by Stant Litore
DEVORA’S DECISION
“...IF YOU will not go...”
Dread sat in Devora’s breast, a clammy mass wrapped in damp, clinging cloth. If Barak did not lead the tribes into the north, surely the vision she had seen would become real. And the infant she had buried would be only the first of many. The cold presence of all the cairns on the slope seemed suddenly intense; the outlines of those farther up the hill stood sharp against the sky, a demand. Like so many silent watchers waiting to see if the judge and navi of Israel would keep her promise. That the unclean death would stop with the raising of these stones and devour no more of the land’s children, whether Hebrew or heathen.
But there were dead in the north, many dead. To go with the men—it would be like returning to the night of the attack on Shiloh, or to that other, earlier night in her mother’s tent. She could hear, faint and distant, the death-shrieks outside that tent. She held the memory at bay with an effort of will.
Behind her, Zadok growled low in his throat, like a wolf coming awake at a threat to his own.
Devora fought to stay calm. “Do I look like a man to you, Barak ben Abinoam? Like one who takes up the spear?”
Omri actually leered at her—as if thinking that, no, she didn’t look like a man to him—but Devora ignored him.
“We both go, or neither, navi,” Barak said.
“He is right,” Omri said. “The men are frightened.”
“When God calls a man to take up the spear,” Devora cried, “he does not ask him to count the enemy.”
Barak’s eyes narrowed.
“I do not count them,” Omri said. His smile didn’t touch his eyes. “I am here. I am ready for a fight. That jackal Nimri is too. But other men shake in their tents or their houses. Maybe they have grown old and weak in their hearts. Or maybe they are just sleepy—who knows? Those with a bit of loot, a few fine garments, a girl or two, are ready to rest. I have brought home no slaves and have little to put in my house. So I’m not done with the spear. But there has been a lot of fighting: the raids of the Sea People, strife with the Horse People east of the river, threats from the chieftains of White Cedars to our north. But now no spearmen come out of White Cedars to raid us, only the unclean dead.”
“Will you come?” Barak asked, his voice cold and quiet.
Devora swallowed. “You would force the hand of God’s navi.”
“I would.”
For a moment Devora glimpsed grief in the man’s eyes, a grief deep as a scream but silent.
“I have heard the dead near my vineyard,” Barak said, “and I have done what I could to gather men to silence them. But I am not Moseh. I am not Yeshua, or Othniel, or Ehud. And God has taken much from me.” His eyes were dark and intense. “Like a woman, God promises out of one corner of the mouth and curses out of the other. Let God send a sign that she favors us. Let God send the Ark—or send you.”
The wind had picked up again, and strands of Devora’s hair flicked across her vision. Her throat felt very dry.
The men’s eyes were on her. They were so strange, these men of the north. Hardly better than heathen. Perhaps they were half-heathen. More than any other tribes in Israel, they’d mingled with other peoples who burned olah before gods of the sea or gods of the rain or gods of the forested hills. With people who did not cleanse their bodies or wash to the elbows before they ate. People who ate foods that defiled them. People who touched the dead bodies of their kin, who raised no cairns over their dead or who fed them to fish. People who defiled the land.
Devora exhaled slowly. She thought of the chieftains losing their courage and returning each to his own territory, and each man to his own crop. The thought horrified her. Those dead she’d seen in her vision—they would devour each homestead, each tent, as easily as a child might pluck berries.
Yet to go with these men, to seek out the dead herself—it would be like riding right into her memories.
Her mother’s screams were louder, nearer. The green leaves above her tossed in a sudden gust. There was sharp pain in her palms. Slowly she forced her hands to open, saw where her nails had cut her skin.
She sat in decision over the People, with the Law at her back like an old woman with a hand on her shoulder to guide her. But what would guide her in this decision?
As if in answer, a wave of heat and a wave of vision. Again she saw the slouching dead moving through barley fields, and recoiled from the sight. For an instant she glimpsed a young woman wielding a bronze peg, a tent peg. A young woman with eyes that hurt to look at.
Then the vision passed, and there were only Barak and Omri before her, and Zadok behind her, and the Canaanite girl weeping silently by her child’s cairn.
But it was enough. For the vision had shown her what she needed to know—that the dead could be dealt with, and that Barak ben Abinoam could not deal with them alone. Once, long years ago, Devora had hid shaking in her mother’s tent, helpless in her terror, while everyone she knew died. She would not let that kind of fear determine her choices now.
She motioned Barak closer.
When the northern chieftain stood before her, Devora spoke softly, for his ears alone. “There will be screaming in the Galilee. But the God who gives me these—visions—he is the same God who parted the sea for Moseh. He gave our fathers bread in the desert. He has shattered walls and broken the spears of chieftains whom men feared. He makes the barley grow and gives heat and light to the earth. And with this God, with this God you have made your covenant, Barak.” Her voice had dropped, and he leaned in to hear. “Learn not to demand assurances,” she whispered.
“Nevertheless,” he murmured, “you will go?”
“I will go,” she said.
Seeing the relief in his face, she realized that for all his bravado, Barak hadn’t been sure she would come—or what he would do if she refused.
“I would like to meet the woman who mothered you,” Devora said. “She must have torn out her hair in exasperation.”
“She is ten years beneath a cairn,” Barak said.
Devora made a small noise in her throat. Barak did indeed have all the traits of a man who had little to do with women and had neither wife nor mother to counsel him or soften his edges. But enough. She had made her decision, it was done. Though she felt so cold. She must turn now to practical matters.
“Provide a white tent,” she said. “One befitting God’s navi to whom the priests at Shiloh listen. My husband has a horse that I will ask for, so you need provide no more than the tent.”
“It will be done.” Barak nodded. “I will send one of the chieftains for you after the Sabbath, navi.” The man began walking back to his horse. Omri gave the navi another look and grinned at her, then followed Barak.
“Barak!” Devora called out suddenly.
He turned.
“Something else God has shown to me. You have approached God with doubt and demands and not as your fathers’ fathers did. The renown for this victory will not go to you or to your kin or to your tribe. God has shown me that he will deliver the dead into the hands of women.”
For a moment there was silence on the hillside.
“Then let us hope those women know what to do with them,” Barak said, and turned from her.
THE ANGEL OF DEATH
AS BARAK and Omri mounted and rode away from the cairns, Devora looked after them, troubled. It occurred to her suddenly that she might be vulnerable among these men of the north, who only granted a grudging acknowledgment of her holy position. Clearly, Nimri and Omri looked at her and saw only a woman, rather than a levite anointed by God. Yet Shiloh’s women were set apart from all the women of their People. Many of them had been dedicated as children to the service of the Most Holy God. They wove the clothing that the high priest wore when he entered the shekinah, the holy presence within the Tent of Meeting. Their hands carried incense to the door of that Tent, preparing a sweet scent for God. They were not as other women.
Now the behavior of these three
men of the Galilee reminded her that women elsewhere in the land had not been dedicated to such holy service. Women elsewhere might anoint their bodies or their bedding with sweet scents for men, but none of those other women carried sweet scents before God. And their lives were more slave-like. They might be beaten, for instance, if they failed to please their father or their brother or their husband, whatever man was their keeper. They might be deprived of food or bartered away if their man tired of them. That bartering was against the Covenant, but she knew such things occurred. Devora sensed that the women of the north lived different lives than those she had known.
She felt Zadok beside her, a tall, firm presence. “Ride north with me after the Sabbath, Zadok,” she said. “God’s navi needs a nazarite beside her.”
“Your will, navi,” he murmured.
She lowered her head. “I am glad you—woke—so quickly,” she said.
He didn’t answer. Devora could feel his shame. Like a drumbeat in the air.
“I should have remembered,” she said. “I shouldn’t have placed that burden on you.”
“I have taken the nazarite vow—”
“Yes,” Devora said. “You have taken the vow. And I was wrong to abuse it.”
Before Zadok could answer, the navi turned and approached the Canaanite where she knelt by the cairn, holding her salmah closed with one hand. If there had been scant time before, the arrival of the riders had only made her urgency greater. The sun was nearly touching the far ridge; the Sabbath bride was already walking across the eastern hills toward them. And she must yet decide what to do with the heathen girl.
Devora stopped when she stood near the Canaanite.
“You are unclean,” the navi said to her, for the girl had carried a corpse for several days. “I cannot bring you to the tents at Shiloh. But I can find you some place to sleep at the edge of the camp.”
The girl didn’t look at her. Her face was pale and exhausted, as though she herself were one of the dead, whose cairn had been inadequate to hold her to the earth. “Leave me here,” she whispered. “Let me die near my child.” She lowered her head, leaned it against the cairn. Began singing softly, Canaanite words that Devora didn’t know. It sounded like a go-to-sleep song, one of the simple, slow melodies mothers sing to infants. Despite her need for haste, Devora watched her a moment, caught. Her own mother had sung to her once like that, other melodies, but just as soft.
Then Devora sighed. “Zadok, carry her.”
The Canaanite’s voice fell still. The nazarite’s mouth twisted in distaste, but he didn’t hesitate. As he stepped toward her, Hurriya looked up at last, her eyes hot. “Don’t you touch me!”
“He won’t hurt you, girl. Nor will he touch your skin. Come, now.” Devora gripped the girl’s left arm near the shoulder through the thin wool she wore, careful not to touch her bare skin, for she was unclean. She lifted Hurriya to her feet. Hurriya looked wildly from her to the nazarite.
“We are not going to hurt you,” Devora said again.
The girl acquiesced as Zadok lifted her into his arms, her body rigid with tension. Devora shook her head. She could not leave the girl on the hill; she was a supplicant. The navi had an obligation to her. But neither did she know what to do with her.
Devora led the way, and she and Zadok circled the hill. The nazarite was watchful. They could see, below in the valley, the two horsemen racing the dusk, hurrying back to their own camp. As Devora and her nazarite reached the slope beneath the olive tree, the navi glanced up toward her seat.
And gasped.
No. No, this couldn’t be.
Her body went rigid with attention; she stopped breathing. Was it only a trick of the light, of the setting sun? It must be. Yet even as she gazed, she saw—she was certain she saw—
She broke into a run, ignoring Zadok’s shout behind her. Climbing the hill was an exertion, and her sides burned, but she forced herself on and came quickly to the olive tree. Even as she approached, she knew that it had been no trick of the light. The tree was changing. The edges of its long leaves crinkling, drying. As though the tree were dying one of the long deaths of trees, accelerated into the brevity of a handful of days, quickened so that she could see the death, even as one might see a fever taking a child’s body, relentlessly, from one brief hour to the next. She reached up, touched her fingers to one of the yellowing leaves. The edge of the leaf crumbled even as she touched it; it was dry, brittle. She let out a low cry and leapt back from the tree, taking in all of it. The leaves along one entire half of the tree were drying away, dying—the half of the tree that faced the north.
“Are you hurt, navi?” Zadok called, hurrying to her side, leaving the Canaanite standing below.
“The tree,” she gasped.
Zadok approached quickly, his gaze darting to the branches. She heard him suck in his breath. For a long moment they stood quite still. The tree appeared to wither even as they watched; whatever part this olive tree, like all others in the land, had shared in the Covenant of God, it was now dissolving away, like papyrus exposed to water. The sight of it drew all the warmth out of Devora’s body, left her shivering. She thought of the unclean flesh she had laid in the earth on this very hill, so near the tree’s roots, and a low moan rose in her throat. She closed her lips tightly to hold it in.
“What does it mean, navi?” Zadok breathed.
Devora let her hand fall from the branch. “It means—the promise is revoked. That the unclean dead will overwhelm the land because we have broken Covenant with God. That blight and plague will no longer pass over us without touching our soil.” She stared helplessly at the tree. “It’s the malakh ha-mavet, Zadok. The malakh ha-mavet. The angel of death.”
CRIES IN THE OLIVES
“IT IS only one tree,” Zadok said as they hurried down the long slope toward the tents. He carried the Canaanite girl in his arms as if she weighed no more than a linen cloth. Their voices were hushed, breathless as they rushed through the heather at nearly a run, the slope already cast into shadow. Less than an hour now before dark, when the Sabbath would come like a bride to the People, her face veiled by the night sky, to free the People from work, give them rest, remind them they were free and possessors of a land of their own, with no overseer’s whip and no foreign gods to take from them their labor and their harvests.
But though it was customary to greet the bride with song or with a slapping of hands against thighs and exuberant shouts, tonight the delight of Sabbath barely touched Devora’s heart as she struggled to keep pace with Zadok’s mighty strides. Her heart was clutched in the withering roots of that olive tree. Her face very pale.
“It is not only one tree,” Devora protested. “What sickens one plant can kill an entire crop. What sickens within one woman’s heart can poison an entire People. You know this, Zadok. Why else did you take the nazarite vow?”
“It is one tree,” Zadok said, “and all about me I see a land fertile and lush, a land of olives and great herds.”
“This day I have seen the land filled with herds of the ravenous dead.” Devora’s voice shook. “Zadok ben Zefanyah, the Law will defend the People from the dead,” Devora breathed, “but only if the People live by it. How many times have I sat in judgment over acts that tear at the very roots of the Covenant? Brothers killing brothers or robbing them. Bodies left unburied. And always, I hear of—of her people, mingling with ours. Of Hebrew men who permit deities of wood and clay to reside in their homes, or who dance at Canaanite festivals in the hill country. Zadok! What if—”
Zadok made no answer, and Devora did not voice her fears. Her side burned; though she was aging, she was the navi and she climbed and descended this hill often. And her need and her anxiety drove her. Yet their haste was taking its toll on her, and her growing dread seemed to choke away her breath.
Glancing at the silent girl Zadok carried, Devora wanted badly to hate her, to loathe her for the withering that was coming on the land, a blight in which her strange people and t
heir small, useless gods had surely played some part. And hate would be easier on her than this cold, clinging dread. But the little flame of hate flickered out; she could not sustain it. The girl was too weak to hate.
Hurriya was a ruin, barely alive; she’d likely been held together only by her need to seek out the navi, to bring her that tiny corpse and beg for the impossible. Now the Canaanite stared out at the valley and at the white tents they were approaching. Unblinking, apparently unaware of the day or the hour or of anything but what lay within her own heart, in her own grief.
The malakh ha-mavet!
Every Hebrew child knew the story. How the night before their fathers’ exodus from a foreign land, the malakh ha-mavet had visited the homes of the men and women of Kemet, from the lowest farm worker to the home of Pharaoh himself. And in each home, the firstborn had been struck with the uncleanness, the fever, the drying out and convulsing of the body, then the quick tossing of the spirit into the empty dark and the stillness of a corpse cooling slowly on its bed. And then, in the hours before dawn, when the Nile was calm and quiet as a lake, the firstborn rose hungering, and the grieving of their parents turned to shrieks of terror as son devoured father and daughter devoured mother, as parents turned on the bodies of their children with spades or shovels or sharpened styluses. That night of the risen dead had left every house in Kemet spattered with blood.
Every dwelling place but the Hebrews’.
For God’s hand had covered them.