“Lie down,” the prophet ordered.
Abinadab pulled the pillows from behind his back and arranged them on the rug. He lay down on his side, facing the two guests.
“Lie on your back,” the prophet said.
He shifted to his back.
“Now think. Think about what you said. Think about the power you have now. Think how you can use that power to get what you want.”
Abinadab lay quietly. For some minutes he could not focus on the subject. His thoughts for so long had been on the securing of loans, most of them small, and the proper handling of his business affairs.
It was a statement of Meor-baal’s, an interruption of his reverie, that sparked his mind. In the dead quiet Meor-baal spoke slowly, with heavy precision: “Those men who dashed madly in their lust worship fertility. They pray for its increase. They wish for power, too, and worship it. But all they need do to worship fertility is to turn their bodies loose. To worship power, they must do more. Power will not come to the man who but worships it, only to the man who exercises it. You gain power through action.” It was Meor-baal’s only interruption through the entire night, but Abinadab caught the words as though they were hung in the air at that point in his destiny by Melkart himself.
He rolled the words and tasted them in his mind. Faces formed, faces of men who owed him money, faces whose eyes could not see as far as his, faces who had other possessions that, accumulated, meant power to the man who accumulated them. There was Baana, the happy one, whose wife was known for her figcakes and her barren womb. There was Shammah, Banna’s close friend, who lost his wife some months ago, and whose two daughters were almost of marriageable age.
The faces paraded before his vision, all of them men who owed him money. A plan began to form. As a gesture of good will to the discovery of Baal by Dor’s citizens, he would return each cloak to each man, and he would offer them extra money to buy oxen, more tools, better seed, and storehouses for the produce that would come from the newly-blessed fields. Their fields would be his collateral. He would foreclose immediately if any could not pay. The first foreclosure would be hard, but he would do it. He would be strong.
Chapter Three
Zebul’s fleshiness was apparent even under his copious priestly garments. His thick, short-fingered hands protruded from huge sleeves, and deep-set eyes peered from shallow caves over puffed cheeks. His heavy beard and long hair covered most of his face and neck. He was a man who had grown confident through years of leadership, for he had come to believe that he really was a cut above the average man.
His garments were regal. He wore a blue robe, woven without a seam, bordered with blue, purple, and scarlet ornamentation in the design of pomegranates alternated with tiny golden bells. The bells made tinkling sounds as Zebul occasionally shifted his weight from one foot to the other. A vest covered the robe from under his arms to his waist. The vest, scarlet like the ornaments, was interwoven with gold thread. It was held at the waist with a matching girdle. Across his chest was a breastplate, opulently adorned with jewelry. His turban was of simple white linen, pinned at the front with a large jewel that designated his high office. The real high priest in Jerusalem wore in place of such a jewel a gold plate inscribed, “Holiness to the Lord.” Zebul conceded this single difference in dress out of practical deference to the people, who believed there was only one true high priest of the Hebrews.
He was brooding. Bad enough to be relegated to a seat below the priests of Baal at the king’s table, but to be threatened with expulsion altogether was horrendous beyond words. Zebul was the highest ranking priest in Israel. In fact, he conducted himself as though he indeed were Israel’s high priest in spite of his Judean counterpart. He had risen to his present position because he had a knack both for the mechanics of the priesthood—which functions he carried out with great efficiency—and for the machinations of politics.
Zebul stood in the shade of the city wall and looked down the north side of the hill of Samaria. He gazed intently at the progress of building the great temple, but he took little notice of the workmen’s efforts. He was wrestling toward a decision. The worship of Baal had spread throughout Israel like the heat of the sirocco wind. The past year had seen altars built to Melkart and holy places built to Asherah all over the land.
His problem was not moral. He had long since given up such bounds on his personal ambition. In fact, his nearness to holy things never had touched the emptiness of his soul, an emptiness he long ago had accepted simply as a part of life.
Zebul’s nervousness was evident, if one could see him well in the shadow of the wall. He had a quirk of rubbing his knuckles against his ring. Leaning against the city wall, he weighed the course of Israel’s future and tried to consider the facts objectively. He could see two courses of action.
The first course called for great personal sacrifice, but quite conceivably he could be well rewarded eventually. Should he cast his lot unequivocally with the Yahwists and intrigue against Jezebel? If Baalism were defeated, he would be in an enviable position in leadership, provided that he could outwit Jezebel, Meor-baal, and other intelligent minds of the opposition long enough to survive.
The building being raised below him represented the other alternative. The temple walls rose imposingly to the sky. Strange irony, Zebul thought, that the Phoenicia that lent stonemasons to Solomon to build the magnificent Temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem should lend others now to build this temple to Baal.
The Phoenicians indeed were brilliant in the use of stone. Straight level trenches had been cut into the sloping hillside to receive the foundation stones. Before the walls had begun to rise, the arrangement of stones resembled two long, parallel stairways joined by stone fences on each end. The entrance was at the south end, nearest the city wall. The main floor would extend level to the back of the temple. The hollow space beneath, created by the slope of the hill, was designed for priests’ quarters.
Zebul often had come to watch the building’s progress, as roughly squared stones were hauled on donkey-drawn carts from a nearby limestone quarry to the workmen, who marked them with red chalkline, square, and plumbline to exactly the required size and texture. Already the stones had hardened to a glaring white. Two huge obelisk columns were being raised on either side of the entrance by a system of ropes. Once erected, they would join the fertility of the earth to the goddess of the heavens who gives so bountifully to men.
Strange how the gods fight, Zebul thought. Each claims to give the same gifts to men—happiness and prosperity. Yahweh could learn something from Baal. He smiled at the thought. Why should men choose to live austere and holy lives to receive Yahweh’s blessings when they have the same promises from Baal, who demands only sacrifices and the consort of beautiful women?
He paused and reflected, caressing his ring more rapidly. Funny how lust is so integral a part of religion. A religion often is rejected or accepted simply because of its view of sex. He chuckled. “Is truth then bound up in sex?” he asked himself aloud.
Zebul had not forgotten his history learned from the chronicles of the kings. The Israelites never really had followed Yahweh faithfully for very long at a time. The baal gods of the brooks and valleys and hills and trees always had claimed their fancy. People, after all, follow the god of the time. Occasionally there is a certain temper, a certain indescribable mood that permeates the air, causing men to become conscious of their wrongdoings and ready to respond to the prophet’s challenge. At other times, though, the prophet’s effort influences only a few. Those few may keep the name of their god alive, barely, but the prophet’s sweeping influence must await that changing, undefined, and completely unpredicatable and independent mood. Zebul watched a dust devil swirl near the temple, as though its movement would reveal to him the mood of his time.
That the name of Yahweh would remain alive was no question to the astute Zebul. The schools of prophets, the priests, the elaborate laws and ritual that were woven into the very fabric of Israel’s s
ociety all were insurance enough for such confidence. Whether Yahweh worship would revive and become aggressive during his lifetime was the question. Baalism held the day. Its aggressiveness appealed to young people and encouraged their natural rebellion against inherited values. Its rituals were even more elaborate and much more sophisticated than those of Yahweh worship, a difference that men—especially young men—often mistake for depth.
Zebul walked slowly past the work project, carefully avoiding the debris of construction. Below the new temple, the road had been widened from a footpath to a lane that was able to accommodate carts traveling in opposite directions. He liked to think among the king’s grapevines in the valley, but the plants were not yet high. Zebul wished for the beauty of climbing vines that would arch overhead to form a passageway when summer came. Then the green of the leaves would be offset by the dark color of the Sorek grapes. He passed through the vineyard toward his second choice for seclusion, the pink-blossomed oleanders growing next to the wadi.
With his stubby hand, Zebul brushed the dirt from a large rock. He clapped his hands to rid them of the dust and sat down, arranging his robes carefully. The little wadi rushed with springtime water, gathering from even smaller tributaries as it made its way to the Great Sea. To make as much difference to the sea, he thought, as the words of Yahweh’s servants make to Israel.
The big priest rested fat forearms on fat thighs. His rich robe drooped apronlike between his legs as he continued his analysis, which gradually was evolving into a decision. He stared at the water, reading its story. The people of his day looked on religion as serious, but they smiled at the deprecations of the prophets. If the people only would become angry, perhaps the prophets would have some chance of success, but a tolerant, dismissing smile, that is devastating.
His fingers worked their way through the heavy beard to scratch an itching on his cheek. His conclusion was well considered. Yahwism is swimming upstream. All of the currents of the world flow against it. He stood and turned toward the temple above him. From the valley its wall towered more imposingly than ever. He straightened to announce his decision to himself, an announcement that never passed his lips but nonetheless resounded in his mind. I shall not give my life to a doomed cause.
His decision made, he turned to follow the wadi upstream to a road that would to the city wall. This way back was longer, but less an exertion than the way he came. He gained the road and turned south toward the city, mulling over his future as he went. He would not openly repudiate his Yahweh religion, but he would not oppose Baalism. As he accepted Baal alongside Yahweh, he would in turn be accepted again as a favorite by the court. Such was his hope.
An ancient olive grove, sloping down into the valley, grew on the right side of the road. As he approached and continued alongside it, a rustle of leaves and branches followed him. His first thought was of bandits, but surely bandits would not operate so near the capital. Being the lone traveler on the road and his size making flight impractical, he stopped and slowly turned to face the gnarled trees. When whoever was there saw his high office of priesthood, he would be left alone.
“Who’s there?” he called.
A purple-robed figure appeared and approached him. “Hello, priest of Yahweh,” the woman said. Her face was unveiled and heavy with cosmetics, her eyebrows heavily outlined, her raven hair pulled back tightly away from her face and covered on the crown of her head with a conical cap. She no longer was a young woman, but her heavy makeup hid that fact well. Her skin appeared smooth and her features soft. A silk robe outlined rather than hid her body. “You are a large man to be on foot.” Her smile and openness kept her from seeming a stranger. “Come, rest a moment and refresh yourself.”
Zebul looked up and down the road, unconsciously twitching his ring.
The woman laughed, but comfortably. “No one will see you talking here with a foreign woman. We can sit there.” She pointed to a gnarled, smooth-skinned olive tree. “A shallow valley behind the tree will hide us from the road. Come, the rest will do you good.”
Zebul nervously attempted to turn and go, but the woman laced her arms about one of his. He could feel her breast as she squeezed gently. “A stranger becomes lonely for someone to talk with.”
She led the way, her small hand clutching his forearm. He followed her and, once out of sight of the road, relaxed. They sat on the soft grass below the tree. The woman waited until the priest became settled, then sat next to him. Her forwardness was obscured by her gracefulness. She gradually shifted her body in the most natural manner until she touched him. Zebul, thoroughly aroused for the first time in months—his wife was almost a stranger to him—recalled his earlier thought about the lust of men and decided to leave the morals to another day. He turned toward her, and she was ready to respond. Her kiss brought to the surface emotions he long had suppressed and he swirled in a vortex of colors and sensations that blotted out everything but the fulfillment of his passion.
Some moments later, the zonah drew on her robe. “Please, priest of Yahweh, a payment for Asherah.” Zebul felt for his coin purse, then realized that he had not brought it with him. Slowly, he drew the ring from his finger, held it out in his hand, gazed at it a moment, and let it slip from between his fingers to the grass. He turned toward the road. The woman laughed softly.
The road was empty. No one had seen him, but he hastened his pace. Every leaf of every tree and bush, every pebble in the road, every anemone that grew profusely in the fields turned itself into eyes and stared at him. The loud rasp of locusts screamed out to him the story of his seduction. The soft rustling of the wind echoed the woman’s soft laughter.
Zebul plodded along the city wall. His stomach felt hollow and uneasy. A lump formed in his throat and crowded its way to his chest. He shook his head violently to scatter the guilt that crowded around him. His thoughts teased him. “I have known men to come smiling from a zonah and continue their work with added vigor. Why should such a feeling of regret haunt me?” he whispered softly to himself. He reached to his turban to straighten the jewel that had become twisted out of place.
In the weeks that followed, Zebul regretted the incident, yet at times he longed to feel the embrace of the zonah again. Alternately the affair turned in his mind, first the awfulness of desecrating himself as a priest of Yahweh, then the joyful thrill of fulfilling himself as a man. He reproved himself frequently, yet he could not help but outline in his imagination the figures of women he knew. His concourse with the sacred prostitute became a catalyst that more and more often tempted him to give vent to his sexual feelings. He could not reconcile the feelings with his Yahweh religion. In light of his decision to compromise with Baalism, the act, he reasoned, should not continue to bother him, but he found that the morals he had repeated piously so many times really had become a part of him. To solve the problem, he gradually learned to ignore his previous convictions. All the while, he kept his conflict within himself. Since he never had been a zealous priest, his friends detected no difference in his manner.
In due time, the temple to Baal was completed. Priests from the Phoenician cities of Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon were present for the dedication. Zebul watched the occasion, in company with several other priests, from the walkway atop the city wall. Ahab had made an early token appearance but had not returned since. Several speeches were made throughout the day, the longest by Jezebel. He could not hear her distinctly, but he had been aware of her voice raised at time to its full intensity, and he had seen her wave her arms vigorously.
As the day passed toward evening Zebul became aware of new preparations. Word spread that the spring worship of Asherah, delayed until now because of the temple construction, would be held in the evening. In front of the two obelisk columns that Zebul had watched workmen erect some time earlier was an altar on which the Baal priests would sacrifice a young calf. Standing in the doorway to the temple was a huge statue of Melkart, similar to the smaller one Jezebel had placed next to the window in her room. Gr
adually the crowd dispersed to prepare itself for the evening rituals, until only Baal-priests were left to make the court area ready for the festival.
Zebul left with his friends, but he declined their invitation to dine together. He went instead to his home, determined to carry out a plan to disguise himself and attend the rituals that night. He had intended to stay away, but while on the walkway he thought he caught a glimpse of the zonah he had met by the roadside. The memory of their meeting aroused a passion he could not ignore.
His first plan to trim his beard and hair had to be rejected after more careful thought. He would not be able the next day to explain his changed appearance. His girth made disguise difficult, but he finally decided that the simple wool robe and camelhair mantle of a tent dweller would be best. Such simplicity was in marked contrast to the fine clothing and many accessories he usually wore.
The flickering oil lamps cast eerie, dancing shadows around the courtyard. From where he stood on the perimeter the statue of Melkart appeared larger than he had imagined it to be. He purposely arrived late, and the ritual of sacrifice already had begun. The two officiating priests were dressed in skins and had on animal masks, one like the head of a horned bull, the other like a goat. A line of men and women, each couple holding a baby, grew longer.
The priests produced a lamb, a perfect specimen, and laid it on the altar. Expertly, one of them slit veins and arteries so that the blood drained quickly. Then he cut the lamb in what appeared to Zebul’s practiced eye to be a prescribed and symbolic manner. Next, a bull calf was burned on the altar, its stench permeating the atmosphere of the temple area. The line of parents began to move then. The priests circumcised one baby after another, each time handing back to the parents their screaming offspring, newly dedicated to Melkart. Most of the boy babies should have been circumcised earlier by Yahweh’s priests, yet the parents had chosen to wait for the dedication of Melkart’s temple. Zebul felt a pang of jealousy. The choice was significant.
Elijah Page 4