Elijah (6 page)

His fingers worked their way through the heavy beard to scratch an itching on his cheek. His conclusion was well considered.
Yahwism is swimming upstream. All of the currents of the world flow against it
. He stood and turned toward the temple above him. From the valley its wall towered more imposingly than ever. He straightened to announce his decision to himself, an announcement that never passed his lips but nonetheless resounded in his mind.
I shall not give my life to a doomed cause
.

His decision made, he turned to follow the wadi upstream to a road that would to the city wall. This way back was longer, but less an exertion than the way he came. He gained the road and turned south toward the city, mulling over his future as he went. He would not openly repudiate his Yahweh religion, but he would not oppose Baalism. As he accepted Baal alongside Yahweh, he would in turn be accepted again as a favorite by the court. Such was his hope.

An ancient olive grove, sloping down into the valley, grew on the right side of the road. As he approached and continued alongside it, a rustle of leaves and branches followed him. His first thought was of bandits, but surely bandits would not operate so near the capital. Being the lone traveler on the road and his size making flight impractical, he stopped and slowly turned to face the gnarled trees. When whoever was there saw his high office of priesthood, he would be left alone.

“
Who’s there?” he called.

A purple-robed figure appeared and approached him. “Hello, priest of Yahweh,” the woman said. Her face was unveiled and heavy with cosmetics, her eyebrows heavily outlined, her raven hair pulled back tightly away from her face and covered on the crown of her head with a conical cap. She no longer was a young woman, but her heavy makeup hid that fact well. Her skin appeared smooth and her features soft. A silk robe outlined rather than hid her body. “You are a large man to be on foot.” Her smile and openness kept her from seeming a stranger. “Come, rest a moment and refresh yourself.”

Zebul looked up and down the road, unconsciously twitching his ring.

The woman laughed, but comfortably. “No one will see you talking here with a foreign woman. We can sit there.” She pointed to a gnarled, smooth-skinned olive tree. “A shallow valley behind the tree will hide us from the road. Come, the rest will do you good.”

Zebul nervously attempted to turn and go, but the woman laced her arms about one of his. He could feel her breast as she squeezed gently. “A stranger becomes lonely for someone to talk with.”

She led the way, her small hand clutching his forearm. He followed her and, once out of sight of the road, relaxed. They sat on the soft grass below the tree. The woman waited until the priest became settled, then sat next to him. Her forwardness was obscured by her gracefulness. She gradually shifted her body in the most natural manner until she touched him. Zebul, thoroughly aroused for the first time in months—his wife was almost a stranger to him—recalled his earlier thought about the lust of men and decided to leave the morals to another day. He turned toward her, and she was ready to respond. Her kiss brought to the surface emotions he long had suppressed and he swirled in a vortex of colors and sensations that blotted out everything but the fulfillment of his passion.

Some moments later, the zonah drew on her robe. “Please, priest of Yahweh, a payment for Asherah.” Zebul felt for his coin purse, then realized that he had not brought it with him. Slowly, he drew the ring from his finger, held it out in his hand, gazed at it a moment, and let it slip from between his fingers to the grass. He turned toward the road. The woman laughed softly.

The road was empty. No one had seen him, but he hastened his pace. Every leaf of every tree and bush, every pebble in the road, every anemone that grew profusely in the fields turned itself into eyes and stared at him. The loud rasp of locusts screamed out to him the story of his seduction. The soft rustling of the wind echoed the woman’s soft laughter.

Zebul plodded along the city wall. His stomach felt hollow and uneasy. A lump formed in his throat and crowded its way to his chest. He shook his head violently to scatter the guilt that crowded around him. His thoughts teased him. “I have known men to come smiling from a zonah and continue their work with added vigor. Why should such a feeling of regret haunt me?” he whispered softly to himself. He reached to his turban to straighten the jewel that had become twisted out of place.

In the weeks that followed, Zebul regretted the incident, yet at times he longed to feel the embrace of the zonah again. Alternately the affair turned in his mind, first the awfulness of desecrating himself as a priest of Yahweh, then the joyful thrill of fulfilling himself as a man. He reproved himself frequently, yet he could not help but outline in his imagination the figures of women he knew. His concourse with the sacred prostitute became a catalyst that more and more often tempted him to give vent to his sexual feelings. He could not reconcile the feelings with his Yahweh religion. In light of his decision to compromise with Baalism, the act, he reasoned, should not continue to bother him, but he found that the morals he had repeated piously so many times really had become a part of him. To solve the problem, he gradually learned to ignore his previous convictions. All the while, he kept his conflict within himself. Since he never had been a zealous priest, his friends detected no difference in his manner.

In due time, the temple to Baal was completed. Priests from the Phoenician cities of Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon were present for the dedication. Zebul watched the occasion, in company with several other priests, from the walkway atop the city wall. Ahab had made an early token appearance but had not returned since. Several speeches were made throughout the day, the longest by Jezebel. He could not hear her distinctly, but he had been aware of her voice raised at time to its full intensity, and he had seen her wave her arms vigorously.

As the day passed toward evening Zebul became aware of new preparations. Word spread that the spring worship of Asherah, delayed until now because of the temple construction, would be held in the evening. In front of the two obelisk columns that Zebul had watched workmen erect some time earlier was an altar on which the Baal priests would sacrifice a young calf. Standing in the doorway to the temple was a huge statue of Melkart, similar to the smaller one Jezebel had placed next to the window in her room. Gradually the crowd dispersed to prepare itself for the evening rituals, until only Baal-priests were left to make the court area ready for the festival.

Zebul left with his friends, but he declined their invitation to dine together. He went instead to his home, determined to carry out a plan to disguise himself and attend the rituals that night. He had intended to stay away, but while on the walkway he thought he caught a glimpse of the zonah he had met by the roadside. The memory of their meeting aroused a passion he could not ignore.

His first plan to trim his beard and hair had to be rejected after more careful thought. He would not be able the next day to explain his changed appearance. His girth made disguise difficult, but he finally decided that the simple wool robe and camelhair mantle of a tent dweller would be best. Such simplicity was in marked contrast to the fine clothing and many accessories he usually wore.

The flickering oil lamps cast eerie, dancing shadows around the courtyard. From where he stood on the perimeter the statue of Melkart appeared larger than he had imagined it to be. He purposely arrived late, and the ritual of sacrifice already had begun. The two officiating priests were dressed in skins and had on animal masks, one like the head of a horned bull, the other like a goat. A line of men and women, each couple holding a baby, grew longer.

The priests produced a lamb, a perfect specimen, and laid it on the altar. Expertly, one of them slit veins and arteries so that the blood drained quickly. Then he cut the lamb in what appeared to Zebul’s practiced eye to be a prescribed and symbolic manner. Next, a bull calf was burned on the altar, its stench permeating the atmosphere of the temple area. The line of parents began to move then. The priests circumcised one baby after another, each time handing back to the parents their screaming offspring, newly dedicated to Melkart. Most of the boy babies should have been circumcised earlier by Yahweh’s priests, yet the parents had chosen to wait for the dedication of Melkart’s temple. Zebul felt a pang of jealousy. The choice was significant.

Under the towering statue of Melkart an orchestra of flutes, harps, lyres, trumpets, drums, and cymbals filled the air with music. They began with a loud clash at the moment the sacrifices began, the rose in crescendo to a mighty forte as the smoke of the burned calf rose to Melkart, whose home was the sky. The music softened to a mellowness, accentuated with the soft beat of drums and easy clashing of cymbals while the line of babies passed. When the last child had been dedicated the orchestra stopped playing. The only sound left was the soft shuffle of sandals as young parents left the courtyard and as Baal priests came from the temple to gather around the altar.

As if on signal, suddenly there came from the orchestra a rapid pounding of drums, followed by a resounding clash of cymbals. The priests then screamed in full-bodied unison: “Our God is Baal-Melkart, our Judge, and none is above him! The heavens rain oil, and the wadis run with honey!” The pounding of drums immediately resumed and the priests began to dance around the altar. They began with little more than a slow run, but as the orchestra joined the drums and the music became more intense they ran more frantically. They twisted their bodies, their faces became contorted; they circled, jumped, and shouted. Some beat themselves with leather thongs, while others offered their backs to be thrashed by brother priests.

The music continued all the while. The steady thumping of the drums and the clashing of cymbals added a monotonous, intoxicating rhythm. Soon, several young men joined the priests around the altar. Others began to recite chants to Baal. Women dashed around the orchestra to kiss Melkart’s statue; others went into ecstatic trances to join the dancing men.

Soon the entire courtyard was bedlam. Screaming men and women, their eyes glazed in ecstatic trance, twisted their bodies into unbelievable contortions. Mantles and robes, normally prized beyond other possessions, fell to the ground to be trampled unnoticed in the dust. Partners were chosen, with no consideration of Israel’s moral traditions, while the unattended, newly-circumcised babies cried from the outskirts of the court area. Eyes became transfixed on the bodies of partners. Each man and woman watched the stomach muscles of the partner. The dancing became more and more sensual. Untouching bodies gyrated toward each other and retreated, toward and retreated, again and again, until the space separating them closed.

Zebul watched like a zombie. Already men and women lay around the base of the altar, the obelisks, the temple wall, anywhere to escape the pounding of feet, and openly engaged in the holiest ritual of Asherah.

Nowhere in the throng did Zebul see the zonah he sought. Thinking she might be in the temple, the fat priest circled the court to work his way to the entrance, stepping around lovers who hardly knew each other. An occasional female arm reached toward him, and he glanced to its source each time to see a woman as fat as he, or old, or maimed, none of them able to engage in the wild dancing, but each aroused to passions that cried out for satisfaction.

The inside of the temple was lighted more brightly than the courtyard. Zebul paused to look around. The walls were niched at several points, into which were placed alternating statues of Asherah, her organs emphasized in the crudest fashion, and Melkart.

Zebul’s desire subsided at the sight of the excessive crudity. Even in his most private and sensual thoughts he never had imagined such scenes. In an attempt to deify sex, the statues only emphasized how insatiable was the sexual appetite.

In the center of the room was a statue of Asherah, cast in the exact pose as the one in Jezebel’s chamber. As Zebul gazed at it, he was startled by a voice at his side. “Well, priest of Yahweh, have you laid aside your robes to join us?”

Zebul looked at the woman made familiar by his dreams. “Am I so easily recognized?”

“Oh, probably not by most.” She smiled and tilted her head a bit. “But then I have seen you before without your robes.” She laughed lightly.

Zebul frowned. “I have not forgotten.” Then, deciding to change the subject, “Why such a large open room?”

“Are you so ignorant of the traditions of Asherah? Every woman devoted to Baal must pay her homage to her goddess for the gift of fertility. One time in her life she must bring a pallet and find her place in the temple. Any stranger who comes to the city may enter the temple and look until he finds a woman to his liking. She must go outside with the first man who chooses her. She can refuse no one. The payment she receives goes into the temple treasury.” She paused and smiled, “. . . to join your ring.”

Zebul ignored the thrust. “Perhaps she would be fortunate and not be chosen by anyone.”

“Is the body of man and woman so unfortunate as that? No, my fat priest, that indeed would be most unfortunate, for she cannot leave once she enters the temple until her debt is paid. I knew a crippled woman in Byblos who remained in the temple for three years. Her family fed her faithfully until finally a maimed warrior viewed her with compassion.”

Zebul shuddered.

“And now, you have come to find me. I am glad that I pleased you. Your gift was extravagant.” The woman moved toward him.