The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel

by Wangerin Jr. , Walter

  Now, the area closely surrounding the altar and the Temple proper was reserved for priests and Levites alone. This was the seventh circle, the seventh degree of holiness on earth.

  The strip of pavement between the altar and the porch of the Temple itself was the eighth.

  The ninth was the sanctuary inside the Temple, furnished with the altar of incense, the table of showbread, the golden candlestick.

  And the tenth—that Most Holy Place, occluded from the rest of the Temple by a double veil of fine twined linen, blue and purple and scarlet—the tenth was a room in which God’s ineffable holiness dwelt among the people, the Debir, a room dreadfully and completely dark, thirty feet wide and thirty feet high and thirty feet deep.

  Here one man only ever entered, the high priest—and he but once a year.

  II

  TEN DAYS BEFORE the Feast of Tabernacles—in those cooling weeks of September after the farmers have finished harvesting their date orchards and their vineyards, in that brief respite before they have to sow their fields in barley and wheat—seven men of the tiny village of Japhia in Galilee gathered their families together and began to travel to Jerusalem for the feast.

  That they were going was not unusual. Jews from every province—Jews, indeed, from all the nations of the world—streamed to the holy city for the joyful celebration at the end of the autumn harvest. But this particular band of Galileans took an odd route south. Moreover, they made several peculiar stops on the way. Therefore, they drew the attention of the Roman authorities, and they were followed.

  Instead of striking southeast toward the Jordan and then down, as did most Galilean pilgrims, they went due south into the royal estates of Herod Antipas, where they spent two days lingering in tents, then they traveled west by southwest through Samaria straight to Caesarea on the sea. They camped outside the city two more days. It was here that the Roman governor of Samaria and Judea maintained his residence. In fact, he wasn’t present at the time. He was in Jerusalem, holding court in the palace of Herod the Great, as was his custom during the high festival days of the Jews. Nevertheless, three men from the Galilean band walked back and forth in front of his residence morning and evening for two days, seeming to study it.

  Then it was that Roman suspicions were aroused.

  After the Galileans had broken camp and departed along the coast road south, an imperial servant left Caesarea for Jerusalem carrying ten crystal goblets to the governor there. He was a corpulent, smiling man, a courtier full of goodwill for everyone, Roman or fanatical, it didn’t matter. He rode with one driver in his chariot and two armed soldiers in attendance.

  It was observed that the Galileans, having traveled south from Caesarea on the coast highway, took the road inland from the city of Joppa. A reasonable itinerary, the same one which the imperial servant himself soon took.

  Reasonable, too, was the brief detour which the Galileans made in Sharon, the coastal plain between Joppa and Lydda. They purchased seven calves from a herdsman there. The Roman courtier was knowledgeable enough of Jewish ritual to recognize the beasts they sacrificed.

  More curious, however, was the stop they made just twelve miles east of Lydda. The place was Beth-horon, one of two towns situated on a ridge which guarded the road’s ascent from the coastal plain into the rough hill country west of Jerusalem. In the middle of the morning the band of Galileans simply stopped. The women began a great babbling. Gossip, most likely. They saw to the children, the goods, and the animals, while their husbands left them alone.

  The seven men climbed the Beth Horon ridge, itself not a difficult climb—but then they hiked back through sharp rock and thorn bushes so thick that a Roman of some girth made sacrifice to follow. But if he hadn’t followed, he would never have discovered the place where the Galileans were going: a narrow defile in which was a natural limestone terrace and a cave, both completely concealed to an outside eye.

  The imperial servant did not try to descend the rugged wall of the defile. He had left one of his soldiers with the driver at the chariot. The other now lay down with him at the edge of the wall and watched as fourteen more Jews emerged from the cave and greeted the Galileans and sat down to talk.

  Brigands, perhaps. Robbers who made the cave their hiding place. Or revolutionaries.

  The visitation lasted an hour. It might have gone on into the afternoon, but it was interrupted.

  One of the brigands dominated the conversation, a man both lank and graceful. Agile. He moved much when he spoke, a passionate fellow, immensely articulate even to Roman ears—and, yes, an insurrectionist! As his voice rose, one could hear a vilification of everything Gentile.

  “Jealous!” he was saying. “Jealous for the laws of the Lord, abominating the coin of the goy and his taxes—”

  Suddenly the imperial servant had a great desire to sneeze. At the same time he commenced to perspire, moistening all the creases of his flesh and drizzling sweat into his eyes. He had just realized who the orator was—and the luck of his discovery made him very excited.

  This was the son of a prominent rabbi in Jerusalem, the son of a man whose hatred for Rome was so massive and so magisterial that even among a race of haters the only one to equal his despisings was his son, the orator before them now! The father was a ranter. Ah, but the son was feral and dangerous, a murderer capable of attacking even Jews whose zeal was less than his. So notorious was he that the public knew him by a nameless name: “Son of Rabbi,” they called him, and “Son of Father.”

  Oh, what a nest of serpents! Seven Galileans, fourteen Zealots—and a leader! The leader!

  The heavy Roman courtier turned to his companion and whispered, “Do you know who that is? It’s Barabbas!”

  Then he sneezed. Once, twice, three times. He went into a fit of sneezing. When finally it had run its course, he looked up and saw the revolutionary called Barabbas standing above him in sunlight, his short sword drawn.

  The Roman tried to smile with peaceable goodwill and genuine beneficence upon the cold Jew staring down at him, but his nose and eyes were wet from the sneezing. The smiling did not succeed. He felt the edge of the sword bite through his flesh, even to the neckbone.

  III

  IN THOSE DAYS the ruler of the Roman Empire was Tiberius Claudius. Caesar Augustus had adopted the man before he died in order to control the choice of his own successor.

  Tiberius was already fifty-six years old when he ascended into power. He determined not to add to the size of the empire Augustus had created, but rather to preserve it. From the beginning of his reign he sought to unify all Roman provinces not only under one governance but also under one mind and in one spirit. To that end he encouraged every race within his realm to worship the dead Augustus as the son of gods, an associate with whatever gods the people acknowledged. In the figure of Augustus, Tiberius hoped to establish a symbol, a force, a focal point for the loyalty of all the tribes and tongues in the empire.

  Let people invoke Augustus, and the state itself would hold their souls.

  Therefore, the present emperor rejected foreign cults. This Jews knew only too well: his policies threatened disaster to those whose laws could know no God but one God. The leaders in Jerusalem scrutinized with keen attention every new decree that issued from Rome. And the legions who came, the centurions, the legates, and the governors—every arriving Roman caused greater anxiety among the chief priests and the Sanhedrin, those who in narrow limits ruled the Jews.

  Already Tiberius had banned Druidical rites and practices throughout the empire.

  What else? Ten years ago, upon a pretext of scandal in that place, he destroyed the temple of the Egyptian mother-goddess, Isis. Then he crucified her priests in public, inviting the entire population to observe the slow exposure and the death of such religious leaders.

  What else unnerved the Jewish leaders? In the city of Rome itself, when he heard the rumor that four Jewish men had conspired to steal a woman’s treasure, Emperor Tiberius commanded that the entire
Jewish community should be driven from the city into exile.

  From such practices there was no safety. Against them there was neither intervention nor appeal. Moreover, they were coming closer and closer to the center of the center of holiness.

  For in these last years the courts of the Roman emperor had appointed a new governor over Samaria and Judea, Pontius Pilate, an insulting, irreligious man. Immediately he began to mint for his provinces coin bearing pagan images. Jews had no choice but to use it, touch it, receive it, spend it. So there was no secret about this governor’s intent: he meant even by his sarcasms to diminish what few privileges Jews had preserved from the days of Herod the Great.

  Indeed, this governor wanted to abolish the laws that separated and distinguished them.

  Pontius Pilate maintained the seat of his government in Caesarea by the sea. But it was Jerusalem which required his greater attentions. Soon after he had arrived, he ordered his troops to encamp within the walls of the city of Jerusalem—in the second circle of holiness.

  “Raise your ensigns high,” he commanded his captains, “so that every Jew can see the images of the emperor affixed to them!”

  The Jews saw. And fiercely the Jews protested.

  Pharisees, Zealots, scribes, men jealous for the laws of God went to the place where the governor resided and cried out against him in the streets.

  Pilate threatened to cut them down where they stood.

  They didn’t weaken. They only cried the louder. One old rabbi stepped face-to-face with a young soldier, who tentatively drew his knife. In a single motion the rabbi ripped open his tunic, grabbed the soldier’s wrist, and forced the edge of the knife across his own bony breast faster than the Roman, horrified, could yank it back again.

  The rabbi stood bleeding and unblinking, a devout ferocity in his eyes. It was the same wild look that all these Jewish protesters had. When the new governor recognized in them a genuine readiness to be slaughtered and to die, then he himself backed down. He commanded the offending symbols to be removed from their holy city.

  Pontius Pilate trod more lightly among the provincials after that. But he did not keep his foot indoors. With somewhat more circumspection, but with cruelty after all, he stepped on the toes of some Jews, and on the skulls of others.

  IV

  IN THE SEVENTEENTH YEAR of Tiberius Caesar, during the Jewish celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, Pontius Pilate, who was holding court in the palace of Herod the Great issued an order for the execution of seven Galilean men.

  “Reprisals,” he said. “The murder of an imperial servant, a Roman citizen, cannot pass without punishment.”

  A contingent of ten soldiers armed with knives and spears and swords, shields, helmets, greaves, and armor, marched in close order out of the palace. Faces forward, themselves an iron military unity, they marched through the center of the city, down into the Tyropoeon valley and up the other side to the Huldah Gates on the south side of the Temple complex. They did not hesitate, but marched through the Royal Portico into the Court of the Gentiles. It was crowded with pilgrims. People fell backward. People dashed out of the way of the soldiers’ grim progress. Some yelled for the Temple guard. Others hurled epithets and curses at the Romans. But the armed soldiers looked neither to the left nor to the right. Swifter than any could warn of their coming, they marched through the gate called Beautiful, past the balustrade, hel, the fourth degree of holiness, into the fifth and then the sixth: the Court of the Israelites.

  In that place, seven Galileans were slaughtering seven calves for sacrifice. All but one of the calves lay dead, and that one had the knife already at its throat. Three of the beasts were being butchered, the new meat draining its blood down channels in the Temple pavement. Rivers of dark blood ran in these channels from the altar eastward, through a drainage system underground into the Kidron valley, which was made extraordinarily fertile thereby.

  The captain of Pilate’s soldiers barked a single command.

  The presence of Gentiles in this place was so unthinkable that it caused a space of perfect silence, as though the universe had paused to consider some wonder. But this was the paralysis of horror. Absolutely no one, neither priest nor Israelite, could utter a word. No one moved.

  And in that space of strange serenity, the soldiers obeyed their captain’s command. They stepped quickly and efficiently among the Galileans and slashed six throats, mingling their blood with the blood of the calves, their sacrifice.

  The captain approached the seventh man, whose face was linen-white and gaping. He noticed the fellow’s youth, a naïvete unusual among Jewish revolutionaries.

  Without emotion the captain said, “Whom did you go to meet at Beth-horon?”

  “I don’t know.” A breaking voice. A boy.

  The captain struck him across the face. “Who murdered the governor’s servant?” he said. “Who stole ten crystal goblets?”

  The Galilean raised his open hands. “Truly, I don’t know the man.”

  The captain struck him again.

  “I don’t know his name!” cried the youth. “I never heard his name! I hardly knew what we were doing there!”

  “Then you saw him?”

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “So you can tell me of this murderer?”

  The Galilean’s feet were huge, but his legs were meatless, thin. They would break like dry sticks. “They called that man something you could say of any man,” he whimpered. “The son of a father.”

  “They said it in Hebrew?”

  “Yes.”

  “They said Bar-abba?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.” The captain wound the fingers of his left hand into the hair of the frightened revolutionary. “And what do they call you?” he said.

  “Gimel,” the young man whispered, “because I was crooked once—like the Hebrew letter gimel.”

  “Well, Gimel, it should come as no surprise to you that the murders of Barabbas also cause the death of Jews.”

  With his right hand the Roman drew his dagger across this throat, too, and the blood of the seventh Galilean ran with the blood of his brothers down to the soil of the Kidron valley.

  V

  THREE TIMES IN TWO WEEKS the high priest convened the Jewish governing council in order to discuss the deterioration of relations between Rome and Jerusalem. They met in the Chamber of Hewn Stone below the pavement of the Temple courtyard. This room of mighty pillars was forever in shadow, lit by lamps and always chilly.

  The first meeting of the council occurred immediately after the execution of seven Galileans. It was a hasty midday gathering. Scarcely forty men arrived. As many as thirty members were traveling out in the province or else were unaware that Gentiles had intruded in the holy places of the Jews.

  High priest Caiaphas allowed an hour of passionate shouting while he sat and said nothing. Priests and Pharisees strode about the stony room weeping, condemning the sacrilege, begging God to preserve the holiness of his name. Even more than the murders of Galileans, it was the profaning of the Temple that most enraged these men.

  Finally, Caiaphas spoke. In a single speech, by calm oratory and a resistless sequence of reasons, he first acknowledged the issue that consumed the council, then turned their attentions from one enemy to another.

  “In the Court of the Israelites,” he said, “ten Roman soldiers have killed seven Galileans. For that you are angry at the Romans. And well you should be. But what can you do about it?

  “Members of the Sanhedrin, we have no choice but to be realistic. Under whose dispensation do we rule? Surely in matters most religious, under the Lord’s. And this is a matter of religion, yes. On the other hand, the practice of our religion and all the rites of the Temple remain free only insofar as we are granted that freedom by Rome. In matters of civil law and the governing of Jewish people as people, we rule under the dispensation of the Emperor and his prefect in this province: Pontius Pilate—who ordered the soldiers to enter our sanctuary.
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  “Now, by your leave,” said Caiaphas, “I will ask you several questions. First: What happens to our authority if Rome decides to withdraw the dispensation which no other race possesses in the empire? Second: What raises Rome’s displeasure more than revolutionary rhetoric? And more than acts of revolt, what provokes its fury? Third: Who is more heedless and loud for insurrection than the Zealots?—than all those who seek a messiah of military designs? Oh, members of the Sanhedrin, they are the dangerous ones! If these people—over whom we still exert some control—are not held in check, then our rule, our authority, the Temple and all its holy ritual will be lost. We have lost them before.

  “Fourth question: And from whence do the most intense of Zealots come to threaten the seat of our power here? Why, from Galilee! Always from Galilee.

  “My brothers, the seven Galileans are not without some culpability of their own. The Romans may not be friends of ours. They surely are not of our blood. But they are the ones we must appease, even while we quench the fires of the radicals who are our kin and our children.

  “This, sirs, is expedience,” the high priest said.

  Then he stood up and said: “Go out. Go immediately to the priests and the people in the Temple courts. Ease their minds. Then go to all the people in Jerusalem, both the citizens and the pilgrims here, and calm them, too. By your own composure and by gentle ministrations settle the people. I’ll go find some valid reason for Pilate’s execution of these Galileans, something we can offer the pilgrims to satisfy their questions. But you must turn their hearts to the keeping of the feast. Remind them that it is the most joyful of all our festivals. Go.”

  During the next several hours the council members scattered throughout the city, presented faces of beneficent kindness, words of comfort, pledges of stability.