J: The Woman Who Wrote the Bible

by Mary Burns

  “But what of us? What shall we do?”

  Ishmael sighed deeply and kissed me again.

  “Our destiny is only partly fulfilled,” he said. “There is more for each of us to do, though we will not be together as we walk our paths.”

  “How do you know this?” I cried. “It’s not fair!” Silently, I couldn’t help thinking, must I always be alone?

  He reached for my hands, and held them to his heart. As before, he answered the question I could not ask aloud. “You will always be here, inside me, and I will be with you.” Then he smiled, almost gaily. “We have ways to see each other, do we not, even though we are far away?”

  Two days later, I was on my way to Jerusalem, and I knew with certainty that I carried Ishmael’s child in my womb.

  * * *

  The journey home took three weeks, and was uneventful except for one vision I had in a dream. As I slept under the stars, too warm and heavy-feeling to sleep in the tent, I was shown a humble man who lived in a small house with his family. This man had one ewe-lamb that he had raised from the moment it was born, and he loved the lamb like another of his children. It was always at his side, and he held it in his arms in the evenings before the fire, when his own children would gather around and pet her and kiss her soft wooly head.

  Then there was a second man, a fat and angry rich man, powerful in the town. He saw the humble man and his little pet lamb one day as his carriage drove by the small house, and he was filled with an unquenchable desire to have the lamb for himself. He sent his servants to the humble man’s house in the middle of the night, and they broke in and tore the lamb from the man’s arms, knocking him on the floor as they did so, and leaving him dead with his wife and children wailing around him.

  I woke in a sweat, fired up with indignation at the cruel rich man. What could this dream mean?

  I found out as soon as I arrived in Jerusalem.

  The Kingdom

  Chapter 31

  “What you have done was done in secret, but what

  I will do will be in the face of all Israel and in the

  face of the sun.” 2 Samuel 12:12

  “There is fighting in the Jordan Valley?” I was incredulous. I scanned Ahinoam’s strained face as I sat over a hasty meal pulled together for me late in the evening. My appetite was not good, but I needed to eat something, and a light broth with bread was something I could keep down. “When did this happen?”

  She had been pacing around the room, unusual for her, and then came over to the table and sat down, facing me. I was glad, God forgive me, that there was something distressing happening that would distract her—and my father and mother as well— from observing me too closely. I didn’t know how I would hide my pregnancy yet, but perhaps this problem would buy me time.

  “About a month ago,” she said. Her lips shut in a thin line.

  I looked at her skeptically. “What aren’t you telling me about this?”

  She sighed deeply. “It’s something your father did.”

  “What, you mean, he insulted some king or something? And started a war?”

  Ahinoam sighed and shook her head. “You will scarcely believe it when I tell you, but everything has gone wrong in the last several weeks.”

  I nodded, my mouth full of bread, and waited for her to go on.

  She took a deep breath.

  “The first thing that happened—what started it all—is your father saw a woman, her name is Bathsheba. She was bathing herself on the roof of her house. It was as if he had been struck with madness. He was obsessed with her.”

  I nearly choked on my bread. I knew that feeling.

  “He could neither eat nor sleep, and finally he sent servants to find out who she was. Well,” Ahinoam sighed again. “Turns out she was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a captain in David’s army.”

  “What do you mean ‘was’?” I caught at the word directly.

  She put up her hand.

  “The King insisted she be brought to his rooms, and she stayed there for three days, during which time he lay with her, of course,” Ahinoam said.

  “Where was Uriah all this time?”

  “Some way out in the plains, with the army.” Ahinoam looked as if she didn’t want to be interrupted again, so I sat silently.

  “Soon after, Bathsheba tells David she is with child, and of course, since her husband has been gone for several months, it was going to be obvious it wasn’t his child. So David sends a messenger to call Uriah back to Jerusalem, hoping of course that he’ll sleep with Bathsheba, and the difference in her time will be as nothing, and Uriah will think it is his child.”

  I scowled at this, but did not speak. Ahinoam gave a short laugh that had nothing to do with humor.

  “Only trouble was, Uriah wouldn’t sleep with her after all. He said his men were out in the desert, deprived of good beds and hot food and their own wives, and he couldn’t bear to enjoy himself while they could not. He slept in the stables.” She looked at me and shook her head.

  “So David calls in Joab—”

  “Joab!” I burst out. “Joab has come back?”

  Ahinoam looked a little surprised at my vehemence. “Yes, the ten years of banishment are long over,” she said. “He’s been preparing to come back for some time, and your father has put him in charge of the whole army again, he and his brother Abishai.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. Why would my father take them back, the bane of his earlier years? But perhaps they had learned somewhat of caution and self-restraint.

  “I’m sorry, go on,” I said.

  “After Uriah left again, David sent Joab out to find Uriah and his men and give them orders to attack some outlying Philistine garrison that had lately been making raids on our people at the outer edges of Judah. And he told Joab to find a way, to make certain that somehow, Uriah would be killed.”

  I looked at her, dismayed. “How do you know my father said that?”

  Ahinoam looked slightly discomfited. “Joab told his … woman, and she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. I heard it from the maids.”

  “And you believed it? That, that fire-breathing madman?”

  “I don’t understand you,” Ahinoam said. “Why do you think Joab would lie? He’s just been taken back into the king’s favor, and besides,” she added, “I know it’s what your father did. Your mother knows it.”

  I understood what she meant, so I just nodded.

  “To get to the end of it, Joab’s plan worked very well. Uriah was ordered to take his troops up to the very wall of the Philistine garrison, and of course he was one of the first ones to be killed—an arrow through his heart.”

  “And Bathsheba? What about her?”

  “She is now your father’s wife, and is with the women of the household.”

  I felt a powerful interest in this unknown woman, the object of my father’s unparalleled passion—had she been willing? Or was she a servant to my father’s lust? Waves of shame and desire spread over me as I felt again the touch of Ishmael’s hands on me, the strength of his body, the wildness of my own yearning. Perhaps she had felt this way, too. Suddenly I saw the meaning of my dream about the poor man and his lamb.

  We sat silently a moment, thinking over these sad, human events. But the story was not yet over. I touched Ahinoam’s hand to draw her back to me.

  “So how is that connected to the fighting that is going on now in the Jordan Valley, so far to the east?”

  She rose abruptly from the table, and began to pace again. I saw her now more clearly than at first, after my long years of traveling, and she was thinner than before, and seemed much older.

  “The high priest has said that the King has done wrong in the sight of the Lord,” she said at last. “And he is being punished for it—we are all being punished for it—because he will not admit his wrong and repent.”

  I cast my mind back, to the time after I lost Nathan. “Abiathar? Is he still the high priest?” I felt we were finally coming to the
point. Ahinoam nodded, but as if that weren’t important.

  “We all know the Lord is displeased with your father as He has never been before. Your brother, Absalom, has taken this as his moment to step forward and declare himself your father’s heir. He has rallied many of the young men to his side, youngsters who have not known the trials of battle or the despair of exile, and they have drawn out your father’s army to the Jordan Valley to fight over the succession to the throne.”

  She sat down heavily, and rubbed her face with her hands. “You know how popular he is, our Absalom! Everyone loves him—with his long hair and charming ways—and he has been doing his best to curry favor with the young men for some time now, promising them riches and wives in return for their loyalty and service to him.” She shook her head, then spoke once more.

  “Absalom declared that David is not fit to be King, since he repays loyalty with murder and breaks the law of God as an adulterer. He said this in the public square and then,” Ahinoam swallowed heavily, and went on, “and then your brother Amnon, David’s first-born son, challenged the truth of what Absalom said, so they fought, and Amnon was killed.”

  She looked at me for a moment, mirroring the horror on my face, then said, “But that was only an excuse.”

  “An excuse for what? Ahinoam, what do you mean?” I suddenly remembered the vision of Tamar, my poor little sister, and couldn’t speak for fear.

  “It is almost to horrible for words, and yet you must know.” Ahinoam reached over and took my hands in hers. “I know how much you loved both these brothers of yours, especially Amnon, but—” she broke off, as if she couldn’t bear to say the words out loud.

  When she could speak again, Ahinoam told me that some months ago, Amnon had been seized by an ungovernable passion and lust for his half-sister, Tamar, Absalom’s little sister. He contrived to get her alone by pretending to be ill, so ill that David himself came to see him and promised him anything he wanted. Amnon asked that Tamar come to his room and make him some bread with her own hands and feed it to him; David ordered that it should be so.

  “And there he raped her, again and again, and when he was finished, he suddenly turned on her, and told her she was hateful in his eyes, that she should take herself off and die for all he cared. Absalom found her near death in her room, and she told him what happened before she died.”

  I sat in shocked silence. The world seemed turned upside down. All this in so short a time? My sweet, gentle Tamar! And Amnon, what demon had invaded him, to commit such a crime? All this had happened while I was sitting enchanted at my cousin Ishmael’s house, drinking in the sweetness of his poetry, his stories, his eyes? I took a deep breath to steady myself. I would have to leave off thinking like that until I could be alone.

  “What did my father do?”

  Ahinoam clasped my hands even tighter.

  “Nothing,” she said. “He did nothing, only told Absalom to keep away from Amnon.”

  “Has anyone said anything to my father?” I looked at Ahinoam, deeply troubled. “Has not my mother, or Abiathar, told him how wrong he is?”

  She looked grieved. “Your father refuses to see her, and Abiathar, and everyone. Everyone but Bathsheba.” She did not smile as she said this.

  “He will see me,” I said. I rose from the table, washed my hands and smoothed my hair, and prepared to confront my father with the truth I had vowed always to tell him.

  * * *

  My father opened the door himself when he heard my voice.

  I almost gasped at the sight of him, so changed that I hardly recognized him. His hair was almost white now, his face haggard, with a stubble of beard, his eyes dull and colorless. Where was David of the brilliant eyes? The mighty warrior, the unconquerable hero?

  He held me in his arms for a long time; I could feel his tears on my head. Over his shoulder, once I opened my eyes, I could see disarray and disorder in his room. Where was Ithream? No longer a boy, of course, but he was still there when I had left on my journeying.

  There was no sign of Bathsheba either, other than a long silk sash, rose-colored, that hung at the edge of the bed.

  My father at last released me, and we walked arm in arm over to the window. It felt like an age had passed since we stood that way, as we used to do in Hebron. I said as much to him now as we stood there peacefully.

  “Ah, Janaia, my dear daughter,” he said, kissing my forehead. “Why do such happy times pass away? Why must there be strife and death and fighting?”

  Here was my opening, and though my heart beat fast, I knew what I must do.

  “Father,” I said. “I would tell you about something that happened while I was on my travels. Shall I?”

  He nodded, almost absently.

  I told him about the humble man and the wicked rich man, as if it had been an actual occurrence.

  “ . . . and they broke in and tore the lamb from the man’s arms, knocking him on the floor as they did so, and leaving him dead with his wife and children wailing around him.”

  My father was immediately outraged, and his indignation burst forth as I had seen it in days of old.

  “Who is this man who defies the laws of God with such insolent pride? I will have him punished in the sight of everyone! He shall not be allowed to do such injustice, such evil, with impunity!”

  I gathered up all my courage.

  “You are that man, my father.”

  He stood very still and silent, and his arms, as he leaned against the window frame, began to tremble. I held my breath, but when he said nothing, I spoke again, the voice of power sounding from deep within me.

  “This is the word of the Lord the God of Israel to you: Everything have I given you—kingdom, power, riches, wives, sons and daughters, and more would I have given to you, without your asking. Why have you challenged me by doing wrong in my eyes? You did not punish your son for the murder of his sister, out of weakness that you called love for him—and now he is dead, justice savagely administered by another son who challenges your authority. You have murdered Uriah the Hittite as truly as if you shot the arrow yourself, and taken his wife to be your own. What you did was done in secret; but what I will do will be out in the light of day for all Israel to see.”

  David was on his knees, weeping rivers of tears; great wrenching gasps and sobs convulsed his body.

  “I have sinned against the Lord,” he said, his voice small and anguished.

  The voice within me took my will and spoke again.

  “The Lord will lay on another the consequence of your sin; you shall not die, but because in this you have shown your contempt for the Lord, your family will never again have rest from the sword. For you, already, a son of yours has been killed. And now, another son of yours will die, in place of the son this woman will give to you. But this new son will be beloved by me, and I will make him king after you, when you are ready to be with your fathers.”

  The power left me then, whirled away like a winter wind, leaving me an empty husk. I sank to my knees next to my father, and put my arms around him.

  The next morning, as the sun rose, a messenger came from Joab to tell us that the traitor Absalom had been found dead, caught in the deadly branches of the oak forest, where he had been pierced by swords as he hanged.

  Chapter 32

  "Listen to my words, O Lord, consider my inmost

  thoughts; heed my cry for help, my king and my God. In

  the morning, when I say my prayers, thou wilt hear me."

  Psalms 5:1

  An uneasy peace settled over the land after Absalom’s death. The rebellion, brief as it was, had ignited the debate over who would succeed David as king, and factions surrounding this son and that son, even nephews and cousins, began to rise and fall, but always at a simmer. Joab set about re-building the army to its previous formidable strength. What the Lord had promised was to come true, all too sadly: our family would never again be free from the sword, and certainly not in David’s lifetime.

  B
ut for now, for a while, life seemed almost normal again.

  Except for the fact that I was going to have a child.

  Luckily, thin and tall as I was, even after three months I was barely showing a bulge, not like my first poor baby, and the gowns and shawls I wore easily disguised a thickening waist. Everyone in the household was well used by now to my solitary habits of study and music, and my father was too preoccupied with managing the increasing skirmishes and attacks on our borders to have much time or thought for me. He threw himself back into a military discipline after the wretchedness of his sins, and when I saw him again after several weeks, he looked better: stronger, with a healthier color in his face, and his eyes once again brilliant green.

  How strange it was that I never once thought of sending to Ishmael to tell him of my condition—to tell him he would be a father! It was as if he had played his part in the drama set out for us, and was now off the stage. I alone would carry this child, and its fate was known only to the Lord. I prayed every day for some sign, some enlightenment, that would reveal to me what I should do. My prophetic powers, my sense of Sight, seemed held in abeyance now, set behind a thick curtain. I tried all the techniques I had learned from Ishmael, staring into pools of water or flames until the sweat beaded on my forehead and my eyesight blurred, but I saw nothing. Not even Ishmael. I wondered if he saw me, but something told me I was inaccessible to him, too, at least for now.

  * * *

  I was very busy, writing every day, forming and polishing the stories I had gathered during my journey throughout the land. I was very possessive of them, however; I couldn’t bear to share them with anyone, and of course, I didn’t have the freedom to discuss my work here that I had enjoyed in Egypt with Ishmael. Each story, as I wrote it out, was like my own child. When I would think this, I would put my hand on my rounded stomach, and my wonder at my situation almost overwhelmed me.

  * * *