Source

by James A. Michener

  It was morning in Makor. Birds chattered on rooftops and children played noisily in the crowded streets below. As the little town nestled securely within its girdle of newly built stone walls, the door of the governor’s quarters opened for the departure of a chubby man who wore a dark scowl on his fat bearded face and a host of freckles on his bald head. Obviously disappointed over some adverse decision handed down by the governor, he entered upon the curving main street of the town and walked disconsolately homeward, but he had gone only a short distance when he was joined by a group of children who began chanting, “Hoopoe, Hoopoe, Hoopoe!”

  He stopped. His worried face lost its scowl and he began to smile until his features formed a great half-moon, reaching from the back of his bald head to his chin, all wrinkled in laughter. Catching up a little girl, he tossed her in the air and caught her with a kiss as she fell back to his arms. “Sweets, sweets!” she squealed, so he put her down and began gravely searching his pockets as if he did not know where the treats were hidden. Other children ran up and danced on nervous toes as he continued feeling his robe, from which he finally produced a cloth bag filled with sweetmeats. Distributing them to the children, he continued homeward as the crowd at his heels cried happily, “Hoopoe, Hoopoe!”

  For as long as men had existed upon the land of Israel they had been accompanied by a curious bird, the hoopoe, who had given them more amusement than any other living thing. He was a stubby creature, about eight inches long, with a black and white body and a pinkish head, and was remarkable in that he walked more than he flew. He was always busy, hurrying from one spot on the ground to another, like a messenger responsible for an important mission whose details he had forgotten. The laughable bird seemed to go around in circles, trying to recall what he was supposed to be doing.

  His appearance added to his grotesqueness, for he had a head shaped like a slim, delicate hammer, which he tripped up and down with surprising speed. One end of the hammer-head was obvious, a yellow bill nearly two inches long, but the balancing end was amazing, a tuft of feathers also about two inches long which could be either compressed into a single projection that matched in size and color the beak or flashed out into a spreading crest, so that the bird seemed to be wearing a jeweled crown.

  As he hurried about the ground he probed into worm holes until a grub was located or insects were caught hiding, whereupon the hammerhead would thrash up and down until the long beak grabbed the meal. Then the happy bird would strut away to some rock where he would throw the captive onto a hard surface through which it could not escape back to earth, and the hammer-head would flash up and down as the bird tore the grub or insect apart and ate it, after which he would go waddling back to the hunting ground, poking his inquisitive head here and there.

  As long as man remembered, this comical bird had been called the hoopoe because of its ugly, short, sharp call. It could not sing like the lark, neither could it mourn like the dove, and to the men of Israel it evoked no poetry summarizing the earth on which they lived. To the Egyptians the hoopoe was sacred; to the Canaanites it was clever, for Baal had given the bird an evil smell and then hidden rare jewels in its nest, and the smell kept thieves away. To the Hebrews the hoopoe epitomized family loyalty, for young birds tended their parents with care, covering them on cool nights and plucking dead feathers from their wings in the moulting season. But to all, the funny little bird that could fly and didn’t was an object of amusement, and even seemingly important men like the governor often stopped their work to watch these busy little excavators.

  During the last years of the reign of King David in Jerusalem, the town of Makor had an engineer whom its citizens called Hoopoe because he, too, hurried about most of the day, peering into holes. Like the bird for which he was named, this short, dumpy fellow was regarded with affection, partly because he made the citizens laugh and partly because he was known to be a man without a single malicious intent. He was so amiable and generous that the governor, in a rare moment of clarity, said of him, “Hoopoe is the happiest man in this town, because he loves his work, his wife and his gods, in that order.”

  Hoopoe’s work was the building of the new defense wall around the town of Makor, a task on which he had been engaged for some years. His wife was the inquisitive young woman Kerith, whose father had been a priest and who had once taken her to Jerusalem, where she had actually seen King David in his grandeur. And his gods were the traditional ones of Makor. There was Baal, the old familiar watchman of the Canaanites, who still lived in the same monolith on the same high place, watching over mundane activities like water supplies and the building of walls; and there was Yahweh, the god of Moses, a new Hebrew deity who had developed step by step from El-Shaddai, a god now so mighty that he controlled both the high heavens and the deep heart of man. In Makor there were a few Canaanites who worshiped only Baal, a few Hebrews like Kerith’s father who worshiped only Yahweh, and the great mass of people like Hoopoe who had accepted Yahweh as the awesome deity of the outer heavens while continuing to worship Baal as the local deity for day-to-day problems.

  Hoopoe was thirty-nine years old, the father of two lively children by his attractive wife, and of several others by his slave girls. In spite of his humorous appearance he was a man who had conducted himself with courage in his younger years while fighting for King David, and it was because of this loyal service that he had been given the job of rebuilding the wall of Makor.

  He was a short, stocky man with broad shoulders, big muscles and an oversized bottom which wiggled when he walked. His bald head was overlarge and on it he wore no covering. He had a pointed nose for probing into corners to detect where builders had tried to substitute crumbling earth in place of solid rock, and he wore a square-cut black beard which quivered when he laughed, and he had blue eyes. In fact, he looked much like a chubby version of his well-remembered ancestor, Governor Uriel, who had perished four hundred and fifty years ago while trying to keep Makor from being burned by the Hebrews, as related in a group of clay tablets stored at Ekhet-Aton in Egypt. In the decades following that disaster the great Family of Ur, like many Canaanites, had accommodated itself easily to Hebrew rule, becoming nominal Hebrews. Hoopoe’s parents, hoping that their son might win the confidence of the ruling group, had given him the chauvinistic Hebrew name of Jabaal, which meant “Yahweh is Baal,” trusting that this would imply that he was more Hebrew than the Hebrews, and this mild deception had worked, for Jabaal was accepted not only as an honest Hebrew, but also as the son-in-law of a priestly family.

  These were the exciting years when Hebrews controlled for a few brief decades a well-knit empire which King David had put together from fragments left scattered around by Egypt and Mesopotamia when their vast holdings fell apart. David’s kingdom reached from the Red Sea on the south to Damascus on the north and provided the Hebrews with unexpected wealth, since it sat athwart most of the major caravan routes and derived much profit from them. Even Aecho, that constant thorn in the flank of the Hebrews, had been captured from the Phoenicians, although it was not held long; and this rapid growth of empire meant that Makor, key to a fluid frontier, was now of more significance than before, and the judges and kings were interested in keeping it a Hebrew bastion if it could be maintained without too much cost to the central government. King David and his generals had therefore been pleased when they heard that in the little town there was an engineer who acted as if he were in charge of the empire’s main city: he worked ten and twelve hours of hard labor each day and spent additional time in planning the schedule for others. As a user of slaves he was unusual, for he treated his men well and few had died under his custodianship. Moabites, Jebusites, Aramaeans, Philistines and Amalekites all found it tolerable to work for Hoopoe, for on the job he fed them well and allowed them to rest when they became sick. In fact, they enjoyed seeing him come paddling along the ramparts, sticking his sharp nose into this area or that and joking with them as he encouraged them to speed the construction.

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bsp; In the evenings he came to their miserable camp outside the walls, bringing them scraps of food or dregs of wine, and often he raised the subject of their accepting the Hebrew god Yahweh, always on the reasonable ground that if they did so they could become Hebrews and thus regain their freedom. He carefully explained that they were free to maintain their former gods, as his own name proved, and he was an effective missionary, for he spoke in the language that practical men could understand. “My god Yahweh is like your god Dagon,” he assured the captured Philistines, “only greater.” And he made it both easy and honorable for his slaves to become Hebrews. In this way his corps was constantly diminished, but from it went converts of good character to serve in other parts of the Hebrew empire, and it was one of these former slaves who finally carried the good name of Jabaal the Hoopoe to Jerusalem, where General Amram, in charge of fortifications in the empire, heard of the master builder in the north.

  “One of these days I must see what the man has accomplished,” the general said, marking the name of Makor in his memory.

  The new wall which Hoopoe and his slaves had finished was made necessary by the gradual submersion of the old Canaanite wall. Alternate burnings and rebuildings had piled an additional eight feet of rubble on the mound, bringing it level with the top of the walls, so that something had to be done; but as the mound grew in height its crown of usable land contracted in size, which meant that the new walls could only be built inside the old ones, and when Hoopoe did this, the area available for the town was sharply diminished. In Governor Uriel’s day fourteen hundred Canaanites had lived inside the walls, but now only eight hundred could do so; however, the tranquillity brought to the area by King David’s good government permitted nine hundred farmers to live outside the walls, the largest number who had ever done so. This was the golden morning of Makor, the glorious apex of the town; it was also the period when Hebrews were demonstrating their ability to govern a kingdom, and if Makor were to be taken as the criterion, they governed well.

  Hoopoe, for example, lived in a comfortable house in the west portion of the town, and now as he walked homeward along the curving street he could see a visual summary of Makor’s affluence. The governor’s quarters were substantial and from then he dispensed an impartial justice which protected men in their ownership of fields and property. According to the ancient laws of the Hebrews the weak had rights, the pauper had a claim upon the charity of his neighbors, taxes were allocated fairly and punishment could not be capricious. The shops that lined the first part of the curving road were filled with materials imported from many parts of the world: faïence from Egypt, brocades from India, silk from Persia, delicate bronzeware from Cyprus, beautiful pottery from Greek islands and marvelous ironware from the nearby Phoenician city of Aecho, plus the ordinary trade goods brought by regular caravans from Tyre, Sidon and Damascus. In back of the shops stood the spacious houses, built of stone for the first two or three feet, then finished in wood and lime plaster, with strong wooden ceilings and lovely courtyards. To the left as Hoopoe started home stood the ancient temple of Epher, now an inconspicuous building where men worshiped Yahweh, and across from it the little shops that sold the day’s necessities: wine and olives, bread and wool, meat and fish brought inland from the sea.

  Two characteristics marked Makor in these days. Almost none of the shops were run by Hebrews, for they had originally been a desert people, unused to commercial ways, and they instinctively avoided occupations like shopkeeping or moneylending, partly because they had no aptitude for such ventures and partly because they had leapfrogged from nomad life to farming, and their love was for the land and the seasons. “Let the Phoenicians and the Canaanites run the shops and deal in gold,” they said. “We will tend the flocks, and in the end we will be the better off, for we shall stand closer to Yahweh.” The second distinguishing mark was that culturally Makor remained pretty much a Canaanite town. For example, it held to the ancient calendar of Canaan, which was divided into two seasons, the hot and the cold, and in Makor the new year began in ancient style at the end of the cold, but certain other parts of the Hebrew empire had begun to favor a year beginning at the end of the hot. The temple building and its rituals were of Canaanite origin, for on that spot El and Baal and Astarte had long been worshiped, and it was only logical that when the grandson of Epher introduced Yahweh to the town, the new god’s temple should have consisted merely of a refurbishing of a building dedicated to the old. In fact, when the average citizen of Makor prostrated himself before Yahweh he could scarcely have explained which god he was worshiping, for El had passed into Baal and he into El-Shaddai and all into Yahweh, the god of Moses our Teacher.

  These were the great formative years of the Hebrew ritual, for from Jerusalem, King David and his priests were endeavoring to impress upon Israel one clearly defined religion, but these reforms were slow to be adopted in Makor; its little temple continued to function as the focus of an ancient community ritual rather than as a surrogate of the unified national religion.

  Near the end of the street stood the house of Hoopoe, built many years before by his ancestors and occupied by a succession of decent men who had tried to live decent lives. As Canaanites they had often had to dissemble regarding their allegiance to Baal, but that was about as far as their duplicity went; in recent generations they had become outright converts to Yahweh, circumcising their sons and marrying their daughters into the best Hebrew families. This process of assimilation had reached its climax when Hoopoe had become betrothed to the only daughter of Shmuel ben Zadok ben Epher, the Hebrew priest, and now this couple had taken over the family residence.

  It was built mostly of stone, plastered on the inside to a cool white finish. Two of the rooms bore murals in red and blue paint, not showing particular scenes but indicating the desert from which the Hebrews had come and the hills which had been the homes of the Canaanites; but the principal adornment was Kerith, Hoopoe’s lovely wife of twenty-seven. She was slightly taller than Hoopoe and much slimmer. Her face was better proportioned, too, with a shapely nose, blue Hebrew eyes, ivory skin and dark hair. Her husband loved her to the point of foolishness, and since he knew that she cherished jewelry, not acquisitively but as works of art, he often bought her bits of glazed ware made in Egypt or enamel from Cyprus; but these minor treasures she kept in small rosewood boxes and wore only a large pendant made of silver from Persia into which had been set a rough oval of amber brought down from the northern countries. Against the gossamer woolen gowns which she preferred, this golden amber shone with a radiance matched by the wide bands of yellow cloth with which she often hemmed her robes. She was a tensely perceptive woman, intelligent, devoted to her children and an adornment to her fat little husband. Between them there was a genial relationship, for if in Makor there were more handsome men—and Kerith could see many in a ten-minute stroll through the streets—there were none who would have adored her so. Only one significant difference existed between them, and this was vital: Kerith was the daughter of an austere religious man who had almost known Yahweh face-to-face and from whom she had inherited her commitment to that deity; Hoopoe as a builder who had to work with the earth was willing to acknowledge Yahweh, but he also knew from hard experience that Baal ruled the soil and it would be folly for an engineer to ignore or denigrate the permanent deity of the earth in which he had to work. In many Makor families this dualism existed, but usually it was the man who inclined toward the Hebrew god while his wife held superstitiously to the old familiar deities; in Hoopoe’s case it was the Family of Ur’s timeless preoccupation with the land that had reversed the process, but he and his wife lived in harmony, for each was tolerant of the other’s spiritual attachments.

  Now, in the month of Abib in the spring of the year 966 B.C.E., when spring rains marked the day and floods filled the wadi, when barley was ripening in the fields and anemones and cyclamen were reappearing along the swamp, nodding to that strange flower which people of another religion would later call jac
k-in-the-pulpit, in this month of Abib when the rebuilding of the walls had ended, Hoopoe walked home along the curving street in some dismay, and when his wife greeted him at the door of their home he fell heavily onto the earth-and-tile bench.

  “I’m worried, Kerith,” he said.

  “I saw your new walls and they seem very solid.” She brought him some barley cakes and a drink of hot wine mixed with honey, and he relaxed.

  “When I was inspecting them today I looked down upon the richness of this town. In back of this street, the best dye vats in the north. Outside the walls, the resting places for the camel caravans. And these good houses. Kerith, this town is a temptation to all our enemies to the west. It’s the gateway to Jerusalem.”

  “But isn’t that why you built the wall?” she asked.

  “The wall will hold them off. Of that I’m sure. But do you know how we’ll lose this town?”

  She knew. Like all the young women of Makor she had often placed her water jug upon her head and walked through the postern gate and down the dark waterwall to the well. One day during the siege four years ago, when she was pregnant with her youngest son, she had made the dangerous journey and had heard Phoenician warriors trying to pierce the fragile protecting walls, and the people of Makor knew then that if the Phoenicians had brought their siege engines against the well instead of trying to reduce the old town walls they would have captured Makor. It was illogical to suppose that in the next invasion, when the new town walls would appear so formidable, the invaders would again fail to hit upon the obvious strategy of knocking down the waterwall. Kerith well knew that whenever the Phoenicians really wanted to capture Makor they could, and she acknowledged that her husband’s new wall represented not security but an additional hazard; but in the tentative discussions that would recur in the weeks ahead she would refuse to admit these facts because of the complex reasons which now kept her silent. She loved her dumpy little engineer and supported him against men like the governor who viewed him with amusement, but she also knew that if Hoopoe launched some extensive new building project in Makor she would be held prisoner in the town and thus her dream of the future would be destroyed.