Elijah
Page 13
She stopped and faced him, her eyes unblinking, a look of placid resignation on her face. The two looked at each other a moment before she spoke. “I’m sorry. I have no food to give you.”
Elijah felt a stirring in his chest, a sign, he felt, that this must be the right woman. He pressed his request. “None at all?”
The woman did not move. She stared at him, her jaws tightening, and Elijah saw tears form in her eyes. “No,” she said. A tear slid down her cheek, but she made no effort to brush it away. The prophet did not speak, and she mistook the look in his eyes for disbelief. “I am telling you the truth.” Still Elijah only looked at her. She gripped the bundle of twigs tightly and shook her head. Anger at his unfeeling attitude rose to her throat. “As the Lord Yahweh your God lives,” she swore, “I do not have a cake of bread in the house. All I have is a handful of meal left in my barrel, and a tiny bit of oil in my cruse.” She thrust her handful of twigs toward him. “I just gathered a few sticks to return home and cook a last meal for myself and my son.” The tears flowed freely now, but she still looked straight into his eyes. She shook the sticks at him. “Then we will just wait to starve to death.” Her words were more resigned than bitter.
Elijah spoke softly. “Don’t be afraid. Trust in my God. Go prepare that last meal for you and your son. But first, prepare a small cake for me. Yahweh makes a promise to you, and I stand as a witness to it, that your barrel will not run out of meal and your cruse of oil will not become empty. Your provisions will last until my God sends rain to end the famine.”
The woman stood immobile for a moment, then raised her free hand to her face. Finally, she lowered her hand and looked at him again. Elijah did not rush her response, but allowed her time to think and consider. “Yahweh will do that,” she asked, “just for giving you a small breadcake?”
He smiled. “Ahab is searching all of Israel for me, for it is at my mouth that Yahweh will bring the rain. I came to Zarephath to hide. I shall stay with you and your son.”
“If your mouth controls the rain, why don’t you call on it to come and save us all a lot of grief?”
“Yahweh will not send rain until my people are ready to turn away from Baal.”
“You are asking me to choose Yahweh now over Baal?”
Elijah did not speak.
The woman pulled her shawl across her face. “Very well,” she said, “I have nothing to lose. I have prayed enough to Asherah. She is of no help.” She turned toward the gate. “Come with me, prophet of Yahweh.”
Elijah followed her, a few steps behind as she led the way through the gate and up the streets of Zarephath. A short walk brought them to a small stone house. Mortar had fallen out from between some of the stones. Its second-story guest chamber was little more than a lean-to, built of rough, undressed wood and roofed temporarily with branches to form an enclosed arbor. A rope, hung with clothes, stretched from the front corner of the lean-to to a rock pillar at the stairway end of the roof.
“Why did you bother to wash if you were about to die?” Elijah asked.
“Water is free and the well is not dry. If my son and I must die, we will die as honorably as possible.” She entered the lower door and signaled Elijah to follow.
A half-grown boy sat listlessly on a low stool. He raised his head and looked at Elijah, then at his mother. The woman did not smile, but moved to the back wall of the house. She took two large jars from a shelf and tucked them into the arm that held the twigs, then she went out the back door to the oven in the enclosure behind the house. She nodded as she passed her son. “Give the prophet a drink of water.”
The boy stared, immobile, at Elijah.
“My name is Elijah. What is yours?”
The boy did not answer, and the prophet could read no emotion on his face. “I am a prophet of Yahweh, Elijah persisted. “What is your name?”
“I am Bosheth.” The boy’s lips hardly parted as he spoke.
“My throat is dry. Will you get me a drink of water?”
Bosheth moved then, slowly. He took a small bowl from a shelf, removed a cover from a large earthen jar, and dipped the bowl. Elijah looked at the boy’s thin arms. When Bosheth turned toward him with the bowl of water the prophet caught the drawn look on his face. He took the bowl from the boy’s hands. “Trust me,” he said quietly. “My God Yahweh is going to feed the three of us.”
Bosheth raised his eyes. He had his mother’s features, and Elijah guessed that if it were not for the famine the boy would be stocky. His shoulders were broad for a nine-year-old, but bony. “Are you going to stay here?” the boy asked.
“Yes,” Elijah responded. “I shall stay in the guest room upstairs.”
The boy turned and walked outside to join his mother. Elijah could hear then arguing, until the mother’s voice rose angrily to order the boy quiet. The voices died down but Bosheth did not return.
Elijah found a stool and sat down. The house was small, with only one room. A table was set to one side, and four wooden stools were placed against two walls. Shelves were attached to the back wall, near the door, with utensils and vessels of various sizes stacked neatly on them. The waterpot was on the floor beside the shelves, with two smaller pots beside it for bringing water from the town well. The other side of the room was bare except for a stack of neatly folded covers.
The woman returned after awhile with a medium-sized individual cake. She held the steaming bread in her hand with a cloth. She set it on the table without saying a word, then went to Elijah, took the bowl from his hands, refilled it, and set it beside the cake. “Now, prophet of Yahweh,” she said with slight belligerence, “you have your food. Eat.”
Elijah pulled the stool to the table. He broke off a piece of the round, flat breadcake and stuffed it into his mouth, then drank from the waterbowl. Not until he had eaten half of the cake did he look up. The woman stood beside her son, one arm around his shoulders, the other arm hard at her side. Her fist was tightly clenched. The boy’s eyes darted from the prophet to his mother and back to the prophet.
Elijah took another bite. “You cook a good cake,” he taunted, testing her decision. Tears welled into her eyes and she held her son more tightly.
The boy could stand it no longer. He wrenched himself from his mother’s hold and ran to Elijah. The prophet raised his arm just in time to deflect the small fist that came hard toward his face. Bosheth’s thin arms flailed at Elijah, but the prophet caught every blow on his arm. The boy screamed, “You thief!” and in exasperation ran to the sleeping pads on the other side of the room and buried his face in them.
Elijah looked at the woman. Her face was buried in her hands. He took the last bite of the cake and turned the waterbowl up to drink the rest of it.
He set the bowl down, then rose and went around the table to the woman. He pulled her hands into his and held them until she looked up. Her face was wet, the flesh puffed from her silent crying. “Now,” he said, “go and fix that meal for yourself and your son.”
She stared into his eyes.
“You proved your confidence in Yahweh,” he said, “even in spite of your fear and anger, as you watched me eat the last of your food. You would have stopped me if your doubt had been stronger than your faith. Go and cook the meal.”
Slowly, she pulled her hands away from Elijah’s, still staring with wonder at him. She backed away, then turned at the door and walked to the oven. She bent down to the two small jars and looked into each one. Her eyes widened. She picked up one of them and reached into it with her fingers to confirm what her eyes saw. A powdered grain met her touch. She reached into the other jar, then pulled back her fingers. She held them up in the sunlight. Clear oil glistened on their tips. She looked back toward the house, then up toward the sky. With stiff, uncertain steps she walked toward the open door. Elijah stood just inside. She collapsed to her knees and threw her arms around his ankles. Oblivious to the soil that covered them, she began to kiss his feet. The boy watched in amazement from the pads.
Chapter Ten
The sharp point of the awl touched Baana’s ear. The priest jabbed the tool quickly through the flesh until its point pressed into the piece of thick leather he held behind the lobe. Baana did not flinch. He stared ahead, at nothing. The villagers clustered in the street around the door of the sanctuary to watch the ceremony. Abinadab stood opposite the priest, smiling, dressed resplendently in wine-colored robes. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, and carried himself as a prince who might had earned rather than inherited his royalty.
Baana’s friends watched in silence. Their faces were as expressionless as the stones of the coastline beyond the city’s gates. The priest reached to take the earring from Abinadab. As he fitted the mark of ownership into the newly-pierced ear, the skin of each watching face tightened a bit. Baana was one of their own. Now he was a slave for life.
The winter wind from the Great Sea brought a chill, and most of the people stayed no longer than was necessary to see the ceremony through. They drifted away then, almost silently, one or two at a time. Baana should have been the first to leave, but he remained at the door. Abinadab reached to take his arm, but the priest signaled the master to leave his new slave alone for a while.
The master walked away. The priest stood beside Baana, watching the crowd disperse. There was no speaking, either from Baana and the priest or from the crowd. Only Baana’s slow, labored breathing and the shuffle of sandals on the stone street broke the silence. Closer friends stayed moments longer than the rest, but soon they left, too, until only Baana and the priest remained. The holy man did not speak. He waited for Baana to give some sign of his need. Finally, when the new slave remained silent, the priest clapped him encouragingly on the shoulder, then turned to enter the sanctuary.
Baana still did not move. He stared at but did not see the street or the shops and stalls that lined it. His glazed eyes saw a wheatfield and rows of grapevines, with a watchtower rising from its center. Once it had been his. And his father’s. And his father’s father’s. For centuries. Now it was Abinadab’s.
That was before Meor-baal and the prophet companion came to Dor. He had listened to the prophet, and even now with the throb of his ear and the weight of the slave ring he could feel the excitement that grew that night in his loins. With his friend Shammah and several other young men he had run wildly, laughing, up the hill to the sacred grove. He remembered the hot embrace of the zonah under the entwined branches of the oak trees, and on his nakedness the cool breeze from the Great Sea. It had been the most ecstatic night of his life.
When he returned home late in the night his wife had listened well to his recounting of the prophet’s talk of fertility. She accepted his visit to the sacred zonah as an act of necessity and worship, and his sexual prowess in their own marriage bed that night certified that the goddess indeed had granted greater fertility to the house of Baana.
She became pregnant that night, another sign of the power of Asherah. The women who talked with her at the well in the chill of the mornings and evenings did not try to conceal their amazement that at last their friend was with child, and because of the intervention of Asherah. She became honored among her friends.
Then they visited the priest of Baal, the holy man Meor-baal sent to dwell at Dor. They told him of their good fortune. Indeed, he told them, it was a clear sign that Asherah had heard their prayers. The spirit of Baal must truly have dwelt in the zonah. But the pregnancy was a test. Surely a child conceived of such a union on such a night was holy to the goddess.
“You must give the child to Asherah,” the priest advised. “When it is but a week old, while the redness of the womb still clings to its flesh and yet after it has taken milk at the breast of its mother.”
Baana had placed his hand on his wife’s stomach that night, and at that moment the baby moved for the first time. It must be another sign. Yes, the priests agreed that it must be another sign. The baby is holy to Asherah.
His wife wept. She wept more as the time of her delivery approached, and Baana tried to understand. But it was the word of the god. Not to give the child to Baal would be to court disaster; to give it would ensure more children, healthy children, boy children, later on. And Baal would bless the grain and the vines with greater heads and larger clusters.
The baby was a boy, another good sign. Shammah had two daughters, almost grown. Until now, they had none. Baana felt regret then, for his joy was great when he saw the boy that had come from his own loins. But he choked back the grief, and he and his wife took the child to the priest on the eighth day.
Together, the three of them mounted the sloping hill to the shrine. Inside, the priest laid the infant on the altar. The baby cried when he was taken from his mother’s arms, and louder when he was placed naked on the cold stone of the altar. The zonahs stood outside, their hands joined together to encircle the shrine. They chanted in unison, a monotonous, haunting chant that repeated Asherah’s name again and again until the oaks themselves took up the chant, and the leaves and branches spoke her name.
The priest drew a thin-bladed, very sharp knife from a hole bored into the stone of the altar. He turned the infant to its side, and in one swift movement the baby’s crying was interrupted by a choking gurgle. Then he was silent. His blood, tapped by expert strokes, ran quickly down the altar’s drainhole.
The wife shrieked and collapsed at the first stroke of the knife. Baana caught her and knelt to cradle her in his arms.
“Now,” the priest was saying to him, “you must lie quickly with a zonah.” He was at Baana’s side, pulling at his arm. “Quickly, now, you must select a zonah.” He ushered Baana to the entrance. “They are there. Choose one and lie with her beneath the sacred trees.”
The priest went to the wife. He held her face in his hands, then with her veil he wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks. She watched him, dazed, and he removed the veil. She felt his hands take the veil from her head, and as deftly as he handled the knife to draw the blood from her child, she felt his hands pull away her robes. His hands moved to her breasts and his lips to her mouth as he pressed her down onto her strewn robes.
She did not resist, nor did she move as he consummated his act amid the pain and blood of her recent delivery. Her thoughts were on the dead body of the boy child on the altar above them.
Baana carried his wife in his arms back to their home. Neither of them spoke. The priest remained at the shrine. She wept all that night, but when she arose the next morning her face shined with a new radiance. She talked of lying with the gods, both of them, she and Baana. As the days passed and she resumed her place at the well and with the women, she talked more and more about the promises of Asherah. She would have more children. Baana’s field would yield more than ever before.
She encouraged Baana to borrow from Abinadab for new tools, and for a new storehouse to store the goods Asherah would give them at the next harvest, and for a new ox to replace the old, tired one that had belonged to his father.
Baana listened to her, excited by the obvious favor Asherah had bestowed on them. He went to Abinadab.
He could not repay the loan. The crops that year were average, but he had planned for abundance. Never in the years before Meor-baal and the prophet came to Dor had Abinadab been so unyielding. The moneylender would not grant an extension. Abinadab took away his field. He could live in his house only if he became a slave.
Through the winter he searched for work, while his wife stayed with Shammah and Shammah’s daughters. To repay his friend he helped him break up the field after the early rains loosened the soil. They planted, and then Baana left. There was no work in Dor, and none in Dothan, and none in Samaria. The slaves bro
ught back from Ahab’s victories worked the fields of their new masters. An Israelite laborer could not compete. In the end, he returned to Abinadab and gave himself as a slave. The Sabbatic Year was but a year away; then all Israelites who had sold themselves into slavery would be freed. He moved back into the home he had been born in, on the land of his fathers, and worked the land of his fathers for Abinadab.
Before the year was gone, the drought came. Baana could claim his freedom only to see himself and his wife starve. He had no choice.
But he went to talk with Abinadab, to beg him to let him serve until the drought ended, and then to claim his freedom. Abinadab received him well, and even called for wine to be served, but he would not yield.
“Baana,” the master said, “Baal’s ways are different from Yahweh’s. Melkart is the God of Power, and he will make Dor a powerful city. But the old ways must go. A new class of landowners must spring up to make best use of the land, powerful enough to make trade agreements, rich enough to finance great undertakings.”
Baana told his master of his experience with Asherah. He told him all of it, and tried to persuade Abinadab that Baal wanted to bless him, too.
Abinadab’s answer surprised Baana, but it made sense in a way that never had occurred to him.
“You are a good man, Baana,” the master said. “Now that I know of the blessing Asherah has promised you, I consider myself doubly fortunate to have you in my service. Could it be that your blessings will come through me?”
The master talked of his dreams, and his need for men who knew that land and the people, men who could supervise. “You will live better in my service, Baana, than you ever could on your small field. If you serve me well, I will set you over other men. Perhaps one day I may even set you over all my fields.” Abinadab embraced him then, and Baana recalled a curious pride at being treated so intimately by such a wealthy and powerful man. He agreed to become a slave for life.