King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (9 page)

Now, Herod had been provoked into sending a small punitive expedition into Arabia, where Sylleus, who owed him a great deal of money, was harbouring robber bands and assisting them, with arms and remounts, to raid Herod’s frontier villages. The expedition was successful ; the robbers were caught and the debt recovered. About twenty-five Arabians were killed. Sylleus fled to Rome and complained to Augustus that Herod was seeking to dominate all Arabia, which he had invaded at the head of an enormous army. “He has already destroyed two thousand five hundred of our principal citizens,” Sylleus lamented, “and carried off untold wealth.”

Augustus was somehow persuaded to believe this nonsense and wrote sharply to Herod : “You must now regard yourself as my subject, no longer my friend.” For no petty king was allowed to wage an offensive war without Imperial permission. The contents of the letter became known and it was generally considered that Herod’s throne was tottering. With Salome’s help, Alexander and Aristobulus then bribed two of his bodyguard to murder him while he was hunting in the desert, but in such a way that it would seem to be an accident. They also secured a verbal promise from the leaders of the Sadducee party to assist their claims to the throne should Herod die suddenly, and arranged with the commander of the fortress of Alexandrium to give them temporary refuge as soon as the accident should be reported. But Herod was informed of the plot in good time by the repentant Salome, who suddenly realized that she had behaved rashly and that Sylleus had no real love for her. She assured Herod that she had been acting in his interests all the time, by tempting his enemies to show their hand prematurely,
and that if he went to Rome he would have no difficulty in regaining the Emperor’s confidence : she knew, she said, that he had been careful to obtain the consent of the nearest Imperial authorities before sending his men against Sylleus.

Herod sailed to Rome at once and soon made Augustus see reason. Augustus apologized handsomely for having doubted him, and ordered Sylleus to be put on trial for his life on the charges of disturbing the peace, plotting the death of Herod, and perjury. Herod’s lawyers pleaded for a postponement of the trial until Sylleus had been sent under escort to Antioch, headquarters of Saturninus the Governor-General of Syria who would decide whether or not the money seized in Arabia was a full and equitable settlement of the debt owed to Herod. The postponement was granted, and Sylleus was sent to Antioch at once.

Herod then reported the new plot against his life by Alexander and Aristobulus, whom he accused of having engineered the whole Arabian conspiracy. Augustus readily gave him permission to put them to death as parricides.

Presently Cleopas visited Joachim again at Cocheba. He found him in the harvest-field, supervising the carting of the sheaves. “I have come here at your invitation, brother Joachim,” said Cleopas.

“You are welcome ; but I sent you no invitation.”

“You invited me to come to your house again when That Man’s two sons were dead. They were strangled three days ago at Samaria. The game is played. Nicolaus of Damascus was their accuser, and Antipater was called to give evidence in the matter of the two murderous guards, whose confessions he had secured. Sing me your prophecy !”

“This is bad news.”

“They were evil men, and news of their death is good news.”

“It is bad news, I say, for last night in my dream I saw the lamps of Zabidus lighted again and heard his idolatrous spells chanted within the very Courts of the Temple. I saw Sacrilege, Blasphemy and Idolatry, three loathsome hags, at a merry-making in the blessed Sanctuary, so that the whole congregation of Israel was defiled—may the Lord God defend his servant Israel from all those that seek to do him harm.”

“You foresaw the deaths of Alexander and Aristobulus and the succession of Antipater. What do you foresee now ?”

“Answer me this one question and you shall have your reply—and it is no grand baffling riddle, such as those that Solomon and Hiram of Tyre exchanged in ancient times, but a simple question. Why has Herod shown such great kindness to the people of Rhodes, rebuilding the temple of Apollo, their abominable Sun-god ; and to the people of Cos, another place sacred of Apollo’s ; and to the Phoenicians of Beyrout and Tyre and Sidon ; and to the Spartans and Lycians and Samians and Mysians, all of whom worship the same abomination under one name or another? Why did he, by great presents to the Elians, persuade them to make him Perpetual President of the Olympic Games ?”

“I cannot explain why these things have been done,” said Cleopas. “I can only condemn. It is written : ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods but me.’ ”

K
ING
H
EROD
’S first choice of a High Priest after the destruction of his predecessor, King Antigonus the Maccabee, had been an obscure Babylonian Jew of the House of Zadok, named Ananel. He soon deposed him in favour of Mariamne’s brother, the Maccabean heir, who was only seventeen years old ; but the ill-timed enthusiasm of the mob when the boy officiated at the Feast of Tabernacles was a warrant for his execution. He was drowned one evening in the public Bath at Jericho, after a merry ducking match between two teams of Herod’s courtiers in which he had incautiously joined. Ananel was restored to the High Priesthood, but not for long. The office had changed hands several times more before Simon son of Boethus was appointed, when Herod considered it to be in safe hands at last.

Simon was an Alexandrian Jew and, though a Levite, not of High-Priestly family : a small, shrewd, diffident man, the soundest scholar in Alexandria, idealistic, upright and apparently without prejudice in religious matters. Herod had employed him to check the genealogy of a certain candidate for the priesthood whose family had been settled in Armenia for some generations ; and Simon in his adverse report had frankly revealed the flaws in the pedigrees of several members of the Sanhedrin who happened to be related to the man. Among them were one or two active critics of Herod’s own pedigree, which Simon obligingly undertook to prove more illustrious by far than he had himself supposed. Herod decided that Simon was wasted at Alexandria. He pretended to be so passionately in love with Simon’s daughter that he could not live without her ; yet how could he decently marry the girl—he asked his brother Pheroras—except by raising her father to a position of such dignity that she would not be despised by his other wives? He deposed Jeshua the Zadokite, who was then High Priest, and appointed Simon in his place. Simon’s daughter happened to be sufficiently good-looking for the world to believe that he owed his office to her royal marriage, rather than the other way about.

Simon, bound to Herod by the strongest ties of gratitude, for Herod treated him with respect and generosity, became his faithful servant. His family, the Cantheres, were named after the scarab-beetle, the Egyptian emblem of immortality, and were Pharisees of a sort, but had become so soaked in Greek philosophy that they regarded the original Hebrew Scriptures as the quaint relics of a barbarous age. They kept the Law scrupulously, but only because they wished to remind the unilluminated
mass of the people that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—by which they meant that conformity even in a barbarous religion is preferable to atheistic anarchy or the clash of competitive cults. They privately regretted the conservative Jewish view of Jehovah as a solitary who would have no dealings with any other gods and whose people were unique—a view that excited scorn or jealousy in foreigners according as the national fortunes declined or prospered.

To the Cantheres, Jehovah was merely an anomalous local variant of Olympian Zeus, and they heartily wished that the differences which distinguished him from Zeus, and from the corresponding gods of Rome, Egypt, Syria, Persia and India, could be smoothed out for the sake of international peace. Their own conception of the Deity was so grandiose and abstract that Jehovah seemed a mere tribal demon by comparison. The Jews, they held, must somehow come to terms with the Greeks who were their neighbours. Ah, if only the Greeks were not so childish, laughter-loving and irreverent even when they had arrived at mature age, and if only the Jews were not so grave and old-mannish and devout even while they were still children, how happy everyone would be! Young people should be allowed to enjoy life to the full and think of gods and goddesses, in the popular way, as tall, shining-faced men and women gifted with supernatural powers, though of gross human passions, who plagued the race of men and one another by their headstrong fancies. As they grew to maturity, they should gradually be initiated into the moral and historical meaning of the ancient myths, until they knew at last, in their old age, that gods and goddesses were merely figures of speech, and that God was what transcended physical nature—immortal wisdom, the answer to all questions that could ever be asked.

They followed Hillel, one of the two joint-Presidents of the High Court and the most revered theologian of the day, in treating the Scriptures as oracular in their phrasing : with hardly any text meaning precisely what it seemed to mean. For example, Hillel generously laid down that the old law “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” did not mean what it means in barbarous codes—that if a man blinds his neighbour even accidentally he must himself be blinded ; if he knocks out his neighbour’s teeth he must suffer the same inconvenience. Hillel said : “The loss of one man’s eye or tooth is not repaired by the loss of another man’s. The Lord in his wisdom ordained, rather, that the compensation in money or goods or land, paid to the injured man, should be equivalent to the loss suffered.”

Simon was no typical member of his family. He agreed with them that, in theory, the works of Homer and Hesiod, regarded as inspired religious texts, would serve as well as those of Moses ; for a true philosopher can hang his grey cloak on a peg of any timber. But he also held that in practice the Jewish Scriptures, the prophetic books especially, had one overwhelming advantage : he found them alive with a faith in the future, a steady belief in the perfectibility of mankind. Of what other national literature could the same be said? And even the solitariness of
Jehovah was commendable : he could be regarded as a type of the original Singleness of Truth everywhere confused by contradictory local truths. Again, the Jews were indeed unique in one sense : they were the only people in the world who carried the thought of God continually in their hearts.

Herod was neither philosopher nor poet. He made fun of Simon’s divided devotion to Plato and Ezekiel the prophet. He put his faith in the crude exercise of power—in power won by the capture of a national oracle, power then extended by compelling neighbouring nations to serve the god whom, as king, he had made the instrument of his own greatness ; but he also secretly held the mystical belief that by a splendid propitiation of Jehovah he would one day renew his youth and achieve a sort of immortality. He was not a man to shrink from any deed, however desperate or unnatural, that would make his name as glorious as those of Hercules, Osiris, Alexander and other mortal rulers who had become gods by the greatness of their feats.

Simon did not know the full extent of Herod’s ambitions but was aware at times of a presumptuous spirit in him, which, when he allowed his mind to dwell on it, troubled him as grossly irreligious ; however, he was never troubled to the extent of offering his resignation. What was the need? Did Herod perhaps fancy himself as the promised Messiah? But the military strength of the Roman Empire was sufficient guarantee against his undertaking any rash war of religious conquest ; and though he might overbear the Temple lawyers in many cases where the Law admitted of more than one interpretation, there was no question of his defying the Law as a whole. And however oppressive he might feel the constriction of his royal spirit, he must remain all his days a humble servant of the many times conquered Jehovah ; and at the same time acknowledge himself a mere petty king, a client of the Roman Empire ; and must eventually die like any other man. Surely Herod did not consider that his virtues entitled him to be caught up alive into Heaven like an Enoch or an Elijah? Yes, between the power of the Roman legions and the authority of the Mosaic Law, the field for the exercise of Herod’s ambitions was a narrow one.

With Antipater, as soon as he was preferred to Mariamne’s sons, Simon formed a close friendship. Antipater had studied at Alexandria under a relative of Simon’s. He took the Law more literally than the Cantheres, and though prepared to accept Hillel’s liberal interpretations of its harsher articles, was averse to Greek philosophy, in which he saw a danger to the authority of the Scriptures. He had been married by his father to the daughter of King Antigonus, but she was now dead. There were two children by the marriage, a boy and a girl. The boy, Antipater the Younger, was being educated in Egypt with the Cantheres family ; he was quiet and studious. The girl, Cypros, was betrothed to the son of Aristobulus who afterwards became famous as King Herod Agrippa, but was still a child. Antipater himself was betrothed to Aristobulus’s infant daughter, but had no wife. He felt lonely without one. His
father hinted that he had some other match in view for him and that meanwhile he should amuse himself with mistresses ; but to keep a mistress went against Antipater’s conscience. He took the Pharisaic view that to lie with a woman except with the intention of progeny was displeasing to the Lord, as was exemplified in the history of Onan. Yet he did not wish to beget children on a Jewess or an Edomite woman, for as bastards they would be cut off from the congregation of Israel ; and the Law forbade him any sexual traffic with Greek or Phoenician women or other foreigners.

One early spring morning, a few months before his brothers’ execution, Antipater visited Simon in his luxurious Temple apartments overlooking the Court of Israel.

“You are troubled, Prince,” said Simon, as soon as they were alone. “You seldom seem to be untroubled nowadays. Your frown grieves me.”