King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (30 page)

When Archelaus returned to his ethnarchy, he found everything in
disorder : the Romans had plundered not only the Temple Treasury but several of the Herodian ones—for Herod had divided his great wealth into many packets disposed among his various fortresses. By the time that the legacies to Augustus, Livia, Salome and others had been paid from what moneys remained, Archelaus’s purse was lean indeed. Besides, his royal residences had all been either destroyed or damaged, his private army was in revolt, he had quarrelled with his half-brother Antipas, the Jews hated him, and almost every mountain village in Judaea was occupied by bandits, some of them commanding considerable forces. Among the most troublesome insurgents was a Transjordanian Jew named Simon, a member of Herod’s bodyguard, who had the boldness to crown himself King of the Jews ; it was some months before he was surprised and killed by a flying column of Romans. A Judaean named Athronges, who lived near Modin the home of the Maccabees, also crowned himself King ; he was more dangerous, because he set himself up as the Messiah, the Son of David, and happened to be a shepherd. His claim to be of the House of David could not be disproved, because during the massacre of Bethlehem Archelaus had seized the Davidic register and all the family records brought there by the heads of houses and made a bonfire of them in the courtyard of the inn—an act which he now heartily regretted. Athronges and his brothers were for three or four years in full possession of a wide region of hills west of Jerusalem, took toll of all merchandise that came through, and massacred all foreigners. They were victorious in several skirmishes with the Romans, and if they had only been men of education and piety might well have united the nation under one banner, as the four Maccabee brothers had once succeeded in doing. But they were bandits at heart and the problem that they set Archelaus was a military rather than a religious one.

The only alleviation of Archelaus’s distresses was that the Samaritans had kept quiet all this time, and that Augustus generously made over to him the greater part of the enormous legacy left him by Herod ; the remainder went to Antipas and Philip. He instituted military law throughout Judaea and managed to govern in some sort of a way for more than nine years ; then he unwisely quarrelled with the High Court. They had upheld a decision of the Captain of the Guard to refuse him entry into the Temple on the ground of ceremonial uncleanness : Archelaus had married his brother Alexander’s widow Glaphyra. This marriage would have been his Levirate duty had Alexander died childless, but Glaphyra had borne him children ; which made the new marriage technically incestuous. Archelaus’s refusal to put her away had the surprising effect of uniting the Jews and the Samaritans in a temporary alliance against him, and it was the arrival at Rome of their joint embassy which persuaded Augustus to banish him : for when Samaritans and Jews made common cause, Livia reminded him, the Jewish problem had become critical.

However, even with Archelaus banished to Vienne in Gaul, Joseph did not think it safe to return to Judaea ; and when he made inquiries
from refugees he learned that his farm at Emmaus had become the headquarters of a bandit company, and that the Romans when they captured it had not only burned the buildings to the ground but also felled the orchards and rooted out the vines, broken the cisterns and blocked the wells. His two sons, he gathered, had escaped. Probably they had migrated to Galilee to become guests of their two other brothers. If he went to Galilean Cana, where the family sawmill was, he might find them all safe and well.

He invited Simeon to come with him to Galilee, but Simeon regretfully declined : he was too old for so lively a climate, and new wine should not be bottled in old skins. “Without you, dear friends, I shall be lonely, but I shall go to the Essene College at Callirrhoë by the Dead Sea, where the Overseer is an old acquaintance of mine. I shall become a member of that God-loving sect and find comradeship there, and friends to close my eyes when I die.”

Joseph’s business was sold to advantage and the family said goodbye to their friends and neighbours ; but when Jesus went his last rounds of the village, collecting and paying small outstanding debts, he was told the same thing at each house : “Perhaps we shall meet again. Drink of the Nile once, drink of it twice !” Indeed, Egypt is a queen whose beauty exercises a powerful pull on the heart : as the Israelites in the wilderness learned when they sighed for her green gardens, the leeks, the cucumbers and the garlic, forgetting the cruelty of their Ramasid task-masters.

They glided down by boat to Alexandria, where they chartered passages in a packet-galley bound for Tyre : she would sail in a week’s time with mail for all intervening seaports. Joseph had decided that the sea-journey would be less fatiguing and not more expensive ; also, they could bring their tools with them, and their clothes, and their books and household utensils, which it would be a pity to sell at a loss ; and he would prefer to enter Antipas’s tetrarchy as an Egyptian Jewish immigrant, not as a Judaean exile. This was a courageous decision, since the Jews, like the Egyptians, have an innate horror of the sea. Most of them would rather travel overland for five hundred miles through sandstorms or thick forest than travel fifty by sea in the calmest weather. They regard the sea as their lifelong enemy, and seafaring for them is almost the most despised trade of any ; but this is because they associate the sea with the Great Goddess in her erotic character of Rahab the Harlot—the Fish-tailed Aphrodite, in fact, of Joppa and Beyrout and Ascalon.

But to Jesus the sea, which he now visited for the first time, was the most beautiful sight that he had ever seen. It filled him with greater amazement than all the wonders of Alexandria, at that time the first city of the world after Rome, though he visited the docks and the Royal Library and the colonnades of the philosophers, and watched the enormous, mad crowd pouring out of the hippodrome and instantly engaging in bitter faction fights, blue against leek-green, with stones and clubs. An old business-acquaintance of Joseph’s, met by chance, won him admission to the lighthouse on Pharos Island, where the famous steam
engine of Ctesibius was displayed, though no longer put to practical use ; and he was allowed to ascend to the lantern-house to wonder at the optic device which enabled ships to be distinctly viewed at no less than twenty miles’ distance. But the sea and the salty smell of the sea, and the sunset over the waters glowing with more royal colours (it seemed to him) than the desert sunset, and the sudden land-breeze as the stars came out, and the planet Venus brilliant in the west : these stirred his spirit in an extraordinary manner.

The roar of the city came confusedly down the wind, like moans and groans, the small waves frothed white along the reefs, and as the glory faded from the sky and the moon rose he repeated softly the words of the Psalm in which David praises God for the creation of the great, wide sea with innumerable fish concealed in it, besides the ships and the whales that proudly drive along its surface. He silently stretched out his hand to Mary and each had a perfect understanding of what was in the other’s mind : “The sea is our mother. From the sea the dry land was delivered at the Creation as a child is delivered from the womb. How beautiful is our mother’s face !” But old Joseph wrapped his cloak more tightly about him and shivered at the waste of waters.

They embarked the next morning in cloudless weather. Joseph said : “We shall have a view of the Promised Land from a distance, like that granted to Moses from Pisgah.” But first they rowed along the coast of the Delta through seas already discoloured by the Nile mud, for the floods had begun, and counted the seven principal mouths of the Nile ; the Canopic first, and then, in order, the Bolbitinic, the Sebennytic, the Pineptimic, the Mendesic, the Tanitic and the Pelusiac—and anchored that night at Pelusium, formerly named Avaris, the gateway out of Egypt and the city from which the Israelites under Moses had begun their flight to the promised land. The next day, after taking bales of raw linen aboard, they coasted past the narrow spit of sand dividing the Lake of the Reeds from the sea. There the Egyptians in pursuit of Moses had been checked when a sudden north-east wind swamped the track. Numbers of them were swallowed up in the quicksands still prevalent there.

The ship laboured under oars along a low sandy coast, made dangerous by shoals, with Mount Seir, the great mountain of Edom, showing far away to the south-east through gaps in the white sand-hills ; and they presently could make out, directly ahead of them, the long bluish range of the Judaean hills. That night they anchored off Rhinocolura, at the mouth of the Torrent of Egypt which is the desert boundary between Canaan and Egypt ; but the torrent flows only in the winter and spring. Jesus asked permission to swim ashore and set foot for the first time in his life on the soil of his forefathers : for in the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Joshua this river is mentioned as the southern boundary of the territory of Judah. The master consented, and he swam ashore and offered up a prayer from dry land ; then plucked a sprig of rosemary from a hedge and swam back again, and gave the sprig to his mother.

The next day mail was put ashore for Gaza, but the town of Gaza,
where Samson took the gates off their hinges and walked away with them, was hidden from the sea. Ain-Rimmon and Beersheba lay a day’s journey inland. They coasted along the fertile plain of Philistia and some ten miles inland the hills rose in gentle slopes, dotted with villages. Soon they came to Ascalon, the former seat of the Herods, a beautiful city in the Greek style built in the shape of a theatre facing the sea, with the two horns of the semicircle abutting on bold cliffs, and by the sea a magnificent temple of the Goddess Aphrodite and another of Hercules-Melkarth, where Herod’s great-grandfather had been a priest. On the next day they came to Joppa, on its well-walled conical hill, another seat of the worship of Aphrodite and Hercules ; from here Jonah had, in the allegory, sailed on his famous voyage to Tarsus, the end of which was that he found himself in the belly of a whale. Joppa was the nearest port to Jerusalem, and the peak of Mount Mizpeh, four miles to the north of Jerusalem, could be clearly distinguished from the ship. The anchorage here was very uncomfortable because of the swell. Then on they went past the red cliffs which bordered the Plain of Sharon, with the hills of Ephraim behind ; and Joseph pointed out Mounts Ebal and Gerizim and said : “Shechem lies between them.”

The colossal statue of a man now appeared on the coast to the northward with white buildings at its feet. Mary began to weep silently when she learned that this was Caesarea, where King Antipater had been arrested on his return from Rome. They rowed by the ancient tribal territory of Manasseh, and ahead of them loomed the great table-ridge of Mount Carmel. Joseph pointed out the peak to the south-east, saying : “The peak of Elijah, where he put the prophets of Baal to confusion.” Soon they anchored in the port of Sycaminum where the River Kishon flows into the sea. Joseph paid the passage-money, they went ashore, bought an ass-cart and an ass, heaped their possessions on it and drove off eastward through the fruitful pomegranate groves.

Upper Galilee is a broad mountain-ridge jutting south from the Lebanon. The inhabitants distinguish it from Lower Galilee, a continuation of the same ridge, by its ability to produce sycomore figs, and by the greater excellence of its olives. But the olive is a tree that grows rank and yields little oil in rich and stoneless soil, and sycomore figs are not to be compared in flavour with true figs ; and these are Upper Galilee’s only two claims to superiority, except for an extraordinary richness in wild game. Old Herod loved Upper Galilee for the sport that the rugged hills and deep glens of its eastern districts afforded him. Panthers, leopards, bears, wolves, jackals, hyaenas, wild boars and gazelles —all fell to his lance and arrow. The summit of the ridge is undulating table-land, a former possession of the Kenites, who a thousand years ago were robbed of its rich pasture by the tribe of Naphtali ; to the west the olive-land of Asher slopes down to a plain, called the Plain of Acre, through which Joseph now led his family towards Lower Galilee.

The hills of Lower Galilee, covered with evergreen oak, slope gently ;
the valleys, famous for their wheat, spread wide. In Egypt Jesus had seen no eminence higher than the pyramids, and it was some time before he could accustom his eye to recognize the mountains that towered in the distance as solid masses of earth and rock ; they seemed like clouds. The forests also astonished him : he had never before seen trees that were not planted by man, and found it difficult to believe Joseph’s assurance that these dense forests were sown by the hand of God alone.

They took the crowded road to the large city of Sepphoris, twenty miles away, which was being rebuilt as handsomely as ever after its destruction by Varus. Here the land flowed with wine and milk. Fat cattle browsed in the valley meadows of the Kishon, the slopes were terraced for vines, mile after mile. They came upon a train of wagons, laden with timber, halted at the roadside. The merchant in charge was able to give them the information they needed. He said that Joseph’s sons Judah and Simon had sold the Cana sawmill ; two other brothers, refugees from Emmaus, were then living on their charity. When he had last seen them, six months before, they were settled on the further side of the Lake at Gergesa in Philip’s tetrarchy.

Presently the road, which was the main highway from Egypt to Damascus, passed through a gap in the hills commanded by the ancient fortress of Hattin. There Mary and Jesus had their first view of the Sea of Galilee, the great freshwater lake through which the Jordan flows. Its western slopes are as populous as the Bay of Naples and even more marvellously fertile. City jostles city ; and even some of the villages are as big as the capital towns of less prosperous provinces. They call this district “The Garden of Galilee”, and it is never without fruit : in the only two months that are figless the pomegranate is ripe. There is a saying : “An acre of land in Judaea will support a child ; an acre of land in Galilee will support a regiment.”