King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (26 page)

The third set an ivory casket of frankincense drops to the right of the crown and said :

“In token, Great One, of thy immortality !”

Mary, her eyes wet with tears, said gravely : “My lords, I thank you on behalf of my son. Your gifts are rightly bestowed. Go, with the blessing of the Lord !”

They went off singing a psalm, the words of which could not have been more apposite :

In Ephrath, lo, the truth we understood,
And found it in a clearing of the wood.
Into his arbour, brothers, let us go,
At his foot-stool abase ourselves full low …
Arise, Lord….

Joseph pretended to have heard and seen nothing and left the gifts where they lay until Mary put them into a place of safety. Breakfast was eaten in silence, and presently Joseph went over to the inn to inquire at what hour the registration was to begin. He wished to finish the business and get home as soon as possible. But as he turned the corner by the barn he heard a cry : “Soldiers are coming! Look, a troop—a whole squadron—of the King’s soldiers !”

He suddenly remembered his dream, which had begun with that very cry, and his head swam with the terror of it. He turned at once and hurried back to the shed. He whispered hoarsely : “Quick, do not waste a moment. There is death in the air. Pack up everything while I saddle the asses !”

Mary said calmly : “We are in the Lord’s hands. By your leave, I shall first wash and dress my little child.”

“Only make haste !”

Prince Archelaus rode into Bethlehem at the head of a Thracian squadron and gave orders to his officers. A dozen troopers were to guard each road and lane leading out of the place and let nobody pass ; the remainder to round up all the Sons of David, together with their families. “Let all be done quietly and without violence. When you have separated the Davidites from the natives of the place, the slaughter can begin. Mind you, only male infants are to die. No grown persons unless they offer resistance. No female infants or elder children. The creature of ill-luck which we are instructed to destroy is not four months old yet, and still at the breast ; but for safety’s sake we are to kill all male infants of two years old and under. These are the orders of King Herod.”

The ass-surgeon and his Kenite kinsmen were waiting for Joseph at the fringe of the wood. They urged him : “Quick, my lord! Death has ridden into Bethlehem—take off your gay merchant’s cloak and put on this old and ragged one. You and your lady and the little one must pass for Children of Rahab.”

Joseph did as he was told, and then all together rode down to the pasture, where the tribesmen rounded up their scattered sheep and drove them along the road towards the Jordan. A party of Thracians were posted at the toll-house, but their sergeant let the nomads pass without question ; and they travelled slowly on until presently down the wind came a terrifying sound of confused shouting, screams and cries. The ass-surgeon said : “Leave us now, my lord and my lady. Strike across the hills to the oak-wood yonder under the jagged cliff, the one with the fringe of pines. Friends are there who will conduct you to a place of safety. It is dangerous to remain with us. Be of good courage ; and may the Lord protect his own !”

In the oak-wood Joseph found a shepherd seated by a fire, a glum, murderous-looking man, with three long knives in his girdle, and stood at a loss, not knowing how to address him. But Mary spoke up readily : “Generous son of the Tent Curtains, I charge you in the name of our mother Rahab, leave these flocks under the care of the lad and convey us with all haste to your lord Kenah !”

They found Kenah encamped at Beth-Zur, ten miles away to the south-west. He greeted Mary and the child with lively joy, and for their sakes showed respect to Joseph.

After three days in the nomad camp they were ready to set out again. When Kenah asked Joseph where he was bound, he answered : “To Egypt, to pay a debt to Simon son of Boethus who was lately High Priest.”

“Is it a great sum? The road to Egypt is not safe for rich men travelling unescorted.”

“No, it is no great sum, but a mere half-shekel, which is two Alexandrian drachmae ; a debt of honour, notwithstanding.”

“My sister’s son will ride with you and make music by the way. You need fear nothing in his company.”

They rode towards Egypt accompanied by Kenah’s nephew. When they reached Hebron news overtook them of Herod’s death and the release of the Jews awaiting destruction in the hippodrome. The messenger said that Herod, feeling death suddenly stealing over him, had given orders that every one of them should be killed ; but that his sister Salome had prevented the massacre.

At this, Kenah’s nephew began to weep and improvised a song of lost hopes, how Jacob had triumphed once more and Esau was thrown back into darkness. Filled with poetic insight, he fixed his eyes upon a green plant growing from a sandy patch and cried : “May the Lord God curse you, wicked plant, for the mischief that you have done !”

Joseph asked : “Friend, why do you curse that plant ?”

“I curse the wild cucumber. Do you not know the wild cucumber ?”

Joseph remembered the story of Elisha and the soup-kettle : how once an ignorant townsman shredded wild cucumber into the soup, mistaking it for the garden kind, and how one of his fellows, spoon to mouth, cried in agony : “O Man of God, there is death in the pot !”, and how Elisha saved them all from death by a miracle. He asked : “Into whose pot has death now been shredded ?”

“The King suffered from a tumour, but he did not die of it. I am the physician of my clan, and I know the virtues and qualities of every herb in the desert. Only the wild cucumber could have caused the dry throat, the stinking breath, the itching, the perpetual flux. A curse on this unprofitable plant for postponing the day of settlement !”

“Yet Esau forgave his brother Jacob when he might have destroyed him on the way to Succoth ; and his magnanimity is not forgotten by us Israelites. No reckoning was ever settled by the sword, noble nephew of Kenah. Sing your song rather in praise of the wild cucumber that has saved the lives of fifteen thousand men.”

Mary added : “And it may well be that the wild cucumber has saved the life of a child upon whom both Esau and Jacob, clasping hands, may fix their hopes of peace.”

They turned aside to Ain-Rimmon, where Mary and Elizabeth met again and each sorrowfully but proudly showed the other her fatherless child. Thence they continued to Beersheba, where they heard further news of events in Jerusalem : how civil war between Herod’s sons had been avoided by an unexpected agreement between them. It was reported that Prince Philip had gone into hiding when the false new’s of Herod’s death was announced, and that when the true news came he had hastened to Jerusalem and seized the Palace with the help of the Belgian Celts whom he had attached to his interest. There Archelaus had joined him with the Thracians, and Antipas had sent a message of peace to them both from Sepphoris in Galilee, where he had collected
the garrisons of all the cities for fifty miles around. The three princes then met in the presence of their Aunt Salome, who acted as peacemaker, and agreed to divide the kingdom between them into three tetrarchies, if the Emperor gave his consent. With the help of Ptolemy the Chamberlain, to whom Herod had entrusted his signet, they forged the draft of a new Will confirming the arrangement. They did not, however, alter the bequests to the Emperor and the Lady Livia, or the bequest of half a million silver drachmae to their Aunt Salome. The kingship of Judaea with Edom and Samaria was awarded to Archelaus ; Galilee and Lower Transjordania to Antipas ; Philip received Upper Transjordania as far as Mount Hermon ; and Salome, in recognition of her services, a little queendom in what had once been Philistia. Prince Herod Philip received nothing in the Will, but in return for a sworn renunciation of his claims to any part of Hcrod’s dominions, Archelaus, Philip and Antipas together allotted him a yearly pension. As for Antipater the Younger, Prince Philip’s agents murdered him in Alexandria and threw his body into the sea ; or so a merchant reported who had just come from that city.

There was nothing in this news which could alter Joseph’s decision to travel to Egypt, for he had divined Mary’s secret. It was plain to him that Herod’s original Will, which Augustus had approved, was the only binding one. By this instrument the succession to the Throne had been awarded first to Antipater ; then to Herod Philip, if Antipater predeceased him ; lastly to Antipater’s heirs. Now, since Herod Philip had renounced his claim, and since Antipater the Younger was dead, the heir-at-law was Jesus, the child born of Antipater’s secret marriage. Augustus might approve the arrangement entered upon by Herod’s sons, but the original Will stood ; hence the princes’ murder of Antipater the Younger and their arrangement with Herod Philip. For Mary’s sake, therefore, Joseph decided that he could not return to Emmaus while Archelaus was king, for if the secret of Jesus’s identity leaked out, as well it might, assassins would be sent to dispatch him.

From Rehoboth, Joseph sent a message to his sons that he was well but had gone on a long journey ; and that they might enter now on their inheritance without waiting for news of his death.

He told Mary : “This journey gives me a new hold upon life. I was growing old and idle. In Alexandria I will return to my former trade : I was once well known for the making of ox-yokes and the coulters of wooden ploughs. The work is not exacting ; it is a matter of knack, not strength. I will soon build up a trade again, please God, and one day your boy shall be my apprentice.”

At the ancient city of On-Heliopolis, Kenah’s nephew left them ; and there in the stream by the gate Mary washed her child’s swaddling-clothes and laid them to dry in the sun while she rested under the shade of an ancient olive-tree. The next day they went to the city of Leontopolis, named after Bast the Lioness, which lies a few miles to the north-west. There Joseph sold the white ass and the decorated saddle, and with part of the price that they fetched bought a bag of carpenter’s tools
from an Egyptian who was retiring from trade. He found lodgings not far from the Jewish Temple which had been founded by Onias the High Priest nearly two generations previously ; and there presently he entered with Mary and gave thanks to the Lord for their escape.

The debt to Simon was soon paid, and Mary became Joseph’s wife ; and because trade was bad and Joseph’s earnings small, she sold vegetables in the market for a market-gardener of their acquaintance, while the child played in the dust by her side.

H
EROD
’s catafalque was followed by his numerous relatives, friends, freedmen and slaves, all weeping vigorously ; also by sorrowful representatives of the many Greek and Syrian communities which he had befriended, by hundreds of Edomites and Nabataeans, besides a great team of professional mourners, and by the men of his private army who were attached to him by long years of loyal service. But the word went round among the pious Jews of Jerusalem that every man should abstain from demonstrations of grief that day, even if he had suffered a bereavement in his own family ; and when the funeral was over a great rival procession of mourners went up to the Temple to bewail the young men who had been burned alive, with their rabbis, for cutting down the golden eagle from the East Gate. The noise that they raised was terrible and continued day after day and night after night until Archelaus lost his patience and sent the general officer commanding the Jerusalem garrison to find Carmi the Captain of the Temple Guard and request him peremptorily to abate the nuisance. Carmi was recognized on his way into the Temple and forced to retreat by a shower of stones. The wailing continued with even greater fury.

By this time, the usual flood of pious Jews was entering Jerusalem for the Passover, and their arrival was made the occasion for a mass meeting in the three Courts to demand the deposition of the absentee High Priest nominated by Herod just before his death—a notorious evil-liver—and the expulsion of all foreigners resident within the City walls. This second demand was not an expression of national xenophobia, for the people of Judaea were hospitably inclined to foreign residents and were enjoined by their Law never to forget the time when they themselves were guests of the Egyptians. It was a protest against the further employment of the Celtic and Galatian troops who had behaved with such brutality in the hippodrome affair and of the Thracians who had carried out the Bethlehem massacre ; and against the presence in the Palace of Archelaus’s mother Malthace the Samaritan, who was thought to have been Herod’s evil genius in his last days. For the Samaritans, though they follow the Laws of Moses with praiseworthy exactitude, are regarded by the Jews as more foreign than any other foreigners. They are the descendants of Assyrian—or, as they themselves claim, Cypriot—colonists settled in Shechem many centuries ago, after the Ephraimite townsmen had been carried away into Assyrian captivity ; those colonists adopted the Israelite religion in placation of the God whose city and shrine they had occupied, because at the time they were greatly
troubled by the depredations of lions. A bitter feud has separated the Jews and the Samaritans ever since the Samaritan priesthood unsuccessfully opposed Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the Temple at Jerusalem : their contention was that the centralizing of worship at Jerusalem, which was not authorized in the Pentateuch, would give the Jews a political power over Samaria which they had not earned and which they would certainly abuse. The Jews resented their interference, and when the revived Temple worship began to attract the Ephraimite peasantry with gifts to Jerusalem, the Samaritan priesthood built a rival Temple on Mount Gerizim, which eventually John Hyrcanus the Maccabee destroyed as idolatrous : for the Samaritans were continuing to worship Jehovah’s divorced partner Ashima the Dove-goddess side by side with Jehovah. Samaritans were now still forbidden entrance into the Jerusalem Temple, even into the Court of the Gentiles, and the proverb current among the orthodox was : “Eat Samaritan bread, eat swine’s flesh.”