The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  They planned to marry in summer, when Joachim’s house was altogether finished.

  But in the spring—exactly three weeks after Joseph had begun his work on the roof itself—Mary suddenly wasn’t there.

  For three days Joseph came and waited to wave his greeting, but she didn’t appear and he felt her absence terribly. He lost concentration for the job. Yet he said nothing to Joachim or Anne. He hid his growing anxiety. This was his nature. It was the hardest thing in the world for the big man to do, to speak his feelings or his fears—especially when they involved confusion and guilt. Ignorance snatched speech right out of his mouth.

  Was Mary avoiding him? Had he offended her somehow?

  Neither was her father saying anything to Joseph these days, but he, at least, was visible. From time to time he would stick his head out of the house and scowl at his son-in-law with a black, speechless anger.

  What had Joseph done? At home alone, the poor man began to sink into despair.

  And then in the evening of the fourth day, Ann came unannounced to Joseph’s house. He went out to greet her and saw that she had brought lentils and onions and rice in a pot. She entered his little courtyard, and he watched her as she kindled a fire of dried brush and dung. Dung burns slowly, with much smoke. Apparently she intended to linger a while.

  When the fire was hot, she poured olive oil over the vegetables and the grain in her pot and began slowly to stir. Joseph liked lentil stew.

  While she was stirring, Anne said, “Joachim does not know that I have come. You needn’t tell him nor fear that I will tell him. This is our business.”

  She fell silent, staring into the stew. Like her husband, Anne was nearly as wide as she was high. When she meditated, her mouth compulsively pursed over and over again. A network of wrinkles laced her lips.

  Suddenly she said, “Won’t you allow us even to talk?”

  The stew had begun to send forth a pleasant aroma. Joseph had found himself grateful for Anne’s presence. But this question immediately caused anguish in his breast. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “What?” he said.

  Anne said, “Are you going to keep her from me? Even from me?”

  Joseph peered at his mother-in-law, seeking understanding.

  “Who—? Keep who from you?”

  Anne turned to the door. “Mary!” she called. “Mary, can we talk together?”

  Joseph widened his eyes with horrible comprehension and spoke: “You don’t know where Mary is?”

  Anne stopped stirring the stew. “No,” she whispered. “Don’t you?”

  Joseph rose to his feet and grabbed his beard. There was no guilt in him now. Only fear. He had a fierce urge to run out into the countryside looking for Mary.

  Anne’s eyes, too, were filled with panic.

  “But she took her clothes!” Anne said. “Last Sabbath Joachim and I went to the synagogue in Japhia. Mary said she wanted to be alone. It was late when we got home. The house was dark and she was gone. She took her clothes. Joseph, if she isn’t here, where is she? Didn’t she tell you anything?”

  BY THE SIXTH MONTH of her pregnancy, Elizabeth the wife of Zechariah, sixty-five years old, was blooming.

  “God has smoothed my wrinkles,” she said. “He has filled my breasts with life again and given my bony body weight for a while.”

  She called herself a gourd. She said she was like a cucumber, so quickly had she swelled up. Her womb was full. A baby! In three months, when Elizabeth turned sixty-six, she would also bend forward and bear a baby into the world. Oh, she spent her days attending to the domestic work as if she were young again, and except in the afternoons when she took dozy little naps on her sitting stool, Elizabeth spent the daytime humming and whistling and singing songs.

  Then early one evening she heard a rapping on her door. She wiped her hands and went to see who was there.

  Zechariah didn’t hear the knock. Zechariah wouldn’t have heard a hammer on his anvil or thunder in the heavens. Ever since the night of his “vision of angels,” as he described it in writing for her—the old nailsmith had been completely deaf and dumb.

  So Elizabeth opened her door herself—and there stood her nephew’s child, Joachim’s little girl, whom she had not seen in years. “Mary!” Elizabeth cried. “Pretty Mary, it’s you! But you’re alone!”

  But this was no common visit.

  And Mary was not a child anymore.

  Her dark brows were lifted in an intense appeal, and her eyes were filled with beseeching. Clearly, she had come with a question.

  Then several things happened so swiftly that they were all one thing, and that thing was the revelation of God.

  Mary’s eyes dropped to Elizabeth’s breasts and then to her belly. In the softest of whispers, she said, “Hail, Elizabeth.”

  Immediately the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaped up to her heart, and old Elizabeth shrieked.

  Because Elizabeth suddenly understood everything: the child inside of her, the reason for Mary’s appearing, the glory of the days in which they were living, the great thing that God was starting to do!

  “Oh, Mary!” Elizabeth cried. She grabbed her young niece by both her arms and pulled her into the house. “Mary, blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”

  Mary mouthed the words, My womb?

  Elizabeth gathered the woman in a crushing embrace and howled, “What a gift has been given me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me!”

  Mary said, “You know about me?”

  Elizabeth released her, covered her face, and began to cry.

  “Mary, I know!” she said. “I know what child is in you right now. As soon as you spoke to me, the babe in my own womb jumped for joy, and that was a prophecy. Oh, sweetheart, blessed are you to have believed that the Lord would fulfill the word he spoke to you!”

  “He told me that I would conceive a child,” Mary said to Elizabeth. “He said that the child would be holy, the Son of God! He said my baby would be called the Son of God.”

  Elizabeth stepped past Mary and shut the door of the room. She returned, took her niece by the hand, and led her to a small, three-legged stool. Gently Elizabeth urged her to sit, then she knelt down before Mary, and the two women gazed at each other, one whose hair, all white, was gathered in a braid, the other whose hair hung all around her shoulders like a black cape.

  Mary whispered, “Things are changing, Elizabeth! I think God is turning the whole world upside down. What do you think?”

  The older woman started to nod, but the words were pouring from Mary now: “God is lifting up the little people, a lowly maid like me, Elizabeth. He is blessing me! Next he will knock the mighty from their thrones! And hungry people will eat, and rich people will go hungry! Things are changing! I know it. The world will not be the same tomorrow. Does anyone else know this, too?”

  Elizabeth reached for Mary’s hands and put them on the tough roundness of her own womb. “This baby knows it,” she said. “And maybe my old husband knows something, too.”

  “God is rising up, just as he did for Israel in Egypt.” Mary’s eyes were filled with a hectic brightness. The times themselves were converging in her mind. Elizabeth watched the young woman fairly explode with understanding. Mary said, “God is remembering his people! He is remembering the promises which he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to Abraham’s children forever. Oh, Elizabeth, my soul magnifies the Lord! I can’t help it anymore. My spirit is rejoicing in God my Savior!”

  MARY STAYED WITH ELIZABETH and Zechariah for three months after that. Often the women murmured and chattered together as if they were the same age, not a half one hundred years apart. And when the commotion caught his eye, Zechariah would look up and smile as well; but his participation was limited.

  On the other hand, he was forever tender with his wife now. He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers. His eyes were voluble with expression, and Elizabeth’s eyes were ears of an exce
llent listening: she understood.

  It was Elizabeth who remembered Joachim and Anne and Joseph. She sent word that Mary was visiting, acting now as her companion and soon as her midwife.

  Then, when the old woman went into labor, she took immense satisfaction in screaming. She paid attention to the strapping pain, the astonishing strength in her old body, and she gave voice to every new degree of hurting. She screamed like a sixteen-year-old. Everyone in the village knew that the day had arrived, that a baby was coming to a woman who had been barren longer than most of them had lived.

  It was a boy.

  Elizabeth had known that it would be a boy. Zechariah had written it down on tablets: A son, filled with the Holy Spirit already in your womb. A son, and we shall call his name John.

  When her jubilant screaming was done and the thin thread of infant squalling had begun, then the neighbors knew, and soon they came to visit. They praised the newborn baby; they rejoiced with his mother; they grinned at his old father, bobbing their heads up and down as if he had lost his brains as well as his hearing.

  On the eighth day of the child’s life, friends and relatives of Zechariah and Elizabeth gathered for his circumcision. In the midst of the ceremony, a rabbi began to refer to him as “Zechariah.” They were naming the boy after his father: Zechariah.

  But when she understood their intent, Elizabeth stood up and cried, “No!” She moved toward her son saying, “He shall be called John.”

  “John?” said the rabbi. “There’s no one named John in your families.” He turned to Zechariah, who was sitting on a three-legged stool, oblivious of the interruption.

  The rabbi stood directly in front of the nailsmith to get his attention, then he pointed at Zechariah and made huge mouth gestures: ZECH– AHHH–RYE–AHHH! Next he pointed at the baby and repeated the same four enormous syllables, bobbing his head up and down, seeking agreement.

  Old Zechariah watched but showed no new expression. Neither did he acknowledge the rabbi’s massive interrogative. Instead, he rose up and went into the other room, then came back with a writing tablet. Standing where the rabbi and others could see what he was doing, he wrote on the tablet in Aramaic: His name is John.

  Everyone who saw the inscription marveled.

  And immediately Zechariah’s tongue was loosed, and he began to speak—softly, softly praising God.

  Elizabeth covered her mouth, overcome with emotion. He had not spoken since the night of their making love.

  Except for the soft singing of Zechariah’s new voice, silence fell upon the room. The rabbi himself had been struck dumb. Who could doubt that this was the work of the Lord?

  In the land where the people had not heard a prophet for hundreds of years, Zechariah, a nailsmith and a priest, an old man with a savage countenance was filled with the Holy Spirit and singing the prophecy of God:

  “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,” Zechariah sang, “for he is visiting his people! He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, exactly as he promised—that we should be saved from the hands of those who hate us.

  “God is remembering his holy covenant! God is remembering the oath he swore to our father Abraham, to grant that we, being delivered from our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness all the days of our life!”

  Now the old man moved toward his baby boy. “You, my son,” he whispered. “You, John,” he sang in greater voice, gathering the child into his powerful arms,

  “Ah, you will be called the prophet of the Most High,

  because you will go before the Lord to prepare his way,

  to give his people knowledge of salvation

  in the forgiveness of their sins,

  through the tender mercy of our God,

  when the day shall dawn,

  giving light to those who sit in the shadow of death,

  light to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

  III

  SPRING TURNED INTO SUMMER. The sky remained bright blue and cloudless all day long. The lack of a roof in the dry season was not a problem. Therefore, Joseph could work at a careful pace, making sure that no one would ever be able to find fault with his mohar, keeping his mind completely on his work, refusing to think of anything except the precision and quality of his work.

  Then, suddenly, the beautiful Mary was home, smiling at him, kissing the few naked places on his person, his ear, his forehead, his neck—and poor Joseph lost concentration all over again.

  He felt anger and fear together, because Mary had put herself in harm’s way, traveling alone without a word to anyone. Yet he could not scold the woman.

  He felt hurt that she hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him of her journey. Even now she offered no explanations. Part of the man guessed that this was her own affair. Part felt sad that she would conceal some important thing from him. But the very sadness prevented him from asking. It wasn’t in his nature to demand. Moreover, if he had attempted to open the topic at all, between his first word and his second Mary would have produced a whole speech, very eloquent, and he would have forgotten all his thought in hers.

  Joseph, therefore, kept his questions to himself.

  But soon he saw that Mary was not the same as she had been at their betrothal, and the confusion increased.

  She spoke less. Her eyes had become strange, as if gazing away from the world—gazing inward, perhaps. Her face had taken a high flushed color. It was growing rounder. She herself seemed to him radiantly lovely. Changed. Not girlish, but gathering on her frame a woman’s softer loveliness. Nevertheless, she often climbed to the roof and watched him work. Then she would rush to him and hug him very, very hard—ignoring the mud and his sweat.

  Soon his anger passed away in such hugging. His hurt was healed. Fear remained, perhaps because the woman was not talking, not chattering as she used to do—though she smiled as perpetually as the moon.

  And then, during one particularly long hug when Mary began to sob, Joseph felt several physical changes that had been hidden from his eyes before: Her breasts had grown large and proud. Her body was generally rounder. And between the wings of Mary’s hips, a tough lump had formed, pressing back upon the man who hugged her. Joseph stepped back and searched her face. Her tears were rain under sunshine: she was beaming, her dark brows raised so high, her teeth blinding white, her eyes peering out of mystery.

  But the face was fuller. Her lips were thicker.

  With an uncharacteristic boldness, Joseph reached and placed his hand upon her abdomen. Mary stopped smiling. She watched him, now, with thin lines of fright.

  Yes. There was a baby in Mary’s womb!

  Joseph took his hand back. Silently he went to the edge of the roof, descended the ladder, and walked away through the village to his home. He went inside and lay down upon his floor and hid his face in the crook of his arm and began to cry.

  Joseph had not cried since the death of his first wife.

  In the evening there came a knock at his door. He rose up to open it, expecting Mary. But it was Anne, short and round and grey and sad. She went to his hearth and kindled a fire of dry sticks and dung. Joseph stood back in darkness and watched. Anne hung a small stew pot over the flames and stirred it until it bubbled, then she poured some into a dish and handed the dish to him, together with a brass spoon. She went up on tiptoe and kissed his beard, then turned and left.

  Joseph’s mind was filled now with one thought only.

  That night before he went to bed, he brought out his writing instruments and a precious page of parchment.

  Carefully, stroking every letter with painful precision, for his hands were very large and his nails gnarled, he wrote formal words on the parchment. They granted Mary release from the contracts of betrothal. They mentioned reasons of ritual impurities, mild causes but legal ones nonetheless. They did not mention adultery. Joseph could not write adultery. He could not lay upon Mary—whom he loved, whom he could not stop loving—public a
ccusations of adultery.

  His mind was very clear that night.

  Tomorrow he would find two witnesses and in their presence give this document to Mary personally.

  Now he unrolled his sleeping pallet and lay down and, mercifully, fell asleep.

  IN THOSE DAYS King Herod discovered that Antipater, his oldest son, successor to his throne, had been responsible for the assassination of his own uncle Pheroras.

  Pheroras was Herod’s brother. He had been an able commander of Herod’s armies. Thirty years ago Pheroras had brought the siege of Jerusalem to a triumphant conclusion, allowing Herod to enter and to rule there.

  This same Pheroras had just been poisoned. He died shouting and whimpering in Herod’s rooms—and he terrified the old king with thoughts of his own mortality.

  Therefore, King Herod destroyed his third will and testament. He ordered his son Antipater brought to trial, and he began to consider which other son was trustworthy and true.

  WHILE JOSEPH WAS SLEEPING on his decision to divorce Mary, the voice of an angel called to him in a dream.

  “Joseph, son of David,” the angel said, “you should not fear to take Mary home as your wife, because the infant conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and when she does you must call his name Jesus, since he will save his people from their sins.

  “God is fulfilling prophecies, Joseph!

  Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

  and his name shall be called Emmanuel.

  Emmanuel,” the angel said. “Emmanuel, God with us.”

  When the son of Jacob woke up on the following morning, he moved more quickly and more lightly than he ever had in his life.