Joseph mumbled, “Uhmmm,” a slow grin dividing his mouth at the teeth.
Suddenly there was the whisper of quick feet inside the house. Joseph’s eyes flicked up. The bridge of his nose grew red.
The householder saw the blush, turned, peered into his house, then looked back at Joseph with a shrewd squint of the eye. “Soooo,” he said.
Joseph nodded and nodded. Within his beard he whispered a single word: “Mohar.”
“Ah, the mohar. Am I now discovering that you have come to negotiate something with me, Joseph?”
Joseph nodded.
“To pay me something for the hand of my daughter?”
Joseph nodded.
“My breath is taken away. I can’t breathe,” said the small man, still fixing the large one with a tight stare. “Yes, yes, this is very sudden. The mohar. So you have been talking with Mary, and I didn’t know about it?”
Joseph shook his head.
“You have not been talking together?”
Joseph didn’t even shake his head this time. Having spoken once, he could not speak again. He had raised his eyes. He was staring over the head of the householder. His gaze seemed absolutely fastened to the lintel over the door, as though no other lintel in the world was as charming as this one.
Ah, but the lintel, the door, the whole house, and the sparkling daylight of Nazareth itself were all but a frame for the face within. Pale in the interior darkness, scarcely visible, as though her smile were winter’s breath upon the air, was Mary, the daughter of this householder. She had strong brows, a high and even forehead, dark eyes, and a mouth of strong convictions.
“No, father,” she declared, “we have not been talking together and you didn’t know it.”
Her father did not turn around but continued to look at Joseph, who continued to gaze straight past him to Mary.
“We meet,” she said. “But there never
has been much need for talk between us.”
“Is that why you have been creeping around my house, Joseph son of Jacob? To meet with my daughter? To peek in at her? Man, you are as old as I am!”
“Father! Joseph is upright and you know it. He would do nothing rash or unrighteous. He has never been unkind to me—as you yourself know right well! Creeping and peeking? Every time we meet, Father, you are lurking nearby.”
“Yes!” said Mary’s father with energy. “And there has been a great deal of ear-whisperings lately, murmurings I could not interpret. What about that? Don’t I have the paternal right to ask about that?”
“Father.”
“What?”
“Joseph the son of Jacob has been asking me about the mohar.”
“Oh. Yes. The mohar.”
“Yes. He wants to marry me.”
The bald-headed man frowned. He cleared his throat with such sudden and explosive fury that he seemed to damage himself. Then he drew his lips into a thin purse and announced: “A mohar, Joseph, is by ancient and honored custom usually calculated at fifty shekels of silver. Are you prepared to offer me, as compensation for the loss of my daughter, a full fifty shekels of silver?”
There was a long moment of silence. Joseph lowered his eyes. He was a large and powerful man; his great beard alone should have intimidated others—but his meekness gave them a sense of advantage, and his habitual muteness could provoke them to sudden wraths and rages.
Finally, Mary stepped into the doorway and spoke, her voice husky with feeling, her dark brows lifted high: “Everyone in Nazareth knows,” she said, “that when his wife died, Joseph spent all he had upon her honor. This is no secret, Father. He sold his tools to buy space in a common cave, a narrow ledge for her tomb. He soaked her linen shroud in aloes and myrrh, very expensive—”
The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Page 50
