Strangers in the Land (The Zombie Bible) (2 page)

One consequence of that Covenant was a profound and lasting distrust of tribes not their own. The Hebrews both envied and feared the less restricted lives of their neighbors, who lived by no exacting Covenant. To cite one example of the many customs that worried and at times disgusted the Hebrews, some of their neighbors left their enemy dead unburied after a raid or buried the dead too shallow. How terrible it must have been to walk among the fallen, unclothing the slain and checking for bites that they may have concealed in their fear even from their own people. The Hebrews believed it was better to simply bury all the bodies—bury them deep if the soil was soft or pile high a cairn of stones over each corpse to crush it securely to the ground so that none might ever rise, moaning, to catch and devour the living.

The commandments by which the Hebrews lived left no room for unwary haste or compromise, whether with one’s own dead or with another’s: pile high the cairn, and if necessity required that in doing so you touch the bodies of the dead with ungloved hands, then wait afterward outside the camp for the required seven days until your uncleanness had passed.

To minds hardened by the crisis in the desert, compromise meant the deaths of others in your tribe. Those might be deaths you couldn’t predict or prevent, but as they rose, wailing, those dead would cry out your guilt to God.

Studying the fragmentary but eloquent records these tribes left behind, I find myself struck with both admiration and horror. Admiration for their ability to both survive and establish a code of law that would permit them to remain human while surviving.
And horror at their readiness to exterminate or enslave other peoples who were less aware and therefore less cautious of the ravenous dead.

In our own time, this globe has suffered one mass genocide at least once every decade for more than a century. Despite this, we are today a sheltered people, and we are losing our memory. Yet it is vitally important that we remember. Like the Hebrews, we are at a moment of terrible choice, where we too must decide what we will do with those who live as “strangers” among us, those who labor in our towns or starve in our streets. Those who speak a strange language and who some of us choose to believe are not of our People.

Some of us have already made the choice. Some of us appoint watchmen with authority to hold and harass and contain the strangers we fear. Some of us erect fences along the border of the land or gaze at the sky and shiver in fear of falling planes.

The ancient records hold lessons for us, hard lessons we too often ignore. Our ancestors, like the Hebrews, yearned for the durability of their covenant passionately enough to write it in stone—not in tablets within an Ark, but on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. We will at times regret and wish to deny the covenants and the commitments our fathers have made, regardless of whether they were right or wrong, foolish or wise. And at times we will fear their consequences, real or imagined. Yet if we cannot honor the covenants we make with those who live among us, then we may prove equally unable to honor the covenants we make with God, or with our own kin, or with ourselves. Like the Hebrews, we are newly come to a land we now consider our own, and though we think of ourselves as one constituted people, a people set apart, we remain in fact many tribes intermingled, giving worship to many gods both sacred and secular.

In the lean years to come, when the dead moan outside our walls and our homesteads, nothing will matter more to our ability to survive—and to remain true and human—than our readiness to
honor the covenants that our fathers and that we ourselves, the living, have made with each other. To do otherwise is to forget that we are strongest together, and that God, who does not make promises lightly, has issued us no guarantee that the ideas that save us will come from a banker in Chicago rather than an assistant electrician in Los Angeles. And to do otherwise is to be less than who we’ve said we will be.

Our narrative opens a few brief generations after the desert. A people without a standing military or any significant arsenal, the Hebrew tribes had raided when they saw land worth taking; now, having taken it, they were weary, and most of them desired only rest and the chance of a new life in a lush and fertile land. The aggressive deforestation of later centuries would let in the desert, but in 1160 BC, the land of promise was not as it is today. Israel was more humid then, and in some places richly forested, a land of milk and honey.

Many of the Hebrews were eager to keep to their own kin on their own lands, trusting in the judges of the Law to arbitrate disputes and keep the region clean of the dead. The Canaanites who had lived in the land before them now had few leaders and fewer armed men; with those few who remained, the Hebrews had made a covenant in the valley that the priests later named Weeping because of their regret for the truce established there. Now most of the Canaanites kept to themselves in small settlements of wooden houses or hovels, or lived and worked among the Hebrews as slaves or second-class laborers. Yet their presence had already begun to change the Hebrews they lived among. Though many of the Hebrew encampments still consisted of tents amid pastures filled with herds, in places a few houses of cedar could already be seen, a few vineyards, a few olive presses.

T
HE
P
EOPLE
of the Covenant had many judges, but only one
navi
who told them the future and the past and found truth. She heard their pleas four times a week from a wooden seat her husband had carved for her beneath the great olive tree on its hill near Shiloh. The tree had branches that spread wider than the roof of a cedar house, and it had been standing there, tall and green, when Yeshua the war leader first led their ancestors to the land. Still rich with life, it served now as a visible reminder to all who came before the
navi
’s seat that the fertility and possession of this land of promise, this land of milk and honey and olive groves, came with a high cost: the keeping of the Law and the Covenant, that commitment to ways of living that alone kept the People clean and secure in a world where heathen tribes or the living dead might rise up in the night and devour them.

To keep the Covenant meant olive oil and abundant fields of wheat and barley, many births among the flocks, and many children.

To break it—that meant a curse: blight and barrenness and unclean death.

Let the People look to the
navi’
s seat and remember this.

Devora the
navi
sat there now with the full authority of the Law at her back, her eyes hard among early wrinkles, her graying hair glowing in that softened light that comes before sunset. A massive, broad-shouldered man stood behind her with a stout ashen spear ending in a bronze head and the long, uncut hair that was the visible sign of his vow. As a nazarite, Zadok lived a life that had no meaning but the wielding of the spear and the defense of the tribe of Levi. He had trained his body for this. Zadok was not a farmer, a tanner, a vintner, or a priest. He was one who preserved life and dealt death when needed. In all the land, only four others shared his vow.

Two supplicants had just turned from Devora’s seat to make their way down the slope, one with a relieved look, the other with a scowl. Their argument over the possession of a bull had nearly drawn blood, and the details of the case were such that the seventy judges in Shiloh could not decide it and had sent the two men to the olive tree. But no vision had come to Devora to reveal where there was guilt and where there was not, and in her frustration the
navi
had resolved the matter by deciding that both men together would take the bull and give the animal to the priests, who would offer it up as an
olah
, a burnt offering before God. In this one act they would sacrifice their dispute and atone for the discord they’d brought to the camps of the People. This case, like others that day, had reminded Devora how divided the People were, how provisional their commitment to the covenants they’d made with God and with each other. In light of the evil news this morning had brought to the valley below, this division alarmed
Devora. She sat very still, anxious to end the day’s judgments and return to the camp. She was intensely grateful for Zadok’s steadying presence behind her.

The people gathered on the slope below parted to let the two supplicants by. There were maybe thirty men and women, some standing, others seated on great slabs of rock that past supplicants had pulled free of the scree on the west side of the hill near the cairns of the dead. Beyond the supplicants lay the valley, filled with the white tents of Shiloh. That land was lush with tall grasses and stands of oak and terebinth near the water; faint from the far slopes across the river came the lowing of herds, many of them her husband’s. The slow river wound eastward on its way to meet the Tumbling Water, which ran through all the land from the Galilee hills in the north to the dead sea in the south where no fish were—and where the salt in the water was so thick a man could lie on the surface without sinking. Where the salt on the shore stood in tall white pillars, shaped like tents or women or creatures the Hebrews had not met before even in nightmares. Like so many reminders that the land was strange to them and they still strangers in it, and their possession of its fields and waters a blessing that could yet be revoked, a promise that could yet be rescinded.

As Devora looked out over the supplicants, she decided she had time before sundown to sit in decision over one more case. It was her responsibility to see as many as she could, yet she was weary. She yearned for a restful Sabbath meal with her husband. The cases of the day had not succeeded in distracting her from her real worry—the armed camp that had set up a few miles downriver around the tent of a chieftain called Barak ben Abinoam, bringing with it news of walking dead in the north.

Devora searched the supplicants’ eyes—herdsmen, levites, craftsmen—for some sign of an easy case, though only the most difficult were sent to her. A stir among those lowest on the slope
drew her attention. People were drawing together as though to form a wall as a woman approached them, climbing unsteadily up the hill with a bundle clutched in her arms. Her lank hair hung forward over her face, and she was wrapped in a blanket that looked to be coarse wool. A salmah, the poorest of garments. One shoulder was free of the wool, bare and dirtied with the stain of a long and sweaty walk. Devora did not recognize her from the nearby camp at Shiloh nor from any of the herders’ camps in the surrounding valleys. She might have come a long way, wearing nothing but that salmah and her long, ragged hair, and carrying nothing but that bundle she held.

One of the supplicants, a white-robed levite, stepped directly into her way and must have said something that Devora couldn’t hear from her seat; she saw the young woman—a girl, really—lift her head and spit in the levite’s face. The man lifted his hand but did not strike, as though reluctant to touch with his bare skin this woman who came strange and dirtied to the
navi
’s hill.