第2章

CHAPTER ONE SIMPLETONS

I, Agabus the Decapolitan, began this work at Alexandria in the ninth year of the Emperor Domitian and completed it at Rome in the thirteenth year of the same.[1] It is the history of the wonder-worker Jesus, rightful heir-at-law to the dominions of Herod, King of the Jews, who in the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, the Governor-General of Judaea. Not the least wonderful of Jesus's many feats was that, though certified dead by his executioners after a regular crucifixion, and laid in a tomb, he returned two days later to his Galilean friends at Jerusalem and satisfied them that he was no ghost; then said farewell and disappeared in equally mysterious fashion. King Jesus (for he was entitled to be so addressed) is now worshipped as a god by a sect known as the Gentile Chrestians.

Chrestians is the commoner name for Christians, that is to say, "followers of the Anointed King". Chrestians means "followers of the Chrestos, or Good Man"—good in the sense of simple, wholesome, plain, auspicious—and is therefore a term less suspect to the authorities than "Christians"; for the word Christos suggests defiance of the Emperor, who has expressed his intention of stamping out Jewish nationalism once and for all. "Chrestos", of course, can also be used in the derogatory sense of "simpleton". "Chrestos ei"—"What a simple-minded fellow you are!"—were the very words which Pontius Pilate addressed in scorn to Jesus on the morning of crucifixion; and since the Christians glory in their simplicity, which the most sincere of them carry to extravagant lengths, and in receiving the same scorn from the world as King Jesus himself, they do not refuse the name of "The Simpletons".

Originally this faith was confined to Jews, who held a very different view of Jesus from that popularized by the Gentile Chrestians; then it gradually spread from the Jews of Palestine to those of the Dispersion, whose communities are to be found in Babylonia, Syria, Greece, Italy, Egypt, Asia Minor, Libya, Spain—in fact, in almost every country of the world—and has now become international, with Gentiles decidedly in the majority. For the visionary Paul of Tarsus, who led the Gentile schism and was himself only a half-Jew, welcomed to membership of his Church the very numerous Gentile converts to the Jewish faith, known as God-fearers, who had shrunk from circumcision and the ritual rigours of Judaism and were thus precluded from becoming honorary Sons of Abraham. Paul declared that circumcision was unnecessary to salvation and that Jesus had himself made light of Jewish ceremonial laws on the ground that moral virtue outweighs ritual scrupulousness in the eyes of Jehovah, the Jewish God. Paul also assured them that Jesus (whom he had never met) had posthumously ordained that a symbolic eating of his body and drinking of his blood was to be a permanent institution in the Chrestian Church. This rite, known as the Eucharist, provides a welcome bridge between Judaism and the Greek and Syrian mystery-cults—I mean those in which the sacred body of Tammuz is sacramentally eaten and the sacred blood of Dionysus is sacramentally drunk; and by this bridge thousands of converts have come over. The Judaic Chrestians, however, have rejected the Eucharist as idolatrous. They also have rejected as blasphemous the Gentile Chrestian view that Jesus stands in much the same relation to Jehovah as, for example, the God Dionysus does to Father Zeus, who begot him on the nymph Semele. A begotten God, the Jews say, must logically have a mother; and they deny that Jehovah has ever had any truck with either nymphs or goddesses.

The fact is that the Jews as a nation have persuaded themselves that they differ in one main particular from all others that live on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea: namely, that they never owed any duty either to the Great Triple Moon-goddess who is generally reputed to have mothered the Mediterranean races, or to any other goddess or nymph whatsoever. This claim is untenable, for their sacred books preserve clear traces of their former attachment, notably in the accounts that they give of their heroes Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Moses. Indeed, that the Jews are at the present day perhaps the most miserable of all civilized nations—scattered, homeless, suspect—is ascribed by the superstitious to the Goddess's ineluctable vengeance: for the Jews have been prime leaders in the religious movement against her not only in their own country but in all the countries of the Dispersion. They have proclaimed Jehovah as the sole Ruler of the Universe and represented the Goddess as a mere demoness, witch, Queen of Harlots, succuba and prime mischief-maker.

Jehovah, it seems clear, was once regarded as a devoted son of the Great Goddess, who obeyed her in all things and by her favour swallowed up a number of variously named rival gods and godlings—the Terebinth-god, the Thunder-god, the Pomegranate-god, the Bull-god, the Goat-god, the Antelope-god, the Calf-god, the Porpoise-god, the Ram-god, the Ass-god, the Barley-god, the god of Healing, the Moon-god, the god of the Dog-star, the Sun-god. Later (if it is permitted to write in this style) he did exactly what his Roman counterpart, Capitoline Jove, has done: he formed a supernal Trinity in conjunction with two of the Goddess's three persons, namely, Anatha of the Lions and Ashima of the Doves, the counterparts of Juno and Minerva; the remaining person, a sort of Hecate named Sheol, retiring to rule the infernal regions. Most Jews hold that she still reigns there, for they say: "Jehovah has no part in Sheol", and quote the authority of the 115th Psalm: "The dead praise not Jehovah, neither do any that go down into silence." But Jove, whose wife and former mother, Juno, is still in sole charge of women's affairs and whose so-called daughter Minerva still presides over all intellectual activities, and who is himself bisexual, has never cared to do what Jehovah did just before his enforced captivity at Babylon: that is, to repudiate his two Goddess partners and in solitary splendour attempt to rule over men and women alike. Nor has Olympian Zeus dared to do this. He also, it is said, was once the devoted son of the Triple Goddess and later, after castrating her paramour Cronos, annulled her sovereignty: but he leaves the charge of women's affairs to his wife Hera, his sister Demeter, and his daughters Artemis, Aphrodite and Athene. Severity towards them he has certainly shown at times (if the mythographers are to be trusted), but he cannot rule satisfactorily without them. God without Goddess, the Romans and Greeks agree, is spiritual insufficiency; but this the Jews deny.

In a somewhat obscene passage in the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel is to be found Jehovah's bill of divorcement against his two partner-Goddesses, who are there named Aholah and Aholibah. Nevertheless, the Trinity continued undissolved in a Jewish Temple at Elephantine in Upper Egypt until five hundred years ago.

Nobody can understand the story of Jesus except in the light of this Jewish obsession of celestial patriarchy; for it must never be forgotten that, despite all appearances, despite even his apparent sponsorship of the Eucharistical rite, Jesus was true to Jehovah from his childhood onward without a single lapse in loyalty. He once told Shelom, the midwife who had brought him into the world, that he had "come to destroy the work of the female"; he accepted the title of "Son of David"—King David who had stabilized the Jewish monarchy and persuaded the priestesses of Anatha, until then the proud rulers of clans and tribes, to content themselves with membership of his royal harem. And as the Second Adam Jesus's self-imposed task was to undo the evil which, according to the patriarchal legend, the First Adam had caused by sinfully listening to the seductive plea of his wife Eve.

Whether patriarchy is a better solution to the eternal problem of the relations of men and women than matriarchy or than the various compromises which civilized nations have adopted, who shall decide? All that needs to be recorded here is that at a critical stage in their history the Jews decided to forbid the further participation of priestesses in their sacred rites. Women, they said, have an unsettling effect on religious life: they introduce the sexual element, which inevitably tends to confuse mystical ecstasy with eroticism. For this point of view there is much to be said, because the effect of sexual promiscuity in festival time is to loosen the ties of family life and disorder the social system. Besides, there was a political side to the Jewish theory: namely, that the only hope of survival for the nation, which was settled at the cross-roads of the world, lay in its keeping strictly to itself and avoiding the foreign entanglements in which amorous and luxury-loving queens and priestesses invariably involve their subjects. Yet the Jews, who are Orientals only in part, have never been able to keep their women in perfect subjection; and have never therefore succeeded in serving Jehovah with the purity that they profess. The Great Goddess, to whom the land of Palestine originally belonged, is always tripping them up and seducing them into folly. Belili, her earliest name, they spell Belial, meaning Utter Destruction. Their apostasy from the Goddess gave them qualms at first, and the poet Jeremiah who lived at this period quotes some of them as saying: "We will now again burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and pour libations to her as we once did, and our fathers, our kings and princes in the cities of Judaea and in the streets of Jerusalem, for then we had food in plenty and health and prosperity. But since we ceased to burn incense and pour libations to her, we have been in distress, consumed by the sword and by famine." But the rest stood fast by their resolution.

The Goddess's venerable Temple at Hierapolis, on the Syrian bank of the Upper Euphrates, a region connected in Biblical legend with the patriarchs Abraham and Isaac, is well worth a visit. There, a Sun-god, a sort of Dionysus-Apollo-Zeus who rides a bull, is married to his mother the Moon-goddess who rides a lion and grasps a snake in her hand. The Trinity, which is ruled by the Mother, is completed by an ambiguous bisexual deity to whom the dove is sacred. The Temple, which is served by oracular women and eunuch priests, faces East; outside the portals are two enormous phallic pillars like those which stood outside King Solomon's Temple; inside, all is gold and gems and marble. The ritual is a complicated one and includes pre-marital prostitution for young women, self-castration for young men; for others, intercessions, comminations, hymns of praise, libations, purifications, incense-burning, sacrifices of sheep, goats and children; holocausts of live beasts hanged from terebinth-trees; and oracles taken from sacred fish and sweating statutes. The Temple is said to have been founded in honour of the Moon-goddess by Deucalion (whom the Jews call Noah) when the Deluge which had overwhelmed Asia at last subsided. In his honour a sacred ark of acacia-wood is exhibited and water is poured down the chasm through which, it is said, the waters of the Deluge were carried away.

The Canaanites, whom the Israelites conquered and enslaved under Joshua, were devotees of this Goddess. Their remnants still cling to the cult of the terebinth-tree, the dove and the snake, still bake barley-cakes in honour of the Goddess, and still maintain the right of every young woman to provide herself with a dowry by prostitution.

I grant the political expediency of keeping certain remarkable facts connected with Jesus's birth and parentage concealed from all but the inner circle of Chrestian initiates. I have discovered these by patient and discreet inquiry, and it is clear to me that if they were laid before the Emperor he could hardly be blamed for suspecting that the other-worldly religious communism of Chrestianity was a cloak for militant Jewish royalism. I also grant the expediency of Paul's decision to dissociate the new faith as far as possible from the faith from which it sprang, and though it is untrue to say that the Jews as a nation rejected Jesus, it is true enough that ever since the Fall of Jerusalem the poor remnants of the Jewish nationalists have detested not only the Gentile Chrestians but the Judaic sort as well. These offended by what seemed at the time a cowardly and unpatriotic refusal to assist in the defence of the Holy City: quitting Judaea and settling at Pella across the Jordan.

The Judaic Chrestians had kept strictly to the letter of the Law under the original leadership of James (I mean the Bishop of Jerusalem, who was the half-brother of Jesus). They were no cowards, but merely considered it a sin to engage in war; since Jesus himself had foreseen the fate of Jerusalem and had shed tears for it, they could hardly have been expected to risk their eternal salvation by defending the walls. After its capture by Titus many of them were tempted to renounce Judaism because of the double disadvantage of being ill-treated as Jews by the Romans and despised by the Jews as traitors. But they would not renounce their allegiance to Jesus. Must they then modify their principles and enter the Gentile Chrestian Church originally controlled by the Apostle Philip but reorganized after Philip's death by their former enemy and persecutor Paul—the very man who had once thrown James down the steps of the Temple? That would mean consorting with uncircumcised and ceremonially unclean Chrestian converts of all classes and conditions—few of whom knew as many as five words of Hebrew and who all considered the Mosaic Law to be virtually abrogated.

It was a hard choice, and only a few chose the more heroic alternative of keeping true to the Law. The Gentile Chrestians were accommodating to those who compounded, for James was dead and Paul was dead and Peter was dead and they had instructions from Jesus himself to forgive their enemies. It was important that a religion of brotherly love should not be contradicted by indecent dissensions. Though there was no question of the circumcision problem being raised again, the breach was repaired with a doctrinal compromise; and what was more, the Gentiles, as they put it, heaped coals of fire on the heads of the Judaists by relieving their financial distresses. For Paul's quarrel with the original Church had been largely a money quarrel. He had counted on a large sum of money collected from converts in Asia Minor, and on an ecstatic vision of Heaven vouchsafed him in an epileptic trance, to win admission to the Apostleship. He was informed coldly that the gifts of the spirit could not be bought and that the vision was indecently ambitious.

This compromise had its disadvantages, as all compromises have: the greatest of which was the mass of petty contradictions in the official account of the life and teachings of Jesus which resulted from the fusion of rival traditions. The mediators between the two societies were the Petrines, or followers of the Galilean apostle Peter, strangely enough a converted Zealot, or militant nationalist, who had been rejected by the followers of James for consorting with the followers of Paul, and by the followers of Paul for consorting with the followers of James. As Jesus had foreseen, it was on the Petrine rock that the Church was finally founded: Peter's name now stands on the diptychs before that of Paul.

Let nobody be misled by the libels against the Jews in general and the Pharisees in particular which, despite the nominal reconciliation of the Churches, are still circulated among the Chrestians of Rome. The Jews are accused by the Gentile libellists of having universally rejected Jesus. Let me repeat that the Jews did nothing of the sort. All his disciples were Jews. The Judaic Chrestians remained an honourable sect in Judaea and Galilee until the so-called "secession to Pella". Throughout the years intervening, they had taken part without question in Temple worship and in that of the synagogue; which is not surprising, seeing that Jesus himself had done the same and had explicitly told the woman of Samaritan Schechem: "Salvation comes from the Jews."

The Jews are also accused of having officially sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion after a formal trial by the Beth Din, or religious High Court; they did nothing of the sort. Nobody with the least knowledge of Jewish legal procedure can possibly credit that the High Court condemned him to death, or doubt that it was the Roman soldiers who crucified him at Pilate's order.

As for the Pharisees, who are represented by the libellists as having been Jesus's greatest enemies: he never denounced this enlightened sect as a whole, but only individual members who failed in their high moral pretensions, or outsiders who falsely pretended to be Pharisees—especially those who, taking advantage of his dialectical method of teaching, tried to entrap him into revolutionary statements. For the Pharisees softened by their remarkable humanity the harsher provisions of the ancient Mosaic Law and both preached and practised those very virtues which Gentile Chrestians now pretend to be exclusively and originally Chrestian. Their moral code was first formulated shortly after the Exile by descendants of the original Aaronic priesthood which had been removed from high office in the reign of King Solomon by the usurping Zadokites, or Sadducees; as priests without stipend or distractive ecclesiastical duties they were able to refine spiritual values without the taint of politics. Jesus denouncing the Pharisees indeed! It is as though Socrates were represented as having denounced philosophers in general because he had found flaws in the arguments of particular sophists.

The ecclesiastical Sadducees, who were necessarily politicians, had little sense of the peculiar spiritual mission with which the Jews as a whole considered themselves entrusted, and were always ready to meet foreigners half-way by a deliberate blurring of their national peculiarities. When the Pharisees, which means the Separated Ones—those who separate themselves from what is impure—had made their popular religious revolt under Maccabee leadership against the Hellenizing Seleucids, the Syrian heirs of King Alexander the Great, it was the Sadducees who undid their work by persuading the later Maccabees to backslide half-way to Hellenism again. The Pharisaic principle of taking arms only in defence of religious freedom was abandoned by the Sadducees, and the consequent enlargement of a small poor kingdom by wars of aggression against Edom and Samaria proved its eventual undoing.

Gentile Chrestians who quote Jesus as having made apparently damaging criticisms of the Mosaic Law are unaware that, as often as not, he was merely quoting with approval the critical remarks of Rabbi Hillel, the most revered of all Pharisaic doctors; and I would not have you ignorant that in certain remote Syrian villages where Judaic Chrestians and Jews still manage to live amicably side by side, the Chrestians are admitted to worship in the synagogues and are reckoned as a sub-sect of the Pharisees.

There were, I grant, degrees of Pharisaism in the time of Jesus; as he pointed out, material prosperity tends to weaken the spiritual sense, and many so-called Pharisees had forgotten the spirit of the Law and remembered only the letter; but in general the spirit triumphed over the letter, and in the monastic order of the Essenes, who were the most conservative sort of Pharisees, spirituality and loving-kindness were practised in a more orderly and humane style than in any Chrestian society of to-day which has not modelled its discipline closely upon theirs.

It will be asked: What reason have the libellists to circulate these statements if there is no truth in them? The answer is plain. Not only do the remaining Judaic Chrestians still refuse to deify Jesus, since for Jews there is only one God; but, the Gentile Chrestians being ignorant of Hebrew, Judaists naturally stand at a great advantage in expounding both the Messianic prophecies relating to Jesus and the collected corpus of his moral discourses and pronouncements. This has bred jealousy and resentment. Truths that to a Gentile brought up in the Olympian faith seem a wholly original illumination appear to the Judaists as a logical development of Pharisaism.

I once heard a Roman Chrestian cry out at a love-feast where I was a guest: "Listen, brothers and sisters in Christ, I bring glad tidings! Jesus rolled up the Ten Commandments given to Moses, by substituting two of his own: 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy strength.' And 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.'"

Great applause.

A former Judaist sitting next to me blinked a little and then said dryly: "Yes, brother, that was well said by the Christ! And now I hear that those rascally Jewish copyists have stolen his wisdom and interpolated the first of these two overriding Commandments into the sixth chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy, and the second into the nineteenth chapter of the Book of Leviticus!"

"May the Lord God pardon their thievish wickedness!" cried a pious matron from the other end of the table. "I am sure that the Pharisees are at the bottom of it!"

Not wishing to cause a tumult, I refrained from reminding her that Jesus had praised the Pharisees as "the righteous who need no repentance" and as "the able-bodied who have no need of a physician", and in his fable of the spendthrift runaway had made them the type of the honest son who stayed at home: "Son, you have always remained dutifully with me and all my goods are yours."

In Chrestian Churches, as among the Orphics and other religious societies, secret doctrine is taught largely in the form of drama. This, though an ancient and admirable way of conveying religious truth, has its disadvantages when the characters are historical rather than mythical; and when the worshippers accept as literally true what is merely dramatic invention. I have before me a copy of the Nativity Drama now used by the Egyptian Church, in which the principal speakers are the Angel Gabriel, Mary the Mother of Jesus, Mary's cousin Elizabeth, Elizabeth's husband Zacharias the Priest, Joseph, Mary's husband, three shepherds, three astrologers, the midwife Salome, King Herod, Anna the prophetess and Simeon the Priest. The play is simply but skilfully written, and I have no fault at all to find with it as devotional literature. Its purpose is to demonstrate that Jesus was the expected Jewish Messiah, and more than this, that he was the same Divine Child who had been foreshadowed in all the ancient mysteries—Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, Armenian and even Indian. The third scene, for instance, opens in the Bethlehem stable on a darkened stage.

The Cock (crowing): "Christ is born!"

The Bull (lowing): "Where?"

The Ass (braying): "In Bethlehem!"

These creatures, by the way, are not quaint characters borrowed from the Fables of Aesop: they are sacred animals. The cock is sacred to Hermes Conductor of Souls and to Aesculapius the Healer. It dispels the darkness of night, is the augur of the reborn Sun. You will recall that almost the last words spoken by Socrates before he drank the hemlock were a reminder to a friend that he had vowed a cock to Aesculapius: he was expressing, I suppose, his hope in resurrection. The cock likewise figures in the story of Jesus's last sufferings and is now interpreted as an augur of his resurrection; though I find this notion far-fetched. The bull and the ass are the symbolic beasts of the two promised Messiahs, the Messiah Son of Joseph and the Messiah Son of David, with both of whom the Chrestians identify Jesus. The "feet of the bull and the ass" mentioned in the thirty-second chapter of Isaiah are invariably explained by Jewish commentators as referring to the two Messiahs.

After this brief dialogue between the creatures, the day dawns, and the Holy Family are discovered together. Virgin Mother and Child in their ancient pose: the mother wearing a blue robe and a crown of silver stars, the child traditionally laid in the manger-basket which is used for the same purpose in both the Delphic and Eleusinian mysteries. Bearded Joseph leans on a staff a little way off, not crowned nor even clothed in purple—the type of all just men whose virtue has earned them a part in the divine illumination. Distant sounds of drum and pipe, gradually nearing. Enter three joyful shepherds, like those of Mount Ida who adored the infant Zeus…. Or (if it is permitted to disclose this) like the mystagogues dressed as shepherds who, at the ceremony of Advent which gives its name to the Eleusinian mysteries, introduce the virgin-born infant by torchlight and cry: "Rejoice, rejoice, we have found our King, son of the Daughter of the Sea, lying in this basket among the river reeds!"

Now, I do not question the tradition that the infant Jesus was laid in a manger-basket in a stable, nor that shepherds arrived to adore him, but the rest of the scene must not be read as literally true: it is rather what Aristotle in his Poetics terms "philosophically true". And I cannot, though my authorities are reliable, be sure that my own Nativity narrative is correct in every particular, but I will say this much. An expert in Greek sculpture or pottery can usually restore the lost details of a damaged work of art: take for example a black-figured vase, with a scene of the harrowing of Hell by Orpheus. If the Danaids are there with their sieves and, next to them, above a defaced patch, the expert notices part of a bunch of grapes and two fingers of a clutching hand and, beyond, a rough piece of rock, that is detail enough: he imaginatively sees Tantalus gasping for thirst, and his fellow-criminal Sisyphus pushing the outrageous boulder up the hill. My own problem of reconstruction is very much more difficult, because history, not myth, is in question. Yet the history of Jesus from his Nativity onwards keeps so close to what may be regarded as a pre-ordained mythical pattern, that I have in many instances been able to presume events which I afterwards proved by historical research to have taken place, and this has encouraged me to hope that where my account cannot be substantiated it is not altogether without truth. For instance, Jesus has so much in common with the hero Perseus, that the attempt made by King Acrisius to kill the infant Perseus seems relevant to the story of Jesus too; this Acrisius was the grandfather of Perseus.

I have also witnessed the performance of another religious drama, concerned with the final sufferings of Jesus. The Chrestian fear of offending the Romans makes this play a masterpiece of disingenuousness. Since only what was publicly said or done on that painful occasion is enacted on the stage, Pilate's infamous behaviour appears correct and even magnanimous and the entire blame for the judicial murder is, by implication, laid upon the Jews whose spokesman the High Priest claims to be.

But I must now warn you against accepting the Hebrew Scriptures at their face value. Only the rhapsodies of the Hebrew poets, the so-called "prophetic books", can be read without constant suspicion that the text has been tampered with by priestly editors, and these too are for the most part incorrectly dated and credited to authors who could not possibly have written them. These unscholarly practices the Jews justify with: "Whoever speaks a good thing in the name of the one who should have spoken it brings salvation to the world." The historical and legal books have become so corrupted in the course of time, partly by accident and partly by editing, that even the shrewdest scholars cannot hope to unravel all the tangles and restore the original text. Still, by comparison of Hebrew myths with the popular myths of Canaan, and of Jewish history with the history of neighbouring nations, a general working knowledge can be won of the ancient events and legal traditions most relevant to the secret story of Jesus, which is all that need concern us here.

What an extraordinary story it is, too! Slave to books though I am, I have never in all my reading come across its match. And, after all, if the Gentile Chrestians, despite the clear prohibitions of the Hebrew Law against idolatry, are moved to partake of Jesus's substance in their symbolic Eucharist and to worship him as a God, declaring: "None was ever like him before, nor will be again, until he returns to earth!"—who, except the devout Jew, can blame them? To be laid at birth in a manger-basket, to be crowned King, to suffer voluntarily on a cross, to conquer death, to become immortal: such was the destiny of this last and noblest scion of the most venerable royal line in the world.

CHAPTER TWO CHILDREN OF RAHAB

Anna, daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher, had been widowed for sixty-five years; but the memory of her husband's benefactions to the Temple and her own remarkable devoutness, which kept her in the Women's Court of the Temple night and day, had secured her at last an honourable office, that of guardian mother to the holy virgins. These were wards of the Temple, and were instructed by her in obedience and humility, in music and dancing, in spinning and embroidery, and in the management of a household. All were Daughters of Aaron, members of the ancient Levite nobility, and had for the most part been dedicated to the Temple by their parents as an insurance against an unworthy marriage. Pious, rich and well-born husbands could always be found for Temple virgins. Their initiation into the lore of their clan was in the hands of the guardian mother, who was tested by the High Priest's deputy for knowledge of Temple procedure and correct deportment but, being a woman, was not expected to have a perfect understanding of religious doctrine. Since their return from Babylonian captivity under Ezra, the Levites had denied the Daughters of Aaron their former function as priestesses, debarring them, with all other women, from any closer approach to the Sanctuary than the Women's Court, which was separated from it by a massive wall and the spacious Men's Court, or Court of Israel.

Anna whined and mumbled in a devout sing-song whenever she moved among priests and Temple servants, but when alone with her charges spoke to them in a voice of calm authority.

The eldest of the virgins was Miriam, whom the Chrestians call Mary, the only child of Joachim the Levite, one of the so-called Heirs of David, or Royal Heirs. She had been a Temple ward since the age of five and had been born on the very day that masons first began to work on King Herod's Temple. Year by year the glorious building was swallowing up the battered old Temple, called Zerubbabel's, which had risen from the ruins of King Solomon's Temple but had been several times seized by foreign armies and seemed to have lost a great deal of its virtue since its desecration by the Syrian king Antiochos Epiphanes. Thirteen years had now passed, and though the central Sanctuary—the House of Jehovah and the Court of the Priests—was completed, and the greater part of the two Inner Courts as well, it was to be nearly seventy more years before the masons ceased work on the Court of the Gentiles and the enclosing walls. The new Temple grounds were twice as large as the old ones, and it was necessary to build out vast substructures on the southern side of the hill-top to allow sufficient space for them.

Anna had been entrusted with dyed flax from Pelusium in Egypt, to be spun into thread for the annually renewed curtain of the sacred chamber called the Holy of Holies—a task which virgins were alone permitted to undertake. She cast lots in turn among her elder charges for the honour of spinning the purple, the scarlet, the violet and the white threads. The purple fell to Miriam, which excited the envy of the rest, who teasingly called her a "little queen" because purple is a royal colour. But Anna said: "Daughters, it is vain to dispute the lots, which are of Heaven. Consider, does anyone else among you bear the name Miriam? And did not Miriam, the royal sister of Moses, dance in triumph with her companions beside the purple sea?"

When she cast lots again and the royal scarlet also fell to Miriam, Anna said to forestall their jealousy: "Is it to be wondered at? Who else among you is of Cocheba?" For the village of Cocheba is named after the star of David, and the Heirs of David owned Cocheba.

Tamar, one of the virgins, asked: "But, Mother, is not the scarlet thread the sign of a harlot?"

"Does Tamar ask me this? Did not Tamar the wife of Er, Judah's first-born, play the harlot with her father-in-law? Did not the other Tamar play the harlot with Amnon her brother, David's first-born? Does a third Tamar covet the scarlet thread because she wishes to do as they did?"

Tamar asked demurely: "Is it recorded, Mother, that either Tamar was punished for her sins by barrenness or by stoning?"

"These times are not those, child. Do not think that by emulating the first Tamar you will be enrolled among the glorious ancestors of another David."

Miriam said: "With your permission, Mother, Tamar shall help me spin the scarlet, for the sake of the scarlet thread that Tamar the wife of Er tied about the wrist of Zarah, twin to our common ancestor Pharez; they had quarrelled for precedence within her womb."

The violet and the white flax were allotted to two other virgins, and as the distractive noise of spinning might not be heard in the Temple, the four spinners were set to work in private houses. Miriam was entrusted to the care of her cousin Lysia, Joseph of Emmaus's daughter; Joseph's wife, now dead, had been the eldest sister of Miriam's mother. She had borne him four sons and two daughters, of whom the elder, Lysia, was married to a purple-seller of Jerusalem, another of the Heirs, and lived near the Temple, just across the Bridge. To Lysia's house Miriam went with Tamar every morning to spin; every evening they came back together across the Bridge and through the Beautiful Gate to the Virgins' College in the Women's Court.

This is the story of Miriam's birth. Her mother, Hannah, had been married ten years but continued childless, to her grief and shame, and found little comfort in the riches of her husband, Joachim. Every year at the appointed day he rode up to Jerusalem from Cocheba to offer a donation to the Temple. There, because of the nobility of his birth and the riches of his estate, he usually took first place in the line of gift-bringers, the elders of Israel dressed in long Babylonian robes embroidered with flowers. It was his custom to say, as he dropped his gold pieces through the slot of the chest: "Whatever I give of my earnings is for the whole people; and here I give it. But these other coins, which represent a diminution of my estate, are for the Lord—a plea for his forgiveness if I have done anything amiss or displeasing to his eye."

Joachim, a High Court judge, was a Pharisee—not one of the Shoulder Pharisees, as those are called who seem to wear on their shoulders a list of their own good actions; nor a Calculating Pharisee, who says: "My sins are more than counterbalanced by my virtues"; nor a Saving Pharisee, who says: "I will save a little from my fortune to perform a work of charity." He could well be reckoned one of the God-fearing Pharisees who, despite the sneers of Chrestians who hate to be in their spiritual debt, compose by far the larger part of that humane sect.

This year, the seventeenth of Herod's reign, as the elders of Israel stood waiting for the hour of donation, Reuben son of Abdiel, a Sadducee of the old school, stood next below Joachim. Reuben had recently gone to law with him about the possession of a well in the hills beyond Hebron, and lost his case. It irked him that Joachim should be devoutly offering to the Treasury, as his own gift, part of the value of the well, which would water a thousand sheep even in the height of summer.

Reuben cried aloud: "Neighbour Joachim, why do you thrust yourself to the head of this line? Why do you boast yourself above us all? Every one of us elders of Israel is blessed with children—with sons like sturdy plants, with daughters like the polished corners of a palace—everyone but only you, and you are childless. The Lord's displeasure must be heavy on your head, for in the last three years you have, to common knowledge, taken three lusty young concubines, yet still you remain a dried stock without green shoots. Humble your heart, Pharisee, and take a lower place."

Joachim answered: "Forgive me, Neighbour Reuben, if I have offended against you in the matter of the well, for I suppose that it is this memory, rather than some notorious offence of mine against the Law, that prompts you to reproach me. You surely cannot be gainsaying the verdict of the Court of Disputes?"

Reuben's brother, who had been a witness in the case and who stood further down the line, spoke up for Reuben: "Neighbour Joachim, it is ungenerous in you to triumph over my brother in the matter of the Well of the Jawbone, and unseemly not to answer him fairly in the matter of your childlessness."

Joachim replied meekly: "The Lord forbid that I should dispute with any man on this holy hill, or harbour evil thoughts." Then he turned to Reuben: "Tell me, Son of Abdiel, were there never found honourable men in Israel who remained childless to the last?"

"Find me the text that mitigates the force of the Lord God's commandment that we should increase and multiply, and you may keep your place with good courage. But I think that not even the ingenious Hillel will help you over this gate."

All who stood in the line were now listening. A low laugh went up and a soft hissing; then, for shame, Joachim lifted up his two bags of gold from the pavement and went down to the lowest place in the line.

The news of his discomfiture ran quickly through the Courts of the Temple. The Doctors, when asked for an opinion, gave it in the same words: "He did well to yield his place; there is no such text in the Scriptures, blessed be the name of the Lord!"

Joachim offered his donation with the accustomed words, and the Treasurer pronounced a blessing on him; but it seemed to him afterwards that the elders avoided his company as if he were a creature of ill-luck. He was about to return home with a sad heart when a Temple servant saluted him and said softly: "The word of a prophetess. Do not return to Cocheba, Benefactor, but remain here all night in prayer. In the morning ride out into the wilderness, towards Edom. Take only one servant, and as you travel abase yourself before the Lord at every holy place, eat only the locust-bean, drink only pure water, abstain from ointment, perfume and women, and continue southward until you are granted a sign from the Lord. On the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, which will be forty days from the beginning of your journey, be back here at Jerusalem. It is likely that the Lord will have heard your prayer and shown his mercy to you."

"Who is this prophetess? I had thought that her race was extinct in Jerusalem."

"A Daughter of Asher, an aged and devout widow, who waits in prayer and fasting for the consolation of Israel."

Joachim sent his servants home, all but one, and spent the night on his knees in the Temple. At dawn he rode out towards the wilderness with only the one servant at his back: he took no food with him but a bag of locust-beans, and no drink but pure water in a goatskin bottle. On the morning of the fifth day, as he passed over the border into Edom, he fell in with a company of tented Rechabites, or Kenites, a Canaanite tribe with whom the Jews had been allied since the days of Moses. He saluted them civilly and was for passing on, but the tribal chieftain restrained him. "You will not reach water before nightfall, my lord," he said, "unless you ride throughout the heat of the day, which would be cruelty to your beasts, and this evening the Sabbath begins, when it will be unlawful for you to travel. Be the guest of Rahab's Children until the Sabbath has ended."

Joachim turned aside, and presently the Rechabites, who were of the smith-guild, pitched their tents in a valley where there was a little water. When the chieftain saw the face of his guest, which until then had been covered up against the heat and dust, he cried out: "Aha, well met! Is this not Joachim of Cocheba to whose corn-lands we come yearly in the winter with our lyres to sing praises to the Lord? Our young men and women tumble about on your rich plough-land together and offer up prayers that the grain may sprout sturdily and be heavy in the ear."

Joachim answered: "And is this not Kenah, Chieftain of the Children of Rahab? Well met! Your craftsmen repair the mattocks, sickles, pruning-hooks, cauldrons and kettles of my labourers, and your work is excellent. But the annual invitation to perform your rustic rites on my land comes from my bailiff, not from myself; he is a Canaanite, I am an Israelite."

Kenah laughed. "Since we Canaanites have the more ancient title to the land, it is only reasonable to suppose that we know best which rites will please the Deity of the land. You cannot complain of your harvest, surely?"

"The Lord has been most bountiful to me," said Joachim, "and if your intercession has carried any weight with him, I should be ungrateful not to acknowledge it. But how am I to know whether I stand in your debt or not?"

"Your bailiff has rewarded us well with sacks of corn from your bins, and though you may be unaware of your debt to us, we are well disposed towards you. By the same token, most noble Joachim, it was only three nights ago that I had a dream of your coming. I dreamed that you freely presented to my people the Well of the Jawbone, near Cushan, the same well that your neighbour Reuben grudges you: you gave it to us for a perpetual possession. And in my dream you called it a gift well bestowed, for your heart was dancing with gladness. You would have given us seven such wells had you possessed them, and all the sheep that watered there besides."

Joachim was not pleased. He replied: "Some dreams are from God, noble Kenah, but some from God's Adversary. How can I tell what reliance to lay upon your dream?"

"By waiting patiently."

"How many days must I be patient?"

"It still wants thirty-five of the appointed number, or so I was assured in my dream."

Here evidently, thought Joachim, was the promised sign. For how, except in a dream, could Kenah have learned of the forty days' journey ordained by the prophetess?

That night, in the black goat's-hair tent, Joachim had no need to excuse himself from wine-drinking, for the Rechabites themselves are forbidden either to own vineyards or, except once a year at their five-day festival, when they also shave their heads, to consume any part of the grape—juice, seed or skin. But when he refrained from the tender mutton prepared for him, and from the little honey-cakes enriched with pistachio, and from the scented junkets, Kenah asked him: "Alas, most noble Joachim, are you sick? Or are you used to daintier food than ours? Or have we unwittingly offended you in some way, that you refuse to eat with us?"

"No, but I have a vow. Give me locust-beans and I will eat greedily."

The servant fetched him locust-beans. As they sat in peace together after they had eaten, a young man, Kenah's sister's son, seized his lyre and sang to it in a loud voice. In his song he prophesied that Hannah, the wife of an Heir of David, would presently conceive and bear a child, a child famous for many ages. Hannah would be one with Sarai of the silver face who had been long barren and laughed to hear the angel's assurance to Father Abraham that she would presently bear him a child. Hannah would also be one with Rachel of the crisp curls, who likewise was barren at first, yet became the mother of the patriarchs Joseph and Benjamin, and through them the ancestress of countless thousands of the Lord God's Israelitish people.

The spirit of the lyre stirred in the singer and he seemed to swell before their eyes as in a changed voice he chanted of a certain mighty hunter, a red hairy king, whom three hundred and sixty-five valiant men followed into battle: how he rode in his ass-chariot over that very border in the days gone by and drove out the usurping giants from the pleasant valley of Hebron and from the Oaks of Mamre, beloved of Rahab. His garments were stained red with wine, and panthers bounded by his side, sweet of breath. The shoes on his feet were of dolphin-skin, a fir wand was in his hand, and a fawn-skin mantle covered his shoulders. Nimrod he was called. And another of his names was Jerahmeel, the beloved of the Moon.

Then the Kenite sang over and over again: "Glory, glory, glory to the land of Edom, for the Hairy One shall come again, breaking the yoke to which his smooth brother, the supplanter, has subjected him!"

He ceased singing but continued to thrum the strings meditatively. Joachim asked: "This Nimrod whom you celebrate, he is surely not the same Nimrod of whom the Scriptures tell?"

"I sing only what the singing lyre puts into my mouth." He prophesied again: "Nimrod shall come once more. He shall soar aloft upon his eight gryphon wings, he shall make the mountains smoke with his fury—Nimrod, known to the three queens. Cry ha! for Nimrod, who is named Jerahmeel, and ha! for the three queens, each with her thrice forty maidens of honour! The first queen bore him and reared him; the second loved him and slew him; the third anointed him and laid him to rest in the House of Spirals. His soul was carried in her ark across the water to the first queen once again. It was five days' sail in the ark of acacia-wood across the water. It was five days' sail from the Land of the Unborn. To the City of Birth it was a five days' sail; five sea-beasts drew the ark along to the sound of music. There the queen bore him, and named him Jerahmeel, the Moon's beloved."

He was singing a parable of the Sun, who turns about in his sacred year through three Egyptian seasons of one hundred and twenty days apiece. At midsummer he burns with destructive passion, and at mid-winter, enfeebled by time, comes to the five days that are left over, crosses the gap, and turns about again; when he becomes a child, his own son Jerahmeel. Both Jerahmeel and Nimrod were titles of Kozi, the red hairy Sun-god of the Edomites, but a smooth-faced Israelitish Moon-god had long usurped his glory. This usurpation was justified in the myth of Jacob and Esau, and also plainly established in the calendar of the Jews—who now let their year turn with the Moon, not with the Sun as in ancient days.

Joachim said: "This child born to Hannah, will it be male or female? Prophesy again."

The Kenite, still radiant with the spirit of the lyre, answered: "Who can prophesy whether the Sun or the Moon was first created? But if the Sun, then let him be called the Sun's name, Jerahmeel; and if the Moon, then let her be called by the Moon's name, Miriam."

"Is the Moon named Miriam among you?"

"The Moon has many names among our poets. She is Lilith and Eve and Ashtaroth and Rahab and Tamar and Leah and Rachel and Michal and Anatha; but she is Miriam when her star rises in love from the salt sea at evening."

Joachim was seized with a doubt. He asked: "The lyre which you have in your hand is made from the branching horns of the clean oryx, but what of the strings and the pegs that secure them? What reliance is to be placed on your prophecy?"

"My lyre is of oryx-horn, made by the lame craftsman. The strings are fastened with the triangular teeth of the rock-badger, and are themselves the twisted guts of the wild-cat; both of which you call unclean beasts. But this lyre was so stringed and pegged when Miriam played on it in the days before the Levitical laws were uttered. It was clean then, and it is clean now, in the hands of the Children of Rahab."

Joachim asked no more, and when the young man laid down his lyre he cried: "Be witness, poet, that if the Lord blesses my wife's womb—for I am an Heir of David and her name is Hannah—and if a child is born to her, then I will make a free gift to your clan of the Well of the Jawbone, according to your uncle Kenah's dream, and as many sheep as my wife and I together have lived years, which is now ninety. But the child I vow to our God as a Temple ward, whether it be Jerahmeel or Miriam, and I shall call you to witness in that also."

Cries of acclamation and astonishment arose. Kenah presented the young man with a jewelled quiver. "You have brought us all delight with your sweet song," he said.

Kenah himself took the lyre. He played and sang the lament for Tubal Cain. "We are of Tubal, alas for Tubal Cain! He was hornsmith and carpenter; he was goldsmith and lapidary; he was silversmith and whitesmith. He ordered the calendar, he codified the laws. Alas for Tubal the mighty, of whose sons only a remnant is left! It has gone hard with us since the day that the hairy male Sun went down behind the hills and a smooth male Moon rose again without him. Yet still we honour Mother Rahab with scarlet, purple and white; all is not yet lost, nor are we the doomed folk that we seem. Is Caleb not of Tubal? In the likeness of a dog he minded the sheep of his uncle Jabal; in the form of a dog he discovered the purple-fish for his uncle Jubal. Caleb is the perfection of Tubal. He reigned, ceased, reigned again, and will reign once more. When the hour comes, when the Virgin of the Moon conceives, when the Sun Child is begotten again in Caleb, when Jerahmeel puts on cloth of Bozrah scarlet and all the valiant men of Edom shout together for joy, then we will be a great people again, as in ancient times."

Kenah's ecstatic words fell so wide of the Jewish Scriptures that Joachim piously stopped his ears against them; yet wagged his head out of courtesy. He continued with the Kenites in their slow wanderings northward until the appointed forty days were nearly done; then parted from them in friendship and hastened hopefully back to Jerusalem.

CHAPTER THREE THE BIRTH OF MARY

Meanwhile Joachim's servants had returned to Hannah at Cocheba, but without any message from him. They said: "Our lord ordered us to return home, all except the groom; our lord appeared to be resolved on a journey."

When she pressed them, they told her the Temple rumour of Joachim's humiliation at the gate of the Treasury. She grew heavy-hearted and said to Judith, her little maid: "Bring me my mourning garments."

"Oh, mistress, is one of your kinsfolk dead?"

"No, but I am mourning for the child that will never be born to me, and for the husband who has left me without a word and gone, I fear, to search for a likely concubine, or it may even be for another wife."

Judith tried to comfort her. "You are young yet and beautiful, and my lord is old. If he should presently fall sick and die, then it would be his brother's duty by the Levirate Law to marry you and raise up children in his memory. Your husband's brother is the younger by twenty years, and a hearty man with seven fine children of his own."

Hannah said: "The Lord forbid that I should ever look forward to the death of my husband, who has never stinted me in anything and is a just and devout man." She cut her hair close to her head and continued to mourn while four Sabbaths passed.

Judith came to Hannah early one morning. "Mistress, do you not hear the shouting and music in the streets? Do you not know that the Feast of Tabernacles is already upon us? Take off your mourning garments and let us ride up together to Jerusalem in the company of your neighbours to lodge with your sister there and celebrate the season of love."

Hannah said angrily: "Leave me to my grief!"

But Judith would not leave her. "Mistress," she cried, "your kinsfolk will be coming to the Feast from all the villages, and if you miss their gossip you will grieve for a twelvemonth. Why heap misery upon misery?"

"Leave me to my grief," Hannah repeated, but in a gentler voice.

Judith stood there boldly, arms akimbo and legs straddled apart. "There was a woman," she said, "in the days of the Judges and she was childless like yourself, and of the same name. What did she do? She did not sit at home, mourning to herself like an old owl in a bush. She went up to the Lord's chief sanctuary, which was at Shiloh, to welcome in the New Year, and there she ate and drank, concealing her misery. Afterwards she caught hold of one of the pillars of the Shrine and prayed to the Lord for a child, silently and grimly like one who at the sheep-shearing wrestles for a prize. Eli the High Priest, my lord's ancestor, saw her lips moving and her body writhing. He took her for a drunkard; but she told him what was amiss, how she was childless and how her neighbours taunted her. At this, Eli assured her that all would be well if she came to the Shrine to worship early in the morning while it was still dark. She did so, and nine months later a fine child was born to her, and a fine child indeed, for it was Samuel the prophet.

"Fetch me clean clothes," said Hannah with sudden resolution. "Select some fitting for the occasion, for I will go to Jerusalem after all. And my bond-maid Judith shall come with me." As she spoke the high tenor voice of the priest rang down the village street: "Arise, let us go up to Zion, to the House of the Lord!"

They rode up together to Jerusalem the same day, in a carriage drawn by white asses. Joachim owned six pairs of white asses, and this was the finest pair of all. Presently they overtook the faithful of Cocheba who had started some hours before them: men, women and children in holiday dress trudging on foot with gifts of grapes and figs and pigeons carried in baskets on their shoulders; driving before them a fat bullock with gilded horns and a crown of olive for sacrifice; flute-players leading the procession. Every village of Judah was honouring Jehovah in the same style and the roads were clouded with dust. Outside the gates of Jerusalem the citizens lined the roads and shouted greetings.

The streets of the City resembled a forest. Green branches were fastened to the houses: arbours had been built at each of the City gates, in every square and on every house-top. In the markets, beasts and poultry were for sale in prodigious quantity, warranted suitable for sacrifice. There were stalls for fruit and sweetmeats, and wine-stalls; everywhere little boys ran about with armfuls of thyrsi for sale, and branches of quince. The thyrsi were for celebrants to carry in their right hands during their joyful procession around the altar of burned offering; the branches of quince were to be carried in their left hands at the same time.

Judith asked Hannah: "Mistress, is it true that this Feast was instituted to remind the Israelites of their desert wanderings with Moses, when they lived in arbours, not in stone houses? It is hard to believe that the desert provided sufficient leafy trees for the purpose."

"You are right, daughter. The Feast was celebrated on this mountain centuries before the birth of Moses, but do not quote me as having said so, for I shall deny it."

"Since it seems that you know more than the priests, Mistress, will you tell me why the branches of the thyrsus are tied together in threes—willow, palm and myrtle—the palm in the middle, the myrtle on the right hand, the willow on the left?"

"Though I do not know more than the priests, at least I am free to tell you what I do know. This is the Festival of Fruits, the Festival of Eve's Full Moon. Once when the moon shone full in Eden the Second Eve, our mother, plucked myrtle and smelt it, saying: 'A tree fit for an arbour of love', for she longed for Adam's kisses. She plucked a palm leaf and plaited it into a fan, saying: 'Here is a fan to warm up the fire', for at that time Adam loved her only as a sister. This fan she hid. She also plucked a palm branch, with the leaf still in its knob, saying: 'Here is a sceptre. I will give it to Adam, telling him: "Rule me, if you will, with this knobbed sceptre."' Lastly she plucked willow—the willow that has red rind and lance-like foliage—saying: 'Here are branches suitable for a cradle.' For the new moon seemed like a cradle to her, and Eve longed for a child."

"Mistress, the quince boughs that I see—for what reason are they carried?"

"It is said that our mother Eve, by giving Adam quince to eat, forced him to love her as she required to be loved."

"But the star of the quince which childless women eat in the hope of quickening their wombs—"

"It has no virtue," Hannah interrupted. "I have eaten the thing with prayers every Feast for seven years."

"They say that the quinces of Corfu succeed where all others fail."

"Then they are wrong. Twice I have sent for Corfu quinces, once from the islet of Macris itself. It was money thrown away."

Judith clucked in commiseration.

"I have tried everything," sighed Hannah.

They drove on in silence for a while.

Judith began again: "I once heard a woman say—an old, old Jebusite woman—that it was the First Eve who planted the tree of the garden, and Adam who plucked the forbidden fruit, and the First Eve who expelled him for his fault."

Hannah flushed. "The old woman must have been drunken. You abuse my confidence. Let me never hear you repeat such dangerous tales again in my hearing."

Judith laughed silently, for she was herself a Jebusite. The Jebusites were the poor people of Jerusalem, descended from the original Canaanite inhabitants, whom because of their usefulness as slaves and menials the Jews forgave their many idolatrous superstitions. At this Feast they still secretly worshipped the Goddess Anatha, after whom the village of Bethany was named and whose sacred lioness had mothered the tribe of Judah; and at the Passover, or Feast of Unleavened Bread, they still mourned for Tammuz, her murdered son, the God of the Barley Sheaf.

Hannah's sister welcomed them to her house, where they sang hymns, told tales and gossiped in the roof-top arbour until midnight. On the next day the Feast began. The sacrifices on this first day were a he-goat for a sin-offering, two rams, thirteen bullocks with gilded horns, and fourteen lambs. The goat was for the past year; the rams for summer and winter; the bullocks for the thirteen new moons; the lambs for the first fourteen days of each month, when the moon is young. With each beast went a sacrifice of flour and oil, and salt to make the flames burn blue. Then followed the Night of the Women, when tall golden four-branched candlesticks were erected and lighted up in the Women's Court at the Temple, and the priests and Levites danced a torch-dance around them, with trumpet music and rhythmic shaking of the thyrsi to each of the four quarters of Heaven in turn, and aloft to the zenith. These gestures had once been made in honour of Anatha, marking out the five points of her pyramid of power; but now Jehovah claimed all the honour.

Towards evening Judith said to Hannah: "Mistress, let us go to the Women's Court and afterwards join the merry-makers in the streets."

"We will go to the Court, but afterwards we will return to this house. Since my husband has ridden off, I do not know where, it would be unseemly for me to go about the streets with you and seem to rejoice."

"Eve's moon shines only once a year. Here are the clothes fitting for the occasion which you asked me to select from your cedar-wood coffer."

Hannah recognized the bridal dress which she had worn ten years before at her wedding. She looked steadily into Judith's eyes and asked: "What is this folly, daughter?"

Judith blushed. "We are commanded to rejoice to-night and to put on our richest clothes. These are your richest clothes, Mistress, and what woman rejoices more than one who wears her bridal dress?"

Hannah gently fingered the many-coloured embroidery and said after a long silence, but in the voice of one who wishes to be persuaded: "How can I go dressed as a bride, daughter, when I have been married for ten years?"

"If you wear your bridal dress nobody will know you for the wife of my lord Joachim; and you may rejoice in the streets to your heart's content."

"But the headband is missing. The moths fretted away the wool and I put it aside to mend."

"Here is a better headband, Mistress, than the one in which you were married. It is a gift from your bond-maid Judith, who loves you."

Hannah looked at the purple headband, braided with pearls and embroidered with gold and scarlet thread. She asked severely: "From whom is this beautiful thing stolen?"

"It is stolen from nobody. Before I came to you I was under bond to my lord's kinswoman Jemima, who inherited jewels and clothes from her stepmother. When I left her, she praised me for my dutifulness and gave me the headband. She said: 'Since you are now to serve in the house of Joachim of Cocheba, who is of the Heirs of David, this headband may win your mistress's favour or soften her heart if you displease her. I am not of royal blood and neither are you; we may not wear it.'"

Hannah's tears flowed afresh. She was sorely tempted to wear the dress and the headband; but dared not.

Judith asked: "How long will you continue to humble your heart, Mistress?"

"So long as my double grief continues. Is it a little thing to be childless? Is it a little thing to be suddenly forsaken by a noble husband?"

Judith laughed gaily. "Wash your face, paint your eyes with green copper paint from Sinai, rub spikenard between your breasts. Wear this royal headband and the bridal dress and come out with me quickly while the household is busily feasting in the arbour."

"Begone from my presence," Hannah cried angrily. "I have never sinned against my husband all these years and it would be folly to begin now. Someone has lent you this headband in the hope that it will lure me out merry-making to my shame; it is some bold lover of your own who wishes me to become an accomplice in your wantonness."

"The headband was given me by a devout woman, as I call the Lord to witness! Are you inviting me to answer your anger with curses? I should do so indeed if I thought that any curse of mine would sting you into wisdom. But it would be presumptuous in me to say more when the Lord himself has cursed you by shutting up your womb and making you the butt of your fertile sisters." With that she ran away.

Hannah took up the purple headband, of which the chief ornament was a silver crescent-moon, curved around a six-pointed Star of David stitched in gold and scarlet: the golden pyramid of Anatha, interlocked with the scarlet vau triangle, her wedge. On either side of the star were embroidered myrtle-twigs, bells, cedar-trees, scallop-shells and pomegranates, the tokens of queenship. She considered the headband and tied it across her brow, but it looked out of place on her cropped head. Then she noticed that Judith had set a large round basket beside the bed; and in it lay an Egyptian wig with crimped golden hair. She tried it on and it fitted her. She bound the headband across her brow again, then picked up her copper mirror and looked at herself. "Judith is right," she thought. "I am still young, still beautiful." Her image smiled back at her. She washed her face, painted her eyes, rubbed spikenard between her breasts, perfumed her bridal dress with myrrh and put it on. Then she clapped her hands for Judith, who came running in, dressed in gaily coloured clothes. They went out together quickly, shrouded in dark cloaks, without a word to anyone; and no one saw them go.

When they came to the end of the street, Hannah said: "I hear the sound of trumpets. My heart fails me. I am ashamed to go up to the Women's Court; if I do, someone in the crowd will surely recognize me."

"Where then shall we go?"

"Let the Lord guide our feet."

Judith led her this way and that through the narrow streets of the Old Quarter in the direction of the Fish Gate. This was the Jebusite quarter.

It seemed like a dream to Hannah. Her shoes seemed scarcely to touch the pavement, she skimmed like a swallow. No man molested them as they went, though the City was filled with drunkards that night and twice they avoided a skirmish between screaming partisans who used the festal thyrsus for a club. At last Judith led Hannah down a narrow lane and, without pausing, pushed at a great gate which stood at the end of it. It swung open on well-oiled hinges and they found themselves in a deserted court; on the left hand were stables, on the right an ancient wall with an ornamental door standing ajar.

They passed through the door into a garden. It was dusk and the noise of the festival came thinly through the boughs of the fruit-trees, so that as she paused for a moment with pounding heart Hannah could hear the plash of a fountain from the further end of the garden, where coloured lights were burning. She went eagerly towards the lights, while Judith remained standing at the garden door. They were lanterns, with coloured panes, hung outside a spacious arbour, at the back of which wax candles were burning steadily in a tall eight-branched candlestick. In the middle grew a laurel-tree, and fastened to it was a nest of silver filigree work containing golden sparrow fledgelings, with wide-open mouths; the hen-bird perched on the edge of the nest, a jewelled butterfly in her bill.

"Come here, Judith!" called Hannah. "Come quickly, my child, and see this pretty nest."

There was no answer, and when Hannah went back to the door she found it bolted and Judith gone away. Yet she was not a prisoner, for the bolts were shot from inside. She returned wonderingly to the arbour. In a dark corner she saw a couch, spread with a purple cloth, which had escaped her notice when she first went in. She lay down upon it, with her head on a soft pillow, and sighed for pleasure, smiling up at the nest of sparrows.

Presently she closed her eyes and began to pray, silently and grimly, as her namesake had once prayed at Shiloh; and when she opened them again, a grave bearded man was bending over her, so splendidly dressed that he seemed to be an envoy of some god. On a blue cord about his neck he wore an egg-shaped jewel set with twelve bright gems of different colours which winked in the candlelight. He took her by the wrist of the right hand and said in a deep voice: "Your prayer has been heard, Hannah. Take this cup and drink it, in honour of the Lord of this Feast."

She asked: "Sir, who are you?"

"I am the servant of One of whom it is written: 'He scorneth the multitude of the City.'"

She asked again: "Sir, what is the egg-shaped jewel that you wear about your neck?"

"When the childless Shulamite heiress asked the prophet Elisha this very question, he answered: 'Beloved of the Lord, consult the silver moon of your headband.' Now drink as the Shulamite woman also drank."

He put a goblet into her hand. She raised it to her lips and drank obediently. It was sweet wine, with an aromatic scent and a bitter after-taste. It seemed to her that the arbour was filled with music though she saw no musicians. Then the candles were suddenly extinguished and the air grew bright with torches whirled in a figure-of-eight. He set the seed of a lotus between her lips, saying: "Swallow this seed whole, Daughter of Michal: do not mar it with your teeth, for it is a human soul."

She swallowed the seed, and presently her limbs grew numb and her senses began to fail her. There was a roaring in her ears, like a tempest at sea, and it seemed to her that the round earth was wrenched from its socket and the stars danced in ecstasy; the Moon and the Sun rushed together with a shout. She was caught up in a whirlwind to heaven; and knew no more.

***

When she awoke, she was lying in her own bed at her sister's house and it was the evening of the second day of the Feast. She clapped her hands for Judith, who hastened to her bedside and wept for joy. "Oh, Mistress," she said, "I had thought you dead, you lay in so deep a swoon. You have slept now for a whole night and day."

Hannah, still drowsy, asked: "How did I come here, daughter?"

Judith opened her eyes wide. "How did you come here indeed! I do not know what my mistress means."

"How? Did I find my way home from the garden of the laurel-tree without your guidance?"

"Mistress, you have lain here without stirring for a whole night and day since you took this mirror to look into it."

Hannah found that she was not wearing her bridal dress as she had thought, but the one in which she had come to Jerusalem, and that she had no wig on her head nor any headband about it. She sighed and said: "Why, then it is the Lord's mercy. I was tempted to a great sin, and might perhaps have enticed your feet into the snare as well, had you come out with me."

"The Lord forbid! I do not know what my mistress means."

"Instead," Hannah continued, "I have been rewarded with a wonderful dream. I dreamed that I went out in my bridal dress wearing a royal headband that you had offered me, and a head of golden curls, and presently came into an arbour of laurels where I saw a golden candlestick lighted, and a silver nest filled with golden sparrows. There I prayed fervently, reclining on a couch until an angel of the Lord appeared. He called me by my name and said that my prayer had been heard. In my dream he gave me scented wine to drink and a lotus-seed to swallow whole, and my soul was caught up in a whirlwind to the third heaven."

"Oh, Mistress, what a dream of dreams! May it prove prophetic of good!"

They both offered up praise together. Hannah said: "I charge you to tell nobody of my dream."

"I am a discreet woman."

"You have been a kind and faithful servant to me, Judith, and I will reward you well. I will buy you three ells of fine cloth and a new cloak before we return to Cocheba."

"Give, Mistress, and I will be grateful, but I am already well recompensed for any service that I may have done you."

"For your modest answer I will make it six ells of cloth and a pair of shoes besides the cloak."

Yet Judith spoke the truth. She had already taken back the royal headband and the wig to Anna, the guardian mother of the Temple virgins. She had said: "Here are the things, Holy One, that you entrusted to me. Praise me, if you please, and say that I have obeyed your orders well."

Anna had answered: "I praise you, daughter, and twenty pieces of gold will to-day be paid to your mother to buy you a worthy husband; but if you let anyone know, by sign or word, what you have done to-night you shall die miserably, you and all your household."

"I am a discreet woman."

***

The Feast of Tabernacles was over. Hannah one morning came to Joachim, to whisper in his ear: "Husband, I think that I am with child."

He looked strangely at her. After a while he said: "Tell me again, woman, when you are sure of the matter. 'I think' is nothing."

A month later, as he returned from a visit to Jericho, Hannah came to meet him, and this time she said: "Husband, I know that I am with child." She clasped his neck and wept for joy.

Joachim was astonished and yet not astonished. He presently summoned his bailiff and ordered him to choose unblemished lambs and calves for sacrifice—twelve lambs and ten calves, and a score of kids as well. These he took next day in a wagon to Jerusalem and presented them at the Temple for a sacrifice of prosperity, but without explaining in what his prosperity consisted.

He still doubted in his heart as he approached the steps of the Priests' Court, though in conformity with Temple ritual he mounted them with as much show of alacrity as if he were assaulting a city. He thought: "If the Lord is indeed reconciled to me and has granted my prayer, doubtless the golden plate on the High Priest's mitre above his brow will make this plain to me."

For as it happened, the High Priest himself was officiating that day; it was a feast of the New Moon. As he approached the High Priest, who stood by the Altar of Sacrifice, and asked permission to make his offerings, Joachim gazed earnestly at the golden plate, to see whether it were bright or cloudy. It shone bright as flame, and he said to himself: "Now I know that my sins are forgiven me and my prayers heard, and the prayers of my wife Hannah."

The High Priest readily gave him permission, addressing him by name and asking whether Peace were with him.

A subordinate priest took Joachim's beasts from the hands of the Temple servants. They kicked and struggled and the priest commented on their fine condition; then, turning their heads to the north, one after the other, with a short prayer of dedication, he cut their throats and, catching the blood in a silver vessel, poured it on the earth around the altar. He next entrusted the carcases to the team of Levite butchers, who, working dexterously on their marble slabs, drew out the entrails, which were at once washed in the fountain of the court, and cut out the joint of oblation—the thigh piece—from each carcase, together with the breast and right shoulder, which were the Levite's perquisites. Next, each oblation was wrapped around with a length of entrails and enclosed in a double layer of fat. The priest laid it on a golden plate, sprinkled it with sacred incense and salt, and finally, ascending the ramp of the altar barefooted, cast it with a short prayer on the sacrificial fire, which blazed up fiercely. The smoke rose straight upwards instead of eddying sickeningly around the Court, as often happened in wintry weather; and Joachim read this as another propitious sign.

The priest instructed him to send his servants to fetch what remained of the carcases, but he waived the privilege. "No, no, let them be given to the Temple servants, for this is truly an offering of prosperity." He went down from the Temple with a serene mind, and meeting by chance with his neighbour Reuben saluted him with surprising kindness, but told him nothing; not wishing to speak prematurely, lest his wife might miscarry or the child be born crooked.

RITUAL SLAYING OF KING-GOD

(From "The Origins of Early Semitic Ritual" by S. H. Hooke, British Academy, Oxford University Press, 1938)

"YAHU" AS A SOLAR ZEUS

(From "The Religion of Ancient Palestine in the Light of Archaeology," by S. A. Cook, British Academy, Oxford University Press, 1930)

KADESH WITH MIN AND RESHEPH

(From "The Religion of Ancient Palestine in the Light of Archaeology," by S. A. Cook, British Academy, Oxford University Press, 1930)

The months went by, and in the height of summer Hannah was brought to bed and delivered of a daughter. When she held the child in her arms and found it perfect in all its limbs, she cried: "The widow is no longer a widow and the childless woman is a mother. Who will run to my scornful neighbour, Reuben's wife, and tell her that I have borne a fine child?"

Joachim said: "Let no one go; for the child is young yet and may not live." But he was a scrupulous man and immediately sent out two servants to fetch Kenah the Rechabite. When he came, the Well of the Jawbone would be made over to him and his people by a deed of gift, and ninety-two sheep besides.

Kenah rode down from Carmel a week later, accompanied by witnesses. The gift was made and registered, and the young man, Kenah's nephew, prophesied sweetly as he played on the lyre. Kenah swore an oath of friendship with Joachim, saying: "If you or your wife or the child should ever stand in need of our help, these tents are your tents, come what may, and this people is your people." When he had returned to his pastures, he sent a woman secretly to Anna the guardian mother of the Temple virgins, to give her a set of carved Egyptian jewels for the casting of lots and for divination; with this gift went a casting-cup of Edomite sard and a white linen napkin to receive the lots.

Everyone was well satisfied: those who lived in houses as well as those who lived in tents.

CHAPTER FOUR A CERTAIN MAN

Joachim and his garrulous brother-in-law Cleopas were talking together in low tones by the well under the mulberry-tree at Cocheba. They did not refer to King Herod by name. It was always "He" or "That Man" or "A Certain Man", except that once or twice Joachim called him "The Edomite". There was no danger whatever of their remarks being overheard by one of Herod's numerous spies, but talking in this guarded way had become habitual with them. They knew that Herod himself would sometimes darken his hair with charcoal, disguise his features, put on common clothes and go out among the people as his own chief spy.

"For one of so wild and petulant a nature," said Cleopas, "a Certain Man has shown surprising patience in the development of his plans. How many years is it now since he first was set in authority over us?"

"It must be more than twenty-five years."

"It seems longer. Almost I could admire him for his political skill and the energy of his rule, which has brought peace and a sort of prosperity to Israel, did I not hate him so sincerely as a secret enemy of our God."

"Prosperity?" cried Joachim. "The shadow of prosperity, not the substance: the palace enriched at the expense of the hut, the robes of State dyed in the life-blood of the peasant. Peace? A Roman peace, imposed on the remnant who survive the slaughter."

Cleopas agreed. "To be sure, we must never forget his impious assault on the Holy City, how the madmen under his command (though he made a pretence of restraining their fury) reddened their swords in the narrow streets on the aged, on children, even on women. We must never forget the principal men whom he murdered for remaining loyal to King Antigonus the Maccabee, and whose confiscated treasures filled his coffers. Forty-five of them he murdered, among them my own uncle Phineas. The passage of time cannot wipe out the blood. But is it not strange that though in our hearts we know the Edomite to be an enemy of our God, there are so few open breaches of the Law with which we can reproach him? The Alexandrian Doctors whom he employs to justify his actions are more cunning than foxes or serpents."

"I hear that he has won another legal victory, in the matter of the edict about house-breakers."

"He has indeed."

"Tell me about it, my dear Cleopas. It has come to me only as vague gossip, brought in by the servants."

"There were, as you know, numerous cases of daylight housebreaking reported in Jerusalem during Passover week, all the work of a single powerful gang, and then more at Purim. The thieves made some wonderful hauls while the householders and their families were away at the Temple, usually having left only some old crippled servant to guard the house. In festival times, of course, there are so many strangers in the streets that detection is almost impossible once the thieves have left the house with their spoil. The victims of these robberies, as it happened, were all either Edomites, Greeks or Egyptian Jews of That Man's party. Naturally this discrimination vexed him: last week he issued an edict ordering convicted house-breakers to be stripped of all their goods and permanently banished from his dominions. The Presidents of the High Court were shocked. They sent delegates to protest that this was dead contrary to the Law of Moses."

"They were right. The punishment for theft is that the convicted person must, with certain exceptions, restore fourfold what he has taken; and if he cannot do so, then he may be sold into slavery for no longer than six years, but sold to a Jew, not a foreigner, so that he may continue as a member of the congregation."

"The delegates," continued Cleopas, "pointed out that to banish the offender from this kingdom is to cut him off from the congregation and to prevent his return even in festival time, when it is his duty to join in public devotions."

"Exactly."

"And 'Exactly,' said That Man too. 'Exactly,' he said. 'The robberies are all committed on holy days, which is the very time that thieves must be forbidden the City. My edict is directed against the Sons of Belial who instead of religiously joining in public devotions break irreligiously into the houses of those who do.' 'But,' the delegates further protest, 'to banish the offender from the kingdom without a penny is equivalent to selling him into foreign slavery, which is dead contrary to the Law.' 'Not so,' says he. 'In the time of Moses there were no Israelitish communities outside the boundaries of the desert camp. But now there are as many of the Lord's people resident outside my dominions as inside, or more; if any one of them is forbidden to worship the Lord in his ancestral manner that is no fault of mine. I have intervened often and successfully on their behalf. Let the thieves go to your kinsfolk of Alexandria or Damascus or Babylon or Pontus or wherever they please, but I will not tolerate them in the kingdom.' The delegates exclaim: 'Well did David say that he would rather be a janitor of the Lord's House than dwell comfortably in the tents of the heathen!' Herod answers: 'And what honest man would not? But the Eighth Commandment is positive: "Thou shalt not steal." And theft is there listed with Sabbath-breaking, adultery, murder, idolatry, blasphemy, witchcraft, false-witness—all sins that are punished with death. Learned men, do you not think it an anomaly that the Eighth Commandment should be the only one of the ten which may be broken without fear of death or disgrace?' Then the delegates bow so low as nearly to knock their heads on the floor and ask humbly: 'Who are we to question the wisdom of the Law?' Herod says: 'Menelaus, fetch me the ancient roll of the Law! Find me the passage about thieving.'"

"You imitate him to the life."

"And that greasy cemetery-hog Menelaus waddles to the book-case and fumbles about among the brittle papyrus-rolls and presently in his snuffling voice reads out a text from the twenty-second chapter of Exodus which none of us have ever heard before, to the effect that any man who breaks into a neighbour's house on a Feast day shall surely die, for he dishonours the Lord besides wronging his neighbour. Herod then dismisses the delegates, saying: 'You have heard the words. And is not my roll of the Law of greater authority than yours, learned men? Read the title. Does it not date from the reign of King Hezekiah? Was it not brought to Egypt by Onias the High Priest, from whose lineal successor I had it as a precious gift? I fear that your rolls have become defective by rough handling and careless copying from a tattered original.' So his edict stands. Nobody dares accuse the King of forgery, or publicly plead on behalf of the house-breakers that the spoiling of Egyptians is no crime, and that over Edom the Lord has cast his shoe to enslave it."

Joachim said warmly: "Brother, it is as well that such puerile pleas are not raised. Our learned teacher Hillel has warned us to distinguish between particular and general commandments of our God. A particular commandment was given to our ancestors for the despoliation of those who had robbed and enslaved them; but to interpret it as a general licence to cheat and steal from Egyptians to-day, is that not monstrous? The text about Edom is also quoted shamefully out of context; that the anger of the Lord was kindled against Edom centuries ago does not license house-breakers nowadays to carry off the goods of individual Edomites. Well, as for the edict, we shall see whether it has the deterrent effect that its author hopes. But I dislike the innovation. I should even prefer to see the rascals stoned to death for a breach of the Sabbath—to force one's way into a locked house is undoubtedly work, just as fighting is, and fighting on a holy day is forbidden. That they should be banished for theft is intolerable."

"But why, Brother Joachim, do you call him the Edomite? You must know as well as I do that, though born in Edom, he is no more descended from Esau than I am."

"I call him an Edomite to avoid the necessity of using a more honourable name. Yes, I am aware that his grandfather was captured as a child by Edomite brigands in their sack of Philistine Ascalon—the son of a priest of the abominable local Sun-god, and that the priest was unable to pay the immense ransom demanded, so that the child was brought up as an Edomite. But if a mere Philistine slave, why was his ransom set at so high a figure? Why was he given high rank by the Edomites and afterwards courted by King Alexander Jannaeus the Maccabee? The child's father was a Slave of the God, which in Philistia usually means a member of a captured, or refugee, priesthood. Can you positively declare that he was a Philistine? Nicolaus of Damascus writes that the ancestors of That Man returned from Babylon with Ezra, being Calebites of Bethlehem."

"Nicolaus of Damascus is a liar!"

"Nicolaus as an eminent barrister has no conscience in his handling of a brief, but I have never known him to tamper with historical facts. And is it impossible that a Certain Man is indeed a Calebite of Bethlehem and that his fathers served idols of the Abominable One in the days of our disgrace? And that during the Maccabean Wars the priesthood fled with their idols to Philistia, where they were welcomed by their co-religionists?"

Cleopas grunted doubtfully. "Be that as it may, it was an evil hour in which King Alexander Jannaeus befriended the grandfather of That Man, who has cut off the last male remnants of the House of Maccabee, one by one."

They pondered the matter in silence. After a while Cleopas said again, recalling the death of Herod's Maccabean wife Mariamne: "I was present at the execution of a Certain Man's lovely wife. Oh, who can describe her beauty, the last brilliant flower of a heroic race? The Rose of Sharon was a weed compared with her. Yet a worm lay in the bloom. Her own mother, condemned on the same occasion, heaped reproaches on her for having involved both of them in ruin by her wantonness. And though it was thought by some that Alexandra spoke as she did in hope of saving her own life at the expense of her daughter's honour, alas, in my ears the words rang true! Mariamne walked too scornfully for innocence. Oh, Joachim, adultery is a sin that cannot be either palliated or pardoned. Granted that Mariamne's husband had been responsible for the death of her father, her brother, her uncle and her venerable maimed grandfather, and that he had twice given provisional orders, when setting out on a dangerous mission, that she should be despatched if he failed to return: yet let us be just to him. He never raised his voice or hand against her, and her duty was clearly towards him as her husband and the father of her sons. A woman must obey her husband and be faithful to his bed, whatever the provocation. For she is only a woman, though the best of women; and he is at least a man, though the worst of men."

"It is a severe law and lays a great burden of responsibility on a father in the choice of a son-in-law. I am glad to be quit of the burden in the case of my daughter Miriam: Simon the High Priest is to choose a husband for her."

"Simon, for all his faults, has a good conscience towards the Lord and men, and you may be sure that you will not be disgraced in your son-in-law. But we were speaking of Mariamne's infidelities."

"Some declare that the Edomite loved her so dearly that he could not bear to think of her lying in the arms of another even when he was himself dead, and that this was why he gave the provisional order for her despatch. They recall the extravagant signs of grief that he showed after her death, and there is even an obscene story current that he preserved her corpse in myrrh with necrophilous intention. Yet they forget that he appeared no less afflicted and distraught after her brother had been drowned in the Bath at Jericho, as if by accident, but, as we know, at his express order. Such grief is feigned as much to placate the dead person's ghost as to distract public inquiry. He never loved her. He married her to benefit from the popular esteem in which the Maccabees had for so long been held in Israel. Yet one by one he rooted them out, and finally he destroyed her too, without pity—as, mark my words, he will destroy the handsome sons whom she bore him and to whom he pretends such fatherly affection."

"I will mark your words," said Cleopas, "but I cannot believe that he is such a wild beast that he would kill his own sons merely because their mother was a Maccabee. Besides, if he did not love her passionately, why did he trouble to order her despatch in the event of his death?"

"He feared, I suppose, that she would marry some enemy of his and found a new dynasty upon the issue of the marriage. He could not bear to think that the heirs of his body would not reign over Israel for as many generations at least as David's did."

"Why then do you suppose that he is intent on killing Mariamne's sons? Does he doubt their paternity? They certainly resemble him closely."

"They are nothing to him. He hates to think that we say secretly of them: 'They are well-born on one side at least.' But he has other sons. Do not overlook his eldest, Antipater, who is marked out as the future king. It was for his benefit that Mariamne was to die, and later did die; it will be for his benefit that Mariamne's sons will die in their turn. Let no one underrate Antipater's claims. Herod may even make him co-ruler with himself one day, in the Egyptian style."

"I had forgotten his very existence. What sort of a man is he, kinsman?"

"Though I have inquired closely, I cannot pretend that I have yet heard one evil word spoken against him by those who know him well. He is reputedly studious and generous, without ambition or malice, punctual in payment, scrupulous in his observance of the Law, besides being a wonderful huntsman of the desert ostrich, the antelope and the wild-ox. Nevertheless, even if this account is true, such good qualities are wasted on his father's son; and for all I know he may be as false a dissembler as ever wore sandals. But I will not reveal my worst fears to you until That Man's plots have matured. When you hear news that the sons of Mariamne are dead, come to my house again, and I will sing you a further prophecy. Meanwhile, I will give you a clue to my fears. Do you recollect the story of the golden fetish of Dora?"

Cleopas smiled. This trophy had been taken from the Edomites by King Alexander Jannaeus in the wars, the hollow head of an onager, or wild-ass, made of pure gold, with red jewels for eyes and teeth of ivory: it was thought to be of ancient Egyptian workmanship. Alexander Jannaeus had captured it from the Edomites of Dora or Adoraim, a city close to Hebron, for while the Jews were in Captivity, the Edomites had reconquered their ancient territories in Southern Judaea. They set great store by this fetish, which they called the Mask of Nimrod. When it was brought back in triumph to Jerusalem, an Edomite named Zabidus who pretended to be a traitor to his country had come before Alexander Jannaeus and said: "Do you not know your good fortune? By means of this mask you can utterly defeat Kozi, who is called Nimrod, the Abominable God of Dora, and expel him from the whole region."

Alexander, who was High Priest as well as King, asked: "How can that be?"

Zabidus replied: "The Evil One can be enticed to this mountain by conjuration."

"That is forbidden by the Law."

"I will perform the elicitation without offence to the Law."

Alexander gave his consent when Zabidus undertook to utter the necessary spells outside the Temple precincts in the Valley of the Jebusites, also called the Cheesemongers' Valley.

Zabidus took down the mask from the Beautiful Gate where it was fastened, wrapped it in a dark blanket and set the bundle high on a cornice of the wall. He warned those who watched him: "If you value your lives, keep away from this accursed trophy."

Then, dressed all in white, he descended into the valley and stood alone in the level place at the bottom. On his head he set a round wooden frame in which fifteen lighted candles were arranged at intervals, ensconced in stained-glass lamps, besides five flaming torches fixed in an inner ring of the frame. He then danced slowly about in geometrical figures, blessing the name of Jehovah and calling upon the God of Dora to come up in haste to Jerusalem and there make obeisance to his rightful Lord, the God of Israel. A multitude of Jews watched from the City walls and the sides of the valley, being forbidden to approach anywhere near him or to utter any sound that might break the spell. The night was moonless and the whirling and twinkling of the tiny lamps below as Zabidus moved, now in a spiral, now in an ellipse, now in a figure-of-eight, fascinated them. Suddenly he uttered a great cry, as of despair and terror, the lights went out and a horrific wailing noise was heard.

No one knew what had happened. Some believed that Zabidus, failing in his project, had been struck dead by Jehovah for his presumption. Others, that all was well, that they had heard the death-cry of the Abomination of Dora. But none ventured into the valley to discover the truth until dawn broke. Then they found the frame with the lamps, and the white robes which Zabidus had worn, neatly folded, but nothing else. When a servant of the King opened the bundle on the wall, intending to restore the mask to the Beautiful Gate, it was found to contain only a lump of red clay, which is the sign-manual of the Edomite. The mask was never recovered.

"He was a bold rogue," said Cleopas. "But I cannot grieve greatly for the loss long ago of a golden ass's head from the Temple trophies."

"It is my conviction," said Joachim slowly, "that the Edomite has obtained the relic from the family of Zabidus by marriage with Doris, whose home is at Dora, and intends to make mischief with it in the name of Nimrod. You are mistaken in calling it an ass's head; for though a man may pile burdens on an ass and beat it to his heart's content, he would be either a fool or a Samson who dared to do the same with an onager. Onagers are man-killers, as is often proved in the Circus when prisoners of war are set to hunt wild beasts. They are swift as swallows, cunning as ichneumons, murderous as Arabian bandits."

"But who or what is Nimrod? The Nimrod of whom I have read was a son of Cush, dead these two thousand years."

"I should soil my mouth if I told you who and what the Edomites believe him to be. But you may be sure that he is a power to be reckoned with. You will remember at least that Nimrod, the lord of three hundred and sixty-five warriors, persecuted Abraham because he would not fall down and worship false gods? I fear that a Certain Man will persecute Israel for the same reason in the name of Nimrod."

"The Lord God forbid!" cried Cleopas in alarm.

***

Herod took his sons by Mariamne to Rome, where they were given a suite of rooms in the Palace of the Emperor Augustus. He sup plied them with an over-generous allowance of money, and the Jewish tutors in whose charge he left them, though of upright soul and orthodox views, were chosen by him principally for their lack of courage and authority. It seems that his secret intention was that the boys should learn to love the profligate habits of the Roman youth and ruin themselves by a scornful disregard of the Law of Israel; for when after a few years he had assured himself that they were perfect Romans he called them home and at Jerusalem subjected them to a strict religious discipline. He married one of them to his niece, the daughter of his sister Salome, and the other to a daughter of Archelaus, the petty king of Cappadocia. Neither was satisfied with his marriage, and both chafed at their enforced studies of the Hebrew Scriptures, at the grave and tedious devotions, the irritating formalities required of them, the Law's restrictions on their eating, drinking and vicious pursuits, and at the monotony of Sabbath-day observance. Cunning Herod also arranged that they should hear Palace gossip about events which until then had been kept secret from them, so that they should learn to hate him as the murderer of their mother and relatives. Alexander, the elder, was told that the beautiful dresses and jewels worn by their father's latest wives were really his own property, having been part of his mother's wardrobe. Aristobulus, the younger, was taught to think himself disgraced by marriage to the daughter of Salome, whose accusations had brought his mother to execution. But for a long while Herod played the indulgent father and turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to their rebellious ways, until they dared to go further and hint at their intention of avenging their mother's murder.

About this time Herod left Jerusalem for Asia Minor, where his old friend Agrippa, the victor of Actium, and next to Augustus himself the most influential man in the Empire, was about to relinquish his command of the Armies of the East. Herod begged Agrippa to restore the Jewish merchants settled in certain Ionian cities to the ancient privileges which the Greek civic authorities had denied them, especially freedom to worship in their ancestral manner, the right to send gifts to the Temple, and exemption from military service. Agrippa thanked Herod heartily for calling the abuses to his attention; he confirmed the privileges of the merchants and sent an unfavourable report to Rome on the insolence and malice of the Greeks. When Herod returned to Jerusalem with this good news, and celebrated the occasion by remitting a quarter of the year's taxes, the leading Jews wished him all manner of happiness; and for once meant it.

During his absence Aristobulus and Alexander had become more resentful of him than ever. They had spoken openly of going to Rome and charging him before the Emperor with having brought false witnesses to destroy their innocent mother, and mentioned Archelaus of Cappadocia as the man who would intervene and secure justice for them. Their indiscretions were so notorious that Herod could not be easily reproached for his next action, that of restoring his eldest son Antipater to favour, as a warning to them that if they did not behave themselves better they might find themselves disinherited. Antipater had hitherto been forbidden to visit Jerusalem except for the festivals which every Jew who lived within a week's travel from the City was expected to attend. Now his arrival at the Palace excited the bitterest anger in the two princes, who continually insulted and abused him; but he bore their insults with good-humour and by assuming indifference earned Herod's public approval for his forbearance. Antipater was a grown man, of settled habits and unimpeachable character, but, since he had been educated in the Jewish colony of Alexandria, his Greek was not the purest Attic and his Latin was barbarous. When one day Alexander taunted him at a banquet for his provincialism and ignorance of the ways of the world, Herod good-humouredly undertook to repair these failings: he would send Antipater off at once to complete his education at Rome. Perhaps, when he returned, Alexander would think more highly of him.

Antipater was sent to Rome under the protection of Agrippa, and there he made as favourable an impression on the Imperial family as his two brothers had made an unfavourable one. Since Herod's father had been granted the Roman citizenship, Antipater was a citizen of the third generation, and Augustus gave him command of a regiment of allied cavalry. This appointment was no sinecure and Antipater soon distinguished himself as an energetic and capable officer. When news of his success reached Jerusalem, jealousy provoked Alexander to a passionate outburst of anger in the presence of his mother-in-law Salome, who repeated his words to Herod. Herod sternly cautioned Alexander, declaring that he was thoroughly displeased with his way of life and that of Aristobulus, that he had shown great forbearance towards them on account of their maternal ancestors, but that unless he observed an immediate improvement in both he would be forced to alter his Will in favour of their eldest brother.

Thereupon Alexander bought poison, intending, it is supposed, to destroy Herod before he had time to alter his Will, though this is not certain. Watchful spies seized the poison, and Herod immediately brought both sons to Rome, with witnesses, to accuse them before Augustus of a plot against his life.

The case against the princes looked black, and Augustus, who was under a long-standing obligation to Herod for his loyal maintenance of peace in the Near East, might well have condemned them to death, had not his sister Octavia, Mark Antony's widow, who had befriended them during their stay in Rome, pleaded for their lives; and had not certain influential senators, to whom Archelaus of Cappadocia had written letters, supported her plea.

Augustus decided that the evidence was not conclusive. He summed up: "Poisoners work in secret. They do not, my dear Herod, advertise their intentions beforehand as your sons are said to have done. Alexander and Aristobulus have in my opinion behaved like naughty children, not like mature criminals. They are jealous of the honours that their elder brother has earned by his prudence and modesty. And, by the by, it is only fair now to let them know that he has joined with my dear sister Octavia in a plea for clemency. He is their true friend, as an elder brother should be, and I trust that their unworthy jealousy of him will give place to gratitude and admiration. I cannot find it in my heart to condemn them, having suffered so many domestic misfortunes myself, and having seen so many vicious young men repent and reform in later life."

When the princes had recovered from their fright they were galled to think that their humiliation had been witnessed by Antipater, and exasperated by Antipater's congratulations on their acquittal. The truth was that he had too generous a heart to wish for the throne at the expense of his brothers' lives; but they judged him by their own standards of conduct to be a hypocrite and decided that his plea for clemency had been made solely to clear himself of the suspicion of having been concerned in their deaths.

They all sailed back to Judaea, where Herod called the leading Jews together at his Palace and informed them of what had happened. To the embarrassment of Antipater, who was present, he then said: "The Emperor has graciously permitted me to appoint my successor. I should dearly have loved to name Alexander and Aristobulus, my sons by the ill-fated Mariamne, as co-heirs in my dominions, for they are of the royal Maccabee blood, descendants of the glorious heroes who won for Israel the freedom which by the Lord's grace I have been able to preserve for you and your children through years of the greatest danger. Alas, they have not yet proved worthy to rule in Israel, and were my soul to be required of me to-night, with my former Will still remaining in force, I should die miserably, expecting that all my work would be undone within a few months. These princes do not yet understand the necessity of obeying the Law faithfully, and what is reprehensible in a private person is fifty times more so in a king to whom a vast multitude looks for guidance. I have decided to appoint my generous and pious son Antipater to succeed me, with the succession, however, to revert to Alexander and Aristobulus, jointly, after his death, though he may have sons surviving, if in your opinion they are then worthy to rule. If any of you, however, has cause to complain of this decision, I hope that he will speak up boldly at once before I record and seal it in a new Will."

No one dared to complain. Unquestionably Antipater was by far the most suitable man of the three to inherit the throne, and was moreover Herod's eldest son.

Antipater rose and briefly thanked his father for the good opinion he had of him, which he would try never to forfeit; but hoped, he said, that no new king would be crowned at Jerusalem for very many years to come. He ended: "And should it happen, Father, that my brothers please you better by their behaviour before long—and I am convinced that they are nobler men at heart than their rash tongues acknowledge them to be—I would not take it ill if you then decided them to be, after all, worthy of the throne of their maternal ancestors. On the contrary, I would be happy in their happiness, for we are all sons of one father and are bound together by natural obligations of love. I have only one modest request to make of you, for which nobody here can dare to blame me since I am commanded by our God to honour my mother as well as my father. It is this, that you will restore my mother Doris to your favour, seeing that you put her away for no fault of hers when you married Mariamne. She has remained faithful to you these many years, separated from your protection and care, without a word of complaint."

Herod cheerfully granted this request, restoring Doris to her former rights by an edict which he signed on the spot.

Alexander and Aristobulus presently found an unexpected ally in their Aunt Salome, who had fallen in love with an Arabian petty king named Sylleus but had been forbidden by Herod to marry him unless he consented to be circumcised. Sylleus explained that if he were circumcised his people would stone him to death, and therefore begged to be excused the rite, but Herod could not give his sister to an uncircumcised infidel without weakening his position with the Jews; he preferred to risk the enmity of both Salome and Sylleus. Salome was mad with rage. The intricacies of the subsequent Palace plots and counter-plots, in which most of Herod's wives became involved, are hardly worth unravelling, but at last she succeeded in stirring up trouble for Herod at Rome with the help of her lover Sylleus and of the influential Ionian Greeks whom Herod had offended in the matter of the Jewish merchants.

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

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

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

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

***

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

"You are welcome; but I sent you no invitation."

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

"This is bad news."

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER FIVE THE HEIRESS OF MICHAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antipater barely wetted his lips with the wine which Simon offered him. He took up a handful of milky new almonds and began absent-mindedly breaking them into pieces which he arranged on the broad edge of a golden salver in geometrical patterns. "Yes, Simon, I am troubled," he said with a sigh. "For a man to be King in Israel, or the King's son and deputy, is a poor thing when all his subjects despise him as an upstart. The orders which I give in my father's name are obeyed, but without alacrity except by the baser sort of people, and by the governing classes with studied surliness. Just now, as I crossed the Court, the ironical salutations with which I was greeted by the grandees were like whips across my face. I knew what they were thinking: 'What title has his father to the throne except that granted him by our enemies, the heathen Romans? And he himself is not even half Maccabee. He is the son of a heathenish Edomite woman, a grandniece of the accursed Zabidus.' If I am stern with them, they hate me as an oppressor; if indulgent, they despise me as a weakling. I know in my bones and blood that I am of their own race, and Jerusalem to me is home and the most wonderful city in the world. What I have come to ask you is this: how can I ever hope to earn the love and confidence of my people?"

Simon might have been expecting the question, so readily came his answer: "I will tell you, Prince. Royalty lies in a consciousness of royalty, as liberty lies in a consciousness of liberty. Know yourself royal, and royalty blazes golden from your forehead. Believe yourself an upstart, and you defeat yourself with that leaden belief."

"Cold comfort," said Antipater. "I cannot alter my condition by wishing that my mother at least had been a Hasmonean Maccabee.

Simon laughed dryly. "Prince, who are these royal Maccabees? Their ancestors were village joiners of Modin not more than a hundred and fifty years ago; Maccabee, as you know, means 'mallet' and was the nickname of Judas, son of Matathias, who led the rebellion. His brothers were all similarly nicknamed by their father after tools in his joiner's chest—for example, Eleazer was called 'Avaran', the awl. The Maccabee pedigree, if one searches back two or three generations beyond Matathias the joiner, is as full of holes as a sieve. It is not even established that he was a Levite. Certainly he was not of the House of Aaron."

"Nevertheless," said Antipater, "by their courage and virtue the Maccabees advanced themselves to royal dignity."

"Your father has done the same."

"Yet the Temple grandees sneeringly call him 'Herod of Ascalon', and 'Edomite Slave', rejecting him as a foreigner and usurper. 'The Maccabees,' they say, 'freed us from a foreign yoke. The man of Ascalon has fastened another yoke securely across our shoulders.'"

"Has your father never told you, Prince, that you are a thousand times better born than any Maccabee? That you stand in a direct line of succession from Caleb son of Jephunneh, who conquered Hebron in the days of Joshua?"

"He has hinted that we are Calebites, but I took this for one of his fancies. When he has dined well his mind teems with strange fancies."

"It is the truth, and he had it from me. Your great-grandfather's grandfather was a Calebite of Bethlehem who took refuge at Ascalon; as a child your great-grandfather was stolen from Ascalon by the Edomites, who honoured him as their prince."

"You did not tell my father this merely to please him?"

"Prince, I would even rather displease the King than forfeit my reputation as a scholar among my fellow-scholars."

"I did not accuse you of lying. I wondered whether you were perhaps retailing an old legend without troubling to test it historically."

"That is not my habit."

"Forgive me!"

"I forgive you. But, before you can follow my argument, you must disabuse your mind of the notion that your ancestor Caleb was a Judaean—a great-grandson of Judah himself through the bastard Pharez. Caleb was a Kenite of Hebron, and Hebron in ancient times was the hearthstone of Edom. The genealogical table that is given in the Book of Chronicles, the second chapter, is an interpolation of recent times. The more reliable myth, which we have preserved in Egypt, is that Hur son of Caleb, who was the son of Hezron the Kenizzite, married Miriam the sister of Aaron, though she was 'neither fair nor healthy' and died in the desert soon afterwards; Hur assisted Moses in the Battle of Rephidim. Caleb was one of the ten champions sent to spy out Canaan before Joshua's invasion; passing through Hebron, then occupied by the Anakin, he visited Machpelah, the tomb of his ancestor Abraham, where he received encouragement from the priestess who interpreted the utterances of Abraham's oracular jawbone. When the invasion began he conquered Hebron, drove out the Giants and married Azubah Jerioth, 'the deserted woman of the tent-curtains'. Later he also married Ephrath of Bethlehem."

"How do you read this account?" asked Antipater.

"I read it as meaning that the Calebites were Kenites of Edom—the Kenizzites are a branch of the Kenites—who originally possessed Hebron but when driven out by an invading tribe of tall Northerners took refuge with the Midianites of Hezron, at the border of the Sinai desert, who like themselves worshipped the Goddess Miriam. Miriam, also known as Rahab, was the Goddess of the Sea, whose sign is the scarlet thread. On the arrival of the Children of Israel from Egypt under Moses, the Calebites became their allies and later joined with them in the invasion of Canaan; but the Midianites would not share in the adventure and the alliance with them was dissolved. After reconnoitring the ground, the Calebites reconquered Hebron, and once more intermarried with the priestesses of Abraham's oracle, whom the Giants deserted in their wild flight. Eventually they extended their rule a few miles northward to Ephrath, which is the region about Bethlehem. I hardly think that you will dispute the common sense of this explanation?"

Antipater looked troubled.

Simon continued: "But just as the Calebites of Ephrath were later swallowed up by their allies the Benjamites, so were those of Hebron by their allies the Judaeans; and a century or two after Hebron had been incorporated in the Jewish Kingdom by David the Calebite—for David traced his descent from Hur—the tribal genealogy was adjusted to make Caleb a descendant of Judah, and by a further interpolation Kenaz, the eponymous ancestor of the Kenizzites, was absurdly reckoned a son of Caleb. The Calebites, however, still obstinately regarded themselves as Kenizzites, and Children of Edom. The unfavourable Judaic view of this tribe's history is expressed by the Chronicler in the names of the children begotten by Caleb on Azubah Jerioth: namely, 'Upright', 'Backsliding' and 'Destruction'. It is clear that they resisted all attempts to make them conform with changes in the Jewish faith, and being still a tented people they avoided the Babylonian Captivity by escaping in a body to Edom, whence they soon afterwards returned with an armed following of Edomites. Moreover, one of their clans, that of Salma, went on to reoccupy Ephrath. The Salma chieftain married the priestess of Bethlehem, and you, Prince, are lineally descended in the elder line from this chieftain."

Antipater took another handful of almonds and began arranging them in five-pointed stars. He said slowly: "I cannot disprove your argument, but I am loth indeed to think that there are interpolations in the Scriptures."

"Is it not better to believe that interpolations have crept in than to accept an historical untruth? Well, I have told the King this much and proved his pedigree by research at Ascalon, Dora, Hebron and Bethlehem, and confirmed my findings with genealogical material submitted to me by my colleagues at Babylon, Petra and Damascus; but I cannot persuade the Pharisee Doctors to accept it, their prejudices against Herod being so strong. Yet there is another point of great historical importance which I have never raised with him, and which I do not propose to raise."

"You mean that you will, however, raise it with me?"

"Only under a pledge of secrecy: you must not divulge the information to a soul while your father lives."

"You whet my curiosity. But why are you willing to tell me what you conceal from my father?"

"Because your father seems perfectly content with his title to the throne, whereas if he knew what I know he might become restless and be tempted into dangerous action."

"I doubt whether I should listen to you. Am I less likely to ruin myself by this knowledge than he?"

"As you will. But you can never have ease in your mind until you acquire this knowledge, which concerns your title to the throne."

Antipater flushed: "Simon," he said, "as my father's friend you have no right to put me into this dilemma. I do not wish to be told State secrets which I must conceal from my father." He took his leave abruptly.

Simon returned to the citron-wood table and studied the dish decorated with the interlaced triangles and stars of Antipater's almonds. He hurriedly disarranged them with his hands lest one of his servants should mistake them for a magical spell. "Alas, if he should go to the King and report what I have said!" he muttered.

"But, please God, he will not. The book is in his lip, of that I am sure. Please God, my line will hold!"

Two days later Antipater returned, fretful and pale. "I have come to take the oath of secrecy of which you spoke, Simon. Your words have preyed on my mind and prevented me from sleeping."

Simon said: "Prince, I was greatly at fault; I should have restrained the impulse to speak. No, I require no oath. Your bare word is sufficient pledge."

Then he confided to Antipater a most unorthodox historical theory: that in Israel every ancient chieftain or king had ruled by woman-right: namely by marriage with the hereditary owner of the soil. Adam by marriage with Eve; Abraham by marriage with Sarah, Hagar and Keturah; Isaac by marriage with Rebeccah; Jacob by marriage with Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah; Joseph by marriage with Asenath; Caleb by marriage with Ephrath and Azubah; Hur by marriage with Miriam; David by marriage with Abigail of Carmel and Michal of Hebron; and every subsequent king of the line of David by marriage with a matrilineal descendant of Michal. He also told Antipater that at the extinction of the monarchy the female line of Michal was engrossed by the House of Eli, the senior line of priests descended from Aaron, who were on that account styled the Heirs of David, or the Royal Heirs.

He ended solemnly: "Prince, what I have not told your father Herod is this, that no king has a true title to rule in Israel unless he is not only a Calebite but also married to the Heiress of Michal; and that the heiress inherits by ultimogeniture and not by primogeniture—that is to say, she is always the youngest daughter of the line, not the eldest."

Antipater was incredulous at first. He objected: "There is no word about this theory either in the Scriptures or the Commentary."

"Except for those who can read between the lines."

"It seems a strange and unlikely notion to me."

"You are aware that in Egypt, for example, the Pharaoh always marries his sister."

"Yes; but I have never troubled to ask why."

"That is because the ownership of the land properly goes from mother to daughter. It was the same once in Crete and Cyprus and Greece. It was the same at Rome under the Kings."

"I know nothing of Crete or Cyprus or ancient Greece, but it was certainly not so at Rome, according to the school histories."

"The object of all school histories everywhere is to enhance the glory of existing institutions and efface the memory of superseded ones. Well, I will show you what I mean. Do you remember the story of the expulsion of the Tarquin dynasty and the inauguration of the Roman Republic by Lucius Brutus? Probably you were asked to compose a set speech on the subject for your tutor while you were studying Latin oratory?"

"Yes, every student is given the task. Let me see! Tarquin the First was succeeded, was he not, by a certain Tullius who had married one of his two daughters, although Tarquin had a grown son, Tarquin the Proud…"

"Well, why did Tarquin the Proud not immediately succeed Tarquin the First? Why had no single early King of Rome ever succeeded his father? Simply because the title was carried through the female, not the male, line. The king was the man who married his predecessor's younger daughter; and since marriage with a sister, though permitted in Egypt, was considered incestuous at Rome, the king's son customarily married a foreign princess and said goodbye to his native land. The case of Tarquin the Proud was unusual. He eventually succeeded to the throne in virtue of his marriage to Tullius's daughter Tullia."

"The historians say that Tarquin the Proud regarded Tullius as an usurper."

"That is natural. And that Tarquin the Proud killed Tullius with Tullia's assistance was nothing remarkable either. On the contrary, every king of this antique sort expected to be killed by his son-in-law when his term of office expired. But by an unlucky accident Tullia was defiled by her father's blood and obliged to retire into private life. Thus Tarquin lost his title to the throne, which could only be renewed by marriage with the next heiress-at-law, namely Lucretia, the wife of his cousin Collatinus, who was descended from a sister of King Numa's wife. It was not Lucretia's beauty but her title that attracted Tarquin; except for his sister Tarquinia, who was the mother of Lucius Brutus and who was now past child-bearing, and Tullia, who was defiled, Lucretia was the only surviving heiress of the ancient royal House of Carmenta. Tarquin carried Lucretia off and forced her to become his wife; but she committed suicide to spite him. So both Collatinus and Tarquin were now without a title to the throne and the monarchy became extinct, for Tarquin had no daughters, and neither Brutus nor Collatinus had sisters. Tarquin was then driven out by his enraged people, and Brutus and Collatinus became co-rulers of Rome—Brutus as the son of Tarquinia, and Collatinus as the son of Egeria, a descendant of King Numa's sister of the same name. But they could not call themselves Kings because they lacked the necessary marriage title; instead, they called themselves Consuls, or Consultants. Lucretia had killed more than a woman when she committed suicide: she had killed Carmenta."

"Carmenta?"

"An Arcadian goddess whom King Evander had brought to Italy in the generation before the Trojan War. She had migrated to Arcadia from Byblos in Phoenicia. By 'goddess' I mean, of course, a line of priestesses in whom a divinity is held to be incarnate, as Miriam (or Rahab) is incarnate in the Michal line."

"I understand the theory," said Antipater. "But before I examine its relevance to Jewish history I must protest that according to the First Book of Chronicles the House of Eli has no claim to be regarded as the senior line of Aaron's family. And does it not lie under a divine curse since Eli's day?"

"That curse is an unhistorical interpolation of the time of King Josiah, who reigned some six centuries ago. Eli's son Abiathar, King David's faithful High Priest, remained loyal after the King's death to Adonijah the heir to the throne, whom Solomon supplanted with the help of his chaplain Zadok. With Solomon's help Zadok similarly supplanted Abiathar, who was forced into retirement, and the Zadokites have regarded themselves as the only legitimate High Priests ever since."

"But surely it was Zadok who was descended from Eleazer the elder son of Aaron, and Abiathar who was descended from Eleazer's younger brother Ithamar? I was reading the First Book of Chronicles only yesterday."

"No, Prince, that is another interpolation of the same date. In the First Book of Samuel it is stated that Eli, Abiathar's ancestor, was of the original priestly House; and it is also stated in the Second Book of Kings that Zadok was not of this House. In other words, Zadok, like Solomon, was a usurper and his descendants tampered with the genealogies. A plausible reason had to be found for Abiathar's supersession in the High Priesthood. It was given in the form of a fable about some man of God or other who prophesied that the High Priesthood would leave the House of Eli as a punishment for Eli's indulgence of his wicked sons, and that the House would be reduced to beggary. But the Zadokites were clumsy. They should have stuck to a single story: either that Zadok was of the elder line and Abiathar of the younger, or else that Abiathar was of the elder line but lost his ancient privileges because the curse of Eli happened to fall on him. They cannot have it both ways: that Abiathar was of the younger line and also that he lost the ancient privileges which he enjoyed as a member of the elder line. As I say, the texts were tampered with by King Josiah, nearly four hundred years after the time of King Solomon, when with the help of the Zadokites he expelled the descendants of Abiathar from the priesthood altogether."

"Loth as I am to believe that there are unhistorical interpolations in the Scriptures, I am still more loth to believe that it contains forgeries."

"Is it not better to believe even this than to weaken your intellect by accepting logical absurdities?"

Antipater was not easily convinced. "You may be right about the law of succession in Rome and other western cities and islands, but you have yet to prove to me from the Scriptures that matrilineal descent was of any regard even as early as the time of Abraham, let alone that of Saul and David."

"I can do so easily," said Simon. "You will find the relevant text in the twelfth chapter of Genesis: Abraham when he visited Egypt gave his wife Sarah in marriage to the Pharaoh, whom I take, however, to be the Pelasgian King of Pharos; whom the Greeks call Proteus. But Sarah, though the daughter of Abraham's father Terah, did not rank as Abraham's sister because she was the daughter of a different mother. In other words, descent in Abraham's time was traced in Aegean style through the mother, not the father; and women were polyandrous. Isaac's wife Rebeccah similarly married a King of Gerar in Isaac's lifetime. And since you doubt what I have told you about the swallowing up of Caleb by Judah, you will find the event obscurely recorded in the account of Judah's rape of his daughter-in-law Tamar after the death of his wicked son Er (which means the Calebites); for Tamar, the palm-tree, is another title of the ancient Goddess of Hebron. The identification of Tamar with Rahab is made in the same chapter of Genesis, the thirty-fourth, where she plays the harlot, bears twins to Judah and ties the scarlet thread of Rahab about the wrist of Zarah, who is supplanted by his brother Pharez—the bastard whom the Judahites have unkindly made Caleb's great-grandfather, as if to prove the Calebites dishonourable upstarts. But Zarah is an Edomite, ancestor of a clan renowned for their wisdom; therefore his twin Pharez is also of Edom. Moreover, that David ruled over Israel in virtue of his marriage with the heiresses of the twelve tribes—Levi excepted—is distinctly stated in the story of Barzillai. The northern tribes complained that, instead of making a royal progress from one tribal shrine to another, he favoured the tribe of Judah above all others and lingered at Jerusalem. His defiant answer was to refuse marital intercourse to the ten northern heiresses, reserving his favours for the heiress of Judah, presumably Eglah, the youngest daughter of Michal."

Antipater sighed. After a pause he said: "Well, let me be sure that I have understood you clearly. My father is, you say, descended from Caleb the Kenite, a sort of Edomite, whose sons were reckoned to Judah and one of whom, Salma, eventually became the lord of Bethlehem. After some centuries the head of this House was expelled from Bethlehem by the Maccabees, presumably because he was an idolator, and fled to Ascalon, where he became a priest of the god Hercules-Melkarth. The Edomites raided Ascalon and carried off his grandson, my great-grandfather, because of his Calebite blood, and made him their prince. To this House of Salma, since David's royal line became extinct, reverts the title to the throne of Israel. You have told my father so much, but not that his title can be traditionally perfected only by marriage to the heiress of the still extant Michal line, who is the daughter of a Levite of the House of Eli."

Simon nodded slowly, without a word.

"But why do you not tell my father about the Michal heiress?"

"For several reasons. The first, because the House of Eli hate your father, and would never tolerate the marriage. The second, because they would refuse their consent on the ground of his being a foreigner; which would incense him to such a degree that lopped heads would soon go bowling down the steep streets of this city. The third, because if he succeeded in marrying the heiress in spite of all, your mother and my daughter, who are at present the King's two senior wives, would lose their ascendancy at Court. The fourth, because the King would insist on elevating the girl's father to the High Priesthood and I should be obliged to step down, which I should not enjoy. The fifth, because if an heir were born of the marriage, he would be preferred in the succession both to you and to my grandson, who I hope will one day become your junior colleague in the Kingdom. The sixth, because the King is happy in his ignorance. The seventh, because the girl has been committed by her father to my own tutelage, and to give her in marriage to the King, while knowing how much trouble must grow out of such a union, would go against my conscience."

"I understand your reasons for not wishing my father to marry the girl, but I cannot understand why you have confided in me. Do you wish me to marry her myself? Surely, if the House of Eli would not tolerate my father's marrying her, they would not tolerate my marrying her either."

"True, but in your case the marriage could be kept secret, whereas your father—"

"Such a marriage would be indecent: it would give me a truer title to the throne than my father."

"Only to the spiritual throne; the political sovereignty conferred on him by the Romans would remain his, and you would continue to be his junior colleague. Besides, he would not be aware of your title. Nobody would be aware of it except yourself and myself and one or two others who are perfectly to be trusted."

"This is absurd! And tell me, how would the title benefit me?"

"It would benefit you by a sense of royalty which would strengthen you and abash your enemies. They would be aware that they stood in the presence of their rightful King. They might even learn to love and honour your father for your sake."

"Who is this girl?"

"She is a Temple ward and therefore under my tutelage. Her mother is Hannah, wife of Joachim the Levite."

"This is a strange way of saying that Joachim is her father."

"He is her father according to the Law, but the girl was born under the old dispensation. If you do not understand me, read again the story of the rich Shulamite, or rather Shunemite, woman and her son; and of Hannah, mother of Samuel. She is, in a sense, a daughter of the Lord. In any case, it is her maternal ancestry that conveys the title: to mention Hannah's marriage to Joachim is, genealogically speaking, irrelevant."

"Tell me more of Hannah's daughter," Antipater said.

"She is young, beautiful, good-natured, high-spirited, truthful. She carries herself with royal dignity."

"Her name?"

"Miriam."

"Simon, what is your intention? How could I marry this girl secretly? Within two days the whole world would hear of it."

"I have considered the problem carefully. Let her pass as the wife of another until you can acknowledge her as your queen. Neither she nor anyone else need be injured by the ruse. Leave everything to me!"

"The notion of marrying a wife whom I dare not acknowledge displeases me."

"It will not be long before you can acknowledge her."

"Why do you say this?"

"Your father, I fear, has not long to live. This grievous news was recently given me in confidence by Machaon of Cos, his physician."

"My father sick?" The news surprised and shocked Antipater. "Can it really be so? His seventy years lie more lightly on him than fifty on most other men. Oh, the unfortunate man! May the Lord postpone his end for many years! Has Machaon told him the worst?"

"Machaon has wisely told him nothing. But there is a cancerous lump in the King's bowels which he recognizes as a certain messenger of death within the next two years at the most. The end will be very painful. It was in this knowledge that I dared speak to you about your marriage."

"If my father is to die so soon I prefer to postpone this marriage."

"The girl is already nubile. I cannot long delay her betrothal."

"You are forcing my hand."

"Not I, but Time. However, at present she is spinning flax for the Sacred Curtain, and I can keep her at the task for some months yet."

Antipater asked after a pause: "You believe that I can undertake this marriage with a clear conscience towards the Lord and my father?"

"I do. You are free to marry without your father's consent, as is proved in the classical case of Esau. Though Esau grieved his parents by a foreign marriage they could not forbid him to take what wives he pleased or force him to put them away. And no law compels you to make a detailed report to your father of all your domestic affairs."

"But to pass off one's bride as the wife of another!"

"Abraham—if you care to read the story literally—not only concealed his marriage with Sarah but allowed her to marry the Pharaoh of Egypt; Isaac not only concealed his marriage with Rebeccah but allowed her to marry Abimelech of Gerar. I do not propose that you should go as far in your deception as these patriarchs are said to have gone: the supposed husband will be denied sexual access to her, as Pharaoh and Abimelech, according to the story, were not."

"I scorn ruses and stratagems of whatever sort, and all who employ them."

"Come, Prince, that is too downright a declaration. It is to express contempt not only for Abraham and Isaac but for Jacob too, whose whole life was a network of ruses, and who did not hesitate to trick his old blind father in order to obtain the blessing destined for Esau. Yet Jacob became Israel, and you would be a hardy man if you dared to confess a scorn for Israel. After all, you are the King's eldest son. The succession to the throne is yours by birthright, according both to Jewish and Roman law, and your father has already bestowed his blessing on you and made you his colleague. Why be so squeamish? Esau vexed his father by a foreign marriage; but the marriage which I am counselling you to make is with a virgin of your own tribe, and it is the only marriage by which you can become the authentic King of Israel."

"Simon, your words are sober enough, but the suppressed vehemence of your tones does not escape me. Confess, you have some other motive for urging me to this dangerous course than a desire to see me happy?"

Simon did not reply at first. He took a sip of wine and twisted his fingers in his little beard.

"Simon, now your eyes are shining as I have never before seen them shine. Your hands are trembling as you play with your beard. Tell me honestly what is in your mind. You are a philosopher and conduct your life according to strict philosophic principles. You keep hope and joy on the curb like unruly stallions, but they are champing and rearing and the white froth flies from their mouths."

"Prince," said Simon at last in an uneven voice, "it is this. Jerusalem is at the meeting-place of continents, it is the fortress commanding the cross-roads through which all nations have marched and counter-marched since history began. Jerusalem lies midway between India and Spain, between the frozen White Sea of the North where the were-wolf Finns are found, and the insufferably hot deserts beyond Punt to the Southward, where the ape-men beat devilishly upon their hairy chests and East and West are confounded. Jerusalem is the centre of the known Universe; here we are centrally situated in Space. And what of Time? The Egyptians reckon the life of a nation at eight thousand years, and in two years' time, by our reckoning, Adam will have been born four thousand years ago."

"I have heard otherwise: I have heard that the fourth millennium ended a century and a half ago in the days of Judas the Maccabee."

"Judas misreckoned. We are at the meridian of Adam's day. The fourth millennium draws swiftly to a close, and the close of each millennium has always been marked by some great event. At the close of the first millennium Enoch the Perfect One, Keeper of Books, was caught up alive into Heaven. At the close of the second, the Lord swore his covenant with Abraham. At the close of the third, King Solomon with great magnificence celebrated the dedication of the First Temple, at which time the All-Merciful granted him a visible sign of favour. Ah, Prince, does not your heart beat with pride and hope to think what the Lord in his bounty may hold in store for us at this four-thousandth year, this half-way house of destiny? Adam was true-born; Enoch, Keeper of Books, was without sin; Abraham obeyed the Lord with superb faith; Solomon, when asked by the Lord in a dream what gift he most desired, chose wisdom. All these men are counted as patriarchs of our nation, and are reckoned in a single genealogical line. What if this latest millennium should close with the appearance of a King who combines all the qualities of his predecessors: true-born like Adam, sinless like Enoch, faithful like Abraham, wise like Solomon?"

A puzzled smile played over Antipater's face. He said: "I never expected to hear you speak in this rapt millennial strain, Son of Boethus. And I do not know how to answer you, except by asking: 'What of Moses?' For Moses is not reckoned in the same line of descent with the other patriarchs, yet nobody can deny him equal dignity with them; and neither his birth nor his death nor any other event of his life coincides with the close of any of the millennia of which you speak. And what of the patriarch Noah, with whom a new age certainly began?"

Simon answered very gravely: "Spoken like a sage! Indeed, were it not for Noah and Moses you might well dismiss my argument as inconclusive; but their cases make it irresistible. The fact is, that the close of this fourth millennium coincides with a Phoenix year. As you know, the residue of hours of the solar year that exceed three hundred and sixty-five days add up every 1460 years to an entire year, which in Egypt is called the Phoenix year or Sothic Great Year: for then the Celestial Bird is consumed upon his palm-tree pyre at On-Heliopolis and from his ashes rises the new Phoenix. Moses worshipped the Almighty in Heliopolis, and when he removed from that city with his fellow-priests the Phoenix age ended which had begun with the patriarch Noah—with Noah who, like Enoch, was judged worthy to walk with the Lord. A new Phoenix age was then inaugurated on Sinai with the institution of the Mosaic Law; this age in turn is all but completed—the old Phoenix must die and a new Phoenix be born. Here, then, we stand at the cross-roads of Space, but also at the cross-roads of Time: not only at the meridian of Adam's day but at the precise point where the Phoenix line intersects with the Millennary line. Is it any wonder that I should wish the eldest son of my King to undertake a fortunate marriage, a marriage which promises a shower of the greatest possible blessings for Israel and all mankind?"

"Nevertheless, I am an Edomite, and Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of red-lentil-porridge, and forfeited his blessing too."

"Esau was famished and would have died but for that meal. Jacob did evil in making Esau pay for the hospitality which was his guest-right. The blessing, too, was stolen by Jacob; and it is written that a thief must restore fourfold. That neither the blessing nor the birthright was permanently forfeited in the judgment of their father Isaac is made clear in the twenty-seventh chapter of Genesis where Isaac says:

Your brother came with subtlety and took away your blessing. Nevertheless, though you serve your brother at the first, the time will come when you shall have the dominion over him, and break his yoke from about your neck.

And Isaiah enlarges on this prophecy in the sixty-third chapter of his book, the Vision of the Messiah, when he writes: 'Who is this that comes from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah, glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength?' Back comes the answer: 'It is I—I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save.' Isaiah asks again: 'Why are you red in your apparel, like one who tramples in the vine-vat?' The answer comes again: 'I trod the vine-vat alone'—that is to say, without my brother Jacob—'for the year of my redeemed has come.'"

"Who is the redeemed?"

"Edom is to be redeemed. The meaning is that the Edomites, not the Israelites, are the original people of Jehovah. When Jacob supplanted Esau, Jehovah adopted the Israelites as his children and showed them wonderful kindness; but they rebelled against him. Now the Edomites call themselves to his remembrance and cry to him through the mouth of Isaiah: 'We are yours. You never were their God. They were not at first called by your name. They trod down your sanctuary.'"

"Then is the promised Messiah to be an Edomite?" cried Antipater in astonishment.

"How else can he be the Second Adam? For Edom and Adam are the same person, the Red Man of Hebron. Or how else can he be the Second David? But his mother is to be of the tribe of Levi, a daughter of Aaron. Thus since Caleb, the royal part of Edom, is now reckoned to Judah, it is foretold in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs that 'the Messiah shall be raised up from the Tribe of Levi as High Priest and from the Tribe of Judah as King: in person sacrosanct'."

His breast heaved for emotion and he began to declaim from the Testament of Levi:

Then shall the Lord God raise up a new priest

To whom his very words revealed shall be:

Judgement of righteousness to execute

Upon this earth for multitudes of days.

His star shall rise in Heaven like to a King,

Lighting up knowledge as the Sun the day.

He on this wide earth shall be magnified,

And like the shining Sun darkness dispel.

Peace universal shall attend his days,

Heaven shall exult and all the earth he glad.

Glory of the Most High shall speak for him,

Wisdom and holiness on him shall rest.

He shall present the Lord God's majesty

Unto his sons in truth for evermore.

None shall succeed him of the race of man.

His priesthood shall instruct all men on earth

And that enlightenment through grace begin,

The end whereof shall be the end of sin.

CHAPTER SIX THE APPARITION

Antipater was in the Court of Israel, praying. It was his custom to go across the valley to the Temple every day at dawn for his devotions. As he prayed, in Jewish fashion, on his knees he became suddenly aware from the confused noises behind him that some terrible event had occurred. He turned and saw grave elders hurrying up dressed in sackcloth, wailing aloud, with their heads sprinkled with ashes; they whispered their news to those already present, who gaped with horror and began to rip the seams of their beautiful garments. Soon the wailing arose on all sides.

Antipater hurried to the nearest of his acquaintances, Reuben, Joachim's adversary, whom he found in earnest conversation with Zacharias the Zadokite. He asked: "Son of Abdiel, what is amiss? What disastrous blow has descended upon us?"

Reuben did not reply. He turned away and began to wail with the rest, calling loudly upon Jehovah to be avenged on his sacrilegious foes. Zacharias followed his example.

Antipater left them and went out into the Court of Women, where the same bad news was current. Everyone avoided his glance and he began to have the disagreeable sense that the wailing and the imprecations which accompanied it were in some degree aimed at himself.

"Should I mourn too?" he wondered. "No, not until I know what has happened."

In the Court of the Gentiles he found Carmi the Captain of the Temple, who had arrived with the Levite Guard to keep order. He spoke sharply: "Carmi, what is the meaning of this uproar? I can persuade nobody to answer me. I hear the words 'desecration' and 'abomination' shouted, but they mean nothing to me. These good people seem to be accusing me of participating in some act of sacrilege, and I resent it. My conscience is clear both towards the Lord and towards men. If I have offended unwittingly in anything, may the Lord pardon me!"

Carmi saluted with punctilio. It was seldom that this tall, lean priest, notorious as one of Herod's creatures, looked anxious, but he looked so now. "Majesty, a nonsensical rumour is running round the city that thieves have broken into the tombs of King David and King Solomon. Some of these shameless dogs even dare to accuse your royal father of having headed the party."

He spoke in a loud voice so that everyone present should hear him.

Antipater was shocked. "The Lord grant that the tombs remain unviolated!"

A shrivelled hag came hobbling up and caught hold of Antipater's sleeve. "Oho," she squeaked, "you are altogether innocent, are you? This is the first news you have had of it, is it not? Very well, let me tell you that last night a certain Edomite slave, the author of an unholy edict against house-breakers, led a pack of uncircumcised Greek dogs into the royal tombs. A line of mule-wagons was waiting at the entrance, and a thousand talents' weight of silver ingots was presently loaded into them and driven back to the Palace. What other treasures were taken off is not known, for they were stowed in sacks. It is said that among them were sixty shields of gold and seven bronze basins; but the silver ingots at least were seen and counted. Confess, what is your share in the loot to be, Son of the Slave?"

She was marched away under arrest, laughing discordantly and crying:

"The old goat has despoiled the living, now he despoils the dead. But the Lord will assuredly judge him according to his own unholy edict, and fling him head over heels from this kingdom into the bottomless abyss!"

When he reached the Palace again, Antipater discovered to his surprise and chagrin that nobody at the Palace troubled to deny the report, though it was generally agreed that the King had not broken the seals of the burial-chambers: he had merely stripped the adjoining treasure-rooms. Herod himself made light of the matter. He said to the deputation of Zadokites who came to him to protest: "O you hypocrites. Am I the first who has borrowed silver from the treasure-house of David and Solomon? Answer me that!"

Zacharias, the spokesman of the deputation, answered frankly: "No, Majesty. The same was done before when this City was besieged by Antiochus the Syrian. King Hyrcanus the Maccabee bought him off with three thousand silver talents taken from the tomb of King David. But that was done at a time of national distress, and done publicly."

"I wonder at your insolence, priest. Hyrcanus took three thousand silver talents from the tomb to buy off an invader, instead of trusting to the might of his God and to the strong hearts of his men, and you applaud it as a righteous action! I borrow less than one-third that sum from the tomb to pay the workmen who are rebuilding the Lord's Temple and you howl at me as if I were a pickpocket. Since when, Zacharias, have you become a Pharisee?"

"The Lord forbid that I should ever become such a thing."

"You do not, then, believe in the resurrection?"

"I am a Sadducee and the son of a Sadducee."

"But if David and Solomon are not to rise again, what use have they of silver ingots and shields of gold and bronze basins? Everything that I have taken from the tomb is for the use of the Ever-Living God. Did not David himself confess in his psalm that naked he came from his mother's womb and naked he should return to the earth? The rich furnishings of his tomb are clean against Scripture. I removed the treasures privately in order to cause no offence. If I had done so publicly you would have complained all the louder of my shamelessness. Be off now, stiff-necks, and trouble me no further."

Seeing that the Pharisees present were smiling at his discomfiture, Zacharias asked: "Majesty, had I been a Pharisee and believed in the resurrection, how would you have answered my protest?"

Herod flushed angrily, and Menelaus the fat librarian stepped forward to reprove Zacharias. "Is this an honest way for a subject to address his King? But let me speak on the King's behalf, to such of you as are Pharisees. At the last day, when King David and Solomon his son arise together in glory, they will claim credit with Enoch the book-keeper, pointing with their fingers at the Temple and saying: 'These massive walls, these fair courts—do you know how the cost of their building was defrayed? Was it not with money which we lent without usury to our son who reigned after us, and who piously completed the work which we began?'"

Zacharias asked: "Can dead men lend money?"

"The money that a man owns he can lend," Menelaus replied. "And if dead men cannot own, then King Herod has done David and Solomon no injury in removing treasure from their tombs."

The Pharisees could not resist a murmur of satisfaction; and once a religious problem could be reduced to a dispute between Pharisee and Sadducee, Herod had no reason to fear a general revolt.

It became known that two of the men who had gone with Herod into the tombs had not returned. Some Jews said that in trying to open the stone chest containing the bones of Solomon they had been killed by a sudden dart of fire. Others said that Herod had killed them himself because they had seen what they should never have seen. However, both men were Celts and the death of Celts did not grieve the Jews. What caused both surprise and scandal was the white stone monument which Herod set up at the entrance to the tomb; it bore no inscription but was cut in the conical shape of the altars erected in honour of the Great Goddess. But the Greeks and Syrians whispered to one another: "Wisely done! It is to the Great Goddess, to Hecate, that the souls of dead men return. The treasure that accompanies dead kings to their grave is an offering made to her, and any man who robs Hecate of a thousand silver talents will be wise to pay her a high fee in compensation: doubtless the King killed those Celtic soldiers to placate the Dog-headed One. Very wisely done!"

The Jebusites of the Fish Gate were in a fever of excitement. Had Herod rifled the tombs merely because he was in need of money?

It was rumoured that no bullion had been found in the tomb—Hyrcanus had removed it all—and that the supposed ingots in the carts were nothing more valuable than large stones put there to deceive. Had Herod's intention been to seize the golden sceptre from the coffin of David and the golden dog from the coffin of Solomon? And had he succeeded? They said nothing to their Jewish neighbours, and it was not for a year or two that prodigies began to be reported in the streets of Jerusalem with which they naturally connected the despoliation of the royal tombs.

Most of these prodigies took place at night—men in white armour and mounted on white horses galloping in pairs at break-neck speed through the streets and disappearing as suddenly as they came; prophetic cries and knockings from under the Courts of the Temple itself; unexplained outbreaks of fire on the roof of the Royal Palace which made the whole building seem ablaze. Similar prodigies were reported from Bethlehem, Hebron, Samaria and elsewhere. Swords were seen at night glittering in the sky among the western stars; desert rocks dripped with blood; and a young crocodile with a jewelled necklet was caught on the banks of the Jordan near the Dead Sea, though crocodiles had hitherto been supposed peculiar to the Nile.

The people grew nervous. Strange dreams were dreamed and visions seen, the most persistent of which were battles fought in the clouds between phantom armies. There was a sense of impending wonders with which the name of the Messiah was freely connected; yet the kingdom was at peace, the harvests were abundant, the seasons equable, no remarkable news came from Italy, Egypt or the East.

It was announced that Prince Antipater would shortly sail to Rome, taking his father's Will with him for the Emperor's approval. His principal business would be to prosecute the case against Sylleus, who had by now been sent back to Rome from Antioch to be tried for his life. The prodigies, which had ceased for a while, began suddenly to increase both in number and strangeness: headless spectres, sudden fanfares blown from massed trumpets in the dead of night, a tall veiled woman seen walking along the Jericho road hand-in-hand with an ape.

The culmination of these wonders came one evening in the very Sanctuary of the Temple.

Zacharias, of the House of Zadok, was related to Joachim by marriage, his wife Elizabeth being the eldest of Hannah's four sisters, two of whom had married outside the clan of Royal Heirs for lack of suitable husbands within it. Zacharias was the most conservative of all the elder priests in the Temple service, and one of the few men in Jerusalem who refused to be perturbed by the hauntings. "Either they are hallucinations," he said, "or else some mischievous person is playing tricks on us. These things are not of the Lord, who declares his will openly and frankly; a true believer has neither eyes nor ears for such apparitions."

It was Zacharias's day of ministration at the Altar of Incense. His was the eighth course of priests, the Course of Abijah, whose turn for duty came round every second year in the eighth month, the month of the wheat harvest. Fasting, ceremonially clean, correctly robed, he entered the Sanctuary at sundown to dress the seven lamps of the golden Candlestick and offer sweet incense on the Altar, and remained there alone while the congregation stood outside in prayer. With delicate and practised gestures he trimmed the wicks with snuffers and filled the bowls with sacred oil to the brim. Then he fetched the cones of incense from a shelf of the ambry and laid them in a golden bowl; prostrated himself and prayed; raised himself up and with tongs set the cones on the glowing coals of the Altar; sprinkled them with salt; prostrated himself again, and again prayed, while the overpowering scent of the incense began to fill the Sanctuary.

The fumes spread to the waiting congregation outside and Zacharias heard the collect of blessing being sung by the choir of Asaph:

Truly thou art the Lord our God, the God also of our fathers; our King, the King also of our fathers; our Redeemer, the Redeemer also of our fathers; our Maker, the Maker also of our fathers; our Rescuer and Deliverer. Thy name is from everlasting, there is no God but thou. The redeemed sang a new song to thy name by the sea-shore. Together they praised and owned thee as their King and said: "The Lord shall reign, the Saviour of his people Israel."…

The singing ceased and Zacharias knew that the evening lamb had been sacrificed and that its pieces were being burned on the Altar in the fore-court. Presently he must return there, pronounce the priestly blessing and accept the meat and drink offerings.

As he waited, calm and at ease, the perfect stillness of the Sanctuary was broken by a voice: a small voice, between a whisper and a pipe, like the voice of a sinner's conscience.

"Zacharias!" it said.

Zacharias was aware that the voice proceeded from the Holy of Holies itself, which no man might enter but only the High Priest once a year; the empty chamber where the God of Israel himself dwelt.

His heart gave a leap and he answered: "Here am I, Lord! Speak, for thy servant heareth!"—the archaic words in which, many generations before at Shiloh, the infant Samuel had replied when similarly summoned.

The small voice questioned him: "Zacharias, what things are these that are burning on my altar?"

Zacharias replied, muttering: "The sweet incense, Lord, according to the Law that thou gavest thy servant Moses."

The voice asked severely: "Is the Sun of Holiness a harlot or a catamite? Do my nostrils smell storax, hinge of scallop, frankincense, narthex, all smouldering together on coals of cedar-wood? Would you make a sweat-bath for the Sun of Holiness?"

Now, the holy incense was compounded according to a very ancient recipe. It had been the custom of the priestesses of the Love-goddess Rahab, on the eve of the May love-orgy, to burn this incense in a hole under the floor of the Goddess's sanctuary. Each woman in turn would crouch for a while over the aperture in a close tent of seal-skin, until her skin sweated and drank in the scent and she became irresistible to her lovers. The ingredients were all of aphrodisiac virtue. Storax is the gum of a white-flowered tree resembling a plane, sacred to the Goddess Isis: the name is derived from the Greek word meaning "causing to lust". Scallop is sacred to the Cyprian and Phoenician Love-goddess Aphrodite, who is represented in the myths as sailing across the sea in a great scallop-shell drawn by dolphins. Great quantities of scallops are eaten at Ascalon and Paphos at her love-feasts, and the hinge of the shell is a symbol of the sexual bond. Frankincense, which is brought from Southern Arabia and the African coast lying opposite, is a fragrant milky resin from the libanus-shrub—white tears mixed with red—and its fumes are credited with the power of inducing amatory eloquence; moreover, the Phoenix is said to burn at Heliopolis on a pyre of frankincense twigs. Narthex is the giant fennel, the wand of office carried by Silenus, the goatish master of the Dionysian revels; and in the pith of its stalk Prometheus is said to have hidden the fire that he stole from Heaven. The gum it exudes is of only a faint odour; but in the holy incense the gums of the storax and frankincense compensated for this deficiency and also drowned the disagreeable stench of the scallop hinge.

Zacharias could make no reply, but knocked seven times with his forehead on the ground, not daring to raise his eyes. He heard sounds of the Curtain being drawn, and the ring of majestic steps approaching over the marble floor. There was a pause, and then a sudden hiss and splutter from the Altar. The steps retreated and Zacharias fainted away.

When he came to himself a few minutes later, he could not for a while recall where he was or what had happened. The lamps were still burning with a steady flame, but the fire on the Altar had been quenched. The hem of his robe was damp with the water that had trickled from the Altar-top. Fear surged back to his mind. He groaned and raised his eyes slowly towards the Sacred Curtain as if to reassure himself that his God did not hate him.

Worse was yet to come. Between the Curtain and the wall stood a tremendous figure clothed in robes shimmering like moonlight on a troubled pool. O horror! The head was that of a wild-ass with glaring red eye-balls and ivory-white teeth, and it was with gold-shod hooves that the figure hugged to its breast the sceptre and dog of monarchy.

From the mouth of the beast came the piping voice. "Be not afraid, Zacharias! Go out now and tell my people truthfully what you have heard and seen!"

Zacharias, half-dead with fear, shrouded his face in his robe. Then he knocked seven times on the floor with his forehead and went stumbling out to the fore-court, where everyone was wondering anxiously at his delay.

He shut the door behind him and stood panting. The cold air revived him. He stared wildly at the placid faces of his kinsmen and the musicians of Asaph. He took a deep breath, and the terrible words that rose in his heart were: "O Men of Israel, hear me! All these generations we have unknowingly worshipped not the true God, but a Golden Ass!"

His lips moved, but no sound came from them. He had been struck dumb.

His kinsmen led him gently away to his own house, but one of them, Reuben, son of Abdiel, whose duty it was to take his place if he fell suddenly ill or became accidentally defiled, pronounced the blessing, accepted the meat and drink offerings and gave the signal for the evening psalm to be sung by the Sons of Asaph.

When the service was over and the priests and musicians had dispersed, Reuben entered the Sanctuary to see whether all were in order. Finding the fire extinguished and dirty water splashed around the Altar, he was astonished and alarmed. Had his staid kinsman Zacharias been overtaken by a sudden frenzy? His first thought was for the Course, which must not be disgraced. No one must know that the fire had been extinguished. With a silent prayer that what he was about to do might not be done amiss, Reuben hastily removed the wet cinders from the Altar, wrapped them in his cloak, relaid and rekindled the fire, and offered more incense with the customary rites.

As he was wiping the floor of the Sanctuary with a napkin the same horror seized him as had seized Zacharias, and the skin of his scalp began to crawl. For he suddenly noticed a wet track of hooves leading towards the Holy of Holies. He stared long at them. There could be no mistake. They were the hoof-tracks of a mule or ass. His mind was in a whirl. All that he could think was that Zacharias had been engaged in black magic and had summoned an ass-demon, one of the Lilim, who had put out the fire on the Altar. A demon of sorts it must have been, for where was the water-jar that had been used for quenching the fire? Zacharias had brought none out with him into the fore-court.

"Alas, alas!" Reuben cried. Casting himself on the floor he prayed aloud: "O Lord of Hosts, protect your servant! Seal the mouths of those that would question him. For I will never publish the disgrace of my House, unless I am required to do so on oath before the High Court."

In the morning Zacharias was questioned kindly by the High Priest at an informal session of the High Court. Writing-tablets were set before him, but he put them aside, shaking his head. When asked whether he had seen a vision he nodded, and a look of such terror came into his face that the High Priest refrained from questioning him further. The Council recommended that he should leave Jerusalem and retire to his country seat at Ain-Rimmon, a prosperous village lying nine miles north of Beersheba. The inquiry was adjourned sine die, to Reuben's great relief.

Extravagant rumours about what Zacharias had seen began to fly round the country, and the priests of the Course of Abijah consulted together to decide on an answer to the persistent questions that were being asked. Reuben did not attend the meeting, and in his absence the Sons of Abijah decided that what Zacharias had seen must have been an angel who had given him surprising domestic news. For it had so happened that Zacharias on his return home to Ain-Rimmon was greeted with the news that his wife Elizabeth, who had been childless for more than twenty years, was about to become a mother at last. What was even more remarkable, when Zacharias had left Ain-Rimmon six weeks before, to attend the Passover Week at Jerusalem, he and Elizabeth had both been bound by a local obligation of marital continence, and during the previous thirty days had exchanged only chaste kisses. Her fidelity being beyond question, he could not conceal his astonishment, but took refuge in his dumbness and abstained from written comment. His kinsmen concluded that the vision which he had seen in the Temple was of an angel prophesying that the child which Elizabeth was to bear in her old age would be one of remarkable holiness; and this was the story which they circulated in Jerusalem.

Elizabeth was embarrassed by the interest that her kinsfolk showed in her condition and retired to an inner room of the house whenever visitors called. The manor of Ain-Rimmon was a large, rich house with extensive orchards and vineyards watered by a spring formerly sacred to Rimmon, the Pomegranate-god. The worship of Rimmon had been swallowed up by that of Jehovah, who had taken over his titles and emblems, as might be understood from the little golden pomegranates, alternating with bells shaped like the opening pomegranate blossom, sewn on the vestments of the High Priest, and the large ones carved in marble on the columns of the Temple. But the country people remembered Rimmon; they still celebrated a love-festival in his honour at the time of the spring budding of his beautiful scarlet blossom, when the Pomegranate King, his face coloured scarlet with the dye extracted from the shell and crown of the fruit, held a mock Court with the Queen of Flowers. This same festival, at which the celebrants wear masks, and fanciful disguises, is observed to this day in the remoter parts of Galilee. The festival chants are collected in the Canticles ascribed to Solomon. One of them runs:

Let us go up to the vineyards,

Let us see whether the vines flourish,

Whether the tender grape appear

And the pomegranate bud forth.

There I will give thee my love.

The Greek mythographers relate that it was from the blood of the slain Dionysus that the pomegranate-tree first sprang; for this reason the women of Athens abstain from eating the seeds of the pomegranate fruit at the festival of the Thesmophoria. In Cyprus, Dionysus is Adonis; in Syria, Tammuz. By what title King Saul addressed the god of the sacred pomegranate grove at Benjamite Gibeah is not recorded; but it is likely to have been Rimmon. For Rimmon is clearly the Canaanitish Dionysus, the lusty god of the year, incarnate in the Sacred King of the year. He presides in glory at the budding of his scarlet blossoms, he is doomed to death by the ripening of his crimson fruit. After the Exile his name was purposely confused by the priesthood of Jerusalem with "Ramman", the Thunder-god, a title of Jehovah. They absurdly interpreted the pomegranates sewn on the hem of the High Priest's vestment as symbolizing lightning, and the bells with which they alternated as symbolizing thunder. But both were put there in honour of the God Rimmon and clashed merrily together as a charm against evil spirits.

It was whispered by Elizabeth's servants that the mystery of the approaching birth was bound up with the love-festival of Rimmon; for the seasons corresponded. They expected great things of the child.

CHAPTER SEVEN MARY AT AIN-RIMMON

One evening a maid-servant knocked softly at the door of Elizabeth's boudoir where she sat at her needlework.

"A young woman, a stranger, desires the honour of greeting your ladyship."

"I am not receiving guests to-day."

"Your servants told the young woman so, but she persists in her request."

"Who is this importunate person?"

"She will not reveal her name or family."

"Who brought her here?"

"She came under escort of a party of tented Rechabites who rode off at once on their asses in a cloud of dust."

"Rechabites, did you say? What were her words as she entered our gate?"

"She said: 'In the name of the Mother.'"

Elizabeth grew angry. "You granddaughter of a camel, why did you not tell me so at once? Has the lady eaten? Have you washed her feet? Oh, you wretches! Bring water and a basin at once, bring soap and a linen towel. Bring food, the best in the house. Bring sweet wine. Make no delay." Elizabeth threw down her tambour-frame and hurried out.

Soon she returned, leading a young woman by the hand, to whom she said solemnly, as she shut the door: "In the name of the Mother, this house is your house and these servants are your servants, whoever you may be, and whatever your business."

For reply, the young woman unveiled with a rapid movement of her arm, kissed Elizabeth on both cheeks and began to weep silently.

Elizabeth cried in astonishment: "Can it be? Can it truly be? It is the face of my sister Hannah when she was a child. The same sea-green eyes, straight nose, courageous chin. Child, you are Hannah's daughter?"

Mary nodded, dashing away the tears with her fingers.

"Why do you weep?"

"For joy to be safely under your roof."

Elizabeth clapped her hands. "Hurry, sluts, hurry, as if wolves were at your heels!"

They came running in helter-skelter, one with warm water in a silver ewer; another with a silver basin embossed with an interlace of fish, perfumed soap and an embroidered towel; another with a great brass tray covered with little platters of relishes—sweet pickles, olives, herbbenjamin, cucumber—arranged around a brace of cold roast pigeons stuffed with savoury herbs and garnished with Cos lettuce. Elizabeth sliced the fine wheat loaf for Mary and spread it with conserve of quince. She asked her servants over her shoulder: "Where are the Jericho dates? And the honey-figs soaked in Cyprus wine?"

"They are coming, Mistress! Here they are, coming behind us. And a flagon of sweet wine of Lebanon!"

"Now, begone, children! I will wash this lady's feet myself."

They stared and retired in silence.

Elizabeth put her hand affectionately under Mary's chin and tilted her face to look at it more closely.

"You look faint with hunger, daughter," she said. "Here is water for your hands. Eat and drink, why do you hesitate? I will be washing your feet meanwhile."

Mary smiled as she answered: "Soap is unknown in the black tents of the Rechabites. A kindly folk, but filthy in their habits. Before I eat, give me leave to enjoy the luxury of dabbling my fingers a while in this basin of soft warm water."

"Your dear mother was the same: she would not be hurried."

Mary ate and drank well. When she had done she washed her hands again, wiped her mouth, gave thanks to the Lord, and sat silent.

Elizabeth waited for her to speak.

Mary said at last politely, noticing Elizabeth's condition: "The Lord's blessing on the fruit of your womb!"

Elizabeth answered: "When you kissed me, the babe inside me leaped for joy."

"Is all well with my uncle, the lord Zacharias?"

"All is well, except that he has been struck dumb, as you doubtless have heard. Yet dumbness is no great fault in a husband, and it keeps him from continually disputing vexatious points of the Law with his cronies—a habit that I have never learned to love. Zacharias knows the Law backwards and forwards and upside down and never fails to win the argument, though it is not always that he succeeds in convincing his opponent. Is all well with your dear-mother and the learned Joachim?"

"All was well at our last meeting. Three times a year they have always visited me, when they come up for the grand festivals."

"Every year I plan to make the journey to Jerusalem, but somehow I never go. I cannot bear crowds. Tell me, when do they intend to redeem you and find you a husband? It is time enough now, and the redemption fee for a girl under the age of twenty is fixed at a mere ten shekels."

"It was as a gift, not as a loan, that they offered me to the Lord; which gave the High Priest the authority to bestow me in marriage. And so I was married."

"Married! To whom? When? Why was I not invited to the wedding?"

Mary was troubled. "The High Priest decided to betroth me to Joseph of Emmaus, who married your sister Abigail." She added hurriedly: "I have been staying at Lysia's house—your niece, I mean. Lysia has been very kind to me, kindness itself."

"Joseph of Emmaus! What an extraordinary choice! He must be nearly seventy and has six grown children. Joseph, indeed! He is not rich. Nor learned. Nor influential. I remember that we girls all grimaced when he was chosen for Abigail; but of course Abigail had a club foot and was not presentable in other respects."

"He is a good man, so they say!"

"Oh yes, too good in a sense. Generous and pious to the point of simple-mindedness. Does he treat you well?"

"I have never seen him."

"But you said that you were married to him."

"No, I did not say that."

"But if you and he are betrothed, why does he not take you to his house? Why have you come running here like a fugitive?"

Mary whispered: "Forgive me, Aunt, but I cannot tell you that."

"Does 'cannot' mean that you are forbidden to tell me, or that you do not know?"

Mary began to weep again. "Do not press me to answer, dear Aunt Elizabeth. Give me refuge and peace. Let nobody know that I am here. Nobody at all."

Elizabeth was greatly puzzled. "Who sent you here to me under escort of the Sons of Rahab?"

"Is was Anna daughter of Phanuel, our guardian mother."

"A shrewd old lady. Tell me, does old Joseph know that you have come?"

"I am not sure. And I do not think that he would greatly care if he did know."

"Not care what has become of his betrothed wife?" Elizabeth's tone was indignant.

"I beg you not to question me," cried Mary in alarm. "I will be your devoted servant, Aunt. I will lie on straw and eat husks, if need be, and serve you foot and hand, but I beg you not to question me. Already I have said too much."

Elizabeth laughed. "I will restrain my curiosity, my dear, though upon my word yours is a very extraordinary visit. But this I demand to know—are you in trouble? Are you running away from Jerusalem because you have committed some crime? At least you can tell me that."

"As the Lord lives, I am not guilty of any crime!"

"Good. I asked only to know where I stand; I should not have liked to compromise my poor Zacharias by harbouring a criminal without his knowledge, though of course a guest is a guest. And there are degrees of criminality. Every girl is liable to make a fool of herself, especially with men, and I should not have been harsh to you if you had done so. Well, that is all I needed to know. I am delighted to have you here as a companion during my confinement; your presence, I hope, will keep me from losing my temper with the maids. Besides, I love your mother. She was my darling from the day that she was born until the day that marriage parted us. For her sake I will cosset you as tenderly as childless Roman matrons cosset their Indian marmosets."

Mary smiled faintly. "But what will you tell my Uncle Zacharias?"

"Nothing at all. What female companions I have with me in my inner apartments are no business of his. After all, I redeemed this estate from mortgage with my marriage gift. He would have lost all but for me. Do you play draughts? Are you skilled at embroidery? Do you play the lyre?"

Mary answered modestly: "Our Temple education was thorough."

"Good again! Tell me, daughter: what is the latest news from Jerusalem? What is happening at the Palace? Is Queen Doris still in favour? I know Doris well. Dora, which is her family seat, lies not far from here, and she was in residence there during her long exile from Court. Has Prince Antipater sailed for Rome yet?"

Mary began to say something, but stopped and sat silent again.

"Why, come now, these are not close secrets too, are they?"

Mary answered, as off-handedly as she could: "I know nothing about Queen Doris. Her son sailed from Caesarea a month ago." She added in a rush: "But he is King Antipater now, co-ruler of the Jews with his father, not merely a prince."

Elizabeth looked incredulous. "What? Are you sure?"

"Am I sure of what? That he has sailed?"

"That he has been made a colleague of his father's."

"Yes indeed. I was present when it was publicly announced in the Court of the Gentiles. The Levites blew a great many trumpets and everyone shouted 'God save the King!'"

Elizabeth rose from the floor where they had been sitting cross-legged and began to walk about restlessly. "Now what in the world is the meaning of this new move on the board?" she cried. "Are they anxious or alarmed about it at Jerusalem?"

"Alarmed? Why should they be alarmed?"

"You know King Herod's reputation?"

"I have heard many things spoken about him, both good and bad."

"Fewer good than bad?"

"Fewer by far, I grant you."

"Does it not surprise everyone that Herod should have raised his son to this dignity? Is it thought consistent with his jealous and tyrannical disposition?"

"I have not heard surprise expressed. King Antipater has never offended against his father in the least degree. Even those who have good excuse for hating the House of Herod confess that Antipater has given proof of a pious and noble nature. Besides, King Herod is growing old. I know little about these matters, but is it not natural that after his disappointment in the matter of the princes Alexander and Aristobulus he should lean on Antipater as on a staff that will never break and pierce his hands?"

"You champion Antipater with pleasant warmth. It is lucky that your Uncle Zacharias is not with us to hear you. How he detests the Herodians!"

"But why should the people of Jerusalem be alarmed when Antipater is awarded a diadem?"

"Because Herod in a generous mood is Herod in a dangerous mood. Your learned father Joachim made this remark to my husband and myself some years ago. Often since then we have verified its truth. By the by, have there been any more hauntings lately in the City?"

"People still tell ridiculous stories of what has been seen or heard or dreamed. I pay no attention to them."

"I take them seriously. Hauntings, whether real or imaginary, are usually the prelude to deeds of blood."

"May the Lord avert them by his mercy!"

***

Elizabeth was puzzled. As she lay sleepless that night she went over the evening's conversation in her mind. Mary had said that she was betrothed to Joseph, while admitting that Joseph possibly did not know and probably did not care where she might be. Surely Mary had not been lying? Her mother Hannah had never lied: evaded a question, yes, but never lied. And surely that absurdly upright old Joseph was not a man to treat Joachim's daughter with scorn or disrespect? He was courteous to a fault: there was a story that he once sent a servant in pursuit of a guest who had robbed him of a silver flagon, to present him with the stopper, saying: "Sir, this also was part of my master's gift to you." Yet Joseph was a very odd choice for a husband. Old Joachim was exceedingly rich. Mary was his only child and would inherit everything.

Elizabeth began to wonder: had Mary been seduced by someone who either could not or would not marry her? Had the High Priest tried to fob her off in a hurry on old Joseph? Had Joseph, after paying the bride-money, become aware of the deception and, not wishing to father another man's child, returned her quietly to the Temple? Had Anna then, to avoid a scandal, sent her down here, with the High Priest's connivance, under escort of the Rechabites? Mary, however, had sworn that she was innocent of any sin. Had she perhaps been violated?

Suddenly Elizabeth remembered that Mary had said at first that she was married. Not merely betrothed, but married! And afterwards she had distinguished the marriage from the betrothal. But a woman once married could not be betrothed unless the marriage had first been dissolved. Was this what she had meant? It did not seem likely. And had she said in so many words that she had been betrothed to Joseph? No, only that the High Priest had decided on the betrothal.

Elizabeth could not solve the problem but decided to let it cost her no more sleep. Perhaps Mary would give away the secret one day by a chance indiscretion.

***

Two pleasant months went by, and then Shelom of Rehoboth, a former confidential maid of Elizabeth's, came to Ain-Rimmon from Jerusalem with her husband. Elizabeth had sent for her because of her skill as a midwife. A woman who first conceives at the age of thirty-six must be prepared for a difficult confinement.

Shelom was married to the son of a former steward of the estate. She brought a budget of news about troubles in Herod's palace. "Yes, my lady, the whole City is disturbed, I am sorry to say. Nobody seems to know how it all began or how it is likely to end. My sister-in-law was saying, the day that we came away: 'It is indecent. We might be living among the barbarous Parthians, not in God-fearing Jerusalem.' She is an excitable woman, is my sister-in-law, but there are many like her in our quarter. It is the yells and screams from the Palace at night that disturb her. The eunuchs are worse than the women, the way they scream under torture: they have no pride of sex, I suppose."

"It must be most unsettling, my dear Shelom. But you have yet to tell me what has happened?"

"I know nothing for certain and fear to earn Solomon's reproof of babblers and tale-bearers. However, I will tell you what is said. The story begins with Jochebed, the wife of the King's brother Pheroras. She comes from Bethany, you know; her father was a travelling tree-grafter. I cannot speak from any personal knowledge, but my husband's family call her the cunningest schemer in all Israel. 'How Prince Pheroras ever came to marry a woman of such low birth,' my husband says, 'I do not know; he must have been bewitched.' However that may be, she formed a close league with the Pharisee nationalists. You remember how heavily King Herod fined them when they refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Emperor, and how obligingly Jochebed paid the fine? Well, some of them began prophesying, to please her, that the sceptre of Herod would pass to Pheroras and herself. Herod's spies soon reported this prophecy to him and he ordered Pheroras to divorce her, but Pheroras refused to do so, saying that he would rather die. What made things worse was that Queen Doris is Jochebed's closest friend, and King Antipater himself is intimate with Prince Pheroras, who was a generous uncle to him while he was a private citizen. Then Salome, King Herod's sister, took a hand in the game. Herod had been living on good terms with her since he married her off to his friend Alexas, the rich Philistine, who is reputedly one of the Lady Livia's agents. She managed to prove to his satisfaction that the prophecy was bound up with some wild talk of a Messiah, and that behind the prophecy lay a plot against his life in which the royal Chamberlain Bagoas was implicated. So he arrested everyone whom she named."

"Was Pheroras perhaps to be the Messiah?"

"Oh no, my lady, not Prince Pheroras but a son who was to be born to him and his wife; and Bagoas's son was to be this Messiah's principal minister. So of course the King—who, if I may put it that way, will tolerate no Messiahs but himself—immediately disproved the prophecy…."

Elizabeth interrupted the story with a burst of loud laughter. "How very comical, my dear Shelom! Either you have misheard the name or else it is another Bagoas. Bagoas the Chamberlain has been a eunuch from childhood!"

"Comical or sad, my lady, it is nevertheless the truth. According to the prophecy, the infant Messiah would miraculously restore Bagoas to virility and enable him to beget children. So, as I was telling your ladyship, King Herod immediately disproved the prophecy by having Bagoas strangled. He also made an example of nine of the leading nationalists. Being Pharisees, of course, they believed in bodily resurrection, but he cheated them of their hopes by burning them alive. Twenty-three other men were executed and four women strangled. Oh, and he also impaled his pretty little catamite Gratus, the one who always used to tuck him up in bed and kiss him good-night. But he did not choose to do anything to Pheroras or Jochebed at the time—I suppose because there was no evidence to connect them with the plot—and Pheroras was indignant to be suspected of high treason and vowed that he would return at once to his principality across Jordan and not visit Jerusalem again until the King were dead."

"Boldly spoken. I suppose that Herod has done away with the poor fellow by now?"

"Yes, my lady, he died very soon afterwards, and the King brought his body back to Jerusalem just to prove him a liar, and gave him one of those costly funerals which he reserves for members of his family whom he has helped out of this world, and wept tears by the jarful."

"What has happened to Jochebed? If I know the Herodian way, she was at once accused of poisoning Pheroras."

"You know the King's way well, my lady, but his scheme was a somewhat more complex one than you perhaps have in mind. He gave out that she had administered what she thought to be a love-philtre but which proved to be a poison; and that the drug had been provided by Queen Doris, for whom it was procured some months ago by Sylleus the Arabian. He put the ladies and maid-servants of Pheroras's Court to the torture, and by asking them leading questions tried to persuade them to incriminate the Queen. They did not at first understand what they were being asked to confess, but at last one of them was shrewd enough to cry out from the rack: 'May the God who governs this earth and the heavens above punish Queen Doris, the sole cause of my anguish!' The screws were immediately slackened and she swore to the required story, and then other women who had been waiting their turn for the rack corroborated it with the necessary detail. So now Queen Doris has been stripped of all her costly robes and jewels and sent packing."

"My poor friend Doris! But what a queer story! Was any charge against King Antipater included in these confessions?"

"King Antipater's name is not mentioned in the official account of the trial."

"No, that was not to be expected. But he is in great danger, none the less."

"Do you think so, indeed? The plot, if it was a real plot, implied the removal of Herod and the usurpation of the throne by Prince Pheroras, so that Antipater cannot be reasonably accused of complicity. People are saying that the King used the occasion as an excuse for removing Doris, who had vexed him by treating his junior wives a little severely—she was a great stickler for Court etiquette, I suppose from having been so long exiled from Court—but that when Antipater returns from Rome she will be restored to favour. They say that the news will grieve Antipater, but cannot alarm him for his own safety, and that if there is one element in this obscure affair of which they can be sure, it is that King Antipater is the most wilfully loyal son a wicked father ever had."

"They are right in saying that King Antipater will not be alarmed: his wilful loyalty will blind him to the danger. But that the danger is real and deadly I am certain."

"Why do you think, my lady, that the King should desire Antipater's death?"

"I have not the least idea. I only know this, that Herod would never have made him a king had he not intended to destroy him soon afterwards. Now that Doris has left the Palace for good, Antipater has no better chance of life than a little child playing with a horned viper."

Mary had been sitting apart with her needlework. She suddenly gave a cry and turned pale.

"Why, daughter, what is amiss? You look like a phantom."

"I have pricked my finger; look, it bleeds!"

"So good a needle-woman as yourself should be accustomed to pricks by now. Are you terrified at the sight of a little blood?"

"It was a sharp prick. It seemed to stab me to the very heart."

"Quick, Shelom," said Elizabeth. "Fetch a cordial. The kerm is best. You know the shelf. Why, upon my living soul, the child has fainted! Is that not strange?"

"I was watching her. She pricked herself because she felt faint; she did not faint because she pricked herself. But oh, my lady, you cannot hide the truth from me. When I first came to your father's house your sister Hannah was the same age, or a little younger, and this girl is my lady Hannah all over again. The Lord shower blessings on her pretty face! Here is the kerm. Give me leave to put it to her lips. Remember, my lady, that you sent me as midwife to your sister Hannah when she was to be delivered of a child; this is the very child that I brought into the world."

"Shelom, not another word! You are as impudent as ever!"

"Yes, my lady, and you will forgive me once more, out of old habit."

Mary revived and continued quietly with her needlework as if nothing had happened to disturb her tranquillity, but soon afterwards excused herself and went to bed.

A few days later Shelom was sitting in the walled garden with Elizabeth. Between them on the flagstones lay a sackful of the lopped heads of roses, and they were plucking off the petals to make perfume. Shelom said: "My lady, a certain young woman who is your companion, about whom I am forbidden to know anything—have you observed her colour?"

"No, what do you mean?"

"I mean that in a few months' time, when you have been safely delivered of your child, I shall have another confinement on hand. I judge from the unevenness of colour in her cheeks."

"Oh, Shelom, you are not teasing? You are so fond of teasing. Is it really true?"

"It is true. Why do you stare at me, my lady? I have heard about the child's marriage, though why she has been sent here who can tell?"

"How much do you know, Shelom?"

"My husband's brother happens to be the Temple scribe who drafted the marriage contract between this child and your brother-in-law Joseph of Emmaus, of the House of David. He mentioned it to my husband because he remembered that I had been in the service of the child's mother."

"But when was this marriage celebrated?"

"That I cannot tell you. Soon afterwards, one would suppose, to judge from the child's condition."

"Shelom, upon my word I am in a very uneasy situation, and the worst of it is that I know as little as you do."

"You fear that the child who is to be born may not be Joseph's?"

"I cannot permit myself to fear anything of the sort, and I forbid you to suggest it."

"I am under your orders, my lady."

"Shelom, you are a good creature. You must stand by us both."

"Yes, my lady. For my lady Hannah's sake and for yours, and for the girl's. But why should she have fainted? Were we discussing anything of concern to herself?"

"No, you were telling me about Prince Pheroras and his wife, and about King Antipater. Perhaps she was not listening but pursuing her own thoughts, and suddenly was overcome by anxiety for herself and her child. The last words that I had spoken were about a child playing with a horned viper. They frightened her, I suppose."

"It is likely enough, my lady. I wonder whether she is aware of her condition?"

"Perhaps not. But soon she will be, and then she must say something to me about it. Meanwhile, I propose to say nothing to her, and I beg that you will do the same."

That same evening Mary came to Shelom. "The lady Elizabeth assures me that you are a discreet woman."

"The lady Elizabeth is not given to bestowing idle praise, and I thank her for her good opinion."

"Shelom, there is something which I cannot ask your mistress to do for me. Perhaps you will help me. It is of the greatest importance. There is someone in Italy to whom I wish to send a message. You say that your husband has dealings with the merchants of Caesarea—could he arrange to have the message secretly delivered? I have a little gold with me: you shall have it all if you can arrange the matter quietly. And look, here is a Babylonian gold pin. You shall have this too, though it was a gift to me from my own dear mother."

Shelom replied in the calmest of voices: "Keep your pin, child. The message has already been sent."

Mary stared at her. "But I have not yet told you the message."

"You told it to me when you pricked your finger."

"I do not understand you."

"The message was sent off on the day that I left Jerusalem."

"This is absurd. To whom was it sent?"

"To the man whom you have in mind. A message of warning about his father's intentions. I did not let the lady Elizabeth know that I had already foreseen the danger which threatens your friend."

"Have you a familiar spirit?"

"No, but I love you. And I have sent off another message since I came here, to the same man. My husband rode off with it a week ago; he will give it to his agent at Jamnia."

"What message did you send?"

"I told him how it was with you."

"In what words?"

"In these words." Shelom bent down and wrote in the dust these antique Hebrew letters:

TETH-KAPH-DALETH-HE

HE-YODH-ALEPH-YODH

LAMEDH-BETH-TETH-VAV

"That is a novel way of writing," said Mary. "Do the letters stand for numbers? It looks like a charm."

"A charm that will cheer him."

"Why do you not tell me more?"

"I have told you far more than you have told me."

Mary eyed Shelom steadily, and Shelom returned her gaze with the air of a servant who has done her duty well.

"You are a strange woman," Mary said at last.

"You will come to understand me in time, Daughter of the Lotus!"

***

At Jerusalem, Cleopas was saying to Joachim as they went up the steep road together towards the Temple: "But it is not true, surely?"

"Why should it not be true? Simon the High Priest had the right to bestow her in marriage on whatever man he pleased. And Joseph of Emmaus is of honourable family."

"Though not a Levite."

"Nevertheless he married the sister of your wife, and of mine."

"The club-footed one. When that marriage was arranged he was a prosperous merchant of middle age. Now he is old and bald and has already divided the greater part of his property between his four sons."

"He still has property at Emmaus."

Cleopas said impetuously: "Something is being concealed from you, honest Joachim. I believe that the High Priest betrothed her to Joseph because nobody else could be found to marry her."

Joachim stopped dead. "You mean?"

"Perhaps she acted foolishly," said Cleopas, trying to speak in a light tone.

"You mean my daughter?" asked Joachim, narrowing his eyes and speaking softly. "Brother, put a bridle on your tongue, lest you offend me." His fingers tightened on his almond-wood staff.

Cleopas blustered. "I meant nothing, nothing whatever. Girls often behave thoughtlessly, especially in festival time: become compromised—innocently, very often. Why, my own sister…"

"Yes, Cleopas, your sister perhaps, but not my daughter!" He turned his back on Cleopas and slowly went down the hill again; he did not wish to enter the Temple with furious passions surging in his heart.

Cleopas was irritated with himself for having blundered so stupidly. He had been trying to find out from Joachim the truth of the rumour that Joseph, having agreed to marry the girl, had come to the High Priest's house with the redemption fee of ten shekels as bride-money, but that for some unexplained reason the contract had not been signed. If only he had refrained from that unfortunate remark! Now he had mortally offended Joachim, one of his dearest friends, and he would have to suffer the reproaches of his wife, whose sister Hannah was Joachim's wife. He stood for a while where Joachim had left him, then turned and hurried down the hill.

He soon overtook Joachim, plucked him by the sleeve and said: "Brother Joachim, forgive me my folly! It is written: 'Even a fool when he holds his peace is accounted wise.' But I, being worse than a fool, have forfeited that consolation."

Joachim answered: "And it is written in the same book: 'A soft answer turns away wrath', and again: 'It is an honour in a man to cease from strife.' Come, let us go up again to praise the Lord together in the Temple." But as they neared the top he said quietly: "Cleopas, I did wrong to boast in your presence that I had rid myself of the burdensome responsibility of providing a husband for my daughter. Since you have proved yourself a wise man by the confession of your folly, I will confide to you my sorrow, which is too much for one heart to bear. The High Priest was directed in a dream to betroth my child to Joseph of Emmaus, in the house of whose married daughter Lysia she had spun the purple flax for the Holy Curtain. He sent to Joseph asking him whether he were willing to consider the marriage and whether, if so, he would ride up from Emmaus on a certain day with the bride-money. Joseph was willing enough; but he came a day too late. Early on the previous morning as my poor child was walking with a companion from the College of Virgins to Lysia's house they were both seized upon by bandits in a narrow lane and carried of. They set the other virgin free outside the City gates and she returned unharmed—none of her golden ornaments had been taken from her—but not my child. The High Priest would not raise a hue-and-cry in the City for fear of damaging her reputation; he hoped that in good time the bandits would state the price of her ransom, which he would pay quietly. But not a word has been heard of her since. I am distracted with anxiety."

"Brother Joachim, I do not wish to add another faggot to the burden of your sorrow, but I suspect the hand of a Certain Man in this. If ransom had been the object of the abduction, why did the bandits release your daughter's companion? Or why did they not at least rob her? It may be that at a time like this, when Messianic prophecies are flying from mouth to mouth, a Certain Man might not be pleased with a marriage between an elder of the House of David and a daughter of the Royal Heirs. It may be that he has ordered one of his Levite creatures to debauch her. You know the Law. Since the contract was not signed at the time of the abduction she was still a virgin, and the man who enticed her need now only offer her guardian the bride-money in quittance; he is then free to marry her at his leisure."

"If, as you suppose, the Man of Sodom has stolen my ewe lamb he will never escape my rage. I am an old man, but my hands are strong to strangle."

Cleopas frowned. Lifting his hand in warning he said: "Be silent, fool! Is it not written: 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay'?"

Joachim's lips writhed as he struggled with himself, but at last he had the mastery. "And it is written also: 'He who hearkens to reproof gets understanding.' I thank you, brother Cleopas!"

They passed on and entered the Temple at peace with the Lord and with each other.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE TRIAL OF KING ANTIPATER

It was some months before King Antipater, who headed Herod's embassy at Rome, finally persuaded the President of the Senatorial Court to pronounce sentence of death against Sylleus the Arabian.

This cost him twenty silver talents, for the President had been bribed by the other side to reserve judgement until the embassy had returned to Judaea—it was hoped that if none of them were present in Rome to remind the Emperor of the seriousness of the case he might be persuaded to grant a reprieve. All Antipater's other business was finished, including that of submitting his father's Will to the Emperor's approval. The Emperor had expressed his satisfaction with it and entrusted it to the safe-keeping of the Vestal Virgins. But Antipater still could not sail home until he had secured an undertaking from the Commander of the Praetorian Guards that he would not postpone the date of Sylleus's execution. This would probably cost another three or four talents.

Ten days later, while he was still negotiating with the Commander, Antipater was angered rather than alarmed by an anonymous letter, dated four months previously, which reached him from Jerusalem. He found it folded in his napkin at breakfast. It contained circumstantial news of the nationalist plot, the subsequent death of his uncle Pheroras, the torture of the Court ladies, and the criminal charges brought against his mother, Queen Doris; but he could not believe that any of these events had taken place, because there had been no mention or hint of them in despatches of later date which had regularly reached him from his father.

He showed the letter to two reliable members of his staff, expecting them to echo his disgust of anonymous libels. To his surprise, they did nothing of the sort. They confessed that the letter substantiated hints and rumours which had reached them from trustworthy sources in Jerusalem, but with which they had not cared to trouble him at the time. Antipater could read in their faces that the letter contained nothing that they had not already heard. They begged him to remain at Rome under the Emperor's protection until he knew whether his father suspected him of complicity in the nationalists' plot or the murder of Pheroras.

Antipater reproved them for their credulity; he said that a clear conscience was the best possible armour against lies and malice, as his father himself had recently proved when he came to Rome unsummoned to answer Sylleus's baseless charges. He would therefore return to Jerusalem as soon as Sylleus had been safely despatched. He wrote immediately to his father to say that he hoped to sail in ten days' time and meanwhile gave him an itemized list of his expenses at Rome, regretting that the legal expenses in the Sylleus case had been so heavy. They amounted to nearly two hundred silver talents, sixty of which had gone in bribes to judges and court officials.

Augustus expressed sincere sorrow when Antipater came to take his leave. He gave him costly presents as well as a letter of commendation for delivery to Herod. In this he characteristically punned on Antipater's name: "A son so dutiful should not be called Antipater, but Philopater—one who cherishes his father, not one who opposes him. I envy you, dear Herod, in having a Philopater as your royal colleague whom you can trust to take from your shoulders some of the burdensome weight of public business. His zeal on your behalf has been remarkable." Augustus knew, of course, that Antipater does not really mean "one who opposes a father", but, in the other sense of the preposition Anti, "one who acts as deputy of a father". It was a hereditary forename of the House of Herod, and originally, I suppose, signified "Priest of Hercules-Melkarth".

He then condoled with Antipater on the death of his uncle Pheroras, the news of which had reached him officially from Antioch in a recent quarterly despatch.

"Oh, then it is true!" cried Antipater, and could not restrain his tears.

"A word to the wise," said Augustus kindly. "Unofficial reports have also reached me that Queen Doris, your mother, is in disgrace. I advise you not to champion her cause blindly, as a son of your generous nature might be tempted to do. Your father is easily vexed; assume her guilty until you have clear proof of her innocence."

Antipater asked: "Of what is my mother accused, Caesar?"

But Augustus would divulge no more. "The report was unofficial," he said, with a smile of dismissal.

Sylleus was executed on the Ides of September, and on the next day Antipater and his staff sailed for home in a fast galley, the Fortune. In the Ionian Sea they ran into foul weather, and again in the Cretan; but the weather was calm when they sighted the coast of Cilicia and were hailed by a packet-vessel from Caesarea. Among the mail which they took aboard was a letter from Herod addressed to Antipater at Rome, begging him to return at once, whether the Sylleus case were concluded or not, since his long absence from public business was being felt more keenly each succeeding day. Herod, who wrote in most affectionate terms, referred only incidentally to the death of Pheroras, which led Antipater to conclude that a previous despatch had gone astray; and also touched on a "slight difficulty" with Queen Doris, who after showing "a somewhat stepmotherly severity" towards his younger wives had not accepted his rebukes in as good a spirit as he had a right to expect. "Doubtless all will be well, Royal Son, when you return as a visible pledge of the love between your mother and myself; and for this reason, as well as for the others upon which I have already enlarged, pray make no delay, but spread your sails wide to catch the West Wind."

Antipater, a great weight lifted from his heart, showed this letter to the same two members of his staff. "Read for yourselves," he said. "The mysterious letter of warning came from enemies trying to foment trouble between my loving father and myself. No wonder it was anonymous. How glad I am that I rejected your advice!"

"May you continue so, Majesty! Pray forget what it was that we advised you to do."

Antipater had noticed a mysterious group of Hebrew letters, evidently numerals, written small on the back of the letter. He had puzzled over a similar group on a letter which had reached him from Jerusalem some weeks previously. He now unpacked the files and searched for the earlier letter, which, he remembered, was a report from the steward of his Jamnian estates. He found it without trouble and compared the figures. This was the earlier group, reading from right to left in Oriental style:

1. 19. 17.

18. 18. 8.

12. 3. 27.

The latter group was:

5. 24. 9.

10. 11. 5.

6. 15. 32.

The handwriting was identical, but what could the figures mean? Were these cipher messages? Then they could not be addressed to himself, since he had made no arrangements to correspond in cipher with anyone. Perhaps they were intended for some member of his staff? Or were they merely registration numbers used by the packet-service?

He copied out both groups on a small scrap of parchment and studied them with the absorbed intentness that travellers often bestow on trifles during an uneventful voyage in calm weather; but could make nothing of them. What puzzled him most was that they were written in the antique characters used in the earliest Scriptural texts, not in the modem Square script.

The ship sailed up the Orontes to Antioch, where Antipater went ashore to pay his respects to Quinctilius Varus, the newly appointed Governor-General of Syria, with whom he had long been on friendly terms. Varus welcomed him with a quizzical look, and invited him to a private audience, but when, instead of making some tearful confession or passionate appeal for help, Antipater spoke cheerfully about current affairs and mutual acquaintances, he grew impatient and at last asked him point-blank whether the death of Pheroras had not greatly complicated his affairs.

"No, Excellency: none of my business was in his hands. This is not to deny that the news was a sudden and bitter blow. I loved Pheroras well. He was more like a father than an uncle to me in the days when I was in exile, and I confess that I wept when I heard that he was dead; indeed, I fasted in sackcloth and ashes for a whole day, as our custom is."

"Majesty, why do you hesitate to confide in me? I am your friend!"

"What have I to confide?"

"Your well-founded apprehensions."

"I do not understand Your Excellency."

"Nor I Your Majesty. Well, I can be as silent as yourself if I please, but I have this at least to say. Your father has invited me to Jerusalem on legal business—which he does not specify but at the nature of which I can guess—and I propose to travel there in a few days' time by way of Damascus, where I have been asked to adjudicate in a boundary dispute. I shall be most happy if you will ride in my coach with me. Reason tells me that you will be assured a more honourable welcome as my friend than either as your mother's son or as your father's colleague and heir-at-law. Have I made myself plain?"

"Your Excellency is most kind, but if my royal father has any suspicions of my loyalty, as you seem to hint, I should be unwise to increase them by placing myself under your protection, as if I knew myself guilty of some crime. Besides, he has begged me to make haste, and I cannot disobey him. I shall continue my journey by sea, and unless the wind changes I should be home in four days' time."

"You have a noble soul, Majesty, but this is not an age in which nobility of soul is often rewarded. Remain with me, and I will take full responsibility for the delay, and help you to the utmost of my powers should your father bring any charges against you. For hand washes hand, and when you are sole sovereign, you will doubtless remember your debt to me. Refuse my offer, and you may find yourself without a friend in the world to support you in trouble."

"Your Excellency must forgive me. My duty to my father comes first."

Varus lost his temper. "They say, Majesty, that nobody can persuade a fool that the rainbow is not his foot-bridge. I leave you to your own devices. When the bridge melts under your feet and you fall into the water, do not call on me for an oar or keg to buoy you up. Your father has other sons who may be more anxious than you are to secure my favour and friendship."

"I do not fear drowning. As your admired Pindar writes:

If Heaven designs to save you, safe you are

Though wallowing in mid-ocean in a sieve."

So they parted, and the Fortune, in which Antipater had re-embarked, stood out to sea again: but as she put in at Sidon she fouled a sunken wreck and sprang a leak. This delayed her for several days, and when she sailed once more she was caught by a violent North-easter, dismasted and driven to within a few miles of Alexandria. She had to battle back slowly, under oars, with many men injured and provisions running short.

It was the last day of October before she made Caesarea. The fine double harbour of Caesarea, carved by Herod at huge expense out of a featureless coast and dominated by a colossal statue of Augustus visible from miles away at sea, is as commodious as that of the Peiraeus. The long mole which breaks the force of the waves and encloses the outer harbour measures not less than two hundred feet across, and the capacious wharves of the inner harbour are protected by strong forts. The city is magnificent, with temples, baths, market-places, gymnasia and an amphitheatre in the best Greek style.

The Fortune sailed into the outer harbour, the entrance of which is to the north, and her captain hailed the harbour-master: "Ahoy there! We are the Fortune galley, Firmicus Sidonius captain, two hundred tons, homeward bound from Rome. We have His Majesty King Antipater aboard and a consignment of copper ingots from Sidon. Clear of fever. A surgeon is needed for ten men injured in the recent gale. We propose to berth at the Royal Pavilion abaft Fort Drusus."

After a pause the answer was trumpeted back by the harbour-master's loud-voiced slave. "Your instructions are: tie up at the copper-wharf on the west quay and discharge cargo."

The captain repeated: "Ahoy there! I repeat that we have His Majesty King Antipater aboard. We propose to berth at the Royal Pavilion."

The reply came back: "Instructions repeated. You are to tie up at the copper-wharf and discharge cargo there. A surgeon will be sent to you."

The captain apologized to Antipater. "Majesty, the harbour-master is a mad little tyrant and I dare not disobey him without your sanction. What am I to do?"

"Perhaps the Royal berth is fouled by a wreck. Make for the copper-wharf as he orders. I will enjoy the walk along the quay to the city. My legs long for dry land."

The Fortune drew in at the copper-wharf and immediately slaves ran aboard to help unbatten the hatches. "Back, dogs!" shouted the master, cracking his whip at them. "Let His Majesty disembark first before you tread filth into my decks!"

The gang-plank was put down and made fast to a bollard. Antipater's aides covered it with a purple cloth, ran across and stood waiting officiously on the wharf to welcome him ashore.

One of them whispered to another: "This is a strange home-coming. Do you remember with what pomp we were sent off to Rome?"

"Why is the Commander of Fort Drusus not here to salute the King? Is everyone crazy in Caesarea?"

"See that the injured men are put ashore first," said Antipater, "and find someone to buy them fresh fruit, poor fellows."

When this had been done and the surgeon arrived, Antipater went ashore himself. A sergeant of Herod's bodyguard with a file of soldiers at his back now sauntered out from behind a building. He saluted Antipater and said: "Majesty, King Herod requires your presence in Jerusalem immediately; you are to take the post-chaise without delay."

The aides were astonished. Only a sergeant! One of them asked him: "Where is your commander? Why has he not come in person to welcome the King?"

The sergeant answered: "My instructions, which are directly from the King, are to answer no questions and permit no delays. The post-chaise is ready for His Majesty yonder by the weighing-shed, and I am to accompany him to Jerusalem. I am also instructed to disarm His Majesty."

"I carry no arms," said Antipater.

"I am to search Your Majesty, nevertheless."

"What of my staff?"

"I have no instructions about your staff: they may please themselves whether they escort you on hired horses or whether they remain here."

"Is my father the King in good health?"

"Your Majesty will pardon me, but I am not permitted to answer questions of any sort."

"First show me your warrant."

The warrant was in order and Antipater permitted himself to be searched. Then he climbed into the chaise, and the cobs set off at a trot along the quay. The staff stood gaping after him, but presently the more loyal members set off on foot for the city, hired horses and rode in pursuit. Jerusalem lay twenty-five miles away inland.

Antipater arrived at the Palace unescorted except by the sergeant; for Herod's guards posted at the City gate had detained the members of his staff who had overtaken him. The sergeant handed him over to the head-porter, who admitted him with surly looks, saying nothing and giving him a most perfunctory salute. No one came forward to welcome him, and a young officer to whom he had once shown favour shrank away hurriedly at his approach and concealed himself behind a pillar.

With head erect, Antipater entered the tessellated Judgement Hall, where he was expected, the news of his arrival at Caesarea having been conveyed by smoke-signal some hours before. Herod, looking pale and thin, sat upon his throne, propped with cushions; Varus in an ivory curule chair at his right hand. They had been settling a dispute about the grazing rights in Transjordania of certain Syrian nomads.

Antipater greeted them both with punctilio. A sudden silence fell as he walked the length of the hall, mounted the steps of the throne and made to embrace Herod.

Herod repelled him violently, turned his head away and cried: "The Lord confound you, you vile wretch, do not dare to touch me! Oh, Varus, is this not the perfect parricide? He treacherously plots my death, and then slobbers over me with kisses. Out of my sight, sirrah, and prepare your defence in the few hours that remain to you! You shall be tried to-morrow for your life, and the excellent Quinctilius Varus, who by a fortunate accident has arrived here to-day, is to be your judge."

Antipater stood stupefied. He turned appealingly towards Varus, who answered him with a wooden look, then again towards his father, who would not meet his eye but shouted: "Begone, begone, I say!"

Antipater made him a deep reverence, and then addressed Varus: "Your Excellency, I have not yet been acquainted with the charges against me; how shall I prepare a defence?"

"Doubtless the charge will be put in writing and handed to you within the hour."

Herod bellowed: "No, Varus, no! By Hercules, no! If I acquaint him with the charges he will use his interest with the warders to secure false witnesses for his trial, and have time to concoct his devilish excuses."

Varus answered mildly: "It is usual in criminal cases to give the accused sufficient time to prepare his defence."

"This is no usual case. This is plain parricide." Then he shouted at Antipater: "Why did you not make haste to return as I ordered? Where have you been all this long while since you left Antioch? You set off ten days before Varus yet arrive four days after him. Have you been visiting your fellow-criminal Antiphilus in Egypt? No, no, do not reply, pray! Save your lies until to-morrow!"

Antipater spent the night under guard in the Palace prison and was forbidden to communicate with anybody. He presently called for the Scriptures, hoping to calm his mind by reading, and they brought him a tattered set of scrolls. The Book of Genesis happened to be rolled back to the chapter which concerns the destruction of Sodom. He began reading at random and the first text that caught his eye was this:

Escape for your life, look not behind you nor stay in the plain. Escape to the mountain lest you be consumed.

He sighed and thought: "The First Book of Moses, the nineteenth chapter and the seventeenth verse: 'Escape for your life, look not behind you, lest you be consumed!' The warning comes too late." Suddenly a light shone through his mind and he remembered the groups of figures written on the back of his letters. They had begun with that very same series, 1. 19. 17. He remembered them all without difficulty from having studied them so intently; and now with trembling hands began to search the Scriptures and look up the remaining two quotations of the first series. The eighteenth book in the Jerusalem Canon was Job.

18. 18. 8. The eighteenth chapter of Job, the eighth verse. He found it:

He is cast into a net, he walks upon a snare.

12. 3. 27. The third chapter of the Second Book of Kings, the twenty-seventh verse. He found it:

Then he took his eldest son that should have reigned and offered him for a burned offering upon the wall.

The three texts comprised a warning not to walk into the snare that his father had set for him, but to escape for his life; for his father intended to destroy him as pitilessly as the King of Moab had destroyed his eldest son. A warning that had come too late. He supposed the other message to be of the same drift. But it was altogether different: it conveyed news.

Deuteronomy 24. 9:

Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam by the way, after you were come forth out of Egypt.

II Samuel 11. 5:

And the woman conceived and sent and told David: "I am with child."

Joshua 15. 32:

And Lebaoth and Shilhim and Ain and Rimmon.

Then Antipater began to weep, caught between joy and apprehension. Mary was with child and safe with her kinsfolk at Ain-Rimmon; or was she still safe? Was it possible that Herod's anger had been provoked by the discovery of their secret marriage? Had Mary's secret perhaps been betrayed by one of the tented Rechabites who had carried her off? Had Herod arrested her and put her to the torture?

He prayed silently to his God that, whatever happened to himself, Mary might escape from the malice of his enemies and bear her child in safety. His love for her was like none other that he had ever experienced. He seemed at once her father, her child and her lover. No sooner had he joined hands with her at their marriage, and tasted the fragment of quince which she placed between his lips, than he felt suddenly enroyalled—enroyalled in the very sense that Simon had proposed. It was as though he had died to his old faded world and been instantly reborn to her new, glorious one. Her image, as he had seen her for the first time, remained fixed in his mind; motionless and calm like the statue of a goddess. Her bridal robe was of white linen banded with blue, her mantle was cloth of gold edged with scarlet, her girdle of golden scallop-shells. Her silver shoes were curved like crescent moons; a jewelled serpent was grasped in her hand. Her diadem twinkled with twelve clusters of diamonds above her calm sea-green eyes; above her brow was the royal headband of Michal. Holiness emanated from her, and when she addressed him in the antique formula: "I am the Mother of Adam, I am the Mother of Salma, I have chosen you Caleb, Caleb of Mamre, to be my love", he had trembled as with an ague.

Now he trembled again to think of her. Only the one meeting, the first and last, and before dawn of the same night she had returned to Lysia's house; and he had ridden off to Caesarea to take ship for Rome. He would barter a year of his life for a sight of her, or a word with her. A year of his life? Had he even a week of life left to enjoy?

And the child?

All that night, stretched on the stone floor in his purple cloak, he brooded on the child. Would it be a son? His heart told him so. When he fell asleep he had wonderful dreams, the glory of which still illuminated his cell when the gaoler entered, an hour after dawn, bringing his breakfast: water in an earthenware jug and a crust of stale barley-bread.

"What have you there?" asked Antipater, still half asleep.

"Bread of affliction and water of affliction until I come again."

"Words of good omen! The prisoner to whom those words were first addressed was set free."

"Was he so? Then I dare undertake that his crimes were less odious than yours." He clanged the cell-door after him.

Antipater gave thanks to the Lord for a new day, washed his hands and began to eat. The spell of the dreams continued to hold him so that the water tasted like snow-cooled Lemnian wine, the bread like honey-cracknels. He spent the rest of the morning reading the Scriptures with a composed mind; especially, the chapter in Genesis which concerns the delivery of Isaac from his father Abraham's sacrificial knife gave him hope and comfort.

About noon he was again summoned to the Judgement Hall, known to the Jews as Gabbatha, or The Pavement. He found Varus and his father once more seated side by side, saluted them respectfully and abased himself as a suppliant at some distance from them, waiting to hear the charges read.

Herod stood up, waved a paper at him and cried: "It is absurd to go through the motions of a formal trial when I have evidence like this in my hand—a letter sent you by your accursed dam Doris, whom I have now divorced and banished. It was despatched a month after you sailed, but my faithful servants in the police service intercepted it. She writes: 'Remain in Rome, dear son. All is discovered. Throw yourself on Caesar's protection.'"

He handed the letter to Varus, who observed dryly: "Queen Doris when she wrote this letter must have been suffering from some painful rheumatic complaint. It has the shakiness that is characteristic of confessions extorted by torture."

Herod glared at Varus and bawled out between fits of wheezing: "It is the writing of a guilty woman who can hardly hold the pen for trembling. I trust, Excellency, that you will regard this evidence as conclusive and pronounce your verdict at once."

"Your son is a Roman citizen, Majesty, and I fear that we cannot curtail proceedings in the way that you suggest—unless, of course, he cares to plead guilty to the charges against him—without grave offence to the Emperor."

Antipater rose to his knees. "Father, I cannot plead guilty to charges that I have not heard. And I beg that you will not condemn me without a hearing. That my mother may have written to tell me 'all is discovered' should not be regarded as a proof either of my guilt or of her own. She may have temporarily lost her reason, which would account for the shakiness of her usually steady hand. It is even possible that the letter has been forged by someone who wishes to discredit us both."

Herod interrupted him with cries of rage and lamentation, declaring that never had a kind father been so ill-used by his children, and that the worst ingrate of all was his eldest son Antipater. What care and love, honour and treasure he had lavished on him! And now this same Antipater vilely plotted to murder him in his old age, not content to wait until the dry knuckle-end of life that remained to him had been picked clean by the kites of Time. "And oh, the prodigious hypocrisy of the last years! How egregiously well he has pretended to watch over me, to proffer me sage advice, to dismiss unfaithful servants, to lighten my burden of business—all this only to strike me down in the end!" Then he laid the whole responsibility for the deaths of Alexander and Aristobulus on Antipater's shoulders, accusing him of forging evidence, suborning witnesses and having been the power behind the prosecution. He now believed, he said—wiping his eyes and groaning—that the poor fellows had been innocent after all; but he himself was not their murderer, it was Antipater. His false son Antipater, whose whole life might be summed up in the phrase "a mystery of evil".

He buried his head on his hands and pretended to sob. At this, Nicolaus of Damascus, who had been counsel for the prosecution at the trial of Alexander and Aristobulus, and also at that of Sylleus, came forward and read out the charges. He was a small dry man with a twisted neck and sneering lips.

The first charge: that Antipater had complained to his mother Queen Doris, on such and such a date, that his father King Herod had lived too long and grew younger every day—that he himself would be grey-bearded before he succeeded him, too old to take pleasure in the sole possession of the kingdom.

The second: that in conversation with his uncle Pheroras, on approximately such and such a date, Antipater had called his father the King a "wild beast and murderer" and said "if we have but courage and the hands of men we shall be free to live our lives without fear".

The third: that Antipater had sent to On-Heliopolis in Egypt for a deadly and subtle poison, which was brought back by one Antiphilus, a member of his staff, and secretly handed to his uncle Pheroras: and that this poison would have been administered to Herod by Pheroras—Antipater, having been sent to Rome by his father on urgent business, would have evaded suspicion—had he not hung back and destroyed all the poison but one small dose, which would be produced in Court.

The fourth: that Bathyllus, the freedman whom Antipater had sent back from Rome with despatches to the King shortly after his arrival there, brought a new pottle of poison with him from Antipater to deliver to Pheroras, in case the other proved ineffective; which poison had been seized and would also be produced in Court.

Nicolaus then offered written evidence of Antipater's guilt under each of these four counts in the form of depositions extracted by torture from Queen Doris, from ten Court-ladies in the employment of Pheroras, from Jochebed the wife of Pheroras and from her sister Naomi, also from Antiphilus, Bathyllus and others. These depositions he rapidly read out and then laid before Varus.

Varus, scrutinizing them with interest, remarked that Queen Doris's handwriting after torture was indistinguishable from her handwriting when she was merely oppressed with guilt, and that she used the same cheap quality of paper and the same muddy ink on both occasions—which he considered strange.

"Why strange, Excellency?" asked Nicolaus.

"My good Nicolaus, do you ask 'why'? Why—because it is the same paper on which all the witnesses have recorded their depositions: typical prison paper, and prison ink too. I make no pretence at being an expert criminologist, but, by the body of Bacchus, I have not been thirty years a magistrate for nothing. I have learned to cultivate elementary common sense. What stationery do queens use? The very best smooth-laid paper, at fifty drachmae a short roll, and they scent it with musk or roses. But this tattered, stained, corrugated stuff, full of lumps and thin patches—it is unthinkable that it ever reposed in the boudoir of a queen as elegant as Doris. If I had not King Herod's assurance to the contrary, I should suppose that the Queen's private letter to King Antipater at Rome had been written on the same occasion as the confession, which was admittedly extracted by torture."

Nicolaus was taken aback by this answer, and Varus continued: "In the ten depositions made by the Court-ladies of Pheroras, who tell their story in almost identical words, King Antipater is alleged to have informed his mother in their presence that he was going to Rome 'to get as far away as possible from that wild beast, my father'. This does not square with the statement in the third charge, according to which King Antipater was sent to Rome by his father on urgent business, or with a letter sent to me by King Herod some months ago to the same effect. King Antipater is also credited with accusing his father of 'cruelty in so wording his Will that my son will never reign after me. He is passed over in favour of my brother, Prince Herod Philip.' This accusation I cannot credit. King Antipater and Queen Doris both knew the contents of the Will—the Will, I mean, that has now been cancelled—and he could therefore never have said anything of the sort: for the Will, as I was officially informed at the time that it was drafted, made Prince Herod Philip heir to the throne only if King Antipater should be the first to die; and even in that event, the succession was to revert to Antipater's children upon Prince Herod Philip's decease or abdication. But if King Antipater were to survive and succeed his father, Prince Herod Philip's claim would lapse, and King Antipater, with the Emperor's consent, might then appoint his son as the sole heir if he pleased. This discrepancy shakes my faith in the evidence as a whole."

In the silence that followed, Antipater was emboldened to make his defence, which he did briefly and simply. "Father, His Excellency Quinctilius Varus encourages me to suggest to you that these depositions are not reliable because extracted by torture, every one of them; and that the letter from my mother to me was also, though of course without your knowledge, extracted from her by torture. I undertake further to prove not only that my mother's letters to me are invariably written on the best Alexandrian paper but also that they are written in the Edomite dialect and the Hebrew script, not in Greek. My mother talks Greek ungrammatically and cannot write it except with the greatest difficulty. Moreover, as you know yourself, I was ordered to Rome by you, greatly against my inclination: I did not go there of my own free will to avoid you. And I am grateful to you, Father, for your admission that I have been a loyal and dutiful son to you ever since you lifted me out of private life and showed the world what a father's love can do. But that you can believe me not only a hypocrite, a fratricide and a parricide but demented as well, is hard to bear. I have lived forty years of my life, free from any accusation of crime, and could have had no expectations whatever from your murder except a tortured spirit and eventual damnation. Consider: my yearly income of fifty talents, over and above your gifts to me and the perquisites of my various offices, is far more than I ever spend; I enjoy the title and power of King; you have recommended me to the protection of the noblest men in the Empire. What is still more to the point, I have never received an unkind word from you in all my life nor had any occasion to complain of your treatment of me, which has been consistently generous and just. There is no one in the whole world, from your meanest subject to our great benefactor the Emperor Augustus Caesar himself, who can honestly deny the truth of what I say. That I should now turn and savage you, as sometimes a Molossian shepherd dog suddenly turns on his master, could be explained only as a fit of insanity; yet if I were insane the sickness would surely appear in my other actions as well. Do you perhaps believe that I am possessed of an evil spirit? Then cast it out, I beseech you, in the name of the Holy One of Israel, blessed be he."

Herod ground his teeth and tore at his small tufted beard. "I will cast this evil spirit out, but not in the Lord's name," he said. "I will cast it out in the Emperor's name with the rack, the brazier and the thumb-screw."

"I am ready to submit to the torture, Father, since it seems that my case is pre-judged."

Varus objected: "No, no, King Antipater, you are a Roman citizen and therefore exempt from torture. The Emperor would never approve of torture practised under Roman Law on a high officer of the Imperial forces. Would you care, by the by, to submit an evidence of the affection and confidence which you boasted just now that the Emperor reposes in you?"

"Here are two letters—the one from the Emperor himself, the other from his wife the Lady Livia. They are addressed to my father, but are open for all to read."

"They may be read later," said Herod, snatching the letters and stuffing them behind the cushions of his throne. "Nicolaus, proceed with the prosecution!"

Nicolaus realized that the case was going badly. The sympathy of almost everyone present except Herod himself and his sons Archelaus and Philip, who had designs on the throne, had swung about in Antipater's favour. The evidence that had at first sight seemed conclusive was now shown to be forged at least in part, and Antipater's demeanour had been that of an innocent and deeply injured man. Nicolaus therefore drew on rich resources of the forensic art when he rose to attack Antipater: reviling him as a cockatrice, a filthy ibis, a black Psyllian snake, a parricide of a unique kind. He denounced him as the betrayer and murderer of his innocent brothers and alleged him to have been Jochebed's seducer and the seducer of Jochebed's sister Naomi, and regularly to have played the part of the demon Azazel in a witches' frolic of lust and blasphemy, leaping about naked under the full moon in a circle of twelve naked women. "By your own confession, detestable he-goat, you had no motive for your crime of patricide but sheer devilry—the ambition, I suppose, to commit a crime unparalleled in history or legend, to poison the father from whom you yourself admit never to have heard an unkind word or experienced the least injustice, and to involve your mother and your father's last surviving brother in your own execrable guilt." Then he turned to Varus and urged him to "destroy this ravening wolf, this hyaena! Are you not aware that a parricide is a universal evil, the existence of which outrages Nature and spreads ill-luck wherever his infected feet may tread, and that the judge who fails to punish such a monster must himself face the frown of Divine Justice?"

When he had done with his raving, Varus asked Antipater in a matter-of-fact voice what reply he had to make.

"Nicolaus has brought against me a random accusation of witchcraft and blasphemy, which he makes no attempt to substantiate, and which he cannot substantiate, and which forms no part of the charges read out at the beginning of the trial. Beyond calling me evil names, he has added nothing new to the case and I am content to refrain from a reply: for I am no fishmonger and disdain to bandy foul language with any man. Instead, I call the God of my fathers to witness that I am entirely innocent of any of the crimes charged against me."

Nicolaus then urged Varus to examine the poison remaining in the pottle alleged to have been brought out of Egypt by Antiphilus. He suggested that a condemned criminal should be instructed to taste it, to prove whether it were deadly or not.

Varus agreed.

A Galilean bandit, who had been held in readiness for this demonstration, was led in and offered a free pardon on condition that he swallowed a little of the powder, mixed with honey. He agreed, swallowed, and very soon fell writhing on the floor, clutching his throat and belly and shrieking horribly. He was taken outside to die.

Varus laughed. "This is no subtle drug," he said. "This is arsenic, one of the crudest and most violent of all poisons. The symptoms of arsenical poisoning are well known and unmistakable, and Pheroras would never have risked detection by its use unless perhaps he had been the victim of the same unaccountable madness of which Antipater is accused. If this bandit, after swallowing the mixture, had grinned and thanked his God that he had escaped from harm, and had then left the Palace rejoicing, I should have suspended judgement and waited to see whether it were a drug of slow action. But now I cannot believe in the testimony, extracted by torture from Jochebed the wife of Pheroras, that this was the subtle poison allegedly brought by Antiphilus out of Egypt. My experience of Egyptian poisoners has taught me to rate their ingenuity far more highly than this. King Herod, may I have a word with you in private?"

The Court was adjourned, and what Varus said to King Herod was not disclosed; but there at least the proceedings ended and on the next day Varus courteously took his leave and returned to Antioch without delivering judgement.

A week later Herod reopened the case, on the ground that new evidence had been discovered. His agents, he said, had seized a letter, written by Antiphilus in Egypt, from the slave who was conveying it to Antipater at Jerusalem. It ran as follows:

"I have sent you Acme's letter at the risk of my life from two reigning houses. Success to your affairs!"

Herod instructed his agents that the other letter must be found at all costs, and suggested that they should search the slave. Sewn in the lining of his coat, sure enough, was the letter, supposedly from Acme, who was a Jewess in Livia's service, and addressed to Antipater:

"I have written to your father in the exact words you dictated to me, and have followed this up by handing a letter to my Lady Livia, also in your exact words as if sent by your Aunt Salome. This should result in Salome's well-merited death, for King Herod will naturally believe that she has been plotting against him."

Herod then produced still another letter, which he said had just arrived by courier from Rome. It was supposedly the letter written to him by Acme at Antipater's dictation and ran:

"As a true daughter of Israel I have been watching your interests here. I have just made an accurate copy of a letter written to my Lady Livia by your sister Salome. As you will see, it accuses you of treason and perjury; doubtless it was prompted by the old grudge that you had prevented her from marrying that heathen rascal Sylleus. Please destroy this when you have read it, because it is written at the hazard of my life." An alleged copy of a scurrilous letter signed "Salome" was appended.

Antipater was hauled out of prison in the middle of the night and confronted with these documents. He denied having had any communication with Acme and suggested that the letters had been forged by Antiphilus.

"That is for the Emperor to decide," Herod answered. "I shall send you to Rome to stand your trial there."

"Do so, Father. The Emperor is just and not easily imposed upon. He will be able to determine whether the letters signed 'Acme are really written by Acme or are forgeries by some enemy of mine."

However, Herod did not venture to send him to Rome. Nicolaus and Archelaus went instead with a digest of the evidence quoted at the first hearing of Antipater's case, copies of the letters (though not the originals) produced at the second hearing, and an urgent request for permission to execute the parricide at once. Herod armed these envoys with rich gifts for Livia and the Emperor's legal secretary, and at the same time sent plate to the value of twenty talents to Varus at Antioch.