by Fast, Howard
“I am,” Elaezar replied shortly. At that moment, Shimeon entered the Holy of Holies, and took his place alongside of Elaezar.
“You I see, Elaezar Hacohen!” Menahem cried. “But who is this Israelitish cur”—pointing to Shimeon—“who defiles this place?”
“Cut him down!” Shimeon shouted to the Zealots who were crouched around Menahem.
“I am the holy one!” Menahem screamed, flinging himself toward the altar, where the razor-sharp knife of sacrifice lay. “I am the preacher of righteousness, the hand of God, the keeper of His kingdom!” He whirled to face them, the knife in his hand, and the Zealots speared him as he stood thus, one spear driving through his golden breastplate, another spear transfixing him from behind and a third spear into his groin.
Yet he remained alive, staring with undiluted hatred at Shimeon and Elaezar until he died.
By nightfall of that day, all the Sicarii in Jerusalem were dead. They were hunted through the city like rats. Men, women, and children joined to drag them out of their hiding places. They were slain in cisterns, in sewers, and in the pulpits of the synagogues. They took refuge on roof tops, where they were spitted and feathered by the Jewish bowmen. They hid wherever there was cover—and wherever they hid, they were found.
It was during these hours that the remnants of the Roman garrison in Jerusalem were released by Shimeon’s orders and told to leave Jerusalem immediately and march to Caesarea. He was unaware of the fact that Elaezar had given orders that all the gates of the city be closed until the Sicarii were destroyed—and that he had assigned a hundred bowmen and a hundred spearmen to guard each gate. The Romans, released from the Palace of Herod and the Tower of Antonia, marched into the streets of a city that was tasting blood and half mad with hate. No sooner were they seen than the people closed in about them, with their bows and improvised spears. A rain of rocks came from every housetop. Covering themselves with their shields, the Romans raced in close order for the Valley Gate, leaving a trail of dead and wounded behind them—and at the gate they impaled themselves on the massed points of the spearmen. The Romans fought well and desperately, but by nightfall they as well as the Sicarii were dead.
All night long, carts loaded with corpses rumbled through the streets of Jerusalem down to the valley of hell, where five thousand men worked through the night digging pits for graves. Sicarii and Romans, stripped of clothes and weapons, were thrown together into the mass graves.
Shimeon watched it—watched the bodies, bleached by death, degraded by death, being disposed of. Under the light of hundreds of flaming torches, the scene was terrible and loathsome—and as Shimeon observed, he was bereft of the last shred of his pride. At least he could comfort himself with the thought that Berenice had returned to Galilee; but with nothing else.
Finally, he turned back to the city—a city free at last from Romans and Sicarii alike.
“My dear and beloved wife,” Shimeon wrote to Berenice, “it is now five months since we have seen each other, and I compose this letter and send it to you in a mood of lonely and bleak desperation. How dreary and pointless life has become; and how ironic that so many should point to me and say, There is the nashi, who leads his people. How wonderful life must be for him!
“Hardly. As to the three letters you sent to me, I received them all and your messengers were good and faithful and discreet. No fault should be found with them. The fault is rather inside me, in my heart, which has in all truth become the heart of a stranger. How could I have answered your letters? What could I say? When you spoke to me, I heard the voice of the saintly Hillel. Better that you had reproached me than to forgive me—for in your eyes my sin is the only true sin that any man can commit, the taking of human life, whereas in the eyes of a world nourished by blood and drunk by blood, I am Shimeon the Patriot. God help me, they have struck coins, and on one side of these coins it reads: SHIMEON, THE PRINCE OF ISRAEL. On the Other Side, IN THE FIRST YEAR OF OUR REDEMPTION. So it is neither an apology nor an act of contrition that I indulge here. I do not ask for your forgiveness, but for just a shred of your respect. I want you to know that I, Shimeon, your husband, have not fallen prey to the music of the idiots—the music of death that is called glory. I live with it, but my eyes are open, and if I act the falsehood in my very existence, I still know the truth.
“Now I must write to you, because of certain rumors being spread by our erstwhile friend and admirer, Joseph Benmattathias Hacohen. Without going into the endless details and complexities of the matter, I must explain that Joseph and I are politically apart. He esteems himself highly and opposes me on every point—and since he considers himself an expert in affairs military, he has developed a sneering and superior attitude that is quite unbearable. It has served, however, to impress sufficient of the Sanhedrin to win him the command of great captain in Galilee and other Jewish lands in the north, where he will head our forces.
“Of course, you know me well enough to wonder why I should engage in these personal hostilities—or why under any circumstances I should pit myself against such a person as Joseph. I might well answer that this business of war is constantly a struggle for power, not against one’s enemies but against one’s own party and friends—but that would be short of the truth. The plain truth is that Joseph has appointed himself historian, not only of our times and this war in which we are so deeply entrapped, but of every human being who shares the responsibility of Rome’s anger. He makes notes endlessly, asks questions, and hands down his own decisions which then come alive as rumors; frequently enough, damaging and heartless rumors. Thus it has come to my attention that there is a process of denigration directed toward your name and reputation. It is being said, under Joseph’s tutelage, that all the good and gentle acts attached to your name are inventions—that you are of the House of Herod in its worst sense. I know how little this will impress you and how small a value you put on questions of reputation—just as I know better than any other that you have never engaged in any action for the sake of glory or reputation.
“But since Joseph realizes that any stones cast in my direction might ricochet and damage him, he has added to the rumor the fact that we were never truly married or man and wife, but myself only a tool of you and a victim of your charms. Oh, I know how ridiculous this must sound—but all I have left is the love I bear you and the memories of the years we spent together. I am writing to you to plead with you to ignore such rumors if they reach you, and to know always wherein is their origin.
“I faced Joseph with these things, and so great is the change in me that I could have killed him with my bare hands. (Do all men who live with war and death turn into animals?) But he denied everything, and I could prove nothing. In any case, I do not desire to further the divisions in our ranks; there are enough.
“I am sure that you have heard all the details of the defeat of Cestius Gallus, the proconsul of Syria. I imagine he was a dull and stupid man, and I can almost feel sympathy for the Romans—in their need for hundreds of administrators—knowing how difficult it is to find even a handful of intelligent men in an entire nation. You will remember old Vibius Marsus, Gallus’ predecessor. Fat, heavy, slow as he was, he understood Jews and respected Jews. There is where so many of our enemies make their mistake; and when Cestius Gallus decided to restore Roman order in Palestine and to march down here to Judea and teach a lot of unruly Jewish civilians a lesson they would not forget, he despised us and paid the price for despising us.
“In war, I am learning, there are nothing but lies—as if the truth and war were utterly inimical, and this display is like strong wine, each liar supporting the next. My colleagues now insist that Gallus came down from Syria with thirty thousand soldiers—when I know very well that there never were thirty thousand Roman troops in Syria. If Gallus had five legions with him when he marched to Judea to punish us, the outcome might have been very different. But he had only three legions, and they were thoroughly indoctrinated with the fact that there were no trained soldiers in Judea and that
Jews were an unruly people who fought chaotically with tiny knives. As if there existed a more terrible weapon anywhere than the Jewish horn bow with its cedar shafts!
“So Gallus came down on us with the effrontery of a fool, marching his men in a column a mile long, as if they were on the Appian Way, drums beating, horns tooting, standards flying—as if they had only to parade into Jerusalem. At Gabaoth, a mile to the north of the city, Elaezar and his Zealots were waiting. They had two hundred Levite spearmen with them, and the Levites were half crazy with chewing erg-batha, and while the Zealots made a roof over the Romans with their arrows, the Levites faced the Roman front and drove onto them with a solid phalanx of spears. The entire head of the Roman column was wiped out, perhaps six hundred men, and if Gallus had not been able to bring up a few hundred horsemen, his army might have been destroyed then and there. As it was, Jews having a historic uneasiness in the presence of horses, the Zealots fell back into the city. They lost less than thirty men in that first engagement.
“For all of his great losses, Gallus still managed to behave like an idiot, and brought up his legions and attacked the city wall in the area of Herod’s Gate. The Jewish archers stood on the wall and laughed at them and brought down the legionaries with their arrows. Finally, Gallus lost his nerve and began a retreat to the north.
“Laughing and mocking at them, the Zealots threw open the gates of the city and poured out after the Romans. Over twenty thousand bowmen followed the Romans. I rode after them, and saw some of it myself. On every hillside, every cliff, every mountain—on the sides of every wadi, the bowmen stood and loosed their arrows at the Romans.
“The Romans fled by the way of Ram and Gophna in the direction of Antipatras, and every mile of the road was carpeted with their dead. At Bethhoran, the Zealots trapped them and tried to seal the pass, but Gallus broke out, and that night he raised a barricade across the road and the valley and left five hundred legionaries to defend it—while the rest of his men shed their shields and heavy weapons and marched on the double all night long—to the safety of the walls of Antipatras. But the five hundred he left behind were trapped and wiped out to the last man, and the Zealots brought the Eagles of the Legion back to Jerusalem as trophies.
“I write of all this, not to boast, but that you may understand the mood of defiance and certainty that prevails here in Jerusalem. We have destroyed an entire Roman legion, six thousand legionaries dead on our soil, and we have captured their standards. Not since the time of Hannibal has such a shameful defeat been inflicted upon Rome—and by no soldiers but only by half-armed Jews. What it brooks for the future, I dread to think. Whom could I convince, even in the Sanhedrin, that we were victors not over Rome but over the arrogant stupidity of Gallus? No one. There are no sober minds left. The mood is that we can defeat the entire world—and soon enough we will have the world against us. I know now that Rome will never rest until Judea pays the price for this—and yet I command. My dear and beloved wife—I am lost. There is no way back, no way out, for I will not desert my people. The House of Hillel has vanished for me. As if it never existed.
“But to my dying moment, my love for you will not lessen. Perhaps we will never see each other again, for I think your will is so strong and firm that you will not come to Jerusalem—and as “for myself, I have accepted the fact that here I will remain and die—even as everyone who remains in Jerusalem must die. I see this so clearly now, and when I walk through the streets—empty because you are not beside me, empty for me, but filled with people—my heart breaks for the knowledge that I am of the company of the dead. How well the Greeks understood the knowledge of the dead and the world of the dead—a place of everlasting gloom and despair! This is what Jerusalem has become for me—and in spite of the wild confidence of the people with their victories over handfuls of Romans, I think that under all they, too, sense the implacable end.
“What terrible thing have we done that the Almighty should take this revenge upon us? That He should punish us, not with His hate but with our own—so that a whole nation decides to die? Yet from the very first time I heard the teachings of the House of Shammai—I knew that the destination was in darkness. We are almost there. My dear and beloved Berenice, forgive me.”
1 About four million dollars in today’s currency.
Part Five
“Titus Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus, commander: to Berenice, Queen of Chalcis:
“Greetings, and I write to you with no ease, and not to command you either, for I know full well what anguish and misery these events at Jerusalem impose upon you although I am uncertain as to how much information you have as to what goes on in the city. I also know with what distaste you receive my compliments and my assurances of regard, remembering only too well how poorly my advances went when I was at Tiberias. So be assured, dear lady, that I write to you because I feel a heavy and unavoidable obligation to do so, as you will understand if you only bear with me and read to the end of this message.
“Believe me that the events at Jerusalem have brought no joy to me. Neither duty nor obligation are necessarily pleasant. I could have reduced Jerusalem two years ago, when I first entered Judea with my army. I am not boasting, but only stating a grim fact of war. But in my eyes and considerations the lives of my soldiers come first—and when I saw that the Jews were destroying each other, I made a difficult if cold-blooded decision, (I pray you to believe that I speak of the decision, not of myself. I am not a cold-blooded man. I do not imagine all men love you, Berenice. The fact that I do, boyishly perhaps, but truly—this speaks something for my nature.) I decided then not to attack Jerusalem, but to ring it round and wait until the Jews inside the walls had destroyed each other or so weakened each other that they could offer no hard defense to my legionaries.
“I am no Jew hater. I have said this. I repeat it, and I will repeat it again and again, so many times as the occasion may require. In fact, I have always been in awe of your Temple and Yaweh, that ancient God that has no being nor substance nor definition in form. My Greek friends say that this Jewish concept of God is the most sublime that mankind ever devised, and I have no reason or desire to contradict them. And if that is so, can one escape the feeling that the frightful, almost indescribable events that have taken place in Jerusalem these past two years are in some measure Yaweh’s punishment? Can you imagine civil war inside a besieged city—two years of awful civil war? First it was war between the Zealots and the people in the Upper City who wanted to come to terms with Rome, and finally the Zealots broke into the Upper City and put to death every man, woman, and child in the families of peace. Then the Zealots split—a fanatical section of them demanding that every suspect Jew—suspect of desiring peace with Rome—be put to death. This faction opened the gates and let twelve hundred Sicarii from the Dead Sea region into the city. For five weeks, bloody war raged between these Sicarii and the ultra-Zealots against the moderate Zealots. Then the Sicarii opened the gates and let in an army of Idumean Bedouins, the so-called Jews of Herod. The Idumeans fought both parties of Zealots and finally the Zealots conbined to destroy the Idumeans. So it has gone, month after month after months of unspeakable warfare inside a great walled city—and never a night that I have laid down to bed without hearing the faint screams of horror and pain from inside Jerusalem. Is it any wonder that we have begun to believe that even your God wills this?
“I had planned to wait another year—and by then this city would be a tomb, a charnel house of self-inflicted horror—but word from Rome changed my plans. My father there has staked his reputation as emperor upon a swift conclusion to the war in Judea, and he commands me to reduce the city immediately.
“I need not tell you that one keeps no secrets here. No sooner had I decided to proceed against the city than I received a message from one Shimeon Bargiora—who leads the largest party in Jerusalem, a combination of ultra-Zealots and Sicarii who number about twenty thousand. No one appears to know too much about this Bargiora—some say he is of the Sic
arii and some say he is not—but all are agreed that he lives on the edge of madness, a huge, powerful man with a violent and terrible temper. Much is said about Roman cruelty, but I can tell you that for three days in a row, this Bargiora hanged from the wall a hundred men a day—men of the peace party.
“In his message, Bargiora claimed that he holds in chains in a prison cell in Jerusalem one Shimeon Bengamaliel, whom he also claims is your wedded husband as well as a grandson of that Rabbi Hillel whom Jews all over the world venerate so highly. I know that the name Hillel is not uncommon, but Bargiora states specifically that this is the grandson of that man whom Jews call the Hazaken, and who is spoken of among you as ‘the saint’ and also as ‘the blessed of the Almighty.’
“I know of your distaste for this Joseph Benmattathias Hacohen, who shed his allegiance to the war party once we had captured him. He has become a sort of Israelitish image of repugnance, but it is not my place to judge or moralize but only to bring the campaign here to a successful conclusion, that I may return my legions to Italy. Joseph has been invaluable as a translator, historian and encyclopedist of Jewish custom and usage. He is also a biographical dictionary of sorts, for he either knows or pretends to know every person of blood or importance in all the Jewish cities. I asked him about Shimeon Bengamaliel, and while Joseph grants that he is in all likelihood the grandson of Hillel the Good, he was distinctly dubious concerning Bargiora’s claim that this man is your husband. Mind you, my dear lady, I am striving to maintain an objective position—to help you if I can in any way. I find that when Joseph desires to be obscure, no one can be more obscure; when he desires to be devious, he is a master at the art, and I cannot obtain any assurance that this Shimeon Bengamaliel is not your husband, but neither will he offer an opinion to the effect that the man is wedded to you.
“In any case, Bargiora warns me that if I move to reduce the north wall of the city, he will put Bengamaliel to death—and there he makes a pointed reference to you, that the blood of a man you love will be on my hands. I cannot take such a threat lightly. Bargiora demands that you enter the city. If you do, he guarantees your safe conduct and pledges himself to allow you to talk freely with Shimeon Bengamaliel. I do not know exactly what he is up to; but I suspect that he desires to make some exchange of prisoners or something of the sort. If that is so, and if you desire me to, I will exert all my energies to gain the freedom of Bengamaliel, whether he be your husband or not. I do this out of regard for you—a regard, a love that is not returned but which is strong enough to endure.