King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (32 page)

During the first two days he did not once open his mouth, but listened attentively, and his heart leaped whenever a Doctor said : “Ay, the learned Shammai said thus and thus, but what has the just and generous Hillel taught on the same subject ?” Often he would mutter under his breath Hillel’s pronouncement which he had learned from Simeon ; for Hillel seemed to Jesus always to have been in the right. Hillel was still living, but Jesus never achieved his desire of conversing with him ; he had for years been too old and frail to leave his room at the Academy.

On the third day it happened that he was attending a debate between two famous Doctors, on the shady side of the Women’s Court. It was so well attended that he could not see the Doctors or their chairs because of the broad backs of the listeners in between. They were disputing a nice point of the Law : why the Paschal lamb must be chosen on the tenth day of the month and reserved until the evening of the fourteenth.

The First Doctor said : “It is clear as the sun shining on the Temple Court : ten is the number of completeness. No man in this world, unless he be a Philistine monster like the one mentioned in the Wars of David, has more than ten fingers and ten toes ; or fewer than ten, unless he has suffered an accident. Ten men form a congregation. Ten persons are a sufficient household to eat a Paschal lamb. The ten-stringed harp is the completeness of music. With ten plagues the Lord visited the fullness of his wrath on the Egyptians. Between Adam and Noah, between
Noah and Abraham, ten generations intervene. More than this : with ten utterances the Lord created the world. And in the evening twilight of the first Friday, the last day of Creation, he created the ten excellent things which, as you know, included the rainbow, the pen, the tongs and the two Tables of the Law—”

As he paused, one of his disciples asked leave to quote the song
Ten Measures of Wisdom
in proof of the traditional completeness of ten. The Doctor welcomed the interlude and the disciple began to sing mournfully :

Ten measures of wisdom were given the world—

Another took up the refrain :

Israel took nine—

and the whole company mournfully finished :

The rest took one.

So it went on :

Ten measures of wealth were given the world.
Rome took nine,
The rest took one.

 

Ten measures of poverty were given the world.
Babylon took nine,
The rest took one.

 

Ten measures of pride were given the world.
Elam took nine,
The rest took one.

 

Ten measures of courage were given the world.
Persia took nine,
The rest took one.

 

Ten measures of magic were given the world.
Egypt took nine,
The rest took one.

 

Ten measures of lechery were given the world.
Arabia took nine,
The rest took one.

 

Ten measures of folly were given the world.
Greece took nine,
The rest took one.

 

Ten measures of drunkenness were given the world.
Ethiopia took nine,
The rest took one.

 

Ten measures of lousiness were given the world.
Media took nine,
The rest took one.

The First Doctor continued : “But especially, as I read the Holy Book, the lamb is chosen on that tenth day in honour of the Ten Commandments. On each day of the ten the pious man reads and ponders one of the Commandments, and on the tenth his heart is ready and aware of his duty towards God and his neighbour ; and he is sanctified, so that he may choose the unblemished lamb with a pure heart and eye. This is the practice in my house and we do not consider the Passover properly performed otherwise. Let any man dispute my words who has the hardihood !”

There was silence for a while and then, though the challenge was only a rhetorical one, Jesus could no longer restrain himself, but cried out : “Learned man : is your roll of the Law arranged in the same chapters as the roll which is fixed in the Chamber of Copyists ?”

Everyone looked round in surprise, and when it was seen that the interrupter was a mere boy, the surprise was greater still.

The Doctor frowned and asked : “What impudent voice asked me that question? Let the speaker come forward and show himself boldly. Then I will answer him.”

Jesus slipped through the crowd and stood before him in the front rank.

The Doctor said : “Little red-locked creature with the pale face, tell me why you have asked me this shameless question and then you shall have your answer. Though we are instructed not to turn away those that wish to hear, we are also instructed to correct folly and lay the rod to the fool’s back.”

“Learned teacher,” Jesus answered, “I do not wish to be impudent, but being a stranger in Jerusalem I thought it possible that your roll of the Law differs from those that I have studied elsewhere. For I have read that the Passover was celebrated before the Ten Commandments were given. The Ten Commandments may be said to have existed from the sixth day of Creation, having been immanent in the mind of the Almighty—if it is true that he then created the Alphabet and the Two Tables—but they were not committed to the Tables or delivered to Moses until after he had brought the Children of Israel out of Egypt into Sinai. Until that time, as I read the Scriptures, no commandments had been given to man of a general nature, but only particular ones, such as the commandment not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or the commandment to build and stock an ark, or that which is now in question, which is the commandment for the eating of the Passover. For that this commandment was to eat a particular feast, rather than to inaugurate a sacrificial festival, the prophet Jeremiah plainly affirms. He prophesies in the name of the Lord : “In the day that I brought your fathers out of Egypt I spoke not to them, nor commanded them, concerning burned offerings and sacrifices.’ ”

The Second Doctor, who did not wish his colleague to be confounded by so young a child, interposed : “You do not understand these matters. If the learned Doctor chooses to think that the ten days were appointed
by the Lord in anticipation of the Ten Commandments, what is that to you ?”

Jesus said : “It troubles me that he considers the first Passover feast to have been improperly conducted : for how could the Children of Israel while in Egypt have read and pondered commandments that had not been committed to writing and existed only in the mind of the Lord ?”

He would have said more, but the Second Doctor broke in again : “In my opinion, the tenth day is chosen because the tithe, the tenth part, is sacred to the Lord, not because of the completeness of the number ten, for it goes without saying that seven is a number of greater completeness than ten. The world may have been created by ten commandments but the Lord hallowed the seventh day when he had done. That the Sacred Candlestick has seven branches, that seven clean beasts went into the ark, that seven times seven days separate the Passover from the Feast of Weeks, that seven times seven years make the Year of Jubilee—all these examples may be instanced, yet where is Perfection, where is Completeness, but in the Holy One? And there are seven elements to his Unspeakable Name. Tithes were instituted before Moses saw the light. Our Father Abraham gave tithes to Melchizedek King of Salem, as priest of the Most High God ; our Father Jacob imitated the piety of his grandfather when he vowed to the Lord a tithe of all the substance that he should acquire in Mesopotamia ; and later Moses ordained the tithing of all the fruits of this land. Let any man dispute this who has the hardihood !”

Jesus spoke up again : “Learned Doctor, though to give tithes is good, how is the Paschal lamb a tithe? If a man has ten lambs let him choose out one as a sacrifice to the Lord ; but what if he has five, or twenty? And where is it written that tithes should be gathered on the tenth day of the month ?”

Everyone present was astonished at the boldness and fluency of Jesus’s argument, and the Second Doctor said to the First : “Brother, what shall we do with this child? Shall we turn him away ?”

The First Doctor said gruffly : “Not until you have answered his argument, which indeed was on the lips of every man in the company ; and I think it not unfitting that a mere child should have advanced it.”

The Second Doctor vented his wrath on Jesus. “Are you of the bandits of Galilee who cut a man’s throat and leave him wallowing in his blood? Are you of the Galilean bandits who tear down but never build up again ?”

“No, though I live with my parents in Galilee I was born in Judaea, and if you have cut your own throat with a word indiscreetly spoken I beg that you will not charge me with murder. As for building up : if you ask me why the lamb was chosen on the tenth day, I will answer that the Children of Israel were preparing to depart on the fourteenth day when the moon is at its fullest, so that they could put as much distance between themselves and the armies of Pharaoh as possible. They chose the lamb and set it apart from the others as if for fattening ; and this was
to deceive the Egyptians. For when lambs are set apart to be fattened, a process which takes a month or more, nobody will expect them to be suddenly slaughtered and eaten unhung four nights later. But the ten days which are in question have not necessarily any greater significance than this, that ten days was a measure of time of frequent use among the Israelites during their bondage : for ten days made an Egyptian week then, as now. Ten days were allowed them by Moses for settling their affairs, and with the choosing of the lamb they made final preparation for their flight. The feast was in the evening, and by the time that it was finished the Egyptians were asleep, and away they stole, well fed and heartened with wine, by the narrow unguarded track which skirts the Lake of Reeds ; thus avoiding the well-guarded highway to Philistia. Indeed, an Egyptian week of ten days, an
asor
, is still of repute in Israel. Is not the Day of Atonement celebrated on the last day of an
asor
? And for a less awful instance, did not Daniel and his three companions choose ten days as a testing period during which they were to subsist only on pulse and water ?”

The Second Doctor smiled in quiet triumph : “You build your house on quicksand, Little Doctor,” he said. “Our Israelitish month may, by a figure of speech, be described as divided into decades ; but these decades have no reality in themselves, for, as you are not yet scholar enough to know,
asor
does not mean the decade itself. It means the tenth day of a decade. And so I come to the confounding of your previous argument. The month is tithed of its days, each tenth day having a certain sanctity—not equal to that of the seventh day, but still a sanctity—to remind us of our duty in tithing everything of use to our Lord.”

“True, Great Doctor, the word
asor
means the tenth day, but it also means a decade. For the brother and mother of Rebeccah in the four-and-twentieth chapter of Genesis said to our father Isaac : ‘Let the damsel abide with us for an
asor
at least’, which is to say a week of ten days.”

At this a little gasp of wonder arose among the Galilean visitors who sat together at one side. It was like the scene in a fencing-school when a novice by dexterous play not only parries every blow aimed at him by the master of fence, but with a quick turn of the wrist sends his sword spinning across the gymnasium so that the master stands disarmed and glaring foolishly. How the bystanders applaud! So now, forgetful of good manners, the Galileans clapped their hands for joy and began to laugh aloud, and someone cried out rudely : “A second David who has killed his lion and his bear !”

Affronted by this unseemly noise, the two Doctors rose as one man. They offered up the prayer that brought the debate to a close, and walked coldly away, dismissing their disciples.

The First Doctor said to the Second : “That boy is extraordinarily impudent. How has he not learned to hold his tongue and listen to his betters? I wonder who he is? I am convinced that he is a bastard. You can tell bastards by their shambling gait and by their reluctance to salute their elders.”

“Surely that cannot be? For a boy so well grounded in the Law would know that no man born in bastardy is admitted into this Court, not until the tenth generation. Besides, he saluted us respectfully as we came away, and since you have not seen him walking, how can you know that he shambles ?”

“It may be that he is not yet aware of his bastardy, but I am convinced that a bastard he is for all that.”

“I deny it. If he were a bastard, though the fact might be hidden from him out of kindness, his teachers would know of it and he would not be so well instructed in the Scriptures : for what profit would it be to teach a bastard what only a member of the congregation can profitably learn ?”

“Let us go back and discover his name, and then we can make inquiries.”

When they returned to the place of the lecture, they found that it was occupied by another group of debaters who had moved there from the hot centre of the Court. They could not see Jesus anywhere but stayed to listen to what proved to be less a debate than a meeting of protest by certain Pharisees against what they took to be a clear breach of the Law by the High Priest. The question was, whether the High Priest had done right to accept a present for the Temple Treasury from a Jewish prostitute. She had repented of her ways and made a sin-offering to the Lord of all the money that she had earned by her profession. The Pharisees were arguing that the money should not have been handled by any priest at all, let alone the High Priest, and should have been distributed to the poor, not added to the Treasury funds. For in the twenty-third chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy it is distinctly laid down :

Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore into the house of thy God.

This prohibition, by the way, though ascribed to Jehovah’s servant Moses, is said to date only from the time of King Josiah. For he put an end to the ancient Jebusite custom by which the girls of Jerusalem prostituted themselves to strangers at the City gates and laid their earnings at the feet of Anatha, Jehovah’s consort.