The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  While she spoke Joseph gazed at his advocate with open admiration. What need had he to talk? Mary was so young, her hair soft and long and innocent, divided down the middle. But her chin was stubborn and her mind utterly sure of itself. In fact, it was Mary who conceived a good plan for the mohar.

  “Joseph,” she was saying to her father, “paid for the meals of the mourners—which, as you know, was most of Nazareth, the same good people that now are pleased to call him odd—though he himself fasted through seven days. For the sake of others he made himself a poor man.”

  “So, Joseph,” Mary’s father said, thrusting forth a pink lower lip, “so, then, is it your hope to bind my daughter to a poor man?”

  “Father!”

  But Joseph raised his hand.

  “It is true, Joachim, that I am poor,” he said, nodding and nodding. “But there is a mohar I can give.” He turned and lumbered out of the yard, leaving Mary and her father alone for the moment.

  “Where is he going?” Joachim said, blinking against the natural leakage of his tiny eyes. Mary, on the other hand, crept a little ways after Joseph, her own eyes filled with eagerness.

  Soon Joseph returned with a very long, very heavy box hanging by a rope from his right shoulder. He set the box down at Joachim’s feet, knelt, drew forth a shining adze, and glanced up. “See?” he said.

  Joachim’s blinking grew more rapid, his frown the darker.

  Joseph pulled out several metal saws so new that Mary could no longer contain herself. She started to giggle. “See, Father?” she said. “Do you see?”

  Next came chisels and awls and files, mallets of various sizes, a compass, a fine piece of chalk, a straight edge for measuring, and finally, marvelously constructed of wood and a well-ground blade, a plane. Joseph stroked this last tool with tenderness, then stood up and faced the householder, Joachim, Mary’s father, directly.

  “I will make for you two doorjambs,” he said, “and the lintel and the door—installed. That is my mohar. I will weave two wooden lattices. And if your house needs new beams I will hew them too, though it will take me longer to get good wood.”

  Mary was grinning so hard her cheeks were as bright as pomegranates. “Joseph is a proud man, Father,” she said, seizing Joachim’s hand and kissing it. “He has always had a craft. You know that. But yesterday he finished making himself a whole new set of tools, and now he is ready for marriage again.”

  “Well,” said Joachim, staring at the instruments scattered in his yard. “Well, this is all so sudden, you know. A father is dizzy. He is gasping with surprise, suffocating—”

  “Yes, yes, Father—suffocate. But choke out an answer before you faint. Do you accept Joseph’s offer?”

  “Mary!” Joachim was wounded. He took his hand back and tucked it under his arm. “Isn’t a man permitted a little time to consider the entire future life of his daughter and his son-in-law and the grandchildren to come?”

  Mary cried, “Son-in-law? Did you say son-in-law?”

  Her father continued, a woeful look on his round face: “Shouldn’t a father be allowed to mourn the loss of his only daughter? Joseph, surely you know the goodness of patience and circumspection.”

  Joseph nodded, sympathy trembling on the rims of his eyelids.

  But Mary clapped her hands and cried, “Finish it, Father! Oh, finish it! Set the date for betrothal, that my darling might begin to build you a beautiful house. And when the beams are up,” she whispered, moving like breath on a winter’s air, floating toward Joseph and touching the backs of his hands, “on the very day the beams are up,” she whispered, “we will be married.”

  IV

  SHORTLY AFTER THE AUTUMN HARVEST, when the mornings were cool and the evenings dry—on Friday, the day before the Sabbath—some three hundred priests began to arrive in Jerusalem. They were coming to assume their sacred duties for the week, while three hundred others were leaving for home again because their duties were done.

  Every week this exchange was made with grace and a strict formality. There were twenty-four courses of priests, divided according to family, each division serving at the temple for one week twice a year. When the service of one division was complete, they gave to the next division the keys of the temple and ninety-three sacred vessels, all in solemn ceremony.

  On this Friday the division of Abijah, eighth in order of service, was gathering from villages and towns around Jerusalem. Tomorrow their sacred labors began.

  Old Zechariah belonged to the clan of Abijah. He came on slow feet, his clothing in one large bag, six new spikes in another.

  Normally he entered by the Sheep Gate, the nearest north side entrance to the city. Its road led straight up to the temple. But today he walked west along the northern wall, then south around a corner in the wall. Still outside the city, he passed the broken stone of old quarries. On his right side were tombs the Jews carved in the limestone hills; on his left, near the wall, were gardens ordered, cool, and green. Zechariah paused. He loved the genial peace of it all: olive trees, poplars, myrtle, juniper, hyssop, fig, mulberry, willow. Wealthy people owned these plots; a young man from Arimathea was rumored to have purchased a freshly turned corner; but they seldom sat here to enjoy their holdings. Zechariah did. He was old, somewhat melancholy about the passage of his life. He tended to sit in green places, thinking.

  He and his wife were approaching their graves alone. They had borne no children. No generation existed to care for them when they could not care for themselves. No grandchildren. It was the sorrow of both their lives.

  Zechariah continued walking. The city wall took a sharp turn westward, but his road went to a gate where the two walls met. He entered Jerusalem through the Garden Gate and was immediately surrounded by the rush and pressure of many people.

  On either side of this street, all the way into the city, were shops and merchants, traders and craftsmen both making and selling their wares: woolen goods, carpets, and blankets. Jewelers sat under whitewashed roofs. Flax traders hung their products on smooth wood railings; bakers sold bread as fast as it came from the back of the shop; sandal makers on their stools called to tailors on theirs. This was one of two market streets in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem was thriving: wines, oils, fruits, flour milled from barley, cheeses, eggs, the chicken itself. People were sweeping the great stones of the pavement. Butchers had a street all to themselves. Weavers worked in the southeast portion of the city. Tanners and curriers were required to set their workshops where the smell could not offend either the pilgrim or the priest.

  Jerusalem was supported by the rich, vigorous business of the temple. Offerings and tithes fed its treasury, from which the temple servants were paid: stonemasons, sculptors, tapestry makers, those who designed fountains, doctors, barbers, experts in drainage and wells and cisterns. The temple was built of alabaster, stibium, and marble. The courts were paved with wide slabs of smooth stone. Delicate stone lattices three cubits high separated the inner court from the outer courts of the Gentiles. All this required the care of skilled personnel. And all these workers, when they were paid, spent it in the markets of Jerusalem.

  The keeping of the temple curtains alone could support a small village. Skilled weavers and knitters had to produce annually two new curtains, twenty cubits wide and forty long. There were twenty-six such curtains hanging in the temple, each woven of six colors on seventy-two strands, each strand with twenty-four threads. It took the steady labor of eighty-two maidens to make two curtains a year.

  Zechariah toiled through the crowds until he came to a cross-street. He turned right and lifted his eyes to the final grandeur of King Herod, and he sighed. Here on the western heights of Zion was a palace containing two magnificent banquet halls at opposite ends and rooms enough for two hundred guests—besides the apartments of his ten wives and all his children and all their servants. Soldiers were garrisoned under three mighty towers at the northern end of the building, and all around it were courtyards and gardens and promenades, border
ed by canals and lovely pools, fountains and ingenious water spouts.

  Zechariah was sixty-nine years old. His wife Elizabeth was sixty-five. They had been married for fifty years. King Herod had been blessed with fifteen children in his old age. Did he know how to give thanks to the Lord? Did he know that each child was more precious than a palace and that the honor each child might render was more enduring than gold?

  The old priest sighed again and then diminished himself by approaching the palace. He had to deliver his spikes.

  BUT THE KING was not in his palace. He had long been sick with an interior affliction whose pain could sometimes grow intolerable. He could not move his fingers, his arms or legs because of the anguish in them. At such times he traveled to the town of Callirrhoe on the eastern shores of the Dead Sea, where there were natural hot springs to ease the aggravation in his extremities.

  This time Herod had to be carried the entire distance in a palanquin on the shoulders of six servants. The journey had taken a week.

  And now he spent his days stripped to a loin cloth, lying in the steaming water, attended by a secretary and two close counselors.

  King Herod genuinely expected to survive this present affliction. Nevertheless, physical pain always caused in him a restless anxiety regarding the identity of his successor. While he lay in the pools of Callirrhoe, therefore, he was revising an old will. He was dictating a new one with sudden barks and fierce decisions naming various sons of his to the throne once he should leave it.

  Herod churned the waters with his obsessions.

  He had already written and sealed one will naming Alexander, the son of Mariamne, to be his successor—and then another, naming her other son Aristobulus. But these two were about to perish. Two princes and two wills were destroyed, driving Herod to his third will.

  “Antipater!” cried the king, dashing water in the yellow baths of Callirrhoe. “Antipater! The son of my first wife, my dear Doris. Inscribe his name on your tablet, sir. Antipater: to him I give my throne, and he will reign over Judea!”

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, when lots were cast to determine which priests received which duties for the day, it fell to Zechariah to offer incense in the Holy Place during the Tamid, the evening sacrifice.

  The old man was speechless with joy. Elizabeth, too, would be glad. This was the first time in all his years as priest that he had ever been selected to offer incense. At his age it would also be the last time.

  That afternoon Zechariah entered one of the chambers on the south side of the temple, a small cubicle lighted by thin sunlight through a lattice. There he washed his rough face and body according to the rituals of purification, and then he dressed: clean linen breeches on his old loins; a pure white tunic pulled down from his shoulder to his ankle. With his bent hands he wrapped around his waist a handsome belt also of white linen but embroidered with a single scarlet thread. Finally Zechariah bound his head in a turban as white as his tunic, then went out into the court of the priests and walked to the front of the temple, to the Altar of Burnt Offering.

  The Tamid began when two priests came and arranged new wood on the coals of the high altar. It sent up a sweet smoke, and a choir of Levites raised their voices in song. At the foot of the altar, a Levite bent down and with one stroke killed a lamb. A priest caught its blood in a bowl, bore the bowl up the altar steps, raised it to heaven, then dashed the blood against the stones of the altar. The Levites struck their musical instruments and sang and sang. Zechariah stood at one side, waiting his turn. Beside him stood another priest, holding a silver firepan.

  Now the officiating priest returned to the lamb and cut it into pieces. He washed it, then carried the entire carcass up to the Altar of Burnt Offering and laid it on the fire. While the meat hissed and sent to heaven a linen-white smoke, the priest began to chant the evening prayer. Another priest carried a meal offering up to the fires of the altar, fine flour soaked in oil. The smell of baking filled the air, and the Levites sang and sang.

  Now the man who stood by Zechariah touched his shoulder and moved forward. It was their turn.

  Zechariah was transported. He seemed to sail up the steps of the temple porch. When he paused at the door and turned, he discovered that his kneecaps were trembling beneath the tunic.

  The assisting priest had gone to the Altar of Burnt Offering. With tongs he took good glowing coals from the fire and placed them in his silver firepan; then he, too, climbed the steps of the porch. At the same time another assistant came up with a dish of incense and a silver spoon.

  One priest on his left, and one on his right, Zechariah turned and walked through the doors into the Holy Place, his heart hammering. Then it happened again as it had at the dedication of the temple fourteen years ago: Zechariah started to cry. There was no sobbing. Simply, the tears began to stream down his cheeks of their own accord, and he considered it a gift of God, that he could both enter the temple and weep on entering.

  Evening light struck at the high windows. A single, magnificent, seven-branched lampstand stood to one side shedding a yellow light. Zechariah and his assistants moved directly toward the small Altar of Incense. The priest with the firepan tipped all its coals into the altar grating. A quick ghost of sparks flew up before them. The other priest set his dish of incense on the side of the altar, then both of them withdrew.

  Zechariah was alone.

  Water dropped on the coals, spitting and searing him, till he realized that it was his tears.

  Oh, then the old priest beamed. He loved dearly the heat of his forge. It was the comfort of a stable life. But this heat, this smaller sacred fire touching the same hands and flesh and face—this heat shot his spirit straight to heaven.

  Zechariah reached for the little silver spoon, weightless in his thick fist, and scooped it full of powdery incense. He lifted the spoon above the burning coals, then scattered the powder down. It twinkled on the coals like red stars in heaven. He spooned more and more incense into the altar, until great clouds of smoke billowed through the temple, catching streaks of sunlight near the ceiling and pouring out the doors. The crowds outside saw the smoke. They raised their voices in prayer. Zechariah heard them in the distance, saying: Make haste! Make haste to hear us, O Lord—

  But suddenly the air at the right side of the altar tore apart as if it were a curtain, and fire broke into the room, a pure white flame with its foot on the floor and its crown at the high beams of the ceiling. The heat should have consumed Zechariah’s clothing and seared his flesh!

  He opened his mouth but could not scream.

  The white flame said, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.”

  It seemed to Zechariah that there now appeared within the standing light a human form; but this was the shading of light in light he saw, a sparkling in the region of the eyes, darkness at the mouth, a spilling of brilliance all down two arms, a torso, and two eternal legs.

  Zechariah whispered, “Prayer? What prayer?” The question was a reflex. The man was terrified.

  The flame said, “You will know both joy and gladness, for he will be great before the Lord. Your son will turn many in Israel to the Lord their God.”

  “A son?” the priest breathed.

  The bright flame said, “He must drink no wine nor any strong drink. He will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb. He will go before the Lord in the power of Elijah, turning the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to justice again, preparing for the Lord a people!”

  Zechariah covered his face with his thick hands. “Sir,” he said in anguish, “don’t ridicule me. I am an old man. My wife is an old woman. It cannot happen as you say.”

  The flame said, “Look at me.”

  Zechariah hunched farther down.

  The light cried, “I am Gabriel. Look at me!”

  The old man uncovered his eyes. Gabriel?

  “I, who stand in the pr
esence of God, was sent to bring you this good news.”

  Gabriel, angel of the Deity, appearing here in cosmic fire!

  The old man gaped. Yes! Yes, there was a human form in light before him.

  The angel said, “Old man, because you doubted me, you shall be both deaf and mute until the day these things have come to pass.”

  OUTSIDE THE TEMPLE the choir of Levites had sung themselves into silence. They had finished the cycle of their music. There was no more to sing. Yet the priest appointed to offer incense still lingered within. Finally, two priests in the Nikanor Gate raised long silver trumpets to their lips and released a long, declarative blast. Where was Zechariah? It was time for the drink offering with which the evening sacrifice came to its ending.

  There! There was the foolish old man on the temple porch. He was raising his arms. He was opening his mouth and thrusting out his tongue. Everyone knew the word that should come forth: The Lord bless you and keep you—

  But the priest could utter nothing at all. No blessing, no explanation.

  Helplessly he stumbled down the porch steps, his rugged face wet with tears, his eyes gaping. He rushed round to the chamber where he had left his clothing, and he disappeared. Sometime during the night the senile priest must have emerged unseen. Sometime in private he took himself home again.

  V

  JOSEPH THE SON of Jacob presented himself at Joachim’s house precisely at noon on the day of his betrothal. He was wearing a clean tunic of coarse woolen weave—sleeveless, roped at the waist, a blue stripe running down its right side from the shoulder to the hem. Over the tunic he had cast a cloak with loose blue fringes at each corner. His hair was oiled. His beard remained a thicket as high as his eyes, but the ends had been trimmed.

  Joseph’s parents had died seven years ago. Therefore, he came alone. But in his huge hands he carried a rolled parchment with such precious care that one might have regarded this article as his companion and friend. It was soft with age. A cramped writing showed on the visible side. The letters were not Aramaic, but Hebrew. This was news. Joachim had not known that Joseph could read Hebrew.