‘I think Ike Isaacs would do better.’
‘Well, he can’t,’ Agrot said shortly. ‘This is a security operation. And she’s done quite a lot already.’
She’d done a bit. The scroll was composed of three skins, wrapped round each other. The best-preserved was the inner one, evidently written by a priest. The second was an addendum or postscript, written by a semi-literate, and on this one Himmelwasser had brought up several words otherwise unreadable. It was the third skin, the totally unreadable outer one, that was now in her laboratory, and this one – which is the way these things go – that apparently contained the details of where the consignment and the OEED were buried.
Apart from the latter disability, the skins were in spanking condition, the finest I’d ever seen. Jordanian scrolls tend to turn up in the form of confetti these days. The Ta’amireh Arabs, who illegally search for and sell them, rarely like to sell a scroll in one piece. They prefer to crumble it into a few hundred pieces, and to mix the pieces judiciously with those of other scrolls, and then sell the resulting assortment as lucky packets. The maddened experts whose life’s work it is to put these jigsaws together again are left with a lot of holes, of course – which makes them keen customers for further lucky packets.
The two inner documents, humidified and castor-oiled, were now under glass in the scrollery. As usual, the writing was on the treated hair side of the skin, the letters hanging down from the inscribed lines (and not footing on to them as in Western practice). Every kind of scientific test had been carried out to determine the composition and age of the materials, and a considerable literature of manuscript notes had already grown up round them. There were literal, vernacular and modern readings of every sentence in a dozen different versions, and a number of elaborate papers on grammatical analysis.
The priest’s document, though in a Hebrew letter, was in the Greek language, and hadn’t engaged the team so ardently. It was with the second, written in a loose Aramaic, that they’d gone to town. Examples of Aramaic vernacular are not thick on the ground, and the scholars had extended themselves, chasing roots through Syriac, Hebrew and South Arabic to a hundred different sources. There were still, in both documents, some thirty odd words either completely unknown or with readings so disputed that Agrot had classified them as unknown.
I spent all morning studying them, had lunch with Agrot in the canteen, and continued in the afternoon. About half past six we knocked off.
Agrot carefully double-locked the scrollery.
‘Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?’ he said.
‘No, thanks. I want to do a bit of brooding. And I’d better make a few notes.’
‘All right. I’ll call you later in the evening to fix arrangements for tomorrow.’
‘You’re still set against Ike Isaacs, are you?’
‘It’s a matter of security – and etiquette. The laboratory belongs to the Faculty of Science. I can’t let him in there.’
‘I could – on the quiet.’
‘I’m afraid that’s not possible.’
‘You couldn’t let the stuff out to him, then?’
‘You know I can’t. Look, let her continue a bit. She is after all a world expert.’
‘All right. Let’s keep the issue alive, though.’
I went back to the hotel and to bed, brooding. At eight o’clock I got up and went out for a walk, still brooding. It was cooler out – Jerusalem is high, two and a half thousand feet up in its Judean hills -but still balmy after England. I turned left and wandered, and presently found myself by the wall and the mount, Zion, with the moon coming up behind me, and the old magic beginning to work.
It’s not much of a town, Israeli Jerusalem, when everything’s said: a strung-out untidy place not half the size of Wandsworth, and built on a series of bald red hills so that cars and lorries are forever chugging up in low gear. It’s hard to think of it, when you’re in it, as particularly holy, or as particularly anything else. Most of it, the Israeli part, has been built since 1860.
Its whole purpose, of course, is the mount, and with that split, the place is curiously blind and without a centre. Around the demarcation line, small boys kick balls and run and shout in a rubble-strewn slum; and in the town itself small shops line somewhat purposeless avenues and streets. A provincial place, and it nearly always has been; poor agriculturally; pointless commercially; on the road to practically nowhere. A fortress; a geographical location; an idea.
The remnants of all the people who have tried to destroy the idea are still around, of course, a factor of considerable attraction from my own business point of view. And, too, it’s a nice place to live: pleasant suburbs, dotted cypresses, a decent university, good air. Also, the Israelis have done their bit with a few stately buildings and byelaws forbidding new construction unless in the beige Jerusalem marble; so that a certain stony homogeneity is present. All the same, and for the visitor expecting something special, a let-down.
And yet – it’s Jerusalem, an affair of the heart, an old affair of mankind’s. And every now and again the magic will work – as now, in moonlight, by the wall; not a provincial town any more; all geographical location and all idea. Here, built upon Zion indeed, the wall of the city of the great king, and there his tomb; and above it the room where his descendant, a thousand years later, ate his Last Supper. An old place; Genesis old; the rock of our Western ethos, for what it is.
It was quiet here, just a few mournful howls coming from the dogs’ home on the hill. The place has developed higgledy-piggledy over the centuries; churches, animal shelters, hospices, elbowing each other for their bits of holy land. All about, the round hills were outlined with lights; one had the feeling of being enclosed in a circle, a rather special circle, very elevated. And all of a sudden I started thinking again of what Agrot had told me, of the gold, and of what had happened here all the years before. I was still thinking about it in Fink’s Bar and Restaurant, where I drank and restaurated, and all the way back up the Jaffa Road; treading history, as they say, every foot of the way.
2
The war of 66 that threw the Jews out of their land and on to the world grew, as its historian Flavius Josephus notes, out of a background of troubles. It was an apocalyptical period. The End of Days was thought to be at hand. The Messiah was expected. In the past few decades a number of candidates had duly presented themselves – and had been dealt with as rapidly as possible by the civil and religious authorities.
The basis of the apocalyptical position was that it was perfectly proper for even the smallest force of the godly to oppose even the largest of the ungodly since God would redress the balance. This was not a point of view shared by the authorities, whose day-to-day dealings with the occupying power had given them a rather better insight into the kind of forces available to him. Their position had been perfectly expressed by one of the messianic candidates: ‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’
Skilful political work had already annexed to God a rather larger number of things than were available to any other non-Roman body in the empire. His True Faith, Judaism, had been declared a permitted religion, a privilege from which numerous auxiliary benefits flowed. No Jew had to participate in or pay for any of the pagan rites obligatory elsewhere in the empire. No Jew had to perform military service, since its exigencies might lead him to violate the permitted religion. And the established Jewish authority, because of the social nature of the religion, was allowed an unheard-of degree of autonomy. These rights – and this was the most singular privilege of all – applied not only to nationals of Judea, but to all their relations in every corner of the empire: a concept of nationality that baffled local military governors and enraged surrounding populations who thus vied to become history’s first anti-semites.
These privileges had to be paid for, and the price was law and order in Judea. The Establishment did its best. Minority groups and apocalyptical enthusiasts were kept
on a tight rein, and their various messiahs speedily attended to. But for years the situation remained tricky; and a succession of bloody-minded military governors hadn’t helped.
Judea wasn’t an important province – a mere sub-province of Syria – and the kind of people sent out to govern it weren’t important people. Not over-endowed, mentally or financially, most set out to improve the latter situation at least almost on landing. Accepted practice was to set local communities at loggerheads and then accept bribes from each for intervening; or to wash the hands of important decisions, and then be persuaded to unwash them. Many ended their careers in disgrace; including that most celebrated handwasher of all, Pontius Pilate, who, recalled after nine years as a result of an incident involving the Jews’ detested neighbours the Samaritans, committed suicide.
The Establishment’s difficulties were not eased one Passover when the military governor of the time thought it an idea to garrison Jerusalem with these same hated Samaritans and posted a detachment of them up on the roof of the Temple cloisters. The city was crowded at the time, some thousands of Galileans, those cup-tie Yorkshiremen of old Judea, having travelled up for the festival. Trouble was bound to come, and come it did, on the fourth day of the festival when, as Josephus recalls, ‘One of the soldiers pulled back his garment and, cowering down after an indecent manner, turned his breech to the Jews and delivered such an utterance as you might expect from such a posture.’
Pandemonium followed. The cavalry were called out. Hundreds were killed in the crush in the narrow streets.
The Jewish authorities, concerned with the well-being of their co-religionists throughout the empire, tried to take a long view. Rome must not be troubled: this was the basis of all policy. It was Rome they were dealing with and not its mischievous minions. God, undeniably, had given Rome the power to govern them. He had, also undeniably, promised that better times were around the corner. This was essentially a period to be lived through.
Alas, the minority groups, kept so long under control, could be kept under control no longer. One group, the Zealots, formed a terrorist wing called the Dagger Men or Sicarii, with assassination as its political method. By the year 66, the daggers were found to be insufficient. Herod, a hundred years before, had stored arms for ten thousand men at his rock fortress at Massada on the Dead Sea. The terrorist wing made a surprise attack, slaughtered the Roman garrison and took the arms back to Jerusalem, where revolution had already broken out. The garrison was killed, public buildings burnt and the ecclesiastical authorities murdered.
The Roman C.-in-C. in Syria acted quickly. With a strong force he raced through the country killing and destroying; but it was late autumn by the time he got to Jerusalem. Not desiring a winter campaign against armed irregulars in mountains, he decided to withdraw temporarily. But unwisely, disregarding the first rule of mountain warfare, he omitted to post pickets to cover his retreat. Formations of guerrillas began to strafe his huge column. They strafed it night and day. The retreat turned into a rout. Six thousand infantry and the entire supply train complete with siege and ballistic equipment, fell to the guerrillas before the Roman force managed to escape.
The victory was so colossal it alarmed not only the peace party in Jerusalem but the rebels themselves. Retribution was bound to come, and when it did it was best met by a united country. The country was divided into six administrative districts or commands, and the commands allotted on a nonsectarian basis. That of the Northern District, which would bear the first brunt of the expected Roman attack, went to the scion of an old priestly family, Joseph ben Matthias.
This young man, not quite thirty, wealthy, gifted and amusing, was one of the lights of Jerusalem. He had just had a splendid year in Rome, where he had gone to plead the cause of some friends who had run into political trouble. In Rome, as a friend of the Jewish comic actor Aliturus, the Danny Kaye of his day, he had gained entry to the swinging circle of Poppaea, Caesar’s wife, and had been made welcome. He found himself now in a quandary. No revolutionary, and certainly no Rome-hater, it seemed to him absurd to opt out of the empire because of the excesses of the oafs sent out as governors. But he took up his appointment, dutifully enough, some time during the winter and early spring of 67.
Just about at the same time, the first consignments went prudently out of the Treasury, into hiding.
Also at the same time, retribution approached.
The news of the Jewish revolt had reached the young emperor Nero in Greece, where he had been enjoying a season of Games. He had been not only watching but participating in the Games, as charioteer and singer, and this reminder of the cares of empire annoyed him. But he saw a way of cancelling out one annoyance with another. Among his entourage was a dull retired general who showed a tendency to nod off to sleep while his emperor sang. It seemed to the emperor that this general would be better occupied doing a bit of fighting. He promptly told him off to go and settle the hash in Judea.
The general, a dull man indeed, was Flavius Vespasian, fifty-seven years old. Undistinguished in birth (his father had ended his days a money-lender in Switzerland) as in his military career, the highlight of which had been the capture of the Isle of Wight, he had now settled to civilian life as a horse-coper.
Vespasian set about his small task very seriously. He assembled an enormous army. He marched with his army through Turkey, collecting more men as he went. He took his son with him, a jolly young man of twenty-seven called Titus, well-liked by everyone and equally proficient as an athlete, poet, soldier and barrister. They reached their first objective, Galilee, in late spring.
Ben Matthias, the commander of this district, had now been in it for a few months, uneasily. His appointment had not been approved by all, and particularly not by a somewhat intense revolutionary called John ben Levi, who had now come up to Galilee to keep an eye on him. Both ben Levi and ben Matthias operated their own intelligence services; and within weeks of taking over his command, ben Matthias was aware that disturbing rumours about him were circulating in Jerusalem.
A very curious incident now occurred. The junta in Jerusalem sent an order for the recall of the Governor of the Northern Command. They went further. A force of 2,500 men was sent to bring him back. ‘If he came quietly.’ as the historian Flavius Josephus records in Chapter 21, Book Two, of his Work, ‘they were to let him give an account of himself. If he insisted on remaining they must treat him as an enemy. But the reason was not explained.’
Whatever the reason, ben Matthias refused to parley. The force he had himself assembled for the defence of Northern Command was greatly superior to that sent to take him. He sent the Jerusalem brigade away with a flea in its ear, and history has no more to tell on the subject.
Besides, the Romans were almost upon them.
Vespasian had noted that the most strongly fortified town in the area was Jotapata, and he decided to take it. There was not much of a road to the town, which was not much of a town. Vespasian built a new road. He moved a gigantic weight of equipment up it. He threw in earthworks, battering rams, towers, a siege train and a hundred and sixty pieces of heavy artillery; an operation akin, say, to taking Giggleswick by use of the entire Afrika Korps.
It took him forty-seven laborious days to do all these things and then knock the place down. It was May 29th before he walked in and set light to what was left of it. But neither among the dead nor the few survivors did he find the Commander, ben Matthias. The reason was that ben Matthias and his staff of forty were hiding in a cave outside the town. A woman gave them away two days later.
Vespasian called for their surrender, and was refused three times. On the last occasion, when ben Matthias himself was inclined to comply, he had to be forcibly restrained by his subordinates, who preferred suicide to surrender. ‘Not destitute of his usual sagacity,’ as Flavius Josephus says, the commander agreed, and suggested they drew lots to decide the order of death, the act to be carried out at each unlucky draw. ‘By the providence of God,’ as the historian ur
banely records, the commander himself drew the last lot – and lost no time in surrendering. He was not put to death. Within a week he was the bosom pal of Titus and the confidant of Vespasian.
The collapse of the commander did not end the fighting in Galilee. Ben Levi, his rival, put up a rather better show, holding the Romans down till November, when he himself escaped to Jerusalem to be greeted as a hero and to become a leader of the revolutionary council, and the Romans went into winter quarters. They emerged again in the spring of 68 and Vespasian resumed his stately offensive, first mopping up other Administrative Districts, including that containing the Essene settlement at Qumran, whose inmates fled, hiding their papers in nearby caves where they remained undisturbed for a couple of thousand years.
But as he took up position before Jerusalem, express news reached the general from Rome. The emperor, thirty-one years old, had committed suicide. Everything ground to a halt. The offensive was the emperor’s offensive; no emperor, no offensive. A somewhat dreary interregnum ensued. This was the Year of the Four Emperors when one son of Rome after another got in the saddle; and fell out of it. Nobody bothered very much about Judea except of course the Judeans, and Vespasian, whose enormous army was sitting around in it, eating.
The size of his army, its present geographical position, between Rome and Rome’s granary, Egypt, and the presence all around of old friends, province-governing, right-thinking friends, began to give him ideas. What the old country wanted was not so much song-singing, Games-attending, suicidally-inclined thirty-year-olds, as somebody, say, in his sixties, who knew a thing or two and was stable, not likely to go off at half-cock.
Nobody ever accused Vespasian of going off at half-cock. He carefully sounded the views of his friends the provincial governors. Syria and Egypt, both okay, and controlling incidentally just about half the imperial armies. The general acted. Establishing himself in Egypt, and directly controlling food shipments to Rome, he sent the governor of Syria with an army to Italy to oppose the current jack-in-office, Vitellius. By the late spring of 70, master of Rome and the empire, Vespasian set sail himself. He told his son Titus to finish off the Judean business as quickly as possible and join him.
A Long Way to Shiloh Page 6
