Desire of the Everlasting Hills

by Thomas Cahill

  The souls of the just are in the hands of God,

  and the torments wrought by evil-doers

  can never touch them again.

  It is true that they appeared to die—

  but only in the eyes of people who cannot see

  and who imagined that their passing away was a defeat,

  that their leaving us was an annihilation.

  No, they are at peace.

  If, as it seemed to us, they suffered punishment,

  their hope was rich with immortality;

  slight was their correction, great will their blessings be.

  God was putting them to the test,

  and has proved them worthy to be with him;

  he has tested them like gold in a crucible,

  and accepted them as a perfect holocaust.

  In the hour of judgment they will shine in glory,

  and will sweep over the world like sparks through stubble.

  They will judge nations, rule over peoples,

  and the Lord will be their king forever.

  Those who trust in him will come to understand the truth,

  those who are faithful will live with him in love.

  Only grace and mercy await them—

  all those whom God, in his compassion, has called to himself.

  “KNEW YOU NOT POMPEY?” exclaims Marullus, a tribune of the people6 and supporter of the popular Roman general, at the start of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The Jews, who by the summer of 63 B.C. had lived under the heel of successive conquerors for more than half a millennium, knew neither Pompey nor his Rome. They were about to learn.

  The Alexandrine empire, significantly weakened by its division into parts, was, by the early first century B.C., ripe for plucking. The energies of the founder had long been squandered in ceaseless competition among the leading dynasties, led by ever less distinguished scions. The Hasmoneans, who were but an instance of local resurgences throughout the lands of Alexander’s conquests, were particularly successful in establishing first a measure of local rule, then gradually something approaching independence—though it should not be forgotten that much of what they accomplished was at the expense of Jewish identity. In the end, they were even affecting Greek names.

  The Jews of Palestine7 knew almost nothing of Rome but its name and that it was a newly expanding power, situated in far-distant Italy. Though Judas had entered briefly into alliance with the Romans, First Maccabees makes clear how vague and naive the Jews were about these Romans: “Now Judas had heard of the reputation of the Romans: how strong they were, and how well disposed toward any who made common cause with them, making a treaty of friendship with anyone who approached them.” Yeah, sure. Judas also thought he had an alliance with the strange, militaristic, xenophobic Greek city-state of Sparta, the North Korea of its day, because for some reason the Jews imagined they were kin to the Spartans.

  Rome, the far-distant, was in its expansiveness drawing near. Having begun in the seventh century at a bend in the Tiber as a settlement of Latin-speaking farmers, it came to master the Italian peninsula by a combination of military acumen and what it thought of as moral superiority. Romans were, by their own lights, a frugal, plainspoken people who put security first, prosperity second, and pleasure far down the list. They had nothing in common with the sybaritic, effeminate East that had so attracted Alexander; and while they admired the Greeks for their unparalleled intellectual accomplishments, they wanted no truck with their effete self-indulgence and inability to form a cohesive society. Despite Alexander’s formal uniting of the known world, the traditions of the independent Greek city-states, each with its cherished and eccentric sensibility—democratic, indifferent, philosophical Athens, for instance; fat, artistic, fornicating Corinth; brutish, lockstep, homosexual Sparta; erudite, airy, esoteric Alexandria—were too ingrained to be dislodged. If all this made for variety, excitement, and life, to the self-denying Romans such quirkiness invited centrifugal fragmentation; and it was no way to run a society or an army, both of which require the upholding of inviolable laws of consistency, uniformity, and order—the preeminent Roman virtue. The Greeks thought they were the most intellectually discerning; and the Romans, arriving late to the fountains of self-conscious culture, were happy to hand them the palm in this regard. But the Romans prided themselves on having crucial talents that the Greeks, for all their complexity, lacked: realism and practicality. By the time their general, Pompey, invaded Palestine, the Romans had come to believe that, since they knew best, they would rule best. To implement their purposes, they had created a military machine that, like a universal steamroller, could flatten the world and re-create it according to Roman specifications.

  Pompey was an old warhorse who had put down a rebellion in Spain, helped extinguish the slave revolt led by Spartacus, and served as consul in 70 B.C., having pressured the Roman Senate into giving him this highest executive honor even though he was only thirty-six at the time and had held none of the required prior offices. Thereafter, he was allowed much leeway in his successful campaign to rid the Mediterranean of pirates (piracy being just the sort of thing Romans found intolerable) and to settle matters in Pontus on the south shore of the Black Sea, where the local king had a misconceived ambition to rule the Balkans and Greek Asia. While Pompey was putting paid to that bit of business, civil war broke out most opportunely in Judea between the forces of two opposing candidates for the kingship—brothers and Hasmoneans—giving Pompey the excuse to intervene in the year 63. Judea, as well as all of Palestine, Syria, and North Africa, would remain in Roman hands till it would fall to the Muslims in the seventh century of the Christian era.

  Pompey was one of three eminent Romans—the others being Crassus and Julius Caesar—whom Caesar would shortly bring together to form the First Triumvirate, whose public mission was to solidify Rome’s political order (always an admirable Roman objective) while furthering Caesar’s unannounced political ambition to become Rome’s dictator. Pompey took Jerusalem after a three-month siege and entered the Holy of Holies—which the high priest alone was fit to enter, and that but once a year. You can almost hear Pompey’s gruff “What the hell d’ye suppose they have in there?” as he, mounting the steps of the sanctuary, noted the growing alarm of the priests. But, his curiosity satisfied, he otherwise left the Temple alone. It would fall to the well-named Crassus to plunder its treasury to finance his military campaign against the Parthians. The Parthians (today they are Iranians), however, were tough nuts whom the Romans never cracked. Apart from the Scots, they were the only people ever to stop the Romans, who were made to halt their eastward expansion at the Euphrates, where Crassus was cut down at ancient Harran, from which a man named Abraham had once set out on the journey of a lifetime.

  Crassus’s quaestor (or quartermaster), one Cassius, became Rome’s proconsul for Syria (and, incidentally, Judea), soon after which civil war broke out in Rome between Caesar, who had added the conquest of Gaul to his résumé (and immeasurably increased his fame by writing a book about it), and sour old Pompey, who’d had enough of Caesar’s strutting about. Pompey lost and was assassinated by the Ptolemies on fleeing with his army into Egypt. Caesar followed and quickly found himself outnumbered and in trouble, from which he was rescued—by Jews! Hyrcanus II, the Hasmonean priest-ruler whom Pompey had set in place, persuaded the Jews of Egypt, who were considerable in number, especially in Alexandria, to fight for Caesar. Antipater, influential king of the Idumeans, a mixed population of Jews and Arabs who lived south of Jerusalem between the Judean hills and the Negev desert, sent troops and supplies. Caesar, triumphing once again while carrying on a torrid affair with Cleopatra, the teen queen of Egypt, was grateful for such surprise support. He gave Hyrcanus the official title “ethnarch of the Jews”; to Antipater he gave Roman citizenship, exemption from taxation, and the procuratorship of Judea. Obviously, he valued Antipater’s contribution more highly than Hyrcanus’s, and he was right to do so: the Idumean king was the real power
propping up the Hasmonean priest. Antipater was a crafty desert chieftain who had converted to Judaism and had ambitions far beyond the desert. His son Herod was appointed about this time military prefect of greater Syria and would soon become a Hasmonean by marriage.

  Just three years after his victory in Egypt, on the Ides of March 44 B.C., Caesar was assassinated by conspirators who included Cassius, the proconsul for Syria-Judea. The following year, Caesar’s great desert supporter Antipater was murdered; and Mark Antony and Octavian, Caesar’s nephew and adoptive heir, defeated Caesar’s murderers at Philippi, where Philip of Macedon had long ago begun his conquests. The Parthians entered Jerusalem, elevating their own candidate as king and high priest. But Herod escaped to Rome where, with the help of Antony and Octavian, he was declared by the Senate to be “King of the Jews.” Hard fighting lay ahead; but the Parthians were pushed back, and by the summer of 37, after a successful three-month siege of Jerusalem, Herod could claim his land as well as his title. He would sit for thirty-three years on the Judean throne, dying in 4 B.C., a year or two after the birth of Jesus.8

  Mark Antony divided the emerging Roman empire with Octavian (and—for a short while—Lepidus, another of Caesar’s allies). Mark Antony’s share was Asia, which included Egypt; and it was there he met Caesar’s old mistress Cleopatra, with whom he fell desperately in love, quite forgetting his marriage to Octavian’s sister. In his ardor, he began to make presents of vast territories under his command to Cleopatra and her children, leading Pascal to remark many centuries later that “had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter [it was quite long], the whole face of the world would have been changed.” But however decisive details such as nose length may be to the outcomes of history, time had run out for Cleopatra. Octavian prevailed upon the Senate to declare war on this unwholesome twosome; and the once-stalwart Roman tribune and the sultry Egyptian queen were defeated at the sea battle of Actium, after which each committed suicide. Octavian returned to Rome, now the only claimant to the authority of Caesar. A grateful Senate, filled with his supporters, greeted him as Rome’s deliverer, the man who had restored its precious peace and order. Octavian, who had already assumed the name of Caesar on his adoption, now received his new name of Augustus (“Exalted One”) and the title Imperator (“Commander-in-Chief”), which was soon to have the force of Emperor.

  The year was 31 B.C. The Roman Republic, with its elaborate consultative mechanisms of Senate, consuls, and tribunes of the people, was drawing to its close. Though no one had quite noticed as yet, the empire had been born, and it would grow ever more extensive and absolute in the years to come. Octavian Caesar Augustus would reign for forty-five years. In 31 B.C., when he was barely thirty, no one could be sure what kind of ruler he would make; but Augustus would prove a proper emperor—an excellent administrator, a politician of labyrinthine cunning, difficult, delusional, and cruel. Those who knew him hated and feared him. He was approaching his fourth decade on the imperial throne when a male baby of uncertain paternity was born to a rural Galilean girl in the emperor’s province of Syria, in the bothersome subdivision the Romans called Judea.

  The Waiting Game

  By the year of Jesus’s birth, the Jews, long familiar with Greek language and culture, had adopted many of the ways of their overlords for many reasons—to survive, to do business, to fit in. They had even, like the Irish in the wake of the nineteenth-century potato famines, abandoned their ancestral language, the Hebrew in which all their sacred books were written, and adopted the common Aramaic of the eastern provinces. This shift in language gives us a better sense of their dispossession than almost anything else. What does it take for a whole people to give up their language, their mother tongue, the original nourishment received along with breast milk, the medium of their hopes and dreams? Does it not mean that their common hopes and dreams have already been shattered and that they have seen their inheritance so devalued that it no longer counts for much of anything?

  Of course, beneath the surface of such a devastating situation, there live the dreams no one wishes any longer to give name to, the dreams we can no longer recount even to ourselves. These dreams had been expressed by the prophets, who initially had warned the people that their apostasies would bring catastrophe, then subsequently tried to comfort them with visions of a time when God would come to save them from their miseries and grant them peace, prosperity, and mastery once more under a salvific leader:

  “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people,”

  saith your God.

  “Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem

  and cry unto her

  that her warfare is accomplished

  and her iniquity is pardoned.” …

  The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,

  “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!

  Make straight in the desert

  a highway for our God.

  Every valley shall be exalted,

  every mountain and hill laid low,

  the crooked straight and the rough places plain.

  And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed

  and all flesh shall see it together

  for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

  Drop down dew, ye heavens from above,

  and let the clouds rain down the Just One.

  Let the earth open and the Savior blossom forth.

  Thus the anonymous prophet, known to scholars as Deutero-Isaiah (or the Second Isaiah) and whose prophecies are collected in the last third of the Book of Isaiah. The historical Isaiah, whose oracles are collected in the other two-thirds—the first thirty-nine chapters—wrote in the late eighth century B.C., before the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians. Deutero-Isaiah, writing at the end of the Babylonian Captivity, does not wag his finger as his predecessor did but caresses his people and weeps with them, speaking in chapters 40–55—often called the Book of the Consolation of Israel—about a coming era of fulfillment. But even the original Isaiah was full of mysterious prophecies of comforts to come:

  Behold, a virgin9 shall conceive

  and bear a son

  and shall call his name Immanuel [God-with-Us].

  The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light;

  they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them

  hath the light shined.…

  For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given:

  and the government shall be upon his shoulder:

  and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God,

  The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

  And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse [progenitor of the Davidic dynasty],

  and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:

  And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,

  the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

  the spirit of counsel and might,

  the spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord.

  One of Isaiah’s most memorable passages is his vision of the Peaceable Kingdom:

  The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,

  and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;

  and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;

  and a little child shall lead them.…

  And the suckling child shall play on the hole of the asp,

  and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.

  They shall not hurt nor destroy

  in all my holy mountain:

  for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord,

  as the waters cover the sea.

  So often these prophecies read like daydreams. A time is envisioned in which all wrongs shall be righted, the land once promised by God to his people shall know everlasting peace, and a second David, anointed by God himself, will sit upon the throne of Israel. This figure, the Anointed One, is called Messiah in Hebrew, Christos in the Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures made for Jews living in
cities throughout the Greek world who could no longer comprehend Hebrew.

  This longing in the midst of present suffering for an impossibly happy outcome is a phenomenon by no means limited to Jews or even to the ancient world. Who hasn’t had such feelings? But beyond the Jews, such longings were almost always thought delusions. The Sibyl of Cumae, a shadowy figure who lived in a cave near the Greek city of Neopolis (modern Naples) about 500 B.C., prophesied doom and death and the cyclical nature of all reality. “As time pursued its cyclic course,” she is made to say in Book 3 of the Sibylline Oracles, “the kingdom of Egypt arose, then that of the Persians, Medes, and Ethiopians, and Assyrian Babylon, then that of the Macedonians, of Egypt again, then Rome.” The succession of empires is without end, all part of the turning of the wheel of time and the infinite procession of worlds (the thought of which made young Alexander weep because he had not conquered one). The message of the Sibyl, who continued to reappear in later periods, haunting various shrines and caves throughout the Greco-Roman world, seems to have been that, though some times are better and some worse, there can be no permanent safety. Peace will be followed by war, prosperity by poverty, happiness by suffering, life by death. This was indeed the constant message of all ancient literature and its principal insight into human existence.

  We actually have no unadulterated Sibylline Oracles left. The perspective of the fragment just quoted (with its two mentions of Egypt) gives indication of having been composed by a Greek-speaking Egyptian, and other portions of the book betray its provenance in Alexandrian Jewish circles of the second century B.C. The work is a pastiche of pagan and Jewish attitudes, alternating between cyclical cynicism and prophetic expectation. But whereas Greeks and Romans and all other ancient peoples tended to see history as an ultimately empty succession of triumphs and tragedies—and human beings as evanescent phenomena appearing briefly on the surface of historical events—the Jews believed that history had a beginning (in God’s act of Creation) and would have an end and that each human being, created by God, had an individual destiny to fulfill and was not merely a momentary glimmer on the ever-recurring waves of fate. And as in so much material written by Jews in the disappointing centuries after the Babylonian Captivity, there is even in this peculiar collection of oracles the assertion of a promised Messiah, a king sent from God: