The Source

by James A. Michener

  “The town, the walls?”

  “The abominations must be destroyed.”

  Zadok fell on his knees before the voice, bowing to the olive tree that hid the terrible countenance, and from this position of surrender the old man expressed his trembling pity for the condemned ones inside the wall. “If I can make the abominations cease,” he pleaded with his god, “may the town be saved?”

  “It shall be saved,” the compassionate god replied, “and not a single rock will be unseated.”

  “Praise be to El-Shaddai,” the old man sighed, and the presence was gone.

  Without consulting anyone the patriarch threw his robe about him, took up his staff and walked through the night, his heart ablaze with love for the people he had been permitted to save. At the town gate he pounded with his staff, shouting, “Awake and be saved!” but the guards would not permit him to enter. He hammered again, crying, “I must see the governor now!” and Uriel was routed from his sleep; and when he looked through an arrow slit to see that the messenger was his colleague Zadok, he said to the guards, “Let him enter.”

  Like a bridegroom rushing to greet his bride the old man swept into the governor’s room and shouted, “Uriel, Makor can be saved.”

  The sleepy Canaanite scratched his beard and asked, “Old man, what are you talking about?”

  “You have only to halt the abominations.”

  “What is this?”

  Joyously the old man explained, “You must destroy the temple to Astarte and the fire god.” Then generously he added, “Worship of Baal you may continue, but you must accept El-Shaddai as the one god above all.” His eyes were ablaze with the fire of zealotry that Uriel had seen that first day.

  Uriel sat down. “You never demanded this before.”

  The Hebrew, seeming not to hear the governor’s logic, ranted, “Divert this sinful city into the ways of the true god.”

  Rahab was awakened by the noise and entered the room, wearing a nightrobe. “What is the old nomad saying?” she asked.

  Zadok ran to greet her as if she were a beloved daughter. “Tell your husband to accept El-Shaddai’s will.”

  “What frenzy is this?” Rahab asked her bewildered husband.

  “Makor can be saved,” Zadok explained ecstatically, “if you halt the sacred prostitution and stop feeding babies to the fire god.”

  Rahab laughed. “It is not prostitution,” she said. “Those girls are priestesses. And your own daughter Leah sent Zibeon to lie with them, the way I sent Uriel when I was pregnant. To insure an easy delivery. Old man, these rites are necessary, and your daughter has more sense than you do.”

  Zadok did not hear what Rahab was saying. He was so ecstatic over El-Shaddai’s offer to save Makor that he expected others to react as he had done, and when they did not he became confused, but before he could react to the introduction of his daughter’s name, Zibeon joined the meeting, bringing Leah with him. When the girl saw her father, bewildered and looking very old with his unkempt beard, she ran to him with compassion and would have kissed him, but when he saw her the words of Rahab took meaning and with his staff he fended her off, asking, “Did you send your husband to the prostitutes?”

  Zibeon answered, “I went to the temple to protect your daughter in childbirth.”

  The patriarch looked at his son-in-law with pity and said, “You have committed an abomination.”

  “But you agreed that I was free to worship Astarte,” the young man protested.

  Then Leah interrupted: “I asked him to go, for my sake.”

  Leah’s voice, uttering such words, startled the old man and he leaned forward to study her face, while a hideous fear took possession of his mind. “Leah,” he asked, “did you also take yourself to the male prostitutes, consorting with them in the same manner?”

  “Yes,” his daughter replied with no shame. “It is how the women of Makor worship.”

  “And if you have a son, will you give him to the fire god?”

  “Yes. It is the custom of this town.”

  Zadok drew back from the four Canaanites, for after this confession his daughter could no longer be a Hebrew, and he was struck by a dizziness that almost felled him. But he managed to focus his weary eyes upon the four doomed faces, and when he saw them clearly, uncomprehending and obstinate in their sin, he realized that El-Shaddai had arranged this night to exhibit the true abomination of the town. Yet even in that moment of discovery he remembered the god’s promise that if the Canaanites should repent they could still be saved. Raising his right arm he pointed a long bony finger at Uriel and asked, “For the last time, will you order these abominations to cease?” No one spoke. Directing his finger at Leah and her husband he asked, “Will you abandon this doomed town, now?” Neither spoke, so he fell to his knees and knocked his head three times upon the tiles, and from this position looked up at the governor, pleading, “As the humblest of your slaves, can I beg you to save yourself?” The Canaanite made no reply, so the old man pulled himself back to his feet.

  At the door he turned back and pointed to each of the four in turn and then to the town. “This shall all be destroyed.” And he was gone.

  It was too late to go to bed, so Rahab called for some food and said, “Your father sounds like an old fool.”

  “In the desert he often talked to himself,” Leah explained.

  “I warned the governor to destroy him at the beginning,” Rahab muttered. “Now it is he who speaks of destroying us.”

  “We may have to turn the Hittites upon him,” Uriel said, and when Leah was gone Rahab directed her son not to let her wander from the walls, “For she is a Hebrew and cannot be trusted.”

  “You think there may be war?” the young man asked.

  “He talked like a madman,” Uriel replied, “and madmen bring war.” In the early dawn he went to the north wall to consult his Hittites.

  Zadok, as soon as he reached his tent, summoned his sons to ask what plans they had devised for the capture of Makor, and they asked, “Is it to be war?”

  “Last night El-Shaddai commanded us to destroy that town,” he replied.

  To his surprise Epher and Ibsha laid before him a detailed plan for investing the powerful town and forcing its surrender. “It will cost us many lives,” they warned, but in his growing fury the old man refused to consider losses. Taking his sons with him to the tabernacle he dedicated them to the work of El-Shaddai, and the three prayed in silence.

  That morning, as soon as the gates were opened, four Hebrew women went to the well while a detachment of men crept through the wadis until they were close to the waterwall. Of the four women, two walked with an awkwardness that should have been detected, but they were allowed to slip through the postern gate and into the dark passageway, where they hurried to the unoccupied guardhouses. There the two awkward ones slipped quietly into the retreats, throwing off their women’s clothing and unleashing long bronze knives. The two real women walked quietly forward, found two Canaanite women at the well and killed them. With rocks they signaled to their Hebrew brothers on the outside, and these troops started breaching the wall that surrounded the well. Canaanite soldiers from inside the town, belatedly aware of the danger, rushed through the postern gate and into the tunnel, where they were intercepted by Epher and Ibsha, who had constructed from pots and benches a kind of barricade. The way was narrow and the two Hebrews were courageous, so that the Canaanites were held back, and after a quarter of an hour the Hebrews on the outside had broken through the wall and taken possession of the well. They ran forward to relieve the two sons of Zadok, but when they reached the barricade they found Ibsha dead and Epher sorely wounded.

  The Hebrews had won the first encounter. They controlled the well and would try to strangle the town with thirst. Governor Uriel appreciated the significance of this move, but in spite of the fact that five of his soldiers had been killed in the waterwall he still hoped that any honest grievances the Hebrews might have could be adjudicated, and to t
his end he sent messengers to Zadok asking what might be done. But the patriarch refused to meet with the Canaanites, and they returned knowing that complete war was upon them.

  When Governor Uriel heard their report he decided to recapture the well at once and summoned his Hittite captain from the stables. Together they climbed a tower from which they studied with satisfaction the unmilitary manner in which the Hebrews were gathering before the town walls. “We can massacre them,” the Hittite boasted, rubbing his hands with pleasure.

  “Ride back and forth and kill as many as possible,” Governor Uriel directed. “Well end this war quickly.”

  The Hittite ran to the stables and ordered his men to harness their horses, two by two, to the war chariots which up to this time Governor Uriel had kept hidden. Few citizens of the town were aware that these ultimate weapons had been smuggled in at night from the seaport of Akka, and none of Zadok’s Hebrews had encountered such machines of war. Into each driver’s bucket stepped a Hittite whose left hand would control the horses while his right was free to swing a chain to which was attached a huge bronze ball studded with spikes. One swipe of this weapon would break a man’s back. Behind each driver stood two soldiers lashed to the chariot so that their hands were free to wield swords and heavy maces. And from the wheels of the chariot projected scythes that revolved as the wheels spun, cutting down anyone the chariot brushed against. They were horrible instruments, calculated to terrorize and kill, and Governor Uriel now moved them to the main gate.

  When they were in position, and when the maximum number of Hebrews were milling aimlessly about the walls, he directed trumpets to sound and foot soldiers to rush forth as if this were to be an ordinary sortie. The Hebrews, surprised by the daring of the Canaanites, began massing at the exact spots Uriel had anticipated, and when they were most vulnerable he ordered the gates to swing open and the chariots to gallop down the ramp and into the midst of the stunned Hebrews. The Canaanite soldiers, instructed as to what was coming, slipped deftly aside, leaving a clear path for the terrible chariots, whose drivers lashed their horses directly at the milling Hebrews while the mounted riders ripped and cut at them.

  It was slaughter, for if the Hebrews stood to fight, the horses trampled them; if they sought retreat, armed riders chopped them down from the rear with maces that broke their necks; and if they merely stood, the whirling scythes on the wheels cut them to death. Zadok, seeing the carnage, cried aloud, “El-Shaddai, god of hosts! What have you brought down upon us?” But Epher broke away from the women binding his wounds and leaped onto the neck of one of the Hittite horses, cutting its throat and toppling the chariot onto the rocks. The red-headed warrior thus proved that the vehicle was not invincible nor the horses immortal, and his Hebrews rallied, driving the Hittites back with stones and flint-headed arrows.

  Judged numerically, the first day’s battle represented a clear defeat for the Hebrews. They had captured the well, but when Zadok mustered his forces before the tabernacle he could count thirty-four dead, and as he moved among the fallen he recited their names: “Naaman, my son. Joktan, my son. Aaron, my son. Zattu, my son. Ibsha, my son.” Not many generals could walk a battlefield at dusk and count as one day’s loss five sons and twenty-nine relatives, and when he reached the last corpse, “Simon, son of Naaman, son of my loins, son of Zebul who brought us from the desert,” he was possessed by a consuming rage and he stood before the tabernacle, swearing, “This town shall be destroyed. Not one roof shall rest upon its beams, not one man committed to the prostitutes shall five.” In this manner the peace-loving old man finally surrendered himself to the accomplishment of El-Shaddai’s will, but at the moment he could not know that his submission had come too late.

  In his determination to crush Makor he became like a young warrior; in moral ardor he was again the primitive man of the desert facing the corruption of the town. But gradually he had to see that the effective decisions regarding the war were now being made by Epher, who, in spite of his wounds, led his father and his brothers to the mountaintop, where this time they succeeded in throwing down the offensive monolith which their Hebrews had erected to El-Shaddai. As the group was about to leave the high place Epher cried, “Let us throw down Baal as well.” The old man tried to stop his sons as they rushed toward the remaining rock, warning them, “No! It is only the abominations we fight. Baal rules here and El-Shaddai approves.” But Epher was headstrong and shouted, “Our war is against Baal, too,” and he brushed his father aside. Leaping at the monolith he called for his brothers to join him, and they toppled it down the mountainside.

  It was a revolutionary moment. For it would be more than a hundred and fifty years before El-Shaddai, in his later manifestation as Yahweh, would deliver to the Hebrews in Sinai a commandment requiring them to abandon all other gods. It was this evolution that Epher was anticipating when he acted upon the principle that El-Shaddai was not only the supreme god of Zadok’s clan but of other peoples as well. When Epher made this arrogant extension of definitions Zadok knew that the boy was wrong.

  “That was not the will of El-Shaddai,” the old man thundered, but Epher ignored him, as if through a vision he had foreseen the direction in which El-Shaddai must grow. And that night when the wounded young leader laid before the others his final plan for capturing Makor, Zadok realized that he had had no part in the building of this plan. It is the daring of a young man, he told himself, one bold enough to throw down the rock of Baal. And at that moment he was forced to acknowledge that the grandeur of leadership had slipped from him.

  While others planned the forthcoming battle he walked alone through the olive grove, seeking to talk with his god, from whom he needed guidance. It would be difficult to penetrate the meaning of the words he talked with his god. Certainly El-Shaddai was no lackey to be summoned at will, as oracles were summoned by the witches of nearby En-dor; many times Zadok had needed advice from El-Shaddai when none was forthcoming. On the other hand, Zadok was certainly not an insane man, as his daughter had suggested, who heard demonic voices; he was never more clearly in control of his faculties than when he conversed with El-Shaddai. Perhaps the explanation was that when the Hebrews faced moments of decisive crisis, especially those involving moral impasses where decision could not be deferred, they found guidance coming to them from the lonely places. A voice cried out from unexpected quarters, the voice of accumulated reason; it could not be conjured up, for El-Shaddai appeared only when he was ready. But the voice could be relied upon, for the god delivered a consistent message; and now as the patriarch sought him among the trees, El-Shaddai did not take refuge in burning bushes or flaming rocks. Like a father he walked beside Zadok, conducting the last great conversation he would offer the old man.

  “The abominations shall be destroyed,” El-Shaddai assured him.

  “And the walls, will we penetrate them?”

  “Did I not promise you in the desert, ‘The walls shall open to receive you’?”

  “According to the plan of Epher?”

  “Have I not said, ‘The sons are wiser than the fathers’? Even according to the plan of Epher.”

  “Then my headstrong son was correct in destroying Baal?”

  “He was hasty, for the time has not yet come when I shall command people to have no other god before me.”

  “Will you forgive my son his arrogance?”

  “He is to lead my people in battle, and such men require arrogance.”

  “And me? Always I have sought peace, El-Shaddai. When the town has surrendered, what must I do?”

  “Destroy the abominations.”

  “And the Canaanites?”

  “The men you shall kill, every man of the town. The children you shall take as your own. And the women you shall divide among you, each man according to his losses.”

  This terrible judgment, not delivered as a parable permitting choice of interpretation but as a firm, hard command from the god himself, appalled the patriarch. He was being ordered to repeat the massa
cre of Timri, and this he could not do. It was an act too grisly for him to perform, even though El-Shaddai himself commanded it.

  “All the men of this town I cannot slay.” Again he had opposed the word of his god and was willing to accept the consequences.

  El-Shaddai was in a position to carry out the executions himself but he always preferred to reason with his Hebrews, and now he said to Zadok, “Do you think it is from cruelty that I order you to slay the Canaanites? Is it not because you Hebrews are a foolish and a stubborn people, apt to fall captive to other gods and other laws? I do not command this thing because I hate the Canaanites, but because I love you.”

  “But among the men of Canaan must be many willing to worship you. If these accept circumcision may I spare them?”

  From the olive trees no voice replied. Zadok had posed a difficult question, even for omniscient El-Shaddai. He had raised the question of salvation, and even a god required time to weigh the proposal. Great risk was involved in what the patriarch proposed: surely some Canaanites would swear falsely and accept circumcision while in their hearts they were determined to resume worship of Astarte. But the relationship between El-Shaddai and his Hebrews was not an absolute thing; not even a god could order Zadok to obey blindly a dictate that was wholly repugnant to him or one that contradicted his moral judgment. El-Shaddai understood why the old man was wrong in his estimate of the Canaanites and the error would entangle El-Shaddai in many future difficulties, but apparently he could not make Zadok understand. So for the moment it was the god who surrendered.

  “If among the Canaanites you find just men,” he agreed, “they may be spared.”

  “What sign will you give me that they are just?”

  “In the moment of victory you must rely upon your own signs.”

  The old man was reluctant to bring up the next point, but h? could not avoid it. “El-Shaddai, today I have lost five sons. I need the help of wise men. When we capture the town, may I spare the lives of Governor Uriel, who is a man of wisdom, and of my daughter and her husband?”