Pontius Pilate: A Novel

by Paul L Maier

  “A Hellenization of Jerusalem?”

  “Oh, Herod didn’t really Hellenize the city—it was his supporters, the Herodians, and some of the local gentiles who used these facilities.”

  “Down there, Pilate, just below us—what are those poles stuck in the ground on that rise?”

  “That’s Skull Place, as the Jews call it. Golgotha in their language. A good name, because capital cases are crucified there.”

  Pilate signaled his cavalry escort to move on, and the retinue clattered into Jerusalem through the western or Water Gate. Immediately, Procula felt engulfed by another world, at least a millennium more ancient. Jerusalem’s labyrinthine lanes and passages were a confusion of Oriental sights, sounds, and smells. An aroma of aged mutton hovered over the city, exuding from countless little butcheries along the streets, no two of which seemed on the same level. There were choruses of sheep bleating, donkeys braying in ridiculous staccato, and above it all, citizens calling to each other in a tongue Procula could not decipher. It was Aramaic, the everyday language of Palestine, though some of the sages in Jerusalem communicated in pure Mishnaic Hebrew.

  Slowed by the crowded streets, their retinue attracted some attention. The pointing hands and craning necks spoke a language of their own but the message was clear: “Look—there’s the governor and his wife.” Neither happy nor hostile, the people merely seemed curious. But because there were so many of them, Procula felt a pang of self-consciousness and kept rearranging her shawl to hide more of her face until a sharp turn brought them into the relative privacy of Herod’s palace courtyard, just south of the west gate.

  Styled in the finest Hellenistic tradition, with lavish use of porticoes interrupted by pools and fountains, the palace was sybaritic in its luxury. Plainly, it was even larger than the temple itself, although its surrounding terrace was not comparable. The royal residence was divided into two wings, which Herod had named the Caesareum and the Agrippeum, in honor of his two most important friends.

  Inside, Procula admitted that she had seen no mansion in Rome which could match the sweeping height of the interior chambers, all trimmed with alabaster, and only the imperial palace on the Palatine harbored the exquisite gold and marbled furniture that Herod had accumulated here from distant lands. The palace at Caesarea was opulent; this one was prodigal. The difference, easily explained, was that Herod had spent most of his time in Jerusalem.

  Pilate stationed his cavalrymen at one end of the Agrippeum, in handsome barracks Herod had constructed for his bodyguard. Their revelry that night could not even be heard in the main atrium of the Caesareum, testimony enough to the size of the place.

  Procula spent the next days digesting the Jewish capital. While her husband was occupied with official business, she explored the city with several women of the Herodian palace staff. The great temple she found particularly intriguing, but her first visit to the sacred enclave nearly caused a riot.

  While her attendants were chatting with a friend in the outer courtyard of the temple, Procula moved beyond a low balustrade on the terrace and was climbing the steps to peer into the sacred interior of the sanctuary. Suddenly a cry shattered the air, and in a trice she was surrounded by a band of angry temple guards, each brandishing a short stave. Their captain unleashed a furious torrent of Aramaic.

  Procula’s women rushed up to where she stood and almost hysterically shouted back in the same language. Several of them were in tears and nearly beside themselves.

  Glowering at Procula, the captain demanded, “Why have you, a gentile, violated our Holy Temple?”

  Both afraid and yet angry, Procula merely stared fiercely at the man, since she could not understand him.

  “Don’t touch this woman!” one of her attendants cried. “She’s the governor’s wife!”

  Momentarily stunned, the captain of the guards asked, “But why did she try to subvert our law?”

  “She didn’t know about the restriction! It was our fault for not warning her. But don’t worry, she didn’t defile the temple itself.”

  The captain pondered momentarily, then said, “No matter. She must pay the penalty.”

  “You utter fool! You’d execute the wife of your governor? Have you lost your mind?”

  The captain hesitated. “Well, we’d better take this matter before the high priest and the Sanhedrin.”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort, you blunderer!” Procula’s attendant hissed. “Unless you want the armies of Rome to destroy Jerusalem for your folly in arresting the wife of a Roman prefect!” Then, switching to Greek, she said, “Come, Lady Procula.”

  The guards, completely befuddled about what to do in such an unprecedented circumstance, stood aside and let Procula return to the women. Only then did she follow their pointing fingers to a stone tablet embedded in one of thirteen similar columns surrounding the temple. They all bore this inscription, in Greek:

  Let no gentile enter within the balustrade and enclosure surrounding the sanctuary. Whoever is caught will be personally responsible for his consequent death.

  First then did Procula realize the mortal danger into which she had innocently strayed.

  Legally, Pilate could not have saved his own wife had the Jewish authorities—as seems unlikely—condemned her for this infraction. But the brave bluff of the women had prevented any extension of the incident, and they all hurried back to Herod’s palace.

  Pilate was angry at the confrontation. Several times he asked the women if any of the guards had laid a finger on Procula. Then, recalling his role as governor, not just husband, he inquired if any imbroglio had developed among bystanders at what they might justifiably consider an outrage. A negative to both queries closed the book on the incident.

  Understandably, Pilate accompanied his wife on future excursions about Jerusalem. As a typical woman, she preferred parks to civic buildings and monuments, but Jerusalem had few public gardens as such. The topography had provided two likely areas for vegetation in the upper arms of the y-shaped valley which flanked the mesa on which Jerusalem was set. But the western arm, the Valley of Hinnom or Gehenna, had been ruined by its use as city dump, and the fires constantly burning refuse there so resembled the Jewish picture of hell that the word Gehenna became, in fact, synonymous with hell.

  In contrast, the eastern branch of the y, the Kidron Valley, remained a place of natural beauty, with some greenery splashing up the slopes of the Mount of Olives, which hovered over Jerusalem on the east. The grayish verdure of olive trees was particularly concentrated near the base of the hill at a grove called Oil-Press Garden, named for a gethsemane or oil press located there.

  But the brook which was supposed to flow through the Kidron ravine was only a dry ditch at the time. An aide explained to Pilate that the stream had water only during winter months, when Judea caught its first rains. It was another piece of the parched picture of a dry and thirsty city.

  Coming from a land where aqueducts gushed water at many gallons per second, Pilate could not comprehend how Jerusalem could exist without a better supply. Jews, of course, used far less water than Romans, who had an insatiable appetite for baths, fountains, and pools. In countless cisterns throughout the city, the people of Jerusalem hoarded the meager winter rainfall which drained from their roofs, and used water only sparingly throughout the year. Even Herod’s palace was supplied from a reservoir of rainwater, built into the top of one of its fortress towers.

  Pilate called a meeting of the city engineers and architects who had come with him from Caesarea, and their Jewish counterparts for Jerusalem. By now it was no secret that the prefect wanted to improve the local water supply, and the men agreed that Jerusalem had a water problem, especially during the great festivals, when the area population at least quadrupled. The specialists debated the question. “Improve the Gihon,” one suggested. Pilate requested an explanation.

  Nature had endowed Jerusalem with but one, solitary spring named Gihon, he was told, and even that gurgling rock lay just ou
tside the city walls in the Kidron Valley. But seven centuries ago, the Hebrew King Hezekiah feared that invading Assyrians would seize the exposed spring just when Jerusalem needed its waters most. So he had his builders carve out a reservoir, the Pool of Siloam, just inside the city; and then, starting from both ends—the new reservoir and the existing spring—they hacked a tunnel under the city walls through 1,752 feet of solid rock, which diverted Gihon’s water into the new and protected cistern. The grotto surrounding the exposed spring was then walled up and camouflaged. The Assyrians missed it. A feat of superb engineering had saved Jerusalem.

  Since the Gihon was still flowing, Pilate and the engineers went down to the Pool of Siloam, where they found the water level disappointingly low. Wading into the shallow waters of the tunnel at the point where it emptied into the pool, they lit torches and began their underground journey inside the conduit. Soon they came to Hezekiah’s proud inscription, cut into the rock of the tunnel wall. It was translated for Pilate’s benefit:

  The Tunnel. And this is the history of the tunnel. While the bronze picks [of the two teams of workmen] were still opposite each other, and while three cubits still remained [to be excavated], the voice of one calling to the other was heard, for there were hollows in the rock toward the south and the north. And on the day of the boring through, the stonecutters struck pick against pick, one opposite the other. And the waters flowed from the spring to the pool, 1,200 cubits in length. And 100 cubits was the thickness of rock above the heads of the stonecutters.

  After some minutes of sloshing along, Pilate and his party came to an abrupt deviation of five feet, after which the tunnel continued again. One of the men held his torch close to the wall and said, “Notice the pick markings are now aiming down toward us, rather than away from us. This shows we’re at the juncture of the two teams of workmen mentioned in the inscription.”

  Pilate was impressed. “Do you mean that Hezekiah’s tunnelers could calculate this accurately that long ago—why, about the time Rome was founded—so that the two teams were only five feet off?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  The men splashed their way further through the conduit and up a slight grade. Their ruddy torches painted a grotesque panorama of shadows on the walls of the tunnel. Just before reaching the spring, one of the Jewish engineers pointed to a narrow shaft that rose directly upward from the roof of the tunnel. “Here’s the passageway dug by the Jebusites, the original inhabitants of Jerusalem, so they’d have access to the spring in case of siege. But King David learned about the shaft just when he was scheming how to penetrate Jerusalem’s defenses. This made it simple: his commandos stole into the Gihon grotto by night, climbed this shaft, and took the city.”

  “The Trojan Horse of Jerusalem,” Pilate commented.

  A few more steps brought them to the Gihon spring, a circular pool bordered by rocks from which cool and delicious water was gurgling.

  “Is there any way to increase the flow?” Pilate inquired.

  One of the men swung a pick into the water source, causing a fountain to squirt up to the ceiling of the grotto.

  “Careful!” one of Pilate’s aides cautioned. “Too much water and we’ll be trapped and drown down here.”

  “Watch that fountain.”

  For several minutes it spurted well enough, but gradually the column of water dwindled in height until it was only a gentle swell on the surface of the pool.

  “Hit it again,” someone suggested.

  After several swipes of the pick, the answering water jet was smaller than the first spurt. In a short time, the spring looked the same as when they first arrived. The engineers inspected the grotto for supplementary water sources but found none. So ended any thought of increasing the flow of the Gihon.

  In the next days, Pilate continued debating the problem with the engineers. Could waters of the Jordan be tapped for Jerusalem? Impossible, because the river flowed 3,500 feet below the level of the city. The Asphalt Lake [Dead Sea] was even lower, and its waters useless. Were any lakes or streams in the area higher than Jerusalem? No. Any large brooks? No.

  “Gentlemen,” said Pilate impatiently, “I ask you to think: are there water sources of any kind within, say, a twenty-mile radius of Jerusalem?”

  “Well, there are pools and cisterns, of course.”

  “Living water: springs, rivers.”

  “Yes,” one of the older Judeans recalled, “there are several springs near Bethlehem. They converge on an age-old pool out there—Solomon may have built it—but Herod added two more reservoirs to supply his nearby castle, the Herodium. That’s also where he’s buried.”

  “Well, since Herod obviously has no further need of the water, why don’t we tap it for Jerusalem?”

  “Wait,” an architect from Caesarea interjected. “Are these pools higher or lower than Jerusalem?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  The next day they visited the site, which lay some seven miles southwest of Jerusalem. Pilate and his party found five springs in the area, while a sixth, further in the hill country, had been tapped by Herod and connected to the pool system by an aqueduct. Though badly in need of repair, Herod’s watercourse would constitute an important segment of the aqueduct Pilate began envisioning.

  The whole scheme hinged, of course, on whether the pools were higher or lower than Jerusalem. Locating a point near Bethlehem from which both the reservoirs and Jerusalem were visible, they sighted on the temple through a hollow viewing cylinder and noted the angle described with a plumb line to the ground. Then, maintaining the same angle, they turned the tube toward the pools and tried to sight them. If blue sky or even the reservoirs themselves were sighted, then the area would be level with or lower than Jerusalem, making an aqueduct impossible.

  The sighting showed a section of beige-colored terrain, broken by out-croppings of white limestone. Pilate looked through the tube, then sighted over it. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “I think it can be done.” The section observed was on a hillside well below the lowest of the three pools.

  They hurried over to the limestone scars and calculated the vertical distance between them and the lowest pool. “About fifty-three or fifty-four cubits,” an engineer called. This was eighty feet higher than the temple.

  “Is that enough fall for water flow?” asked Pilate.

  “Oh, yes. If our aqueduct meanders, we might have no better than a 500-to-1 drop, but that will move water.”

  “A fall of one cubit for every five hundred in length?”

  “Yes.”

  The next days were spent in verifying the preliminary survey and planning a route for the aqueduct. This proved difficult, since the terrain between the pools and Jerusalem was a natural obstacle course of hills and valleys, not to mention the town of Bethlehem, which lay directly across the proposed route.

  “We’ll have to tunnel under Bethlehem,” Pilate decided.

  The planned aqueduct would resemble a stone-lined ditch over much of the route, hugging the contours of the hills ranging toward Jerusalem and, therefore, winding and twisting until its length became twenty miles—to cover a direct distance of only seven. And then there was the final engineering problem of crossing the Valley of Hinnom into the city. The architects planned a traditional Roman arched aqueduct for this segment in order to “bridge hell,” as Pilate fondly put it, once he learned the significance of Gehenna.

  After reconditioning Herod’s equally long upper aqueduct, which fed the pools, the entire water system with all its windings would extend more than forty miles. This length, plus the construction necessary within Jerusalem to prepare it for the happy onslaught of water, would make Pilate’s proposed aqueduct very expensive. Preliminary estimates showed that the costs would run several times that of the Tiberiéum in Caesarea. His problem, apparently, was less mechanical than fiscal.

  The financing for construction projects in the provinces regularly came from local taxation, but there was no provision in the budget for Judea to
cover an expense of this magnitude. Extra taxes would therefore be necessary. Pilate consulted with his fiscal officer and asked him to jot down the various taxes which Jews paid to Rome.

  He was handed this list, with brief explanations:

  tributum soli—land tax

  tributum capitis—head tax

  the annona—levy of grain and cattle to support the military

  the publicum—customs duties, salt tax, sales tax, etc.

  “Do you know which tax the Jews hate most?” the fiscal agent asked Pilate.

  “The tribute, most likely.”

  “No. The publicum, because it’s farmed out to the private tax-collecting companies.”

  “Oh, yes, our friends the publicans, always collecting more than their quota and pocketing the surplus. Rome should never have resorted to that disgusting system…This is the whole tax picture, then?”

  “Yes, our side of it. But the Jew must also pay his synagogue tithes and temple dues.”

  “It seems fairly oppressive, this total tax load.”

  The officer told Pilate that in Gratus’s administration, Judean resentment had spilled over into an appeal to Tiberius to lower the tribute, but he had not granted the request.

  Against this background, Pilate thought it futile to increase taxes just when the Jews wanted them lowered. There was also a question of ethics. Was it justifiable to add to the tax load of someone in Caesarea for a local improvement in Jerusalem? The money, Pilate decided, would have to come from another source.

  Toward the close of his stay in the Jewish capital, he invited Joseph Caiaphas and Rabbi Helcias to the Herodian palace in order to discuss the proposed aqueduct. As Pilate laid before them the architects’ routing and structural plans for the water system, the Jewish leaders seemed pleased. The high priest admitted that the shortage of water was particularly noticeable at the temple, the focus of activity in Jerusalem.

  Then Helcias, the temple treasurer, added, “But I hope, Prefect, that the aqueduct can be built without increasing taxes. In fact, we look for a reduction.”