by Lynn Austin
“It wasn’t. I don’t blame you. I shouldn’t have interfered with your life by offering to marry you.”
She moved closer and knelt in front of him. Tears streamed down her beautiful face. “If you hadn’t interfered, I would have foolishly married Rafi. I would have married a man capable of murdering me. I should have listened to you and to everyone else. Please, please forgive me.”
“Of course, Yael. Of course I forgive you.” She was so distraught that he reached for her and pulled her into his arms, letting her sit beside him and weep against his shoulder. But in spite of his assurances, part of him did blame her for what had happened. And if his grandfather died . . . Zechariah wasn’t sure he could ever look at Yael without thinking that she was partly to blame.
“I burned up my star charts . . . I threw them all on the hearth and watched them burn.” Her voice sounded muffled against his robe. “I’ll never look at the stars for guidance again. I’ll worship your God from now on.”
He didn’t reply. She had spoken the words he’d waited to hear all these years. But at what price? His grandfather’s life?
“Will you give me a second chance, Zaki?” she whispered.
“Of course.”
Yael released him and leaned away to look at him. She took his face in her hands, touching his beard, stroking his hair. “When Rafi said he was going to kill you, he was a man I didn’t know. A stranger. I could never have loved a man who would kill you. But in that terrible moment, I saw you, I knew you. You were Zaki, my friend. The man I’ve shared a lifetime with, the man I know so well. I love you, and I can’t imagine a future without you. I’m so sorry for what I’ve put your family through. For what happened to your grandfather—”
“Shh . . . shh . . . Don’t cry, Yael.” He pulled her close again, desperate to stop her flow of words. He had promised to forgive her, the same way he had assured Saba that he believed in a God who could do the impossible—and Zechariah wasn’t sure if any of it was true. He didn’t know what he believed or if he could ever forgive. He needed to get away somewhere alone so he could think.
“I want to truly be your wife,” she said, “if you haven’t changed your mind.”
“You are my wife, Yael. We’re already married. I won’t change my mind.” But his heart, not his mind, needed to change. Especially if his grandfather died.
Her arms tightened around him. “I’m yours, Zaki. From now on. I’m yours.”
“Yael, right now I . . . I need to go pray for Saba.” He unwrapped her arms from around him and struggled to his feet. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
He left the house and walked through the dark streets, dodging the rubble still piled everywhere after so many years. Dim lamplight lit a few of the scattered houses, but not many. The inhabitants of Jerusalem were too poor to waste precious oil. Wanting to avoid the temple mount, he walked downhill to the reservoir that held the runoff from the Gihon Spring. The pool used to be inside the city walls, but they had all been destroyed by the Babylonians. Zechariah climbed onto a half-broken section of wall and sat down.
Across the valley, thin plumes of gray smoke curled into the night sky from Rafi’s village. Zaki turned away from that view and gazed up the hill at the cluster of houses where he and the other settlers lived. Farther up the slope was the house of assembly and Governor Sheshbazzar’s residence, and on the highest point above this mound of land where King David’s city had once stood, Zechariah could see smoke rising from the Holy One’s altar. It was the mountain where the temple should be.
He closed his eyes, lowering his face in his hands so he could think. Yael had given up her idolatry. She was ready to be his wife. But he knew she acted out of guilt and obligation and fear, knowing Saba might die. Zaki wanted her love. It had taken the crisis of nearly losing her, seeing that knife pressed to her throat, for him to realize how much he did love her. He had offered to trade his life for hers. As he opened his eyes again and gazed up at the place where the temple should be, he wondered if living with a wife without her love was like serving as God’s priest without loving Him. Was this how God felt about Zechariah’s halfhearted faith? Did He also want all or nothing, a relationship of mutual love, not mere guilt or obligation?
All or nothing. That’s what his grandfather was trying to teach him. Did Zechariah believe all of the stories in the Torah, all of the impossible deeds that the Almighty One had done in the past, or didn’t he?
He realized that he did. Because Saba was right—he had learned to know God through studying the Scriptures. What he saw was a God of love and miracles and laws, and he knew that a life without Him wasn’t worth living. He would be no better than the dumb beasts of the earth. No better than the Samaritans.
Zechariah truly had experienced God’s presence back in Babylon. The Almighty One had commanded him to return to Jerusalem and to Him. Zechariah had been longing for His presence ever since, searching for Him, waiting for God to tell him why he was here and what He wanted him to do. And as Zechariah gazed up the sloping hill, at the ruins, at the half-built city, at the empty place on the top of the hill where Abraham had offered up Isaac, the place where the temple should be, he suddenly knew exactly what God wanted him to do.
The impossible.
He jumped down off the wall and ran up the hill, hurrying through the narrow lanes as fast as he could in the dark. He raced through the gate into his house, passing the others still sitting in the courtyard, and went straight into Saba’s room. His grandfather opened his eyes and looked up at him as Zechariah knelt beside the bed.
“We need to rebuild the temple,” he said, still breathless from the climb. “Not because King Cyrus told us to, but because we long to meet with God. Because we love Him and are incomplete without Him. It’s just like you said, Saba—God has been testing us with all these difficulties to see how important the temple is to us. Will we allow ourselves to be discouraged, or will we trust Him and do the impossible?”
A slow, gentle smile lit Saba’s pale face.
“The Almighty One wants our love, Saba, not guilty obedience. That’s what’s been missing in my life—love. Instead of waiting for God’s presence to come to me again, He wanted me to pursue Him the way the Torah says to do, with all my heart and soul and strength. Following rules and offering sacrifices is meaningless without love. Am I making any sense?”
Saba nodded, still smiling.
“We need to rebuild the temple. We need to trust the God of the impossible. It’s so clear to me, so obvious—but how do I get the others to believe it?”
“You’ll have to convince them.”
“And you’ll have to help me!” Zechariah gripped his grandfather’s icy hand in both of his. “You have to fight to get well and to live so that we can do this together. It was your dream, and now it’s mine for us to minister together in the Holy One’s temple.”
He felt the gentle pressure of Saba’s hand in return. “I’ll do my best.”
And Zechariah would do his best, too, from now on. He would build his marriage with Yael and his faith in God—day by day, one loving, impossible step at a time. And then he would rebuild God’s temple.
Part IV
The
Temple
“Not by might nor by power, but
by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty.
ZECHARIAH 4:6
Chapter
36
SIX YEARS LATER
The relentless sun left Zechariah parched and thirsty as he made the six-mile trek home from the grazing pastures outside Bethlehem. The report that he and the others had just heard from the chief shepherd, Besai, had discouraged all of them. “Let’s stop for a minute,” Rebbe Jakin said. “I need to rest.” Sweat rolled down his face, which was red with exertion from the uphill climb. Zechariah and the two other young priests-in-training halted in the stingy shade of a cedar tree, grateful for the rest.
“If it’s this hot in the springtime, what will summer be like?” Ze
chariah asked the others. He took a drink from his dwindling waterskin, not expecting a reply.
Jakin gestured to the straw-colored landscape all around them. “The Judean hills look nearly as desolate as the wilderness by the Dead Sea. Have any of you ever seen the Judean wilderness?”
“No,” Zechariah replied. “But I’ve walked this route before in the springtime and these wadis usually gush with water. It was a challenge to wade across some of them. Now they’re all dry. Even the Kidron Brook has dried up.”
The spring rains that usually filled the dry riverbeds to overflowing hadn’t come. Neither had the winter rains or the early rains last fall. Drought baked the Promised Land’s fertile soil, leaving it dry as ashes.
“Jeshua won’t be pleased with our report,” Jakin said. “The daily offerings will need to be scaled back yet again.”
“And what about the Passover sacrifices? And the ones for my ordination?” Zechariah asked. No one knew the answer. He mopped the sweat from his brow, and they set off again for the last leg of their climb over the Mount of Olives. “I’m finally going to be ordained in a few weeks,” he said to the others, “and now there may not be any lambs for me to offer.”
When they arrived in Jerusalem, they went straight to the house of assembly to give their report. From inside the high priest’s stifling room, Zechariah heard the young yeshiva boys’ voices droning like a beehive as they studied, their heads bent over their scrolls. Rebbe Jakin told Jeshua about the effects of the drought and how so many of the ewes from the temple flocks had miscarried. “If large crowds come for the Passover Feast, Besai fears that we may not have enough lambs to go around,” Jakin finished. “Let alone enough for the daily sacrifices.”
The high priest closed his eyes for a long moment, the strain evident on his face. “I checked our storehouses this morning and our supplies of grain and oil are critically low. Those daily offerings may have to be halted as well, for the first time since we rebuilt the altar.”
“The Almighty One won’t get His portion and neither will we,” Jakin said. “How will our families survive? We depend on the peoples’ tithes, and ten percent of nothing is nothing.”
“I don’t understand why this is happening,” Jeshua murmured, fanning himself with a dried palm frond.
Both Jeshua and Rebbe Jakin had seniority over Zechariah, and he knew better than to lecture his elders, but he could no longer keep still. “Ask the Lord for rain in the springtime; it is the Lord who makes the storm clouds. He gives showers of rain to men, and plants of the field to everyone.” The men stared at him as if trying to place the Scripture he had just quoted. Where had it come from? The words had sprung to Zechariah’s mind, but he couldn’t place the verse, either. He scrambled to think of another one that he could quote. “I was reading and praying about the drought the other day, and I found a passage about it in the Torah. May I read it to you?”
“Yes, of course.”
Zechariah hurried into the yeshiva, interrupting the lessons as he borrowed the scroll of the fifth book of Moses. He searched for the verse as he returned to the high priest’s room, and although it wasn’t the one he had just quoted, he read it aloud to the others. “‘If you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul—then I will send the rain on your land in its season, both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather your grain, new wine and oil. I will provide grass in the fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied.’”
“We’re all familiar with that promise,” Jakin said, his irritation apparent.
“Yes, that’s why I’ve asked all our priests and students to examine their lives for sin,” Jeshua added. “Can you say that any of us don’t love Him or serve Him, Zechariah? How are we failing to obey God?”
Zechariah drew a slow breath as he gathered his courage. He had been trying to get someone’s attention and say these words for the past six years as he’d served his apprenticeship for the priesthood. Maybe it was finally time. “With all due respect . . . I believe that we’re failing because we haven’t obeyed the Almighty One’s command to rebuild the temple. I think He sent this drought to get our attention.”
The high priest’s fan stilled. He leaned back in his seat, studying Zechariah for a moment. Zechariah’s heart began to race. Maybe the others would finally listen to him. But when Jeshua spoke, his words were disappointing. “Prince Zerubbabel and I met recently to discuss the temple, and we both agreed that the time hasn’t come for the Lord’s house to be built.”
“I disagree! The time to build was nearly twenty years ago when we first arrived. We’re disobeying God and—”
“Zechariah!” Jakin interrupted, his voice sharp. “You’re an outstanding Torah scholar, and you’re going to make a fine priest. But I think you’re forgetting that it was an edict from the Persian king that forced us to stop in the first place. Neither Jeshua nor Zerubbabel dares to come against the might and power of the king.”
And Zechariah shouldn’t come against his elders, but he couldn’t stop the flow of words as another Scripture verse came to him: “It’s not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord Almighty.”
The men stared at him as if he had spoken another language. Where had that verse come from? One of the prophets? Zechariah couldn’t recall. He had studied the Scriptures diligently, had memorized large portions of it, and it upset him that he couldn’t recall where he had read this verse, imprinted so strongly on his mind. He was still trying to figure it out when Jeshua said, “The prince is concerned about the safety of our people. He’s responsible for us. He doesn’t want to risk retaliation from the king or from our enemies. We stopped rebuilding for the sake of peace.”
“But we haven’t made peace, we’ve simply compromised with our enemies,” Zechariah said. “We’re not fulfilling our purpose for being here in the land. We’re supposed to glorify the Holy One among the nations. He wants to fulfill His promise to Abraham that through his offspring all nations would be blessed!”
“What does that have to do with rebuilding the temple?” Jakin asked.
“It has everything to do with it! Our worship at the temple demonstrates the way to find fellowship with God. He promised to dwell here among us. The rebuilt temple isn’t just for us, it’s so that the whole world can know the Almighty One. We’re meant to bring life and hope to the world the same way we brought life from the rubble. The Babylonians and Samaritans have no hope because they don’t know God. That’s why they cling to superstition and try to see the future in the stars.”
“If they wanted to find God,” Jakin said, “they wouldn’t have opposed us when we began to rebuild.”
“No, I know some of those stargazers, and they’re searching for Him whether they realize it or not. Listen, during the first exodus from Egypt, the Almighty One commanded our ancestors to utterly destroy all the inhabitants of the land. This time He didn’t say that. I believe God wants us to live in such a way that we’ll draw all men to Him. So they’ll give up their idolatry and find the living God.” The way Yael had, after all these years.
Zechariah got the impression that only Jeshua, out of all the men in the room, was truly listening and trying to understand what he was desperate to say. “We’re supposed to remain separate from the other nations,” Jeshua said.
“I know. But we haven’t remained separate. In the name of peace we’ve gone to their pagan festivals, and we’ve eaten food sacrificed to their idols and followed their customs instead of showing them the right way to live and how to worship properly. My grandmother gave one of the bravest examples of how we’re to conduct ourselves among unbelievers when she saved a newborn baby that the Samaritans tried to kill. She could have reasoned that killing the child was just their custom and she shouldn’t interfere, but she didn’t. She told them that human life is precious to our God, and she adopted the child as her own.”
“We all a
dmire her for her brave example,” Jeshua said.
“We all need to become examples,” Zechariah continued. “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Men from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, “Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you.”’”
“Where is that written?” Jakin asked. “I’m not familiar with that verse.”
Once again, Zechariah couldn’t remember. Where had it come from? “I-I’m not certain . . . but God showed the prophet Isaiah a time when foreigners would seek Him. He said, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.’ We need to rebuild His house! This drought is His way of getting our attention. The fact that we barely have enough offerings for the sacrifices should tell us that He isn’t pleased with our worship.”
“You’ve certainly given me much to think about,” Jeshua said. But then he sighed and laid down his fan, and Zechariah could see that he was dismissing the topic. They were all hot and tired. Jeshua had other work to do. “Right now I need to figure out how to hold the Passover feast with this shortage of lambs,” he said. “If the drought continues after the holiday, Prince Zerubbabel and I will call for a day of prayer to seek the Almighty One’s will. Thank you all for your report.”
Zechariah had been dismissed. But instead of going up to the temple mount with the others, he remained behind in the yeshiva to study the scrolls of the prophets, determined not to leave until he found the prophecies that had imprinted so strongly on his heart. He would prove the truth of God’s Word to Jeshua and Zerubbabel. “It’s not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord Almighty.”
Chapter
37
Dinah rooted through the storage room, opening baskets and clay storage jars to see how much food was left. What she found—or rather, what she failed to find—dismayed her. “Look at this,” she said to Yael, who had followed her inside. “Every jar is nearly empty. I wanted to prepare an enormous meal for this joyous occasion but how can it be a feast with so little food?”