King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (19 page)

On the eighth day, the day after Elizabeth had ceased to be ceremonially unclean, the town rabbi rode up from Beersheba to circumcise the child. He took it from Shelom’s arms and said : “His name is to be Zephaniah, the porter tells me.”

“No, no,” said Shelom. “John is his name. The lady Elizabeth has made that clear enough.”

“I will not circumcise him in that name,” the rabbi cried, “without his father’s permission in writing.”

Zacharias was called from his study, where he was preparing a concordance of Messianic prophecies with a commentary, a work on which he had been engaged for several years. The rabbi handed him a writing-tablet and asked : “What is his name to be ?”

Elizabeth bustled out from her bedroom and stood between the rabbi and Zacharias. She said indignantly : “Husband, I am naming this child John and my impudent household wish to name him Zephaniah. Tell them that they have no right to interfere with my choice !”

Zacharias wrote : “His name is John.”

“John? What is John ?” cried the testy old rabbi. “My lord of Ain-Rimmon, I should be ashamed to address a Son of Aaron by so newfangled a name as John. There were no Johns in Israel until the day before yesterday !”

Zacharias grew angry. He shouted : “Fool, fool, mule, creature of stubbornness! His name is J
OHN
, I say !”

Everyone was astounded to hear Zacharias speak. He was astounded himself. He fell on his face and gave thanks to the Lord for loosening the strings of his tongue.

The circumcision ceremony was then carried out in the customary manner, and the rabbi prayed : “Our God and God of our fathers! Preserve this child to his father and mother, and let his name be called, in Israel, John the son of Zacharias. Let the father rejoice in him that came forth from his loins and let the mother be glad in the fruit of her womb.” It was not until the rabbi had taken his leave and the screams of the child had been somewhat hushed that Zacharias began to consider with apprehension what the effects would be of his restoration to speech, and heartily wished himself dumb again : he recollected the horror of his vision in the Sanctuary and knew that he must now testify before the High Court. He said sadly to the child : “Alas, little John, I fear that I shall never live to see you walk and talk !”

Elizabeth protested in astonishment : “Why, husband, have you no better blessing for my child than this, that he will be orphaned within the year ?”

Zacharias felt the justice of the reproach. He answered : “Give me leave to return to my study, wife, for I have not the art of extempore speech, but before nightfall, by the grace of the Lord, I shall have composed the blessing that you ask.”

Now, when he had been called suddenly from his study to answer the rabbi, two strips of parchment, which were texts from his concordance, had been carried across the table by the draught from the door and lay close to his pen and sand-caster. He picked them up and read them. The first was the well-known passage from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah beginning :

The voice of one who cries in the desert : “Clear the way for the Lord, build a straight highway for our God through this desert.”

And the other was the equally well-known passage from the Psalms beginning :

The Lord has sworn a firm oath to David….

The verse that caught his eye was :

There I will cause the horn of David to bud : I have ordained a lamp for my Messiah.

The accident provided him with what the poets of the Negeb term “a kindling” : as it were a sudden tongue of flame that seizes upon the poetic sacrifice and consumes it. He muttered : “It is said that every man who loves the Lord and his neighbour will find one poem at least written on his heart, if he searches closely. May he give me the skill and patience to transcribe mine !”

With trembling hands he set to work, writing, cancelling and rewriting until his goose-feather quill grew blunt and blotched the letters. Too busied with his thoughts to trim it, he threw it over his shoulder and seized another. And hardly half an hour had passed before he came running out from his study, parchment in hand, stood over the sleeping child and chanted :

The God of Israel, blessed be he,
Who visited his sons in majesty
And bought them from Egyptian slavery.

 

Will he not cause a tender horn to bud
Above a brow of David’s princel blood
For the renascence of our nationhood?

 

The same is told by every poet’s tongue
Who truth has uttered since the world was young
And in his Name prophetically has sung :

 

Promise of rescue from our foes, of peace
To serve him righteously, with huge increase,
Holy and fearless, until life shall cease.

 

Now is renewed the oath which once before
To our great father Abraham he swore
That Canaan should be ours for evermore.

 

And of you, Child, the wondering world shall say :
“Look, the King’s outrider who clears the way
Preaching salvation and the longed-for day,

 

Who like the dawn scatters the doubts of night
With largesse of pure gold, in sin’s despite
Leading our feet to mercy by his light.”

When the infant John was one month old, Elizabeth vowed to dedicate him to Jehovah as a life-long Nazirite, according to the regulations set out in the sixth chapter of the Book of Numbers : his hair was never to be shaved and he was never to eat grapes or drink wine. And in emulation of Zacharias’s poem she composed a lullaby for him which is still current at Ain-Rimmon, where I myself heard it sung by a village woman to her fretful child :

Down in the garden as I walked

One lovely day of spring
A tall pomegranate-tree I spied,

Of every tree the king.

 

More green his leaf than beryl stone

Caught in a blaze of sun ;
His scarlet flowers that budded out

More sweet than cinnamon.

 

With trembling hand a flower I plucked

Between my breasts to lie—
Fruit of the tall pomegranate-tree,

Sleep well and lullaby!

The news that Zacharias had suddenly been cured of his dumbness soon reached Jerusalem. Summoned to appear before the High Priest, he locked his unfinished concordance in a cedar box, signed and sealed his Will, kissed Elizabeth and the infant John goodbye and rode off alone towards the City, his heart heavy with foreboding.

When on the following afternoon he reported his arrival at Simon’s house in the Old Quarter he was instructed to wait in an ante-chamber, where refreshments would be brought him. Then Simon summoned the Great Sanhedrin, or Council ; they were to meet as soon as possible at his house, not at the House of Hewn Stone, as they usually did, “for the purpose of investigating the nature and circumstances of the priest Zacharias’s recent experience in the Sanctuary, in so far as it raises any question of political importance”. He requested them to keep secret the time, place and business.

The Great Sanhedrin must not be confused with the other Sanhedrin, called the Beth Din, or High Court. Originally there had been only one Sanhedrin, but when Queen Alexandra, widow of King Alexander Jannaeus the backsliding Maccabee, was forbidden by the dominant Pharisee party to give his body decent burial, she had persuaded them to change their attitude by promising that the Sanhedrin should thereafter consist only of Pharisees, to the exclusion of the Sadducees who had been Alexander’s chief supporters and who had assisted him in the massacre of eight hundred Pharisees. The Sadducees had then formed a rival Sanhedrin, to which Herod’s father, when Julius Caesar made him Governor-General of Judaea, gave official recognition. The original
Sanhedrin, the High Court, remained exclusively Pharisee, and dealt with religious questions only ; but the political Sanhedrin, which called itself the Great Sanhedrin and dealt with lay questions, was prominently Sadducee, though the Pharisees were represented in it. Ideally, there was no distinction between religious and lay questions among the Jews, because the Law of Moses governed all social and economic life ; yet the Great Sanhedrin was a political convenience, since it could take realistic cognizance of foreign institutions within the Judaean state which for the Pharisees had no existence. For this reason the High Court insisted that the
Mezuzah
, which was fixed on the door-post of every building not sacred in itself, should be displayed at the House of Hewn Stone when the Great Sanhedrin met there ; yet when the High Court met there it became a sacred building and the
Mezuzah
was temporarily removed. (The
Mezuzah
is a piece of parchment inscribed on one side with the “Hear, O Israel” text from Deuteronomy and on the other with the divine Name S
HADDAI
; it is rolled up in a container of horn or wood with the Name showing through an aperture.)

Simon had decided to call Zacharias’s case before the Great Sanhedrin, although the matter seemed to lie wholly in the jurisdiction of the High Court, because if Zacharias should be proved guilty of any ceremonial irregularity, the Leader of the Course of Abijah would be able to persuade his broad-minded Sadducee colleagues to quash the matter with a discreetly worded report and an adjournment
sine die
. He acted quickly and secretly in order to forestall a claim by the joint-Presidents of the High Court that the inquiry should be conducted by themselves. The members of the Great Sanhedrin were all men of wide juridical experience, and since they were required to understand foreign languages and the humane sciences, besides being word-perfect in the Canonical Scriptures, would be sufficiently men of the world, Simon trusted, to settle the affair without scandal.

By the time that his messengers had gone the rounds and a full Court of Inquiry had assembled under Simon’s Presidency, it was an hour after nightfall ; but Zacharias was not brought before them at once. Simon preferred to begin his investigation by questioning Reuben the son of Abdiel, who was asked to explain why, on the night that Zacharias had been struck dumb, just before dawn, he had secretly removed from the Sanctuary some wet object wrapped in his cloak.

When Reuben looked around him—at the grave elders, priests and doctors, full members of the Court, seated in a semicircle about the President’s chair, with three rows of associate members ranked behind them, all fully qualified magistrates, at the two clerks with pens poised and paper ready to record the proceedings, he was seized with sudden alarm. He decided to reveal the whole truth, rather than continue to shield Zacharias.

He deposed on oath that when he had entered the Sanctuary on the evening in question he had found the sacrificial fire quenched on the Altar of Incense, though the seven lamps of the Sacred Candlestick were
still burning brightly. Then, to preserve the honour of the Course of Abijah, he had taken the wet cinders from the Altar, relaid and rekindled the fire and duly burned incense ; it was these wet cinders that he had removed from the Sanctuary in his cloak at first cock-crow, when he went off duty, hoping that the Watcher of the Curtain who had come to relieve him would not notice anything amiss.

Simon commented : “In my opinion you did well, Son of Abdiel, though you would doubtless have done better still had you immediately reported the occurrence either to myself or to the venerable Leader of your Course.” Here he bowed to the aged priest, who nodded gravely. Then he added : “Brothers and Sons, does any of you wish to question the learned Reuben further ?”

A curly-bearded, youthful associate member sprang up and cried impetuously : “Holy Father, ask him this : ‘By what evil hand do you suppose that the fire was quenched?’ ”

There was a murmur of agreement, mixed with exclamations of disgust. The white-bearded elders of the front row craned around to glare their disapproval of this unseemly interruption. It was held that associates of the back row should be always seen but seldom heard. Moreover, the rules of the Court forbade them to speak for the prosecution, and though no charge was being preferred against either Reuben or Zacharias, so that the distinction between prosecution and defence could not yet be drawn, it was clear that this associate wished Zacharias no good.

Simon reluctantly asked the question.

Reuben answered : “Holy Son of Boethus, if I tell you how I think that the fire was quenched this honourable Court will be angry with me. I shall therefore refrain from an opinion. I am bound to disclose facts, but I am ignorant of any rule that compels me to disclose the innermost thoughts of my heart.”

“I undertake,” said Simon, “that your opinion will not be censured by this Court, whatever its nature.”

Then Reuben said : “Notables of the Sanhedrin, none of you is admitted as a member of this famous tribunal who is so little experienced in the magical arts that he cannot expose and punish magic when it is practised by the enemies of our religion. Seventy-one of you, a full Court, are assembled in this hall, and only one chair is empty, the chair reserved for the great prophet Elijah, who has not yet suffered death. I call this same Elijah to witness, if he is within hearing, as he may invisibly be, that what I say is the whole truth, with nothing added or omitted. It was thus. When I entered the Sanctuary that evening as deputy for my kinsman Zacharias, I noticed at once that the air was noxious and that wet marks sullied the clean marble floor. The smell may have been merely the stale odour of quenched incense and embers, but I fancied that my nostrils distinguished something else : the subtle but pervasive odour of evil. And when I stooped to wipe the marks away with the broidered napkin, in horror I recoiled. O learned Elders of Israel, refrain from anger against me—for alas, as the Lord our God lives, the marks
that I saw were the clear imprints not of a man’s feet but, horrible to relate, of hooves—the narrow hooves of an unshod ass !”

Without pausing to observe the effect on the Court of the dreadful declaration, Reuben continued : “I am asked my opinion on how the fire at the Altar of Incense was quenched. I will give it. My opinion is that by blasphemous and abominable charms, there in the very Sanctuary of our God, my kinsman Zacharias had conjured up one of the fiendish ass-haunched Lilim and compelled him to his service. But why? Was it to persuade the demon to quicken the womb of his wife Elizabeth who had been barren twenty years? For demons are credited with such powers. Or was the demon summoned to reveal the whereabouts of buried treasure? Or to do a cruel injury to some man whom Zacharias hated? These are questions that I cannot resolve, but my studied opinion is that a fiend was summoned and that, pricked by diabolic spite, this fiend quenched the coals with a spurt of foul water from his mouth. And why do I believe this unlikely thing? Because, though I looked carefully about me, I could find no vessel of any sort in the Sanctuary by means of which the fire could have been extinguished. And if I am asked why I consider that Zacharias was struck dumb, this is my reply : in my opinion Zacharias was struck dumb by an angel of the Lord so that he might utter no further blasphemies, charms or abominable incantations.”