The
Last of the
Hebrews
|
Run through the streets of Jerusalem and
seek in the public places if you can find a man who is seeking the
truth. And though they say Yahweh lives, surely they swear falsely.
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Jeremiah 5:1-2
|

The
boys grew up in Anathoth, a township in the territory of Benjamin, a
brisk
hour’s walk off to the northeast of Jerusalem. Their father was a
Levite, which
means his sons were groomed like circus monkeys to read and learn by
rote, and
were barely seen playing outside. Gemariah, the younger of the two, was
treated
with more lenience and often escaped from his tutors into the small
lanes and
catwalks of Anathoth.
The father was a haughty and temperamental
man; he
made sure his sons would never forget that, although themselves not of
seed
royal, it was their ancestors who had made and unmade kings.
In King Saul's days a certain Abiathar had
committed
treason and given food and shelter to the fugitive David. Abiathar
barely escaped
King Saul’s retribution. The risk paid off, but then he committed the
almost
fatal error of punting the wrong horse in the race for David’s
succession.
Instead of Prince Adonijah, Solomon, the son of a concubine, ascended
to the
throne and the aged Abiathar was put under house arrest on his estates
in
Anathoth.
Since the time when the judges - the
Hebrew’s
equivalent to Phoenician suffetes and Roman consuls - had become
defunct, the
big estates provided a platform of local influence from which the
landed gentry
could marry their daughters into the center of power. They became
concubines at
the royal court, and verging on the incestuous, an urban nobility was
filling
with “seed royal” the
various
positions at the court, the temple and in the guards; offspring and
kinsmen
from the numerous harem of the king. But since the days of King Saul,
itinerant
“prophets” kept in their haversacks vials with oil, and not just for
frying an
omelet.
On demand a prophet would anoint a
contender from the
opposition or sanction a rival’s mandate against the ruling king. The
prophet
Ahijah, the Shilonite, had anointed Jeroboam as king over the tribes in
the
north. It was meant to be an affront against the still ruling King
Solomon. In
842 BC. it was the prophet Elisha’s turn to anoint a certain Jehu,
which
promptly led to the wholesale massacre of the then ruling House of
Omri.
The incumbent kings didn’t hesitate to
retaliate,
prophesying was a risky business. In this age of tyrannies everywhere
the voice
of authority was the only to be heard. As a commoner, you were reduced
to the
squeak of a mouse and expected to grovel as “your slave,” “your servant,” “your handmaiden.” The
freelance prophet who had the temerity to announce that “the word of the Lord came also unto me,”
better had tangible protection. Lynching a prophet by an enraged mob
was not
unheard of, and the authorities, too, didn’t hesitate to prosecute the
harbinger of unasked for opinions. Nevertheless, hundreds of “prophets”
plied
the trade at any given time and dared to raise the volume in a shouting
match
between the strutting bull of royal blood and proclamations alleged to
come
straight from the mouth of God. Against this level of noise it was not
easy to
stand out.
Even the aristocratic Isaiah promoted
himself with
indecent exposures in public; Ezekiel had a habit of baking his bread
over a
fire from his own turds and walking through walls when he could have
taken the
door. Hilkiah’s son however didn’t need the shenanigans. His father was
the
high-priest.
Hilkiah made sure that his oldest son
would read and
recite everything known of the prophets. The boy’s favorite story was
the
prophet Elijah’s personal encounter with God. With his eyes closed he
chanted
to himself how the "great and strong wind” had “rent the mountains, and broke to
pieces the
rocks,” but “He” was not in the wind, neither in the
earthquake
after the wind, nor in the fire after the earthquake; and then Elijah
pulled a
veil over his face and heard a “still small voice."
The acolytes in the temple of Solomon used
to live in
fear of the high-priest’s short fuse. So when Hilkiah returned from the
capital
to attend to his affairs in Anathoth it made his oldest, more sensitive
son,
live in a state of constant unease, like sitting next to a crumbling
wall that
could collapse at any time. The high-priest was not always sure what to
make of
the boy and his questions. Why it was that Cain was allowed to walk
away from
his crime? Where was the justice in the confrontation between the good
King Amaziah,
“who did right in the eyes of the Lord,” and the baddy, Israel’s King Jehoash “who
did evil in the eyes of
God,” when in the end it
was the
wicked king who’d prevailed, conquered Jerusalem, took Amaziah captive
and
carried away his daughters, even pilfered the treasures from the
temple? When
Moses arrived at Jethro’s tent, was he in the eyes of his own laws not
a
fugitive murderer running from the Egyptian police? And when the
Assyrians came
to conquer Samaria and impaled the surviving defenders alive and tore
off their
limbs, how was it that without telling his chosen people, the god of
Israel had
promoted a foreigner, the Assyrian king Sargon, to be his “rod of
indignation” against his
own family?
Strange enough, Hilkiah thought of himself
as a patient
man, and that because he never lost it completely when he allowed his
sarcasm
to boil over. But if you didn’t know the man he seemed to come at you
with the
fury of a wild elephant and would shout: “Can you do a Leviathan and
make it
breath fire from the nostrils? The God of Israel can!” Time and again these sudden flares took
even his
oldest son completely by surprise, he could never get used to it.
Stumped, the
lad would just sit there, like Job in the potsherds, scratch his tush
and not
know what to say. It taught him to bottle up his emotions and look at
his
father with a blank face. He liked to imagine King Sargon’s Assyrian
beard and
project it on the chin of his father. If he were God, why should he
even want to
make a Leviathan?
Of the kids in the neighborhood a certain
Gedaliah,
the son of Ahikam took pity on him. Gedaliah prided himself of his
descent from
King Saul’s seed. A dubious claim; the house of Saul had long gone
extinct, but
nobody tested him on this. Although younger than Hilkiah’s oldest son,
Gedaliah
was the undisputed leader with the boys in the streets and protected
the future
prophet from the bullying by his peers.
During his puberty he discovered women -
or rather
the interest of the other boys in women. They told Hilkiah’s son about
the
going rate for a commoner’s daughter - “fifteen pieces of silver,
and an
homer of barley” - but
unlike his
brother Gemariah who more than once was caught in the barns with hay in
his
curly hair, he was not interested, and not because he was shy or
prudish; his
brother’s strong shouldered muscularity did leave an impression on him.
All the
more it made him feel that he “shall
not take a
wife, neither shall have sons or daughters.” He
didn’t know yet that this could brand him as an outcast; in the
Hebrew’s
society there was no place for fulfilled male relationships. And yet,
despite
the profound difference in temperament, the young man picked up his
prophetic
vocabulary mainly from the prophet Hosea, a man utterly infatuated with
the
opposite sex.
With approval he read Hosea’s uncouth
swearing
against his own wife - “for the whoredom of her boobs I shall strip
her
naked and kick her into the wilderness as in the day she was born” - without being able to realize that this
typical mix
of metaphor and teeth-grinding frustration was the utterance of a man
who
actually had been living under the spell of the fairer sex. Hosea had
had a
wife with a colorful past; he was acquainted with the green eyed
monster and
suffered from frequent bouts of frustrated horniness. For his young
reader this
uninhibited language and the imagery of “whoredom” became a purely verbal exercise. The
talents of the
high-priest’s son laid somewhere else.
He was good at figures; to his father’s
dismay he was
seen to sidle up with traveling merchants whose caravans twice a year
stopped
at Anathoth and set up a trade fair. The travelers astonished the good
people
of the town with grotesque tales about the seafaring nations in the“Isles of Chittim.”
To the lad’s surprise his father actually
drew the
figure into the dust of the courtyard when he listened to his son
retelling the
tale about a merchant in olive oil, a certain Thales, who lived in
Miletus on
the Anatolian coast. This Thales had proven that a triangle inscribed
in a
semicircle is right. He also expected an eclipse to occur on May 28,
585 BC.;
nobody knew yet it would be the first year of the Babylonian captivity.
Hilkiah
nodded even to the Greek’s proposal of hydrogen (“water”) as the basic building block of the
Universe; it seemed
not so far fetched in a Universe surrounded by the waters up high and
below.
The youngster tried to elicit a chuckle from his father and mentioned
Anaximander, a student of Thales.
Anaximander reasoned that, without parents
to protect
and instruct, the first generation of men could not possibly have
survived on
its own. He looked at the birds and asked the same question.
Anaximander
suspected that the first man and the first bird must have sprung from
an other
less sophisticated species which did a rudimentary parenting. Further
observations on the fetuses in sacrificial victims and the intriguing
finds of
fossilized crustaceans in the rocks of high mountains did lead
Anaximander to
believe in the aquatic ancestry of life and that ultimately all life
had
generated from the oceans. In other words, he was the first to propose
evolution.
Hilkiah reflected on it. His son didn’t
notice the frown on his father’s face. To the youth this sounded just
like the midwife’s tales his father’s sharecroppers used to tell of a
primeval clash between “Tehom,” the dragon of the water-world and
Yahweh, who assailed Tehom in his chariot of fire and slew the monster
so that the Elohim could use the carcass to shape the Sun, the Moon and
the stars and stretch out the skies like a tent cloth. Hilkiah shook
his head, but his reprimand was unusually restrained: “Every
man is
brutish in his
knowledge and confounded by the graven image,” he said, “with the axe they cut a tree, deck it out
with silver
and gold; fasten it with nails. It’s all a workman’s handiwork, but it
doesn’t
move. It is as upright as the palm tree, and yet it doesn’t speak and
they
carry it on their shoulders, because it will not walk.”
His son wasn’t so sure but kept it to
himself; he was
bright enough to understand that images are the symbol, not the object
of
worship. A Chaldean prisoner of war had told him that the Babylonians
worshipped Marduk in a temple with a couch in an empty chamber. How was
this
different from the empty chamber in Solomon’s temple?
He looked away, towards the fields where
his father’s
tenants were tilling the soil. Hilkiah’s heir was brought up never to
forget
the divide, between him - the high and mighty landlord, who never
worked an
honest days wages with his own fair hands - and the hairy, barely human
sharecroppers and goat-herders; people who “burned
incense to the Queen of Heaven, and poured out drink offerings to her,
as we
have done, we and our fathers, our
kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of
Jerusalem.” Yahweh was worshipped only by an elite, and
merely as a
matter of preference, not exclusivity. In Jerusalem, Tammuz and the
grove of
Ashteroth shared the temple’s premises with Yahweh’s male prostitutes.
Like
their neighbors, the Hebrews were a society of tribal polytheists with
shrines
and “high places”
dotting the
country side.
To the modern mind religion is all about
moralizing
and feel good mysticism; we no longer consider reading the horoscope as
a
religious activity. Only Japan’s Shinto is still coming close to the
amorphous
mix of shamanism, fertility cult and hero worship in ancient beliefs.
With
aristocratic disdain Isaiah had condemned the superstition of the poor:
“they
wank themselves into a frenzy and copulate under every green tree, slay
their
children under the rocks and pour drink offerings to the smooth stones
of the
stream.”
But there was more hidden underneath this
sentiment
than the mere arrogance of the privileged and educated. Nobody would
openly say
it, but since the great upheavals from 637 BC. the high and mighty
began to
look with apprehension at their human cattle. Inundated with
generation-old
debts, the poor in Judah never had an “inheritance
to turn it to the strangers,” nor held a title to the house
from
which they “suffered eviction.”
Many
lived in bondage, not under the yoke of aliens but of their own people.
They
were indeed “orphans and fatherless”
for them every sip of water and the wood for fuel was on a premium. “Laboring, and having no rest,”
and already “working for the foreigner
to find bread for
their hunger,” they lived, in the words of the Roman poet
Virgil, “a
life close to the needs, hardened by incessant labor and finding
refreshment
only in the hours of prayer,"
which isn’t as idyllic as Virgil is making it sound. The coming and
going of
the stork signaled the days of tilling and harvesting and in between
there was
only the empty gaze into the oppressive heat of noon. Petitioning at
court was
pointless, the king’s ministers didn’t give a damn about the people in
the mud
hovels whose skin was “black like an
oven,”
and for whose emaciated daughters nobody would bother paying a dowry.
Mothers
were pressed to send their chronically undernourished little ones to
the mines;
four- and five-year-old midgets, maggot-like crawling through the
claustrophobic shafts, barely living from a basket of food hauled down
in
exchange for a basket of ore going up.
So when in 637 BC. the courtiers of King
Amon
assassinated the monarch in open daylight, it became the signal for
every pauper
in the land to rise and settle old scores. Hilkiah’s oldest was not yet
seven
years old then, and he would never forget what he and his brother were
made to
witness from the roof of the barricaded townhouse; he later said: “death had risen on our windows, and had
entered into
our palaces, and had cut off the children and the young men in the
streets.”
It was a social revolution.
The wives and daughters of
the rich were dragged
down from their mounts and raped in the streets, and in retaliation the
rich
hired mercenaries to round up the have-nots and burn them alive on the
spot.
After weeks of anarchy the grandees and their hired thugs regained
their grip,
although there was talk of concessions. But only many years later it
became
part of King Josiah’s new deal. The high-priest Hilkiah was a key
player in
this reshuffle of the deck.
To his sons’s relief he now
spent most of his time
in Jerusalem at the center of an ambitious circle of politicians and
courtiers
like Ahikam, a certain Achbor, Shaphan, Asahiah, and the prophetess
Huldah; she
was the chamberlain’s wife. Out of the purges emerged Josiah as the new
king, a
mere boy of nine years. His mother, Jedidah, was Asahiah’s cousin. The
high-priest seized the opportunity to strike his terror into the heart
of yet
an other boy and took custody of King Josiah’s education. Not
surprisingly the
teenager was groomed to do “what was right in the sight of the Lord.”
However not everybody set his
hopes on reforms. A
first wave of disenchanted emigrants left Judah to join the expatriates
of
former Israel, and everywhere enclaves of Hebrew communities began to
emerge.
They became the avant-garde of a new cosmopolitan citizenry and made
themselves
at home in a world of stark contrasts to the rustic provincialism of
Jerusalem.
In those days the city was a
mere mountain
fortress, overseeing a suburban area stretching west on a narrow
mountain ridge
that sheltered barely nine thousand people. On festival days, the
visitors
pitched their tents outside of the gates. Even by the standards of the
day,
this rural seat of bureaucrats and royal guards was a small town.
Everybody
knew everybody else, an unknown face in the street ignited a wildfire
of
gossip. By comparison, the old Samaria had been a thriving, almost
metropolitan
community of merchants, some forty thousand people sitting next to the
highways
of international trade. Jerusalem on the other hand could only be
reached by
exiting the main road and for a day’s walk through the rough.
Judah was Assyria’s tributary
vassal and surrounded
by a quilt of petty magistracies - Hamath, Byblos, Damascus, Sidon,
Tyre,
Hauran, Megiddo, Samaria and Ashdod. Ammon, Moab and Edom maintained a
token
independence. The principality was cut off from the seaboard and
sidelined by
the major arteries of trade from Egypt to the east. Then, in 627 BC., a
messenger arrived at Anathoth.
Hilkiah ordered his oldest
son to pack his duffel
bag and meet him in Jerusalem. Civil war between three contenders was
about to
tear apart the Assyrian empire and a Chaldean prince, Nabopolassar of
Uruk, was
marching on Babylon. For Hilkiah this was the signal, and with a cocky
and well
coached performance, his son, still a fifteen-year-old teenager, was to
speak
to the public: “The word of God came
to me, saying,
before I formed you in the belly I knew you, and I ordained you a
prophet to
the nations. Then said I, ah, my Lord! how can I speak: I am a child.
But the
Lord said to me, don’t say you are a child: you shall go where I send
you, and
what I command, you will speak. Then Yahweh put forth his hand, and
touched my
lips and said to me, behold, I have put my words in your mouth.”
A
spell, added the prophetic touch: “This
day I
have set you over nations and over kingdoms, to root out, and to
destroy, to
build and to plant.”
We use to think that a
“prophet” is foretelling the
future. The ancients however, for a glimpse at what the immortals held
hidden
in their lap, would go to the local shrine, pay a fee and ask for an
omen. “Prophets”
received their commissions for something different. They were asked to
cast
spells and pronounce blessings. It was old-fashioned sorcery under a
different
name. Fittingly Elijah the Tishbite ascended to heaven in a chariot of
fire,
and the poor expected him to return in times of need.
Elijah had been a veritable
Merlin in search for
his King Arthur, but all he had to work with was King Ahab. The idea
was to
make things happen, not just to foretell them. The classic example is
Ezekiel’s
curse on the Phoenician city of Tyre, apparently the favorite object
for curses
with every prophet doing his apprenticeship. The book bristles with
vain
pronouncements, and this here wasn’t any different. The siege
operations went
on for sixteen years; the city never fell, not before the arrival of
Alexander
the Great, centuries later. So the man who had commissioned the curse -
the
King of Babylon - told his Jewish court sorcerer in no uncertain terms
that a
second installment was due, or else! Ezekiel scrambled to save his
reputation.
He promised the burned thief better success in his next burglary and
laid a
curse on Egypt.
When collected in a book,
such seemingly successful
spells may strike the impressionable reader as genuine forecasts,
especially
when nobody is telling us about the legions of “failed” spells excluded
from
the text. Yet for now Hilkiah’s son couldn’t do any wrong. Assyria’s
decline
had made the unthinkable possible. In such times and with the full
backing of
the regime and the priesthood, it was easy to be a prophet. It meant
for the
young man the entree ticket to the royal family. Later events seem to
indicate
that he and a brother of the king - Zedekiah - must already have been
on
friendly terms.
It still took two more years
to engineer the coup
and outmaneuver the opposing factions at court, but by 624 BC.,
Hilkiah’s cabal
finally took control of the government policies and the treasury.
The new regime announced
reforms. The people were told of an “ancient” book that after centuries
of laying hidden under the construction debris of the crumbling temple
miraculously had come to light, a novelistic exercise with Moses
writing his own biography in the first person allegedly at a time, when
in the real world the Hebrews hadn’t yet invented their script. Huldah
backed up the pious fraud with her prestige. It was the signal for the
worshippers of Yahweh to start a rule of terror.
Yahweh’s cult had originated
from Shiloh, now on
Assyrian territory, “my place where I
set my name
at the first.” Even after the fall of Samaria in 721 BC.,
the shrine
had lost little of its importance for the Hebrew worshipper; it was the
place
where after a hard day in the office, Yahweh used to come home to his
consort
Asherah - “she who gives birth to the gods.” Asherah was not without influence. Her
400 prophets used to dine at
the table of Israel’s Queen Jezebel; and the mother of King Asa of
Judah, too,
it was said, had been a priestess of Yahweh’s consort. All this was
about to
change.
The king’s extensive building
program soon was running dry of funds. His revenue officers turned
their attention to the “high places.”
For centuries these places had accumulated valuable offerings. After
the intimidating spectacle of burning the temple prostitutes alive,
King Josiah’s regime made itself odious with vandalizing the rural
shrines, murdering their priests and desecrating ancient tombs. Every
attempt to resist was crushed, and many left the country and joined the
refugees from Samaria. At home and in the Diaspora, the fallout from
King Josiah’s new deal began sowing the first seeds of opposition
against the House of David.
To the people in the land the
reform was introduced
in a carefully staged ceremony. The new prophet was still in his
twenties, when
his public career already reached its apex. He was a tall, cerebral
figure,
ignoring the knowing nudges about his somewhat decadent airs: “Hear ye the words of this covenant, and
speak to the
men of Judah, and to the denizens of Jerusalem. The God of Israel says:
cursed
be the man that does not obey the words of this covenant, which I
commanded
your fathers in the day that I brought them forth out of the land of
Egypt. You
shall be my people, and I will be your God, that I may perform the oath
which I
have sworn to your fathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and
honey, as
it is this day.” And the king turned and looked at the
prophet and
answering for the people he said: “So
be it, oh
Lord.”
With the benefit of hindsight
it is easy to see
this as a turning point in the prehistory of Judaism, and none of the
players
had any idea that things would go so wrong. The problem with old oaths
and
prophecies is, especially in times where literacy is the monopoly of
the few,
that nobody exactly remembers the circumstance from which they
originated.
Pulled out from underneath the rubble of history they are to become the
free
floating currency in the ideological battle between the factions. What
seemed a
good idea at the time - a written contract of Yahweh’s conditions in
return for
his help - was to haunt the people who had to pick up the pieces when
the divine
partner failed to deliver. It inaugurated the era of the rabbinical
interpreter
and slowly but surely brought “prophecy” into disrepute.
The Chaldean King
Nabopolassar had made Babylon his
capital; it was the largest city on the planet, truly a metropolis and
melting
pot of nations and cultures. In 614 BC. the Chaldeans signed a pact
with the
Medes. In 612 BC., Assyria’s capital, Niniveh, fell to the coalition
and was
destroyed. The Assyrian regime immediately reconstituted itself in
Harran. But
Harran, too, was captured in 609 BC. With the aid of Pharaoh Psametik,
the
Assyrian marshal Ashur-Uballit II and the still formidable Assyrian
army
marched to regain the city. The attempt failed, but it created a
momentary
vacuum in Palestine and King Josiah seized the opportunity for a
crusade across
the border heading for Bethel on what must have been a mere pillaging
spree.
Hilkiah and the king’s policy makers began to see the finish line, but
the
prophet’s announcement: “And Yahweh
said to me,
Israel has redeemed herself. Go and proclaim to the north: return, you
backsliding Israel! I will not keep my anger for ever” was
premature. The expedition had to be terminated with all haste when
Ashur-Uballit retreated into the Syrian dessert to regroup and took his
residence
in Carchemish as the new capital.
In 608 BC., a new pharaoh,
Necho, gave in to
overtures by King Nabopolassar. He marched against his former suzerain.
Assyria urgently needed a
speed bumper in the way
of the Egyptians, while her own forces were facing the Chaldeans.
Plenipotentiaries from Carchemish arrived in Jerusalem with a last
bargaining
chip: the province of Samaria. We cannot be sure whether Hilkiah still
lived to
see his ambitions fulfilled: Judah and Samaria united under the rule of
the House
of David!
Still, how could Judah’s
politicians have been so
shortsighted? Assyria clearly was a lost cause. Nobody was about to
shed a tear
over the demise of the most cruel and bloodstained tyranny this planet
had seen
before the Aztecs. So, stepping into the way of the coalition could
only bode
bad tidings for times to come. But neither Yahweh nor his prophet had
even the
slightest inkling. Instead there is jubilation: “Again
I will build you, o virgin of Israel, you shall again be adorned and go
forth
in merry dances. You shall plant vines upon the mountains of Samaria,
and the
watchmen upon the mount Ephraim shall cry, arise and let us go to Zion.
Behold,
I will gather them from the north country and the coasts of the earth,
even the
blind and the lame, the women and her that travails with child. I let
them walk
by the rivers in a straight way and they shall not stumble: for I am a
father
to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn. Behold, the days come that I
raise unto
David a righteous Branch and a King shall reign and Judah shall be
saved, and
Israel shall dwell safely.” It was not to be.
The Assyrians cashed in on
Judah’s commitment. In
606 BC. “Pharaoh Necho went up against the king of Assyria to the
river
Euphrates: and King Josiah went against him.”
The pharaoh gave fair warning
and “sent ambassadors
saying, what have I to do with you, king of Judah? I come not against
you this
day.” King Josiah would not listen. He received a fatal wound and “his
servants carried him dead from Megiddo.”
What became of Yahweh’s pledge to assemble King Josiah to his ancestors
in
peace? Had Yahweh lost his way when chasing the deer, or was he getting
a tan
in Ethiopia? “Or peradventure he had his late afternoon nap?”
Egypt had regained her
traditional influence over
the region. From one day to the next the prophet found himself in the
position
of the speaker for a lost cause. He was heartbroken. “We
looked for peace and a time of health but no good came.”
With popular acclaim, the
oldest of Josiah’s sons,
Jehoahaz, was made king, but Pharaoh Necho had other plans. Jehoahaz
was
deported to Egypt and died in captivity. In his stead the pharaoh
appointed his
brother, Eliakim, changed his name to Jehoiakim, and charged the new
king to
raise tributes and “exact the silver and the gold of the people, an
hundred
talents of silver, and a talent of gold.”
Josiah’s new deal was off and King Jehoiakim returned to the
traditional ways.
The prophet became more and
more isolated; not
without reason, the new regime held Hilkiah’s son responsible for the
present
situation. “Prophets prophesy falsely
and priests
rule by their own means and my people love to have it so. Woe on us!
The day
goes away and the shadows of the evening are stretching out.”
The prophet went on long,
lonely walks; he saw “the children
gather wood, and the fathers kindle fire,
and the women knead their dough, making cakes to Asteroth, the queen of
heaven,
and pour drink offerings.” Perhaps for the first time in his
life,
the prophet not only looked, but took notice of the plight of the poor;
there
was very little else for him to do: “Surely
these
are poor; they are foolish. I will go to the great men and speak to
them.” His peers turned
a deaf ear: “Wicked men: laying in
wait to set a trap and catch
you. As a cage is full of birds so are their houses full of deceit:
that’s how
they became great and rich. They put on fat, they shine, and damn them,
they
ignore the rights of the orphans and needy, and yet they prosper, troop
in into
the brothels every day and like horses lift their heads from their feed
in the
morning and neigh after the neighbor’s wife.”
It was a class issue and in the eyes of
his peers the
prophet had made himself visible on the wrong side of the fence. In his
anger he
had his first run-in with the law.
On a public holiday, he pitched his
soapbox right in
the middle of the temple’s court: “I
will make
this house like Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the
nations of
the earth.” In the ensuing riot, the prophet gave himself up
into
the custody of King Jehoiakim’s guards. A risky move. There was the
case of
Urijah, the son of Shemaiah, who after expressing rather unpopular
sentiments
had fled the country, seeking asylum in Egypt. The regime in Jerusalem
was the
pharaoh’s puppet, so without any trouble, the Egyptian authorities gave
King
Jehoiakim’s commissioner Elnathan a free hand and
he apprehended Urijah. The Egyptians signed the
deportation papers and the king had Urijah executed. However, unlike
the unlucky
fugitive, the prophet was not an ordinary commoner. Ahikam, the old
friend of
his father, pulled enough weight at the royal court. The prophet was
permitted
to retreated to his estates in Anathoth and lick his wounds. Yet even
at home
he was in danger.
“I was like a lamb
brought to the
slaughter, he says,
and I knew not
that they had devised devices against me, saying, let us cut him off
from the
land of the living, that his name may be no more remembered. The men of
Anathoth, seek my life and say prophesy not in the name of God, that
you die
not by our hand. I plead with you my Lord, let me talk with you of your
judgments. Wherefore does the way of the wicked prosper? Wherefore are
all they
happy that deal very treacherously? You have planted them, and now they
have
taken root: they grow, they bring forth fruit: you are near in their
mouth, and
far from their reins. How long shall the land stay in mourning, and the
herbs
wither in the field, for the wickedness of the people? Even my
brothers, and
the house of my father, even they have dealt treacherously.”
“Woe is me, my mother,
that you have
born me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth! I
have
neither lent on interest, nor men have lent to me on interest; yet
every one of
them does curse me. You, Lord, said it shall be well with my remaining
life;
the enemy shall entreat me in the time of evil. Lord, know that for
your sake I
have suffered reprimand. Because of you I was made to eat your word; I
sat
alone because of your hand on me.”
“Why
is my pain perpetual, and my wound refuses to be healed?
Will you be to me altogether as a liar, like water running through the
fingers?
Oh Lord, you have deceived me. Since I spoke I cried violence and
spoil; your
word exposed me to reproach and made me the butt of ridicule.”
“Then I said, I will not
make mention
of you, nor speak any more in your name. Your word was shut up in my
bones and
I was weary with forbearing. I heard the defaming of many, saw fear on
every
side. Report, say they, and we shall report you. All my familiars watch
for my
halting, saying, he may be enticed, and we shall prevail against him
and take
our revenge on him. Cursed be the day wherein I was born: cursed be the
man who
brought tidings to my father, saying, a son is born to you instead of
slaying
me from the womb.”
Never one of the overconfident, but used
to being
pampered and coached, it came to the prophet as a painful realization
that he
wasn’t really one of the bright and innovative; he was not living a
productive
life and wherever he cast his shadow, the roses began to wither.
I am old-fashioned; I agree with the
prophet “that the way of man is not an
end in himself.”
Life is not about avoiding death. It is about the values we embody in
our
conduct; values that give nobility to a moment of consequence. It was
the
prophet’s tragedy to become aware that the redeeming element in his
life
refused to be forthcoming, that he was God’s abused child. And yet God
was God,
there was nothing to choose. Nobody, not even Thales of Miletus, was an
atheist
in those days. We can’t be sure whether the prophet ever heard of
Deutero-Isaiah’s new doctrine: “I form light, and create darkness; I
make
peace, and create evil: I am God, and there is none else.” For him, Yahweh, although superior, was
still one
among peers, not the God,
but nevertheless his divine liege in a contract signed by Moses. He
asked for a
god able to help - “and isn‘t that all that really matters” (Heinrich Heine) - for a person with “a
will, and in order to exercise it, his elbows free,” and the sentiment of the Scythians,
who, according
to the Greek historian Herodotus, used to shoot arrows at the sky when
they
felt that God was slacking in his performance, was not utterly foreign
to him.
The prophet arrived at a genuine insight: “The heart is deceitful above all things,
who can know
it? When I comfort myself against sorrow, my heart is faint in me. The
harvest
is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”
A warning for everyone who loves to reason
from the
faith of his heart. The prophet witnessed Judah falling to pieces and
saw the
heathens prosper despite of not knowing God. “I
have heard the prophets say, I have dreamed, I have dreamed. Yes, they
prophesy
out of their own heart’s deceit. Say every one to his neighbor, what
has Yahweh
answered? Has he spoken? And don’t even mention the ‘burden of the
Lord:’ every
man's word shall be his own burden, a reproach never to be forgotten.”
Was it not true what the paupers were telling him, that “since we’ve stopped burning incense to the
queen of heaven, and
pour out drink offerings to her, we live in misery, consumed by famine
and the
sword?” The prophet found this world as cruel as the god who
had
created it; how could he honestly blame the pot for the potter? “Behold, as the clay is in the potter's
hand, so are ye
in my hand.”
The more radical minds in exile like
Ezekiel,
verbalized the dilemma: “If the prophet be deceived when he has
spoken a
thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet. I gave my people statutes
that
were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; and I
polluted them
in their own gifts, that I might make them desolate.”
A familiar story. The story of a family’s
heartrending loyalty to the abusive father. Of finding excuses for the
abuser
developed to a way of life. The story of the Jews.
In 605 BC. Nebuchadnezzar II ascended to
the throne
of Babylon. Pharaoh Necho realized that the Chaldean would not stop at
merely
reducing Assyria and threw in his weight at the side of the defenders
of
Carchemish. He lost it all. According to Babylonian sources, the
pharaoh’s army
was cut down to the last man. “You
also shall be
as ashamed of Egypt, as you were ashamed of Assyria,” said
the
prophet, “Pharaoh king of Egypt is but
a noise;
he has passed the time appointed. Egypt is like a very fair heifer, but
out of
the north destruction is coming; it is coming.”
Not everybody appreciated the reminder.
Fat is always
floating on top and the seed royal had its cut whichever way the
tributes went,
whether to Egypt, or, as now, rerouted to Babylon.
The prophet vented his frustration: “The sin of Judah is written with a pen of
iron upon
your heart, and upon the horns of your altars. Hear ye kings of Judah,
and
inhabitants of Jerusalem; the Lord of the armies says he will bring
evil upon
this place, the which whosoever hears it, his ears shall tingle.”
The outburst earned him a night in the stocks on a misdemeanor charge.
Not that
the cooler did him any good; the next morning on his release, the
prophet left
with angry words to his jailer.
His grizzled hair announced the advancing
age, the
prophet was about to enter his forties, which was old in those days,
and he
reacted with irritation to the giggles behind his back.
Then, something happened. It was under the
arch at
the stairwell to the prophet’s quarters in old Jerusalem, sometime in
604 BC.
Out of the shadow stepped a rather stocky man with powerful shoulders
and
strong limbs. The prophet recognized the quick smile flashing a set of
shining
teeth. Baruch, the son of Neriah made no secret of his Chaldean
partisanship.
He was known to be the spokesman for the expatriates in the Diaspora
and held
contacts to officials at the Babylonian court. The prophet looked
again, and he
was smitten. Baruch had followed, perhaps was instructed to follow, the
prophet’s dissolute activities for quite a while. The time seemed ripe
to offer
the prophet, what he needed most: directions, leadership, someone
easing the
weight of the world on his shoulders.
Baruch’s task of “reprogramming” the
prophet was
simpler than one might expect. He resolutely encroached on the shy but
enchanted prophet and one by one he interpreted the prophecies that
apparently
had failed to be fulfilled and interpreted the “actual” meaning of
“God’s word”
as something that had eluded the prophet because at the time he had
failed to
take into account three factors:
That the outrage against the poor in the
land, of
which he already had become aware, had resulted in a debt of sin
towards God.
That the House of David had forfeited
Yahweh’s
mandate for good.
That with the approval of God the
Chaldeans were to
bring justice to the disenfranchised. Therefore the failed prophecies
regarding
King Josiah were actually prophecies for a different era and not yet
fulfilled.
It took some tweaking and tuning to get
the prophet
over the hump. The rejection of the House of David didn’t taste kosher
to him.
He wasn’t yet used to the idea that Baruch spoke for a growing faction
among
the expatriates who firmly believed that, as a payoff for their return
from
exile, God was about to cast away “the
seed of
Jacob and David, so not to take any of his seed to be rulers over the
seed of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
The prophet found this unacceptable and
kept ignoring
it, he stood loyal to his roots: “Thus
says the
Lord of the armies: even if this place shall become a pasture for the
shepherds
to rest their flocks, the days shall come that I will cause David to
grow a
branch of righteousness, Judah shall be saved, and Jerusalem shall
dwell
safely; David shall never want a man to sit on the throne of the house
of
Israel.”
Long before he met his Baruch, the prophet
had begun
writing down “the words that I have
spoken in a
book.” This manuscript laid the foundation for the
reprogramming of
the prophet and became Baruch’s first edition of the book we now find
in the
Bible. “And Baruch wrote from the
mouth of The
prophet all the words of the Lord into a roll of a book.”
The
project kept the two busy for the entire year.
The prophet’s original preface had spoken
of a “conspiracy found among the men
of Judah and Jerusalem.
The house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken God’s deal with
their
fathers and went to serve other gods. Therefore says the Lord, I will
bring
them evil, which they shall not escape; and though they cry to me, I
will not
listen.” In Baruch’s hands this became much more
inflammatory and
something different altogether: “Who
is the wise
man, that may understand why the land is perishing? The Lord says,
because they
have walked after the imagination of their own heart, therefore I will
scatter
them among the heathen, and I will send the consuming sword. Therefore
take the
cup of fury from my hand, and give to drink from it to all nations. I
will
consume the nation and the kingdom which will not serve Nebuchadnezzar
the king
of Babylon, with the sword, the famine, and with pestilence. But
nations that
bring their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, those shall
remain in
their land, says the Lord, and they shall till it, and live.” A declaration not quite to the taste
of a
patriotic Hebrew and the exilic or post-exilic editor couldn’t help
himself
adding a vengeful gloss, an act of black magic: “The broad walls of
Babylon
shall be utterly broken, and her high gates shall be burned with fire;
oh Lord,
you have spoken against this place, that it shall be desolate for ever.
And
when you have done reading this book, you shall bind a stone to it, and
cast it
into the midst of Euphrates, and say, thus shall Babylon sink.”
The book was ready to be published.
In The prophet’s days this meant somebody
would read
the manuscript to the public. The prophet himself, after his last brush
with
the law, was under a gagging order, so this somebody had to be Baruch.
The time
was well chosen, it was the festive season and the people thronged into
the
temple from every place in Judah. The reading at the temple gate caused
a stir
among the officials. The account is very specific about who these
officials were: “Gemariah the son of
Shaphan the scribe, Michaiah
his son, Elishama the scribe, Delaiah the son of Shemaiah, Commissioner
Elnathan, Jehudi the son of Nethaniah, Zedekiah the son of Hananiah,
and all
the princes.” The king’s council required a second reading
behind
closed doors, before they informed the king. Knowing their master, they
had the
decency to advise Baruch and his companion to lay low while King
Jehoiakim
ordered the book - a scroll of papyrus sheets glued together -
delivered to his
winter residence.
Sitting next to the fire, the king
interrupted the
reading after every three sheets and had them cut out and burned on the
hearth.
Not the first act of censorship in history but the first that came on
record.
Then he issued orders for the arrest of Baruch and the prophet. The
prophet was
now a fugitive. But somehow the police misplaced the file and pursued
no
further.
The two fugitives put their time in hiding
to good
use. They recovered the lost manuscript from memory and Baruch added “many like words,” which can mean
anything
and everything and leaves the editor all the license in the world to
amend and
rewrite. The prophet’s actual involvement in this process is a moot
point. The
story of the prophet is as much the story of the anonymous custodians
of his
tradition, as it is the story of Baruch, the man who created the
prophet whom
posterity still remembers. If the prophet had fallen silent after King
Josiah’s
debacle, would we even know that he ever had existed? The exilic
copyist received
Baruch’s book in a state of disrepair.
The lacuna in the prophet’s prayer in
chapter 32,
spoken in the first person, resisted the editor’s best intentions of
amending
the loss with grafts from other parts of the book. Not that the exilic
editor
treated Baruch’s manuscript with disrespect; he tried to restore
chronological
coherence without changing the original format. In other words, he
added to the
confusion. Here and there he inserted a gloss about the occasion where
the
prophet allegedly had delivered the prophesy, together with a
commentary on the
significance of the pronouncement.
This was not meant to deceive, but the
editor could
do no better than his sources such as the often conflicting memories of
surviving witnesses and his own conjectures.
After Baruch had passed on his manuscript
the book
went through at least two more editions: a restoration attempt on the
damaged
manuscript by the exilic editor some time in the 570s or 560s BC. and a
thorough makeover in the century after Cyrus’ edict, to bring the book
in line
with the rest of the canon.
Meanwhile, from 604 to 601 BC., a sense
grew among
the people of Judah, or rather among their politicians, that King
Nebuchadnezzar was encircling them with annual campaigns into the
surrounding
territories. Egypt, still reeling from the disaster at Carchemish,
could do
little but watch. But the old crocodile still had teeth. In 600 BC. it
came to
a showdown on Egyptian soil and the Egyptian mercenaries from Lydia and
Greece
held their ground. The Chaldean king was shaken, perhaps even wounded
in
battle. He retreated and in the year after, King Nebuchadnezzar was
staying
put, but the pharaoh’s spies reported that he “gathered his chariots
and
horses in great numbers.”
In the
following years King Nebuchadnezzar decided to consolidate the access
route for
his annual campaigns and to train his untested recruits for bigger
things to
come. The Babylonian army fought a number of sharp actions against
petty
princes in the Arabian desert, “and scouring the desert they took
much
plunder from the Arabs, their possessions, animals and gods (sic!).” It should have been a
warning for everybody who thought of defecting from the Chaldeans. But
did
anybody listen?
During the famine of 598 BC., The prophet
dared to
show his face in public again and dutifully extended his prayers on
behalf the
land: “Judah mourns, and the cry of
Jerusalem is
gone up. Their nobles have sent their little ones to the waters and
they return
with their vessels empty and cover their heads in shame. The ground is
chapt,
there is no rain in the earth, and the plowmen’s head is sinking. The
hind has
calved in the field and forsook it, because there is no grass. Oh Lord,
though
our iniquities testify against us and we have sinned against you, help
us for
your name's sake.”
But God turned a deaf ear and it was
rumored that he
had told his prophet: “Pray not for
this people.”
And as if this was not enough, King Jehoiakim died and left his
successor King
Jehoiachim a country where people crowded the garbage dumps for food.
If King
Nebuchadnezzar needed an invitation, this was it; the handler received
orders
to unleash the prophet:
“Say to king and queen,
humble
yourselves, for your principalities shall come down. Judah shall be
carried away
captive, all of it. The
Lord says, they shall not lament Jehoiakim king of Judah, nor say ah my
brother! or, ah sister! and shall not lament his dominion and glory! He
shall
receive the burial of an ass, dragged to the gates of the city and cast
out of
Jerusalem. And as I live, Coniah (Jehoiachim),
his son I
will give into the hand of assassins.” This was the opening
salvo.
On the 16th of March, 597 BC. and facing no resistance, King
Nebuchadnezzar
occupied Jerusalem and issued deportation orders for the king, “the queen, the eunuchs, the princes of
Judah and
Jerusalem,” and three
thousand of “the carpenters, and the
smiths.” Of all
deportations this was the most comprehensive.
The period of “exile,” not just of
opposition to the
House of David among the expatriates but of Zionist sectarianism in the
Diaspora, begins here.
King Josiah’s seed had run out of princes
and
Nebuchadnezzar replaced Jehoiachim with his uncle, King Zedekiah. The
royal
deportees ended up in a Babylonian prison, where according to a clay
tablet,
every morning Jehoiachim queued up with his courtiers for is daily
ration.
The prophet, too, had to bid farewell to
his brother.
Gemariah delivered a letter to the expatriates in Babylon. The document
testifies to bitter squabbling between the factions: “To
the priests, and to the prophets, and all the people whom
Nebuchadnezzar had
carried captive from Jerusalem to Babylon. The God of Israel says that
Ahab the
son of Kolaiah, and Zedekiah the son of Maaseiah prophesy a lie in his
name! He
will make them a curse to all the captives of Judah in Babylon, and
people
shall say: the Lord make you like Zedekiah and like Ahab, whom the king
of
Babylon roasted in the fire for villainy and their adultery with their
neighbors' wives, and for their lying words spoken in God’s name. To
Shemaiah
the Nehelamite, the Lord says: because you have sent letters to the
people at
Jerusalem, and to Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest, and to all
the
priests, saying, the Lord has made you priest instead of Jehoiada the
priest,
and that you should officiate in the house of the Lord, and that every
man who
makes himself a prophet should be put in the stocks, tell us, why have
you not
reproved The prophet of Anathoth? For his dispatch to us in Babylon
says this captivity
is going to be long and therefore we should build houses and plant
gardens and
eat their fruit.” An increasingly dogmatic opposition to
the Davidic
dynasty among the expatriates clearly had no intention of reinstating
David’s
or any monarchy for that matter.
Which was quite in tune with trends
everywhere in the
Mediterranean. In Athens, Solon issued a bill of rights and introduced
the
right of appeal and trial by jury. Democratic assemblies made their own
laws.
In a provincial town in middle Italy the magistrates sent their king
into exile
and began the long march for world domination. This was the dawn of a
new era,
but for the prophet the sun was setting. He was the last of the
Hebrews, rooted
in the soil and loyal to his god and the House of David, even when
imprisoned
and abused. With regret he waved his good-bye to a departing
generation.
Baruch, on the other hand, was already a Jew for whom the days were
over where “they say the fathers have
eaten a sour grape, and the
children's teeth are set on edge.” From now on “every one shall receive his own reward,”
and be at home everywhere where a synagogue opens the door.
Jerusalem hadn’t fallen yet, and already
the scribes
and rabbis set themselves the task to reinvent the meaning of Yahweh’s
covenant
and of national identity. Under their hands Hilkiah’s novelistic
exercise was
to become the Book Deuteronomy,
to which they added Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers. Exile is the
predominant leitmotif. Adam and Eve are driven out into the wilderness,
Cain is
exiled for homicide, Noah takes to the ships, Lot barely escapes from
the
destruction of Sodom. And his brother, Abraham, on his own free will,
leaves
behind friends and the comforts of the city for a life under the stars.
The Torah was designed to become the
portable country
for the homeless Jew.
In fact the majority of expatriates in
Babylon and
Khorasan, even Egypt, didn’t feel homeless at all. They saw themselves
represented in the story of Joseph who after heart stopping turns in
his fortunes
is finding prosperity and advancement in a foreign country. A juicy
tale of
betrayal, infidelity and a feel good reunion scene. So when in 538 BC.,
King
Cyrus’ edict allowed the exiles to realize their dream of a new Zion,
the
settled denizens in the Diaspora were only too glad to see the fanatics
and
utopian troublemakers leaving.
But King Cyrus’ decree did not entail
political
independence, in fact not even statehood, and there were renewed
deportations
under Artaxerxes Ochus.
However back in 595 BC. a sudden glimmer
of hope did
put to the test Baruch’s hold on the prophet. News from Babylon had
arrived of
a conspiracy in King Nebuchadnezzar’s top brass and of purges in the
military.
In Jerusalem the royal court and his speaker, the prophet Hananiah, “the son of Azur the prophet, which was of
Gibeon,”
took this as a sign and Hananiah announced that God was about to break
the yoke
of Babylon “within the space of two
full years,” and
bring back the captives and the royal princes and even the vessels
carried away
from the temple. It characterizes the prophet’s true feelings that he
would
have liked to believe that too. “In
the presence
of all the people The prophet said to Hananiah, amen, the Lord do so
and
perform your words which you have prophesied.” But the
seasoned
politician wouldn’t leave without a piece of friendly advice: “Nevertheless hear this: The prophets of old
prophesied
war, evil and pestilence. The prophet who prophesies peace, him shall
we
remember. And The prophet went his way.” The scene is
reported by an
unknown eyewitness, he says: “Hananiah
spoke to
me (sic!) in the
temple.” This
was not, what the Chaldean faction had in mind.
Baruch gathered information and then egged
on the
prophet to a shouting match: “Yahweh
has not sent
you; but you make these people trust in a lie. Thus says the God of
Israel, I
have put a yoke of iron upon the neck of all nations, they shall serve
Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and I have given him dominion over the
beasts in
the field as well.” And for Hananiah, God had a special in
store: “Hear now, Hananiah, the Lord
will cast you off from
the face of the earth: this year you shall die, because you have taught
rebellion against the Lord.” The “Lord?” Which lord? The one
up high
or the one in Babylon? Oddly enough “Hananiah
died the same year in the seventh month.” His relatives
would
remember this.
Then, in 593 BC., the Great King in person
was
leading a punitive strike and ordered a second wave of deportations.
The
remarkably well informed spokesman for the expatriate front against
David’s
dynasty was almost triumphant: “Say now to the rebellious house,
know ye not
what these things mean? The king of Babylon has taken of the king's
seed and
made an alliance and has taken an oath of him. He has also removed the
mighty
of the land so that the kingdom might not lift itself up and so might
continue.
Yet Zedekiah sent ambassadors to Egypt, that they might give him horses
and
soldiers. Shall he prosper? Shall he escape whot does such things? As I
live,
says the Lord God, surely in the place where the king dwells who made
him king
and whose oath he has despised, and whose alliance he broke, he shall
die.
Neither shall Pharaoh with his mighty army come to his aid, seeing he
had
despised the oath that obligated him to keep the alliance with Babylon.
As I
live, says the Lord, surely it was my oath (sic!) he has despised and the alliance he
broke I shall
recompense upon his own head.”
Ezekiel refers to the year 589 BC., when a
new
pharaoh had ascended to the throne and had moved reserves to the
biblical
Migdol on the border. King Zedekiah made reconciliatory overtures to
the
opposition. The prophet was permitted to put the finger on an old sore.
It was
his finest hour: “Hear the word of
God, oh king
of Judah, you, and your retainers who enter through these gates.
Execute
righteousness and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor:
do no
wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow,
neither
shed innocent blood. If you will not hear these words, I swear by
myself, says
the Lord, that this house shall become a desolation. Woe unto him who
uses his
neighbor's service without wages, and gives him not for his work. Shall
you
prosper because you encase yourself in a wide house and large chambers,
cieled
with cedar, and painted with vermilion?” King Zedekiah
issued a writ
of manumission to all the people in Jerusalem, “to
proclaim their liberty, that every man should let his Hebrew servants,
men and
women, go free.”
A brief joy; if not the king, his grandees
certainly
didn’t mean it. The moment the Egyptians seemed to be on the march, the
manumission orders were rescinded, as if the danger was already over.
It gives
us an idea for the degree of incompetence at King Zedekiah’s court.
King
Nebuchadnezzar pitched headquarters in Riblah, Lebanon. The invading
troops
barely met resistance.
Zedekiah threw all his resources into the
fortified
strongholds in Lachish, Azekah and Jerusalem, and waited for the
Egyptians.
They never came.
In 588 BC. the Chaldean general
Nebuzaradan knocked
at the gates of Jerusalem. Real estate prices fell through the floor
and the
prophet had one of those “told you so” moments. So, King Zedekiah took
the
angry prophet into protective custody in the royal courtyard. With the
help of
the indispensable Baruch, he continued transacting business from within
confinement. The editor tries to surround the deal with an aura of
symbolic
significance, but the simple fact of the matter is that a noted
partisan of the
Chaldeans had every reason to expect that the new masters would
authenticate
his titles on real estate recently acquired from the deportees. The
prophet -
or rather Baruch - recommends this investment opportunity even to the
expatriates.
We get an idea about the prophet’s true
standing and
wealth. Even in custody he commanded access to a considerable sum of
silver
bullion, and that in an age where his secretary couldn’t simply go to
the local
bank and ask the cashier to fill his briefcase with unmarked bills.
The hopes went up when General
Nebuzaradan’s scouts
reported troop movements in the Sinai. The Babylonian general
immediately broke
up siege operations and confronted the Egyptian forces. After a brief
standoff,
Pharaoh Apries’ mercenaries called it a day and marched home without
firing a
shot. In Jerusalem the prophet threw a triumphant tantrum at his
people: “For your treachery, says the
Lord, I proclaim my kind
of liberty for you, the sword, the pestilence, and the famine; the king
of
Judah, the princes, the eunuchs, and the priests, I will give into the
hand of
their assassins: and their corpses shall be meat for the vultures.”
With the Babylonians soon to be knocking
again on
Jerusalem’s gate, you don’t say this sort of thing to people already
desperate,
and the prophet scrambled to escape to his place in Anathoth. In the
feverish
jostle at the city gate, he was recognized by a captain of the guards
who
happened to be a relative of the late Hananiah. He arrested the prophet
as a
Chaldean collaborator.
The prophet received a caning and was put
under house
arrest at the residence of an other of his personal enemies, Jonathan
the
scribe. This time King Zedekiah hesitated to intervene, these people
were the
heads of powerful clans and he couldn’t do without their support.
Finally he
got around to remembering his old friendship with the prophet and
arranged a
meeting. In the interview the prophet pleaded for his life and the king
arranged to transfer him to the prison’s courtyard and gave orders to
supply
him with food from the royal purse. At this point, the whereabouts of
Baruch
are uncertain.
The prophet however still hadn’t wizened
up and
continued to give attitude: “Behold, I
am the
Lord, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?”
(Well it would have been harder to actually stop the Chaldeans.) “The
Chaldeans shall set fire on this city, and burn it with the houses,
upon whose
roofs they have offered incense unto Baal, and poured out drink
offerings unto
other gods, provoking my anger.” Shephatiah the son of
Mattan,
Gedaliah the son of Pashur, and Jucal the son of Shelemiah, and Pashur
the son
of Malchiah, all of them people of the seed royal, decided to have a
word with
the king.
Zedekiah resigned himself to the fact of
his own
impotence. He abandoned the prophet.
The jeering courtiers roped down the
struggling
prophet into the prison’s cesspool. However while the prophet was
treading on
manure and trying not to inhale the methane, there were still people
who cared
for him. The king’s eunuch, Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, interceded and
Zedekiah
changed his mind again and even had “thirty
men”
to spare who pulled the prophet out of his hole with “old
cast clouts and old rotten rags” at the end of the rope so
that he
could prop it under his armpits. Nobody mentions a bath, but the king
came for
another interview.
The prophet finally came to his senses and
appreciated the gravity of his situation.
He asked for assurances if he spoke
freely, and after
the conference, the king insisted that what was said remained
confidential. The
occupant of David’s throne obviously was worried about the hostility by
his
exiled tribesmen in Babylon: “I am
afraid of the
Jews that are fallen to the Chaldeans, once they deliver me into their
hand
they will mock me.”
The king’s intervention didn’t pass
unnoticed by his
courtiers. The same people who had made the prophet inspect the
prison’s septic
tank confronted him again, but this time the prophet held back and did
as he was
told by Zedekiah and eventually was left alone; stinking, shackled and
handcuffed. Nobody had any more time to waste. The city was in panic.
The Chaldeans assembled their forces to
breach
Jerusalem’s walls and King Zedekiah and a small retinue made their
escape at
midnight. They were picked up man by man and, locked together in a
chain gang,
posted to King Nebuchadnezzar’s headquarters. Normally, Nebuchadnezzar
was
rather lenient, especially if we compare him with the jewels of cruelty
among
his Assyrian predecessors. But he felt he had to set an example.
Zedekiah’s
sons were killed before their father’s eyes and then the king himself
was
blinded. King Nebuchadnezzar moved on to summary executions of the
people he
considered to be the ringleaders: of “Seraiah
the
chief priest, and Zephaniah the second priest, and the three keepers of
the
door, the eunuch, which had the charge of the men of war; seven of the
king's
bodyguards, the principal scribe of the armed forces who mustered the
people of
the land, and threescore of the people who were found in the midst of
the
city.”
Jerusalem - houses, temple, palace and all
- was
torched and razed to the ground. We hear that the Great King personally
showed
concern for the prophet and held his commander responsible for the
prophet’s
welfare. Perhaps the chronicler has heightened the colors a bit, the
fact
remains that after the fall of Jerusalem the prophet was a protege of
the
Chaldean officials. General Nebuzaradan ordered the release of the
prophet from
prison, provided him with funds and handed him over to the care of the
prophet’s old friend from the days of his youth, to Gedaliah, Ahikam’s
son. The
occupants had appointed Gedaliah as the new governor of Judah.
Finally the prophet could wash up and
change his clothes.
He was a free man, but where to go from here? With the other exiles to
Babylon?
The prophet looked back at the smoking ruins of the city and suddenly
remembered something. He asked for the release of Ebedmelech the
Ethiopian. At
least this is what I hope he has done: instead of making the bombastic
announcement we read in the book, actually go to General Nebuzaradan’s
office
and put in a good word for the eunuch.
The general was a busy man.
He was under orders to implement a
sweeping land
reform, designed to win hearts and minds of the underprivileged; and he
did. In
the life of the paupers it made a big difference. The evicted
landowners were
forced to pack their bundles and fall in with the train of deportees. “This is the people whom Nebuchadrezzar
carried away
captive: in the seventh year three thousand Jews and twenty-three; in
the
eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar eight hundred and thirty-two; in the
twenty-third year of Nebuchadrezzar, seven hundred forty-five persons:
altogether four thousand and six hundred.”
Gedaliah, the new Governor, chose Mizpah -
King
Saul’s old lair - as his seat of government, which may or may not have
been of
some symbolic significance. The prophet had enough of meddling in the
public
affairs and asked for leave. He returned to his estates in Anathoth,
and this
probably saved his life.
Baruch was already waiting for him; it was
the first
time the two met again after the prophet’s arrest at the gate. Seven
months
passed in peace and quiet, a monotony interrupted only by the scattered
bleating of his herds in the hills, and, more annoyingly, by
altercations with
Baruch, whose cockiness more and more stung the prophet as an
insufferable
arrogance. But then, in autumn 586 BC., a horseman cantered into the
courtyard,
covered in dust and grime and with “urgency” written all over the face.
He
brought the worst possible news.
Gedaliah had been a popular and
reconciliatory
administrator. By and by refugees had come from every direction, from
Moab,
Edom and Ammon, and paid their respect to the new regime in Mizpah.
With the
Davidic bloodline out of the picture, Mizpah could have become an
acceptable
center for a national rebirth. The officers of Judah’s surviving
regulars,
their general Johanan the son of Kareah, and with him members “of the seed royal, and ten of the princes
of the
king,” as well as fugitive women from the royal harem and
their
bastards like Ishmael the son of Nethaniah gathered at the governor’s
court.
Johanan became Gedaliah’s chief of security and he was an able and
alert man to
have at your side. He was aware of Ishmael the son of Nethaniah’s
hostile
intentions and suggested to do away with Ishmael before things could go
out of
hand.
Unfortunately, Gedaliah didn’t appreciate
sound
advice; it didn’t mesh with his policy of reconciliation. Johanan
remained
skeptical: “Can the leopard change his
spots?”
he said and left the court to make himself useful touring the land and
policing
the streets.
This was Ishmael’s moment.
Over dinner he and his thugs killed
Gedaliah, their
host. A violation of every taboo in the book. Ishmael not only had
assassinated
the Babylonian governor, he also murdered the Chaldean liaison
officers. There
was no way after this fait accompli that Ishmael had even the slightest
chance
of consolidating on Judah’s territory. All he had accomplished was to
take away
from the remnants of the House of David the last fig leaf of
credibility, and
the invisible puppeteers behind Ishmael knew it. Realizing his own
stupidity,
the frustrated Ishmael robbed a caravan, murdered most of the
merchants, then
burned Mizpah to the ground and shielded his escape with hostages from
Mizpah’s
citizenry and prominent ladies from Gedaliah’s court.
Where was Johanan when you needed him?
Well, he did
what he could. His posse caught up with the fleeing Ishmael, liberated
the
hostages while they were still alive and killed most of Ishmael’s
gang-members.
But Ishmael himself and ten of his men escaped into exile across the
border.
Johanan had no illusions about his
situation. He
summoned the prophet to meet him in a place near Bethlehem. I suspect
that
Johanan didn’t really intend to ask the prophet for advice. So the
exhortations
to trust the Chaldeans fell on deaf ears. Chaldean liaison officers had
been
killed. Did Johanan really need to say more? King Nebuchadnezzar’s
interrogators would not be in a forgiving mood. Johanan felt
responsible for
the survival of his charges and the train of courtiers and women went
to Egypt
into Exile. Johanan was not the man to leave the prophet a choice
whether or
not he should stay behind. The prophet was the only pillar of the old
establishment that had remained standing; he was the last best hope for
a
national rebirth.
But the prophet was not to play ball
anymore.
He and the custodian of his legend were to
go their
separate ways. For quite some time now Baruch felt that he was losing
his grip
on the prophet. The prophet finally drew the line when Baruch was up to
his old
tricks again and suggested that he could become the second Moses for
the
refugees in Egypt. The prophet raised a sarcastic eyebrow: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel to
you, yes you,
Baruch: you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not.”
When the
two parted at the banks of the Nile, the prophet gave Baruch a story on
the
way. He said: “A prophet delivers a message to the king. He is
instructed
not to tarry and not to take food or shelter. Yet a colleague, under
the ruse
of a divine vision of his own, cheats on the man and lures him to his
table.
The two sit at their meal when the spirit suddenly seizes the lying (sic!) host and from his mouth
issues genuine prophesy. He announces that lions shall eat his guest
for his
disobedience. And so it happens.”
The prophet fell silent, turned, and
walked down to the
Nile where a barge was waiting for him. Baruch’s eyes followed the
prophet. “You
didn’t tell the end of your story,”
he muttered to himself: “The prophet who had caused the calamity
feels
remorse, searches the road for the corpse and buries him in his own
tomb. Yes,
Brother!” It was the last
time the
two were seen together.
The prophet traveled upstream into the
district of Pathros and settled in the suburbs of Thebes, either
illegally but ignored or on special permission by the Egyptian
authorities. Usually foreign immigrants lived in their own settlements
in the delta. In 567 BC. news arrived of war with the Chaldeans and
contingents of young recruits marched through the streets. In a
military coup a new pharaoh, Amesis II, had assumed the throne, and the
aging King Nebuchadnezzar immediately confronted him in the Sinai.
Other news, like of the amnesty for the last living king of the
Hebrews, may never have reached our man. In 561 BC., Nebuchadnezzar’s
successor released King Jehoiachim from prison and allowed him to live
out his life as a state pensioner at the royal palace in Babylon.
To the neighbors, the prophet was just a
foreigner. Nobody knew about his past. At the market he was often seen
in the company of a young Egyptian who helped the old man with the
grocery. He never lost his funny accent and after most of his teeth had
taken leave he learned to chew his food on the gums. He missed his
books and the view from the window of his study in Anathoth. He missed
the distant bleating of the herds, the smell of the sacrificial smoke
from the temple, he missed Jerusalem. The garden at the riverbank was a
pleasant place, the women here were pretty, and the Egyptians were the
first to cultivate the primitive forerunner of urban literature, story
collections and novels, but he was not about to learn how to read
hieroglyphics. Most people, after a quick glance, treated him with
polite indifference. For them Jeremiah was just an old man who every
morning sat on his porch in the shade and watched “the children gather wood, and the fathers
kindle fire,
and the women knead their dough, making cakes to Isis, the queen of
heaven, and
pour out drink offerings.”
The world seemed cradled in a moment when
the eternal
touches us from an unspeakable distance and the arrested mind looks at
the most
familiar as something utterly alien, so alien that it leaves us
speechless and
lost like little children.
©
- 7/5/2006 – by michael sympson,
12,400
words, all rights reserved