Prophet Joseph did not know, that Bat Gad’s arrival in Judea had already been reported to Queen Athaliah. She had first sent her maid to Rachel, Bat Gad’s sister. Athaliah invited Rachel to arrive at the palace with her baby, who was two years old, and with Bat Gad. Till then Rachel was cautious not to publicize her sister’s arrival in Judea. However, the main house keeper had reported that to Athaliah. The queen, with her devilish memory, had decided to bring Bat Gad to her. But not just to fulfill her curiosity regarding that woman, whom she had recognized from the past, but for a definite purpose.
It was a cold automn morning, and Rachel’s kid was chilled. So the queen only glanced at him, said that he had a resemblance to his father, and rendered Rachel a small gift for him: a toy of doll made of colored rags. She sent the kid with his Mom back home, and remained alone with Bat Gad.
She shook her head toward the young woman and asked:
“Don’t you have any kid yet?” Bat Gad shook her head: no. She knew that the queen was talking to her while recollecting her family’s tragedy.
“I remember you quite well,” said Athaliah, “I hired you, while my mother had been still alive. But the planted tree had not brought the expected fruits…With so many detectives and spies there, our folk missed bloody conspirator Jehu. Woe to us.”
“Yes,” said Bat Gad, “the traitors had succeeded in keeping their plot strictly secret...And please remember, that I was reponsible to act only in Beth-el neighborhood. Perhaps…had I been active in Dan Temple in the North - I would have discovered the plotters. Their conspiracy ceneter had been there.”
“Elisha had known Jehu, for sure...How could you miss all that plot? It was not made up in one day.” Bat Gad understood that the old news about her marriage had been spread out. It arrived to the queen, and now she, Bat Gad, should defend herself against condemnations.
“I am sorry,” she answered, “the vile prophet had not only brought your honorable family’s disaster. He had bittered me so much. It became hell - to live with him.”
“Whatever happened - I still trust you. And...I nominate you now to do the same job,” Athaliah was severe faced, “I know that my late mother had relied on you. Hopefully you’ll be here more resourceful and successful than…”
“But- your excellancy, I had been so hardly hurt by that job …I can’t.”
“Don’t contradict me. It’s my order! I must have much more spies against the priests here. My daughter’s husband is their main inciter. They conspire against me, for sure. You should sacrifice your genitals and breasts and whole body to the desires of covetous hypocrite God’s clergymen. Surely, most of them are just normal males. So they can be easily seduced…I have searched a long time such a capable and outstanding woman like you…Philistine whores are stupid, and Egyptian women look different than us, and our own tramps here are frigid,” she smiled assuredly,
“You will find your special way to cajold the priests.You have a unique pretiness and wit, I’ve discerned that. You have to use that for the sake of our people. A quiet and peaceful Queendom like Judea - isn’t a self-understandable national entity in the wild area of Zion.”
“I am sorry, but I must… refuse that job!” said Bat Gad decisively, “I’ll kill myseld, your Highness. I will make suicide. I had enough with sacrificing my body and my dignity. I came here, thinking that nobody would recognize me and inquire my past. That I’d be able to have a serene life. . .I have thought… of a quiet breath, like fading out…” she murmured her last words.
“Your end will come very soon,” scolded her the queen, “if you refuse me. It’s imperative, that you sacrifice your private life, your happiness, your wish of homeliness, if you have such. Your every limb should shutter for your queen! Do you want an atonement for what you’ve failed to discover to my deceased family?”
Bat Gad shook her head: no.
“You should follow my order with great joy. Your God will bless you. . .You have not changed your religion, have you?…”
“No, queen Athaliah. I still believe in the God of Israel. Despite knowing his terrible demands from his believers…”
The queen handed her a neat handkerchief and she wiped her tears.
Then Athaliah showed her the iron rod that she was owning. It was now ornamented with a colored dark snake twisting around it. She explained to Bat Gad her simple philosophy of ruling by it.
“Bat Gad, be like this snake. It is the most cunning animal that either God has created. It is smooth skinned, cold blooded, sneaks everywhere, penetrates holes. And bites its enemy…then retreats and twists again around its owner’s iron stick...”
On her way back to her cabin near her sister’s house, Bat Gad was suddenly enthralled. She was forced to undertake that job, and she should just look at its pros. The queen has relied on her. She was worthy again in the eyes of a ruler, and she was eager to show again her capacity to bring benefit to the people and enjoy her revenge on human males. She had entangeled herself by beauty and desire… All would become a thrilling pleasure now. Poor innocent prophet Joseph was the first. Who would be next, and next?…
Her next man was the deputy of Yehoyada, El-Zion. He was the keys’ keeper of the Temple. On the following night, according to Athaliah’s advice, Bad Gad was striding at the temple courtyard’s fence. She saw the man, a clay made oil candle in his hand. He was closing the small woods store, towhere people were still allowed to come and pray in days and nights, in a place as near as possible to the locked and quite neglected large Temple.
She had just called : “sir!”. He turned to her and she asked if she could enter the Hall at that late hour. “Having suffered recently very much,” she begged, “I would like to be praying close to God...” The priest discerned that she suddenly put out her upper coat and remained in a green dress. She opened its cleft and exposed her long bare leg and looked at his eyes, and he knew she could be only a prostitute, but much prettier than others that he had seen.
“I’ll pray with you,” he said with a smile. A rain began to drop, and he told her that they would soon find a shelter.
“But not in this woods store,” he said, “It has a bad smell and the rain would penetrate. Better we’ll enter the stone cabin, there. In the past - our nice priests would wash their hands and feet there in a large basin. . .”
They came into the ‘priests’ old washroom’. He found inside the stone cabin some woods, and lit a small fire, that immediately warmed the place.
“You can begin saying your prayer slowly, don’t be in a haste,” He said.
She nodded, and did not fear from him. They looked curiously at one another in the red fire light. While still standing near her, he pressed his mouth on hers and she was putting her tongue inside his sweet mouth very passionately. He laid her askew on the old stone basin. She undressed and threw her dress on the floor and he saw that she had already spread her legs, just wishing to be given to his wishful penis, that had alreay been peeping out from his front robe, that he had promply opened. She felt her hole had become a furnace, while he entered her and remained there – still without moving, but just existing there, like still extending and thickening and feeling her juices stream sweetly smoothly delicately around his stick of flesh. Then she put her mouth on his ear, and he felt a lick so sweet, and her long tongue explored his inner hollow hole there, and he heard sea waves like rustling into his head and saw an unending blue horizon, and he murmured to her, asking if she would like to feel the same enjoyment in her inner head, and she agreed. He said that hers was a lick of sweetness like the taste of the apple to Adam’s mouth, and she rejoiced from that beginning. While still licking each other they were feeling electric currents passing from their inner brain tunnels to their whole nerves’ system, and then the priest knew that now he should caress her breasts and her finger nails bruised his thighs while she began moving back and forth and he still wanted only to hold his cock tight inside her, but not yet start his manifested torch
racing toward the targeted wire at the end, though he was pleased to feel the sensational soaking wetness of her pussy and heard her moan when he pumped more deeply into her womb and then rubbed with his fingers there in her underlips and suddenly took the stick out and retreated and said:
“I must get rid of my dress, hotty lass from paradise.” Then he bent nakedly to her, while she was still lying-leaning askew on the stone that became warm too, and he dropped his head to her genitals and drew his lips and tongue to reach there down and he was tasting her own cum, and after that he pumped there with his two fingers three times, and said: ‘sweet like honey’. She smiled, and remembered that she had actually smeared bees’ honey on her cunt’s lips, - before arriving to the temple. So their taste was confusing for him, but he continued that lick, while she began massaging-rubbing his wet penis, and she guessed that he had finished licking the real honey, but continued to praise her streaming juice’s taste, and she said: “Please, I am burning from lust, let it in, let me get it,”- and his cock began like rotating inside her, and she did not feel he was too harsh or abrupt, but knowledgeable that the joined love machine stirs both and that the sighs and moans and murmurs should flatter them to still remain inside one another like a blessed connectd unconnsciousness. “I should still restrain myself,” he whispered suddenly, “just to feel you ejaculating your sperm-like juice more and more, to smooth my whole being, oh wonderful stream…Oh my climax, please wait! my lass would like to send her perfumed juices on your head, please …Oh, God, give me strength to repeat that in a second roll…”
He had not yet ejaculated, but pulled out, saying: “Have you known, maid, that our Torah forbis me marrying you? Ha Ha. As you are not a virgin.…Therefore I hadn’t even asked your name, dearie. But I have never felt such wonderful intercourse with a stranger woman, nor my with wife, of course. Now I have calmed down a little, and I can enter you again, but as I am very hot - I would not like to have my sperm jolt inside you and bring you to pregnancy.”
“I don’t mind if yes,” she said, “I am a foreigner here, and a baby would make me stay and have a home, set a root here. I have come from north Israel.”
“Hopefully, you were not a real prostitute, I’m sure. You are an artist in fucking, which a whore is not. She just wishes to get rid of the man who lies with her.”
“I was a honorable and respected woman,” she said, “till God had dragged me over the land and forced me to be what I am. I don’t demand anything from men, but to pay me for my work, so that I can make a living.”
“Well, I’ll pay you. But I want you to be my sole concubine. Only with me you shall lie. In ‘Leviticus book’ – Moses says nothing about a priest’s mistress… Can you agree to my offer?”
“I have first to know you, sir,” she said, “I have to rely on you, and enjoy your society even out of bedtime. Otherwise I am for you only a fucking wagon.” ( The word ‘machine’ had not been used at that ancient time. The most complicated machine and its symbol - was a chariot, a carriage, a wagon).
Hearing that – The Priest’s shaft enlarged again, and he entered her and pumped her very fast and breathed much more quickly than before…
At the end of their journey he told her: “I will build a separate hut for you. Please be my concubine. I am quite rich.”
“Well,” she said, “But I am afraid. I have known too many men, who had cheated me, even proposed and then retreated.”
“Don’t chat about that with anybody. My boss, High Priest Yehoyada is fanatical for Purity of flesh and Piety of spirit. I am now in great danger…”
“I swear I won’t bring assasins upon you,” she said with a smile.
Nefertita heard some voices inside her cave- coming through the wall of the old basin room. She wondered what those could be, because one was a woman’s voice…When Yehosheva visited her soon afterward, she told her about that. The High Priest’s wife told her, that it might have been her imagination, that had gone astray.
“I know you have very hard nights and darkened days,” she said, and went away with a feeling that Nefer really should get a vacation. But how?
A week later Athaliah organized a ‘night of fulfilling desires’ to the youngsters of Judea. The Baal priest Mathan and his guys announced that happening in the streets and in the markets of Jerusalem, Mareisha, Lakhish, Livna, and Geva. One of the attractions would be, they declared, a naked exotic extravagant stripteser and dancer. She would teach the art of seducing to every woman, with a live show of making love to a young Baal’s priest. Bat Gad, who was said to be that maiden, kept that in secret, of course. She had known that Joseph was really in love with her, and would refuse to share her amazingly pretty body with other men. To hide her identity she was covering her forehead, eyes and nose - by a dark kerchief, tied at the back of her neck - with two narrow holes torn in its center for the eyes.
Athaliah had heard from Bat Gad about Joseph, the anti-Baal prophet, who one day may organize rebels. She just asked Mathan to put Joseph’s name in the suspects’ record, and nothing more. However, she had not told anything about El-Zion, the deputy of Yehoyada. She saw he was taciturn about her, and to tighten relationship with him might be very fruitful, but it would take time.
That night Bat Gad wanted just a vacational sex journey. She was making love nonstop with four joyful guys, in addition to the one in her streaptese sex show. The sexual intercourses took place in the ‘vineyard hill’, that its owners were forced by the queen’s soldiers to supply sharp liquids from his wines cellar to the celebrating Idols worshippers. Younger girls, who came from all the nieghboring towns, were waiting impatiently to put an end to their virginity. They were screaming like mad to every youth who was standing on a small box and showing his hammer. To express their lust, many giggled hysterically, to the applauds of friends scatterd around.
Most of those girls had prepared themselves a week or two before - for the pilgrimage to the so called vineyard,( though the area had been really a Terebinths woods). They bought good olives oil and smelling perfumes for that night, and washed themselves before that day, rarely having done that so carefully in the past. Many were polishing their nails to be neat or even color them. They were cleaning their teeth with good smelling leaves of mentol and flowers of lavender. Some were said to uproot a rotten stinking tooth, by connecting it to a string. It would be tied to a door’s handle, and hacked by closing the door by a strong push. (at those remote days, as well as fifty years ago, in most countries of the Globe – no tooth treatment had existed).
Two days after that event, High Priest Yehoyada asked El Zion if the gossip about him had been true.
“What gossip?” asked the deputy High Priest.
“You boasted of having a concubine.”
“Yes, I’ve…thought to tell you about that.”
“What? How dare you!?” shouted the High Priest, “It’s writen in Torah,‘The priests shall not take a woman who is prophaned by harlotry…nor a woman divorced from her husband, for he (the priest)is holy to God.”(LEVITICUS Chapter 21-7).
“Excuse me,” said his deputy El-zion,”I interpret the wording: ‘shall not take a woman’- shall not take her for good, for a wife. But had Moses intended to say that we shall not have a concubine - he would have written: ‘A priest should not have a meeting or touch with any woman except his wife,’ and so on…”
“You blasphem the name of the Almighty by saying that!” roared Yehoyada.
“Why should a king or a prince allowed to do that? He should be holy like us.”
“I don’t know about any priest in our history, that had done that,” said Yehoyada.
“That does not mean, that a priest should not,” said the young priest.
“What’s her name, can you reveal to me?”
“Yes. Bat Gad.”
“Oy oy, Oy! People had testified of having seen her walking toward the ‘vineyard hill’, among a line of young women, God’s offen
ders.”
Priest El Zion was frozen on his seat. His hands and his beard were quivering like leaves in a storm, and his chest was pounding like drums.
“I am shocked,” he groaned, “she swore to me… that she had repented to God.”
“If you, El-Zion, don’t put an end to that profanity immediately,” said Yehoyada, “I ensure you, that God’s believers would. Now I fire you from your position as Chief Priest’s Deputy. Go to Mathan, kneel to Baal! You scoundrel!”
He called two flower priests who drove him from the Temple.
Later on that day, Bat Gad came alone to Athaliah. She complained that her name had been made publicized as a participant in the Baal’s celebrations. The only man, who had known her identity was Mathan. He had revelaed that to God’s Priest… Yes, Mathan, Chief priest of Baal, nobody elese…
Athaliah called Mathan and reproached him. She told him what she had heard from Bath Gad, and also that he had tried to rape her. Because she scolded at him, saying that he was a filthy old man for her. “It’s a shame on a man like him,” she told the queen, “to use my body against my will, doesn’t he unserstand that?”
Queen Athaliah called Mathan after Bat Gad had left her palace.
“You have resented me,” she told him,”for trying to rape a woman. Maybe I had to order her surrender to you. But how dared you- to revenge her by pubicizing her identity as the stiptease maiden? You have burned her now as my spy. All God’s priests now talk about that, and their gossip exaggerate the bare truth even ten folds. They will all beware of her. Nobody will reveal to her anything. I won’t be able to detect any conspiracy. I can’t understand you, old villain…”
“But why had not you informed me that she’s an agent?” asked Matahan.
“You don’t have to know about every step that I take. I’m the Queen! And you aren’t even my husband, though I lie with you wimsically, your belly on mine.”
“Why had she joined to my festivity there at all ?” sked Mathan, “The Idols’ worshippers were not her branch business, you had told me that now.”
“That was in her vacation timeout. She had certainly wanted to have some fun. She had suffered a lot, man…if would know her story. I’m liberal regarding a woman’s behavior, you know. I am not puritan, and you are for profanity, like me. I would bless Baal if I could return to my mad younghood pleasures’ practice, and revive my desires. You understand that, don’t you?
I would even neglect my throne, if not the memory of my family and respect to them would stick me to rule in this fuckened country!”
She screamed the last sentence in hystery, and astonished Mathan. He knelt before her and kissed the nails of her feet. He carressed her kness delicately and asked her forgiveness, saying he would find for her another seducing whore. She said that he should search everywhere till he finds.
“I feel in my nerves- that some conspiracy is boiling under my nose. I smell its scent, but I can’t do anything against that. I will tighten my instructions against the God believers. Maybe my closing their prayers in the Temple was not enough. What more should I do? They aren’t allowed to harangue to more than ten people in a house, and I scatter any demonstrtation against me…”
Later on that day prophet Joseph went to see Bat Gad near her cabin. She was not there, though they had dated to see each other at that point. He was worried, but since that day he had never seen her. There were rumors that she was stabbed by a man and found dead in the Baal celebration Vineyard Hill. Athaliah had once reminded her to Mathan, and he denied having a hand in her assasination. The Priests and Levitin of God had never talked about her. Their lips were locked regarding many subjects, believing that a talk is a beginning of a deed. Many prophane women disappeared in Athaliah’s generation and afterward. Bastard children became also orphans, and sweethearts became heart-broken.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 20
Athaliah, Daughter Of Jezebel Page 25