The Source

by James A. Michener

  When Mikal brought the boy home from the temple Gomer could not hide her displeasure, and when she heard the boy’s name she spat in the dust; but when she observed the love that Mikal lavished on the child and when she saw how much he resembled Rimmon she had to accept him, and she went into the fields for sixteen and seventeen hours a day, grubbing food to keep her little family alive. As soon as Mikal was strong enough to help in the work she placed her son with an old Canaanite woman and joined Gomer at the slave’s work; and the two women working side by side developed a love such as mothers and daughters know. It was the love of women striving to their utmost so that a family might be preserved.

  Each morning and night they prayed to Yahweh that Rimmon might return from the solemn battle that was forming in the north, and if at other times Mikal climbed the mountain to ask for Baal’s intercession, too, Gomer chose not to know, for these were days of tragedy and if Mikal could do anything to bring her husband home alive she was free to try it. In the tunnel there was no voice; the people of Makor had forgotten Gomer’s strange prophecies to the Egyptians, and she herself did not remember that she had once shouted with the voice of Yahweh.

  Then messengers began arriving from the fields of Carchemish, far to the north on the Euphrates. They ran gasping up the ramps to the gates of Makor and fell exhausted with dust in their mouths and terror in their eyes. “Great Egypt is destroyed! The chariots of Babylon were like seeds of the cypress tree blowing across the fields in winter. Woe, woe! Egypt is no more!” They rested, with gloom upon their foreheads, then resumed their running toward the Nile, where the court would cause them to be strangled because of the calamity they were reporting.

  Other fugitives followed. “The Babylonians captured our generals and blinded them on the battlefield, leading them off with yokes about their necks. Our charioteers had their tongues and ears cut away and they were led to slavery.”

  “The men of Makor?” Governor Jeremoth asked. “What happened?”

  “Those who lived were blinded on the battlefield, then taken away to tread water pumps for the rest of their lives.”

  “How many?” the governor asked, his knees trembling with anguish for his town.

  “Not many,” the messengers said, and they too ran on.

  Finally a man whom the Egyptians had conscripted from Accho wandered through the gates. He had lost his arm in the battle and had been released by the Babylonians to report the battle properly. “We marched north with overwhelming power,” he said as if he were a ghost reporting to the ancient gods of Phoenicia in some afterworld, “but Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon was waiting for us with an army that was ten to our one. At Carchemish he led us cleverly into a trap where his chariots destroyed us as if we were wheat at the harvest. He was so powerful that Egypt had no chance. Her generals were like children and her lieutenants like sucklings. But you had better prepare. For soon Nebuchadrezzar will march down the wadis. Makor and Accho are no more. The little kingdoms that we played with are no more.”

  Gomer and the other women besieged the man to see if he remembered their men. “They are all dead,” he said indifferently. Then he looked at the pathetic walls, broken by Sennacherib, and he began to laugh hysterically.

  “What is it?” Governor Jeremoth demanded.

  “These pitiful walls! Manned by pitiful women! You remember Sennacherib as a fearful man. But can you imagine what Nebuchadrezzar is like?” He stopped laughing at the helplessness of Makor, and his silence, the look of terror that came over his face, told the citizens all they needed to know.

  The next months represented one of the most despairing times in the history of Makor. When Sennacherib had destroyed the town it was a swift, terrible vengeance that eliminated almost two thousand people in a few hours; but when it was ended the town was permitted to rebuild as an outpost of an Assyrian province. The months following Carchemish were more hideous because of the near-starvation, the captivity of the men and the uncertainty as to when Nebuchadrezzar would strike in revenge because the Hebrews had sided with the Egyptians.

  “We didn’t want to fight with them,” Mikal pointed out, but her father said that the Babylonians would not take such subtleties into account.

  “We must gird ourselves to withstand the first shock,” he warned, and rarely in the long history of the Family of Ur was one of their members to behave with such voluntary courage as Governor Jeremoth now displayed. Assembling his people he announced, “We are a poor group with few men. But we have found in the past that if we can hide behind these walls for three or four months the besieger grows weary and goes away.”

  “We have no walls,” an old man pointed out.

  “When Nebuchadrezzar arrives, we shall have,” Jeremoth replied, “and you will have blisters on your hands from building them.”

  He drove his starving people at a pitch that they would not have believed possible. He became the builder, the hortator, the priest, the general. Wherever he went he inspired his people to additional work, and when a committee of the faint-hearted approached him with the idea that perhaps it would be better in the long run if the town surrendered to Nebuchadrezzar, trusting to his benevolence, he dismissed them scornfully: “Our fathers surrendered. They trusted Sennacherib. And four hours after he took the booty the town was demolished. This time if we perish we perish on the walls and at the gates.”

  One morning, when the fortifications were beginning to regain their former strength, he climbed down into the tunnel to inspect the water system, and on the way back he stopped in the darkness to mutter a prayer to Baal for the miracle that the god had permitted Jeremoth’s ancestors to accomplish. “With this water in our hands, great Baal, we can hold off the Babylonians.” As he rose he saw Gomer coming toward him with her water jug balanced on her head, and she stopped to greet him.

  “You’re a brave man, Jeremoth,” she said. “Yahweh will bless you.”

  Governor Jeremoth thanked her, and she added, “For all the fine men we lost, for our sons, we shall be avenged.” She took the governor’s hand and kissed it.

  “Thank you, Gomer,” he said. “When the day for fighting comes you shall stand beside me on the wall.”

  “For the memory of my son I shall kill fifty Babylonians.” And they passed on.

  But after the governor had climbed the stairs, and after Gomer had gone to the well and filled her jug, she was returning alone through the tunnel when an extraordinary thing happened. She was walking toward the shaft, brooding upon the revenge she would take on the Babylonians, when she was suddenly knocked to the stone floor, where her clay jug was broken, sending water upon her face, while from the bottom of the shaft shone a light more powerful than the sun.

  From her prone position Gomer had one curious thought: Our shaft is so located that the sun never shines to the bottom. It had never done so and she knew it never could, but there it was.

  A voice said, “Gomer, widow of Jathan, in the days ahead I shall speak through your lips.”

  “Is my son alive?” she asked.

  “Through your lips will I save Israel.”

  “Is my son Rimmon alive?”

  “The walls must not be finished, Gomer, widow of Israel.”

  “But we must destroy the Babylonians,” she cried, still prone on the wet stones.

  “In chains and yokes shall you march to Babylon. It is the destiny of Israel to perish from the land it has known, that it may find its god once more.”

  “I cannot understand your words,” Gomer muttered.

  “Gomer, widow of Israel, the walls must not be finished.” The light diminished and the voice was gone.

  She picked herself up and looked at the broken water jug, and the sight of its fragments brought her back to reality and she began to weep, for she did not have enough money to purchase a new jug and did not know what to do.

  Climbing the shaft she placed her feet carefully so as not to slip into the deep holes, and all she could think of was that the voice had refused
to speak of her son, so when she reached her home and saw her grandson Ishbaal playing in the sun and her cherished daughter-in-law Mikal working at the noon meal, she wept again, moaning, “Now I am sure that Rimmon is dead, and I have broken our water jug.”

  The two tragedies were of equal weight to the unfortunate women, and they wept together, for the loss of the jug was so unexpected and so costly that they could not comprehend what had happened to them; and in this lamenting Gomer ignored the wall, and it was finished.

  Then came the day that made the long months endurable. A child was playing on the new wall and to the east he saw a flurry of dust rising along the Damascus road, and he cried, “Some men are coming home!” No one attended his foolish words, but after a while he saw real men and shouted, “Our men are coming home!” And again no one bothered to listen to him, but finally he saw a man whose face he knew and he screamed, “Gomer! Gomer! Rimmon is coming home.”

  The cry spread out across the town, and Gomer and her daughter hurried to the walls and saw below them Captain Rimmon, tall and blond and very thin. He had with him thirty or forty men of Makor, neither blinded nor mutilated, and no one spoke, neither the men in the road nor the women who saw them through tears that were beyond pain, but the child kept calling off the names: “There’s Rimmon and Shobal and Azareel and Hadad the Edomite and Mattan the Phoenician …” One by one he called them from the dead and they climbed the ramp to their poor town.

  The released prisoners clutched at their women, embraced their children and uttered little animal cries of joy. At the temple of Astarte the three young prostitutes danced naked and took all men, one after the other, into their booths for celebration, after which a procession headed by the priestesses and two old priests marched to the mountain, where sacrifices were offered before the monolith of Baal. Food that had been hoarded for months was brought out, and there was dancing and crying and love-making and men and women alike getting drunk without the help of wine. The men were home! Once again Baal had saved the little town.

  It was dawn before Rimmon and his friends had finished telling of Carchemish and the wonders of Babylon. Of the battle they said only that Egypt was so crushed that it would never rise again. No more would Makor know the tramp of Egyptian armies; the scarabs of the officials could be thrown away, for they would no longer be needed to sign official documents. At this news there was little mourning, for Egypt had been a careless and a cruel administrator, and perhaps the first weakness was worse than the second, for under her dominion the land had deteriorated, the forests had diminished and security had changed to anarchy. Egypt was dead, and Hebrews who had suffered under the Pharaohs felt no grief.

  “But Babylon!” Rimmon cried. “A city of magnificence beyond imagination! At the Gate of Ishtar …” He wondered how he could explain. “Mikal,” he called to his wife, “fetch me your jewel,” and his happy wife ran to their home and brought back a piece of glazed ware from Greece shaped in the form of a bird. “This is precious,” Rimmon said, holding the brooch so that it shone in the night flares, “but at the Ishtar Gate there are walls three times as high as Makor, all studded with glaze finer than this fragment.” Above his head rose the imaginary gates of Babylon.

  “They have canals that bring the river from a greater distance than Accho, gardens that float in the air, temples as big as all of Makor, and at the edge of the city a tower so big and so tall that words cannot describe it.”

  “Why did they let you go free?” an old man asked.

  “So that we could tell Israel of Babylon,” Rimmon said.

  From the shadows Governor Jeremoth stepped forward, a stubby, hard man of demonstrated courage, to say, “They sent you back to frighten us. But we are going to defend this town with our courage and with our blood. Rimmon, tell us no more of Babylon’s might. Let us tell you that here we shall defend ourselves.”

  To the surprise of the townspeople the governor’s harsh words did not offend Rimmon, for with a broad smile he grasped Jeremoth’s hand and said, “Azareel, tell him what we’ve been talking about.” And a battle-tough man with a bandaged head explained, “All the way home we’ve been deciding what to do. We’re going to defend this town. Because we found that when a town resists, it wins a more favorable treaty. We pledged, ‘When we get home, we’ll rebuild the walls.’ ” Through the night shadows he peered at the battlements and asked, “Who had the courage to do that?”

  A toothless old man pointed to Governor Jeremoth and said, “He did.” And the soldiers embraced the governor and assured him that he had done right, and at the height of the celebration Jeremoth stood under a flare and announced, “Old men and women built the walls. Young men shall defend them.”

  Most of the soldiers, like Rimmon, went home with their wives, and some, like Azareel, wandered to the temple of Astarte, where they enjoyed themselves with the priestesses, and some like Mattan the Phoenician, who had never expected to see Makor again, climbed the mountain to offer sacrifice to Baal, and a few were so lost in a mixture of joy and sorrow that they went from house to house to comfort the widows whose men would not return and to assure them that their husbands had died bravely.

  And when the sun was up, old Gomer descended the shaft with a new water jug and went to the well, but as she was about to lower the bucket the water fell away many cubits until the well was dry: at the bottom a fire burned and incense filled the air and a voice thundered from the depths and terrified her so that she dropped her new jug and broke it: “Gomer, widow of Israel, for the last time I command you. Speak the words I send you. Israel has gone whoring after false gods and must be destroyed. Makor has built walls of vanity upon foundations of sand and they shall be thrown down. Your people worship Baal and lust after naked goddesses and in captivity they shall suffer. Tell your son to remember not Babylon but Jerusalem. Gomer, speak these things.”

  “Thank you, Yahweh, for returning my son.”

  “He shall stay but a little while,” the voice said, and as the fire died down the water returned. And there was silence.

  This time Gomer showed no petty concern over her broken water jug, for at last she understood that it was Israel that was broken and that only the tremendous fires of defeat and exile could recast the shattered pieces. Like a moon-mad woman she climbed the upward stairs, not caring where she placed her feet, but because she had been assigned a providential purpose her life was preserved. Walking past her house she heard Mikal calling, “Mother! Mother! Did you break the water jug again?” and she replied in a voice that was hardly her own, “It is Israel that is shattered. Israel is no more.”

  Like a disembodied spirit she continued to the wall where Governor Jeremoth was directing refinements to the fortifications, and pointing to them as she had at the doomed Egyptians, she cried in a harsh and penetrating wail, “O men of vanity, throw down these useless walls. For it is written that Babylon shall capture Israel. And you shall see the hills and valleys of Galilee no more.”

  Her words were clearly demonic and Governor Jeremoth did not feel it necessary to reply. He merely stared at her, but his men stopped their work and stepped aside as she strode along the walls and came to face him, staring down at him as if she were his mentor. In this unexpected manner they started the confrontation that would mark these last days of Makor, and it was a most uneven conflict upon which they were engaged. At fifty-three Governor Jeremoth was a tested man, a toughened warrior. He was clever and was supported by the principal family in town. He was determined to save Makor, and both the women who had rebuilt the walls and the soldiers who had returned to man them trusted him, for his personal courage gave him a power of leadership that words alone could not have done. She was fifty-nine, a confused old woman at the end of her life, with barely enough to live on and no capacity for either leadership or logic. Even to her neighbors she was a woman of no importance, yet Yahweh had chosen her as his spokesman during these critical months, and as such she would determine what transpired in Makor.

&nb
sp; Now she cried, “Tear down the walls and open the gates, for it is the fate of Israel to be dragged into captivity.” There was silence. The woman was speaking treason but Governor Jeremoth refrained from arresting her, for she was the mother of the captain upon whom the defenses rested.

  “Did I not tell you that the Egyptians would be humbled?” she wailed. “And their generals led away as slaves? Do I not speak the truth as you know it to be in your hearts?” Still Governor Jeremoth made no response.

  Now Gomer went into a kind of spasm; her right shoulder hitched upward and her elbow trembled as she intoned, “On that mountain the statue of Baal must be torn down. In that temple the priests and priestesses must be driven out. In all of this town the abominations must cease.” There was silence, and in a powerful wail of lamentation she cried, “Today these things must be done.”

  Guided by a force outside herself she did three symbolic things: she went to the wall and threw down one stone; she went to Governor Jeremoth, grabbed a staff he was carrying and broke it, and she went to the temple of Astarte where with curses she drove one of the prostitutes out of her booth. She then went home, where her son and daughter were ignorant of her performance, for they had gone into the tunnel to satisfy themselves that she had again broken her water jug—“She is too old to carry such a burden,” they had decided—and when she faced Mikal, Yahweh directed her to deliver a fourth symbol of her new identity; but when she looked at her daughter-in-law, that generous young woman who had saved her life during the time of starvation, what Yahweh required her to do was too horrible to perform, and she ran from the house sobbing in her human voice, “Almighty Yahweh, I cannot!”

  That day her children could not find her. She had fled to a stable near the wall, where she huddled in the straw, fleeing the intolerable duty that had been placed upon her. She prayed, seeking release, but found none. She remained hidden in the stable, unable to muster strength for the final obligation that Yahweh had put upon her; when evening came she felt stronger and started to rise, but when she did so she saw ahead the task that awaited her, and in fear she collapsed in the straw, weeping in agony and praying, “This last command, Almighty Yahweh, take from me.”