This is the record of Sharlappius Avramus of Palmyra, Roman citizen descended from the people of Sinai, who endeavors in the following volume to tell the history of the Judean decline from the height of Maccabee power to the fall of Western Rome so that time shall not dim the shame of deeds perpetrated, nor the heroism of those who fought against them. It is a story of a perpetually old land forever made new by holy acts offset by acts the height of ignominy. It is a record of deeds famous and infamous, and deeds obscure and obscured by time. It is offered to the glory of Christ and his empires on earth as they are in Heaven, in whose service all deeds are free from disgrace.
Amen
I. nom-de-guerre Hyrcanus
135 BC, 619 Ab urbe condita, 3626-7
1. John the Hasmonean, nom-de-guerre Hyrcanus, youngest brother of First Liberator Judah the Hasmonean nom-de-guerre Maccabee, born mid-war after his father’s death, was left behind to mind affairs of state while his family journeyed to the Wadi of Nahal David for a wedding uniting the House of Hasmonea with House of Abbus, where Simon Maccabee’s daughter was to marry Ptolemy-ben-Abbus, Greek-appointed governor of Jericho. Within a day, John received notification of his brother’s assassination.
2. Simon Thassi Maccabee: High Priest and Third Liberator of the Hasmonean Revolution, Conquerer of Gaza, Jaffa, and Yavneh, Besieger of Dor, defender against the Medians, ally of King Demitrius II Necator of Greece, defender against Demitrius’s brother Prince Trypho, older brother of the First Liberator; was mid-toast at his own daughter’s wedding when his throat was slit and his vassals murdered.
3. Simon’s daughter, Hannah, became both wife of Ptolemy, and also his prisoner, along with Simon’s other two sons, Eliezer and Matthias, and the matriarch of the Hasmonean dynasty: Miriam Solomonia, widow of High Priest Matthias of Modi’in.
4. Simon was the third of Matthias’s sons to die in office as High Priest and Secretary General of the Hasmonean Revolutionary Party - a position called ‘Liberator’ among the populace, and the second Liberator to be assassinated. Upon his brother’s assassination, John the Hasmonean adapted the name John Hyrcanus Maccabee, Fourth Liberator of the Hasmonean Revolution. A mere few hours after his installment as Liberator, an attempt was made on his life, whereupon the Fourth Liberator immediately slew the assassins with his own fists. No more few hours after the attempt on Hyrcanus, an army raised by Ptolemy attempted to breech the walls of Jerusalem. Ptolemy-ben-Abbus mounted the walls himself along with Simon’s children: Hannah, Eliezer, and Matthias, and the Hasmonean matriarch: Miriam Solomonia, Widow of Matthias - all four of whom were bedecked in chains. Ptolemy immediately set about beating his Hasmonean prisoners in view of the Jerusalemites with pieces of bone heated in a fire. Upon her flaying, Miriam Solomonia uttered the following speech to her son and the people of Jerusalem:
5. “Oh, my son, Johannes Hyrcanus, who chose the name in war of Hyrcania, land of the wolves lain to ruin by Mithridates of Ponthus, the Anatolian scourge of the Medians, Achaemenians, Seleucids, and Parthians! Hold fast your intent! Our torture is but a shadow on your torment watching Ptolemy inflict his agony upon us. Succumb not to fear nor to the Ptolemaic lacerations! Such moments are to us as but titilations on the soul, which belongs to the Holy One! Blessed be His name! Pour out your wrath on the nations that kingdoms that do not acknowledge our name! You and only you are the Lord’s Chosen Defender, Ruler of the Judeans, Fourth Liberator of the Revolution, appointed for your task by the Holy One Without End! Never acquiesce! Never concede! Tremble not! Quaver not! For the Lord is one and He is with you!”
6. Whereupon the Hasmonean matriarch and her grandchildren fell through their irons to their deaths upon the hallowed Jerusalem ground; and the people of Jerusalem, repulsed by their flaying and cherishing the honor of the Revolution, massacred the entire army of Ptolemy-ben-Abbus.
II. The First Aristobulus and Antigonus
Fall 129 BC, 625 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3633
1. The death of Antiochus VII Sidetes was followed by precisely what Antiochus the Pious predicted to Hyrcanus. Antiochus’s two sons, also named Antiochus, plunged Sellucid Greece into civil war, which quickly became civil massacre, as two rival brothers claimed the throne in quick succession, each alleging the other a Pretender.
129-109 BC, 625-645 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3433-3453
2. Upon reaching the throne, each son encountered further insurrection from their supporters. Many of the Greek Court, having supported Antiochus’s older son, Antiochus VIII Grypus, rebelled quickly against him after installation so they might support a claim of Grypus’s own son, Sellucus VI Epiphanes. Grypus’s younger brother, Antiochus IX Cyzicenus, encountered insurrection from his mother and lover, Cleopatra Thea, previously wife to both Antiochus VII Sidetes and his predecessor, Dmitrius II Nicator. During ten years that followed, each would overthrow the other multiple times every year and occasionally two would attempt to lead as co-rulers, only for collaboration to collapse immediately.
3. Hyrcanus, seeing the Greek territory that formerly belonged to Israel, set about reconquering parts of Syria, including the entire Madaba region across the Jordan River, the city of Shechem - sometimes referred to as Nablus, and the Mountain of Gerizim. He made war further against the Idumeans, Samaritans, and Cuthians - a tribe of Babylonian colonists settled upon the Jordan River’s West Bank. His greatest achievement is widely regarded as the ‘Sack of Sebastia’, the Idumean capital, which Hyrcanus’s army laid to cinder.
108 BC, 646 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3454
4. The true achievement at Sebastia belongs however to the generalship of Hyrcanus’s two eldest sons: Judas, nom-de-guerre Aristobulus, and Matthias, nom-de-guerre Antigonus - hereafter known by their war names, who so incinerated the city that starving survivors were said to feast upon deceased flesh for twenty years thereafter. Without consultation of Hyrcanus, the sons insisted upon forcing the conversion of all Idumeans with all consequent circumcisions. When Hyrcanus heard of their action, he admonished them to ‘beware the leaven of conversion.’
5. We must pause to mention a story, possibly apocryphal, of an Idumean boy who came upon the desert convoy of Aristobulus and Antigonus to beg. The boy explained that for three weeks he’d lived only upon his own leavings. Aristobulus and Antigonus explained they would give food if he pledged himself to the Jewish faith and seal his covenant with a circumcision. The boy replied ‘I will do first, understand later.’ This boy’s name was Antipater, who later became Antipater the Idumean, founder of the Herodian Dynasty, Governor of Idumea, valued advisor and minister to a pendulum of Hasmonean Liberators, all the while positioning his issue to inherit a Judean client state controlled by Rome rather than Greece.
104-103 BC, 650-651 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3458
6. Aristobulus, elder of Hyrcanus’s two favored sons, became Fifth Liberator upon his father’s death. Immediately he ordered imprisonment of his mother and three other brothers in the darkest cells of Kishle, the still infamous prison of Jerusalem. Two of the other brothers were never seen again and within a fortnight his mother, Alexandra Jannea, died of starvation. The historian Eusebius Polymocretes of Aleppo writes that Aristobulus burned his father’s will because Hyrcanus left the office of Liberator to his wife, their mother. According to Eusebius Polymocrates, Hyrcanus was greatly distressed with Idumea’s forced conversion, for it brought into Judea an enemy swearing revenge from within; and fearing the ruthless stupidity of his sons he secretly machinated to pass them over.
7. Both Flavius Josephus and the Book of Maccabees refer to the ‘tender passion’ of Aristobulus for Antigonus, and tell also of Aristobulus’s cerebral hemorrhages, after which Aristobulus required Antigonus to be conquering general in his stead; from which Antigonus’s wife planted the seed of a labyrinthine plot to assassinate Antigonus. However, Eusebius Polymocrates states that Aristobulus was not married, and that such tender passion was not only consummated, but that Aristobulus was no general at all but rather a poet/musician in the manner of Nero, and divided the Liberator’s job between that of civil governance and High Priest so that Antigonus might be simultaneously named High Priest, General, and the Liberator’s consort; and therefore the Pharisees were scandalized by their Liberator’s Hellene licentiousness and corruption. According to Eusebius Polymocrates’s Chronicle of Antique Infamies, Antigonus returned to Jerusalem to a parade of triumph, and immediately afterward was stabbed by incensed Pharisee conspirators in the Temple. When Antigonus saw what became of his brother and consort, he stabbed himself next to Antigonus’s body so that their blood might mingle in death.
III. The Labours of Alexander Yannaius
1. Two sons of Hyrcanus were never heard from again. Eusebius Polymocrates posits they were killed not by Aristobulus, but by Aristobulus’s successor, third son Alexander, nom-de-guerre Yannaius, who having heard tale of Greek civil wars of family intrigue, greatly feared rival claims to succession.
2. By Book of Maccabee’s narrative, Alexander married Salome Alexandra, who was also wife to Aristobulus before his tragically premature demise. While Eusebius Polymocrates mentions Salome Alexandra, he does not mention marriage to Aristobulus. In the Chronicle of Ancient Infamies, Salome Alexandra is described as an insatiable older temptress who took young Alexander Yannaius as lover even as she married his older brother, and when Alexander was imprisoned, machinated for his freedom under the belief that Alexander would marry her and make her his queen were the unstable Aristobulus to fall from his throne. By Eusebius Polymocrates’s account, Alexander Yannaius did not marry Salome Alexandra, but rather Chana Yocheved, lady of virtue from the Rabbinical House of Shetah, an indication to posterity of return to Maccabean rectitude after the Greek licentiousness of his brothers.
The Annointing Ceremony of The Sixth Liberator, Alexander of Hasmonea, nom-de-guerre Yannaius, of the Maccabee Dynasty: 103 BC, 626 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3634
3. “Repeat after me. Baruch...” “Baruch...” “Ata...” “Ata...” “Adona”“PROVE YOURSELF!” (a man of prophetic shouts among the guests, general scandalized whispers) “Adonai” “Adon”“PROVE THYSELF O LIBERATOR OF DUST!” Alexander: “Oh good, another false prophet....” “THERE IS NOT ONE MACCABEE THAT DOETH GOOD! NO NOT ONE! PROVE THYSELF WORTHY OF OFFICE NOW FOR WHICH ALL MACCABEES ARE UNFIT!” (scandalized gasps and yells) “REPENT THEIR MISDEEDS! REPENT OR GREAT EVIL WILL BESET US!!” Alexander: “Ladies and Gentlemen, we seem to have one of Jerusalem’s many meshuggoyim who think they alone carry the word of God. If our guards can just see to escorting him..” “HEAR ME PRETENDER! ISRAEL HAS BECOME UNCLEAN IN EASE! PROVE THYSELF WORTHY FROM THE FIRST MINUTE OF THE FIRST DAY OR FACE FATE FAR WORSE THAN THY BROTHERS!” (The false prophet runs to the bimah, lunges at the chalice of office containing oil meant for Yahweh’s Holy of Holies) “TAKE AWAY THIS CUP OF HOLY OIL FROM THE ERRANT WEED!” (Alexander grabs the cup in defense, the oil spills on Alexander Yannaius’s breastplate, all present issue consternated gasps.)
4. (other men in the crowd) “That oil was meant for ELOHIM’S SACRED MENORAH!” “This is proof Alexander is no Liberator.” “The prophet is right. A true anointed would never spill.” “It wasn’t his fault!” “The prophet said he must prove himself from the first minute or else horrible evil would befall us, and in the first minute the Liberator spilled...!” “But the prophet caused the grail to spill!” “If he were the true anointed he would have stopped the prophet!” “But Alexander fulfilled his office, there’s nothing which says he has to use ALL the oil to light the Menorah.” “If he were a true servant why would the prophet decry him?” “Perhaps the prophet is false.” “If the prophet were false why would Hashem allow him to speak at a holy ceremony?” “There are many corrupt people here. Why does Hashem permit them to be at this ceremony?” “All men in this temple are holy or else they wouldn’t be allowed.” “If all men in this temple were holy why is the prophet permitted to say that the Liberator is not holy?” “Are you saying that Hashem is not holy?” “Are you saying that I’m not holy?” “Are you comparing yourself to the Holy One on High?” “ASTONISHMENT!” “CURSE!” “REPROACH!” “EXECRATION!” “GONIF!” “KADOKHES!” “KHAZER!” “KHALERYEH!” “NAFKEH!” “KORVEH!” “PROTSHAK!” “PUTZ!” “SHAAAAAAAAAAYGETZ!” (the assembled crowd breaks into a fistfight, which goes into the street, which leads to more fighting, which leads to deaths in the streets, which leads to still more, and soon all of Jerusalem riots).
5. The Jerusalem riot raged on for six weeks, and Alexander had no choice but comb the world for hearsay of gentile soldiers to set down the insurrections, for his predecessor Aristobulus had not paid the Judean army for the entire year of his reign, and the soldiery willingly disbanded (more on that anon). He therefore settled upon the Isle of Rhodes, where was said to live the world’s greatest mercenary soldiers, trained upon the Peninsula of Italia. And near the heels of Rhodes’s most famous ruin, Alexander Yannaius guaranteed the price of 30 shekels each of gold and founding a settlement at Stratonos Pyrgos, upon the Mediterranean coast halfway between Acre and Jaffa. 300 of the world’s greatest soldiers sailed back with Alexander, and within three days of landing in port, 6,000 Jerusalemites were slain.
6. The soldiers of Italia effected such terror that each of their subjegations caused another rebellion. Over the next ten years the soldiers of Italia besieged rebellions in Jerusalem, Emmaus, Hebron, Jericho, Lower Beit-Horon, Bethany, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Capernaum, and even the ancestral Hasmonean seat of Modi’in. With each new revolt, Alexander returned to Rhodes to promise more spoils for more soldiers to subdue the Judean peoples, who seemed all too happy to sacrifice seven of themselves for every mercenary. By such time of Alexander’s victory, 50,000 more Jews were slain.
93 BC, 636 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3644-5
7. After ten years, a negotiated peace was procured by Alexander Yannaius’s probable brother-in-law, Rabbi Shimon-ben-Shetah. The surviving Italian soldiers were so wealthy and so maddened by the Judean people that upon the resumption of peace, they simply went back to Rhodes. There was great pomp and ceremony at the signing at which Pharisee rebels were welcomed from all around Judea, and each local general signed the document, and yet at the final signature, General Z’vulun of Zelah refused to sign until one last term was procured: Alexander’s death.
8. At that moment, a herald arrived to the hall with announcement that 43,000 Greek soldiers crossed Benjaminite territory, and they proclaim Z’vulun of Zelah as King of Judea. All the rebel forces met the Greeks at the Battle of Sheol. 21,000 Judean soldiers perished upon the field, and Alexander Yannaius was reduced to pitiable wandering. In Jerusalem he happened upon his own funeral, and when he protested that he was Alexander Yannaius in the flesh, none believed him.
95 BC, 638 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3646-7
9. Amid his wanderings he came at last to the one true rebel stronghold left in Judea, the Hill People of Ephraim. They took pity upon their king and organized a force of 6,000 with spears of only the most fragile flint. And these six thousand pushed out all the Greek soldiers with all their tens of thousands in all their finery, their polished weapons of metal, their shields and breastplates, their swordplay, their chariots.
10. And thus said Alexander the Hasmonean, nom-de-guerre Yannaius, High Priest and Sixth Liberator of the Maccabee Revolution, butcher of Jerusalem, ignominious vanquished at the Battle of Sheol, liberator then slaughterer of Gaza, scourge of Emmaus, Hebron, Jericho, Lower Beit-Horon, Bethany, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Capernaum, and Modi’in:
“6000 shepherds of Ephraim have effected all that which the soldiers of Italia could not. What profit has a nation in all its conflict when the least worldly inherit the earth for which all worldly men strive? What profit it a liberator to work for his people when by liberating he sentences them to die? I have striven for Israel yet I am now the butcher of all Jewish history. No enemy to Judea could slay all that I have slain; not Nebuchadnezzar nor Shalmaneser nor Alexander nor Antiochus nor not Pharaoh himself. By my reign’s end, shall I have killed every Jew by accident? Wherefore means the end to all I have done?
I am the only liberator for whom righteousness illumined my every deed, yet all my deeds are bloody. Sinfulness was with my predecessors, yet goodness followed them all the days of their lives. My father Hyrcanus was called ‘Holy John’, yet he imprisoned me for his favored sons, then let his favored sons burn the Idumeans as though in ovens and circumcised them into Judaism’s covenant from the virtue of their incestuous sheets. He swore a blood oath with the Greeks not to attack after Antiochus the Pious’s death yet the pious king was not dead a month before he took the Heights of Golan; military necessity he said - Simon before him breaking treaties to colonize Jaffa, Jonathan before him killing an entire bridal procession of 300 so he might seize the treasure. Judah before him, a fanatic like his father, willing to burn all the beneficial works of Greece and kill any tempted to call it progress in the name of their Yahweh, for whom all horror is perpetrated without blemish.
I endeavor to liberate and they call me pretender. I intend to defend and they call me vanquished, I intend to unite what they divide. My sole purpose was to secure Judea, and at the crossroads of all paths: ancient and modern, the Jewish people choose uncertainty.
400 years of slavery, 400 years of exile, civil war upon civil war; history written in innocent blood by the goblet. The very golden ages of our people are murder: the burning of Sodom, Joseph dreaming famine, Moses slaughtering at the Golden Calf, Joshua massacring all the tribes of Canaan, Saul cleansing the world of Amalek, the children of David and Solomon leading their people to extermination for their own glory. Is this our covenant? Is this the nature of Yahweh for whose worship so much is laboured? And what did the Greeks try to give us but paths from out this two thousand years of darkness?
What would be lost by our loss? Whom among all the earth shall mourn us? What suffering yet untold may be prevented by ending us all? My deaths are mercy compared to what has come and what may come yet. And so perforce we must declare war without reconciliation on the Divine Seat, and shake its very throne.
For there is one god, and His name is Death.”
Alexander then conceived a plan with which he could affect the destruction of the Jewish people for all time.
11. In the northern town of Metulla, bordering upon Seleucid Greece, came reports of insurrection with the aid of Greek weapons and soldiery. It is probable there was no rebellion, but rather the subsidy of a local watch and police. Nevertheless Alexander chose to believe it rebellion. He came with his soldiers to Metulla, and within the city walls he watched as all the men of Metulla were put to the cross, Jew and gentile alike; and as the men of Metulla groaned their weight, slaves of all genders administered sodomous services to Alexander Yannaius and fed him pork.
12. Hearing tale of Metulla’s barbarous fate, the Canaanites of Acre - a northern city called by themselves as Ptolemais, were in a panic, and they beseached an Egyptian prince, notorious for his vile savagery, Ptolemy Lazarus (later Pharaoh “Ptolemy the Savior”), to save them from the same fate. Lazarus was then at civil war with his mother Cleopatra III, and very glad for chance for conquest to the North. He promised no less than 50,000 troops to protect Acre, but when he came he put the entire Jewish population to the sword.
13. Lazarus then marched upon all the port towns of Judea: Shikmona, Certa, Dor, Tel-Michal, Jaffa, Yavneh, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and in all towns he put Jews to the same. Against all protestations, entreaties and suits, Alexander Yannaius did nothing.
14. In panic, the town of Gaza opened its doors to Ptolemy Lazarus so that they might be granted quick and painless death, and for their cooperation, Lazarus announced temporary clemency, and if Alexander Yannaius agreed to meet with him, the Jews’ of Gaza sentence would be commuted to lifetime slavery. But Alexander Yannaius did not respond.
15. Ptolemy Lazarus sued a second time for meeting, Alexander Yannaius did not respond. Ptolemy Lazarus sued a third time, Alexander did not respond. And so, with minimal delegation from his army, Lazarus made the journey to Jerusalem himself so he might deliver the Egyptian suit for a meeting personally. When Ptolemy Lazarus arrived in Jerusalem, Alexander Yannaius had no choice but to meet.
16. And this is when Lazarus finally revealed his own plan: to conscript every Jew of Israel under Egyptian yoke, town by town, and bring them back to Egypt as conscripted soldiers to battle against his mother, Cleopatra III. And then Lazarus revealed his full motive: to reverse a thousand years of Egyptian to the days of its highest Pharaohnic glory, made possible by four hundred years of Hebrew slaves.
17. And Alexander surprised Ptolemy Lazarus by saying that this plan was extremely amenable to him. They drew up a document and Alexander was on verge of signing when a letter arrived from Cleopatra.
18. At the command of two defected Judean generals from the unpaid days of Aristobulus, Cleopatra sent an army of 250,000 to meet Lazarus’s 50,000 at Gaza with orders to annihilate every one of them as justice for the murder of ‘our Jewish bretheren.’ “You know as well as I do Lazzy that I don’t care what you do with Jews, but our Minister of Coin, Visere Lowenstein of Memphis, is very particular that Jewish lives be spared. He has close connections to the finance minister of Armenia and if I don’t support him the Armenians can call in my gambling debts to King Tigranes. So I’m afraid that by the time you read this, you won’t have an army. Just come home Lazzy, we’ll act as though this never happened, and you can go back to waiting patiently for your time to become Pharaoh.” And so Ptolemy Lazarus went back to Egypt, and the people of Gaza demanded that Alexander Yannaius dispose of 50,000 Egyptian corpses.
IV: The Rise of Antipater
. The patronage of Cleopatra III, and to his astonishment, Alexander Yannaius lived his remaining seventeen years a hero, intoned by subjects with reverence by subjects Jewish and goyish. Upon death his tombstone reads: "Here lieth Yannai Alexander, Alexander the Survivor, unfortunate then fortunate, a liberator as subject to our God's caprice as Job, and a steward who served his people with goodness all the days of his life." The priest delivering his eulogy lauded him as the greatest of all Judean sovereigns since King Solomon.
76 BC, 653 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3661
2. ...The greatest until his successor - his wife, of whom so little is known but the auspicious quality of her liberatorship. We know so little of her that her very name is in dispute and there are not even legal documents by which to remember her. And yet the ten years of prosperity and achievement spoke for itself; which by appointing a council of seventy as Judea's governing judiciary. This judiciary is known forever thereafter as the 'Sanhedrin'; an institution that lasted as the definitive legal word in Judea for two-hundred years.
3. According to both the Book of Maccabee and Flavius Josephus, the Seventh Liberator was named Salome Alexandra. According to Eusebius Polymocrates, her name was Channa Yocheved. Eusebius Polymocrates labels Salome Alexandra a mere intriguing whore in the courts of her sons: Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, who tantalized herself into marriage and philandering beds. This, however, may be the lies of jealous courtiers, or, more likely, the lies of her sons. Clearly, whomever these intriguers were, they existed, and struck all documentation of her and her policies from the record. And yet the results of her era's policies proliferate through posterity with a golden era of Judean achievement - from which the first written legal documents exist of rulings that eventually lead to Rabbinic compilations like the Mishna and the Jerusalem Talmud, to Holy Books like Tobit, Judith, Baruch-ben-Nerah. Furthermore, the 'Era of the Liberatress' begat an era of archeological digging within the Temple Mount, which resulted in the discoveries of two ancient text; one of which was The Collected Letters of the Prophet Jeremiah, the other being The Collected Wisdom of Solomon.
4. Regardless of the Liberatress's name, Alexander Yannaius clearly wanted no repeat of his own problems of succession, and seeing the weakness inherent in both his sons, who veered greatly into ideological extremities he placed his wife upon the throne instead, and hoped over the intervening years for one of their sons to mature into judiciousness.
5. The elder son, Hyrcanus Jonathan, took his mother's progresive liberality to extreme. The second Hyrcanus believed in the use of power and treasure to alleviate suffering in the Pharisee population, the vast majority of whom were uneducated and downtrodden. He believed in the new religious officiants, laymen scholars not of the priestly class, called 'Rabbis' - the word 'Rav' being Hebrew for 'teacher' or 'master.' The second Hyrcanus believed in appointing judges to the Sanhedrin educated in the growing body of expert rabbinical commentary, and elevating local synagogue rabbis the presidency of local councils, each of whom he would give power to veto national rulings in their own jurisdiction. The younger son, Aristobulus Simon, believed in preserving the strong central authority of the establishment. The second Aristobulus believed in an originalist legal vision that ignored all judicial precedents past the Torah itself. He wished to consolidate all legal authority into the Sanhedrin with no leeway for regional courts to countermand any national ruling. The second Aristobulus also believed that rabbis had no authority for religious ceremonies and ceremonial authority was the sole province of men born into the priestly class. The second Hyrcanus was progressive and open of character, easily suggestible, and inevitably enacted the policy of whomever was the last to present their opinion. The second Aristobulus was hotheaded of character, considered little counsel above his own, and was greatly feared by all who sued within his court; yet Hyrcanus was the first between them to enact unprecedently bloody deeds.
67 BC, 662 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3670
6. As elder son, Hyrcanus had the rightful legal claim and was his mother's declared choice for successor, but upon the day of his mother's death, the Sanhedrin issued an immediate ruling that Aristobulus was rightful Liberator. Hyrcanus immediately went to the temple and went through with his coronation, his brother invaded Jerusalem with a Sadducee subsidized army. Most of the army was Sadducee, but as Hyrcanus still had the lower classes and their militias, he had the non-Jewish men of wealth, and he had command of the Palace of Wadi Qelt where lived all the women and children of the royal family. On the advice of Hyrcanus's prime adviser, Antipater the Idumean, Hyrcanus arrested Aristobulus's wife and children and threw them in Kishle.
7. At the Battle of Jericho, Aristobulus's forces trounced Hyrcanus's quite soundly, and in desperation Hyrcanus had to flee back into Jerusalem, where the Sadducees already requisitioned the capital in the name of Aristobulus, struck Hyrcanus from Temple Records, and barred Hyrcanus from the Temple Grounds. Antipater, however, took the liberty of removing Aristobulus's family back to the Palace of Wadi Qelt, where they were kept under lock and key.
8. Hyrcanus returned to Jericho, and presented himself under flag of truce to present an offer formulated by Antipater. Hyrcanus will remain Liberator and High Priest, but he will return Aristobulus's family unharmed, and would create a position for Aristobulus so powerful that not the Liberator could contravene his word. Hyrcanus therefore promised to declare Aristobulus the first ever Hasmonean King of Judea.
9. Perhaps, as Judea did in the day of the Zugot, the bicameral leadership of Judea might have lasted had its occupants more nobility of character, but the sons of Yannaius were too weak to effect success - one too hot-headed, one too soft-headed. All required to break Judea into civil war was a perfidious advisor of chicanery. Alongside these two mediocrities with no conception of power's use came a master manipulator who understood the uses of intrigue with magnificence as Moses the uses of prophecy.
10. At times Antipater would claim descendence from a destitute background of pagan fisherman. Other times, Antipater claimed descendence from wealth. Sometimes he claimed his family converted a hundred years previous, other times he claimed descendance from Jews enobled by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylonian knighthood; still at others he claimed to have converted himself because an angel spoke to him in the desert while wandering away from the Sack of Idumea. There is no true accounting for his origins. The issue of Antipater arrives upon history like a whirlwind reaped. The most able man in Judea arose from Idumea's devastation to dethrone the Hasmonean Dynasty forever and put Judea to the use of Rome. Not since Joseph himself has Jewish history seen an intriguer to compare with Antipater.
11. The night following Aristobulus's coronation, Antipater, then Governor of Idumea, arrived at the court with a forged affidavit; demonstrating proof of a murder plot against the Liberator arranged by none other than King Aristobulus. Antipater immediately convinced Hyrcanus that having created a position so powerful as King of Judea, Hyrcanus was required to be its occupant or face immediate death. He therefore had no choice but to sue for immediate claim upon the Judean throne with an outside arbiter to determine its veracity. For arbiter, Antipater suggested the King of the Nabatheans, Aretas, with whom Antipater plotted the conquest of Judea and an independent State of Idumea. In reward for his loyalty and sage counsel, Hyrcanus promised to appoint Antipater the new Liberator.
12. After his coronation, King Aristobulus's first act was to pursue his leisure at the Wadi of Qelt; but when the King received word of his brother's accusation, and further word that Hyrcanus sued for claim upon his throne, Aristobulus immediately organized an army to march upon Jerusalem. Hearing word of the advancing army, Antipater convinced Hyrcanus to flee immediately to the Nabathean court. The siege lasted a year but King Aristobulus allowed all the rich Jerusalemites to flee to Egypt, where they were received in great luxury. Poor Jerusalemites were left to starve and broke into the Temple abbatoir to eat the animals reserved for sacrifice. A priest guarding the abbatoir predicted this would lead to Judean suffering of limitless duration just before his head was crushed with a Temple brick.
66 BC, 663 Ab Urbe Conditia, 3671
13. With word of this desecration, Aristobulus granted food to the populace from the Temple reserves of meat and grain so long as the food was bought. As the remaining populace had no money, Antipater advised Hyrcanus to save them by granting loans to the Jerusalemite poor, which bankrupted Hyrcanus and put him forever in the debt of the Nabathean king. Antipater conspired a further plot which he knew will cause equal consternation for Hyrcanus's brother. Antipater paid an Idumean butcher living in Jerusalem to plant a pig among the remaining Temple animals marked for priestly sacrifice.
13. Upon discovering the pig, a priest named Onias climbed the Temple's western wall to denounce the abomination and pronounced a curse upon the entire Hasmonean Dynasty who brought Judea to such iniquitous state. As the curse was pronounced, a soldier's arrow felled Onias, and yet another revolt formented, prevented from becoming worse only by a earthquake of titanic magnitude, toppling all buildings over an entire third of the city.
14. At just the moment after the earthquake, letters arrived for both Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, sealed by a Roman consul named Pompey. Pompey elucidated that he heard tale of their struggles, and as his current situation abided in Syria, he would be quite happy to deliver a Roman legate to broker peace between the brothers. Aristobulus and Hyrcanus needed no sage counsel to realize that Rome insisted itself upon Judea's future. Upon arrival of Pompey's legate, both brothers journeyed into Jerusalem to meet him with golden gifts. But as Hyrcanus was bankrupted, Aristobulus had far more gifts to give, and thus the legate ruled in his favor. Antipater counseled Hyrcanus that this is a ruling he should not accept, and immediately return to Nabathea, where King Artas would provide the army he required. When the Nabatheans arrived in Jerusalem, they were met by Roman legions, and with ten minutes fighting, were compelled to retreat back to their court of origin.
15. With no knowledge to either brother, Antipater met with the Pompey's legate, named Scaurus, and immediately after the battle offered Scaurus bribe from Nabathean King Aretas to switch Rome's loyalty to Hyrcanus. As Roman policy was all set in favor of Aristobulus, Antipater and Hyrcanus had to travel with Scaurus to the imperial office of Pompey in Syria; but when they arrived, Aristobulus was already there, preparing his own counsel. Historians ask the question to our own day, how did Aristobulus know to intercept Hyrcanus in Pompey's camp?
16. Just as Aristobulus commenced presentation of his argument in front of Pompey, he was interrupted by a third party of rich Jerusalemites - the very Jerusalemites he allowed decampment to Egypt, who sued to let Rome arbitrate in favor of their plan to make Judea a republic after the manner of Rome. Once again, Aristobulus began his argument, only to be cut off by Pompey himself, who had allotted just twelve minutes for the matter; for he had just heard tale of his great enemy's suicide: Mithridates, King of the Black Sea, and in Pompey's desire to celebrate, ruled immediately in favor of Hyrcanus without hearing any argument. With Hyrcanus installed as King, Hyrcanus immediately offered Aristobulus the Liberatorship and High Priesthood, but Aristobulus spat upon Hyrcanus's offer and stormed away. Once again, historians ask the question, how did the rich Jerusalemites know to intercept the brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus in Pompey's camp?
17. Immediately after Pompey's ruling, the Egyptian Jerusalemites approached a compromise to Aristobulus: recreate Judea as constitutional monarchy with him atop the throne, so rather than return to Jerusalem, Aristobulus descended on Egypt to raise an army Pharaoh Cleopatra bequeathed. Even upon arrival to the Alexandrian court, a message from Pompey awaited him, declaring this plot and decampment to Egypt an act of war. Aristobulus and his erstwhile Jerusalemite followers, realizing Rome impossible to resist, returned to Pompey's Syrian encampment upon their knees, with as many gifts as rich Jews can bestow, and upon the moment of Pompey's forgiveness, Aristobulus arose to embrace his absolver and mid-embrace whispered to Pompey's ear "Divine Consul, I perceive the ultimate wish of your heart: to incorporate our great country into Rome's magnificent Empire. Allow me a brief moment to shepherd your flock and Judea shall forever be Rome's."
17. It was not a week before Aristobulus, arrived outside Jerusalem's gates with Pompey in a parade atop two legions; and Hyrcanus, seeing potential for atrocious abomination, surrendered his sovereignty and opened Jerusalem's gates to Rome without condition. Yet the people of Jerusalem, lacking even a king to lead them, rose up violently to force Rome out with no premeditation, killing literal hundreds of Roman soldiers and driving them from the city gates in a mere three days.
18. Pompey was wroth beyond anger and bellowed his fury upon his Jewish collaborator, "You have set Rome into quagmire! A mere Jew has damaged my ascent! A mere Jew has weakened the glory of Rome! What other people will hear tale of Jerusalem and mount rebellion? Why should you semite vermin not be crucified right now!"
"Do not kill him Divinity! He is of use. Wait until Shabbos, when the Jerusalemites are belabored with obligations to their day of rest. Some Jews would stay at their posts through all, but some feel the Sabbath is inviolate and no war would breach their commitment to their Holy One's day of rest."
And at this moment, Antipater emerged and presented himself to Aristobulus, accompanying Aristobulus's convoy in disguise.
"Alright, then give me the addresses of every synagogue in Jerusalem so my men can kill these Jews at prayer."
And so on the next Shabbat, six Roman legions put their battering rams on Jerusalem's gates, entered the city, killed every praying Jew and all upon the Temple Mount. So great was Rome's prestige for butchery that innumerable Judeans climbed the city walls to throw themselves off rather than submit themselves to Roman swords, others killed their families and set their houses afire lest their helpmeets and progeny be raped and domiciles pillaged. One hundred twenty thousand Jerusalemites died upon that day, and it was not three days before Pompey took as prisoner both Aristobulus and Hyrcanus and threw them both into a Kishle dungeon beneath the ground where festered Jewish skeletons innumerable.
19. It was a week later that Antipater descended upon Kishle's deepest cellar to visit them. He related to them that the position of Hasmonean Liberator has been forever disbanded, and Antipater himself has been crowned King of Judea and High Priest. Though how he did so remains unknown, Antipater further disclosed to them that it was he who originally solicited Pompey's assistance, he who leaked tell of Hyrcanus's journey to Pompey so Aristobulus might intercept them, and he who notified the Jerusalemites in Egypt. Upon hearing, the Hasmonean brothers could only ask him why such an intriguer would effort himself to such destructive lengths for his kingdom. Antipater reposited that the answer should be obvious to any man capable of leadership: he did so to avenge the destruction of Idumea, and swore vengeance upon Judeans long before ascent to eminence seemed even possibility.
"You will both be taken in chains to Rome, where you'll be paraded in Pompey's triumph."
20. After Antipater's coronation, the King took Pompey on a tour of Jerusalem. It is said Pompey inspected every street and had his scribas noted every decrepit building, every broken road, every puddle of feces, every threatening looking resident. The tour ended with an inspection of the Holy Temple, and finally of the Holy of Holies, where Pompey was the first man not Israel's High Priest entering the Holy of Holies in a thousand years. Upon entrance, Pompey is related to have asked Antipater: "I see only a menorah and air."
V. Thus Spake Herod
(It is to posterity’s negligible loss that Sharlappius’s account of Antipater’s later years and Herod’s early years is entirely lost. 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, sections obscured by varied 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 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 Mariamne - granddaughter to yet another Hyrcanus Hasmonean who had usurped Antipater, and Herod’s subsequent poisoning and usurpasion of said Hyrcanus after Hyrcanus poisoned Herod’s brother and mutilated another brother’s 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 chronicle; perhaps a group of writers in conjunction. Some passages aspire to the sublimity of classical epic, others to biblical cadence, still others seem written by classical dramatists of particular mediocrity, all exaggerating the historical record for dramatic license yet derivative of previous texts to point of plagiarism, none of particularly distinguished aesthetic quality nor historical value; but of some historiographic value as record 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 great benefit to autocratic aims. It is to be doubted that he had 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 continually more sombered peoples subsumed within Rome’s eternal expansion.
5. As a young man in the desert, 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; 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, 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 human-sized vat of slave piss.” “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 brass drinking horns?” “Look at these pictographs here.” “Fuck you 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 technicolor 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 pictographs that mean things 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 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! 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 leviathan.’ 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 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 a rich Roman Jew immediately knew him, one 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 can count on Rome!”
And Herod did go 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...” “Aren’t you?” “What’s the Antipater family gotta do to convince you all we’re Jews?” “Conversations like this.”
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. And complemented on either side by Octavian and Lepidus, thus spake Marc Anthony
“Alright Philistine, you say there’s a threat, and you come to us with cloth that’s clearly manufactured by some goy Jacobus knows. I have a Jew in Tyre whose document fakes are so much better than this, but I can’t have myself looking weak by ignoring a threat that you obviously made up in front of all these honorable senators or else they’ll exaggerate the threat themselves and stab me the way they stabbed the last guy. So you see that I have to pretend I believe you and you have to pretend I believe you when really, I don’t give a shit. You’re not going to get any Roman legions; Rome’s soldiers will never soil themselves with Judea ever again. Instead, you’re going to get a band of Gauls; don’t worry, these ghouls are even bloodier than the Romans. They’d as soon fuck what they kill after they kill it as before.
Now these mercenaries need to be financed, and they need to be financed extremely well or else they will turn on their benefactors, and that would be a shame; because in this case, the benefactors won’t be Rome, they’ll be a Jew, Flavius Jacobus, and your partners in Antioch. You wanted a partnership with Herod so that you could make money and declare financial independence from subsidizing Rome at a rate we dictate. Don’t try to deny it. Julius figured out how you Jews work and knew how to keep you under us. So you see the little bambino next to me? His name’s Octavian. He and I intend to continue that, don’t we pischer? (Octavian is silent) See? He wants to keep you our friend too....
Flavius Jacobus, you made your arrangement with Herod without me? Now you’re gonna pay for him without Rome. You’re gonna lose so much money on this that you and your family will be Rome’s puella defututa for the rest of time. And Herod, congratulations, you’re King of Judea again. Were you ever before? I can’t even remember. What is it you Jews say? Mayzel Tov? (Herod is silent) Oh right... it’s pronounced Mazel Tov. Mazel Tov, Baruch Ha’Ba, Yasher Koyech, and may your memory be a blessing. You want to die on that mess? Go ahead Philistine, it’s all yours.”
In the coming years, Herod would be referred to derogatorily as The Philistine. Anyone heard repeating it would be doused in boiling water.
13. A year and a half later, Herod’s Gauls were still fighting the Hasmoneans and losing. Herod came to visit Anthony’s new base camp in the Turkish region of Samosata. And thus spake Herod:
“Divine former consul, vanquisher of Brutus and Cassius, benefactor of Judea and best friend to the Jewish people, it is a terrible burden to report these findings with such heavy heart, but a long war without Roman involvement is, so clearly to benefit of Octavian’s pitiably duplicitous interest, and of no benefaction to Anthony or Rome, because Anthony’s strength lies so clearly in the East with us, and Octavian does use these irresolute Gauls to undermine Anthony’s position.”
And thus answered Anthony:
“Herod, Anthony’s loyalest vassal, his counsel in time of need; friend to Rome, soldier constant and true, you need not convince us of what our mind already concludes, and merely hearing corroboration from this shrewd and sensible mouth is tiding so felicitous it undermines all doubt and gives indication from Mercury himself that Fortuna shall ride Neptune’s wave above Octavian and all disloyals who consort with him. You shall have two Roman legions, thousands of Syrian conscripts, mercenaries and slaves from all around the empire. All under General Sosius, a commander of greatest experience and achievement.”
14. Sosius immediately marched Herod’s legions to Jericho, torched five settlements and killed all their inhabitants. He then marched upon Jerusalem which he put under siege. The legions build ramparts, During this year, Herod divorced Doris Flavia and sent her back to her father in Rome, for having gazed upon the third Antigonus’s sister for many years, Mariam, he’d long conceived a dark passion. He sent three Roman soldiers to abduct her by night and bring her to his base camp, purely handled.
15. Waiting in the base camp was both Herod and Marc Anthony:
Anthony: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to witness the lawful joining of Judea’s King Herod in matrimony to the princess Mairiam!” Mairiam: “WHAT?” Anthony grabs Mariam and puts hand over her mouth: “If anyone does object, speak now or forever hold their piece.” (laughter from all the guests of Herod’s tent) “Do you, King Herod, take Mairiam as your lawful wedded wife?” “I do.” “In the absence of her father, whom you killed, in the absence of her brother, who will not live another month, I speak for her as the bride’s guardian (Mairiam screams from underneath Anthony’s mouth, everyone in Herod’s tent laughs further) “Mairiam takes you as her lawful wedded husband, to obey and serve you all the days of her life, however long or short.” (Mairiam screams again) “In Rome it was always customary for Jewish grooms to break a glass. I would imagine this custom is observed in Judea as well, so may we have a glass in a napkin please?” (What’s a napkin? someone asks) (Herod breaks the glass) “MAZEL TOV!” Anthony: “And now I must return to Turkey immediately, but let us all leave Herod’s tent so that Herod’s wife may enjoy the fruits of her wedding night!” (Amid everyone shouted cheers, Mairiam screams a third time.)
16. In spite of Anthony’s prediction, it has been over a month, and Rome’s rampart construction progressed not an inch. Night by night, the Jerusalemites, many starving, snuck out from city walls to make attack upon Roman camp. Picking at manifold points, differing night by night, Jerusalemites killed God knoweth how many slaves and conscripts and well over a centurian’s worth of Roman troops, meanwhile bribing many other soldiers, stealing food and weaponry, building walls within the city still higher than the city walls themselves. Yet every attack resulted in Romans venturing to the surrounding townships to bring back thirty Jews of all ages to crucify in view of Jerusalem’s walls. All Jerusalem heard the innocent groans upon the wood.
17. Upon the siege’s fortieth day, two members of the Sanhedrin, Shemaiah and Avtalyon, advocated to let the Romans into the gates and for Antigonus to surrender. They did not convince Jerusalem to favor appeasement, but they did tell their clansmen to absent themselves from tonight’s raid, because, so they lied to their kinsmen and children, Rome would kill all raiders tonight, and none would survive.
Every day, Rome’s slaves ventured into the Judean hills surrounding Jerusalem, and every day thousands of slaves carved boulders from the mountains and carried them to Roman camp. And every night, a dozen Judean guerillas carried those boulders into the city gates without Rome’s notice.
Yet without soldiers from the Houses of Shemaiah and Avtalyon, there were not enough experienced soldiers to coordinate that night’s boulder operation. The next morning, these boulders were hoisted upon catapult and breached the northern wall. Roman soldiers and all their slaves and mercenaries invaded Jerusalem from the north. They immediately went upon the Temple Mount, looted all treasures, raped all women, slaughtered all priests and animals. Then they ran into the streets and began to kill all those they saw, including those who showed papers demonstrating loyalty to Rome. Thus seemed next to be the fate of all Jerusalem.
And thus spake Herod:
“God help me I so do love those screams.... These are screams of people who know you can stop their suffering by raising an eyebrow, and choose to do nothing because it’s your pleasure.... isn’t it a shame most people don’t ever know what that power truly is.... I wish I could give it to them.... resurrect each one from the grave and let them stand in my place to watch others suffer so I could say to them: do you see, my friend, what it means to triumph over life and death.... they would only conclude that yes.... if I can feel so powerful, it’s worth your death and the death of all you love.... because it would show them what I know - what my father knew, what Caesar knew, what Yahweh knows: that life is all a myth, suffering’s a myth, meaning is a myth.... survivors of this catastrophe will tell stories of their dead to their children, parts true, parts false, but just stories.... and these stories breathe meaning from generation’s life to generation, and let them know that they too suffer to a purpose just as did ancestors.... yet unknown to them is that their entire purpose is someone else’s pleasure.... the stories are as worthless as life itself.... just more excrement the Romans pump from the cities along with their rivers of blood.... life is not stories, it’s trash to throw out, bills to pay, pots to empty, things to insert in the front, things to dump out the back. Life is a thing, not a meaning.
DUMAH!
(a page appears)
Here is an officially sealed document announcing that every Syrian conscript who stops this slaughter by killing another Roman soldier will be remunerated as though he were a Roman soldier if he can produce the head with the helmet still on it. Read it aloud to the Syrians and then burn the document immediately.
(”Yes your majesty.”)
Oh, and Dumah?
(Yes your majesty?”)
Wait another half-hour before you give it.
VI. Herod's First Day:
1. Thus spake Herod:
“Today is the 27th anniversary of the day Pompey sacked Jerusalem.... Why do things keep happening to Israelites on the same day as other things?.... I remember my father drinking from his Arak horn, lying in his chair, hearing the thousands of Jerusalemite screams, and feeling as though muscles relaxed in his body that he never knew were there. All of Israel wailed that day and recorded it the darkest of the many dark days in Jewish history, but records are made to be broken and so are the Jews.
This latest Aristobulus is now in Kishle... after him there’s only two Aristobuluses left and one Hyrcanus. I will send this third ‘latest’ Aristobulous to Anthony, who will, torture and behead him against all custom within Rome’s city limits. Rome is always shocked when they hear about the barbaric things their soldiers do abroad.... but Anthony was always an animal. He loves when blood spurts even more than women. Rome will blame him for the murder. Romans are supposed to be more virtuous than us brown barbarians, and my willingness to be taught Roman ways will raise me in to the grace of that beneficence, Octavian Caesar, who fancies himself magister of his provinces just as Aristotle was tutor to Alexander.”
2. Here follows the minutes of Herod’s first day as governor:
A. Herod summos his personal treasurer, Ishmael, along with his son Ananel who is to be appointed High Priest, and tells them the government coiffures will be replenished because the entirety of the Sanhedrin property and treasure will be confiscated today.
Herod then asks “How certain are you of your family’s line of descent from Aaron?” “Absolute.” “In spite of everyone calling you an Ishmaelite?” “Quite positive.” “Do you have documentation?” “I...” “Anthony has a scribe in Tyre who can create any script to specification. You both will ride to Tyre and give this scribe a sealed message to recreate a calligraphy to exact specifications I set, is this clear?” “Yes your grace.” Dismissed.
B. Herod received two elders who sit upon the Sanhedrin: Avtalyon and Shemaiah, whom he refers to as ‘my only allies.’ As gifts he presents them both with knives ornately jeweled as thanks for their efforts. Three Roman guards appear at the door immediately thereafter, and Herod tells his two allies that these men are the principales of an entire Roman centurion, all of whom will be present to help them in their task. One of them asks: “What task?”
“Soldiers will be posted as posted at every exit of the Sanhedrin chamber as their captors, but also as witnesses and assistants to what you’re about to do. Roman soldiers will hold up every member of the Sanhedrin while you, Avtalayon and Shemaiah personally execute all 69 members who are not you. You are thereafter to appoint a new Sanhedrin entirely from among your family and friends. This new Sanhedrin is hereby ordered to institute a 10% tithe for every case heard.”
Herod further tells them that on the authority of his new high priest, Ananel, is descended from priests in Babylon’s makeshift Jewish temple, and his appointment requires the Sanhedrin’s unanimous approval. “From this day forth, all rulings which benefit the Sanhedrin are synonymous with rulings which benefit Judea.” Dismissed.
C. A visit from Mariam, unannounced but Herod assures, very much expected. Mariam claims she has a letter from Anthony, and the letter does have his seal upon it. This letter from Antony “requests” that Mariam’s younger brother, Aristobulus, fourth of his name, be made High Priest. Mariam clearly expects Herod to be shocked, but Herod calmly lets Mariam know that he’d discussed this matter with Anthony at some length, and planned on conferring High Priesthood on her brother the whole time. Herod summoned Aristobulus, embraced him as the High Priest and gave him all the insignia. Still not dismissed at time of this record.
3. Aristobulus’s ceremonies of investiture: Herod’s First Shabbos
There are several hundred wealthy Judeans in the Temple courtyard. Herod, Aristobulus and Mariam stand upon a raised dais right outside the Holy of Holies. All three are dressed in linen robes of white. Both Herod and Aristobulus wear white turbans upon their heads. Herod speaks in heightened voice:
Herod: “And the Lord called unto Moses, and spake unto him out of the tabernacle of the congregation, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, If any man of you bring an offering unto the Lord, ye shall bring your offering of the cattle, even of the herd, and of the flock. If his offering be a burnt sacrifice of the herd, let him offer a male without blemish: he shall offer it of his own voluntary will at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation before the Lord.
(Three Roman soldiers enter with a bull in harness, whom they bring to the top of the dais between Herod and Aristobulus.)
“And he shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt offering; and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him. And he shall kill the bullock before the Lord:...”
(While Roman soldiers still hold the bull, Herod places his right hand upon the bull’s head, and with his left he draws from his gardle an overjeweled knife that resembles a cleaver. Aristobulus takes it, and with both hands, slices the neck of the fully conscious bull with too much might. The blood immediately splatters upon all three officiants. The bull collapses in a pool of its own blood and repeatedly attempts to stand as its vocal chords and esophagus spill out its neck. The partially disembodied vocal chords making a whistle pitched wheeze that causes a few children in the front row to cover their ears. The attempts to stand get slower, the wheeze gets quieter, the attempts to stand turn into attempts to kneel, then slide, then breathe, then the wheeze stops, then the motion stops. The bull has died. The slaughter’s taken seven minutes.)
(27 priests enter the temple courtyard, each holding 49 sticks of pine. In a single file line they approach the dais, form a circle around it and place them down all at once. They exit. Enter 54 Levites in a similar single file carrying 49 sticks of fir. They form two similar circles around the dais. In turns of 27, they place the sticks of fir atop the dais. They exit.)
“ and the priests, Aaron’s sons, shall bring the blood, and sprinkle the blood round about upon the altar that is by the door of the tabernacle of the congregation....”
(Aristobulus picks up two sticks of pine, smears his face with cow blood, and then paints the blood upon all the doorpost of the Holy of Holies)
And he shall flay the burnt offering, and cut it into his pieces.
(Aristobulus cuts a piece from the breast of the cow. A Roman principale hands Mariam a bowl of salt water. She holds up the bowl to Aristobulus, who dips the piece of breast into the salt water, then eats the brisket raw.)
(Enter an entire Roman centurion in single file, each carrying 49 sticks of cedar. They form four circles of 25, each places the sticks of cedar atop the the bull’s pool of blood. They exit.)
“And the sons of Aaron the priest shall put fire upon the altar, and lay the wood in order upon the fire:”
(Enter 150 elders from the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, each carrying a bail of hay. They place the bails atop the bull, atop the blood, and atop the pine, fir, and cedar.)
(A Roman principale hands Mariam a lit torch, who passes it to Herod, who passes it to Aristobulus, who lights one straw from the bail of hay atop the cow’s head.)
(Herod, Mariam, and Aristobulus step off the dais and into the crowd. Herod chants louder as the fire begins to kindle.)
“And the priests, Aaron’s sons, shall lay the parts, the head, and the fat, in order upon the wood that is on the fire which is upon the altar: But his inwards and his legs shall he wash in water: and the priest shall burn all on the altar, to be a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord.”
(To the side of the crowd, Aristobulus disrobes completely and washes the blood off in water. He walks up to the bonfire, now beginning to burn. Aristobulus nakedly throws his bloody clothes atop the fire. Mariam then puts on him his new white cassock, the bejeweled blue tunic worn above it of the High Priest, and above that his coat of many colors and crosses, and above that his white blue and red gardle, his silver breastplate, his golden clasp, and his large white skullcap.)
(The fire begins to truly blaze. Herod chants still louder)
“And he shall cut it into his pieces, with his head and his fat: and the priest shall lay them in order on the wood that is on the fire which is upon the altar: But he shall wash the inwards and the legs with water: and the priest shall bring it all, and burn it upon the altar: it is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord. And if the burnt sacrifice for his offering to the Lord be of fowls, then he shall bring his offering of turtledoves, or of young pigeons. And the priest shall bring it unto the altar, and wring off his head, and burn it on the altar; and the blood thereof shall be wrung out at the side of the altar:”
(The 27 other temple priests enter single file, each holding in their right hand a string of hemp tied to a unique variety of bird, each bird suffering a broken neck, in their left hand each priest carries vials of their bird’s blood. Each of them empties the vile of blood into the now mounting fire, then throw the birds in.)
(The fire has reached a full consumation. Herod shouts at the top of his voice.)
“And he shall pluck away his crop with his feathers, and cast it beside the altar on the east part, by the place of the ashes: And he shall cleave it with the wings thereof, but shall not divide it asunder: and the priest shall burn it upon the altar, upon the wood that is upon the fire.”
(All there stand for thirty more minutes in silence as the fire devours itself, and then dies down.)
(Herod says at the volume of a normal stage voice.)
“It is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord.”
4. Aristobulus’s Ritual Purification in the Temple’s Mikvah Bath: One Hour Later
Aristobulus and Herod are alone in the ritual wash room. Aristobulus in the water, Herod standing above him:
Herod Chants:
“He shall put on the holy linen coat, and he shall have the linen breeches upon his flesh, and shall be girded with a linen girdle, and with the linen mitre shall he be attired: these are holy garments; therefore shall he wash his flesh in water, and so put them on.”
“Then you shall bring Aaron and his sons thou shalt bring unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and shalt wash them with water.”
“Whosoever toucheth the dead body of any man that is dead, and purifieth not himself, defieth the tabernacle of the Lord, and that soul shall be cut off from Israel: because the water of separation was not sprinkled upon him, he shall be unclean; his uncleanliness is yet upon him. This is the law, when a man dieth in a tent: all that come into the tent, and all that is in the tent, shall be unclean seven days.And every open vessel, which hath no covering bound upon it, is unclean. And whosoever toucheth one that is slain with a sword in the open fields, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be unclean seven days.And for an unclean person they shall take of the ashes of the burnt heifer of purification for sin, and running water shall be put thereto in a vessel: And a clean person shall take hyssop, and dip it in the water, and sprinkle it upon the tent, and upon all the vessels, and upon the persons that were there, and upon him that touched a bone, or one slain, or one dead, or a grave:”
“O Lord, the hope of Israel! All that forsake thee shall be ashamed, and they that depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters.”
(Herod leaves the ritual bath room so Aristobulus can lie there peacefully and undisturbed, which he does for three seconds, whereupon a Roman soldier emerges from the water, pushes Aristobulus into the water and holds him under water sixty seconds until Aristobulus stops resisting.)
(The Roman gets out of the pool and leaves the bath house. Waiting for him outside the bath house is Herod, Shemaya, Avtalyon, Ishmael and Ananel.)
Herod: “Right, well, we gotta do all this again next week. Get everything ready. We’re gonna work all through Shabbos!”
VII. 33 BC: At the Court of the Sanhedrin
1. Shemayah and Avtalyon, heads of the Sanhedrin, wrap up Sanhedrin business and finish another meeting of the full court. Their fellow elders line up to say goodbye to them. After they leave, the two stay behind, as they always do, to plan the next day's agenda. But every day, before they do, they daven (chant) the Vidui together - the confessional. Just as they begin to recite it, Avtalyon breaks down in tears again. It had been a number of months since either of them did, but this is the third time in two weeks week that Avtalyon has. The weight of their crime, their forced murder of their fellow 68 Sanhedrin, weighs on them both. "Every day, I see their faces: Enosh over there, Kenan over here, Lamech and Mehallel getting into fights right where we're standing. "It's best you don't think about it." "It's impossible NOT to think about!" "Avtalyon they're with me every day too, but they're not as judgmental as you think they are." "God is judgmental!" "Then let God judge!" "How could he not have stopped us?" "How could he not have stopped a hundred things before us?" "We are the greatest criminals in Jewish history!" "We are so far from the greatest criminals in Jewish history." "We killed our whole people's leadership!" "Herod killed our whole people's leadership, we just held the swords." "Then we're nothing but the arms of Herod!" "You've just figured this out?" "Then we're not leaders at all!" "We ARE leaders! We were the begging children of converts and now we're the Rosh Sanhedrin protecting the people who hated us from an insane leader who wants to kill them! That's leadership and we don't have time to mourn!..." (Shemaya waits a beat then says) "Some days they shout at me and point to me with red eyes and grey skin, like Shmuel announcing Shaul's doom, and some days they seem to understand what I've done and say 'Shemikeh, we get it!' There isn't a day when I don't see their ghosts peaking out around all our friends and enemies in those chairs, but the more we work, the less I see them, and the more freindlich they seem when they come to me."
2. Shemayah calls in his assistant, Hillel, who, as usual, looks at him snarlingly, as Shemayah killed his father and grandfather. Tells Hillel that he is changing his duties. Until now, Herod's own guard would fetch the claimants for Sanhedrin hearings, but Herod is withdrawing his guardianship, so it falls to Hillel and his fellow pages to fetch them. As assistant to the President, it falls to Hillel to organize these trips, and he must keep a roster of addresses. "You can look that sullen in front of us Hillel, but a future Rosh Sanhedrin needs to be freylich in front of everybody else." Hillel leaves. Avtalyon says "We have to replace him. He knows what we did to his father..." "Of course he knows what we did to his father! We did it to his grandfather too!" "Then we have to replace him right away!" "Are you meshuggeh?! Then everybody will ask why we replaced him!" "I've got to leave the Sanhedrin." "You know that the only way you're leaving this job is without your head." "Better dead than this!" "You want Herod to kill every Judean? Let him put another son of Ishmael in your job. He'll start with all your sons and nephews." "Oh my god can you just let me complain." "You're responsible for keeping the entire Judean people alive, and they're all complaining! You don't get to!" "No you don't understand. You haven't seen Herod's latest letter. We'll be here all night."
3. Herod has sent Avtalyon a letter from Masada stating that he will be returning shortly and they need a ruling drafted upon his return. Cleopatra is scheming again to try to bring back the Judean people into slavery, and has used her Judean holdings in balsam to flood the market and ruin Nabathea's balsam, it's biggest export, and since her source is Jericho, the Nabatheans are preparing for war with the Tribe of Benyamin. Furthermore, Cleopatra is secretly on the side of the Nabatheans, and has sent King Malich a Roman general - Atheneon. Herod believes that this can all be worked to Judea's (re: Herod's) advantage. Since Benjamin is the poorer of the surviving tribes that lo these six years has given Herod so many headaches, it is best to simply cull many Benjaminites from the Judean kingdom. Herod therefore requires a ruling that prevents all other tribes and peoplehoods in Judea from coming to Benyamin's aid - thereby assuring the defeat, ethnic cleansing, and potential annihilation of the entire Benjaminite tribe.... Shemaya puts his head in his hands. "Hashem is not with us..." Sitting in silence, they hear Herod's chariots come to the Sanhedrin building days sooner than expected, along with the footsteps to their door.
4. Herod is very blase about it. "Don't worry, I don't expect you to have a ruling yet. I just thought we could run through some options." Herod is met sullen silence. "Oh come now, this isn't like you both. You've been so good to me these years, I know I can count on you for this." "Sire..." "I know, you're going to beg for Benyamin's life. It's only natural. Didn't Avraham beg for the lives of the Sodomites? If genocide is good enough for Hashem, why shouldn't it be good enough for me?" (Avtalyon) "Your majesty, have the Benyaminites done anything to merit their annihilation?" "I understand Avi, it's not fair. But gold only goes so far when there are too many people who don't have it and are mad they don't." "Surely we can divert some funds from the tem..." "I told you, discussion about the Temple renovations is off-limits. We're in the Roman era, and Romans are builders. If we want gold for poor people like the Benyaminites, we need to build like Romans. A great god deserves a great temple." (Shemaya) "Neither of us doubts that Sire, but this is a very delicate matter." "Romans crucify opponents by the million and this is a delicate matter? We don't have the military for this! It's either let the Benyaminites go to the slaughter or let us all!" "But surely Marc Antony won't..." (Herod gets angry) "Marc Antony may not last the year against Octavian! We have no more allies in Rome." "But once they've taken Benyamin won't they go after the rest of us?" "LEAVE THE MILITARY MATTERS TO ME!" "Sire, I'm sorry, this is just an unprecedented requ..." "This is just what you do! How many times did we agree that the Sanhedrin was corrupt at its core and needed to be cleansed."
5. Hillel knocks on the door and says "I'm sorry Rebbes but these defendants on the list, Joachim and Anne, ((Hillel...), they don't seem to live in Jerusalem anymore (Hillel!......). I spoke to their neighbors and they seem to have moved to Nazareth (HILLEL!)." (Hillel looks up and realizes he's in the presence of the King and immediately bows to the floor.) "Oh get up. I'm not the King here, I'm just a friend talking with his two most important friends." (Hillel hesitantly gets up) Herod: "Your name is Hillel-ben-Gamliel, isn't it?" "Yes." "Whether it's for me or my children, you're gonna be the Rosh Sanhedrin someday." "Thank you your majesty." "Don't thank me. Everybody in Jerusalem knows about the nice Jewish boy Hillel, and everybody remembers your father." "Yes sire." "You're barely fourteen and it's already said by other Rabbis that you're the best teacher in Jerusalem, is it true?" "I try only to be a credit to my students." "See? Fourteen years old and he's already the best politician in Judea. Can you help me teach a lesson to your teachers?" "I don't know if it's my place but if your majesty commands it..." "Come over to me, I want to show them something." (hesitantly) "Yes, your grace." (Hillel walks over to Herod and Herod pulls him into his arm, draws out a dagger and holds it against Hillel's throat.)
6. Shemaya: "Your majesty please, don't do this!" Herod: "You see this nice Jewish boy?" "Yes." "In ten or twenty years he's going to have you killed. Give me the order and I'll take care of this problem right now." "What??" "Hillel, you know what these men did to your father, right?" (Hillel hesitates) "I've only heard rumors, sire." "See? His life is about to end and he still knows the exact right thing to say. Somebody like him can conquer the world and his followers would still think he's a lamb." Shemaya: "My King, please don't do this." "What are you worried about? Until he gets a real following you two are the only men in Judea whose lives aren't in danger. I might be murdered tomorrow, but if you die, I have no legitimacy left." "Your highness, he's just a boy." "Exactly! He's just a boy. Hardly anybody knows about him yet or cares, but he knows that as long as he's alive, he's a threat to you and eventually you'll kill him just like you killed his father!" Avtalyon: "We don't know that he would ever kill anyone." Herod: "But do you really want to take the chance? I can make this problem go away forever years before it ever becomes a problem and now you schlemiels hesitate." Avtalyon: "Your grace, whatever we've done to Hillel, please forgive us." "What's to forgive? You haven't done anything I didn't order you to do, it's what I did to Hillel and what he WILL do to you, and he WILL do it." (Avtalyon breaks down crying) "See? You can't do it; and that's why you need me." (lets Hillel go)
7. "Stop crying Reb Avi. I just solved 20 years of problems for you. Hillel, nu? You're clearly a smart boy. You just saw, these meeskaits can't even kill you when your head's already on the platter! How much less could they have ever killed 70 people if I didn't threaten to kill them and their families if they didn't. Believe me, while they were doing it these prostaks were blubbering more than the dying. Be mad at me, not them." Hillel: "I'm not ma..." Herod: (cutting him off) "Of course you're mad. we're your father's killers, and he was a saint, just like you'll be one day; not like all those kings and queens I have to deal with all the time." "Thank you for honoring my father." "You see, he IS a saint, and he's gonna be loved by Jews long after people stop thinking about how much they hate me. You see nudniks? This is what you do to keep a nation going! You anticipate the problem, and you solve it, whatever unpleasant way you can. (turns around to leave)
8. Geb a cook. I gave you guys the best possible deal. I go out into Jerusalem with you, and every time, you'd think you're the real kings. They don't believe the rumors; as far as they're concerned, you're the last living links to Judah fucking Maccabee! I'm the one they hate, and I'm gonna let you in on a little secret: I LOVE it.
9. Hillel: "You love it?" (Herod laughs at Hillel's confidence): "Oh yes. I really do. Think about this boychik. When's the last time any Judean feared an Idumean? When's the last time any Philistine was taken seriously! Two thousand years of these Zhids giving Palestinians the worst possible deal, and finally, someone has the will to stand up to them. And once I do, I promote two Babylonian mamzers over you and your father to head the only organization that can stop me! And how do I do it? By doing exactly what those Heebs have always done." Hillel: "What have we always done?" "Come on mensch, you're too smart for this. You know the Torah much better than I do. Look at what Yahweh does, look at what he wants, and then tell me, who's followed his example better than I?"
10. Avtalyon: ""SHANDEH KHERPA BOOSHE UN KLEEMA!" Herod: (amusedly incredulous) "What?" "SHAME DISGRACE EMBARRASSMENT AND INFAMY!" (pause, Herod's amused, Shemaya's horrified) "I don't know if you've noticed but that's kinda what we do around here." "We can justify your murders. We can justify your thefts. But THIS COURT WILL NOT JUSTIFY WORSHIPING YOU AS A GOD!" (Herod pauses again) "Avi, come on, as though I could ever dream of being as much of a pig as your god."
11. "SHAME AND DISGRACE AND EMBARRASSMENT AND INFAMY! We should EXCOMMUNICATE YOU!" (Herod pauses again... says indulgently...) "Y'know... I wouldn't do that..." "Do your people truly mean nothing to you?!" "No, they mean everything to me, but if they suffer along the way for the way they made my people suffer, that's kinda nice..." "I know how you work Philistine! Today you say you honor Hashem through murder. Tomorrow it will be putting your statue in the Temple!" "Actually our endgame is putting Roman gods in the temple. Y'know, those people we're trying to be nice to? (without a pause) Haven't we talked about this?" "You've taken away their leaders, you've taken away their money, now you take away their faith?" "(Herod sighs) "Shemaya, I don't have the energy for this. Can you just explain it in a way he'll understand that the whole point of everything we're doing is to bring these Jewish peasants into the negative first century so that the Judeans will have a better life?" "You mean to have yourself worshipped as a God!" "Avi, look around Jerusalem and see the way people bow down to me. I'm already a god, I don't need anybody to call me one." "YOU ARE A HERETIC AND YOU WILL BE PUNISHED BY THE HOLY ONE BLESSED BE HIS NAME IN WHATSOEVER WAY HE CHOOSES!" Shemaya: "AVI ENOUGH ALREADY!" Herod: "No, actually this is kind of refreshing. Nobody but Marianne talks to me this way. We should do this in public, I can show that I welcome disagreement and that you're not just rubber stamps."
12. (brief pause) "Reb Avi, my most valued friend, please understand. I don't want to be worshiped as a god. It's not useful to me. Money is useful, business is useful, power is usefu, and yeah, sometimes murder and slavery is useful. So if we can give the people a few more gods, let them choose which to sacrifice to, make the religion of the Jews closer to the way Romans and Greeks worship, that's useful." "WE WILL NOT WORSHIP THE GODS OF THE EPICUREANS!" (Herod's eyes grow cold) "Reb Avi, you've been a wonderful collaborator, but don't ever say that again." "WE WILL NOT DO IT!" "DON'T SAY THAT AGAIN!" "WE WILL NOT DO IT! WE WILL NOT DO IT! WE WILL NOT DO IT!" (Herod takes out his sword and just barely stops himself from striking Avtalyon) "I SWEAR TO YOU I FIND SOMEONE WHO WILL AND THAT WILL BE THE MOMENT YOUR HEAD COMES OFF!"
13. Avtalyon: "GOD HAS FINALLY SHOWN US WHAT YOU ARE!" Herod: "And what am I?..." "YOU ARE THE TEMPTATION OF SATAN! YOU KILL AND YOU KILL AND YOU KILL, AND FOR WHO'S BENEFIT? GOD'S? YOUR PEOPLE? MINIONS LIKE US? NO! NOT EVEN YOURS! YOU DO IT FOR ROME AND YOU WILL LEAD US BACK INTO EXILE AND LIKE THEY'VE DONE TO A HUNDRED OTHER PEOPLES!" Herod: "Rome's benefit IS our benefit!" Avtalyon: "HASHEM SENT YOU TO THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL TO TEACH US THE LESSON THAT EVIL IS EVIL AND THERE IS NO LESSER EVIL! (the ground begins to tremble) MURDER IS MURDER AND THE LORD GOD WILL MAKE US PAY FOR WHAT WE'VE LET YOU DO."
(the ground shakes and building collapses with rubble from the ceiling falling on all four of them. Herod digs his way out, and then Hillel, and then Avtalyon and Shemaya.)
14. Herod: Everybody alright? (everybody nods) Nothing broken? (everybody moves their limbs.) Roman Guard: "He's over there! Sire, thank Asclepius you're alright." Herod: "None the worse for wear. Everything's alright.... Though that Rabbi over there was telling me what an asshole I am..." "Should we?..." "Maybe,... he's done us enough good that he gets a free pass for now, though I may change my mind in a few hours..."
15. Herod asks the guards: "What's the damage?" "The palace sustained no damage but three quarters of the Temple has been completely destroyed." (Herod bursts into laughter, then he gives Avtalyon a long hug and a comic Judas kiss - Roger Rabbit style, who is still fuming) Shemaya: "Majesty are you alright?" Herod: "Reb Avi you're even more value to me when you hate me. If you meant to bring down the wrath of the Lord on me you just saved me a lot of money. It would have taken a hundred thousand prutahs just to tear down the old Temple, and you just did it for free. (pause) Mazel Tov, you just saved Benjamin." "What?" "Now we can put that money into a war to save the Benyaminites."
VIII. - Rededication of the Jerusalem Temple: 23 BC - Inaugural Speech by Rabbi Hillel
Your Majesty Herod the Great, Your Royal Highness Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, Your Graces of eighteen nations, High Priest Annanel and assembled Cohanim, Conscripted Fathers of the Roman Senate, my illustrious predecessors Rabbi Lord Shemaya-ben-Xerxes and Rabbi Lord Avtalyon-ben-Artaxerxes, my beloved colleagues in the Sanhedrin, Your Excellencies the assembled elders of all twelve tribes, Commanders, Rabbanim, Legates, Dayanim, Tribunes, Chazzanim, Centurions, Shameshes, President and Board of the United Synagogues of Judea, Chair and Distinguished Members of the United Board of Diaspora Synagogues and Communities, Chairs and members of the United Synagogue Brotherhoods, Chairwomen and members of the United Synagogue Sisterhoods, Chair and members of the Jerusalem Earthquake Relief Committee, amalgamated builders of Habonim Dror, indispensable young patrolmen of Hashomer Tza'ir, cherished young people of United Synagogue Youth, B'nai Brith and New Israel Foundation for Temple Youth, to all our wonderful Musicians and Decorative Artisans of this magnificent temple, distinguished guests,
In the beginning, I want to thank Your Royal Highness Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa for the glory of your attendance as your first official act as Governor of Syria. Never before in the history of our people have we been graced with so imperial a presence. It is the greatest possible testimony to the strength of the Roman Empire's unity, and the terrific splendor with which Rome has earned its authority. We are overwhelmed by your greatness. May the Almighty Without End bless you in all the good that you do, and may Rome and Jerusalem continue in partnership for ages to come. Strength, Strength, and we can strengthen one another.
I want to thank our two newly created Lords who shall always be the Rabbis who affected the direction of my life more than all others: Rabbi Lord Shemaya and Rabbi Lord Avtalyon, for the magnificence of their teachings. As Menahem the Essene and I assume the posts of Zugot after the glories of your shockingly exceptional leadership, we can look to your examples: your worldly wisdom, the point of your moral compasses, your intrepid moral bravery, and your redoubtable commitment to the Jewish people. I was with them on the day of the earthquake. And right where you sit Rabbi Lamech ben Mehallel, when it came time to pursue the war against the Nabatheans, Rabbi Lord Avtalyon advocated for the greatest possible commitment to the Benyaminites. He argued with such force that it often seems to me as though he brought down the walls of the Temple and brought down so much of Jerusalem with it. I was there when Rabbi Lord Shemaya would sit in the room of the Sanhedrin and experience his mournful visions of the old Sanhedrin, murdered in cold blood. It is their commitment to the most progressive future for Judea that we owe this bewitchingly gorgeous temple renovation, and to them we owe the commitment to repentance that comes from Herod the Great.
Herod the Great, how deserving you've been of that moniker since your atonement. If you have overcome your inclination and not been overcome by it, you have reason to rejoice. There are no words any among us may provide for the naches of your change, your commitment to rebuilding Jerusalem, rehousing the displaced, providing for the poor. If I may alter a quote from another great king: we are an army of your sheep, lead by a lion!
It is a new day in Judea! Not in eight hundred years has a king had such occasion for wisdom's accumulation, and not even King Solomon could look upon such works you've wrought. Your Majesty is already Herod the Great, but you, our king, have your chance to take your place among the great leaders of our people: Matthias and Judah Maccabee, Mordecai and Queen Esther, Ezra and Nehamia, David and Solomon, Moses and Joshua, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph... Herod...
To those who point out that Herod the Great cannot trace his yichus to Mount Sinai, Abraham nor his issue could neither. To those who point out Herod the Great was not educated in Torah, neither was Moses. A new age for the Jewish people begins with your majesty. You have committed terrible sins, but for seventy years of war and death, so have we all. If our King must repent his foul wickedness, so must we all. The difference between Herod the Great and us is that our land's peace was bought by him. Your Majesty, you have resurrected our people, and to you now falls the hard part: the challenge of keeping the Jewish people strong in a modern world where so many forces can pull us apart.
The prophet Isaiah said: "Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth, shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert."
And therefore I put to you all three questions addressed to three different bodies.
The first body is you, the Jewish people: If our illustrious king, Herod the Great, was not for himself, whom among us would have been for him? Herod the Great came from tiny circumstances. Not a century ago his family converted to our faith by the sword, and his grandfather Antipa an Edomite fisherman in the Gulf of Aqaba. The People of Esau and Ishmael have an honored place as our brothers and neighbors, and we all must work so that one day, all the Peoples of the Book will live together in peaceful accord. Herod the Great is a model to our young of how to collaborate with people different from us and a model to us all of individual initiative.
The second body is the Jewish State, and the incarnation of us all in its sovereign, Herod the Great. Your Majesty, with all modesty and good intent, I ask you as I have many times in private: if your royal self is only for yourself, who are you? The people of Judea have seen and survived so much. Our peoplehood is full of as many villains and heroes. We have survived Ramses, we survived Nebuchadnezzar, we survived Haman, we survived Antiochus, we will survive whatever comes, but to your choice comes the challenge of how we may thrive. Just as none are with the High Priest when he enters the Holy of Holiest, no one sits on the Judean throne but you. Responsibility for us all is a burden to only you, Augustus princeps, and God. I therefore hope the High Priest does not mind me paraphrasing him, but may God protect and defend you, our unquestionable King, may the face of God shine upon you and grant you with His grace, may you see the face of God, and may you, our great King, give us peace. Amen.
The third body is us, all of us. King and subject, Rabbi and layman, Jew and Gentile, Hebrew and Roman. I ask of you: "If not now, when." Jerusalem knows peace again. Rome knows peace again. Our Messiah has not come, but the world for which our grandfathers dreamed is here and now. God said through the prophet Isaiah: Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness." So I say yet again: if not now, when? Fear is the proof of a degenerate mind. No one develops courage by being happy in their relationships every day. They develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity. Whatever comes from God is impossible for man to turn back, and God has given us peace. So yet again let's say together, three times:
If not now, (crowd) when?
(gestures and they say with him) If not now, when?
(gestures and the crowd says themselves) If not now, when?
And let us all say,
(Hillel and crowd together) Amen
Caesar Agrippa to the man next to him: Well I don't like that responsa, but I obviously don't speak Hebrew. What did he say?
Assinius Pollio: Nothing particularly treasonous but these Jews have a way of seeming to praise while actually insulting people.
Agrippa: Let's keep an eye on those Rabbis, they could be trouble.
IX:19 BC: At the Court of the Sanhedrin
1. A meeting of the Sanhedrin. Due to popular demand, Menachem the Essene has finally been replaced as Father of the Court since he is seen as a puppet of Herod. He leaves to found a Yeshiva in Caesaria where Herod diverts a full sixth of the stipends that used to go to the Sanhedrin, which is all the more surprising because the Essenes are supposed to live in luxury.
2. Menachem has been replaced by Rabbi Shammai, a Rosh Yeshiva in the Upper Gallilee town of Sepph, appointed because he's seen as even more liberal and modernizing than Hillel. Shammai says very little in council, and yet he has appointed a whole new generation of his students as members of the Sanhedrin, and while he's seen as a reformer, his students refuse compromise with Hillel, whom they routinely accuse of being as much a stooge to Herod as Menachem. Shammai inevitably dresses them down in front of the full tribunal, yet the accusations against Hillel keep being issued.
3. The current issue before the Sanhedrin is that a group of five young Rabbis come forward with a letter claiming evidence that Herod is siphoning money from Menachem's yeshiva toward the extensions in his own personal palace. "It does not bear Herod's likeness on its seal yet it does bear the seal of the Temple Menorah, which means it comes from the Temple Curia and that it bears some amount of royal imprimatur." "Objection. On the other hand there's no evidence that priests operate with any imprimatur from Herod or his ministers." "On the other hand, don't be a freyer! Herod's high priest is still Ananel and his father is still Master of Coin. Nothing comes out of the Beys HaMikdash without Herod's imprimatur!" (general fracas and grumbling) "This is yet more evidence that Herod has not reformed ("objection?") nor has intention to reform! ("objection,"). He deliberately provoked the Nabatheans and Partheans into war for his own gain ("objection."), he assassinated the entire Maccabee-Hyrcanus dynasty but one heir (Objection.), and deliberately murdered this entire court (Objection!) with the willing consent of Shemaya and Avtalyon may they rest in piece (OBJECTION!). Hillel (bangs gavel): "Do I hear a motion for a half-hour recess?" "Motion granted." "Seconded." "All those in favor?" Few can hear Hillel over the commotion, Hillel bangs the gavel anyway. "The motion passes!" Nobody moves as everyone's shouting. Hillel says to his fellow zug at the front lectern "Shammai, may we confer in my chamber?"
4. Hillel and Shammai enter Hillel's chamber. Hillel immediately turns around: "Can you shtill your guys please?" "What?" "Geb a kook Shammai, you know that The Young Gallileeans can accuse me of whatever they want and I'll take it, I don't care. But once they bring Herod into it they're putting us all..." (Shammai interrupting) "What is it you want me to do?" "I want you to get them to shvayg." "You think I have any power over these guys?" "Stop with the shpiel. They're your bokhers, and I don't know what your goal is in this, but clearly you want them to go after Herod." "They don't need any convincing from anyone to go after Herod." "Most of these guys passed through your Yeshiva at one point or another. I'm not even sure what you stand for, but given what they stand for you..." "Look, I'm new here and you're President Hillel, I'll always defer to you running this place however you think best, but I told both you and Herod that I don't believe a Sanhedrin Father should be an activist. I'm just a shofet who only interferes when I think it's an absolute necessity, and that goes for any case at all." "So you're not standing up with them to denounce Herod... am I to infer from that that you think denunciation of Herod is unnecessary?" "I have no position on this." "You have no position on this? Your position is Father in the House of Judgement and you have no position on our king?" "None." "Why not?" "You can infer anything you like about my non-interference but that doesn't make it true." "Then I'm inferring with reasonable certainty that you believe with absolute faith in the necessity of our King's deposition." "I have no position on that."
5. Hillel: "Well, that settles quite a bit. At the beginning of business tomorrow, I'm putting to vote the removal of Bava-ben-Yehuda, Yochai-bar-Shimon, Hanunnah-ben Yitzhak, and Ravina-ben-Ashi. I assume you have no objections." "None." "Well then..." "Indeed... should we return to the chamber?" "In a moment... may I just inquire, humor me for a second Shammai, is that legend about you true? The one that you made your seven year old son fast during Yom Kippur?" "I have no answer to that." "Very well, shall we go back to the chamber?" "Rabban Hillel, I suppose I have a question too?" "Please." "Is it true what I heard about you at my Yeshiva in Gallilee?" "What did you hear?" "That Hillel, son of Sanhedrin President Gamliel-ben-Yehuda, was forty years old when he began to study Torah?" "Well obviously I'm not forty yet, so no." "Is it true that you, grandson of Royal scribe Rehovam-ben-Yerovam, were a woodchopper so poor that you couldn't afford to study so you climbed to the roof of a Yeshiva?" "Of course not." "But you've heard these stories?" "Maybe something like them once or twice but no." "And it would be beneath you to answer them, yes?" "It would be beneath me to answer them, but these rumors are not circulating around the court because your son fainted during Ne'ilah." "Alright then... is it true that Herod the Great, whom you go to such active lengths to defend, personally held a knife up to your neck when you were barely Bar-Mitzvah age and admitted to ordering the death of your father and grandfather?"
6. "Now I really think we should go back to the chamber." "I heard there's even more to that story." "It didn't take much for you to go from non-activism to hostility." "Rabban Hillel it's not hostility, it's to make the point that once we start interfering, there's no limit to what we have to acknowledge, and there follows a parchment trail." "So you have your students do your dirty work about Herod for you?" "What dirty work? My students have a mind of their own!" "So you admit they're your students." "They were my students." "When did they stop being yours?" "They've never stopped, but do you hold yourself accountable for all your students' ideas?" "Yes, actually, between you and me, if their conduct isn't worthy of what I teach them, I'm very disappointed." "But their conduct is not in question, it's their beliefs." "How is their conduct not indicative of their beliefs?" "Perhaps there's correlation but I do not judge your students, and isn't one of your famous sayings 'Judge not your friend until you stand in his place?'" "I suppose it is, but you've stood as Holy Father of the Sanhedrin for six months, and you see what I deal with every day." "Rabban Hillel, when have I ever not stood up to defend you when your character is slighted?" "You've been exemplary in that regard. I fault you not anything; but in six months, half is done we got done when Menachem the Essene didn't care what I did as long as Herod's associates got what they wanted, so why are you not helping us hear more cases and not deal with still another article of deposition against Herod? People are fighting violently and starving because we won't hear their cases."
7. "It's not our place to solve their problems." "IT'S NOT OUR PLACE TO SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS?!?" "No." "Then let me ask you a further question Holy Father: is the story true that you forced your daughter to give birth under a Sukkah?" "I have no answer." "Is it true?" "I have no answer." "I have it on good authority that it is and you know as well as I do that forcing a woman to give birth anywhere but her own bed is an offense punishable in the Galillee by stoning." "Is the legendarily kind Rabban Hillel threatening me right now?" "It's not a threat, I won't put this in front of the court; but it is undoubtedly a slight against your character that you appear to so care about laws that you have little consideration for your daughter's safety and comfort. Would you like to answer this slight from the legendarily kind Rabban Hillel?" "Well... Mr. President... if you must know, I tore the ceiling down so that her baby could observe Sukkot from the moment he was born." "...I'm sure they both were thrilled..." "I'm sure God was." "God has better things to care about." "God gave us laws so we can follow them." "God gave us laws so we can live better lives." "We live better lives by following His laws." "We live better lives by interpreting His laws in the way that best provides our welfare." "And how's that working Rabban Hillel?" "Well... Holy Father... while I was risking my life trying to assuage Herod the murderer, you were safe in in your Upper Gallilee yeshiva. Everything he did he justified by claiming that our religion is more authoritarian than any measure he adapted, and there were times he was right. But we showed him that Judaism has another way, so yes, I would say it's working pretty well."
8. "And what about when Herod decides that your Jewish liberality is no longer useful?" "Meaning?" "Your liberality is useful when Herod tries to ingratiate our country to Rome for business, but when Rome bleeds Judean resources dry as they do every country they subordinate, and we have to defend ourselves against enslavement, what have we left to defend us?" "When it's time to defend ourselves against Rome, we will defend ourselves with every way we must." "And who will follow you? A people unused to privation? Grown indolent and lazy with your liberality?" "Do not underestimate the lazy. They above all people are sensitive to their circumstances." "And what will we have left to fund their rebellion?" "Well,... emes... but there is always trust in the covenant of Lord to fall back on."
9. "So then you admit you don't have faith in the Lord's covenant." "Reb Shammai! Of course I do... I just have some faith in fellow Jews as well." "And what... evidence... is there that we are as worthy of your faith as God?" "The fact that we have sustained a faith in God's covenant for two thousand years. Not to mention the fact that God clearly has faith enough in us to give the covenant to us." "So you would have us be so indistinct from God that we deserve your faith?" "We are not indistinct from God, but we are made in his image and therefore deserve some small degree of the faith He deserves. We really should go back into the chamber." "Just one more question Rabban, if men deserve some degree of the faith God does, then why have we the chutzpah to punish men when they break laws and not punish God when he breaks his covenant."
10. "So you admit that God sometimes breaks his covenant or have you no position on that too?" "(sighs) ....Emes... but why should we expect him to keep the covenant when we are so unworthy of him?" "How can we expect our people to always be worthy of God if He does not provide the example of how to be worthy of us?" "Rabban, am I suppose to accept you're such an Apikores that you believe the being who created us all is unworthy of us?" "No such heresy as that, but I do not believe our Worthy creator always provides an example, and our laws must make provisions for the emptiness that God refuses to fill." "I bow to you as the Sanhedrin's ultimate authority, but that is still heresy by any precedent set before you." "Then history's arrived at a moment when we set a new precedent." "God is present in every place, and whether we know why he afflicts us, He knows." "Whether God is present, we live our lives without proof of His presence, and we make law to compensate for His silence." "God gave us laws, not men, and our law exists to clarify His meaning." "And how is God's meaning clarified by letting our laymen fight each other and starve?" "Emes again... but if God has the faith in us you say he has, then surely he shows how we are in His likeness by forcing us to confront problems great enough that only a God can solve them." "Emes to you... but why then not put the matter before the court where men can help their fellow men solve challenges so great that they're worthy of gods?" "That is not the purpose of the courts." "What is the purpose then?" "The purpose is to help bring Jews closer to God." "How do you bring Jews closer to God without easing their pain?" "The law not here to ease their pain, nor could it, pain is inherent in humans, and it is because of pain that our flock turns to God and His law."
(pause...)
11. "...not emes, but valid. I finally see the Kadosh Boruch Hu deliberately sent me a worthy partner, who balances my trust in men with trust in Him, but I doubt this partner would ever accord me the same worthiness." "Of course I would." "Then why the facade with the young Rabbis?" "There is no facade. There is only law. I don't control them but these Rabbis are right that King Herod has violated the law so flagrantly." "As opposed to... any other King of Judea or Israel?" "Then history's arrived at a moment when we set a new precedent."
12. (enter Hillel's assistant Zakai) "Rabban! Abba! Please come finally and put a stop to this!" "Stop to...?" "While you were in the chamber the fighting only got worse and eventually the Young Gallileeans stormed out. They began preaching on the Western Wall and are now leading a march of three-hundred Jerusalemites to the King's Palace to call for his abdication." Hillel: "Gevalt!" Shammai: "Shkhitah!" "We have to catch up with them" "Emes."
(they run outside to discover Herod's guards already slaughtering all the insurrectionists.)
13. "This is what happens when you demand clarity." "This is what happens when you allow ambiguity."
-----------------------------------------------
(Hillel and Shammai in Herod's chambers. Herod is standing behind a desk.)
14. Herod: "Father Shammai you're very smart and bold, but I'm moreso." "Thank you sire?" "I should have known that your non-interference was a way to depose me." "It was no such thing." "Tell me, and tell me the truth. Do you believe I should abdicate? The truth." "Yes." "Good, then I won't kill you." "Because if I said no you'd think that I was lying." "We understand each other, Mr. Rabban I think I can work with this guy." "He's quite bright." "My non-interference is a way of letting the law speak for itself." "And by speaking for itself, you mean to show how flagrantly I violate it." "Yes Your Majesty." "As for you, President Hillel, you're the one who should be controlling the Sanhedrin, not this new guy." "They were his recommended appointments!" "And you believed him?!" "We agreed to appoint him because there was nothing in his rulings which indicated his beliefs!"
15. "Rabbi Shammai you've taught me the most valuable lesson I have ever learned in sixteen years as your king." "Thank you sire." "What you've taught me is that Rabbi Hillel is absolutely wrong, and you are absolutely right." "In what sense sire?" "There is no assuming the best in people. If there is any ambiguity about their motives, they are plotting against you. I thank you greatly for your candor Holy Father, you truly are worthy of the office." "You're most welcome sire." "And because of that, your life is safe." "Thank you sire." "GUARDS!" (Herod's guards bring in all five Rabbis who spoke about the letter in the Sanhedrin chamber, all chained and gagged.) "I'm sure you've heard the rumors of how Shemaya and Avtalyon had to kill each of the Sanhedrin while Roman guards held them up." "I have." "Thanks to President Hillel, we are much more enlightened now. You will merely have to choose their method of execution: hanging, garroting, or beheading." (all five Rabbis panic and try to scream in their chains) "I choose for them to be beheaded." "You realize you will have to watch them die." "Of course." "Guards take them away and prepare them for death." (Guards escort the chained Rabbis out)
16. "Rabban Hillel, this man could sleep soundly after killing more men than I ever could, and that's why I trust him; I prefer my enemies right in front of me. This is what comes from your liberal reforms: subversion, revolution, insurrection. The new days for Judea you speak of are over. It's the old days of Joshua and Elijah now. I do not want anyone's worship or statues, but for all our purposes, there is only one God in Judea, and his name is Herod the Great. Thousands of times you will throw yourself at my feet to grant mercy to your people, and I will almost always refuse you. Rav Shammai, men like you are the reason Hillel's dream of peace can never happen, because men like you always want war. War is what you want, and war you shall have. You will be the death of all you mean to save, and even after you cause the murder of all you love, men like you still believe. Come, let's go watch your students die."
(all three men leave Herod's study)
X: Cain Fragment 1:
(Once again we arrive at a Cain Fragment, inserted directly into the text of the Tales of Classical Perversion with incompletions rendered as though metatext and urtext are interchangeable formterms. As none of this Cain Fragment is in prototext we cannot know if the restcorpus was lost or if it was redacted, but there is circumstample evidence of both. Perhaps one can enconceptualize a Roman-Jewish philosopher of middling intelligence, analyzing personages of the Catiline Conspiracy in a manner thoroughly unscholarly; unburdened by factable knowledge of the trial he discusses, but since those mentioned in the document's remains are entirely whom history remembers most vividly, one must conclude that the writer was of a later century, writing historical commentary as though it were of his present day, or, perhaps a redactor chose those passages of a document from the Catiline Era which he thought relevant to scrollreaders of his day and let the remains disappear.
Let us presuppose, just for an instant, that this were really Cain writing to Abel. While the Bible tells us Cain lived eight-hundred sixty years, he has never lived so long a life as he seems to by the end of this letter, which presupposes that whether or not he is Cain, the writer at the end is in fact the same scribe as the beginning, and, in the only instance among many Cain fragments, lived another seventy years of this lifetime unburdened by death or even by substantial ageing. This is, therefore, a highly unique and disputable Cain fragment. The Cain Fragments are almost certainly forgeries, but it is likely that this fragment is a forgery of a forgery. Nevertheless, if this forgery is a forgery of a forgery, then that would indicate that the Cain Fragments were already of note to people in the ancient world, and forgeries of the forgery proliferate, thereby creating forgeries of forgeries of forgeries ad infinitum. Perhaps scribes of different epochs took it upon themselves to continue the Cain narrative from one generation to generation throughout recorded history at an almost regular instance of roughly seventy years, which in itself is a finding of miraculous proportionality.
Again, one cannot imagidefine one's way into the worldspirit of two millennia ago, and yet this worldspeech timespeaks to us of how Judeopicureans and symposiers may have societoperceived the sociesoul and civispiritus of Rome in the decade directly before the Caesarrise.
Dr. Richard Westenbach - Humboldt University of Berlin - Department of Archeology - 1952)
My Dearest Abel,
It is your brother again, currently named Flavius Iacobus, reporting to you live from Rome, the latest in a protracted series of eternal capitals; yet unlike those others, this one seems to stay put no matter how often it deserves burning like Jerusalem.
This lifetime sees me the latest in a series of Jews born to Rome. When I first got here I was Flavia-bat-Yehuda, a poor servant in Umbria born to Israelite immigrants who fled the Assyrian destruction of Israel's Northern Kingdom. I was housekeeper to a Sabine family who witnessed their famed rape then, of course, shared their fate; only to become slave, then housekeeper, then mistress to Romulus himself, redecorating his hut until the Founder of Rome decided my best decorative use would be on a sacrificial pyre.
Two-hundred years later I was returned to the Italian peninsula as Flavius Avramus: a contract lawyer who settled a dispute between Plebians and Patricians by writing them a simple constitution. The Roman decemvirate told me it was so good Rome was going to adapt it as their founding document, then the decemvirate buried me alive.
Three hundred years later I returned to Rome as Flavius Isakus, a professor of geometry whom Scipio Africanus employed as a tactical advisor during the Second Punic War. Scipio had me crucified after the Battle of Cannae - there were 70,000 Roman casualties that day, all because Scipio thought I told him to attack the right bank but I said to attack FROM the right bank.
Now I'm Flavius Iacobus - a Roman banker born Yaakov de Sabatus, adopted into the Flavians for having repeatedly paid off the orgy debts of six separate heirs. You'd think nobody is horny enough to spend that kind of money on sex, but Romans spend so much on sex these days that some patrician families need to adopt a banker just to keep having it.
This is what happens when a country gets too much power. Some Romans think her power the result of excessive zeal for work, others think power grows Romans lazy. Regardless, Rome is no longer a city or even an empire, Rome is the world, and from here to aeternam, the world shall build on roads Rome paves. For my whole youth (of this lifetime), the goal for which Rome strove was Armenian defeat, and from the moment of our recent victory over King Mithridates, Rome's decline will begin.
You'd think decline would make a country less powerful, but no, Rome's too magnum to fail. Every time Rome fails, they simply get more powerful. Romans are such great builders, but no engineering feat can govern an empire of 60 million, and no building can make livable this capital of a million inhabitants. When Rome falls, people will feel the ramifications millennia hence. No country is meant to be this successful, and the more Rome accomplishes, the more accomplishment Romans demand of it.
And what half Rome's citizens demand is in direct contradiction to what the other half demands. Half of Rome demands the government share its wealth among its peoples, while half demands Rome's wealth be hoarded among the wealthiest families - including a large quotient of Rome's poorest inhabitants. Half of Rome demands complete bodily liberation, the right to sleep with any type of person, the right to live as any gender, the right to consume any type of drug, while half believes such liberation breaks the bonds of Roman family and demands the violent policing of Roman virtues like fidelity and temperance with severe penalties for those who violate them. Yet the half who believes in fidelity and temperance is the half that particularly exults in vicious spectacles like executions and tributes and gladiatorial ga...
(Here the narrative breaks off as the author heirs what seem to be copious grievances about living in the world's most prosperous city. The narrative only resumes when speaking of the subject occupying everyone's mind in the very year when King Mithridates of Armenia was defeated. - RW)
...me sets itself up for greater defeat with every passing victory. To conquer pirates and Armenians, Pompey needed every available soldier at Rome's command, united under a single officer. With the growth of armed forces comes a growth in armaments, and apparently Romans' privately held armaments are of even larger quantity than anything possessed by our exceedingly forceful army and police.
Meanwhile the Gauls amass on our border in quantities ever greater. The Gauls are fearful of what we may do to them, and potentially eager for revenge on what we've already done - a threat that could be neutralized if Rome limited its sphere of influence, but of course, Rome never would - because its ambition is to make the world into Rome. Eventually, Rome will grow so powerful that even her greatest victories are defea...
(Given that past here, the fabricator begins to discuss current events, this is presumably where the author would compare the Rome of BC 60s to the Rome of BC 80s when ruled by Sulla, whose iron fist was far deadlier than anything meted out during the Catiline Conspiracy. This scribe seems to paint an overly flattering picture of Roman freedom, because what extant parts of the narrative fail to mention is that in the four hundred fifty years before Julius Caesar's consulship, the Roman Senate granted temporary dictatorial power to ninety-six consuls. - RW)
...tiline, that family-defiling bucco of a conspirator whose debauched hair could serve as its own battle helmet. Has power made Romans the stupidest people on earth? Was Rome blessed by the BBH out of pity because Romans were already this stupid? Or will the naivete which unbridled Rome to reach the highest peaks just as easily create its downfall?
If I'm still alive then killing your brother is more common a sin than it seems; but deflowering your daughter? Sealing a conspiracy with a human sacrifice you eat? What can you say except that when one looks at the trumpery of men like Catiline, you'd think man formed from monkeys rather than ribs. If a serpentine sponge of feces rises so high, is there a sewer into which Rome cannot sink?
Whatever stupidity guided Catiline to such heights, the fact is clear as day: he was bait to measure how many fish would bite at a dictator. They say a fisherman once stung will be wiser, but news travels so quickly through the world's forums that a million fish can share your corpse before you realize you're dead.
That stinking trash had neither money nor legions nor brains to organize his own rebellion, and even were that public toilet to be dictator, there was clearly a puppetmaster to whose questions he provided answers. The feeling of many is that it's King Pharnaces, eager to avenge the Armenian conquest and willing to infiltrate Rome from the inside. As implausible as it seems prima facie, evidence is overwhelming of at least some Armenians colluding with that cow flatulence; but my feeling is that even if Catiline had Armenian handlers, there had to be collusion within Rome's most powerful interests as well. Was it from Crassus's camp, did it come from Pompey's, was it Caesar's? Was it all three? Or was it a different puppetmaster abroad? Perhaps it was King Antipater, but that's too tempting a leap: everyone loves to blame Judeans for things they don't do.
But even were there no conspirator behind Catiline, all these potens look oh so closely at the lessons of the Catiline Conspiracy, testing its data, formulating precisely where it went wrong and documenting every way it went right. Rome claims to be a republic but the empire's run by three or four families. Everybody else is just a bureaucrat under their patronage. Had the Republic hope of survival before Catiline, there's no hope now. Were I to die a natural death, I would live to see Rome a perpetual dictator...
(Here is a further break for which one cannot surmise the nature of the missing paragraphs. It is almost as though the writer could not formulate a transition. - RW)
...st as the world was divided between Rehovam and Yerovam, or Menelaus and Paris, (or Cain and Abel), you would think the world would have better options than its current neat division between the priggish Optimates and the vulgar Populares. All it takes to destroy a civilization is dwell within the indisputable apogee of its progress and watch helplessly as the societal organism vivisects itself into two parities with a neatness as miraculous as an ocean pebble.
How?
Because so great are this great society's newbegotten powers that its citizens believe themselves possessed of their truth like God possesses our truths. They grow accustomed so quickly to comforting powers for which they have neither understanding nor precedent that they think themselves gods. The more accustomed they grow to new conveniences, the more dim their realization that they know as little of the innovations' dangers as children, yet have no parent willing to guide them. And because the society believes they understand powers of exponential largesse compared to what they shortly once had, and with so little evidence, the society neatly divides into two parties:
"The Party of More", and "The Party of Less."
The Party of More wants to use their powers to effect enormous change to include everyone, the Party of Less wants to use these powers to exclude everyone from any and all change, and because they dismiss the ideas of all who disagree with them, none are present to tell them their beliefs are impossible, and members of their party constantly push each other into ever more extreme versions of what they already believe.
And yet creation remains complete.
In 3700 years, what God best taught me is that when each person pursues their goal far and hard enough, their goal becomes precisely the opposite of what they initially thought they pursued.
The Party of More who wish to share their riches attract so many who wish to benefit that the value of what they share shrinks precisely to the penury they wish to alleviate - thereby making the Party of More into the Party of Less.
The Party of Less who wishes to preserve and increase their riches repel so many with what must be done to preserve their wealth that the vileness of their actions cause their own downfall. Thereby freeing up their resources and making the Party of Less into the Party of More.
Life is a vapor: the flower withers, the grass fades, the world mourns, but He is forever.
How do we know all this?
Because after the zenith of every civilization in every era, either side of these political arguments achieves a near absolute equality of means to convince the populace that their side is the right one. The Party of More has more adherents, the Party of Less has disproportionate political power to their numbers, but neither party can defeat the other, and within a generation of a civilization's celestial apogee, every society reaches that state of absolute parity - every one, when gridlock freezes all actions in a kingdom where dynamism so recently was the state of everything, until such time as the Holy One BBH decides its time to mix these volatile elements together like we're compounds in his personal chemistry set.
Inevitably, some small event sets dynamic elements in motion again, and in such a frustrated place, mere gusts of wind may set off explosions that cause entire countries to live in abyss and amiss, maelstroms overcome only by darkness on the face of the deep - the imposition of a human dictator who rules his land as though vicar to both God and Sa...
(Presumably the Cain forger-within-a-forger now elucidated what he thought was a terribly interesting theory of how dictatorship is imposed over chaos and authority is chaos's inevitable result. Such theories would be familiar to any ancient reader possessing a cursory familiarity with Plato's Republic. No doubt, the writer fancied himself quite familiar with it in spite of being reading it only cursorily. - RW)
....t are these new powers brought to earth?
It's different in every society. In Sumeria it was writing. In Babylon it was law. In Egypt it was measurement, but in the case of this particularly grandiloquent metropolis, it's their engineering - their capacity to build: housing, plumbing, weapons, tools, roads, roads; roads: roads so strong, so durable, so distant that they pave the world, and what once was a globe of million spheres becomes a place to wander for an eternity.
Rome's roads brought her wealth beyond any state, but with more work than elsewhere, Rome has more workers, more mouths, more garbage, more crime, more noise, more fire. The more Rome builds, the the more buildings f....
(another element which tells us this Cain fragment is a particularly ill-made forgery is that wherever an old paragraph leaves off, the next paragraph resumes with the exact letter which was the next of what we must presume the former word would have been - a feature I have been at great pains to translate precisely. If this Cain fragment is, as I could not suspect more strongly, a forgery from at least 300 years later, then it is a trick designed to orient the reader so he might feel continuity between passages that have none. - RW)
...all major politicians in Rome profess to be horrified at the prospect of permanent dictatorship, yet each seeks it. Those who don't actively seek the throne, like Cato and Cicero, are thrust into life-threatening danger.
Every Roman knows that Pompey and Crassus detest one another, yet recent machinations show they're in alliance and I have no doubt they asked Cicero to form a triumvirate of Rome's most powerful men; but Cicero knows such alliances only end with one ally eliminating the other two.
There is a small chance that by staying out, Pompey and Crassus may kill each other and Cicero may restore Rome to the republican virtues he claims it's always had, yet Pompey and Crassus are just the latest in a long series of civic monsters created by the Roman Republic, so whether Rome stays republic or becomes dictatorship, why should anyone expect those who follow them to act better?
In any event, I think it far more likely that one still more authoritarian and canny than the other two will prevail, and we must occasionally allow the devil his due, if a republic allows for death to populate the planet as Rome has, perhaps only a dictato...
(It is probably impossible to know in what follows whether or not the fabricator views Caesar or his actions with approval or censure. But in what follows, the Cain forger clearly looks upon Caesar with an awe he has for no other politician of his era. - RW)
...Rome so takes its democratic norms for granted that it could turn dictatorship overnight and half the population wouldn't know for a hundred years. Rome rose because the rest of the world ran itself with mediocre tyrants while Rome's republic allowed educated men of ability to rise to the station of their worth.
It's still an abysmal model for maximizing human potential, but Rome's model was so superior to any other provided that should Rome 0become just another tyrannical imperium, when will a world power rise to Rome's like station and simultaneously so rise with better means of governing?
Perhaps I'd seen Rome's like in the rise of Sumer, but it's been two-thousand years since Rome improved upon Sumer's model. How many thousands of years will it be before we see again the likes of R...
---------------------------
...assus is the most likeable man in Rome who converses with any slave as his equal, convinces everyone he agrees with what they believe, tells women and business associates exactly what they want to hear, and like all likeable moderates, cuts professional corners exactly as he does ideologically. The man is corrupt as a rotted fig and rumors persist he conspired with Cataline to lend money at interest that would make Crassus dictator of Rome's dictator.
Crassus still believes he can make himself dictator, but the world of Crassus is the world of likable mediocrities who hand out giftbags at the end of an orgy. If Crassus is remembered in thousands of years, it will be as moderate corruptors always are, the mediocre villain in the hagiography of a fanatic.
Yes, Spartacus was a slave, but as far as slave life goes, Spartacus's was fairly glorious: a highly literate descendent of the deposed Spartaocid Dynasty in Armenia, allowed for years to soldier in the Roman army and even to keep his priestess wife when he became a slave; whom upon becoming a slave used his collegium education to preach to fellow gladiators that colonialism is a particularly Roman invention and that the so-called universality of the Roman system is particularly designed to oppress occupied peoples and indoctrinate them into wanting to be Roman.
What did Spartacus do when he wasn't burning his captives? He and his wife were lecturing them about his ideas. Were his ideas right? I never read those treatises and I'm convinced no one else has, but when people explain them to me I can never make sense of that collegium shite, it reminds me too much of all that rabbinical doublethink, but right or wrong, what the fuck did Spartacus know about slavery? I have lived more slave lives than Spartacus and died on more crosses, but there would be no privileged pseudo-slave leading the Roman Empire to the cross had the entire empire not been robbed blind by money-mad p...
-------------------------------------------------------
...ompey is not a man. He's a machine of murder. This machine is the most beloved man in Rome, known for being Rome's most tireless administrator, but that's exactly what he isn't. He's just a general who knows nothing but war nor wishes to learn. Some call Pompey one of that new type of conservative who believes that by imposing his values elsewhere, Rome will elevate their tribute states, but that's all a ruse. Pompey Magnus is precisely that old sort of Middle Eastern adventurer who never gives thought to his subjects after he conquers them; he simply lusts to conquer. He trains giant mechanisms to conquer then disbands them before they can help rebuild the societies he destroyed. He gets credit in Rome for allowing the East to self-govern, but what makes Pompey's reputation so effective is that he leaves his conquered territories so chaotic that they kill themselves while he moves on to his next glory, and there are so few Romans in the conquered territories that Rome has no idea about the casualties inflicted by Rome's unregulated proxy kings.
A lot of senators claim that would Rome have a dictator, Pompey would easily be the best as being reliable and trustworthy, and most importantly, too libertarian to state fund ambitious building and employment projects like Caesar's proposals. But Pompey will never be a dictator nor would he hold power because a true dictator provides the one thing Pompey never does: authority. Were Pompey to rule Rome she would be left to the same chaos as the entire Middle East. Historical infamy is made from such R...
----------------------------------------------------------------------
...o is precisely the sort of man everyone claims they aspire to be but everyone hates because he achieves it. His oratory defends democracy with prophetic force worthy of Jeremiah, yet millions resent Cicero because in pointing out the greatness of Roman virtue, he holds the mirror up to how everyone fails to live by it but him; therefore they call him a Rome-hater rather than the man who loves its virtues beyond Rome's deserts.
The very Romans he champions call him smug and arrogant, they carry on about the circumstances of his birth, they call him a supercilious snob; but whether any of it is true is immaterial. The more judiciously he conducts the investigation into Catiline, the more it seems to Romans a show trial; the more evidence Cicero turns up, the more they think it manufactured; the bigger a story Catiline's conspiracy becomes, the less Rome cares. Cicero might very well be the assinus arrogans gossip claims he is - surely no one but a bore would signal virtue so loudly, but he could act as saintly as Hestia and people would still think he views them as his inferiors precisely because he extols virtues no Roman has.
The most damning evidence of Cicero's insincerity is how many resent his beneficence. No one worries that Cicero looks down on them, they worry that Cicero is correct to look down on them, and they would rather sabotage the future than improve their own lots, because if Cicero enacted policies that created a world of smarter, better Romans, future generations would look back on our Rome as a city of violent animals.
Cicero is surely not the criminal Pompey or Crassus is, but his willful naivete is even more dangerous because he enables blood by preventing it. He claims he saved the democratic process, and he's absolutely right, but by clothing republican ideals in such hauteur, he slayed it for future generations more thoroughly than a Catiline ever can. He claims he saved the republic from civil war, but by framing the Catiline conspiracy as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism rather than a mediocrity who rose to power from slime, he condemned Rome to an eternity of civil war.
Already we see how Clodius, who seems to have abused every woman in Rome, turns on Cicero. Cicero spoke out against Clodius's misogyny, which is obviously the moral thing to do; but once Clodius revealed his true nature, it cost him so little to switch his loyalty from the moral gesticulating of Cicero to the rapacious libertinism of Crassus.
Cicero constantly sets a precedent for virtue that cannot be followed. Perhaps Cicero's virtues will go into abeyance for a while, but they will come back, and the ability of tyrants to kill on the massive scale hinges on the invocation of vir...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...o is hardly the most dangerous man in Rome so long as Cato the Younger lives. A man of impeccable virtue is as rare as a peaceable Roman, and the one virtuous man in Rome is her most lethal. They call him a reactionary but reactionary or revolutionary, it's all the same isn't it?
Fanatics are always the best, most virtuous people and their trustworthiness ends up killing us all. When virtuous beliefs are as simple as Cato's stoicism, no society can be worthy of a man like Cato who devotes every waking moment to his zealot zen.
Cicero's austerity causes him to live in a constant state of the most eruptive rage, and his rage of his belief taps into the unarticulated rage of the populi because he shows that it's possible for powerful men to live righteously. It gives some of them a hero and casts everyone else in the role of villains. The passion of Cato's following will terrify Rome into a dictator's hands and destroy everything Cato means to create. If or when Rome acquires a lifetime dictator, it will be Cato's insistence on stoical justice that pushes him ther...
XI: Cain Fragment 2:
As is my custom, I write to you once every biblical threescore and ten, as though I have just lived yet another full lifetime, and burn my offering to the post in the sky where I hope you shall receive it, or at least it shall be received by our creator. My burden is, as always, greater than I can bear, yet have I born it this century as every other.
I write to you from a mountain hideaway called Masada, composing a letter amongst a thousand blackened corpses. I have just composed a speech I shall tell the world was written by our general, Elazar-ben-Yair, exhorting his people to nobly fall on their swords rather than allow themselves taken prisoner. I shall leave it next to his body ere I depart.
But there was no speech, and only one of these deaths shall be a suicide. Rather than tell and risk their families' flight, each husband strangled his own wife so they would not cry out in death and scare the children before the child murder itself. For once all the mothers of their children were dead, each father slaughtered his own children like kosher butchers, slitting the throat as two other men held the child down. Only then did they kill each other, for surely suicide is a great sin . . .
One might understand their plight, as surely torture, rape, and slavery is their best hope at Roman hands, yet were we better than the Romans? All I could do in response was hide a few women and children in a singular small alcove of which I knew I was the only person to discover. I wanted to save so many more, yet where could I hide them that their patriarchs would not find? The lots were drawn for whom should be the last man to live and burn the corpses ere they be sodomized, and of course, the chosen man was me. For I am Cain, who since that awful day in the field has died in every century yet resurrected from each death in different corner of the world with 4000 years of memory within me. I have died by burning and drowning, sword and beast, famine and thirst, violence and plague, strangling and stoning. Much of it self-inflicted, for if God will not let me die, he can at least see how much I long for it.
Jesus-ben-Joseph, if he is whom Paul says, was only resurrected once, and for that he is god, whereas resurrection is all I am, and I am not even a devil; merely sentenced to life eternal, wanderer and witness to all things, not even permitted sleep, everlasting to everlasting. Perhaps Satan is who awaits the sinners, but since I am the true and knowing perpetrator of original sin, I am His witness for all sins on earth. Your blood cried out to God, but for my injustice perpetrated upon you, God cries out the blood of every injustice to me.
It is nearly 4000 years since we trod earth together. I have written you in every century of my trevails and few small triumphs, but I do not know if you have received my letters, so every century I write you anew of my sufferings, my guilt, my experience, and my horrible knowledge. I have seen century after century of death. I've killed a tens of thousand more than I was killed - in war, in execution, and for pleasure. I watch as millions of slaves groan under their burdens. I have watched millions of tortured and executed plead for mercy. I have watched millions of women cry out against their captors, and millions of their children cry out before their sacrifice. I have watched billions cry out at every age for release against the pain of illness, the one pain which I shall never know, and therefore can never be released. All that I have loved has died so many times that I worry my longing to love shall rot, yet I am cursed to love anew in every lifetime - the eyes and embraces of so many women remain etched within me, all of them cursed to live alongside my curse, and bear my fate even after I am gone. My wives have born thousands of children, and each time I am reborn, my children think their father dead. A whole race of Cains probably exists upon earth in every corner of God's Earth - the wretched class of every empire and territory, existing at the mercy of all who are not them, their treatment a mere bellweather for whether their hosts shall be rewarded, or punished in manners little different than Cain is in every lifetime.
He with no name thinks he can console me for my sufferings with wisdom, but the greatest wisdom is that wisdom has no reward. He who increases knowledge increases sorrow, and to He my soul went with you, and like you, I am eternally departed from it - the one material man on earth. What shall it profit a man if he gain the world but lose his soul? Well, I have heard Christ preach on the Mount and was crucified the week after him. I wrote reports for Augustus Caesar and warned Julius about the Ides of March. I was sentenced to death by Cyrus the Great and had my death sentence commuted by Cyrus in my next lifetime. In one life was a Babylonian slave who died under the stones of Nebuchadnezzar and in the next designed buildings for Nebuchadnezzar. I died in the Punic Wars twice, once for Rome, once for Carthage. I was killed by the soldiers of Qin Shi Huang four times. I designed pillars for Ashoka, meditated with the Buddha, and sat at the feet of Confucius as his disciple. I fought alongside both Alexander and Achilles and was there when Troy burned. I was methodically examined by Socrates, examined Aristotle in turn, measured angles for Pythagoras and redacted Homer. I sealed the treaty at the Peace of Nicas with my blood and drowned at the Battle of Aegospotami. I hunted with Gilgamesh and sat at the gambling table of Yudhistira. As a slave I built pyramids for Pharaoh Khufu and sphinxes for Hatshepsut, yet advised Pharaoh Thutmose on science and served as high priest of Ra for Akhenaten. I attended to Cleopatra in her chambers and I counseled Queen Esther on how to please King Ahasuerus. I have written songs for David and wisdom for Solomon. I was with Pharaoh at the Red Sea and the Israelites at Mount Sinai. I, too, am that I am, and I everything the world is, I have gained, but gain after gain, life after life, I shall lose.
Fifty-nine years ago I was poisoned by Empress Livia before I could tell Caesar Augustus of her many plots. Divine Augustus, there was a king with the wisdom of Solomon who created an empire that will bend time's arrow just as once did David. But if the world only knew the price of greatness, even of goodness and justice, would we ever venture it? Would we ever pursue any goal knowing how much we shall suffer from it?
People only accept great leadership when webbed in chaos's maelstrom, and the greater the leadership, the more the followers forget that but for the restraints their leader imposed, they would be dead. And in the wake of great leadership, no potential successor has the credibility to make followers see unity's necessity. The only place a great leader earns credibility is in the valley of the shadow of death, and when a leader leads to a mountaintop, there is no place to move but by descent - the leader sometimes has great assistants groomed to become good leaders - Moses had his Joshua, Hatshepesut her Thutmose, but greatness has no true successor, and most leaders are no leaders. No great leader had a true heir but dear David, who only found him after the death of many sons, and even great Solomon paid for his success upon death with the immediate division of his kingdom. Under new leadership the followers bristle under the necessity of taxes and wars, old rituals and new traditions, current responsibilities and new righ
(Bloodstains make the scroll largely illegible for three columns at this location but for a few passages. One cannot help a tantalizing temptation to surmise a thought that in these passages the mystical Cain details a theory of historical evolution, effective political action, the rise and decline of civilizations, and the formation of the Roman Empire - RW)
Republics are lonely islands floating in the sea of autocracy. They inevitably begin with hopes for eternal improvement in the human lot and end with aspirations violated, inspirations defaced, and accomplishments dashed to ruins. In Athens, Carthage, and Rome each, republics generated the greatest achievements known to human history, and therefore still greater hopes. Each republic ended amid a rain of blood all the larger for their towering achievements that were enlisted in the service of murder. Perhaps future republics shall last still longer and achieve still more for more people, but the longer they last, the more people they include, the more death shall be their end.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amid a hundred years of decline and dysfunction, the end of our Roman republic seemed covered with such hope - first in Caesar Julius, then in Caesar Augustus. For fifty years, our First Citizen was the greatest man of his time raised to our highest position, and after our deaths, a ruler greater still would succeed him: be it Agrippa, or Gaius, or Germanicus, who could possibly doubt that Rome's next Princeps would extend her to still greater glories from which it could provide the world still more decency and improvement and peace? Who would have thought that the next Caesar would be mediocre, brutal, depraved Tiberi
--------------
... the future was so charged with the godliest sunlight, but there is no sun god; neither Apollo nor Ra, nor was Augustus divine, there is only our Yahweh, who has no competition in the heavens, yet is jealous of phantoms as invisible as he.
(One can form no worldconception of this scroll's historicospirit. It was discovered underneath antiquisand in the Judean Desert's Cave of Horror and the historiographiconature of this testamentscroll is highly beliefdubious, and yet carbon dating does appear to show its composition to be roughly veracitous with the timedating of its claim of periodicity; one could easily imagine a Judean mystic, perhaps an Essene, who formed a genesis of selfconception as a man who'd lived past lives, albeit such a selfconception would be seen as blasphemous had he related his selfstory any fellow mystic. But how could a mere Judean mystic have such accurate knowledge of historical events and personages in the Eastern Orient? And how could he analyze future historical events with such foresighted precision?
That such a testamentscroll could arrive in the Cave of Horror when it was composed at Masada leads one to the definiconclusion that it is a work of spiritupure sensifabrication. One cannot definimagine one's way into the spirit of worldview in the world of two millennia ago, and yet this timespeaks to us of how Judeomystics may have selfperceived in the spiritudesolation of Roman Palestina post-First RomanoJewish War.
Dr. Richard Westenbach - Humboldt University of Berlin - Department of Archeology - 1952)
XII: Palestine's Colossus:
Not 24 hours after that lethal encounter with Shammai was I ordered to set sail for Rhodes and meet none other than Octavian himself, newly consecrated Caesar Augustus; the implication clearer than marble etching that groveling was expected at the new Caesar's feet; and having collaborated with Anthony, Herod must beg Octavian's clemency to spare Judea.
Yet there were augers for hope. The symbolism of meeting at Rhodes with its Colossus seemed clear: Caesar was the colossus and I doubt Rome would make such a grand gesture if they meant to kill me. And as my ship approached the famed ruins, I heard charmingly vulgar talk between two sailors, one Roman, the other Judean, showing just what understanding was possible between two peoples whom nothing in common held. To my best ability, my memory records the conversation:
"When sailors sailed under it, they must have peered up. Did they... ,,, get a view of anything underneath?" "There's no phallus among the ruins if that's what you're implying." "How could there not be?!" "Well it's just not there." "It just seems unlikely to go to all that trouble to scare the bejeesus out of visitors who sail under it with a statue a hundred meters tall and not give it a sch.." "..I don't know what to tell you." "Maybe you Romans should... y'know... look harder." "Are you saying the fucking Colossus of Rhodes had a small..." "I'm not saying it was small, though it had to be small enough that somebody could make it disappear without noticing." "You're fucking pazzo." "Look, all I'm saying is that something must have happened, and I bet I know what did even..." "Whatdya' think?" "I think some Jewish bronze merchant a hundred years ago said getta load'a that schvantz, and sold it to a Roman senator." "...Get the fuck outa here!" "I really do!" "You think some Yid had the balls to steal a gigantic bronze phallus from the most watched site in the world?" "I think Rome helped!" "You think the penis of the Colossus of Rhodes is in Rome?!" "I think it's standing straight up on top of the fucking Pantheon is what I think."
And yet when we arrived, there were statues in the likeness of Herod and Antipater right next to the feet of the old Colossus.
Captain: "What does this mean your majesty?" Me: "It means either I will be feted as hero, or I will fall like the statue." Captain: What happens if you fall? Herod: I'll be killed, my family killed, and all of Judea sold into slavery like every other Roman province.
I embarked onto land; and my welcome? A dozen slave girls, temptingly naked, who painted my face red - as Romans thought the gods were colored. They stripped me of my clothes so they could dress me in a purple toga, and on my head they placed a laurel wreath. Still I thought I may die as a Roman sacrifice to their gods. I knew Romans didn't practice human sacrifice, but I didn't know if Rhodesians did, and maybe Caesar planned to give them a king to burn as a particularly mighty offering.
Then was I placed on a large pulled chariot straight into a triumph through the streets of Rhodes, utterly Roman-style. Behind my chariot was a town praecones, continually announcing 'Hail Herod! Rome's protector in the East! Hail Herod! Vanquisher of the Hasmoneans! Hail Herod! Ensnarer of Cleopatra! Hail Herod! Rebuilder of Jerusalem!" I saw in front of me a hundred open wheelbarrows. First an armory's worth of weapons - the short gladius, the long spatha, the tiny pugio, the enormous hasta, the aerodynamic pilum, the flying plumbata - a hundred each at least, in front of a dozen catapults of all manner: the onager, the ballista, the scorpio; and within them a thousand dolabras - the tool which every Roman soldier used for digging, along with a thousand helmets and shields. In between each caravan was another open chest of currency: gold and silver in coin and bullion. And further chests containing giant jewels of pearl, jade, malachite, amethyst, carnelian, topaz, chalcedony, obsidian, olivine, and lapis lazulli. In front of all these chests, further statues and paintings and tapestries: of Herod, Antipater, Mairiam, all the Hasmonean protectors, and all the prophets of the Bible.
At the end of the parade, six hours later, stood Flavius Jacobus, at the foot of Rhodes's Temple of Jupiter, there to bid his old friend into the temple, who silently motioned to bid me up the stairs.
And when I entered, immediately I saw, on the center wall of the Temple, sitting upon Divine Jupiter's lap, was in the flesh, Caesar Augustus.
"The Temple of Jupiter here is not much of a temple but it'll do for now. Rome and Rhodes bids welcome to its Protector in the East. I hope this trip is turning out as eventfully as you hoped?"
"Well, I don't know if I hoped for such events but..."
"...Such events you now have. We have named you Rome's Protector in the East, and we trust that you will act to Rome's benefit just as you've acted to Judea's. Do you notice all the finery in front of you in your triumph?"
"I couldn't help but.."
"..It's yours of course. Along with the slave girls."
"Well thank you, but is this a harbinger of something ominous? Isn't some slave supposed to shout in my ear to remember that I'm mortal?"
"Probably not, and you're from Judea. Nobody there forgets they're mortal."
"So this is a triumph?"
"It's very much a triumph. Yours and mine."
"Didn't you have a triumph of your own in Rome?"
"Come with me King, let's talk among the ruins."
And as in suspense I walked with Augustus to inspect the Colossus's many bronze ruins, Augustus immediately launched into conversation:
"I didn't want the triumph but it was insisted and I found it the opposite of enjoyable. What ruler who wants to die of natural causes ever throws himself a triumph? So this is my celebration as much as yours. When Divine Julius wanted to holiday, it was to places like Rhodes he came. 'My boy, when Romans go north you work, when you go east and south, you play.'"
"Your father went to Rhodes?"
"He tried, but was abducted by pirates, just like you were when you left Egypt."
"I wasn't abducted by pirates."
"You weren't?"
"I was shipwrecked after Cleopatra sent me to Italy to pitch something straight to you and Anthony. I honestly thought I'd be killed the day after we embarked - either Cleopatra wanted me thrown overboard, or she sent me to Anthony so he could kill me, and if they didn't kill me, I figured you would. But instead I was shipwrecked and fell into the belly of whale where I stayed for three days."
"You mean like your prophet Jonah?..."
"How do you know about Jonah?"
"A good leader reads..."
"I swear on my people's god it happened."
"If you say it happened it did. You're a king and kings write their own histories. All manner happens to me that no one would believe."
"If you say so."
And strangely enough Augustus began to croak and ribbit like a frog, but stranger still, within forty seconds three hundred and some frogs appeared noisily. They all jumped atop the ruins of Rhodes's Colossus, and all the frogs did bow to us like the kings we were.
"The Gods allow some people to do some very strange things. We great men, we're not made of the same stuff."
"In my country, I'm told there is only one god who grants such permissions."
"I've heard you believe in two."
"How did you discover that?!"
"A good leader also listens."
"I don't necessarily believe in two gods. I've only heard one."
"What god is that?"
"Whatever god it is, it is not the god worshipped by my people. I've heard it called the 'other' God."
"The other god?"
"The God who appeared to me after the destruction of my true home country, Idumea, and ordered me to avenge my homeland upon its destroyers."
"So it's true!"
"What?"
"You hate your people!"
"And you love Romans?"
"I'm ambivalent about them."
"You fear them!"
"Yes, very much so."
"How many of my own subjects are Idumeans? It was ten percent before Judea destroyed them. What is it now? Eight percent? Six percent? So how much more reason have I to fear my subjects? They killed my family, they killed the family that birthed my family, they've been killing my family since the time of Lot and Ishmael."
"Well, the Romans did just kill my father, but no, we don't have your prodigal patrimony. Rome is a city of immigrants, and immigrants come to new places to forget old hatreds."
"Hatred is history's oldest motivator. Let Roman history go on long enough and there will be enough hatred to power the rest of Judea's history."
"You're probably right but don't forget Protector, you're still in the company of the only man you can't rule."
"My apologies your majesty."
"And don't you dare call me that either. I'm no king or emperor, my title is 'Mr. Princeps', Rome's First Citizen."
"You really want me to call you that?"
"It's just ridiculous enough that people won't be in awe of me."
"Whatever you say Mr. Princeps."
"I must say, I'm more impressed than I expected to be."
"What did you expect?"
"The world entire knows of Herod's Odyssian cunning, but I worried I'd encounter a spoiled killer."
"Well that's exactly who I am."
"We have spoiled killers everywhere in Rome, they all kill each other and assume they can take the spoils without another spoiled killer taking theirs; but you're different Herod son of Antipater. I can't tell whether you're just a little spoiled or just a lot a killer, but men like you kill so freely that you either build nations or destroy them."
"What charm of mine gave it away?"
"Don't you know? You, king of a people supposed so skilled in the arts of duplicity?"
"As I said, I'm not a Jew."
"Of course you are, all semites are partially Jews, and you rule over them! Were you not the most gifted among a very gifted people you'd just be another Judean prince strangled in a prison."
"I still don't understand."
"You're gifted enough that I'm scared just talking to you."
"Mr. Princeps can't be scared of a vassal king."
"I'm scared of every vassal king who knows to speak less than I do."
"Have I spoken less?"
"Had you spoken more, it would have been impossible not to read your mind, and you'd be stunned how many vassal kings speak over me in conversation."
"Ignorance is bold. Knowledge is reserved."
"Indeed, yet amid all this tact and erudition, I hear there is no German horde who can perpetrate all the atrocities it's said Herod does, and it's for that reason I trust you to pilot a project I hope to institute through the whole empire."
"What project?"
"Jew, how long did it take your people to advance from Abraham to such learning as you now have that that neither Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Syria, nor Greece could destroy you.
"I suppose it's been two-thousand years."
"How many men are there among the Jews like Flavius Jacobus?"
"Rich?"
"No, just uncannily scrupulous and unscrupulous whenever appropriate. You want revenge against your Jews, but Jewish skill gives your people \such eminence that the finance of men like Jacobus animates the greatest Empire the world will ever see."
"I still don't see where this is going."
"So two thousand years was the amount of time it took you to evolve to such a state. This also was roughly the same time that Egypt and Sumeria learned to read, yes?"
"I suppose."
And just then, conveniently enough, we arrived upon the Colossal ruins. I would say it was a coincidence but Augustus probably knew to time it perfectly.
"Now look at this bronze Jew. Two and half centuries ago, the might of the ancient world looked upon its work and despaired, yet just fifty years later, a mere earthquake took it down for all time."
"I must be stupider than you give me credit for because I still don't understand."
"Well I understand there was an earthquake none to long ago in Jerusalem?"
"One of a few."
"Two thousand years it took for Jews to go from a desert people to work at the side of an empire that dwarves every other. Prosperity never abides long in the same place, and so this, now, is a once every two millennia opportunity. The most competent nations in the world are also the most powerful."
"I suppose I see that, but I don't understand what to do with it."
"It will not be again unless we educate the other nations of world to our standard."
"And you truly believe you can do that?"
"I believe YOU can do that. Rome may think it wants glory for its senate and people, but Rome must not be allowed to become an empire of bread and circuses! Your people are commanded to be a light unto nations? Well, be that light!"
"I?... Mr. Princeps, I think your ambition exceeds even your own power. Who am I that Herod should bring the world out of slavery? Does the world even want freedom?"
"The world doesn't know what it wants, the world does not know what it needs. What the world needs is for all Rome's vassal nations to be as strong as Rome herself."
"You would willingly give up your empire?"
"It was never my empire. I have neither the right to it nor the desire."
"Wouldn't so many strong nations cause permanent war?"
"Not if nations were united in a league of alliance!"
"Mr. Princeps, you surely realize this is madness."
"It is only the mad who change the world!"
"And it is surely only the mad who seek the world's improvement."
"Then be mad with me Jew! Surely you've seen the augers. Jupiter is in retrograde for the next fifty years, every horoscope in the world predicts that our era borders a new age with wholly new visions of possibility. Surely you see the evidence."
"The evidence is Roman power."
"No, the evidence is change."
"Rome IS that change."
"No. Change is Rome. Pericles built a republic in Athens, but it was a mere city-state, then it became the Delian empire during the Peloponnesian War, but once the Delian League became the Athenian empire it ruled for fifty years, then declined within in a generation. Yet Rome's republic lasted seven-hundred years! For the Republic to survive further it must create its own united league of equal nations!"
"Won't that create the same circumstances that caused Athens's decline?"
"Not if we raise their strength to the full extent of Rome's."
"How can one possibly effect affect that?"
"By imposing new religion."
"A new religion...?"
"This is my imperial project. This is my imperial legacy."
"So you want to export the Jewish religion throughout the empire?"
"No, though I could think of worse religions. I want a religion of liberalism."
"What is liberalism?"
"You know... tolerence, practical logic, knowledge and open exchange."
"Surely you know my people of all people would not accept such a god."
"Religions can coexist with the religion I have in mind. All the local gods can still be worshipped, but we compel their gods to embody those principles."
"I don't think people are as intelligent as you think we are."
"Jews surely are."
"Let me rephrase that. I don't think my people are as intelligent as you think we are.
"They can be if you educate them! Doesn't your bible encourage indulgence to the poor?"
"You can't interpret everything in the Bible literally."
"So many of them already read, so many of them handle money; teach them our higher maths and physic!"
"Hardly any of them read! Two in every hundred perhaps."
"Two in every hundred is more than the one in every hundred in Rome."
"I don't even know your higher maths and physic!"
"It only need begin with a couple dozen. You're Herod the builder, teach your people to build so that there are a hundred Herod the builders! We'll send the engineers!"
".... Mr. Princeps, I worry that by saying that I believe in your vision, you'll realize that I'm indulging you. So I would like to tell you a lesson my father imparted to me about his idea of the perfect government."
"Your father was an able man."
"The ablest. If I may speak freely?"
"Always."
"Were he Roman he could have outfoxed your father."
"My father said as much every time he was mentioned. Nothing would delight me more than hear it."
"My father said the perfect government is a government where all its subjects are slaves, but think themselves free."
"Don't you see Jew? That's precisely the government I seek."
"Then I'm afraid I still don't understand."
"Once the world is educated, they are slaves to reason, and forever compelled to make wise choices."
"Sire, I will tell you what I am thinking right now. My father gave me a Greek tutor, as I'm sure your father did."
"Of course."
"So you know your Herodotus."
"Indeed."
"Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this.."
"'..to know so much and to have control over nothing.' Yes Jew, of course I know my Herodotus, I read it once every year and that is precisely the point. So long as Rome is me, Rome knows enough to share its hoard of knowledge, and once the world has knowledge, the world's knowledge will forever increase and it would be impossible for any man to learn its full contents."
"And you know your Thucydides."
"He's a little drier. The limits of my intelligence. I expect you're smart enough to remember every passage."
"Only because the tutor would flay me alive if I didn't. The quote is 'Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in discovering the truth,..."
"...'but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.' Yes, my father's favorite maxim. So let's make sure the story they hear from birth is the truth. But you've also read The Republic."
"Oh god that fucking Greek tyrant. Still worse would happen every time I didn't sufficiently commit Plato to memory."
"So then you know this quote Jew: Either we shall find what it is we're seeking.."
(both) "..or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know."
"Let's free these men from their caves Jew. I doubt you believe in the augers any more than I do, but the astrologers surely see the new era we all live in and predict accordingly. Let's head off this new era's ignorance and blood by creating an era of our own. You know exactly what I'm going to quote now."
"Pericles?"
"Indeed. Recite it Jew."
“For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples...
"Splendidus Iudaeus. Come, let's embrace on this."
And like a nimrod I went into that embrace. He pulled me into his bearhug and the divine Mr. Princeps gave me a kiss of betrayal upon the lips. He thereupon took my hand in quite gently, patted it, and the gentle stroke became an iron grip. Augustus drew a dagger in his left hand and severed the artery in my arm. I could not help screaming so loud that the entire beach heard me. I spurted blood in volumes and literally thought he'd saw my forearm off completely. The scream turned to whimpers and I could not help myself weeping in front of the world's master.
Caesar Augustus whispered into my ear from half a digitus:
"We've documented every manner in which you've ordered a subject executed. Cross me on this project Philistine and you'll watch as we use all those techniques on your children, then save a technique never yet seen in Judea for you."
Wherewith Caesar reached behind one of the ruins and produced a woolen coat.
"Come, put this on. Rhodes gets cold at night and wool absorbs the blood like a bandage. No one will will even know you bleed. As a Roman protector you'll have to sacrifice to Jupiter like us all tonight, then we'll parade you in triumph back to your ship tomorrow. We'll give you golden armor to cover the wound."
At which point he hugged me again.
"Come, they're waiting for us at the temple."
XIII: Cleopatra's Needle:
Narrator: We begin with a gargle amid that bed where has been entertained so many of the great men of history.
(Anthony empties his bladder into Cleopatra's mouth, who delightedly gargles Anthony's micturation and then swallows.)
C: I do wish you would use the other end.
A: I.... need to grow bigger balls before I do that.
C: You need to grow bigger balls? I'm the one who's begging you to shit in my mouth!
A: How can you have a taste for that?
C: There's a lot you didn't know about Julie.
A: He? Liked to, farcockt in you?
C: No! He liked me doing it to him.
A: He liked... Fuck... If that ever got out?...
C: He didn't care...
A: And you did it too?
C: I was curious!
A: And you liked it??
C: It's not the most disgusting thing that's ever been in me.
A: Alright, you need to be quiet.
(Anthony puts his phallus in Cleopatra's mouth and fucks it while Cleopatra makes noises in her throat 'GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW GAW!)
A: I'm telling you, the Briton girls don't make noises like that.
C: (talking while phallus still in mouth) "What noises do they make?
A: Who?
C: The Britons.
A: I don't they even had sex before Rome got there.
C: What about the Gauls?
A: What about who?
C: The Gauls.
A: Oh... they make even dirtier noises.
C: The Germans?
A: They do dirtier things than you've ever done.
C: The Slavs?
A: They're too drunk to do much of anything...
C: The Israelites?
A: Depends on if it's before or after they're married...
C: What happens after they're married?
A: Apparently you never have sex again.
C: Why is that?
A: Jews seem to have a very love/hate relationship with sex.
C: Well they do punish sodomy.
A: What? (takes phallus out of mouth)
C: The Jews, they punish sodomy.
A: Oh... yeah I heard something about that... So... now that I can hear what you're saying you fancy a bit of that right now?
C: What?
A: Sodomy!
C: Oh! I'd love it, you first though... (Cleopatra stands up to reveal she's wearing a wooden dildus) ... (speaking to the servant in the corner of the room) "Menefer where's the shaving cream?
M: The tub's on the bed right next to your other dildii."
(Cleopatra starts stroking the dildus up and down with shaving cream)
C: Octavia never did this for you right?
A: Never, but she never loved me.
C: I'm playing the world's smallest lute for you."
(Cleopatra sticks it in)
A: Ah... ah... AHHHHHHHH THAT'S NO LUTE!...
C: You said the other one was too small!
(Cleopatra begins premensing his anus)
A: THIS one's Perfect!
C: HOW many ROman WHORES are THIS GIVing?
A: There's... buggery... in the love... that... can't be reckoned."
C: (Cleopatra increases the speed) The BREAking OF so GREAT a THING should MAKE a GREATer CRACK!
A: AAAAAAAAAHHH AHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
(Cleopatra pulls out)
A: Not so quick my love or I very well may shit in your mouth.
C: (Cleopatra unfastens the dildo) Why don't you take a taste of what I want you to do.
A: Does my lady so order it?
(Cleopatra shoves the dildo in Anthony's mouth and he throws up.)
C: How was it?
A: Do it again!
(Cleopatra moves the dildo in and out of Anthony's mouth.)
C: I needed protection against the Parthians, and you were never the diplomat in this relationship.
A: (with dildus still in mouth) "And you liked it?
C: Marcus Antonius,... what's the worst thing you've ever tasted?"
A: (Anthony moves his head out of the way from the dildus) Probably this dish in Palestina, it's calves feet in jelly.
C: Oh! P'tcha.
A: Yeah! That's right! Pitcha! Our accountant says the Israelites call it that because that's the noise they make after they taste it.
C: Tony, come on, seriously, is this the first time you ever vomited?
A: After half my meals!
C: Have you ever bit into rotten food?
A: When my food taster sucks...
C: Have you ever tasted mud? Dried blood?
A: Every battle drill.
C: When you were on your vineyard, did you ever get fertilizer in you mouth?
A: Pretty disgusting, sure.
C: Have you ever bit your tongue?
A: Oh that hurts more than a sword to the stomach.
C: Have you torn your Achilles?
A: No but I've torn plenty of others'.
C: Have you passed a kidney stone?
A: No but some senators pass them all the time. The vomitorium isn't fun those days.
C: You've clearly been burned.
A: Three times in the field.
C: Have you ever had a tooth ache?
A: Thank the gods, no. I hear that's the most painful thing on earth.
C: Alright, well I've experienced things far more painful than a toothache, and after a tooth ache, excramentum in your mouth is thrilling.
A: What does it taste like?
C: It tastes like shit. That's not the point.
A: What's the point?
C: The point is that you've just eaten the most disgusting thing known to man, you live to tell about it, and even if you smell awful, you're not in pain, and that's the best feeling on earth.
A: I don't know why, but I'm turned on right now... how about something more traditional?
(Anthony puts his phallus into Cleopatra's vaginae while putting fingers in her anus, a hand clasped with all his might over her mouth against the pillow, and biting down hard on her nipples, she screams with what seems to be pleasure).
(It would once again seem that the fragments we have are that of a greater metanarrative. In the first fragment, it would seem that Cleopatra is written as a kind of Egyptian whore, perhaps for a satyr within a Greek bawdy house, whereas the rest is a narrative of much more lofty sentiment. One might suppose this the narrative of an extremely ambitious epician in 5th Century Byzantium, and yet, while the original text prints this fragment in Greek letters, the words they spell are the common tongue of Ancient Egypt in thoroughly idiomatic 1st Century BC grammar. This circumstance is further complicated by the fact that the Egyptian court in principle spoke Greek. It is highly to be so doubted, particularly because it contravenes so much of the historical record, but however infinitesimal, there is a possibility that the rest of this tale may be none other than the authentic last testament Cleopatra herself before suicide in a letter to her children.
Dr. Richard Westenbach - Free University Berlin, 1952)
....I had no ear for music but loved the theater and was a great actor so long as no singing requirement. What I really loved was drawing, and even at eight was so passionate for theater that I drew elaborate stage sets and recited Antigone's monologue for the manager of the Royal Alexandrine Theater. I knew I was good, but actors at court would train for eighteen years, yet there was the company manager telling my father the Pharaoh that I displayed once-in-a-generation's talent. I have no idea if it was an artist's eye or an actor's lie, but I can't possibly have been that good, could I? Irregardless, the company affected such faith that I acted in a production of Euripides for my father's pleasure. It was onstage that General Pompey first saw me.
The play was The Bacchae. Queen Agave was played by a man, but in the throne room of my father, I was allowed to play Pentheus, the king torn to pieces by women. Pompey was in Egypt to extract protection money from the Pharaoh, to maintain ruse he was being paid to protect Egypt from enemies when, in fact, Rome was the enemy the Pharaoh was paying not to attack. My father, Ptolemy XII, had been made extraordinarily rich by the investments of his court minister, Enoch-bar-Joseph, but our Egypt suffered dysfunction for a thousand years, and by the grace of Juno we are still a kingdom; but whether kingdom or fifedom, Egypt had neither the army nor the arms to fight Rome. My father, next to General Crassus the richest man in the world, offered Pompey no less than half our fortune to refrain from attack, but Pompey refused the offer. He'd seen me onstage and what he really wanted was a weekend in my company. I was 9.
My older sister killed herself a year later, and to spare my father shame at court, it was announced Egypt's next co-sovereign died of a chill. Thereupon was I forced at 10 to wife my older brother. Eleven months later, my father died of that same chill... While my brother-husband was stupid, I'd displayed all manner of scholastic aptitude, so it was decided that he'd go off to sport and whore every day, while I'd be ferried down the Nile to be educated amid the Library of Alexandria and its 500,000 scrolls, with understanding that I'd be the one true Pharaoh when I turned eighteen in all but name. To this day, the library and its glories are my true husband.
For six years I studied seventeen hours every day. Assignments incomplete in allotted time would result in beating. I learned the full measure of grammar, logic. rhetoric, arithmetic, music, astronomy, and geometry. I spoke Greek with family and court and was fluent by servants in Coptic from first speech. I spoke fluent in Latin by eleven, Nubian by twelve, Aramaic by thirteen, Numidian by fourteen, and Hebrew by sixteen. I was compelled to memorize whole volumes of Homer - Odyssey 9-12 and the entire last third of the Iliad. I must have read three hundred critical commentaries from end to end.
Along with this useless literary merit, I learned the mythology of our pagan world, Grecian and Egyptian. My tutor instructed: "Think of the Gods not as beings apart but your daily company. They are the only true peers who understand the divine burdens of thronely life." He too assigned the literature of other countries: their philosophies, their sacred texts, their theologies, theogmonies, and theophanies.
My tutor, Philostratus, was a eunuch. Yet when I was sixteen he cornered me in a library stack: "My crownest princess, it is expected that boys have affairs with their tutors, why not girls? No education is truly complete without sex." I was married already for six years, deflowered for seven, briefly a mother at twelve. Never had I known happiness conjugal nor connubial and what option had I more attractive? Philostratus was more husband to me than my brother. "But you're a eunuch, how can you possibly instruct me?" "All the more way I can."
My education effectively ended at sixteen when, rather than learn history, we embarked upon a course of learning which, unburdened by the need for ejaculate nor care for pregnancy, engaged sexual congress for those seventeen hours a day. This ugly, fat, sweaty man, twice and a half my size, finished my education, but had I learned history rather than sex, we might have outfoxed the Roman burden. I was not for a moment attracted to Philostratus, I shall not deny that sensations he imparted made me hungrily curious, and he told me to picture in his stead any man I liked 'as all good wives do.' He was, as always, the most thorough tutor; knowledgeable and authoritative. He taught from a rare Indian textbook and approached every act as a further lesson in Archemedean mechanics and Euclidean geometry.
It was not until eighteen when Philostartus was caught in flagrante delicto with me. My brother, for my tutor's lustful presumption, impaled Philostratus on a spike from anus to mouth. In ensuing fight between me and husband, I came at him with a knife, opened his vein, and thereon he developed a gangrenous infection; spread around his body for nine months until it killed him. Across the palace I could hear my brother's screams and it gave me more pleasure than two years with Philostratus ever could.
Ancient custom required me to marry to marry my second brother, then the ten year old I was when I was first married. I refused custom and my refusal launched a civil war. Many at court considered my refusal to marry my brother the worst kind of dishonor. Those tongues in opposition to me wagged that never would a Pharaohess issue such a brazen demand had not been Egyptian women so spoiled by equality and education.
Egyptian women were first in the world in liberation, and the first to be slaughtered and raped in the civil war which followed. It is said th...
-------------------------------------------
....e I mounted the Pharaohship as sole ruler, my brother's friends at court never ceased in their toximaic comments that 'our new Pharaoh looks like a witch', even as I walked by them. As woman in a world of men, I had to cultivate that which only women have, and as I believed I had innately less than others, I had to make more of less.
I went to the official Pharaonic tailor, Joseph-bar-David. He and his assistant, Jonathan-bar-Joseph, lived together above their office. They importuned me to let them see me naked so that they could accent all my best features. I had always worn the traditional androgyne clothing of an Egyptian heir, even after becoming queen in all but office. When gazing at me nude, they affected great gasps and temeritously told me I was hiding Babylonic features behind a uniform that was such a baggy dump.
They began by design for a headdress of gold and slaved for six days to create it. When it was new, it was the most dazzling thing ever lain eyes upon by an Egyptian kingdom. I will not deny that at night I danced naked in the gold head dress in my obsidian mirror. It was also in view of the servants, and I made it a point of seeing if I could arouse the manservants keeping watch; those servants I found pleasing I bestowed with favors. And yet the dress weighed so heavily that my upper back and neck ached ever since as though I'm Atlas with the world on my shoulders.
Joseph proceeded to design me a series of broad necklaces, broad so we could bedeck each with some of the largest jewels in the Pharaonic palace, each worn by a different previous Pharaoh. Every one of them cut to my skin like lacerations, and to this day, a servant every night applies spirit of camphor to my collar.
Thereon were designed sashes around my waist of finest raiment, deliberately long and phallic, reminding my subjects they gaze upon no mere woman; each sash embroidered by a different geometric pattern to represent my educative years in Alexandria's Library. Once a day for two decades I get them caught and trip, and every subject has to pretend not to laugh, and at least once a week I have to resist the urge to bury them in sand.
Afterward a series of capes, each the color of a different noble house. Every day I would enter with the colored cape of whatever house held my greatest favor that day. So many noblemen sacrificed their lives in attempt to gain it; some deaths were of irritants I welcomed, some were of friends I loved.
And finally, the dresses, the gowns, the robes, the frocks; some revealing legs up to the pelvis, some revealing cleavage up to the areola; all of them hugging my form like skin. I would return every night to my apartment and the material would inevitably chafe, leaving skinmarks that peeled and rashes that itch every minute of the day for twenty years.
And the shoes: oh Yahweh those shoes...; I'm thirty-nine now, I'd be lucky still to walk before I'm forty five.
And finally, the makeup: the cake of foundation, the eyeliner that stretched halfway to my hair, the lengthened eyelashes, the earings that so stretch my ears that I wear my hair long and never can braid it, the eyelids weighed down by led dye. My face has burned every day for more than twenty years, nowhere moreso than my eyes, and in recent years I've lost clarity of sight.
Through the beginning of that redressing process, Philostratus admonished me for 'lewd ostentation', claiming that a woman sovereign particularly must be modest lest she attract envy; yet no tongue thereafter called me a witch. Yes, I was proud of how I looked. It a cynical ploy of strumpery, but it was also a manner of reminding subjects at court that indeed, their Pharaoh was woman, but she was also a goddess. No mortal could endure this regimen of beau....
---------------------------
...was Caesar who arrived when I was 20 and brokered peace between brother and sister. Caesar, having heard of Pompey's exploit, guessed from my refusal to marry the one act that would give me more pleasure than any: in an immediate private audience he requested after disembarkation, he presented me with the most splendid gift; beneath the present an engraved silver platter from Brittania, above the bounty an immaculately preserved Egyptian embroidery from the 18th dynasty; the gift was Pompey's head.
Caesar looked like a phallus. He was 51, tall and so thin he could walk through a lyre; completely bald on top with half his hair ring combed forward in a manner more absurd than British stone henges he'd recount; yet legends of female conquests were so manifold that I doubted a homely, witchy girl like me merited romantic affection; yet I felt immediately the heave of his eros - not from loins but from heart, and within fifteen seconds understood why women more beautiful than I thought him tantalizing.
Caesar was every woman's dream of a husband. Caesar was largely raised by women, whom by his fifties were all dead and he yearned to resurrect their company. What enticed us was that women felt his absolute equal. He spoke openly of his many ailments, had no fear to cry or panic in front of women, and no reservation for bequeathing all those sexual services men of high station considered degrading. Most importantly, he listened to women as complete conversational partner. He considered our insights, and while never hesitating to refute us did so with such nuance that we understood he apprehended every word we said. Upon men he imposed his full might's authority, with women he shared his vulnerability's full burden.
He'd surely in mind to bed me from his moment of Nile embarkation, but with Caesar, women did not seduce nor he them, he simply knew his ability to converse as peer would receive reward. In his company, women learned what he'd tell no man. He'd inevitably explain he thought ambition the worst of all burdens; one pursued as joyless compulsion. Even as he chased an unsat throne atop the Roman world, he knew he concurrently chased death and martyrdom. To Caesar, empire and imperial rule were Rome's only option to save itself from dying the horrible collapse of all world powers. To save Rome, so said Caesar, he had to destroy it. Putting his name into glory and history simply was his reward for the gratitude he felt himself owed, like a doctor to a patient he saves.
Woman's wisdom was Caesar's greatest weapon, his greatest resource, his greatest teacher. We watched powerlessly as man after man fell to Caesar. Caesar would enter land after land the conqueror, take the defeated king's wife into confidence, and she'd divulge every secret of what made her husband a mediocre king. Yet even as he loved women, he played them like a pan pipe. Everything he said was true, yet none of it was. Was he ever truly attracted to me, or was I allure to him simply because of my descent from the true love of Caesar's life: Alexander the Great?
Caesar had been to every eastern court and saw the gorgeous ways kings lived; the art, the jewels, the fashionable finery, and coveted it as only could a man formed by Rome's censure of luxury. He was, like all Romans, born into austerity and wanted to die drowning in frippery. He wished to be king because he knew himself the smartest of Romans, and therefore best fit to know what Rome needed, but as the smartest of Romans, he had contempt over those he ruled, and was intelligent enough to keep that contempt to himself. Cicero also thought himself the smartest, and his contempt for those Romans for whom he spoke was shouted from Capitoline Hill into every home, and yet he inveighed against Caesar and me all the gorgeous corruption which his manner demonstrated more loudly than Caesar ever could.
Cicero was that type of who always flourishes amid power's corruption: the liberal hypocrite - the higher the ideals, the lower the reality. The signal to locate a den of vice is to look for the loudest preacher of virtue, and even as Cicero public perorated about virtues and privately inveighed against Caesar's 'rich young slut', he combed Rome's drawing room nurseries for the youngest heiress he could find, and when he quickly realized the child wife inadequate to appreciate his magnificence, he separated from her with no more regret than the hundreds of wh....
.....Cicero determined to hate me because I would upset the balance of a world he mastered. In his mind, Caesar and Cicero was a truer partnership than Caesar and Pompey: Cicero master of the spirit; Caesar master of the corpse - but a woman who shows herself a capable in both those realms? She might as well be declared a master greater than Cicero for how greatly it upset the knowledge of a man who pontificated as though he knew all. Cicero extolled virtue as though he was virtue herself, but he was everything the Rome hated because none knew better than Romans that there was vice behind every Roman virtue he extolled. Even those who loved Cicero hated him.
---------------------------
...Caesar clearly decided from the beginning my rule and my brother a mere figurehead, and my court clearly knew it; for next morning by my entrance, Roman soldiers already subdued and arrested all my older brother-husband's advisors, all of whom fought on my younger brother's pliable side. They all had shown up to greet Caesar that morning with knives in their tunics.
Upon my entrance, Caesar related all that had happened, and left their fates to me. Remembering the story Philostratus imparted to me of how King David pardoned enemies like Shimei, I decided to pardon them; but remembering how King Saul took it upon himself so many times to murder David, I decided to find out who lead this conspiracy. I had each of them bound, took each into a private room, and as Caesar and my brother watched I thrashed each on the back with 60 lashes, blood everywhere upon my white dress until it was a smock. Within ten lashes they each confessed the names of the organizers: Omari and Chisisi; nevertheless, I persisted. Caesar smiled the whole time, my brother cried. I told the Romans to dispose of the leaders with their worst death, Omari and Chisisi were nailed o...
-----------------------------------------
...Was it all a play? The father of my tutor, Philostratus, was, in fact, a Judean from Yavneh named Philo. a philosopher himself who taught all his children and grandchildren. Philo was of no school nor party; he believed that all ideas were true, the truth is without end, and all ideas emanated from a totalizing celestial source stretching from the heavens to the earth, and therefore one cannot ascertain people's complete motives, either by formal ideas as Plato would have it, nor substance as Aristotle would. To assume one knows the truth in its whole is presumption to assume the role of gods. Caesar is now a god, and I therefore I know as little of Caesar's motives as my mortal self knows of my own....
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...for, you see, my dearest children, then as now, we'd birthed the new age of feminism. Women were educated for school, women could work, women could fight, women could sue at court, women could judge, and women could lead. Our empire was always the vanguard of women's progress, but the progress was accelerated by one development above all others: not the arrival of our Ptolemaic Dynasty, but the re-arrival in Egypt of Judea.
We may be Greek, but we feel pain as Egyptians, and Pharaonic Egypt traces her decline to the Hebrew exodus, after which we no longer had our underclass for all that work which Egyptians demand such exorbitant pay; yet who in their right mind prefers the Egypt of Amenhotep and Tuthenkamen to the Egypt of the Ptolemys and Cleopatras? Rome has the soldiers but we have the books. Greece produces the scholars but they come here to teach. Antioch runs the trade but we Egyptians buy everything while Rome saves. Modern Egypt is a glory so far past that which any Pharaoh could build. The whole world is run by Rome, studied by Greece, administered by Antioch, but it pays tribute to Egypt.
Why? Because the Jews never really left. From earliest establishment of a Judean kingdom in Palestine, Kings David and Solomon re-established good relations with neighbors whose history is as shared as Isis and Osiris. Centuries of enmity, then the closest of allies: our soldiers fought the same wars, traded the same goods; heard the same musicians, watched the same theater companies; the same artists drew our courts, the same tutors taught our scholars. Egypt's had many allies, but the relationship to the Jewish people is built on stone that never moves.
And every time there was new instability in Judea, more Jews arrived on our shores. Six centuries ago with the assassination of Governor Gedalia, ten thousand Jews arrived in Alexandria by single caravan. Ten thousand became tens of thousands, tens of thousands a hundred thousand, then two hundred, then three hundred, and finally seven-hundred fifty thousand in Alexandria alone. In Egypt they once were slaves, now they become masters, often beloved by their servants; overlords who've run the country for ten generations of predecessors and ancestors, chamberlains who ran our courts; landowners who administer our land more competently than any Egyptian taskmaster, farmers who worked twice as hard, generals willing to lead our armies' charge in combat, soldiers on our borders willing to die for Egypt twice. Where Luxor made them slaves, Alexandria made Jews free, and Jews love Egypt more than any Egyptian.
lf Egypt stands after Macedonia and Persia fell, it's because we welcomed Jews to an extent no ancient empire did, and they repaid our welcome with prosperity so unlike that of Ancient Egypt; not the totalitarian prosperity of an overlord worshipped in cult, but equalizing, egalitarian prosperity. And from this prosperity we conceived new justice, where which liberated Egyptian women claimed all these rights we take for granted.
And yet even now, men's prosperity against women is as bounteous as Nile banks against desert. Women are just 7% of landowners, farmers, soldiers, shepherds, policemen, local councilmen and judges. All women at court but me have inferior positions, half the women I enoble are met with court veto. And... of course... whatever the job of women, they are paid a fraction of men doing the same. Gaia herself a goddess, and not even she is honored enough that progeny in her image are allowed a fraction of men's dignitas.
I too am a god but not even a god can raise the position of women if god is a woman herself. I am Pharaoh and daughter of Pharaoh, yet I could not shield myself from forced marriage and rape. We are so far from equality yet so very close. Who cannot believe in a limitless future for women if we do what must be done?
Every horoscope says the same: a new era dawns now. You feel it as surely as I. Rome will rule, then decline as every empire does; but other Empires rule their corners, Rome can rule the whole sphere. Its might will unite us all: by government, by language, roads, culture, and fashion. Rome's beliefs will be the world's beliefs, Rome's dogma the world's, Rome's edicts unbreakable law; and when Rome declines, what will the world be?
There is another side to our Jewish friends, a dreadful one that continually manifests itself in its history's long turbulence - a side that believes women mere helpmeets to men and husbands created to rule us, that believes an excellent wife rarer than jewels; that believes it better to live in the desert than a house with a quarrelsome woman.
Jews are quick to vengeance as to mercy, they are turbulent as the jealous god to whom they bow. For centuries after liberation from us, they conquered and killed people of their homeland down to the last man, woman and child. When they finally achieved enlightened prosperity through government of the Davidic Monarchy, they cast off their Solomonic wisdom as quickly as they achieved it slowly - and all that destruction for the sake of bringing greater honor to the very god who inspired their wisdom. When our Greek siblings sought to improve Jewish life just as Jews have improved ours here, the Hasmoneans cast them out and killed anyone tempted to adapt Greek mores.
When chaos reigns, we all turn to gods, but when Rome dissolves in chaos, we all will turn to Rome's gods; throughout the world, and for all time; but no god can ensure order as the Jewish god can: one god; eternal, omniscient, all powerful, as judgemental as the empire who imposes it and searing in his anger as men are to quarrelsome women. The higher the ideals, the lower the reality. Whomever comes after Rome will adapt the Jewish god as the god for the world, for all places at all times, a god who knows all actions and all thoughts, who can control people even within their minds. For all their contributions to Egypt and the world, the world is cursed by their presence.
Ergo, whatever Rome does in response, it is imperative that you annihilate every Jewish person in Egypt down to the youngest infant, then march on Israel to do the same. It is worth the deaths on your conscience, it is worth the death of Egypt, it is worth the death of all humankind to prevent this future, where 99 out of every hundred men shall be lower than dirt, and therefore 99 out of every hundred women still lower. All the progress of women, just a mirage in time's sand; all rights stripped, all dignity violated.
My great-uncle, Ptolemy Lazarus, tried to reslave the Hebrews. Everywhere in Egypt, Lazarus is thought a villain of history, but he did not go far enough. He thought Egypt could be restored to former glory, but Egypt is not the world's future. Slavery is the world's future, and worldwide slavery the Jews' revenge upon the world.
I was weak. Jews were our friends, mentors, allies, they only seemed to mean well at court and in business. Whether Jews will be the rulers or ruled like the rest of us is irrelevant. Their ideas must be stopped before they take hold, and it can only be stopped by their immediate deaths. Whether any of you knows it, whether any Roman knows it, whether any Jew knows it, I know it, and their god knows it. Whether Jews are the rulers or ruled like the rest of us, the world is at eternal war with all that Jews represent.
I have raised you all to value women, to respect them always, to fear them when appropriate, and to advocate all their dignity, rights, and futures. To honor our futures, you must annihilate the Jewish people.
May you live forever,
Your Mother, Queen Cleopatra, The Goddess, The Younger, Father Loving, and Fatherland Loving
XIV: Of a Type:
After Papa's death, I had no reason to remain in Yavneh. My father studied Torah with me as though I were his son, and a son to him is what I felt. I didn't want to get married, and inside me a voice repeated over and over "No! You are not cut out for a woman's life."
Finally, on the Shabbos before Rosh Hashana, I girded my lions and told him:
"Papa, I have the soul of a man."
"So why then were you born a woman?"
"Can heaven make mistakes?"
"No."
"But I know I'm a man."
"I've made a mistake in teaching you Torah."
"But the Lord said to Shmuel: 'For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.'"
"The Tanakh says a thousand things about the duty of women for every one about His mercy for those who sin."
"Well, maybe one in every thousand women is supposed to be a man."
"You are a woman, and shall learn no more Torah."
On the shabbos after Yom Kippur, the Holy One struck him dead. Whether my father was punished for his judgement, I knew that from the next world, Papa would look on me with mercy. He was buried by Monday and Shiva continued until Sukkot.
Alone on the first night of Sukkot, seventeen days after my confession, I took Papa's dagger and shore my hair. I dressed myself in Papa's trousers, his fringed garment, his silk coat, his skullcap, his velvet hat, his gardel and the dagger he carried within it, then studied my reflection in the mirror. I was very nearly the young man I knew within myself. All of Yavneh was asleep; and after I packed clothes, mine along with his, I lit my father's pipe and left his house forever as I smoked.
It would be a terrible sin to abide assistance from fellow Jews without telling them of intentions they'd regard as mortally sinful; but requiring food for my journey, I sold my body so any sin of this journey would only be on me and those who sought sin: once a day for six days in Ashdod, six in Ashkelon, six in Gaza. After eighten days fornication, I walked into the Sinai Desert where once trod Moses and Miriam. So many mountains and any among them could be where Moses met God.
I was tall and thin, possessing narrow hips and a deep voice. There was but one feature that made me seem womanly. My chest was outsize and cumbersome. Older men of Yavneh would repugnantly joke about my irrepressible endowment and the hands of no few would cheapen them with immodesty.
Having heard only my footsteps and breath for three days, I stripped down to nakedness under the Sinai's night cover. As I shivered in the wind I grabbed hold of Papa's dagger and chopped those breasts from my body; and as I howled blessings to the Gates of Heaven I attempted to stop my bleeding with sand. Even as I wailed I passed out, certain I was dead; yet I awoke midday more man than woman. I searched the ground for remains but my breasts were gone, disappeared into wind and sand.
It takes 30 days for a beginner to cross the Sinai alone that a bedouin can cross in ten. I had but eighteen days' rations upon leaving, but could not abide another day's harlottry. As a woman, there was no reliable travel partner to join, nor could I travel by caravan as fellow passengers would know my secret after my wrongly placed casabas were excised. Only alone in the desert that could I annoint my identity, and therefore I determined to sojourn with alacrity, perform the amputation at my first encounter of three days' silence, recover swiftly from the excision, abstain from all but the smallest rations, journey with infinite haste, and pray to the Holy One BBH for assistance.
Yet after eighteen days silence I was nauseous from lack of water and food. I walked bare chested because every day it bled anew and demanded shirts used to stop my bloodflow and half my water ]to clean my wounds. It seemed the CBH was without mercy as Papa said, yet on the nineteenth day I thought of using the dagger on the rest of me, and there appeared a small caravan. A traveler saw the blood upon my chest, told me I was near death, and invited me to abide with them to rest and heal.
"A pregnant man..."
"What?"
"I've heard such things but never thought I'd minister to one."
"I'm pregnant?"
"Yes, and you're not dying."
"I'm pregnant?"
"Surely a man won't recognize the symptoms."
"So I'm a man?"
"No less than I..."
"Are you a man?"
"Of a type..."
"What type?"
"The type that bleeds, same as you."
"You bleed?"
"I did."
"Has your monthly cycle ended?"
"No, but just like you I bled from what was severed."
"What was severed?"
The old healer pointed to their loins.
"Is it any different than your people, who sever the foreskin of babes?"
"The babe is eight days old."
"It's still barbaric."
"But why would parents permit yours to be severed so late?"
"So the child might be educated in the Pharaoh's service."
"The price of education is to relinquish manhood?"
"Of a type. It's said that the attractions of the palace are such that only eunuchs may survive civil service temptations without defiling women at court."
"Do you desire to defile women?"
"Less than most men, but yes."
The eunuch administered to me an herb called silphium, and told me thrice daily imbibement would flush the fetus out. At the very moment of our arrival in Alexandria his medicine took root, and the healer threw the entire company out of the caravan so they would not witness its effect.
And for the second activity of my time in Alexandria, the eunuch did lead into an underground passage that brought me by candlelight to a hall directly beneath the palace of Cleopatra - I was face to face with a synagogue minyan, and all its members were eunuchs in Egypt's public service.
"And who is this Reb Moshe?"
"We've just crossed the desert together but I actually never learned his...."
"...My name is Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Yavneh." I had to think quickly what my name would be.
Reb Moshe the healer immediately responded: "Reb Yanai, I don't think that's your real name."
"What?"
"You are now Yanai-ben-Yokhanan of Alexandria. He came here to work."
"Peace be unto you Reb Yanai. Can you do a drasha?"
"Right now?... I guess..."
"So you're a khakham."
"Of a type..."
"And you are... one of us?... nu?"
Again Reb Moshe: "What gave it away?" The whole minyan laughed at a high pitch.
"And you can lain Torah?"
"Hen vaHen."
"So you're a Rabbi?"
"Of a type."
"Alright Rav, well, let's hear a drasha from you. We'll pick an easy one. Simchat Torah wasn't that long ago, so let's hear a drasha on B'reishit."
B'reishit. "In the beginning," the first part of the Torah telling when CBH created the world, put Adam and Eve in the Garden then threw them out, watched passively as Cain slew Abel, then destroyed the world with flood.
I quoted them the passage on how Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge and realized their nakedness. "We should not presume to question God but God created our class of eunuchs and brought us to power. Perhaps He means to demonstrate through us that man can return to the Garden of Eden, where they are unaware of base desire, and therefore untainted by evil or shame."
I did not know men could applaud so lustily as they.
"Well Rav Yanai, did you learn any other skills across the desert?"
"Of a type." (everyone laughed again)
"Well even if you have no skills like all the other Israeli rabbis, we can put you to work here in the palace. My name is Rav Yosef-ben-Ephraim and I'm chief of medical research to Pharaoh Cleopatra, blessed be her name, and in case you don't already know, you were riding through the Sinai with Rav Moshe-ben-Menashe, Cleopatra's chief physician - sent to Jerusalem to look at King Herod's arm. What's it look like?"
"It works but it keeps getting infected. The Mamzer's in serious trouble..."
"Then all Judea's in serious trouble. You did the right thing in coming here Rav Yanai."
----------------------------------------
Rav Yosef taught me Greek as devotedly as Papa taught me Torah. I learned just as quickly and received as much praise. I recited passages of Hesiod and Homer as though they were the Song of D'vorah. He checked out scrolls of Aristotle from the Library and I read from beginning to end his animal writings and worked my way through the densest passages of Physics and Nicomachean Ethics with the concentration Papa forced me pay to Leviticus. I learned Euclid's geometry and Pythagorus's holy ratios, I was examined weekly on how well I retained my reading on Hippocrates and aced every examination; we studied oration and rhetoric, logic and deductive reasoning, and most exhaustively, gardening and botany and potion making. Rav Yosef even taught me rudiments of playing the lyre, because every civil servant was called upon occasion to play music for Pharaoh in moments of her distress, even Jews on Sabbath.
Rav Moshe would inevitably come to us during his many visits to our laboratory.
"How's he coming along?"
"He's an illui," Rav Yosef would say to Rav Moshe almost constantly. "Once we're ready to go he can take both our positions and write his own papyrus for anything he wants besides."
"Well, as it turns out, it's time for him to take one of them. I'm retiring; taking my golden sun dial and buying a beach house in Aqaba."
"Why not Eilat?"
"Too many Jews."
"Oy. There are more in Egypt."
"You see the problem. What's our melamed working on?"
"It's an experiment to see if there are more than nine geometric shapes."
"Mazel Tov, but aren't you worried he'll be punished for heresy?"
"Feh. The priests are too busy plotting against Miss Cleo to get beyz about what a stupid rabbi's doing - slicha Yanai."
"Shayn fargessen."
And so Rav Moshe retired, got a ceremonial Friday night dinner (kosher) at which Cleopatra and Rav Yosef spoke, along with a bunch of other palace functionaries I'd never met, then Rav Moshe accepted a small obelisk from Cleopatra that had his name and position inscribed in carving, but most of the speeches were used to pay tribute to Marc Anthony, who wasn't even there, but protocol was protocol.
That was Friday, that Monday I went to an interview with the Pharaoh in her apartment. (description of her apartment here).
But the Pharaoh was not in the royal revelations to which we eunuchs were accustomed, she was dressed like a male pharaoh going to war; wearing a blue cap that went up an entire cubit, wearing two satchels of bronze fastened over each arm, a blue shield on her upper body and a black tunic underneath, completing the ensemble with a golden satchel that began between her legs and went near to the floor.
"You're Rav Yanai of Yavneh?"
"I am, your majesty."
"Strip."
"What?"
"Strip."
"Why?"
"It's not for subjects to question their Pharaoh why. Is is your ruler's pleasure to see you strip, and you shall strip."
"I fear to do so."
"I know what you are, now do as I say."
And in terror I exposed myself to Cleopatra in all my truth.
"Why did you do it?"
"Because I believe I am a man."
"Many women wish they were men, some men even wish they were women."
"But I am a man."
"And you were a woman before you did this?"
"No, I was a man in a woman's body."
"All Jewish women are men in women's bodies."
"I don't understand."
"What matters it that you have breasts if your people go to such lengths to cover them up?"
"But Your Majesty, I know I have them."
"How many Jewish women do you think would rather be men?"
"Probably most of them."
"How many of them want to be men so badly that they could convince themselves they are men?"
"Probably a few."
"So how then are they men?"
"What matters it if they convince themselves? If they want to be men, shouldn't they be men?"
"A-ha, you are as smart as they say. Yes they should, and we in Egypt have many ways of letting them indulge their masculine side, if only Jews got rid of all that farshtunkener repression."
"Repression, Majesty?"
"What matters it whether Jewish women are women or men if your people don't look on women as women?"
"We don't?"
"Your women are wives, they're mothers, eventually daughters, unfortunate children of an unfortunate god. But if it weren't for the beards there'd be no meaningful difference between Jewish men and women. You'd all be these sexless creatures; for all we in Egypt know you reproduce by hatching out of an egg."
"Your Majesty I assure y..."
"I know I know, you do it on your sabbath night in the dark"
"We make love to the soul, not the body."
"Yes, you feel everything but lust after nothing."
"Has lust been a blessing for your people?"
"Lack of it hasn't been a blessing for you if it makes you chop off your own breasts, which, judging by your incisions were quite a sight."
"I did not like them."
"Mister Yanai, I will relate you a saying we have here in Egypt. 'That which the Gods have joined together, let not man tear them asunder.' I think that has different meaning now."
"I'm not sure I follow."
"In Egypt, you could have been a man with breasts."
"I could... I don't understand."
"If you could be a man with a womb, you can be a man with breasts."
"I... I can?"
"Do you desire to know women? You can tell me."
"Majesty..."
"Do you desire to copulate with women?"
"I honestly have never considered the question."
"That's a falsehood if ever I've heard one. Do you desire to lie with women?"
"I... well... Sometimes."
"Do you desire women and men?"
"Yes, yes I suppose I do."
"Well... unlike Judea, here in Egypt you can copulate with men, fornicate with women, and marry a eunuch if that is what you so desire, and you may fuck all three at the same time if that is your wish. So long as Cleopatra is Pharaoh, no law prevents you and the majority of the population agrees with me. They will let you live as you like so long as you make a home in a liberal alley, and those who disagree can live in conservative alleys."
"Well... I suppose I owe you thanks Majesty."
"Don't thank me, thank the eunuchs. They run this country, not me, and many of them are Jews."
"Your majesty is not powerful?"
"I don't need power, I AM power, but a great leader only steers the chariot while the horsespull it, and they know how to drive far better than we do. And that's why you will be my personal doctor."
"Thank you, Majesty."
"I am also promoting you above Rav Yosef to be Chief of Medical Research for Egypt."
"Majesty..."
"Don't worry, he'll have so much to do after what I tell you that he will thank his Yahweh he doesn't have your job. Both Yosef and Moshe said you were smarter than them both, and judging by this interview I agree."
"You flatter me Majesty."
"You won't be flattered when you learn what you have to do."
"If Your Majesty orders i....."
"She does and there is much to explain. Are you listening?"
"Certainly."
"You've studied Aristotle yes?"
"Yes."
"Hippocrates?"
"Yes."
"Euclid? Archimedes? Pythagoras?"
"Yes, yes, and yes."
"Useless, useless, useless, useless and useless."
"Majesty?"
"Experiments are not an activity to prove theories. Theories are activities to prove experiments."
"I'm afraid I don't...
"...Until now, the accumulation of knowledge has been its own reward."
"Isn't it?"
"What reward is there if people are starving and diseased but we cannot feed them?"
"Majesty, knowledge is the greatest of all vir..."
"Spare me androgyne. Virtue is the greatest of all virtues, and the second greatest virtue is to save lives. The accumulation of knowledge is the only way we can learn to save them, and you, supposedly the brightest mind in Egypt, with unique knowledge of what it means to be all men, are to lead us there."
"Your majesty this is an awesome..."
"...I know it is. Furthermore, what science there is is entirely too devoted to questions only a man would pose. Everything in war has axiom and a measurement, meanwhile, all women have wondered if their cosmetics are poisoning them for two-thousand years and no thinker has thought enough of us to answer the question. All women but Jewish women that is..."
"Majesty."
"It's alright if you take offense but just keep listening. For as long as history's been recorded on tablet, there are proposed cures for baldness and impotence, yet an astonishing common number of women suffer from headaches that alter their sense of vision and sound, yet no man has thought to ask why that is. You must solve this in addition to finding manners that increase our food supply and prevent drought on our farms, how to best build aqueducts so we can maximize the distance of water transfer from the Nile. Do you understand?
"Yes, Majesty."
"You will have still further responsibilities. You will supervise the building of lead pipes through Alexandria so that sewage and sepsis can be deposited in the desert."
"Yes, Majesty."
"But among all these questions I wish for you to answer, I have one chief desire above them all. Are you listening?"
"Yes, Majesty."
"Show me you're listening by something other than yes majesty."
"Your Majesty I am listening as intently as a man with knowledge of all men can."
"Childbirth is the death of a plurality of Egyptian women. It would be magnificent if you found means of contraception more reliable than an animal intestine but I will be forgiving if you can't. However, there is one thing we must determine above all. All other questions you may delegate to Rav Yosef if you have not enough time. Please, I must know if you're listening."
"Majesty, I am praying to the Lord Most High to listen with even more intention than I already am."
"I would like very much to make abortion a right for all Egyptian women to pursue without questions or conditions, and make all abortions state-funded. However, there are priests in the Temple of Osiris, many of them and powerful, who believe that women who abort their fetuses are committing murder because a fetus is a human life from the moment it is conceived. Your job is to discover at exactly what point during human pregnancy life begins, so that I may present the proof to the High Priest. This is the most important task of your research and administration, all the Pharaoh's treasury is at your disposal. Everything else we can cover in our meetings, but I want weekly reports sent to me on papyrus with every detail of your experiments and their findings. Do you understand everything I have said?"
"Your Majesty, I must be honest, I don't know if I..."
"...It's not your job to say what is impossible. It's your job to discover what is possible. Now go forth and spread the legs of knowledge."
-----------------------------------------------
And so we began work, but I knew Pharaoh's priority. On the one hand, there were the projects to benefit all people: those which Rav Yosef was already working on for years, and for the moment, those would still be 'delegated' to him until all the other projects were completed. Then there were the projects unique to women.
One of the first things Rav Moses told me was 'a good civil servant always knows a boss's true intention by what they don't say.' What Pharaoh didn't say was that the real priority was the women's issues - if the general issues were solved first, men would use the greater resources to sit atop them and make women beg for a share as ever through history as recorded on the tablets. But the more progress women made, the more they could share in general progress, and the more evenly men must share their spoils. It's not like men wouldn't still get the majority of it.
So I tried first to locate the source of women's headaches. One of Pharaoh's great innovations was a specific prison where only women were kept: the prisoners were women, the guards were women, even the warden was a woman. There were one thousand prisoners, and of the 1000, a full 200 complained of headaches. The name of the prison was Sabinia.
I could immediately dismiss at least one solution. The good father of medicine, Hippocrates, believed headaches were induced by digestive problems and could be cured by the instigation of vomit. However, at least fifteen of the prisoners chronically induced vomiting in themselves. Of those fifteen, five suffered from chronic headaches. None of the five reported any change in their head pain by their induction of vomit.
As a control for our experiment, we tried the four traditional methods on four separate patients: cupping, leeching, bloodletting, and burning the head. None of them seemed to work, but truth be told, we already knew that.
Our first true experiment was to try the ancient Egyptian method of tying a clay mini-crocodile to the head, stuffing the crocodile's mouth with grain and a piece of linen containing the names of the god we think is responsible for headaches, though nobody seemed to agree which god it was. We took the ten women with the severest headaches as test subjects, we began the experiment by writing the name of a different deity among the ten major gods in each separate crocodile. Secretly, I also included an eleventh subject in whom I placed the name 'Yahweh.' Inconclusive results. We then used all 200 test subjects to write the names of all ten major gods in every possible combination and tied bigger mini-crocodiles to the test subjects whose mouth could hold a bigger piece of linen with more writing. There are 1400 minor Egyptian gods, realizing that there was no way to include each minor god in every possible combination on our test subjects, we limited it to the thirty minor gods we thought would be most relevant to headaches, and tried them all in combination. After three months, the results were inconclusive.
Our second experiment was with potions. We tried boiling 22 separate herbs alone, some of which seemed promising: giving a few hours of relief, until the potion was administered to a second subject for whom the solution was nowhere near so effective. We then attempted combinations of herbs. Some potions showed promise, but results were still inconclusive by the time they were administered to the third or fourth subject.
I did not want to do the last two experiments because they seemed so drastic. One was to bathe the subject in hot water filled with electrostatic eels. Even one eel struck me as potentially lethal, but clearly it would take more than one to result in a level of electrostatic that could cure a severe headache. This seemed incredibly inhumane.
So instead we made incisions into the skull and prodded the brain with tools. We enlisted sixteen particularly brave prisoners and made an incision in a different part of the brain for each subject. The results were fascinating, they were also at times quite mystifying. Subjects whose previous behavior was relatively lucid began to speak words that were completely unrelated to what they tried to express. Other subjects, previously quite docile, began to exhibit violent behaviors. Still others exhibited slurred speech. Still others lost memories which were previously quite vivid. We could only conclude that, unprotected by skulls, various spirits had invaded their brains and stolen their neurofunctions.
It had been nine months since we began these experiments, and it was always with great trepidation that I reported these findings to the Pharaoh at our weekly audience. At every meeting, she was extremely solicitous, understanding, and cordial, but after nine months I found her patience worn.
"Rav Yanai, you've now exhausted all the potential solutions you listed to me at our second meeting. I have given you the full term of a pregnancy to find the source of women's headaches and you have not produced results. Is my confidence in you misplaced?
"No Majesty, but I do need time to pursue other remedies."
"While you're thinking of those remedies, it's time you conducted experiments on the question of when a fetus comes to life. Women who were not pregnant at our first meeting have now died in childbirth."
"Yes Majesty, I understand."
"I'm not sure you do..."
"Well then I'd be happy for Majesty to explain it to me."
"I don't like your tone."
"Majesty, all I want to do is serve you."
"I'm sure, and I'm sure your fear of me affects your work, so I am taking you into the palace."
And the Pharaoh did take me underground, and lo, it was the very same place where our weekly Jewish minyan was held, yet it was transformed to a brothel. Never had it occured to me to use the torch to look at the walls, yet when Cleopatra held torch to wall I saw iconography of Zeus transformed to a bull to rape Europa and into eagle to kidnap Ganymede, Apollo chasing Daphne then making love to her trunk, Circe pining after Glaucon as he attempted to kiss a rock, while Pyramis and Thisby did more than kiss through the glory of a wall.
And against the wall opened a door, where came out a man and woman unconcealed.
"Have you been with men or women?"
"Neither of course."
"Don't lie."
"Men for money to get to Egypt."
"Then you will know women, then men with joy, and then...."
And right on the lectern where Rav Yosef and I read every week from the Sefer Torah, I spent three whole days on my back amid orgiastic factoral groupings from every conceivable sexual taxonomy in every geometric permutation. To be sure, Cleopatra was among the many lovers I encountered, so, I think, was Marc Anthony, and so even were a few of my prisoners. Lights were always lit. I did not know most names of my collaborators, yet as exhilarating as it was, it was still more exhausting. The climaxes themselves ceased to be joyful, they felt merely like compulsive mechanics - each of their own type, more to be understood than experienced. I was neither man nor woman, merely a machine of gears and wheels in a laboratory far more elaborate than any provided for me. In experiencing her many satisfactions, I felt as though Cleopatra raised me to the height of her service so that I could bring an eye as clinical to science as she brought to sex.
And so we began upon abortion.
-----------------------------------------
Well, first we had to get the women pregnant. Not a single one among the prisoners didn't want to be part of the experiment; even women who vastly preferred women, even the few women who thought themselves men. It was easy enough for the prisoners who have sexual contact with each other, it happened all the time and vaginal disease could be rampant; but the contact of men was the closest any prisoner would get to the freedom they'd once known, even if, like most every sexual congressum, a moment's freedom could result in eternal slavery. Since every palace guard who could defend himself against a prisoner was a eunich, and every male prisoner could not be trusted in the private company, we brought in Roman soldiers on the proviso that their coitus must be watched by myself, a prison guard, and a eunuch palace guard to ensure that the woman was in no way mishandled.
We started with a group of thirty to whom we'd permit three sessions of coitus with a male prisoner at days corresponding with their cycle's greatest fertility. We waited a month after conception and administered silphium in doses strong enough that there would be no chance that the baby would remain alive. We explained to them that many of these potions were so strong that they could damage the health of the mother as well as the baby, they didn't care. One of the patients died immediately, one died after a few days of searing pain, two lived on with irreparable bodily damage. Twenty-three of the thirty women expunged fetuses which were roughly the size of a grain of rice. Of those who did not expunge, only two remained pregnant. All fetuses too small to read whether the test subject had any signs of life.
We then asked for a second group of thirty, there were no fewer volunteers. We waited two months and administered silphium at twice the dose. Two of the patients died immediately, two died after a few days of searing pain, still two more died a month after expunging while exhibiting no distressed symptoms until three days before death. Five lived on with irreparable damage. Twenty-two of the thirty women expunged fetuses which were roughly the size of a finger's breath - one-third of it was head. There was no sign of life.
We asked for a third group of thirty, there were slightly fewer volunteers. We waited three months after conception and administered silphium at three times the initial dose. Five of the patients died immediately, five died after a few days of searing pain, eight died a month after expunging while exhibiting no distressed symptoms until three days before death. All other seven lived on with irreparable damage. All thirty women expunged fetuses, all the size two fingers' breath. All fetuses exhibited signs of normal development with fully developed extremities: arms, hands, legs, feet, and nails. Yet none were in a living state.
It was at this moment when I had to report more than just another written report to Cleopatra and had to see her immediately, for I knew what had to be done to observe a live fetus, and dreaded it as a horror greater than any Pharaoh could visit upon me; a horror greater than any visited upon me on my journey to Egypt, horror so far greater than that performed on myself.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"What do you mean horror?"
"Your Majesty, it is an abomination to cut women open merely to see the living fetus inside."
"Women die in childbirth all the time and must be cut into alive to save the fetus. By killing thirty women you can save an eternity of them."
"These women needn't die!"
"Then you will send entire eras of women to their deaths."
"Why is it on me to save people the world disposes of so casually?"
"Because you can."
"I have no idea if I can save so many women."
"Alright, then because I can save them. These are the subjects I value, and if you do not impregnante thirty women again and cut them open, I will liquidate the subjects you value. I won't just execute you, I will liquidate the entire servant class of eunuchs will die in lieu of these women."
"I still refuse."
"Then I will kill every Jew in Egypt and march on Judea to do the same there."
"Your Majesty, I don't believe Pharaoh Cleopatra, world renowned for her humanity, could ever do something so unspeakable."
"Every humane leader must do terrible things to serve humanity."
"How does killing a race of people serve humanity?"
"I have held out to you the possibility a race of people might die, but surely you know, the possibility of every woman's death is held out every day."
------------------------------------------------------------
None of the women knew they would be cut up, but all knew themselves likely to die on the next round.
There was only one incentive we could offer women they would value more than life: their freedom. If they survived, they could live as free women anywhere they liked in Egypt. We got three volunteers. We then increased the offer: if they survived, they could get a pension from the palace equivalent to lifelong service. Another three volunteered. We increased again: should they volunteer and survive the procedure, they could even work in the palace as though they were eunuchs. We got another four volunteers. We then made the ultimate offer: they would live their pregnancy in luxury at Cleopatra's own palace. We got our thirty volunteers.
And for ten whole weeks, the Pharaoh herself showed them luxury's lap as though they were foreign dignitaries. "You are the most valued soldiers of my army." Every day she brought them the finest food, the finest wine, the finest music, and the finest companions. She listened eagerly to their woeful tales of life before the law's interference, and affected still more eager attention to their dull tales of prison life. She bought each of them a green bee-eater bird in a cage, each wearing a tag of gold with the gifted's name, with the implication that those who died would live on in Pharaoh's palace. She promised that the soldiers would be extremely careful, and those those who died would die as though they went to sleep.
And so came the day, and in the same underground hall where the Pharaoh had me pray and play, Cleopatra had them all lain on sheets of saffron silk and instead of administering to them a silphium, she administered them an opiate potion for sleep. All of them, if not completely asleep, would be numb to pain.
But when came time to take the opium, no one slept. Not one woman fell asleep, they did not even close their eyes. They simply lay there as court musicians played soothing lyre chords.
Finally one enjoined "Pharaoh, are we supposed to be this awake when you give us the silphium?"
"My dearest women would you excuse a Pharaoh a moment who always has urgent business? I promise when I return it will be with a solution."
Five hours later, Cleopatra returned. All the prisoners were simply talking, each seemed to convey a note of surprise as though they were amazed even to be having conversations at such a moment.
Cleopatra returned to the applause of her beloved prisoners. She immediately effaced their applause and asked if she might speak to me outside. I exited to find 90 soldiers, palace and Roman, all fully armed and shielded as if for battle.
"If we can't put them to sleep you're going to have to open them alive."
"How can you ask me to do this?"
"I'm not asking you, I order it."
"I refuse."
"I have ninety soldiers here who can carry out your execution then open the women themselves, but they will be a lot sloppier than you, so if you want any chance at all.for the women to survive or recording the fetal results, you will carry out my order."
"The women won't survive the procedure. You've known that the whole time."
"If you replaced the opium with a placebo to move me to compassion, you understand neither Cleopatra nor what women have endured."
"I have never and would never disobey my queen. I understand only that this is murder worthy of Herod."
"Herod murders for his future. It's not murder when done for... this is all kibbitzing. Soldiers, on my command, the lowest ranked Roman among you is to open Rav Yanai from his bottom to his top."
"Gemacht nafkeh! I'll do it!"
And so entered the soldiers along with the Pharaoh and I, who grabbed every woman in the room and pinned her to the ground. One to hold the right arm, one to hold the left, one to hold the legs.
All thirty prisoners emitted cries, howls, whimpers, vomits; they spat, they shook, they prayed, they tried to bite.
Yet each had no control before the knife, and the manifold reactions of each turned to the familiar shrieks of tortured animals. And once split open we saw that within each woman was a fetus who either was not alive yet, dead along with the mother, or never would have lived.
"NO PHARAOH MAY BAR ME!"
"PREPARE YOURSELF MAJESTY!"
"Osiris himself heard the screams of importunate women from above and...."
High Priest Ramfis stood at the hall's back entrance in the company of Rav Yosef, along with Marc Anthony's viceroy and best friend, Enobarbus, and the hall was fallen with the silence of tombs.
"Gaze Enobarbus on Rome's greatest ally. The Pharaohesss, Cleopatra herself, champion of woman's cause, is woman's most revolting murderer."
"Your Holiness it was I who performed these procedures." I held the knife, it was only right to throw myself upon it.
Rav Yosef stepped in at the ready. "Your Holiness it could not have been Rav Yanai. Surely no eunuch has the passion for so visceral an act."
And with the precision of a water pump, the answer occurred to Cleopatra: "No Rav Yosef, it was you."
"What was me Your Majesty?"
"You knew of the plan from office gossip, you told the high priest of it, you switched our opium supply with placebos, you did it knowing of our projects, you did it knowing how the high priest might reward you."
Rav Yosef seemed terrified: "Majesty I..."
"Not that your people has any problem with knives! To you the screams of babies' severed flesh are music!"
I could only intervene: "Your majesty please..."
"Or maybe you're not doing the high priest's bidding. Maybe the high priest is doing your bidding."
"MAJESTY!" I shouted.
"I see it now, Ramfis is just a mouth through which these spadones whisper their perverted contortions."
Enobarbus finally spoke up: "Your Majesty, I realize the eunuchs are not Rome's concern but I don't need to tell you that the Consuls will not look kindly upon any turbulence in Egyptian leadership."
But that would not stop her: "Rome could be complicit in this plot too. How many eunuchs are Jews and how many could write their financier bretheren in Rome?"
The viceroy resolved: "I'm afraid I must write to Marc Anthony immediately and tell him that Cleopatra is no longer capable of being Pharaoh on her own and he must come back to Egypt to comfort his love.
The Pharaohess ventilated in panic: "Oh Isis please help me! Rome is complicit in it too! The whole world conspires to keep women in slavery!"
And Cleopatra burst into tears. Enobarbus immediately locked her in an embrace and walked her out of the hall. Followed by Rav Yosef and high priest Ramfis and all the soldiers. Only I was left with the dead women and their remains.
And in that moment after everyone living left, I thought I saw a fetus come to life.
XV: Nu, Shammai?
Nu Shammai?
I trust in my absence you've upended every one of my rulings and the Kingdom of Judea is now the theocracy of your geshlechter wet dreams. More seriously, I trust you in my absence to be fair and broadminded tzaddik I know you are; but don't worry, if you do anything too egregious Gamliel will report back to me and we'll call back all the disputants, at which point they'll watch me dump a plate of falafel over your head.
Don't get me wrong I wish I was back in Jerusalem making headway on our mountain of parchmentwork, but our dear leader really has something extraordinary here in the desert. He's literally built a castle out of a mountain's rock, it serves both as desert resort and a military fortress people can flee to under siege.
That doesn't mean it's easy to get there. Ochen vey the trip up the mountain is excruciating and you have to start at first light or else you're too winded to climb the farshtunkiner thing. Climbing it takes forever, it's murder on the knees, and by the time you're at the top you're too tired and hot to appreciate the place.
Anyway I was obviously there to dedicate the synagogue, but who could be waiting for us but an Essene priest named Yochanan (they're all named Yochanan...). I know the Essenes know how to live in the desert like we never will, but he was just standing on one of the benches, waiting for us to get there as though anybody could have seen him, but clearly the guards had no idea he was there, and who knows? He might have been hiding in the palace for weeks!
I know the Essenes really get to you Shammai, but if you got to know the Essenes, you might be stunned by how much you have in common with them. They might live communisitically, but they do it so they can better live Hashem's laws. These are people so devoted to living like a mensch that most of them never get married or have relations. They don't own slaves because they serve each other. They don't swear oaths so they won't break them. They don't even trade because they view business matters as unclean. They even hold in their drek on shabbos to keep the day pure. Isn't this the kavonah you've always wanted from our Yisraelim? I'm sure you don't like that they don't sacrifice animals, but nu, what's there to eat in the desert?
Obviously, Herod made pretty quick work of this guy, but not before he rendered a pretty impressive prophetic speech. Anyway, this wasn't just an Essene, this was a rhetorician. I can't relate you the tone of his speech, but it was as incantory as anything you've heard in the beis hamikdash. We think prophets no longer walk among us, but if half of what this guy forecasts is true...
Try not to think about that for now. What's more important is that dear leader wants us to interpret his sayings, so I'm just going to report to you the fragments I remember, and maybe you can help me interpret what that means for us. Among other things he said is that 'Rome is only conquerable from within', but also 'Israel shall conquer Rome.' He said 'the world has not and shall not change such as this for two thousand years', 'god will render god unto Rome,' but also 'through Rome shall gods conquer all.'
Then there were his musings on our dear leader for which I'm sure said leader wants ample interpretation: 'Herod slays kings, yet a king is born shall slay Herod in a house of bread.' 'The king shall be as merciful as Herod vengeful, yet is Herod an angel next to this king's vassals.'
But most troubling is what he said about us, and this I remember quite clearly: 'After Herod shall the Lord cast Israel off unto the seventy-seventh generation. Herod's yoke shall be as a kiss. In Israel shall be found the mark of Cain, bless Israel and ye shall be blessed, curse Israel and ye shall be cursed. The Lord chose Israel as His instrument, and the Lord's instrument is a trumpet of judgement.'
As you can see, if this man is a true prophet his prophecies are deeply burdensome.
I trust your discretion and good sense to let no one know until I return of this prophecy but certain members of the small court you think best suited to interpret it, I leave that at your jurisdiction. Upon my return we will of course discuss it in the small court.
Abi gezunt and please thank Bernice for that wonderful kafta recipe, Doris swears it would have never occurred to her to put cinnamon in,
Hillel
XVI: Listen, Whore
Everybody's got a mother-in-law. Even Herod. All the time he was plotting with letters back and forth to Anthony in Rome, the shvig was planning how to kill him with Cleopatra in Egypt. But when it came time, Cleopatra summoned them both to Anthony's base camp in Leodicia--in Turkey where Cleopatra can quietly order some deaths without any eunich cuck at court to spread it around.
You gotta give the bitch credit, Alexandra's loyal as shit and her friends always get paid. Not even Anthony makes that much money for his partners. There's been half a dozen kings and civil wars, and through it all a steady supply of Judean fruit and grain would disappear every night and reappear three weeks later in Egypt's capital. Every year, we harvest 14% less grain than people claim we make, and nobody knows where it goes....
But obviously Herod's no schmendrik either. He knows he's either leaving Cleopatra a king or a corpse, but however good a friend to Anthony, Cleopatra needed him dead because he could always just halt any harvest shipments whose roads pass through Idumea: the only place in Judea where everybody's working with him not against him. So he's not coming out of that meeting unless he gives something more valuable to Cleopatra than all that fruit and grain: not just the usual jewels and raiment, but something that keeps Egypt secure forever. There's only one thing Cleopatra wants more than our crops, it's the palm trees in Jericho.
The second he saw Cleopatra in Laodocia, he gave her a notarized deed to all Jericho's balsam, forever and binding. He made no claim to the flowers or the essential oils, just a daily transit of balsam to the Egyptian capital, pre-pressed in a hundred vats.
But just in case that plum humiliation wasn't enough, he had one other insurance premium. He put Alexandra's daughter, Mariamne, under the charge of that thug of an oaf or a yutz: Joseph. That's right: my husband. If any word reaches Joseph that Herod was executed, he told Joseph to murder Mariamne without wasting a rega.
I'm sure Herod would find it a shame. She's a sweet girl and Herod loves her, but all he could console himself with is the thought that she could be his again in the great sheol to come.
Now Alexandra thought she was the real queen of Judah. She says outright, no Phillistine can ever be the legit king of Judah, and I understand why she thinks that. She's lost her father, father-in-law, brother-in-law, husband and son. She wants vengeance and who can blame her? But she thinks the people of Judea will welcome her. Who's gonna welcome her? We killed all her supporters!
Still, she can bet on the fact that it's only a matter of time before the Jews rise up against the Palestinian occupation, and if they have enough will to violence, all Herod's friends will eventually turn into his enemies. Rome doesn't care who dominates who, they just want stability. Alexandra's only real friend is Cleopatra, but Cleopatra only rules because Rome lets her. The minute Anthony gets tired of her, Rome gets tired of her. Sheol, the rest of Rome already is! So Cleopatra needs real allies, and her only real ally is Alexandra Maccabee.
So it's obvious. Cleopatra was appointed by Augustus to judge whether Herod came in. Clearly Augustus is tired of Herod. Augustus wanted him to be a fair ruler and obviously Herod's not, so Augustus planned to kill him and swallowed his contempt for the shiteatress to conspire with her. Even though Cleopatra would obviously rule in favor of Alexandra, they planned to poison Herod. Gahennim, Herod has so many enemies that Anthony would never be completely certain it was them. It could just as easily be Augustus, and let's face it, it was probably all three.
And of course Herod had his insurance plan, but still, he's Herod: murderer, tyrant, gangster, khameruk. What guarantee can Herod now make that anyone would believe? Cleopatra may or may not have believed he would give her the balsam. She probably thought she could strashen whoever followed him into it.
Herod told me a year later that as a formality, Cleopatra delayed the ruling for an hour to consult her oracle. And as Alexandra stood there with Herod, that godfather of beitz showed her what tyranny really is. Herod left his wife, her daughter Mariamne under the auspices of my hideous schtik drek Joseph. Herod's fingers point to whoever he wants killed, and Joseph's hands turn him into a cadaver. Her sweet little daughter, Mariamne, so much younger her paskudnyak spouse, will never outlive him. She's a dead woman. She was told as a child that she'd be Judea's next imperatress and every day she walks this palatial monstrosity as prisoner.
All Alexandra could do was rescind her claim.
At the time I didn't know what she was doing at our house, though I knew it could be nothing good. Mariamne's the queen, a good queen, a nice queen. It's terrible, but the only reason Judea never overthrew Herod is probably because everybody loves her. Everybody around her is vipers. Herod, Joseph, me too.
But the one who really wanted to change was Joseph. He always liked her, maybe even he loved her, but if he loved her, his could have easily..., you know... and after years of Herod, what would she have done to fight him off? Joseph's a murderer, but even she will learn that I'm much more evil. I don't like it, I don't want to be, but you try staying alive in all this. It is not my responsibility to stop shtupping men and shlogging slaves to impress a Queen whose story can only end with Herod ordering her death. All my life, people told me I am everything Jewish women are accused of: spoiled, manipulative, shrewish. She's a woman of valour: worthy of the Matriarchs. I'm the cast off woman of evil: Lilith, Hagar, Potiphar's wife, the one in thirty-seven women who gives Jews a bad name.
Women hate Mariamne because she is better at being a woman than us in every conceivable way: more beautiful, kinder, more virtuous, more forgiving. She's been ravished by the worst man in the world every day for seventeen years but she still she seems virginal. She must suffer like nobody else but she gives every appearance of joy. Always smiling, always greeting subjects, always going out among the people. Ministering to the poor: washing their feet, distributing food, building them shelters out of her allowances. She's everything we all should be, and we all hate her for it.
But nobody suffers more than Joseph. I don't get it. He's killed, I don't know how many he's killed. Half the days of the year he comes home covered in blood. His hands tremble, his eyes tic, and I seem to be the only person who notices because he never looks anybody in the eye. He comes home, barely acknowledges anybody, and practically jogs into his room to daven on his knees, or so the servants I pay to watch him tell me. But I would know anyway because every day we hear him shouting the prayers, beating his breast and crying. He takes three quarters of the water into his room and uses every bit every day to wash the blood off. He never talks about it but he screams every night in his sleep with the names of all kinds of people who've disappeared: priests, rabbis, rich Sadducees, even family members. I'm sure Herod sleeps soundly every night after fucking everyone from Mariamne to homeless whores. I can't help wondering every day, he kills everybody else, why doesn't he kill Herod?
I can only guess it's because of Mariamne. He's constantly tonguetied around her, staring at her when he isn't looking down. Making sure to have the best food when she and Herod come over, getting them gifts more expensive than anything he gets me.
And there she is, sipping tea on our public balcony. For the first time ever, they talk. They really talk. Not just the usual formalities. It goes on for a week, a whole week, all day every day, and on shabbos I suddenly hear him crying.
Right away I hide outside the balcony window and try to inch closer. I only hear snatches, but it lasts hours. It seems to last all day. He must have confessed to everything he did. Literally everything. Who knows if he could remember it all but there might have been things he imagined he did too. The murders, the rapes, the abuses, the thefts, the enslavements, and all the lies. I'm sure he even told the instruction to not let her outlive Herod, but Joseph must have told her all his evil deeds, all of Herod's evil deeds, all the evil deeds they're still planning.
I heard Mariamne say nothing until I clearly heard her say two distinct words:
"I know."
When I saw him in a few minutes, nothing ever disturbed me like what I saw from Joseph. For the first time he didn't look like a hulking murderer or a tortured crybaby, he looked at peace. He was looking up rather than down, his eyes were like kind saucers. No blinking, no trembling, walking slowly and confidently, answering me calmly when I yelled at him. This is not Joseph.
This is Mariamne. She has that effect on people. Everybody but Herod. They all want to be cleaner, better, kinder; all that stuff. They all probably want to repent. It's not even a sexual thing. It's holiness.
I hate it. Every holy person I've ever met gets killed. Good riddance.
Once I hear the 'I know' I move closer, as close to the door as I can get without them seeing me, and I hear:
MARIAMNE:
Go into hiding with me.
JOSEPH:
I don't deserve your forgiveness. .
Then I hear silence. I can't take it anymore and I look at them. Fortunately Mariamne was facing me, not my husband.
But what do I find? Mariamne placing Joseph's hand on her heart. Tears falling from her eyes.
He says back:
"I don't dare."
"Yahweh forgives."
"Not me."
"It's not too late."
"No. It is."
"Put the knife down. Make peace."
But it was at this moment that a servant came in to say that he could see Alexandra's caravan riding in the distance. Suddenly he gets up, shouts to Mariamne:
"Your mother's here! Herod is dead. Herod's guards will be here in a minute to see if I carried it out the order to kill you, but run to the Egyptian embassy and you might be free in moments. Your only chance is to run now. RUN!
And Mariamne ran.
Immediately I run in and scream:
"She's supposed to be dead! Herod's dead and you're going to keep her alive! You're gonna kill me and take Mariamne as a better wife!
I beat his breasts, claw at his face. Usually Joseph just takes it like a servant. Looking down with his hands at his sides. This time he grips my wrists in one giant hand and squeezes. He's perfectly calm and he looks me in the eye.
"You don't deserve to die. You're too evil."
It was Alexandra's sigil alright. And then out steps Herod,
Alexandra would never believe that Joseph tried to save her life, but she could go to the Egyptian embassy and bring her daughter back if she wanted. She pulls up right to my house and gets out of the carpentum with a smile so painted on she looks like an Idumian harlot.
And out steps Herod.
He grips her hand and holds it up in the air.
I was the only person ready for this. I shouted out "Mariamne's run away after being unfaithful to you with my husband!"
Herod slaps me.
"Quiet witch."
"NO. Search the palace! We saw Alexandra's sigil, not yours, we thought you were dead! Mariamne's not here. I heard my husband scream at her run right away."
"Joseph I honestly should make you the high priest. The best service you ever did me is taking the Whore of Babylon as your wife."
"He told her to go to the Egyptian embassy."
"Egypt is Rome and Rome is me. So long as I'm alive, everybody in Judea does what I want.
"But they thought you were dead!"
"There's no way they thought I was dead! Joseph, I never thought you'd actually have to kill her. How can anybody think I wouldn't be able to persuade Cleopatra whom I've persuaded so many times in situations exactly like this?"
"You literally instructed them that in case of your dea..."
"...I was never going to die."
"How were we supposed to know that?"
"Slut do you think your brother is so unloved by his friends that they'd stoop to kill him?"
"Tov, Joseph send one of your valets to the embassy to get Mariamne... IF she's even there, and there's no way she is."
At that moment, Mariamne shows up with a combination of Roman and Egyptian guards."
Without even a rega, Herod slit Joseph's throat.
All three of us screamed and were reduced to tears: me, Alexandra and Mariamne. And Herod exclaimed:
"SLAVES!"
Six of Joseph's slaves immediately appeared.
"Clean up the blood of your master and dump his body into the Valley of Gahennim."
SOLDIERS!
Six Roman soldiers immediately appeared.
"Three of you escort Mariamne back to the Royal Palace, and three of you escort Alexandra to Praetorium Prison where she'll be for the forseeable future!"
Much like Mariamne and me, Alexandra was too in shock to protest.
I was still crying and Herod started said to me with no raise in his voice but a little nastiness
"Listen whore, I don't know if what you say is true. What I do know is that if Joseph told Mariamne of my plan, if he even told you, even if he even told someone who told you, he's capable of everything you said. If I ever find out what you're capable of, you will join your ex-husband in Gahennim even more quickly than Joseph did. Word will go out tomorrow that Joseph was executed for trying to rape Mariamne, and a million people around the world will celebrate his death."
And here's the real irony: you're going to be named 'protectress of Jerusalem' in his place. You, who can't even run a palace chamber, will have to learn to defend Jerusalem. You'll have to inspect his troop, you'll have to get the aquducts clean, you'll have to keep track of the supply of grain and fruit, you'll have to mediate temple disputes. You always wanted to help out here. Hell, you probably want to be Queen, now we'll see what kind of ruler you are.
Herod left. I was still weeping.
XVII: Majesty?
Shammai: You commanded me to audience majesty?
Herod: Yes, have a seat.
Shammai: I presume this is about o... .... Majesty, may I inquire what's happening to your arm?
Herod: Nothing that's your concern.
Shammai: Majesty, please forgive me for pointing it out, but your right forearm is twice the size of your left.
Herod: Of course it's about the oaths. Six thousand of your followers refuse to take the loyalty oath. Are your bochers really that stupid?
Shammai: I can't be responsible for those who don't take your oaths.
Herod: Of course you're responsible! Every one of your beheymes refuses it.
Shammai: Am I the Pharisees' keeper?
Herod: You're THESE Pharisees' keeper. It's not like they respect Hillel.
Shammai: They don't know him as we do.
Herod: You know what I mean. They don't follow Sanhedrin rulings.
Shammai: So?
Herod: Everything they follow is written by a nudnik named Rav Shimon of Jamnia.
Shammai: Is your majesty implying something?
Herod: Do you think I'm stupid?
Shammai: Anything but, majesty.
Herod: You think Hillel is stupid?
Shammai: Is what I think of Rabban Hillel what we're discussing?
Herod: If you're gonna publish your own rulings that contradict the court you can at least do it under a name that doesn't sound exactly like Rav Shammai of Yavneh.
Shammai: Well if Majesty is so curious, he should know that yes, I have sometimes written under the name Shimon of Jamnia, but never since I was summoned to become the Sanhedrin's court father.
Herod: Well, Shimon of Jamnia is surely aware that I could have you charged with perjury. Tribe of Reuben vs. Hezekiah, Yahya vs. Binyamin , Yitzhak vs. Yitzhak, these are cases the Sanhedrin heard after your arrival.
Shammai: I have not perjured myself. There is no Shimon of Jamnia. It's a common name many rabbis have used.
Herod: Oh you're good. You're as good as Hillel.
Shammai: I suppose I should take that as a compliment?
Herod: The highest. You have a code with your followers. There is no place called Jamniah, it's probably just a way of saying Yavneh in some slave language.
Shammai: No language I'm familiar with, Majesty.
Herod: For decades, the Sanhedrin ruled on the laws and the sane part of this country followed its rule, but for twenty-five years there's been this northern fanatiker named Shimon of Jamnia who issued legal ruling after rabbinical writing that declares the exact opposite of the Sanhedrin on every rule, but now, instead of writing on regional cases in the northern tribes, Shimon of Jamnia's now issuing entirely separate rulings about Sanhedrin court cases. Are you going to plead ignorance of this?
Shammai: These writings have crossed my desk.
Herod: These opinions began right after you came to the high court!
Shammai: Your majesty, I have not once written under the name of Shimon of Jamnia since I came to the Sanhedrin.
Herod: Of course you haven't, you just have any one of your twenty chassids on the court write it for you. For all I know they're just taking dictation, and these are rulings on everything from prohibiting conversions to the direction of Hanukkah candles... for fucking Yahweh's sake, what Haredi meshuggener needs a separate ruling over which way to light the candles?
Shammai: Your majesty, I cannot presume to control the religious practices of hereti... Your majesty there is liquid issuing from your arm.
Herod: There's always liquid on my arm. Don't change the subject. You have your Labans publish rulings for you, and those are the rulings your northern schnorrers observe.
Shammai: Surely you're not suggesting that there's more than one court in the land.
Herod: This country has two courthouses: the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. The House of Hillel for the sane people who just want to live their lives, and the House of Shammai for idiots who throw their lives away on Hashem.
Shammai: Your majesty forgive me but you promised independence for the courts and it's not for you to judge how your subjects choose to worshi
Herod: I promised the independence of one court, not two.
Shammai: There is only one court.
Herod: Of course there is, you secretly don't recognize the Sanhedrin. You only recognize the court of Shimon of Jamnia, who apparently isn't you.
Shammai: If that's true, why did Rabban Hillel appoint me as his court father?
Herod: Because Hillel knows that he has to appease all your northern mamzers by letting you do all those tzudreyt things you do in the n... ... ... ...
Shammai: Majesty?... ...
Shammai: ... ... Majesty?
Herod: ...North! Forcing widows to marry their brother-in-laws, not letting widows have a dowry on remarriage, having separate plates for each food, saving all your meat for Shabbes even if the meat spoils, having to go all the way to Jerusalem to eat certain fruit, forcing people in the North to freeze to death every night in the Sukkah: what sort of mole people live like this?
Shammai: Majesty forgive me for pointing this out but before you listed your misinterpretations of our northern practices you just froze for a mo
Herod: I freeze now, it's something that happens. Don't change the subject.
Shammai: Forgive me Majesty, I'm not sure I follow what the subject is anymore.
Herod: The subject is that your followers refuse to take the loyalty oath.
Shammai: Umm, Forgive me, Majesty, I cannot be held responsible for the actions of people who would presume to follow what they think I want.
Herod: What you want is obvious.
Shammai: Then please enlighten me Majesty, what do I want?
Herod: That your... your northerners won't take the oath. I'm... I'm trying to run a kingdom here that doesn't break into civil war.
Shammai: I doubt you're in any danger of that.
Herod: Civil war... is what you Israelites do, it's your fa... favorite shabbos activity.
Shammai: Well if your majesty is worried about civil war surely a mere oath won't stop your subjects from pursuing...
Herod: It will remind them that if they cross me I wo... ... won't hesitate to kill them.
Shammai: Surely the king is not so vengeful as to kill six thousand men just because they might feel a loyalty to Hashem.
Herod: I should have known. After all these years I still can't believe that it's all about your farshtu... farshtunkiner god. You're all just naarish enough that I believe you.
Shammai: Northerners are not naarish, but we do take our emuno seriously.
Herod: Seriously or not, tell your Shimon of Jamnia that I need that oath.
Shammai: I keep telling you, there is no Shimon of Jamni
Herod: Don't play.... dumb khaleryah, you know what I need. And remember, I've done worse than.... kill six thousand, but no. I'm not that vengeful, though I can make them wish they were dead.
Shammai: Your majesty might consider that such behavior might be another reason why they refuse to take the oath.
Herod: Oh I'm well aware of why they REALLY don't take the oath Rebbe, but since I'm... so hated, I have to ensure rule of law somehow.
Shammai: You might consider giving the north a greater role.
Herod: Rav Shammai of Yavneh! I never thought I'd see the day you actually played politics.
Shammai: All I'm saying is that the north should have a greater say in the matters of state and law.
Herod: Tayerer gott, I... I don't believe it. Yes. It's a shame the North doesn't have a bigger say. It's a shame after all this time that we never worked together.
Shammai: We do work together!
Herod: We work against each other. I need someone who works with me.
Shammai: Don't you have Hillel?
Herod: Hillel's weak, you know it as well as I do, I need a Chief Rabbi of iron.
Shammai: Your majesty. What kind of iron?
Herod: The iron Hillel will never be.
Shammai: Majesty. Surely if you communicated your wishes to Hillel.
Herod: I communicate them every day. They go into a tohu vavohu and I never see them again. Maybe it's time for him to join it.
Shammai: Em... If your majesty means what I
Herod: I'm not going to commit any violence against the Northmen, but if they refuse to take the oath I will tax two-thirds of their holdings. If they take the oath, I will annihilate the threat from Hillel and push Shimon of Jamnia's rulings through the Sanhedrin, but I need to know, when I have my own laws to add, will you push through my ruli.....
....
....
....
....
....
....
....
Shammai: Your Majesty?
Your Majesty?
YOUR MAJESTY?!
KING HEROD?!?
(Shammai waits a moment, thinks about it, then slaps Herod as hard as he can. Walks to the door of the room, then thinks twice of it, comes back to Herod and slaps him again. Then he leaves the room. )
XVIII: Nobilissima, grave and reverend Mr. Princeps and his divine and ever resourceful wife, Domina Julia Augusta Livia,
Our man in the East has fallen upon tristi tempora. Half gone are his cerebum and corpus, and that which remains consumes itself in fear, fear projected outward and subjects his populum to all his terrores.
He sits in his garden, signing warrants of mortum and ordering murder of others by cover of nox. He's ordered me to prosecute two of his sons to mortem, and of course, the verdict is foregone. A third remains in Sheol, and I merely await instructions to sue for the death of this third. He has executed his wife's mother, and beside Mariamne has murdered the entirety of Hasmonea's line. Queen Mariamne certe knows her time comes. There is no safe portum for Judean man, woman or child is safe, a danger that very much includes me. Vassallus fidelis goes to the sword next to traitor next to communis criminalis. All are guilty in this kingdom: their crime? Not being Idumean or Philistine like our man, yet even his own tribes sit uneasily. They do not sit in the Sanhedrin, but they comprise his guard and army, and know that he may still turn the machinery on them; yet plot against the fickle domini they never do because all know that treachery is still more sure to result in ruin than loyalty.
Because our man in the East retains some of his old virtu. Even as all Judea falls to the gladius, the Sanhedrin remain with a kind of safety. He happily executs sitting members, but they're always replaced by kin: fratres, sons, even patres. The old guard of Pharisee goes to Gahennim Valley with the rest of Sadducaic Jerusalem, but the familias themselves, the lineage, the futurum, remains entirely intact.
There are, as ever, only two truly safe men in Jerusalem. As ever, our thorny coronae: Rabbis Hillel and Shammai. Even now among this great terror, Herod clearly knows their mortes would trigger revolt among a populatio already incensed. To execute either of them would be the equivalent to executing a Consul, something I've surely heard you confirmo that no Roman Princeps shall ever do. Men like Hillel and Shammai are not mere 'viri sancti,' these are civilibus adroit enough to debate in the Senate and win. Either of them could serve as publius and patrician Senators would rue their generatio.
My advice, our man shall soon pass to the Elysian Fields (however unlikely that to be his destinatio). It is tempus to rescue his son from Sheol and cultivate our new asset. He shall be far more malleable than his extremely demanding and saturnine father.
As ever your humblest eastern servant,
Nicholas of Damascus
XIX: To our Rabbanim Hillel and Shammai,
This letter is for your eyes only. If it is to be discovered, we're all the dead men we may soon be.
Herod says nothing, he merely sits in full royal robes in a makeshift throne on a raised platform as a tribunal of 150 Pharisees sit below him in the temple to do his every bloody bidding. Nicolaus of Damascus lays out the charges and prosecutes every case - including his sons. There is no counsel for the defense. Every man in Judea spies for him, yet every man is an agent of his now executed children and heirs, everyone is treasonous and everyone is put to death by unanimous consent. Gradually, a trickle of tribunal members are put before the tribunal themselves, where the tribunal votes them as guilty of sedition as the alleged partisans. Herod replaces them on the tribunal with the alleged guilty's sons or brothers, where they have no choice but vote the death of kin.
There was, however, revolt among the Sadducee class implemented by ones Yehuda ben Tzipori and Matisyahu ben Margalot. They lead a force to storm the temple, cut Rome's eagle down with an axe, threw the eagle down the western wall. For their futile stunt, they were burnt alive right in the Temple courtyard in front of the tribunal and all the Sadducees who followed them, whereupon the Sadducee offenders were hung on crosses at Golgotha Hill.
It is said they were inspired by rumors of Herod's death, but no Jew is ever so lucky. Herod refuses to die. The maggots invading his boils are plainly visible. It's claimed he cannot talk without slurred speech, while his entire right side is plainly paralyzed. Amid these hundreds of showtrials, Herod's made only one intelligible comment whenupon he shouted 'Palestine has defeated Israel!'
And that is not the worst that's said. It's said when Herod dies that he's ordered execution of the entire Sanhedrin that same day so that he might stop celebrations of his demise. Rather, the day of his death would be a day of national mourning.
My dear Rabbanim, wherever you choose to go, if you return to Jerusalem, Judaism itself shall die.
Ever your bokher,
Gamliel
XX: Prepared Remarks of Rabbi Hillel to the Babylon Judea Joint Distribution Committee
To my esteemed colleagues and our honored donors,
It is so wonderful to be back in my mother's home country. I have always felt, though the warmth of the Babylonians I've known, through your commitment to Israel, to your commitment to keeping the Jewish people alive, Babylon is nearly as much home to me as Judea. The Babylonian dream guarantees freedom of worship for however many or few gods. How much more secure is that than Judea, where even worship of one god is under threat forever?
When I first met Herod, he was ruthless, flawed, Machiavellian, forever testing what he could get away with, but he was human and could strive half-mightily to be a better king and do what's right. He is now the prince of darkness. The Romans have their Pluto, Jews have our Herod.
However evil Herod seems, he's much moreso than that. He is the darkness forever present in Jewish History, the Amalek that it's arguable has always been within us. We claim Herod is not one of us, and yet if he isn't, has not the rise of someone like Herod always been inevitable?
From the moment we arrived in Israel, there were people already present. People we have conquered again and again for a thousand years and killed off by the tens of thousands over and over. Our people are continually dispersed, yet these people always remain, fight against us upon our return, continually lose, only for us to overmatch them and kill them again the way we ourselves were killed by others. This is as much part of God's plan as our return. We will be thrown out of Israel until such time as we learn to stop ourselves from aping the slaughter perpetuated upon us.
Because through it all the Kingdom of Judea is a place of unaccountable light. God promised us the Land of Israel, and in His own way, He kept his promise in full. The world is full of unaccountable darkness and unaccountable light, and the maintenance of both is Hashem's will: unknowable, unaccountable to all. But there is something in the holiness of this land that provokes the dark within us all, and makes us unworthy to stay in this holiest of places. We leave and we suffer until such time as our sins are cleansed to make our return, only yet again for our behavior to force us to leave.
Herod is the divine punishment for our people's sins. He is the murder we perpetrate visited back upon us. We cannot resurrect those Herod killed off any more than we can raise the souls our people have killed.
I hear from the auditorium's consternation that this sentiment is as controversial as I presumed it would be. Perhaps you feel as you have to the boot of gentile hands upon your necks in an entirely different way from how they're placed on ours. Perhaps we in Israel give Jews a worldwide reputation as homicidal and slaughterous. The eyes of the world are forever looking to Israel, judging us as harshly as the Holy One does, condemning us in their minds as more animal than man.
What sort of God would allow His people such an impossible situation? What sort of God would willingly place His nation in such peril? Why would He do it? What does He gain from our uncertainty?
We cannot know the divine will, but we can interpret, we can guess, we can plan accordingly, and perhaps this guessing game is the purpose that leads us to the crown of wisdom. The ability to interpret is the Jewish people's essence. Hashem left it up to us to locate connections between the world of God and the world of man. We are God's middlemen, his portfolio traders, his lawyers and doctors and engineers, the white collar workers who tend the world's accounts and make the deals. We are the variables in God's experiments, we are the beta testers through which God observes the results of his new research. God is perfect, but perhaps His perfection is perfect because He is always evolving, rather than perfect because He is. Perhaps He is God not because He knows all but because He learns all. And because He learns, we Jews are those who learn half His truth, who dwell in God's ambiguity while the rest of mankind dwells within various places of not knowing.
So therefore, without the Jewish people, there can be no 'this world,' because how could God create a world without testing its results? Before this world, there was only the world to come, but we bring parts and essences of the next world down to earth. We establish the new within the old and the old within the new. We sometimes bring the alpha, we sometimes bring the omega, but however much He knows, only God knows the divine alphabet from Aleph to Taf.
If all this sounds very hermetic, not to worry. There are moments in your lives when such mystical jumble will seem as clear as a sunny day and others when they seem even more obscure than they do currently. This is the essence of God's kingdom, where nothing makes sense and it all seems like a load of shit. Forgive my language but you know it as truly as I do: an Israel where Herod is king makes no sense and leads us into the desire to curse the earth. Yet the earth is a blessing, where all good things are possible. So far as we can determine Hashem's intentions, it is that we find the good within the bad just as we are easily tempted by seeing the bad within the good.
(The text of Hillel's prepared remarks cuts off here. - RW)
XXI: Remarks of Shammai to the Essenes - Outline
Be sure to thank the Essenes profusely for their hospitality and discretion. Make sure they know you know the risk they're taking by hiding us.
1. Even during our enmity, Hillel pointed out to me similarities between my beliefs and the Essenes.
2. Herod's evil, and the failure to contain it due to the absence of backbone straight opposition - make the implication clear that it's Hillel who made Herod possible.
3. Rulers like Herod rise up because our lack of stringent observance allows them.
4. The State of Israel belongs to us, and those who exist upon our land must be made submit to our rule or face the consequences.
5. The light of the world is Hashem, we are the darkness who must constantly aspire to live in the luminous path Hashem lays for us. Stray from that path and we remain in darkness.
6. We have tried as much passive resistance as we can afford. We can only resist tyrants like Herod through violent opposition.
7. Our reputation in the world as murderers is not because our people are murderous but because our people are weak. Every civilization arose because they killed those who opposed them. If we simply did what other peoples have long always done, our existence would simply be taken for granted.
8. We know the Divine Will. We need only follow it closely enough and we shall prosper.
9. G-d is testing us, waiting for us to show strength in the face of opposition and inertia to demonstrate ourselves worthy of His greatness.
10. There is nothing obscure about what Hashem wants from us. There is no hidden truth. Everything about what Hashem wants has been made clear in the Torah.
Thank them again.
XXII: Bava-ben-Buta
Hillel: Are you sure this is the way?
Shammai: This is the only way.
Hillel: Not what I meant.
Shammai: This is the way we get to his cave.
Hillel: I don't understand why we couldn't have taken a bedouin with us who knows the caves.
Shammai: And compromise our identity?
Hillel: What identity? We're in disguise!
Shammai: We can't take the chance.
Hillel: Nobody knows we're missing yet. If we don't get back by sunup tomorrow everyone will assume we've fled and they'll kill us.
Shammai: They might kill us if we stay.
Hillel: They'll kill us if we go, they'll kill us if we stay, why don't I go and you stay and we'll see who's alive by next week.
Shammai: You want to go? Go. But it's your beloved people we're trying to save.
Hillel: Wait, what are you trying to save?
Shammai: The sanctity of Hashem.
Hillel: So you admit that Hashem means nothing without people to worship Him.
Shammai: If I had known a brief walk in the desert is the only thing that would make Rabban Hillel grouchy I'd have taken him on a walk eighteen years ago.
Hillel: I'm grouchy because we're about to get killed and you're taking me on a walk to a cave to visit a Rabbi we don't even know is alive.
Shammai: He's alive.
Hillel: You'll have to excuse me for doubting you when you just told me for the first time that he survived the Sanhedrin massacre.
Shammai: He's here.
Hillel: How do you know?
Shammai: Because he said he would be.
Hillel: What did he say? When did he say it?
Shammai: He told me in a dream.
Hillel: Doesn't your school reject dreams as otherworldly temptation?
Shammai: We reject dreams unless we can prove to an authority that they come from God.
Hillel: And your proof is?..
Shammai: My proof is when we find who we're looking for.
Hillel: That's a dumb rationalization even for the School of Shammai.
Shammai: There is no school of Shammai, there's a School of Baba ben Buta. I'm just the Rabbi who spreads his word.
Hillel: 'Spreads his word?' What on earth? You sound like a goy!
Shammai: Once you meet him you'll understand.
Hillel: What's there to understand? Herod had a stroke and went meshuggeh. It doesn't get more simple than that.
Shammai: Nothing is simple in the eyes of Rav Baba.
Hillel: Just what we need right now, something complicated.
Shammai: That's why we need Rebbe Bava. He'll know.
Hillel: What will he know?
Shammai: I don't know, but I know he'll know.
(enter bedouin from behind a rock)
Bedouin: You seek the one who knows?
Hillel: GAH!
Shammai: We seek nothing.
Hillel: Genug Shammai. (to bedouin) We seek the one who knows!
Bedouin: He who knows is here. Very close by. Listen closely and you can hear what he sees.
(they listen to the wind, and they hear two very faint voices, one shouting gibberish, the other shouting in terrible pain)
Shammai: We do not seek whomever you think we do.
Hillel: Shtum Shammai.
Bedouin: You seek of whom I speak.
Shammai: We do not. Zei gezunt and be gone.
(the Bedouin disappears)
Hillel: Farkakte's sake, he disappeared. You don't fuck with a dybbuk like that.
Shammai: LANGUAGE!
Hillel: Whatever, we'll be dead tomorrow. How many geists will you shoo off just because you don't want anybody to know where we're going.
Shammai: We don't seek who he's taking about because Rebbe Bava is blind.
Bedouin: (still invisible) Yet he who knows can see.
Shammai: A blind man doesn't see.
Hillel: We're here because your dream said to go to the House of Bread just like the prophet said, and that's what you saw in your dream. How many nesses do we have to see before you get it into your keppe that this invisible bokher is why we're here.
Shammai: (shouts to the air) Zein nito! Be gone!
Hillel: Fuck him don't listen! Show where you want us to go!
(A star appears to shoot and slowly falls to earth, it illuminates a dilapidated stable)
Hillel: Well it can't hurt us to see what's there.
(Hillel and Shammai knock on the door of a horse stable. Inside they hear overwhelming screaming and cheers.)
Shammai: Rav Baba? Rebbe Bava?! He doesn't hear us.
(Shammai opens the stable door. Inside is Rav Baba, looking at a video images of the Nuremberg Rally from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. After three seconds, the images stop.)
Rav Baba: Komm mein kint! Shammai, you've done well.
Shammai: Not well enough it seems.
Rav Baba: It is Hashem's will you should fail, just as it was that I fail too.
Shammai: When did you ever fail?
Rav Baba: To pacify Herod, and even that was a success.
Shammai: You failed to succeed?
Baba: I succeeded to fail.
Hillel: Oh... He succeeded to fail......
Baba: It was Hashem's will that I fail, and now I see what Hashem wanted.
Hillel: Ah... Now he sees what Hashem wanted....
Shammai: What does Hashem want?
Baba: He wants the Jewish people to leave Israel.
(silence)
(Hillel bursts into laughter)
Baba: I came to Herod shortly before the Sanhedrin were massacred. The guards nearly killed me for approaching him. I told him it was not too late to repent his misdeeds, but he must do something for the Lord which only he could do.
(silence)
Hillel: OK, I'll bite. What could only Herod do?
Baba: Only Herod had the funds to build the temple to the glory I thought Hashem wanted.
Shammai: The glory you THOUGHT Hashem wanted?
Baba: I thought glory was what Hashem wanted, but all glory but Hashem's is false glory.
Hillel: So you're the reason Herod renovated our temple?
Baba: God is the reason Herod rebuilt a temple. His temple. Not God's. I was the mouthpiece through which God inspired Herod to build the temple.
Hillel: So if I'm to understand correctly: you were the mouthpiece through which God told Herod to build the temple God doesn't want...?
Baba: God wanted Herod's temple, but God wanted Herod's temple so that He may destroy it.
Shammai: God builds things so that He can destroy them?
Baba: There is a tree of life and a tree of death. God creates so that He can destroy and destroys so that He might create again.
Shammai: Master, surely our God is not so fickle.
Baba: God's constancy is often fickle to our eyes.
Shammai: Mein Rebbe, I have missed your wisdom every day for thirty-six years, but even I cannot believe you that God would be so indifferent to our essence.
Baba: You were not brought here for easy emes. He that sits in the heavens laughs at us in derision.
Shammai: Master!... Why?...
Baba: There is a world past this one, and we will know more when we arrive there. Perhaps there are many worlds with many different truths.
Shammai: Rebbe, you just spoke heresy!
Baba: Treat what you don't understand with a little khesed Shammai.
Shammai: The khesed you claim our god lacks?
Baba: He lacks nothing, neither khesed nor malice.
Shammai: What has become of you?
Baba: Sha, sha kint.
Shammai: You have succumbed to the Other.
Baba: I did not succumb to it, but Hashem sometimes does.
Shammai: Hillel we must leave this evil place.
Baba: There are evil actions which are not beneath Hashem, and there are actions great enough to be beyond his competence.
Hillel: I actually want to hear more.
Shammai: My master has become the evil he bravely fought.
Hillel: I thought your master was a schmendrik, but your master may understand things we don't.
Baba: I understand nothing Hashem did not wish for me to understand.
Hillel: Rav Baba, please understand, Herod is very much alive and still more evil than you remember. He had a stroke after getting sepsis in his right arm. Since then he's had terrible brain damage and paranoia: he ordered one son executed and thrown his other two in jail. He's obsessed with a prophecy about a usurper about to be born in a house of bread, so he may be about to issue an order killing babies and young children around the country. Even if we wanted to stop him, he still has a bodyguard of 2,000.
Baba: The House of Bread is here.
(pause)
Hillel: Shammai, how far are we from Beyt-Lekhem?
Baba: The border of Beyt-Lekhem is roughly a thousand cubits from where you stand.
(they suddenly hear the cry of a baby. Enter Joseph)
Yoseph: Koom arang my friends! Rav Balthasar has told us so much about his kavodiker guests! Kavodiker guests of a kavodiker freint! So much nakhes you must have from everything you do! And barukh hashem, all these presents you sent! Gold! Myrrh! Frankincense! I'd send you a thank you note but business has obviously been slow this year and I had to sell off my stationary. Koom, meet my nayes sohn, Yehoshua, along with his beautiful mother, Miriam. Everybody's named Miriam these days but this Miriam, this Miriam just had a baby! Miriam! Sha the baby already! We thought she would have to give birth in some cave but we met Reb Balthasar while registering for the Census, ochen vey that census, we were told by our elders we could register in Natz'rat where we live, but I'm from Beyt-Lehem and moved to Natz'rat because the wood there is so nice. I'm a carpenter by the way, and I had to go all the way from Natz'rat to Beyt-Lehem because I have to register in my birthplace. Did you know you had to register in your birthplace? Zicher I didn't and neither did my landsmen. I had to register, but I didn't know that Miriam was pregnant when we left and who would have? I'm sure King Herod does enough shtupping for us all but who has time around Pesach for anything in the bedroom am I right? Anyway, the whole spring you're lucky to have time for one quick one and that one gets you pregnant right when you have to make a huge nesiyeh from one land to the other. But anyway, we met Reb Balthasar in town and he's been such a mensch to give us this shed where we've been staying for more than a month. He really is nice for a greycer goy isn't he?
Hillel: Yes, he is.
Yoseph: All this naarishkeit about a God who's light and dark and doesn't know light from dark, what kind of schmegegge is that? Anyway, I just let him go on about his meicehs and I don't say anything because I'm a good guest but you and I both know it's a lot of bupkis. Right?
(Shammai clears his throat)
Yoseph: He goes on and on and on about how my son is going to be some king that overthrows Herod, but then he says that once he becomes king he should pay attention to his followers because they're going to be just as bad as Herod, so I say to him 'what does Yehoshua need to become king for?' He can just build houses like his Tateh, it's a nice living, at least it is when you're not running around to alla drerden telling the Romans you got born. Don't get me wrong Miriam is very happy her son's gonna be a king but if you ask me it's a lot of tsuris for not much. King Herod is a king and he seems pretty tsoredik these days.
Hillel: If you'd excuse us just for a moment Reb Yoseph, we will come meet Yehoshua in just one minute but we'd just like to understand something Rav Balthasar told us.
Yoseph: Oh... alright... I understand.
Hillel: Thank you Reb Yoseph.
Yoseph: No, it's alright. A boy gets born and you'd think people would want to meet the boy.
Hillel: Please understand.
Yoseph: I understand! There's something really important here. What other reason would there not be for celebrating with a new father who just had his first born?
Hillel: Thank you Reb Yoseph.
Yoseph: It's just... what is so important?
Shammai: Reb Yoseph ple...
Yoseph: A bokher just has his first child and all these kavodiker guests come from far away to be there for the birth, you'd think they'd want to celebrate the simcheh with him but apparently there's more important stuff to talk about.
Hillel: Reb Yoseph, please try to understand we do want to share your simcheh and will come to you in just a moment.
Yoseph: Oh you want to share your simcheh with me! So why don't you? What's stopping you? Apparently something so important is happening that you need to stop celebrating a simcheh for it.
Hillel: But Reb Yoseph, it IS that important.
Yoseph: Of course it is! Otherwise why would you interrupt a new family to talk about your vichtiger things that are too important to bother with a big simcheh!
Hillel: Alright, this can wait... Let's meet your son.
Yoseph: And my wife!
Hillel: And your wife…
XXIII: The Accused
Court Bailiff: FOREMEN BE UPSTANDING!
(the entire room gets up)
HIS GRACE RABBAN MENACHEM THE ESSENE, SANHEDRIN HOLY FATHER EMERITUS! AND HIS LORDSHIP THE RIGHT HONORABLE NICOLAS OF DAMASCUS, EARL-MARSHAL OF JUDEA!
(music plays, the entire room bows)
HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF JUDEA, HEROD THE GREAT. HAIL HEROD! ROME'S PROTECTOR IN THE EAST! HAIL HEROD! VANQUISHER OF THE HASMONEANS! HAIL HEROD! REDEDICATOR OF JERUSALEM! HAIL HEROD! BUILDER OF GOD!
(A boy page rolls Herod in on a wheelchair)
Menachem the Essene: Call the prisoner.
Bailiff: BRENGEN THE PRISONER!
(everyone sits, Mariamne is led in by a jailer by the elbow and made to sit on a rock chair in the center of the room)
Nicolas of Damascus whispers to Herod: Your Majesty, I repeat one last time, letting Mariamne defend herself is so dangerous. She will tell everything you're alleged to have done to your people, the world and the historical record.
Herod (struggling to make himself understood): Good.
Menachem the Essene: Queen Mariamne, you have been called before us here in the central courtyard of the Beis HaMikdash to answer charge of High Treason. And though you have grievously offended your husband's splendor, we hope now that you will confess, repent, pray, and do charitable penance, so that you may still taste His compassionate indulgence.
Mariamne: My lords I give masterful thanks.
Menachem the Essene: But you do not confess?
Mariamne: Have I something to confess?
Nicolas of Damascus: Yes.
Mariamne: And it i...
Nicolas: That with Herod's uncle Joseph you did conspire, consort and collude to murder His Majesty and sit upon his throne as Hasmonean restorer and liberatrix. Have you nothing to say with regard to it?
Mariamne: As I have said many times I am not guilt...
Nicolas: She has nothing to say. And that you did further conspire, consort and collude to murder Her Royal Highness the Princess Salome, governess of Idumea, Queen Regnant of the Toparchy Yavne, Ashdod and Phasaelis?
Mariamne: As I have said many time...
Nicolas: She has nothing to say. And do you further deny that you did not invite connubial relations with Salome's faithless husband that caused him to try to push himself upon you?
Mariamne: My Lord I hav...
Nicolas: Nothing to say. The scion of the Hasmomneans is simply that. Another royal sieve which international makers pass through on their way to making Judea a mere colony to more powerful thrones. It is only through Herod that Judea gained her independence from the Roman yoke, and only through Herod that Judea maintains its place at the center of the world's discourse, commerce, spiritus and sensus.
Mariamne: I have never ruled this lan...
Nicolas: Nor could you, as though our land has ever profited
(text cuts off here)
-------------------------------------------------
Menachem the Essene: Have you something to say before sentencing?
Mariamne: Yes.
Menachem: The defendant may proceed.
For seventeen years I have held my tongue from the historical record.
(text cuts off here)
XXIV: My beloved colleagues in the Sanhedrin. Dayanim, Rabbanim,
We arrive at a moment of terrifying crossroads. You all know the litany of perverted infamies Herod has done. Matricide against his wife, filicide of his sons, rumors of infanticide all around the West Bank. I needn't elaborate on them.
Then a crime which we cannot hold from our ears. He demands to put his statue in the Temple in place of Adoshem Elokim. ...Alright, I'm just going to say the name, Adonai Elohim. What does it matter now? I believe we have to say His name. If there is any time in modern Jewish history when He is present then HE is here, right here, with us. He is watching. We are in His presence. We are ALWAYS in His presence, and some infinitesimal part His presence is a part of us all.
I did my best to fight Herod on it. I did something I've never done before: I stood up to him. Not persuaded him, stood up to him. Literally. I blocked his statue with my body and dared Roman guards to kill me. They didn't, but my time is probably limited. They didn't kill me, but now, here I stand in front of you, standing trial before my own Rabbanim after two months in the Praetorium.
Herod knows he can't kill me. Why am I not dead? Because only you can, and as your Rosh-Sanhedrin, I hereby ORDER you to pronounce my execution.
(general whispered commotion)
We have done everything we can to accomodate Herod. More to the point, I have done everything we can to accommodate Herod. It is my responsibility that we have blessed a ruler who is everything God is not, and it is my shame. I have been culpable, I have been unfaithful, I have robbed, I have cast aspersions, I have been perverse, I have acted wickedly, sinned intentionally, acted violently, falsely ascribed guilt, given bad council, lied, scoffed, rebelled, vexed, committed iniquity and transgressed.
I am an execration and astonishment before the Living God, and I deserve death, but SO DOES HEROD!
(yelling commotion: 'SHANDEH! FARRETER!
Shammai smiles)
No leper should be judged by his appearance, but as he ages, Herod IS his appearance: more maggot than man now. He is Pharaoh, he is Amalek, he is Haman, he is Nabuchadnezzar. He is the evil that the Kadosh Baruch Hu brings to us once every few hundred years to test an entire new era of Jews: will we be silent, will we collaborate, will we let our souls go to their deaths, or will we resist? Will we fight? Will we save our souls?
I collaborated Herod even as Herod never collaborated with us. I called him a penitent even as he murdered and stole and I thought by instructing Herod then little by little he would reform. Herod will never reform, and somewhere in my lev I knew that and felt a pain of fire. I willfully neglected the most important rule of Judaism: not the First Commandment, not any commandment, not even any mitzvah in the Torah. The most important commandment in Judaism is 'What is hateful to you, do not do unto them.' That is our faith. That is the whole Torah. The rest is just commentary.
(more whispers)
Herod 'did unto them.' He has 'done unto them' every day for thirty-three years, and whatever you do, I do my part to say that had I any power at all, I would expel him from Judaism!
(KAPO! BOGED! TZADDIK! HASID!)
I curse that ugly pustule the way Elisha cursed the boys who called him bald. Cursed be he by day and night, cursed be he in sleep and cursed be he when he wakes, when he goes out and when he comes in. Let him walk in God's fury all the few remaining days of his life!
(MOSER! REBBE!)
Shammai speaks: SHA! Rabban Hillel is your master even in death!
Thank you Rebbe Shammai but I don't deserve your tzedakah. For years and years we fought the Jewish destiny. I now see that Reb Shammai is the man who must lead you and should have from the moment he became our Holy Father. I lead God's body to wickedness, he would lead you to purification. The world of Israel must be cleansed, and Shammai is the man to cleanse us.
(half the room cheers)
All that can cleanse us is the truth, and here is the truth: the Sanhedrin has been sullied from the day it was formed.
(the room boos and hisses)
You know it's true! You all know how the Sanhedrin collaborated with rulers of filth long before Herod. Please understand, the Sanhedrin is not an evil institution, it is the last best hope of our people to remain a country of our own. But it is an institution of the earth, not the skies, and the Holy One Blessed be He gave it to us so that we could prove ourselves worthy of him, and prove it we have not.
(PASKUDNYAK!)
You know it! You've seen it! You've heard it!
So here is a truth of my youth. When I was fourteen, I served as clerk to Rabban Shemaya and Rebbe Avtalayon, the very men who killed my father and grandfather. They didn't just order their deaths, they killed them, they held the knife!
(SHREKLEKH! AYMAH!)
They held the knife to kill the entirety of the Sanhedrin. All of your ancestors in both office and blood. And not only did they that but they are responsible for Herod's Sack of Jerusalem!
(KHOSHEKH)
The Houses of Shemayah and Avtalayon deliberately held withheld their troops on the day of the invasion. All that they did but HEROD MADE THEM!
(silence)
It does not excuse anything they did. Perhaps they should have chosen death rather than collaboration, but WHAT DID WE DO FOR THEM?
They were the begging children of converts. Like Herod we sieged and raped and massacred their peoples, then we forced conversion on survivors by the sword, and then we left them to live with nothing. These men rose in the ranks of the Sanhedrin while owed us nothing and having every reason for vengeance.
And yet they were tortured men of God. I watched Rabban Shemaya weep every day in Rebbe Avtlayon's arms as they tried to reconcile their horrible deeds with their holy office. Perhaps suffering is all they deserve, but suffer they did, and in spite of their justified hatreds, in spite of their treachery, in spite of their belief in their irredeemability, in spite of the contempt for them of all Jerusalem, once they achieved their holy offices they executed them in complete faith!
I will tell a further truth now. When I was fourteen Herod was in meeting with them. Without he grabbed me by the chest from behind and held a knife to my throat. He told them simply to give the order and he would cut it. He said, quite correctly, that they are the murderers of my entire patrimony. He said that one day I would be Rosh Sanhedrin, and I would take my revenge. Why did he do it? To show that Shemaya and Avtalyon were weak, that they could never do it, that Herod was the murderer, not them.
Shemaya showed just how weak he was... He didn't just weep, he cursed Herod, he cursed Herod in terms that went all the way to God! The Holy One Blessed Be He heard his curse, and brought an earthquake to Jerusalem. Yes, that earthquake of our childhoods was summed by Rabban Shemaya! These were men of God and my revenge on them is to tell you so!
To tell you the truth, not just in part, but the whole truth, the whole men, the whole Rabbanim.
These are men who came from the nothing our parents gave them, and with that nothing they defended Judaism and the Jewish people for twenty years of repentance. For twenty years they administered the poor and the sick. Herod, blessed be he for this, built sanitoriums for the unfortunate. It was not out of Herod's goodness that he did so, it was out of public health and safety. But Herod would have reduced their funding to nothing had our Chief Rabbanim not begged him on their knees to keep funding them every month, and on the months Herod refused, they paid for the sanitoriums themselves. Yes, it was illegal money but from where else would it have come in this regime of theft?
Repentance, prayer and charity avert the evil decree, and for a decade and a half, these murderers were our protectors who averted Herod's evil decrees upon us a hundred times or more.
But Herod is no Shemaya or Avtalyon. He has not repented, he will not repent, and he deserves nothing short of death.
And here is the second truth. Rebbe Shammai you may not want me to speak anymore after you hear this:
The truth is this. We are incapable of the standard Hashem sets for us.
(KHALERYEH! KHERPAH! KLIMAH!)
WHY WOULD WE BE CAPABLE OF NEARNESS TO THE HOLY ONE BLESSED BE HIS NAME? We are not supposed to be capable of it! We're supposed to sin. It is only through sin that we're redeemed! If any among us did not sin, we'd have no need for a Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
The Maccabees set us an impossible standard of righteousness and holiness, and that impossible holiness sent us to generations of humiliation and infamy.
(commotion stars)
IT IS NOT because we should have assimilated. It is not because should have followed the Greeks or the Romans instead. We did not rebel until the Maccabees because we are weak and lazy and born to sin, and it should not have taken a group of fanatics to make us realize the profanity of Western ways. But we were comfortable, we were satisfied. The privileged among our houses were well fed and domiciled, and we forgot that centuries people beneath us were born to poverty, violence, sickness and early death.
Shammai has always been my ally, Shammai has always been my right hand, in spite of us not agreeing on anything. But Shammai is necessary BECAUSE we are weak and indolent and settled on our lees. Even as I try to point us toward the Father of Mercy, Shammai strengthens us and moves us to the Father of Justice in an era when we've forgotten what justice is.
It is only just that you sentence me to death, and it is only just that Herod is sentenced as well. My death is in your hands and God's. If I die, let my death be the atonement for all the sins and errors and transgressions of my Presidency, and may my death inspire the uprising of which only Shammai is capable of leading.
Strength, strength, and may you be strengthened.
Amen
And Herod just sits there, signing his papers on his throne, in his garden, in his bed, in bath and at toilet. Signing his name to pronounce their deaths, one after another after thousands, as though death by Herod were as natural as the breath of Yahweh.
Death IS as natural as the breath of Yahweh and it presents itself when it chooses to present itself. Herod just made it happen sooner for a lot of us. I'm amazed he didn't make it happen sooner for me. There was no one in Israel he wanted to kill more.
He has strangled me, and yet he's made me live, for I am Mariamne, the chosen one, the rightful protector, Last of the Lillies, daughter to a murdered king, sister to a murdered high priest, now mother to murdered princes. The Corpse Bride, deified and defiled nightly in his chamber so he might know connubial bliss in death he never got from me in life.
Do I consent to it? Did I ever consent to anything of Herod? Anything to my person? Anything to untold thousands I knew and saw? What matter my trials next to their's? Until Herod killed them, their lives were but dust while Herod neglected them, they were but dust after Herod paid attention. But when Herod neglected me, I was their Queen, beloved by all crowds, bedecked with garlands, every appearance in the street a triumph. I lived on not for myself, and certainly not for Herod, I lived for them. I live on for them and stay in this world so I might aid the passing of Herod and the coming of the Messiah.
For I have just one message to whisper in Herod's ear. He hears it every day now, and every day the voice in his head afflicts him as no lamentation for the dead ever can. "Hillel is loved."
Hillel, you see, was supposed to be executed. The Sanhedrin President was supposed to be executed years ago, but Hillel cannot die. Herod the Great always knew that the moment he touches Hillel is the moment the people of Israel demand his head on the pike next to the Great Sage. But he thought he had Hillel cornered. His men were boils among the Sanhedrin, hydra heads with yarmulkes, even if he could not pronounce death upon Hillel, Hillel's own organization could, and Hillel had committed a sin against the state so egregious that the Sanhedrin had to pronounce his death.
Hillel, great sinner that he is, blocked an idol of his King from adorning the Temple with his own person, seemingly determined to make his person into a carcass. Herod demanded nothing but his resignation, yet the message was clear. Everyone knew what it meant. Hillel must die, and the vipers of the Sanhedrin must pronounce sentence.
And Hillel? What does the saint do? He orders them to execute him posthaste and make Shammai, his opposing rival in every manner, the new President! This slight man, a sagely scholar who barely reaches the letters of Herod's German guards, is our greatest politician since Queen Esther! He knows that if the Sanhedrin kills him, his blood be on them and on their families. The Sanhedrin make Shammai President, but they not only don't kill him, they vote him Shammai's old position of Holy Father!
Were all ten plagues to afflict just this man, he would survive them and thrive. He, not I, is the true anointed sovereign! He may well be the Messiah we await!
And yet were he offered the crown of God, he is too wise not to refuse it. He has something more actionable than the divine blessing: he has the loyalty of his people, he has the trust of his people, he built an empire out of love neither I nor Herod had any idea how to build.
He is not the deliverer, but were there one in our time, this combination of prophet and heretic is the truest incarnation we ever shall know. Everything which Herod built from fear and death, Hillel built through love of life.
Herod knows all this, and this, not Augustus's wound, is what drove him mad. Herod's mind calculates all possibilities like an abacus, and yet he cannot account for how Hillel built a parallel soveriegnty to his own of spirit and love. For all time, Herod has believed there is no truth, there is no word, there is no good or evil, there is merely sense and pleasure, and the senseless pleasure of watching others not feel the pleasure you feel. Only in Hillel did Herod finally realize: there is more.
I know Herod's end, his end is with me, and it is momentary. When he is finished with me tonight, his guards will deposit me back into the vat of honey, and Herod will jump in with me.
End of Volume 1
No comments:
Post a Comment