The Last of the Hebrews

 

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