King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) (40 page)

That night, over a camp-fire of thorns, a group of learned pilgrims were discussing the antiquities of Hebron. Now, according to the Book of Genesis, it was in this fertile, cool and sheltered valley, which lies four thousand feet above the level of the Mediterranean Sea, that Abraham planted a sacred grove known as the Oaks of Mamre in honour of Jehovah, and dug a well. He was buried not far off in the cave of Machpelah, which he is recorded to have bought from Ephron, one of the Children of Heth, as a burial-place for his sister Sarah, who was also his wife. The patriarchs Isaac and Jacob, with their wives Rebeccah and Leah, are recorded to have been buried in the same cave. But a merchant from Petra declared this account to be erroneous. “What the Jews call the Oaks of Mamre, we Petraeans call the Oaks of Miriam. According to our tradition, Miriam, sister of the demi-god Moses, was the goddess of those Calebites who came up from the south with the Jews and seized Hebron from the Anakim. The Jews, who have an aversion to all goddesses, conceal the truth by a transliteration and pretend that the place is named after a certain Mamre, an Amorite, brother to Eshcol. But you will see Miriam’s effigy displayed in the sacred grove ; she is a Love-goddess with a fish-tail like the Aphrodite of Joppa. The people of Hebron pretend that the effigy represents Sarah, wife of Abraham.”

At this the elder Greek philosopher, a Spartan, who was making a tour of the world with his son in search of geographical knowledge, exclaimed : “Miriam is her name? She must be the ancient Phrygian Sea-goddess Myrine, who gave her name to the chief city of Lemnos, and who according to Homer was the ancestress of the Dardanians of Troy. Scholiasts equate her with the Aegean Sea-goddess Thetis, or
Tethys, whose name is linked by the mythographers with that of the hero Peleus. What if the Children of Heth were Aegeans, the Children of Thetis, and Machpelah was at one time an oracular shrine of
magus Peleus
, or Peleus the sooth-sayer ?”

“You are suggesting, Father,” asked his son, “that the Jews and Calebites whose ancestor was Abraham expelled Thetis from the shrine in favour of their goddess Sarah ?”

“No, but rather that the clan of Caleb supplanted the clan of Ephron in the favour of Thetis, whom they renamed Sarah. Can any man here speak on the subject of this Sarah ?”

The merchant from Petra answered : “Little is recorded of her except that she laughed at an angel who assured Abraham that her descendants were to outnumber the sands of the seashore.”

“Good,” said the elder Greek. “Then you may depend upon it that she is entitled to her fish-tail, and that Heth, Miriam and Sarah are a single deity. The mention of the seashore is sufficient indication, even if it were not for the laugh. Sea-goddesses, who are invariably also goddesses of Love, are famous for their laughter. I would have you know, Sirs, that this question is of more than academic interest to my son and myself. Our two Jewish fellow-travellers will bear me out when I maintain that we Spartans, being Dorians, are also Sons of Abraham.”

Jesus kept silence, for he caught a mocking intonation in the Greek’s voice, but Judas answered politely : “It is so. The historian of the First Book of Maccabees quotes a letter sent by your King Areus to Onias the High Priest of Jerusalem, shortly after the death of Alexander the Great. He claimed a cousinship of the two nations in virtue of a common descent from Abraham. A further letter was sent to the Spartans by Simon the Maccabee a century and a half later, confirming this cousinship. Yet I cannot think that you Dorians are Abraham’s sons by Sarah ; I suppose rather by his wife Keturah or by Hagar.”

The Greek smiled indulgently. “Well, it is possible that Areus was right, and possible also that he was confusing Abraham with Hercules ; both heroes are renowned for their readiness to destroy their sons. But as a lifelong student of myths I am prepared, rather, to believe that certain of our ancestors, in common with yours, once worshipped the same Sea-goddess at the Oaks of Mamre. Mind you, the legends of Hebron are so confused that I cannot commit myself outright to the theory that Heth was Thetis ; she may perhaps have been Hathor, the Lady of the Turquoise, whose name means ‘The abode of the Sun-god’, that is to say ‘The Sea’. So also Pelah may well have been the eponymous ancestor of the Pulesati, or Philistines.”

“Who or what, then, do you suppose Abraham to have been, learned Greek ?”

“The clue lies in his name, which, according to your tradition, was changed from ‘Abram’ on his arrival at Hebron. Some of your Doctors whom I have questioned say confidently that it means ‘God Loves’.
Others are less confident ; and I have been convinced by a famous scholar of Alexandria who holds that the original change was from Aburamu, ‘the Father is the High One’, to Abrahab, meaning the ‘Son of Rahab’ or ‘Rahab’s chosen one’. Rahab is the common title of the Sea-goddess whom the Jews picture as a devouring sea-dragon, and a poetic name for Egypt in so far as Israel was swallowed by her but belched up again like Jason or Job. He holds that the ‘Rahab’ in Abraham’s name was subsequently altered to ‘Raham’, the name of a so-called grandson of the hero Hebron, to break Abraham’s dependence upon her. Therefore when you ask me : ‘Who or what was Abraham?’ I reply : ‘A title of the kings of Hebron after the capture of the shrine by the Aramaeans.’ ”

Judas objected : “Learned Greek, you are right in making Abraham an Aramaean, for the formula at the first-fruits ceremony runs : ‘A wandering Aramaean was my father.’ But if you say that Abraham is a title of the former kings of Hebron, on the strength of Abraham’s tomb, you might as well say the same of Abner. For the tomb of Abner son of Ner lies not far from that of Abraham. Though you may dispute the meaning of Abraham, beyond all doubt Abner means ‘God is my Lamp’, and a lamp has from the time of Moses been used in the cult of our God.”

“Remind me of Abner. How did he die ?”

“He was the chieftain from whom King David demanded Michal of Hebron in marriage, and was killed there by David’s servants. David was his chief mourner.”

“Then he must have been the king of Hebron whom David dispossessed. But Abner may equally mean, ‘the chosen of Nereis’ — another title of the same Sea-goddess, which gives the Nereids their name. Caleb must also be a royal title here. What is the meaning of Caleb? I am no Hebraist.”

“It means Dog,” answered the merchant of Petra. “I hardly think that ‘Dog’ would be a royal title.”

“And why not ?” chattered the Greek. “Why should not the Calebites have been Sons of the Dog-star? And unless the oracular cave of Machpelah differs from all other ancient oracular caves that my son and I have visited in our travels, the Great Goddess who inspires the oracles is also a dog. She is a dog both because of her promiscuity in love and because she is an eater of corpses ; in her honour as lovely Isis, or Astarte, her initiates wear dog-masks, and in her honour as deathly Hecate, or Brimo, dogs are sacrificed where three roads meet. The Dog-star shines in the most pestilent season of the year. And dogs have always guarded the land of the dead for the Great Goddess. Witness Cerberus, and Egyptian Anubis, guardian of the Western Paradise. And is there no connexion between Caleb and the Goddess Calypso, queen of the Paradisal Island of Ogygia, whom the poets describe as a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, or of Nereus, or of Atlas Telamon? And is not ‘The Power of the Dog’ a poetic synonym for Death in Hebrew poetry? I have read David’s Psalms in Greek translation.”

“Oracles are no longer given in the cave,” said Judas, “since Good King Josiah blocked up the entrance to the innermost of the three chambers, the one in which the oracle of Adam was delivered to Caleb in the time of Moses. Only two chambers are now accessible, the inner one containing the tombs of the three patriarchs and their wives.”

“An oracle of Adam? Not of Abraham? I had taken Adam for a primitive Chaldean hero.”

“According to our Ebionite tradition he was both created and buried at Hebron. The Angel Michael formed him from dust within a mystic circle, scraping it together from east, west, south and north. When he and the Second Eve, his wife, were tricked by God’s Adversary into disobeying the divine orders, he remained in Hebron (after a long penitential immersion up to the neck in Jordan), but outside the Garden, the entrances to which were guarded by seraphs ; after many years he died at Hebron and was buried in the cave of Machpelah.”

The merchant from Petra cried : “Michael? I think you are mistaken. Was not Adam the parthenogenous son of the Nymph Michal, otherwise called Miriam? And I will take you up on another point, Ebionite! The oracle is not silent, as you say. It is still to be consulted. The pythoness who controls the oracle is called Mary the Hairdresser.”

The Greek asked : “In whose name does this woman speak oracles ?”

“In the name of the Mother, using the oracular jawbone of Adam.”

Judas interposed : “How can that be? It is recorded that when, after some seven years’ residence at Hebron, King David moved his capital to Jerusalem, and there set up the Ark on the threshing-floor previously sacred to Araunah, he carried Adam’s skull away with him and buried it as a protective charm at a cross-roads outside the City. Jerusalem thus became a colony of Hebron : as the prophet Ezekiel writes : ‘Thy father was an Amorite’—I suppose that Mamre is intended—‘thy mother a Daughter of Heth’.”

“Yet David left the jawbone and the remainder of the skeleton. No, no, it is as I say! My own brother, now dead, has consulted the pythoness ; by his account this Mary is a woman greatly to be feared.”

The talk ran on, but Jesus took no part in it. The elder Greek said : “It interests me that this Fair coincides with the mourning season kept at Athens and Rome : the May season of purification, when sin-puppets of rushes are thrown into running water, and sexual intercourse is forbidden even between husband and wife, and temples are swept out and the sacred images washed and scrubbed, and torches and lamps drive evil spirits from the fruit-trees, and everyone goes about without laughter in dirty clothes. I am told that almost precisely the same customs are observed at the Oaks of Mamre, but that the Festival has no sequel. Mourning and a religious ban on sexual intercourse normally imply that when the ban is lifted a sexual orgy ensues, with pent-up passions surging to joyful madness ; but here, they say, nothing at all happens of that sort.”

The Arabian captain laughed. “Hebron is no longer what it was when
Absalom, the rebellious son of David, companied promiscuously on the palace roof in the sight of all the people with twenty or more princesses of his father’s harem. But ‘nothing at all’ is an under-statement. Why do you suppose that we Arabians bring our barren wives to Hebron if not to be made fertile by the Kerm-king? But those rites, and the rite of equitation in which the Jebusite girls are deflowered by him, take place over the hill, outside the town limits, when the Fair is over.”

“Now, who in the world is the Kerm-king ?” asked the younger Greek.

“The murderer of the Terebinth-king for whom we mourn at this festival ; and the principal mourner himself.”

“Then Father Abraham is the Terebinth-king ?”

The merchant of Petra explained : “The sacred grove consists of two sorts of oaks : the kerm-oak and the terebinth-oak. The Terebinth and Kerm-kings are twins and rivals, like Aleyn, the Osiris of Sinai, and his brother Mot. They share the year, and the favours of the Queen, equally between them. The son of the murdered Terebinth-king enjoys, his revenge at the September New Year, when he murders the Kerm-king his uncle, and becomes his principal mourner, and succeeds to the Kingdom.”

“Yes,” said the Arabian, “we call the Terebinth-king Abraham, but the Jews are not pleased with us for doing so, for you will soon see what sort of a patriarch this Abraham is, and what a beauty is his fish-tailed wife.”

It should here be explained that the terebinth, or pistachio-oak, is highly valued in Palestine because of its sweet nut and the valuable oil it yields, and because of the thick shade it affords in summer. It is the equivalent there of the royal oak, sacred to Mercury or Zeus in Greece, to Jupiter in Italy and to the Celtic Hercules in Gaul. As timber of the royal oak is almost invariably used in making statues of these Western gods, so is that of terebinth-oak for the corresponding rustic gods of Palestine : indeed, “terebinth” and “statue” are synonymous terms in Hebrew.

The kerm-oak, or holly-oak, or scarlet oak, as it is variously called, is the evergreen tree that produces the kerm-berry, from which is extracted the sacred scarlet dye for which Hebron is famous. Some authorities deny that the kerm-berry is a fruit, on the ground that the tree also yields acorns : they take it for a sluggish female insect, since a peculiar fly, perhaps the male, is often found hovering near it. But in appearance, at least, it is a juicy berry and is credited with strong aphrodisiac virtue.

“Upon my word,” said the Greek, “I am slowly beginning to understand the complex mythology of Hebron. Here, perhaps, you have a clue to the origin of the Aeolian double kingdom, as at Sparta, Argos, and Corinth ; and also an explanation of the myths of Hercules and his twin Iphiclus, of Romulus and his twin Remus, of Idas and Lynceus, of Calaïs and Zetes, Pelias and Neleus, Proeteus and Acrisius who quarrelled for precedence within their mother’s womb, and the numerous
other pairs of royal twins that stud Apollodorus’s mythological dictionary. But if Adam and Abraham and Abner are one, what of the dead heroes Isaac and Jacob who are also supposedly interred at Hebron ?”

“They were Abraham’s son and grandson,” said Judas. “Isaac son of Sarah, whom we Ebionites call the Son of Laughter, lived at Beer-Lahai-Roi near Kadesh—the well of the antelope-ox’s jawbone. It lies some fifty miles from here, to the southward.”

“Good. Then the
boubalos
, or antelope-ox, must have been his sacred beast, and the well must have been an oracular one. And since laughing Sarah was his mother, laughing Isaac must have been one of the kings of Hebron. And Jacob ?”

Judas was distressed at the freedom of the conversation, but the merchant of Petra replied : “At Petra we style him Jah Akeb, the demi-god of the sacred heel. He dislocated his right thigh in the wrestling ring so that his foot went into spasm and his heel was raised from the ground. By this means it was protected against scorpion, asp or the bristle of the boar maliciously laid in his path by his enemies ; and for this reason it is held unlucky to mock at a cripple.”