Strangers in the Land Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 Daniel Fusch

  Stant Litore is a pen name for Daniel Fusch.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612183923

  ISBN-10: 1612183921

  for my daughters River and Inara

  may their lives be full and free

  CONTENTS

  Historian’s Note

  Part 1: Shiloh

  Navi

  Cairns for the Dead

  Men from the Galilee

  Barak

  Devora’s Decision

  The Angel of Death

  Cries in the Olives

  Shiloh

  The Man Who Defended His Cattle

  Screams in the Night

  Wind in the Camp

  Mishpat

  The Sounding of the Shofar

  Words of Going

  Strangers in the Land

  Hardly Daring To Close Her Eyes

  The Corpse

  Part 2: Shiloh, Years Past

  The Girl Weeping

  What God’s Eyes See

  Carrying the Dead

  Kindled Like Straw

  Judge of Israel

  Part 3: The High Galilee

  Water Near the Sky

  Kadosh

  The Silent Town

  The Moaning Dead

  The Olah

  In the Silence of God

  No Survivors

  Breaking Camp

  Zadok’s Run

  Part 4: Along the Tumbling Water

  The Withering Land

  The Vineyard

  Heber the Kenite’s Story

  Hurriya

  All Falling Apart

  Feast of the Dead

  To Save One Life

  God Rising Over the Water

  Who Gives and Takes Away

  Sh’ma Yisrael

  Devora’s Vigil

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Places

  About the Author

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

  IN THE thirteenth century BC, several wandering tribes of Hebrews were crossing the desert. They were a young and vigorous people, flushed with life. Few of them had ever seen a walking corpse.

  They were freshly displaced from the fertile fields of the Nile, where the dead were carefully contained; indeed, many Hebrew workers had broken their backs in hard labor, making or hauling brick to build the high tombs in which the cities of Kemet (that land the Greeks called Egypt) housed their dead. Those of Kemet cherished the memory of their dead and did all they could to send the deceased to the judgment hall well prepared.

  There, the recently deceased handed its heart to the gods, to be weighed in scales against the feather of virtue. Often, the heart, burdened by the evils of this life, proved heavier than the feather. Then, the people of Kemet believed, the soul was cast back into the body. Deprived of the fruitful fields beyond death, it rose from its sarcophagus in a mind-devouring hunger.

  The bodies of the dead must be securely entombed against this possibility. Hoping that any wakeful dead might yet find peace, the people of Kemet inscribed the insides of the tombs with hieroglyphics and magnificent art—spells and prayers and histories, everything that a risen corpse might need to remember who it had been. Perhaps, if a corpse could be made to remember the life it had lived and its hope of new life beyond death’s river, the spirit might return to its gray eyes and it might offer an acceptable sacrifice and atonement using the incense, fruits, and ornate vessels of fine drink that its relatives had left with it in the tomb. Then lie down in the sarcophagus and return to the hall of judgment with a lightened heart. So those of Kemet hoped as they slid closed the massive doors of the tombs.

  In our own era, several unwary archaeologists have slid open those same doors to find themselves food for the cursed and hungry dead—a testament to the utter forgetfulness of death and the smallness of the human voice, which even with its strongest stories and most beautiful pictographs cannot yet reach across death’s river to bring messages or remembrance to the lost.

  In time, Kemet adopted other practices for securing a successful journey across death’s river. The brains of the dead they scooped free of the skull, and the other organs too, placing them in canopic jars. Mummification effectively prevented resurrection; the bodies were now but hollow shells closely enshrouded in linens. In time, the plague became virtually unknown in Kemet. Yet that cultural legacy of a pronounced concern for the well-being of the newly dead persisted. Over the centuries, the brick tombs grew greater and more magnificent, and many laborers—both Hebrews and men of other ethnicities—died in the toil of making them.

  In caring so meticulously for their own dead, the people of Kemet oppressed bitterly the living members of other tribes, and the tale of the revolt of the tribes is among the most dramatic of the stories that come down to us from our spiritual ancestors. The Hebrews have left us many folktales and songs that tell of the coming of their Lawgiver and his confrontation with the Pharaoh, their liberation from oppression, and their march into the wilderness to find their own land and their own deity.

  The story is well known and frequently retold. Yet most modern storytellers end their tales and let their voices fall still after the celebratory departure, the exodus from Kemet; it is hard for us to gaze steadily at the dark years in the desert and the trials that turned a frightened people of former slave workers into the hardened, efficient, and even brutal tribes that a generation later invaded fertile Canaan, slaughtering many of its people and setting up their tents in the valleys near the burned and smoking towns.

  What happened to these people in the desert?

  Their exodus from a land lush with food yet dark with oppression into barren hills with few oases strikes us as both magnificent and naïve, perhaps in equal measure. The Hebrews starved in the desert, and thirsted, and even lamented the loss of a life of enslavement that at least had not required any of them to be responsible for their own provision. Better to be oxen pulling brick than be men, some of them cried. It is too hard to be men. The women offered their own complaints: along the Nile, their more lovely daughters may have been prey for lusty overseers, but at least they had been fed and clothed.

  This season of innocent misery came to an unanticipated and terrible end one night when the dead stumbled, groaning, out of the rocks and canyons and fell upon the tents. We do not know where these dead came from, or why they were so many. Dead have been known to travel together en masse, shambling slowly like animal herds across an empty landscape until they encounter food. It is possible some other tribe had succumbed to the illness and had slouched into the dry hills without direction or destination, there to wait for years or even centuries until drawn by the noise of the Hebrew camp.

  We do know that the death toll was severe. Even if we accept the Hebrews’ written memories as the most extravagant of exaggerations, the loss of life must have been catastrophic. When dawn came, the Hebrews faced the hard reality that many of their people had been eaten and many others bitten. Some of the latter were already lurching unsteadily to their feet, their hands reaching to clutch at the survivors.

  How the Lawgiver ended the pestilence is a narrative that I will refer to elsewhere, not here; it is at any rate no s
tory to tell after dark. More important is the way of life the survivors adopted in their fierce intent never to suffer such a crisis a second time.

  That time of terror in the wilderness redefined how the Hebrews understood their world and their duties within it. They saw themselves now as alone—desperately alone in a complex and threatening world they had been taught to believe was simple; in the empty desert they had few things to rely on. In their need for certainty, they established a Covenant with the God they had encountered in the desolate wastes, and they chiseled the first words of their Pact into tablets of hard stone, which they then kept with them always in a sacred Ark. In Kemet, they had seen contracts written on scrolls of papyrus, a vegetable material that perished if exposed to moisture; the desert demanded that a covenant as important as this one be recorded on some substance less fragile. Only a contract written into stone that would last as long as the earth could assure them of its reliability.

  Among other exacting rules, the Covenant demanded a sharp separation between the living and the dead. The living were to clean their hands and arms up to the elbows before and after touching any dead meat, and the meat of some animals could not be touched at all; they were not to touch with their naked hands the body of any dead man or woman; they were not to leave any dead body unburied, for any reason. The punishments for breaking the Covenant were severe, even as the promised reward for keeping it was great: an eternal inheritance in a clean and fertile land and divine protection from the hungry dead.

  One consequence of that Covenant was a profound and lasting distrust of tribes not their own. The Hebrews both envied and feared the less restricted lives of their neighbors, who lived by no exacting Covenant. To cite one example of the many customs that worried and at times disgusted the Hebrews, some of their neighbors left their enemy dead unburied after a raid or buried the dead too shallow. How terrible it must have been to walk among the fallen, unclothing the slain and checking for bites that they may have concealed in their fear even from their own people. The Hebrews believed it was better to simply bury all the bodies—bury them deep if the soil was soft or pile high a cairn of stones over each corpse to crush it securely to the ground so that none might ever rise, moaning, to catch and devour the living.

  The commandments by which the Hebrews lived left no room for unwary haste or compromise, whether with one’s own dead or with another’s: pile high the cairn, and if necessity required that in doing so you touch the bodies of the dead with ungloved hands, then wait afterward outside the camp for the required seven days until your uncleanness had passed.

  To minds hardened by the crisis in the desert, compromise meant the deaths of others in your tribe. Those might be deaths you couldn’t predict or prevent, but as they rose, wailing, those dead would cry out your guilt to God.

  Studying the fragmentary but eloquent records these tribes left behind, I find myself struck with both admiration and horror. Admiration for their ability to both survive and establish a code of law that would permit them to remain human while surviving. And horror at their readiness to exterminate or enslave other peoples who were less aware and therefore less cautious of the ravenous dead.

  In our own time, this globe has suffered one mass genocide at least once every decade for more than a century. Despite this, we are today a sheltered people, and we are losing our memory. Yet it is vitally important that we remember. Like the Hebrews, we are at a moment of terrible choice, where we too must decide what we will do with those who live as “strangers” among us, those who labor in our towns or starve in our streets. Those who speak a strange language and who some of us choose to believe are not of our People.

  Some of us have already made the choice. Some of us appoint watchmen with authority to hold and harass and contain the strangers we fear. Some of us erect fences along the border of the land or gaze at the sky and shiver in fear of falling planes.

  The ancient records hold lessons for us, hard lessons we too often ignore. Our ancestors, like the Hebrews, yearned for the durability of their covenant passionately enough to write it in stone—not in tablets within an Ark, but on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. We will at times regret and wish to deny the covenants and the commitments our fathers have made, regardless of whether they were right or wrong, foolish or wise. And at times we will fear their consequences, real or imagined. Yet if we cannot honor the covenants we make with those who live among us, then we may prove equally unable to honor the covenants we make with God, or with our own kin, or with ourselves. Like the Hebrews, we are newly come to a land we now consider our own, and though we think of ourselves as one constituted people, a people set apart, we remain in fact many tribes intermingled, giving worship to many gods both sacred and secular.

  In the lean years to come, when the dead moan outside our walls and our homesteads, nothing will matter more to our ability to survive—and to remain true and human—than our readiness to honor the covenants that our fathers and that we ourselves, the living, have made with each other. To do otherwise is to forget that we are strongest together, and that God, who does not make promises lightly, has issued us no guarantee that the ideas that save us will come from a banker in Chicago rather than an assistant electrician in Los Angeles. And to do otherwise is to be less than who we’ve said we will be.

  Our narrative opens a few brief generations after the desert. A people without a standing military or any significant arsenal, the Hebrew tribes had raided when they saw land worth taking; now, having taken it, they were weary, and most of them desired only rest and the chance of a new life in a lush and fertile land. The aggressive deforestation of later centuries would let in the desert, but in 1160 BC, the land of promise was not as it is today. Israel was more humid then, and in some places richly forested, a land of milk and honey.

  Many of the Hebrews were eager to keep to their own kin on their own lands, trusting in the judges of the Law to arbitrate disputes and keep the region clean of the dead. The Canaanites who had lived in the land before them now had few leaders and fewer armed men; with those few who remained, the Hebrews had made a covenant in the valley that the priests later named Weeping because of their regret for the truce established there. Now most of the Canaanites kept to themselves in small settlements of wooden houses or hovels, or lived and worked among the Hebrews as slaves or second-class laborers. Yet their presence had already begun to change the Hebrews they lived among. Though many of the Hebrew encampments still consisted of tents amid pastures filled with herds, in places a few houses of cedar could already be seen, a few vineyards, a few olive presses.

  PART 1: SHILOH

  NAVI

  THE PEOPLE of the Covenant had many judges, but only one navi who told them the future and the past and found truth. She heard their pleas four times a week from a wooden seat her husband had carved for her beneath the great olive tree on its hill near Shiloh. The tree had branches that spread wider than the roof of a cedar house, and it had been standing there, tall and green, when Yeshua the war leader first led their ancestors to the land. Still rich with life, it served now as a visible reminder to all who came before the navi’s seat that the fertility and possession of this land of promise, this land of milk and honey and olive groves, came with a high cost: the keeping of the Law and the Covenant, that commitment to ways of living that alone kept the People clean and secure in a world where heathen tribes or the living dead might rise up in the night and devour them.

  To keep the Covenant meant olive oil and abundant fields of wheat and barley, many births among the flocks, and many children.

  To break it—that meant a curse: blight and barrenness and unclean death.

  Let the People look to the navi’s seat and remember this.

  Devora the navi sat there now with the full authority of the Law at her back, her eyes hard among early wrinkles, her graying hair glowing in that softened light that comes before sunset. A massive, broad-shouldered man stood behind her with a stout ashen spear ending in a bro
nze head and the long, uncut hair that was the visible sign of his vow. As a nazarite, Zadok lived a life that had no meaning but the wielding of the spear and the defense of the tribe of Levi. He had trained his body for this. Zadok was not a farmer, a tanner, a vintner, or a priest. He was one who preserved life and dealt death when needed. In all the land, only four others shared his vow.

  Two supplicants had just turned from Devora’s seat to make their way down the slope, one with a relieved look, the other with a scowl. Their argument over the possession of a bull had nearly drawn blood, and the details of the case were such that the seventy judges in Shiloh could not decide it and had sent the two men to the olive tree. But no vision had come to Devora to reveal where there was guilt and where there was not, and in her frustration the navi had resolved the matter by deciding that both men together would take the bull and give the animal to the priests, who would offer it up as an olah, a burnt offering before God. In this one act they would sacrifice their dispute and atone for the discord they’d brought to the camps of the People. This case, like others that day, had reminded Devora how divided the People were, how provisional their commitment to the covenants they’d made with God and with each other. In light of the evil news this morning had brought to the valley below, this division alarmed Devora. She sat very still, anxious to end the day’s judgments and return to the camp. She was intensely grateful for Zadok’s steadying presence behind her.

  The people gathered on the slope below parted to let the two supplicants by. There were maybe thirty men and women, some standing, others seated on great slabs of rock that past supplicants had pulled free of the scree on the west side of the hill near the cairns of the dead. Beyond the supplicants lay the valley, filled with the white tents of Shiloh. That land was lush with tall grasses and stands of oak and terebinth near the water; faint from the far slopes across the river came the lowing of herds, many of them her husband’s. The slow river wound eastward on its way to meet the Tumbling Water, which ran through all the land from the Galilee hills in the north to the dead sea in the south where no fish were—and where the salt in the water was so thick a man could lie on the surface without sinking. Where the salt on the shore stood in tall white pillars, shaped like tents or women or creatures the Hebrews had not met before even in nightmares. Like so many reminders that the land was strange to them and they still strangers in it, and their possession of its fields and waters a blessing that could yet be revoked, a promise that could yet be rescinded.