For the space of the evening, they are proud and independent again.
The children huddle together under heavy blankets, the weave rough against bare skin, scratchy and comforting at the same time. Wide-eyed to fight off sleep, they absorb the story of how the Galileans rose in rebellion against the upstart King David. And rose again against his son Solomon, who tried to force Galilean men into labor on his temple in Jerusalem and destroyed the northern temples in Shechem and Beit-El. They rose up and separated, and created a true, Israelite monarchy, the royal house of Omri, with a great capital of its own and a temple built in ivory.
Children and adults alike nod in recognition, knowing what comes next, for kings and priests are never to be trusted. Always, they'll betray the people of the land, the peasants. And so arose Elijah, the great prophet of the north, from the wild, ultra-austere sect of Rechabites. Elijah, who came from the poor and spoke for the poor. Who lived by the Jordan River and was fed by ravens. Who wore animal skins and fed on carobs—the fruit of the honey locust tree. Who bested the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel and brought down rain. Who heard the voice of God on top of the sacred mountain:
"And behold, the Lord passed by," chants the story-teller. "And a great wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord."
And together, they respond: "But the Lord was not in the wind."
"And after the wind an earthquake."
"But the Lord was not in the earthquake," they reply.
"And after the earthquake a fire."
"But the Lord was not in the fire."
And then a pause before the softly spoken final line they all know is coming, the one they mouth silently along with the teller: "And after the fire a still small voice."
There is never any tiring of tales of Elijah. How he multiplied the wheat and oil. Raised children from the dead. Cured leprosy and blindness. Foretold the future. Smote the waters of the Jordan River with his sacred mantle and parted them, just as Moses parted the waters of the Red Sea. And at the end of his life was swept up in a whirlwind and mounted to heaven in a chariot of fire, leaving behind his mantle for his successor, Elisha, to wear.
Open-mouthed children slip into sleep, comforted by the familiar stories as children still are comforted by stories they know well, insisting on the same words, the same inflections, the same pauses, the same places where they can join in—always wanting the stories to be told anew even though they know them by heart, word for word.
And among the adults, many stare into the fire and wonder not if, but when there will be another Elijah, another prophet living in the desert in rags, eating the fruit of the honey locust tree. Another to whom God will talk, who will create food where there is none and make the crippled walk and raise the dead. Another who will ascend in glory to heaven.
This is how the biblical stories were told in Maryam's world, long before they were committed to papyrus or parchment, and longer still before the invention of printing. There was no distinction between entertainment, history, identity, and faith; the stories fulfilled all these needs simultaneously. And they were recited out loud because only a fraction of the elite could read, let alone write. In the villages of Galilee, nobody could.
Maryam was illiterate, as was everyone she knew. Illiterate, but not ignorant. As Claude Levi-Strauss has pointed out, in a culture such as ours that tends to equate the two, it would be more accurate to say "without writing."
Without writing, then, but with powers of memory that we have all but forgotten are possible. It seems ironic that the more literate we become, the more memory fades. Our dependence on the written word means that once something is committed to writing, we no longer need to know it by heart. We can refer back to it, look it up, read it. Essentially, writing replaces memory.
"Recite!" the angel commanded Mohammed at the start of the Koran. And Mohammed recited what the angel told him. He had to, since he didn't know how to write. The Koran—qur'an, meaning "recitation"—would not be transcribed until after his death. His followers learned the Koran by heart, as students still do in Islamic seminaries, and that phrase "by heart" is appropriate: they took it into their hearts.
Four centuries earlier, the central text of rabbinic Judaism began the same way. Mishna means "repeat," for this is how its texts were learned, even after they were committed to writing. Manuscripts were icons rather than books, too cumbersome and too precious to actually read. Like Mohammed's early followers, so too early rabbinical students relied largely on memory. And people still do so in many parts of the world, where what anthropologists call "the oral tradition" is alive and well.
Some years ago, I spent a starlit night in the sand dunes of the northern Sinai munching on giant olives and listening to Beduin elders recite long narrative poems about the stars and their legends. They had learned these poems—"stories," they called them—from their own elders, who had learned them from theirs, through the generations. The tellers competed genially with one another, and the listeners were part of the performance, reciting a line here, nodding in appreciation there, rather like jazz fans listening to a particularly inspired improvisation on a well-known theme.
But what was most striking was how biblical these Beduin elders sounded. At the end of the twentieth century, rhythms, images, indeed whole phrases echoed across thousands of years, defying the multiple religious and nationalist rifts in Middle East culture. "Those who have ears to hear, let them hear," Jesus says many times, a phrase I first heard in Arabic from a Beduin telling the legend of Saint Onuphrios, the fourth-century hermit who heard the voice of God echoing through the mountains of Sinai.
For these traditional Beduin, the heard word was as alive and fertile as it was two thousand years ago. They would have understood the legend that has Mary conceiving through the ear, or John writing that "the word was made flesh . . . full of grace and truth." In the oral tradition, words are heard, not read, and the hearing itself gives them a mythic power.
In a literate society, it is easy to forget the imaginative connection that comes with the spoken word. And yet we do still recognize it. When we hear the kaddish prayer for the dead or the call of the muezzin or an African American spiritual, we respond to the rhythm of the voice. We know that to fully appreciate the power of "I have a dream," you need to hear the voice of Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the voices of those listening to him rising in assent. Words come to life in the hearing.
This is why we still speak of great story-tellers, not great story-writers. The tellers are the ones who carry the story. Indeed, there were no single authors of the stories we now know as the Bible, no copyrighted, fixed texts. As linguist William Whallon says, "they were all part of the once undifferentiated collection we now know as psalm, proverb and prophecy. They belonged to the culture as a whole." And until they were written down, they changed not only with each teller, but also with each telling.
The Bible came into being "from your lips to God's ears," as the old Jewish saying has it. What was heard from human lips would eventually become holy writ. But in Maryam's time, the contents were still fluid. Which books were in or out, which stories, which language, all depended on who was doing the telling.
Some might consider this a painful way to think of our holy books. For others, like myself, it's a liberating way. We can see them anew as living traditions instead of canonized documents. Stories alive in the mouth and in the ear found new life with each telling. They tumbled and danced through the joint lives of tellers and listeners, binding them together.
Biblical stories are still told like this, as I found out one fine spring day on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee.
I had been trying to find a way into the remains of a sixth-century Byzantine monastery built over the ruins of Magdala, home of the "other" Maryam. A high stone wall enclosed the compound, but there seemed to be no gate. Fierce barking from the other side of the wall put paid to any notion of climbing over, so I followed the wall down toward the la
keshore, bushwhacking through tall reeds until I came to a section that was only shoulder-high. In the center of it was a chained gate. I yelled hello, and a man appeared behind the wall, the first person I'd seen all morning.
He was sixtyish, wearing a keffiya, and all three large dogs behind him were growling ferociously, hurling themselves against chains that were far too long and looked like they would break under the strain at any moment.
I greeted him in Hebrew-accented Arabic and he returned the greeting in Arabic-accented Hebrew, but before I could utter another word, he said, "You can't come in. Nobody can come in. Those are my orders."
"From whom?"
"From the Latins. The ones in Capernaum."
"The Franciscans?"
"Those ones."
A scent of mint came toward me on the breeze, and I saw that the whole compound was overgrown with the stuff, run wild and rampant.
"What is this place?" I asked, just to keep talking.
He shrugged. "They say it was where this rich woman once lived. A long time ago. They say her name was Maria Magdalena. But that's all I know."
I gave him a quizzical look. He stared blandly back, not giving anything away. And so we introduced ourselves, he on his side of the wall, me on mine. His name was Khiyr, and he was the caretaker.
And after we'd talked for a while about what it was like for a Moslem to work for "the Latins," he said, "If you like, I can tell you something else about Maria Magdalena."
"Please," I replied.
"She had this man friend, and one day he heard a very wise man speaking. This man's name was Jesu. You've heard of him?"
I nodded, and reassured, Khiyr continued.
"This man friend, he liked what he heard Jesu saying, so he left Maria Magdalena and went to follow him. Now she was very sad because her man friend had left her. So she went to the man called Jesu and said, 'How can you take my man friend away from me and leave me alone like this?' And Jesu looked at her and said, 'Come join us too.' And she did. And that's all I know."
That last phrase alone said there was more to come, but that I'd need to be patient to hear it. So over the shoulder-high wall, we went on talking about other things—how all Khiyr's children had grown up and left, how things had changed in the nineteen years he'd been here. His wife came out of the caretaker's shack to hang some washing on the line, smiled bashfully, then disappeared again. The dogs had long calmed down and were lying peacefully in the shade. And finally Khiyr offered to tell me more about Maria Magdalena.
"You remember I told you Jesu said she could come join him and his followers? Well, the other followers were not very pleased with this, because she wasn't"—he paused to find the right words—"a good woman, if you know what I mean?"
He looked at me carefully to see if I understood, and to make sure he hadn't offended me. Satisfied that it was all right, he continued:
"So the other followers said, 'How can you let a woman like this join us?' And do you know what Jesu did?"
He waited for me to shake my head, and then went on.
"He picked up a stone off the ground"—and here Khiyr bent down as though to pick up a particularly heavy stone—"and he said, 'Let any of you who has never done something bad in his life take a stone and hit me with it.' " And Khiyr struck the side of his head with his empty hand to make the point, and with the hand still to his head, looked at me searchingly.
"And nobody did hit him," he continued, "because you know, we've all done something bad at least once in our lives, every one of us. Haven't we?"
Under those searching eyes, even as part of me was stunned and delighted by the twist he'd given the familiar tale of the adulterous woman and "He who is without sin let him cast the first stone," another part of me thought of the bad I had done, and I blushed and said, "It's true, we have."
Somehow, in that moment, we forgave each other with no need to know what we were forgiving. A Moslem had told a Jew an ancient Christian story, and now that it had been gratefully accepted in the spirit in which it was told, he smiled and said, "Maybe, if you don't tell anyone, it will be all right if I open the gate and let you in . . ."
II
Maryam has never been to the great temple in Jerusalem. True, there will later be stories that she was raised from age three inside the temple, but for now, it is safe to assume that she has never been farther than fifteen miles east of Nazareth, down through the narrow defile of the Arbel gorge to the Sea of Galilee.
The old men are the ones who go, the ones too bent with age to do the hard work of the fields. They fulfill the vow to make the pilgrimage once in their lifetime, as Moslems still do today to Mecca. And they're honored afterwards as the Moslem hadji is still honored today.
They are travelers returned from an exotic land, bringing back stories and news. Things seen with their own eyes, heard with their own ears. The villagers gather around them late into the night, dazzled at their descriptions. Walls so high that they touch the sky! Marble so white that it blinds the eye! Gold flashing like fire in the midday sun!
But it's the water that impresses the Nazarenes most: the very idea that water can be wantonly, flamboyantly, wasted—a sign of riches far beyond gold and silver.
"Water everywhere!" the old men exclaim, withered hands moving expansively as though the dry hills and dusty landscape around them were running with moisture. Huge pools of water for pilgrims to wash in, purifying themselves before entering the temple courtyards. Water running in gutters along the flagstone floors. Tall trees of water in the courtyards of the king's palace—for how else explain fountains to those who have never seen them? And exotic trees that do nothing but give shade: no fruit, just shade!
Maryam, like all the villagers, is stunned at the very idea of so much water that you can immerse your whole self in it. True, in wet winters, pools form where there's a depression in the hills, and she'll rush into them fully clothed with the other children, laughing and splashing through the goats and sheep lined up at the edges. But they know that the water will disappear in a week or two, and the depression revert back to caked earth and dust.
And as for the idea of running waters . . . She gasps as the old men describe the aqueduct bringing water to the temple from miles away. Water running high through the air on columns and arches of stone? Impossible, surely, yet the old men swear on all that is sacred that they have seen it with their own eyes. Huge man-made pools collect winter rainwater from the surrounding hills, they say, and then the aqueduct funnels it to the great temple. There, it runs through gutters and sluices to wash down the altar, supply the immersion pools, feed the fountains and trees of the king's palace, and fill the giant cisterns beneath the temple.
"No spring, like ours?" someone asks, and the old men laugh. Jerusalem has a spring, to be sure—the Silwan spring, at the lower reaches of the city—but that's not for drinking. That's reserved for healing, as befits a holy city. The sick and crippled are borne on litters down narrow steep-stepped alleys to the covered gallery over the spring, with the center of the roof open to the sky. Here, the old men say, the water washes away what ails you. Carries it off and bears it back down into the earth. And they swear by their fathers' houses to the miracles they have seen at Silwan: a man who got up from his litter and walked, a girl whose eyes cleared and could suddenly see, a leper whose skin became clear and soft.
"Miracle water," the old men call it, and villagers for whom water itself is often close to a miracle nod in agreement.
For peasant villagers, to offer water was a sign of respect. You washed the feet of an honored visitor when he entered your home, for instance. Moslems today still wash their feet before they enter a mosque. And pilgrims still kiss the stone at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where Mary Magdalene washed the feet of Jesus. So what if the woman in the gospels of Luke and John was not the Magdalene, and it was not in Jerusalem? A peasant custom has been elevated into sacred image, and the dry-land respect for water has been preserved.
Na
zarenes could only be stunned by Herod's aquatic lavishness. No matter that the water in those ritual pools in Jerusalem was filthy from all the dust and grime of the bathers. Only the faintest ripple disturbed the surface as fresh water from the aqueduct trickled in, but this was enough to make it "living water"—running water—as the temple required. Its purpose was ritual, not hygienic, and this was what impressed the villagers more than anything: that water could be used for no human purpose at all, only for a godly one. The water itself was a sacrifice to Yahweh.
But the truth is that all that water in the Jerusalem temple was not just for ritual purification. Or to satisfy the thirst of the thousands of civil servants and cultic personnel who served and serviced the temple. Or even to be displayed in lavish abundance in palaces and gardens, impressing peasant rubes from the north. It was needed for the most practical of purposes: to wash away the blood.
Sacrifice is a messy business. The temple air was thick not only with incense, but with the stink of drying blood, the acrid smoke of burning animal flesh, and the stench of rotting entrails. The cries of animals being slaughtered—frightened birds, lambs and calves bleating and bellowing in alarm—rang through the colonnades. The priests were filthy, their robes spattered with blood spurting from slashed throats and stained with fat spitting from the eternal fire on the altar. They were flushed and sweaty with heat and exertion. In the midst of all the noise and commotion, they went about their work in grim-faced silence, their movements as coordinated as a meat-packing line.
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