Mary of Nazareth

by Marek Halter

  “Barabbas clearly doesn’t think so,” Miriam murmured, shaken.

  “Barabbas!” Yossef exclaimed mockingly. “You know him better than we do. He’s spoiling for a fight! He’s so impatient. And most of all, he wants to dazzle you. Who knows? He might even become king of Israel just to conquer you!” Yossef’s irony turned to laughter.

  Miriam lowered her eyes, swaying with exhaustion and stunned by what she had just heard. Was Yossef telling the truth? Could she have been wrong about everyone’s reaction?

  “You wasted a good night’s sleep for nothing,” Yossef said in conclusion. “Come inside the house. Halva will take care of you.”

  YOSSEF was telling the truth.

  As she was finishing drinking a bowl of hot milk, Joachim came looking for her. His eyes bright, he whispered in her ear, “I’m proud of you.”

  Joseph of Arimathea appeared, smiling. Beneath his kindliness, there was a genuine concern. “Joachim told me his daughter was no ordinary girl. I don’t think he’s wrong, and I don’t think it’s just his father’s pride.”

  Miriam looked away in embarrassment. “I’m a girl like any other. I simply have more of a temper. You mustn’t take what I said last night seriously. I’d have done better to keep quiet. I don’t know what came over me. Perhaps it was because I was annoyed by Giora, or because Barabbas…”

  She did not finish her sentence. The three men and Halva all laughed.

  “Your father told me that you learned to read and write here in Nazareth,” Joseph of Arimathea said.

  “Very little…”

  “Would you like to spend some time with some female friends in Magdala? You could learn more there.”

  “Learn? Learn what?”

  “To read Greek and Roman books. Books that make you think, like the Torah, but in a different way.”

  “I’m a girl!” Miriam exclaimed, hardly able to believe her ears. “A girl doesn’t learn from books.”

  Her reply amused Joseph, but not Joachim, who muttered that if she started talking like her mother, Hannah, she really would make him feel ashamed.

  “It sometimes happens that a woman’s brain is worth more than most men’s,” Joseph of Arimathea declared. “The women in Magdala are like you. It’s not so much that they want to be scholars, more that they’re eager to understand and to do something useful with their minds.”

  “And besides, you have to think about the days to come,” Joachim said. “We won’t be able to go back home to Nazareth for a long time.”

  Miriam hesitated, and looked at the children clinging to her friend’s tunic. “Precisely. Halva needs me here. This is not the moment to leave her alone.”

  Halva was about to protest when cries came from outside. They recognized Obadiah’s voice before he burst in through the doorway.

  “That’s it!” he cried, trying to catch his breath. “They’re in Nazareth!”

  “Who?”

  “The mercenaries, damn it! Barabbas was right. This time they’ve come for you, Joachim!”

  For a moment, they were thrown into disarray. They urged Obadiah to tell them what he knew. He had been sleeping under the low branches of an acacia on the road to Sepphoris, in the company of Barabbas and his companions, when he had been woken by the noise of marching soldiers. It was a Roman cohort, followed by at least a century of mercenaries, heading in the direction of Nazareth. They were marching quickly in the dawn light, still carrying the torches they had used to light their way in the dark. Behind them came mule-drawn carts filled with firewood and jars of oil.

  “Firewood and oil?” Joseph of Arimathea said in surprise. “To do what?”

  “To set fire to the village,” Joachim replied in a toneless voice.

  Obadiah shook his head. “Not to the village. To your house and workshop.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Barabbas asked us to go and wake everyone and warn them that the Romans were coming. But when the mercenaries arrived, they went straight to your house.”

  “Lord God!”

  Yossef squeezed his friend’s shoulder. Joachim broke away and rushed to the door, but Obadiah stopped him from going out.

  “Wait! Don’t be a fool, Joachim, or they’ll take you.”

  “My wife is there!” Joachim cried, pushing him away. “They’re going to hurt her!”

  “I keep telling you, don’t do anything stupid,” Obadiah said, pressing his small hands to Joachim’s chest.

  “I’ll go,” Yossef said. “I’ll be quite safe.”

  “Will you all just shut up and listen to me!” Obadiah cried. “Nothing will happen to your wife, Joachim, she’s on the way here with some of my friends! We got her out of the house and I ran ahead to tell you. And to get away from her. My God, that woman can really scream!” Obadiah smiled to overcome his annoyance.

  “Where’s Barabbas?” Miriam asked. “If he stays in the village, he could get arrested.”

  Obadiah shook his head, avoiding her eyes. “No, no…He…He didn’t come back with us. He said you didn’t need him anymore. He must be nearly in Sepphoris by now.”

  There was a brief silence. Joachim, pale-faced, whispered, “This time, it’s over. My house is gone. My tools are gone….”

  “We couldn’t do anything,” Obadiah said softly. “Barabbas was right: The mercenaries were bound to come back sooner or later.”

  “What about Lysanias?” Yossef asked suddenly.

  “The old madman who was working with you? He almost got himself killed. He didn’t want to leave the workshop. He screamed even louder than Joachim’s wife. The neighbors almost had to knock him out to keep him quiet.”

  “It isn’t wise to stay here,” Joseph of Arimathea said.

  “That’s for sure,” Obadiah agreed. “The mercenaries will stick their noses in every corner, just to scare the whole village.”

  “You can hide in my workshop,” Yossef suggested.

  “No, you’ve taken enough risks,” Joachim declared firmly, going to the door. “Joseph of Arimathea is right. As soon as Hannah gets here, we’ll leave for Jotapata. My cousin Zechariah the priest will take us in.”

  “My friends and I will go with you, Joachim.”

  By way of reply, Joachim, who was standing waiting for Hannah to come along the path, put his hand on the back of Obadiah’s neck in a fatherly gesture.

  Miriam’s eyes clouded over. Standing beside her, Joseph of Arimathea said gently, “Your parents are in good hands, Miriam. I think it would be best if you came with me to Magdala.”

  PART TWO

  MIRIAM’S CHOICE

  CHAPTER 9

  “MARIAMNE ! ” Miriam cried. “Don’t swim too far out….”

  It was a pointless warning, and she knew it. Rachel’s daughter Mariamne’s joy in living was contagious. She was also beautiful to watch, swimming with all the vigor, all the carefree eagerness, of youth. The water slid over her slender body like transparent oil, and each time she moved, there were flashes of copper in her long hair, which spread around her like living seaweed.

  It was two years since Joseph of Arimathea had brought Miriam to Rachel’s house in Magdala. Immediately on her arrival, Rachel had declared that the newcomer was so like her daughter Mariamne, they might almost be sisters. The women in the house had agreed. “It’s really amazing,” they had cried. “You’re as alike as your names: Mariamne and Miriam!”

  It was meant kindly, but it wasn’t true.

  Of course, the two girls had certain characteristics in common, quite apart from their physical appearance. Yet Miriam could see only the differences between them: differences that were not due only to age, even though Mariamne, the younger of the two by two years, still had all the passion and fickleness of childhood.

  There was nothing, not even the difficult initiation in languages and other knowledge, that Mariamne was unable to transform into pure enjoyment. This hunger for pleasure could not have been a greater contrast with Miriam’s austerity. Rac
hel’s daughter was born to love everything about the world, and Miriam envied her this power of wonderment.

  When she looked back over her own life, she could find nothing similar. During the first months she had spent in the shadow of her young companion’s exuberance, she had often felt her own common sense, determination, and stubbornness weighing heavily on her. But Mariamne had demonstrated that she had enough joy in her for the two of them, which had only made Miriam love her even more. A friendship had soon sprung up, which even now helped Miriam to support the somewhat prickly character the Almighty had bestowed on her.

  And so the happy, peaceful, studious days had flown by on this beautiful estate whose courtyards and gardens stretched as far as the shore of the Lake of Gennesaret.

  Rachel and her friends were no ordinary women. They had none of the reserve usually demanded of daughters and wives. They talked about everything, laughed over everything. Much of their time was devoted to reading and conversations that would have horrified the rabbis, convinced as they were that women were only meant for maintaining the home, weaving, or, when they were well-to-do, like Rachel, an idleness as arrogant as it was senseless.

  Ten years previously, her husband, a merchant who had owned a fleet of ships plying between the great ports of the Mediterranean, had been stupidly knocked down and killed in a street in Tyre by a Roman officer’s wagon. Since then, Rachel had used her considerable fortune in an unexpected way.

  Refusing to live in either of the luxurious houses she had inherited from her husband, in Jerusalem and Caesarea, she had settled in Magdala, a town in Galilee two days’ walk from Tarichea. Here, it was easy to forget the hustle and bustle of the great cities and ports. Even on the hottest days, a gentle breeze blew in from the lake, and all day long you could hear, through the constant birdsong, the water lapping on the shore. Depending on the season, the almond trees, the myrtles, and the caper bushes were a riot of color. At the foot of the hills, the peasants of Magdala assiduously cultivated long strips of wild mustard seed and rich vineyards lined with sycamore hedges.

  Built around three courtyards, Rachel’s house had the sobriety and simplicity of the Jewish buildings of bygone days. Cleared of the opulent clutter usually found in Roman-style houses, several rooms had been transformed into study rooms, their bookcases bulging with works by Greek philosophers and Roman thinkers from the time of the Republic, manuscript scrolls of the Torah in Aramaic and Greek, and texts of the prophets dating back to the Babylonian exile.

  As soon as she was able to, Rachel invited the authors she admired to the lake. They would stay in Magdala for a whole season, working, teaching, and exchanging ideas.

  Joseph of Arimathea, defying the traditional Essene mistrust of women, was a frequent visitor. Rachel greatly appreciated his company and always gave him a warm welcome. Miriam had learned she secretly gave financial support to the Essene community in Damascus, where Joseph not only shared his wisdom and his knowledge of the Torah, but also taught the science of medicine and relieved the sufferings of ordinary people as best he could.

  Above all, though, Rachel had opened her doors to those women in Galilee who desired to educate themselves. She had to do so with a great deal of discretion; if the suspicions of Herod and the Romans—as well as their spies—were to be feared, the narrow minds of rabbis and husbands were a no less formidable threat. Many of those who crossed the threshold of the house in Magdala, mostly wives of merchants or rich landowners, did so on the sly. Sheltered from the disgust that men felt for educated women, they threw themselves with abandon into learning to read and write, very often passing on their own taste for knowledge and passion for thought to their daughters.

  And so Miriam had learned the kinds of things that in Israel were normally reserved for a few men: the Greek language, political philosophy. With her fellow students, she had read and discussed the laws and rules governing justice in a republic or power in a kingdom, and had pondered the strengths and weaknesses of tyrants and sages.

  Rachel and her friends suffered just as much as she did from the yoke of Herod. The moral and material humiliation, as well as the spiritual decay, of the people of Israel were growing worse every day. These misfortunes were a constant subject for debate—debate that all too often ended with the terrible admission that they were powerless. They had no weapons against the tyrant but their own intelligence and stubbornness.

  If the rumors were to be believed, Herod was becoming ever more dangerously insane and seemed determined to drag the people of Israel down with him into his personal hell. Every day, his mercenaries were crueler, the Romans more contemptuous, and the Sadducees of the Sanhedrin greedier. Yet Rachel and her friends dreaded Herod’s death. What was there to stop another madman, a younger one from the same degenerate line, from seizing power?

  True, Herod seemed to be trying to assassinate his entire family. Already, his wife’s relatives had been decimated. But the king had distributed his seed generously throughout his life, and there were many who could lay claim to his lineage. So there was a strong likelihood that even when the tyrant finally got his just deserts, the people of Israel would not be delivered from his evil.

  Miriam had recounted how Barabbas had hoped, but failed, to start a rebellion that would not only overthrow the tyrant, but also liberate Israel from the Romans and wipe the Temple clean of Sadducee corruption.

  Even though the stupid quarrels among the Zealots, the Pharisees, and the Essenes saddened the women of Magdala, they still could not resign themselves to the idea of violence as a means to attain peace. Did not Socrates and Plato, whom they admired, teach that wars led to more injustice, more suffering for nations, and the ephemeral rise of conquerors blinded by their own strength?

  But did that mean that they simply had to wait for God to intervene? If the men and women of Israel could not deliver themselves from misfortune, did they have to bide their time until the Lord, through the intermediary of the Messiah, was able to free them?

  Most of the women thought so. Others, including Rachel, believed that only a new justice, born of the human mind and the human will, a justice founded on love and respect, could save them.

  “The justice taught by the law of Moses is great and even admirable,” Rachel would say, provocatively. “But we women are well placed to see its weaknesses. Why does it lay down that men and women are unequal? How could Abraham have given his wife Sarah to Pharaoh without being condemned for such a sin? Why is a wife always dust in her husband’s hands? Why do we women count for less than men? There are as many of us as there are of them, and we work as hard. Moses chose a black woman to be the mother of his children. So why does his justice not treat all men and women on earth as equals?”

  To those who objected that this was an ungodly idea, that the justice of Moses could only apply to the nation chosen by Yahweh in his covenant, Rachel would reply, “Do you think the Almighty wants happiness and justice for one nation only? No! That’s impossible. That would reduce him to the level of those grotesque divinities worshipped by the Romans or those perverse idols venerated by the Egyptians, the Persians, and the northern barbarians.”

  This would be greeted with protests. How could Rachel dare to think such a thing? Had not the history of Israel, from its beginnings, demonstrated the bond between God Almighty and his people? Had not Yahweh said to Abraham, “I have chosen you and I will establish a Covenant with your descendants…”?

  “But did Yahweh say that he would grant his justice, his strength, and his love to no other nation?”

  “Do you want us to stop being Jews?” a woman from Tarichea said, in a shocked voice. “I’d never be able to follow you. It’s inconceivable….”

  Rachel shook her head. “Has it never occurred to you that the Lord might have made a covenant with us only as a first stage? So that we could then reach out our hands to all men and women? That’s what I think. Yes, I believe Yahweh expects us to love all the men and women in this world, without exception.”<
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  Arguing long into the night, until there was no more oil in the lamps, Rachel would try to demonstrate that the obsession of the rabbis and the prophets with preserving their wisdom and justice purely for the benefit of the people of Israel might well be the reason for their misfortunes.

  “So what you want,” another woman mocked, “is for the whole universe to become Jewish?”

  “Why not?” Rachel retorted. “When a few sheep break away from the flock, they become weaker and risk being devoured by wild beasts. It’s the same with us. The Romans have understood that. They want to impose their laws on all the nations of the world in order to remain strong. Our ambition, too, should be to convince the world that our laws are more just than those of Rome.”

  “That’s quite a contradiction! Didn’t you just say that our justice is not just enough, since it leaves aside us women? If that’s the case, why should we want to impose it on the rest of the world?”

  “You’re right,” Rachel admitted. “Before anything else, we need to change our laws….”

  “Well, you certainly don’t lack imagination!” a laughing woman cried, easing the tension. “Changing the brains of our husbands and our rabbis, now that’s something harder to bring about than the fall of Herod, I can tell you.”

  FOR days, Miriam had listened to them debate like this, their moods alternating between the greatest seriousness and riotous laughter. She rarely intervened, preferring to leave to other, more-experienced women the pleasure of confronting Rachel’s sharp mind.

  But the debates never deteriorated into quarrels or sterile squabbles. On the contrary, the clash of opposing views was a lesson in freedom and tolerance. Rachel, modeling herself on the practice of the Greek schools, had decreed that no woman was to suppress her opinions, nor to condemn the words, the ideas, or even the silence of her companions.