The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel
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“Hilkiah is our father too,” the men said miserably. “This fellow, this Jeremiah, this seer—he is our brother.”
III
BY THE TIME he was twenty-one, Jeremiah had left Anathoth and found lodging in Jerusalem. In the fourteenth year of Josiah’s reign, he began to prophesy the violent advent of a foe from the north. Jeremiah took his stand in various gates of the city, distressing the population wherever he went.
“At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem, ‘A hot wind comes!’” Jeremiah tore the air with his high voice. He stood in the Damascus Gate as do messengers from far cities, or heralds of the king. He fixed the merchants with his eyes and cried:
“Behold, he comes up like clouds,
his chariot like the whirlwind;
his horses swifter than eagles—
‘Woe! Woe, for we are ruined!’
O Jerusalem, wash your heart from wickedness,
that you may be saved!
How long shall evil ideas
worm within you?”
The prophet staggered backward against the stone wall, crying, “My heart! My heart! The walls of my heart! It beats so hard, I can’t control it! I hear the sound of the trumpet of war! Disaster follows disaster! The whole land is laid waste! How long, O Lord? How long must I see the horrors and hear the trumpet?”
There was no congregation around the prophet now. He had begun to frighten the people. His feelings shot between extremes. Who could follow his wild transitions? Who could tell that this last collapse was for love of Jerusalem? Jeremiah loved desperately the daughter of his people, Judah. Something in him hated to prophesy her suffering.
But soon the cadaverous man was standing straight again, a solitary figure speaking softly, with terrible articulation. “I looked on the earth,” he said, “and it was altogether void, and the heavens gave no light. I looked on the mountains and they were quaking. I looked, and lo—there was neither man nor woman anywhere, and all the birds had fled. The fruitful land was a desert, every city in ruins before the Lord.”
Jeremiah walked away. He walked out of the gate, out of the city, down to the Kidron, where he lay down on the dry ground and fell asleep. No one disturbed him.
IV
FOR THREE YEARS Jeremiah prophesied in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem. For five years he troubled the ears of the people. But then he fell silent. In the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign, Jeremiah withdrew from public places. If he was in the city, he was not seen. Certainly, he was not speaking, for the people who had been lashed by his language were experiencing ease again and a sort of peace.
In that year the Book of the Law was found in the temple. King Josiah had already begun to purge the idolatries of Judah. He had heard of the prophecy of Jeremiah and had paid attention to it. At the same time the king’s cousin also began to prophesy—and the word of the Lord in his mouth was the same as the word in Jeremiah’s. Through the prophet Zephaniah, in the very palace of the king, the Lord God announced:
I will sweep everything from the face of the earth!
On that day I will punish the officials and the king’s sons and all who dress in foreign raiment. I will punish everyone who fills his master’s house with violence and fraud.
Like Hezekiah before him, Josiah destroyed the images of Assyrian gods. He tore down the Asherah and the high places of Ba’al. He drove out pagan practices, their priests and their prostitutes. He forbade sorcery and divination and magic in the land. Not only in Judah, but even as far north as Galilee he shut down the local shrines and caused all worship to look toward Jerusalem. And in the midst of this activity, he commanded that the temple be cleansed again of the desecrations of his grandfather, Manasseh. In the eighteenth year of Josiah’s reign, while priests were repairing and purging the temple, they found the Book of the Law written upon a long scroll. They gave it to Shaphan, Josiah’s secretary, who read it in part, then took it to the king in his private chambers. “Look,” he said, “the priests have uncovered an old book!”
Josiah said, “Read it to me.”
So Shaphan sat down and read it aloud, from the beginning to the end. The Book of the Law, the ancient statutes of the covenant of God, the holy code first spoken to Moses, older than David and Jerusalem, older than kings in Israel, as old as the exodus and Sinai. When Josiah heard its words, he tore his clothes and wept.
“Great is the wrath of the Lord,” he said, “because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book!”
So the king sent for all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem, the priests and all the people. He gathered them together in the courts of the temple, and then he himself took a stand by the pillar and read the book to them. Next, in their sight and in their hearing, King Josiah made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord and to keep his commandments and his statutes—with all his heart and soul to perform the words of the covenant which were written in this book.
Then Josiah called for a heifer three years old. When it was brought forward, he commanded that it be cut into two pieces, one half laid on the north side, one on the south with a path between. It was done: blood laced the pavement where the heifer had been dragged apart. Likewise, a she-goat three years old was cut in two and laid beside the heifer, and a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon. Then King Josiah commanded the people to join the covenant with him by walking between the halves of the beasts. In that day the people of Judah, both young and old, passed through the blood of the sacrifice and bound themselves one to the other before the Lord, to keep the statutes of the Lord.
Among those who walked in the way of old obedience was a man of twenty-five, whose body was wasted, whose head was huge, whose hair was a wild defiance—but whose countenance was suffused with joy as bright as sunlight.
He smiled and kept silent. There was no need now for the harsh word. The king had returned his people to mercy again.
V
IN THE TWENTY-SEVENTH YEAR of Josiah’s reign, the Medes and the Babylonians joined in a mighty alliance. In his twenty-eighth year they laid siege to Nineveh, and in three months the capital of Assyria fell. The Medes proceeded to eat up the mountains of Urartu and all the land north and east of the old Assyrian empire.
The Babylonian king pursued the miserable remnant of Assyria’s great army eastward to Haran, which he attacked that year and again the next year—until the wreckage of old Assyria fled across the Euphrates River to Carchemish and sent desperate messages to Pharaoh Neco in Egypt: “Help us! We are perishing!”
Their message defined the cry of the whole world in those days. God, help us! People everywhere lived anxious and uncertain lives. Farmers and merchants and priests and kings: no one was not threatened. Nations were raging and dying, and the collapse of those ancient empires that once had been fixed stars in the universe made the earth itself a loose and doomful place. Nothing was sure.
Twenty years ago Assyria had invaded Egypt and destroyed its eternal cities forever. But now a new Egypt was emerging, whose Pharaoh Neco was not beholden to the old ways. When the same Assyria, now dying, begged for his help, Neco granted it. Pharaoh Neco mustered an enormous force and marched northeast, out of Egypt and up the coast road of the Great Sea.
King Josiah, now in the thirty-first year of his reign, himself not forty years old, read the Egyptian advance as a threat to Judah. Therefore, he rushed his own armies to Megiddo and drew up battle lines to block Neco’s passage.
Neco sent messengers to Josiah, saying: “King of Judah, I am not marching against you, but against Babylon. Let me pass.”
But Josiah did not withdraw. Instead, when Neco appeared on the plains of Megiddo, Josiah himself joined the troops in battle, riding among the first chariots, swinging his two-edged sword with power. But an archer shot the king through his neck. He slumped in his chariot. Immediately his driver wheeled around and fled the fighting. He whipped the horses into a furious gallop and drove to Jerusalem as fast as h
e could go. Sixty miles. When he came full cry through the Sheep Gate, the driver glanced down, then reined his tired horses to a walk. There was no need for haste. King Josiah was dead.
Jehoiakim was crowned king of Judah—but not in liberty, not with autonomy. So soon after Josiah had seized freedom and purged a nation and expanded his northern borders, his son became the king of Judah as a vassal of Egypt. He was forced to pay tribute in the amount of a hundred shekels of silver and ten talents of gold, annually. Jehoiakim laid a heavy tax on the people Judah. No free man escaped it. And the king himself took the benefit.
VI
SUDDENLY THE WORD of the Lord returned to Jeremiah, saying, Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house and say, “Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah who enter these gates to worship the Lord—”
JEHOIAKIM LOVED STRONG SCENTS and a luxurious life. On the day of his coronation he opened a large wooden box that had come by caravan from Alexandria. In it were small bags and sachets, jars of alabaster and bottles of glass. From these Jehoiakim selected an oil of calamus, smooth and sweet, and worked it into his beard until that beard stood out like a shining wet sculpture.
Then the king elect rose up and left his private quarters, gathered his servants around himself, and in grandeur went out of the palace door.
It was early in the morning when he stepped into the outer court of the temple. Both courts were filled with people from everywhere in Judah. They broke into roaring as the royal figure passed.
Inside the temple the priests were waiting. It was New Year’s Day: already they had thrown open the doors to the bright rise of the eastern sun. Smiles met smiles as Jehoiakim entered the temple—and every priest remarked upon the magnificence of his apparel and his smell.
In solemn ceremony, the priests invested Jehoiakim with the symbols of his office, the royal crown and a royal name which ever thereafter testified to his new identity. Priests poured olive oil on the king’s head, allowing it to run down his long hair, his cheeks and beard. It dripped to his shoulders and chest. Then the chief priest stepped out on the porch and shouted:
“Long live King Jehoiakim!”
Immediately the people thundered their acclamation, clapping their hands, blowing on trumpets of metal and horn.
Just as the king himself emerged on the porch, preparing to process to the palace and for the last acts of his coronation, a high, whining voice cut the air like a weapon, destroying the music, destroying the joy of the day.
“Hear the word of the Lord,” the voice was wailing. “All you who enter these gates to worship the Lord, thus says the Lord of hosts:
Amend your ways, and I will let you dwell in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: THIS IS THE TEMPLE OF THE LORD, THE TEMPLE OF THE LORD, THE TEMPLE OF THE LORD!
The priests rushed out on the porch. They stood between the king and the people, seeking the source of this sacrilege. There! There he was, in the New Gate between the inner and the outer courts! A man as skinny as a stick, wild hair, a huge head. A vein was swollen in the middle of his forehead.
For if you truly amend your ways and execute justice one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land I gave to your ancestors forever. But you! You trust deceptive words—
“Seize him!” the priests screamed. “Grab that man and silence him! This is the day of the king!”
But those who were nearest the New Gate were stricken by the man’s language, by its force and boldness and holy aggression. They said, “He is a prophet,” and they could not move. The priests screamed, “He is reviling the temple!”
The prophet, standing on a stone of the gate post, pointed at the priests:
Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Ba’al and then come before me in this house and say, “We are delivered!”—only to go on doing the same abominations? Has my house become a den of robbers in your eyes?
My anger will be poured out on this place, on people and beasts, the trees of the field and the fruit of the ground.
It will burn, and it will not be quenched! I will make this city a curse for all the nations of the earth!
Suddenly a strange transformation came over the prophet. He ceased speaking, and in the peculiar silence he began to gaze into the eyes of the people nearest him. Then tears were streaming down his wasted cheeks.
“Ah, my heart is sick within me,” he whispered. He stepped down from the foundation rock. “Because of the wound of the daughter of my people, my own heart is wounded. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?”
Whereas his cursing fixed the people in fear, the tenderness of this appeal broke the trance. Several men moved forward and seized the prophet, and suddenly he was only thin and weak. The courtyard erupted in confusion and distress. Angry priests came running with the temple guard.
“You!” they snarled with loathing. “Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, we thought we were done with you!”
They commanded the guard to hold him here while the king’s coronation proceeded according to law.
So King Jehoiakim passed through the New Gate, staring coldly at the prophet named Jeremiah. The priests and a large element of the people disappeared into the palace—officials, the rich, men who sought important positions in the new king’s court. But many people remained in the temple yards, fascinated by the prisoner who could curse them and love them at once.
Before evening the priests returned and accosted Jeremiah. “Who do you think you are?” they said. “Are you above Josiah? King Josiah made this temple the only place of worship throughout all of Judah—all of Judah! How can you blaspheme it?”
Then to the leaders of Judah who had followed them from the palace, the priests declared: “Because this man has prophesied that Jerusalem would be a curse for all the nations of the earth, he deserves to die!”
“No, not me! It was the Lord!”
“What?”
Jeremiah had spoken, and the priests were indignant.
“What did you say?”
“It was the Lord who sent me to prophesy against this house,” he said. His voice was steady. He turned to the leaders of the people and put his case before them.
“Yes, Josiah brought the worship of the Lord to this house only,” Jeremiah said. “But the priests of the temple have forgotten that it is not the house who protects us, but the Lord himself. O people, nor is it your sacrifice which the Lord God loves. It is your obedience!”
A man named Ahikam quietly moved to a place where he could observe the prophet. A reed of a man, his head a bony dome, his eyes big and unbearably sad, Jeremiah looked sixty years old. Yet Ahikam’s father had known him since he first began to prophesy, and Ahikam knew that he could not be older than forty.
“Amend your ways,” the prophet was saying, looking straight at Ahikam. “Obey the Lord, and the Lord your God will repent of the evil which he has pronounced. As for me, I am in your hands. Only, know that though you put me to death, the word of the Lord will endure.”
Jeremiah closed his mouth and waited.
Some of the leaders said to the priests, “If a man has truly spoken in the name of the Lord, how can anyone say that he deserves the death sentence?”
Then the man named Ahikam spoke. “My father is Shaphan,” he said, “Josiah’s royal secretary before the king died—a scribe, a learned man. He told me of a prophet Micah who prophesied in the days of Hezekiah, saying, Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins and the mountain of the holy house a wooded hill. Did Hezekiah put the prophet to death for that? No, because he feared the Lord! Instead, he begged for mercy, and the Lord repented of the evil he had pronounced. Priests, if you kill this prophet, you will bring that evil upon us now!”
Ahikam’s argument prevailed. The leaders believed him, and Jeremiah was not put to death.
VII
So did Nebuchadnezzar. His father had just died. He went to bury the old king and to establish himself as the king of the Babylonians.
Jehoiakim of Judah smiled. Suddenly he was receiving taxes without having to pay tribute to an overlord.
So the king announced a building program. He spent the tax money for materials, but labor he got for free. He commanded the citizens of his kingdom to work for him. They began to rebuild the old palace of Solomon. They refurbished the chambers of the king.
At the same time the prophet Jeremiah also worked outside the palace, heaping new stones into a pile, stones powder-white from the workman’s chisel. Then he climbed his little hill and cried from the top of it:
Woe to him who builds his house by sinfulness,
his upper rooms by a cruel injustice,
who makes his neighbor serve
and does not pay a wage!
Your father ate and drank and practiced justice!
He judged the cause of the poor and the needy,
and it was well with him!
But you have eyes for greed
and teeth for gain,
a fist of violence,
and a hand of heavy oppression!
Jehoiakim in his palace commanded his servants to close the windows, but they couldn’t. The windows had only just been cut into the new walls. And the prophet cried: “Thus says the Lord concerning Jehoiakim: