The Source by James A. Michener
At this point Eliav appeared with a book under his arm and took away the King James Version. “John, I wish you’d do your next two readings from this new English translation done by a group of Jewish scholars in Philadelphia.”
“Why Jewish?”
Eliav hesitated, then said, “It’s a ticklish point. But Deuteronomy is particularly Jewish in nature. It’s our holy book and it means double to us what it could possibly mean to a Catholic or a Baptist. Yet everybody reads it in Protestant or Catholic translations …”
“To me a translation’s a translation,” Cullinane protested.
“Not so,” Eliav retorted. “Even when the King James Version was made, it was purposefully old-fashioned. Something beautiful and poetic. Today it’s positively archaic, and for young people to study their religion from it can only mean they’ll think of that religion as archaic—clothed in dust and not to be taken as contemporary.”
“Perhaps, but why a Jewish translation?”
“The other thing that’s wrong with the King James Version is that it’s purely Protestant in its choice of words. You Catholics discovered that early, so you held to your Douay Version, which was just as lopsided on the Catholic side. And all the time, the book you’re wrestling over is a Jewish book, written by Jews for the instruction of Jews in a very Jewish religion. We can be forgiven if we feel that we ought to have a translation which takes these things into account … especially with Deuteronomy.”
“So now you’ve slanted everything into a Jewish bias.”
“We didn’t, but that’s not the point. Do you know Isaiah 7:14?” Cullinane was always impressed with the way Jews could cite the Bible, and now Eliav repeated the Old Testament words that lay at the heart of New Testament Christianity: “ ‘Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ ”
Cullinane consulted his Protestant Bible and satisfied himself that Eliav had quoted accurately. But then the Jew said, “Now look it up in the Jewish translation,” and there Cullinane found the word virgin translated as young woman.
“On what authority did they make that change?” he asked in some surprise.
“Look at the original Hebrew,” Eliav suggested, handing him a third version, and in the original language of the Bible the word virgin was not mentioned. It had been introduced by Christian scholars as a device for proving that the Old Testament prophesied the New and that the New should therefore supersede the Old. “Throughout the centuries,” Eliav explained, “hundreds of thousands of Jews were burned to death or massacred because their own Bible was misused against them. I think we’re entitled to an accurate Jewish version.”
When Eliav left, Cullinane began what was to be a startling experience. The new Jewish translation, by divesting Deuteronomy of its Shakespearean poetry, offered the reader a blunt and often awkward statement. The old and the new compared in this manner:
Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and keep, and do them.
Hear, O Israel, the laws and norms that I proclaim to you this day! Study them and observe them faithfully!
He checked the modern translation against the original Hebrew and discovered the Jewish translation to be literal and the King James Version not. He tested half a dozen additional passages and satisfied himself that the Jewish translators had at least tried to render their version faithfully if not poetically.
But gradually his critical judgment receded and he found himself reading for the pure pleasure of contemporaneous expression; and on his second run he came upon that verse which has always had such a powerful hold upon the Jewish reader: “It was not with our fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, the living, every one of us who is here today.” And the point Eliav had been trying to get across was burned into Cullinane’s consciousness: Deuteronomy was a living book and to the living Jew it had contemporary force. When he came to the scene in which the Jews, having received the Ten Commandments, urged Moses to go back to God for further instructions, the simple idiom of the new translation gave him the sensation of being actually with the Jews at Horeb as the commandments were being delivered: “You go closer and hear all that the Lord our God says; then you tell us everything that the Lord our God tells you, and we will willingly do it.”
When he was finished with his fourth reading he told Eliav, “I see what you mean. It has a sense of actuality. You can almost touch the Jews.”
“Now for the last one, this time in Hebrew. Just as it was written down.”
“My Hebrew’s too rusty,” Cullinane protested. “I’ll take your word that it’s a fair translation.”
“I want to prove quite a different point,” Eliav said. “And for it your Hebrew’s adequate. Skip the words you don’t know.”
It took Cullinane about a day to make his way through the Hebrew text, and it was one of the best days he was to spend at Makor, for as he dug his way into the powerful Hebrew, in almost the same way as he had to dig through the soil hiding Makor, he came upon that quiet yet singing declaration of faith that is the core of Judaism, the passage which expresses the essence of Jewish history: “My father was a fugitive Aramaean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers and sojourned there; but there he became a great and very populous nation. The Egyptians dealt harshly with us and oppressed us: they imposed heavy labor upon us. We cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our plea and saw our plight, our misery, and our oppression. The Lord freed us from Egypt by a mighty hand, by an outstretched arm and awesome power, and by signs and portents. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”
At dinner Eliav said, “The point I wanted to make is this. The Hebrew used in writing Deuteronomy sometime in the seventh century B.C.E. is the same Hebrew that we’ve revived in Israel after it had been a dead language for a thousand years. Call over one of the kibbutzniks. Son!” A youth of fifteen ambled over, sloppy, happy, his sleeves rolled up for the job of cleaning the dining hall. Eliav asked, “Can you find me someone who speaks English,” and the boy said that he did, so Eliav handed him the Hebrew Torah, pointed to a passage in Deuteronomy and asked, “Can you read this?”
“Sure.”
“Go ahead.” The boy studied the words, some of the oldest written in Hebrew, and said tentatively, “ ‘My father was an Aramaean with no home. He went to Egypt. Not many. There he became a nation.’ ”
“Good,” Eliav said, and the pleased kibbutznik returned to his work.
Cullinane was impressed. “You mean … any educated Israeli today can read the Bible exactly as it was written?”
“Of course. For us this is a living book. Not necessarily a religious book, you understand. That boy, for example. Son!” The youth came back, smiling. “You ever go to synagogue?”
“No!”
“Your parents religious?”
“No!”
“But you know the Torah? The Prophets?”
“Sure,” and he left.
“That’s what you must remember, Cullinane. Every Jew you see on this dig can read the original Bible better than you can read Chaucer.”
“You’ve proved your point,” the Irishman admitted.
“I haven’t got to the point yet,” Eliav corrected. “We Jews persisted in history … where are the Babylonians, the Edomites, the Moabites with their multitudes of gods? They’re all gone, but our tenacious little group of Jews lives on. And we do so because what you’ve been reading in Deuteronomy is to us a real thing. One crucial passage you must have noticed. It has an historic actuality, whether you Gentiles and we Jews like it or not.”
“Which one?”
Without consulting the Torah, Eliav quoted, “ ‘For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all the peoples on earth the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people.’ ”
“I wish I could believe it,”
“He does,” Eliav said, pointing to the kibbutznik, “and the fascinating thing is that he believes it exactly as I do, in a non-racial sense. I suppose you’d call me a free thinker except that I believe in the spirit of Deuteronomy.”
This was too finely drawn for Cullinane, and he pushed aside the Hebrew Bible, but Eliav picked it up. “The key to the Jew,” he said jokingly, “is my favorite passage in the Torah. Moses is being eulogized as the greatest man who ever lived, knew God face-to-face and all that. But what is the very last thing said of him as a man … as a living man? It seems to me that this is a profound insight … It’s the reason why I love Deuteronomy. I’m going to quote it from the King James Version first: ‘And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.’ ” Eliav repeated the last phrase, “ ‘nor his natural force abated.’ But in our Hebrew original this last eulogy on a great man ends, ‘His moisture was not fled.’ ” Eliav closed the book and placed his hands over it. “A man who had known God, who had created a nation, who had laid down the law that all of us still follow. And when he dies you say of him, ‘He could still function in bed.’ Ours is a very gutsy religion, Cullinane.”
• • •
In the town of Makor eight hundred years had passed since that memorable day when five of its citizens had been involved in tragedy, and because of poetic dirges composed at that time the men and women of the tragedy had been transformed into gods who had added spiritual richness to the religion of the area.
Joktan the Habiru was now remembered as a heavenly stranger arriving from the east with many donkeys to give protection to the murderer, and the legend left no uncertainty as to the welcome Makor had given him. He had been quickly absorbed into the town, primarily because he had been willing to recognize the gods of Makor as superior to his own.
Welcome the stranger, Astarte,
Welcome the one who comes from afar,
Who comes to worship you on donkeys.
Later verses made it clear that Astarte had smiled upon him, making of him a principal citizen who had inherited the house of mirth once occupied by the man he aided.
Urbaal the farmer enjoyed a more spectacular transformation, for when the local poets reviewed his tragic history they saw a great man, the owner of fields and the father of many children, caught in the grip of passions he could not master, and it became obvious that he could not have been a man. He was the god Ur-Baal, sent to Makor for a divine purpose, and through the centuries the poets had shortened his name and made him the principal god of Makor, known simply as Baal the omnipotent.
Amalek the farmer suffered a curious fate, for although he had been in many ways the most decent actor in the tragedy, he was always remembered as the enemy whom Ur-Baal had to kill, and thus he was gradually changed into the villain Malek, and then into Melak, the god of war. When this was accomplished, what had happened on that new year’s day of 2201 B.C.E. was made clear: Ur-Baal had slain Melak in order to protect Astarte, and only Ur-Baal’s courage, his willingness even to travel abroad among the donkeys, had saved Makor:
Ride on the clouds, Ur-Baal,
Ride on the clouds of storm.
Behold, you shall ride the storm!
Libamah the enticing slave girl was now seen as a manifestation of the lovelier aspects of Astarte, and her capacity to inflame Ur-Baal had come to represent the creative processes of nature.
Timna the faithful wife also contributed to the concept of Astarte, and it was recalled that although she had loved Ur-Baal she had also been directly responsible for his death; but it was Timna’s willingness to follow her husband barefoot and pregnant into his exile that had provided Astarte with one of the most beautiful adventures in Canaanite mythology:
The year closed and the rains came,
Even to Makor came the rains,
And Ur-Baal fled to the olive grove,
Fled to the night, to the realm of Melak,
Down to the realm of Melak, god of the night.
There Ur-Baal would have remained in banishment, depriving Makor of its spring growing season and causing it to perish of starvation, had not Astarte gone seeking him to lure him back to earth and his assigned functions:
Pregnant she left the zigzag gate,
Pregnant with children of tomorrow,
Seeking tomorrow and her lover Ur-Baal.
She had found the greatest of the gods imprisoned at the altar of Melak, and in a terrible hand-to-hand fight she had slain Melak, chopping him into small pieces and scattering his fragmented body over the fields like seeds of grain. This had brought the wheat to germination and the olive trees to blossom, and each winter since then the voyage of Astarte to the nether world had been repeated.
So now Makor was governed by a benign trinity: El, the unseen father of the gods whose characteristics grew ever more vague as the centuries passed; Baal the omnipotent; and Astarte his wife, who was both forever virgin and forever pregnant as the mother of all. The trinity had one additional peculiarity: Astarte both loved and hated Baal, and it was this conflict that explained the world’s confusion, the contest between female and male, the warfare between night and day, between winter and summer, between death and life.
El, Baal, Astarte. In a tightly knit and beautiful partnership they watched over Makor, guiding it through the turbulence of that unsettled age. In the last eight hundred years Mesopotamia and Egypt had often contested the great valleys to the east; strange armies belonging to neither of those powers had also swept through Canaan, gutting and burning, but the little town on its slowly rising mound had managed to survive. It had been occupied by many victors and had been burned twice, but it had always recovered, thanks to the manifest interest taken in it by the trinity.
The town looked different. The mound had grown fifteen feet higher and now stood thirty-five feet above the surrounding plain. This meant that the original wall had long been submerged in rubble, but the wall itself still stood, locked in earth and providing the solid base from which subsequent walls had risen, as strong and as wide as before. Also, when the savage Hyksos had appeared out of the north to conquer the area, they had adopted Makor as a fortress city and had imported slaves to surface the slope with smooth stones, thus forming a glacis which protected the approaches to the wall. Makor was now practically unassailable.
Inside the walls other changes had occurred. The rising level of the town had quite obliterated the four monoliths, over whose heads rested a small temple consecrated to Astarte. No longer was there a Baal-of-the-Storm or of the water or of the sun; these attributes were now concentrated in Baal himself. The big temple was no more, for Baal resided on top of the mountain in the back of town, but there were homes for his priests, whose principal job was to guard the underground silos where grain was stored and the water cisterns where emergency supplies were kept in case of siege. Makor now contained more than one hundred and eighty houses and the greatest internal population it would know—nearly fourteen hundred persons. Another five hundred farmers lived outside the walls, which were broken by two large gates built of oak imported from Tyre. The first, preserving the original approach from the south, was much wider than before and was marked by four square towers, two abutting the outside wall and two inside. In the various times that Makor had fallen to enemy troops the main gate had yet to be forced.
It was the second gate, a postern in the north wall, that accounted for the most noticeable change. In several sieges of Makor the enemy had triumphed by capturing the well outside the wall and mounting siege until the internal cisterns were empty. Then, faced by thirst, the town had been forced to surrender, so in 1440 B.C.E. the town fathers, led by a strong-minded young man named Uriel, had decided to build a pair of stout walls leading out from the postern gate and surrounding the vital well. The walls were built and then roofed over, which had the effect of bringing the source of water inside the town, so that in time of siege the women of Makor co
The great Family of Ur was now represented by this builder Uriel, who had persuaded his elders to construct the waterwall. Incontestably he was the leading citizen of Makor, the man who owned the olive groves south of town and the oak forests to the east. He was forty-one years old, taller than the average Canaanite and more thoughtful. The priests of Baal looked to him for guidance; at first they had opposed the building of the waterwall, arguing that if Baal had intended his well to be protected he would have cared for the matter himself, but when Uriel’s strategy proved right they changed their criticism to support. There was now no king of Makor, the Hyksos invaders having exterminated the royal family, but Uriel served so many of the ancient functions that he enjoyed a quasi-kingship. In the official records kept in Egypt, which now ruled the area, he was known as governor, a role which he filled rather better than most of the Egyptian appointees in neighboring towns like Hazor, Megiddo and Akka.
Uriel wore a black beard, trimmed square below his chin, and he was unusual in that age in that he had but one wife, Rahab, by whom he had one child, his son Zibeon. Concubines were not important in his life; he had several, as befitted a man of his dignity, but their children he did not bother about and as he grew older he no longer found it necessary to surround himself with younger women. He loved his one wife and found her both a congenial companion and a wise counselor.