(It is of negligible loss to posterity that Sharlappius's account of Antipater's later years and Herod's early years is lost to us entirely. Sharlappius's Tales of Classical Perversion was discovered only due to a sack of Palmyra by early Muslims attempting to levy the destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin. Again, it is thought that this is a mere volume of a much larger work encompassing similar tales of classical Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Egypt, Carthage, and Persia. By cutting into one of the stone columns an unnamed Islamic personage discovered a pristinely preserved text within its marble. There are, however, various sections obscured by various cuts and stains of blood; implying that whomever initially carried the text out from the city was gravely wounded.
It is highly probable that these missing tales of the volume in question deal with lessons of statesmanship imparted by Antipater to his son, Herod the Great; with Herod's trial before the Sanhedrin for which he appeared with armed escort, of dealings between Herod and his Roman patron: Sextus Julius - uncle of Caesar, Herod's betrothal to Mariam - granddaughter to yet another Hyrcanus Hasmonean who had usurped Antipater, and Herod's subsequent poisoning and usurpasion of said Hyrcanus after Hyrcanus poisoned his brother and mutilated his ears so that should he escape he could not be Herod's high priest.
As stated in the forward to this volume, due to subtle differences in the writing style, it is highly probable that Sharlappius is a portmanteau of ancient texts collated into a larger wisdom volume; perhaps a group of writers writing simultaneously in conjunction with one another. Some texts were of writers aspiring to the sublimity of classical epic, others to a biblical cadence, still others by classical dramatists of particularly mediocrity, all of them exaggerating the historical record for dramatic license and derivative of previous texts to point of plagiarism, none of particularly distinguished aesthetic quality nor historical value; but of some historiographic value as document of how particularly mediocre writers of their day approached historical subjects.
- Dr. Raginmund Westenbach - Free University Berlin, 1952)
4. It was in the general worldview of Julius Caesar that he saw open liberality as of great benefit to his autocratic aims. It is to be doubted that he had any specific opinion of Jews, but he welcomed Jews to his court as he did all peoples whom he saw of use, and treated those Jews of detriment with the ruthless vengeance to which he meted every person of impedimence. The consistency of his approach, the open embrace of allies and pitiless retaliation to enemies was to his great benefit against Pompey's unpredictable caprice; which, in turn, was of great benefit to Rome, as the virtue of Caesarean imperitration saved their Empire from fortune's ever repositioning chaos, even as it was to the detriment of the continually more sombered peoples subsumed within Rome's ever expanding borders.
5. As a young man, displaced from power, his father dead, defeated after yet another battle with Hasmoneans; Herod the Great, penurious and derelict, fleeing yet another capture, contemplating suicide in the desert; a desert vision spoke directly unto him:
'Herod. Herod the Great. I am the Lord your God. The God of Lot, the God of Ishmael, and the God of Esau. Go unto Egypt, speak with Cleopatra, receive her benefaction, and avenge all brothers of disfavor.'
In contemplative response to his vision, thus spake Herod:
"It is this fate of the world which I solemnly welcome to make final reckoning unto the Judean peoples to ignominious providence, consigning them in wrathful duplicity to beyond the lychgates of Sheol. Were Idumea to die one thousand million deaths, fate would be more merciful than one generation more's endurance of Israel. The God of Israel is the God of death, and death shall die from Palestine's vengeance. "
6. And Herod visited Cleopatra in Alexandria, and Cleopatra offered Herod generalship in a war against the Partheans, who supported the claim of a third Antigonus, whom with Parthea's assistance handed Herod opprobrious defeat:
Herod: "I need shit." Cleopatra: "You just got shit." "I need more shit than this." "You're not getting more." "Like fuck I'm not, you need me and you don't even motherfucking know how badly." "Give me one good reason I shouldn't have you drowned in a pool of slave urine." "Do you have any idea how bad the Parthean threat is?" "Bad enough to hand you your ass." "The Partheans wouldn't beat fuckall if they didn't have help from a peoples you've never heard of." "What peoples are those schnorrer?" "These people from the far east called the Chinese whose country alone is bigger than Rome's empire." "Fuck you." "They've got yellow skin and slits for eyes." "Don't be racist." "You make slaves of every brown person to your south and you care about being racist?" "We have ambassadors from every court in the classical world and you're feeding me bubbemeicehs about how there's a country larger than Rome subsidizing an emperor whose most famous deed is fucking himself in the ass with his boutique drinking horns?" "Look at these pictographs here." "What am I looking at?" "You're the ones with the pictographic script you tell me!" "Dennis! Look at this script." (Court scribe Dennis comes over.) Herod: "This is Chinese calligraphy." Tell me. Does this or does this not look like the pictograph for war?" Dennis: "I suppose there's a certain resemblance." Herod: "And does this not look like the word for Egypt?" "Not particularly." Herod: "It's so obvious!" Cleopatra: "You're an idiot." Herod: "And this looks like your pictograph for Jews." Cleopatra: "You're telling me a bunch of black lines slashing through other lines look like our picture language?" "Look at it!" "And you're telling me that there's a people so far across the world that their whole country alone is as big as Rome's empire didn't evolve to have pictographs with words that mean something completely different from what they mean to us?" "So you admit there's a resemblance!" Dennis: "There's a certain resemblance." Cleopatra: "Shut the fuck up Dennis!"
7. To quell potential fears amid the Alexandrine court of Chinese invasion, Cleopatra put Herod upon a ship bound for Rome to visit Marc Anthony and beseech him a Roman legion.
And a tempest did toss the ship upon the waters and the ship was like to be broken.
"Fuuuuuuuck. Why are you sleeping?" "What's going on!" "We're in a tempest. Pray to your god." "What god?" "Don't you have a god?" "I have two gods." "Pray to them both." "One of them probably wants me to be in this storm." "Then jump off the fucking ship." "I'm not jumping off the fucking ship!" "If you're responsible for this storm then jump off the ship." "I'm not fucking responsible." "Then fucking pray." "What will praying do?" "You don't want to pray, then join the crew and take a fucking hammer and some nails to mend the broken hull." "I'm not helping, I used to be a king." "Fuck you, and I'm Cyrus the Great. Take this shit and fucking work." "I'm fine with working! I'm just royalty and don't know how to use this. What do you call it? A hammer and nail?" "Just take it. You club the nails into the wood with the hammer."
8. And Herod did take the hammer and nail, but no sooner did he put them into his cassock's pocket than the storm's wave did toss into the sea its passengers, and all did perish in the sea but Herod, who was swallowed by an whale. And Herod dwelt inside the whale for three days, and still he had the hammer and nail, and upon the third day Herod said: 'Behold, I have lived upon the fish swallowed by the great whale, but I am like to die in the belly of such a beast.' And Herod did hammer a nail into the whale's stomach, whereupon the whale did vomit, and did extrude Herod and his fish. And Herod did find himself near to the coastline of Sicily and the city of Lampedusa, and an Sicilian fishermen did see Herod from his boat and called to him: "Behold, thou art the likeness of a man sent from the sea by Neptune. Let me not entertain angels unaware." And the fisherman did take Herod into his boat and did ferry him to the peninsula of Italia, where Herod did sojourn to Rome by foot.
9. Once again penurious and derelict, Herod came to Rome and was recognized immediately by a rich Roman Jew, one named Flavius Jacobus. "King Herod! As the Living God breathes! You were at my eldest son's bar mitzvah at Khirbat-Kharazza!" (Herod stares at him...) "Don't you remember me? We smoked Hashish behind the Wadi as my concubines...." "Oh! You were the one who beat the shit out of the Rabbinical student looking for a handout for his Yeshiva." "Yes!" "I knew I could count on finding a friend here!"
And Herod went to the house of Flavius Jacobus, who clothed him in tunics with golden raiment and fed him sausage and mussels, and Herod took Jacobus's daughter Doris Flavia as his wife.
10. Herod and Jacobus sued for a meeting with the Imperial Senate to present the evidence of a Chinese invasion.
Jacobus: "We need a lot more parchment than this." Herod: "I don't have any more." "Like fuck you don't. I know a guy." "What does a goy do for us?" "No, a guy." "He's Jewish?" "I dunno, he's a guy." "You don't know if he's a goy?" "He's a guy, I'm not paying him to daven maariv." "Well we all know goys, even in Judea." "No, I know a guy." "What guy?" "A guy who does parchments." "What parchments?" "All parchments." "No, what do you mean he does parchments?" "He knows how to handle them." "What do we need to handle parchments for? I can write, you can write..." "This guy, he knows how to fake parchments from any part of the world." "Even this part of the world? I've never seen manuscript like this before and I don't even know if this part of the world exists." "When he's done with it he'll make that part of the world real to everybody who sees the parchment." "And he's a goy?" "YES! YES HE'S A GOY!" "Ok then." "WHAT DOES THAT MATTER?" "I just thought you said goy not guy." "If you want to do business in Rome, you gotta know a guy for everything." "But the guy doesn't have to be a goy?" "NO HE DOESN'T HAVE TO BE A GOY!" "Would you rather he be a goy?" "I would rather he knows what he's doing." "Do Jews around Rome have the reputation for knowing what they're doing?" "Nobody has a better reputation than us." "So why are you getting a goy?" "BECAUSE THIS GUY'S GOOD!" "But if Jews can do it better..." "Nobody does it better than this guy!" "What's he doing?" "I've been trying to tell you for five minutes! He's going to copy your script and make forty-nine more pages of it." "How's this goy going to do it?" "Fuck if I know, if I knew we wouldn't need a guy." "So the goyim know how to do this script and we don't?" "THIS goy knows how to do the script!" "So what would happen if a Jew figured out how to do a script like this, would you take your business to him?" "No Jew does, and it's best we don't, because if we get caught, we'll be crucified." "I wish I was a goy right now..."
And Jacobus took Herod to his gentile, and the gentile fabricated forty-nine separate parchments of Chinese-like calligraphied script, and together with their evidence, they approached the consular bench of Antony.
11.
No comments:
Post a Comment