Strangers in the Land Page 6

  The Hebrews commemorated that night each spring at the festival of Pesach, the Passing Over, even as they commemorated the time of wandering in the desert each harvest at Sukkot, the Feast of Tents. Each year, the kohannim reminded the gathered celebrants in the fields about Shiloh that so long as they kept the Covenant and lived by the Law, God’s hand would cover Israel. Their sons and their daughters would be as many as the stars in the night sky; their tribes would grow as fruitful as the branches of the olive tree.

  But now the olive tree above Shiloh had withered.

  The three in the heather were approaching the camp swiftly; Devora could see men and women among the white tents ahead. She found that she was reciting one of the mitzvot softly, though she barely had breath for it; for once, the words of the Law brought her little calm. The burn in her side was fierce.

  When they had approached within shouting distance of the camp, they halted where a dip in the land would conceal the girl’s uncleanness from the sight of the tents. While Devora leaned forward with her hands on her legs above the knees, gasping for breath, Zadok took his cloak and, with only a moment’s hesitation, laid it out across the weeds and blossoms. Then he placed the girl gently on it. He would need to find a new cloak; he would not get this one back.

  The girl lifted her hand and caught at Devora’s sleeve. The navi tensed.

  “I heard you talking with the men,” she whispered. “There are more dead. Many more dead.”

  “Yes,” Devora said.

  “We’re all going to die. Like my child.”

  “We most certainly are not,” Devora snapped.

  “They came out of the olive grove. There were eight of them, and their bodies had been torn open and eaten on, as though a lion or a wolf had been at them. But they were walking, they were walking.” The girl’s eyes showed their whites.

  “I know,” Devora said.

  “Malachi was at the olive press, and they ate him. They snarled like animals. They dragged him down and tore at him and ate him.”

  Devora shivered.

  “I was in the shack, and I tried to hold the door. I tried to keep them out—I tried—I tried—” She began weeping, without tears. “They were too strong. They wanted the baby—they wanted my baby—”

  In her mind Devora could hear the shrieks of her mother again, dying outside the tent. “I know,” she said again, her voice hoarse. The girl’s misery seemed terribly familiar, a dark mirror of Devora’s own. The girl had come to her seat for judgment, but there was never any forgiveness for the deaths of your kin. Whether you could have prevented their deaths or not, they were gone. Devora knew this too well.

  Some days a woman can only save one life, the old navi Naomi had tried to tell her when she was a girl. Yet surely if that one life were always your own, that was an abomination in the eyes of the God who sits in decision over the living and the dead. Unable to look away from Hurriya’s quiet misery, Devora realized that the Canaanite, like she herself, stood alone and still breathing among the corpses of her kin. And even if Hurriya survived her heart’s grief and her body’s anguish, she would still stand there, every night of her life, every morning. Though she had sacrificed everything she had and everything she was as she struggled out of the hills, wasting her body away as she bore her dying infant in her arms, still her child and its father were dead. She, she only, was alive. There would never be forgiveness for that. Devora knew this; she had fled alone out of the death of her parents’ camp when she was twelve, had listened and waited for mercy, and had received only barrenness in her womb and night terrors when her memories came back to her in the dark, and hard burdens to carry.

  Devora felt that she must say something. She could not just leave this girl grieving here in that woolen cloth that could only be called a garment by an act of the imagination, with her body thin and exhausted and torn from childbirth, her breasts swollen with milk that had become futile, a curse to her.

  “You did what you could,” Devora told her after a moment. “Try to sleep, and forget.”

  “Forget,” Hurriya whispered. She began to laugh softly, helplessly. Letting go of Devora’s sleeve, she curled up, bringing her knees to her chest as though to protect an unborn child, though she had only her own ravaged heart to protect, only her own body to shield.

  Devora exchanged a look with Zadok, then stood.

  “I can get bedding for her,” Zadok said. “But if we leave her here weeping, a wolf will come for her.”

  “Guard her tonight, for me.”

  “Your will, navi.”

  Devora’s shoulders sagged beneath the weight of her unseen burdens. What if the girl did die out here? She glanced at Zadok, saw the weariness in his eyes.

  Shelter the stranger you find in your land.

  Yet like Hurriya fleeing her hills, Devora had done what she could. It was not enough, but only a small crescent of the sun was visible now above the hills. She’d lingered too long already.

  “When your uncleanness has passed,” she said without looking at the girl, “you can wash linens in the camp, be given meals, a place to sleep. Until we know if any kin live who can claim you. Forget, girl. That is all you can do. There will be other children.”

  The girl just sobbed. The sound wrenched at the navi’s heart.

  Devora turned and hurried toward the white tents, walking fast.

  SHILOH

  SHILOH CAMP was both a monument and a defense against the past. It lay on the land like a great map beneath the gaze of God that charted the People’s history and their orientation toward their deity. The kohannim boasted that no matter where a Hebrew found himself in the land, he always knew which direction he was facing. For a People whose fathers had lost a generation wandering in the desert and hiding from the restless dead, knowing where things were was vitally important. Where there was water, where there was sand, where there were quail to eat or deer to hunt. Where there were enemies and where there were kin. Where you were and where God was in relation to you.

  The camp was a great square, tilted so that its points faced north, west, east, and south. The eastern quadrant held the tents of the kohannim, the priests who’d gone through seven-day rites of purification and cleansing and could now approach God’s presence without fear, bringing burnt offerings to atone for the uncleanness of the tribes. The doors of their tents faced east, toward the Tumbling Water, the great river the People had crossed when they took the land. Their tents faced the past.

  The western tents held those levites who were not of the priesthood. Scribes and craftsmen and the young dedicates who were brought to Shiloh as children, to be raised as levites if they were boys or to be raised as wives for them if they were girls.

  The southern quadrant held the tents of the seventy judges appointed to resolve disputes. These faced the vast settlements of Benyamin and Yudah tribes, the most populous in the land.

  And across the camp, facing north and away from the People, as though keeping watch toward those hills where there were still many heathen, stood the tents of the nazarites, those who’d taken the harshest of vows to defend the Ark, the holy tribe of Levi, the priests, and the navi. In the midst of their tents lay a great cleared space of dirt and sand where the nazarites danced the spears each morning, training for battles with either the living or the dead. The nazarites were few. There were in fact only five in Shiloh this year. Though in the north there were raids from the fortified towns on the coast or from the heathen settlements in White Cedars where the hilltops were high enough for snow, those were the concern of the northern tribes. The rest of the land had lain quiet for a generation. Few now took the nazarite vow or kept it. Many of the older nazarites had even gone through the rites to be released of their vows. Of the generation who remembered the night the dead had come to Shiloh, only Zadok was left.

  And finally, broad and mighty at the utmost east of the camp, standing between the People and their terrible past, stood the Tent of Meeting, many-colored and stretched over
a frame of wooden poles. It was the reason for Shiloh’s existence. Within it, behind a heavy veil, was the kodesh kodashim, the Holy of Holies, which held the Ark of the Covenant. Inside that great chest of wood and gold were tablets of stone on which were inscribed the Ten, the words spoken by God to the People at Har Sinai, the words that had initiated the Covenant, the first words of the Law. And above that Ark, in an empty space between the outspread wings of carved golden angels, dwelled the shekinah, the heat and presence of their ancient desert God.

  Even in their ancestors’ time when Shiloh had moved often, this Tent had never been raised within the camp. It always stood just outside, in hope that the uncleanness of the People would not offend God to wrath. In the outer part of the Tent, in a tiny censer prepared by levite women and placed before the veil, incense was burned at all hours, to sweeten the scent of the camp, so it would be easier for God to live near them. The kohannim taught that this God they’d found in the desert was not like the handcrafted gods of wood and stone that the heathen revered, gods who might be housed within your own tent without fear, small gods who were powerless to protect those who honored them from either the spears of the living or the teeth of the dead.

  No, the Hebrews’ God was el kadosh. He was a mighty and holy God, and the unclean dead and the unclean living alike would wither if they approached him. At all times he was set apart from the camp, so that if his anger burst into flame, perhaps only a small part of the camp would burn, those tents nearest him. He must be approached with care. His heat could kindle not only against the enemies of the People, living or dead, but against the People themselves. For though the kohannim believed this strange God had consented and chosen to dwell among the Hebrews alone out of all the peoples in all the lands beneath the sun, the kohannim also remembered that before this God, all peoples, even theirs, were small. If God’s slightest fingertip touched the land, that touch might dry a river or scorch crops. What then would happen if, looking about and seeing the evil the People too often did to each other, how the People too often failed to care for the living or confine the dead, what if God in wrath should strike the land with his fist? Would not the very hills smoke?

  Devora passed the Tent of Meeting as she hurried into Shiloh, and she passed the charred earth beside it, that silent memorial to the night of wrath thirty years past. Her heart hardened at the sight of it. That night it had been Canaanites who had brought the unclean death to the camp. The heathen who could not be trusted to place their dead beneath cairns or to keep their camps clean of dead meat or even to wash their own arms up to the elbows before lifting their fingers to their mouths. The heathen who all but invited the coming of the unclean dead.

  At the doors of the white tents, the kohannim and their wives stood singing, in robes and gowns of white with embroidered hems. The men sang first, deep voices lifted in ululation to greet the Sabbath bride, who came over the hills clothed in the shekinah. Even before the men’s voices fell silent, their wives lifted their own, lovely voices calling out their worship of the God who gives and takes away, the God who stirs new life in the womb and closes us each in the womb of the earth when our brief lives have ended.

  The men and women of Shiloh camp inclined their heads respectfully as the navi passed, and despite her haste Devora slowed her walk enough that she could pass them with dignity—though her white gown was stained and torn in places from her work in raising the cairn, and her feet were sore within her sandals. The song she heard all about her was a comfort; it eased the anxiety that had choked her after the withering of her olive tree. With so many men and women singing a greeting to God, it was unthinkable that God was not here among them. Perhaps the withering had only been a warning, nothing more.

  As she approached the high priest’s tent—her husband’s was still many tents beyond it, in the western part of the camp—Devora halted and looked at the high priest and his wife as they sang outside the door of their tent. She had to tell him, she realized. She had to tell the kohannim of her vision.

  Eleazar ben Phinehas ben Eleazar ben Aharon was the head of Levi tribe and the one man who might pass within the last veil to speak face-to-face with the shekinah, the hot presence that dwelled over the Ark. He alone could give offerings there, sending up a sweet smoke to renew the Covenant between God and People. Among all the People, only he was permitted by Law to speak without the veil between him and the divine ears.

  Only he.

  Except that God, too, could draw aside the veil. Without consulting priest or levites, the shekinah might sometimes fall upon a navi, showing the prophet things that otherwise only God’s eyes would see. It was an uneasy relationship, that of the high priest and the navi.

  Eleazar’s robe was white like the other priests’, but over it he wore the ephod, a loose garment gold like the sun. And over that he wore an ornamented bronze breast-piece. It was the sign of his office, the hoshen mishpat, the breast-piece of decision. Embedded in the hoshen were twelve smooth river stones from the Tumbling Water, on which had been inscribed the names of the Hebrew tribes, and also two stones with no letters on them, one dark as a cow’s eye, the other pale as dead flesh. The urim and thummim, a last resort, a device for divining God’s will in uncertain matters.

  Beside Eleazar stood Hannah, his wife, in a white levite’s gown with the blue sash of the midwives about her hips. Her head tilted back in song. She was a tall woman, nearly as tall as the priest; she had always towered over Devora.

  “Eleazar!” Devora called out.

  The priest stopped his song, and his wife beside him fell silent. They looked at Devora curiously. Disheveled as she was, the navi likely was a strange sight to them.

  Devora found herself out of breath, trying to gasp out what was in her heart. “Kohen, there are dead—the olive tree—it withered—and there are dead. So many.” She swallowed, gathered herself. “God sent a vision.”

  “What did he show you?” Eleazar murmured. There was respect in his tone, but wariness too.

  Briefly, Devora told of her vision, of the lurching herds.

  “This is horrible!” Hannah gasped. And Devora saw in the other woman’s eyes that she too remembered the night of wrath thirty years before. No one who had been there would ever forget it.

  Eleazar’s eyes had become windows into a desolate place. “What you have seen is like cold water on my heart,” he said after a moment. “The men of the Galilee sent a messenger here today.”

  Devora stiffened. “What did he say?”

  “He said the other tribes were refusing to come at Barak’s call. He asked for the Ark.” Eleazar looked grim.

  It was said that in the days of Yeshua when the People took possession of lands east of the Tumbling Water, the levites had carried the Ark on stout poles in advance of the host. The few dead walking in those valleys had stumbled out of the fields with their lifted arms and their moaning voices, only to wither before the Ark like dry wheat before a desert wind. So it was said.

  “But they have come with only three tribes, navi. They cannot take the Ark. They think God does not care if his People are divided or together.”

  “Maybe we should talk, all of us, after the Sabbath,” Devora said quickly. “What I’ve seen—if there are so many dead—”

  “We are one People, navi.”

  “I know that. But perhaps it’s time to cast the urim and thummim, to find out if God wishes to go north with the men. Why else would he have sent me such visions?”

  “Perhaps. But right now it is time to greet the bride,” Eleazar said, cutting her off. And he turned toward the door of his tent.

  “Eleazar, please—”

  “We will talk after the Sabbath, navi.” He spoke without turning and disappeared into his tent.

  Devora stood a moment, afflicted again by a terrible sense of not having done enough. Hannah gave her an understanding look but said nothing. Devora turned to leave, then stopped. Fresh to her mind had come the sight of the Canaanite curled up like a wound
ed animal in her travel-stained salmah, nothing but a woolen blanket to shelter her body and her grief.

  “Hannah,” Devora called.

  The priest’s wife had her hand at the door of the tent. She glanced back at the navi.

  “Hannah, please. After the Sabbath. There is a girl at the edge of the camp. Zadok is tending her. She is weak from childbirth and likely ill. She’ll need ointment, and herbs, and warm water and cloths. You’ll know what else she needs better than I. Will you go to her, Hannah?”

  Hannah gave her a curious look. “Who is she?”

  The navi paused. She could hear the sides of the tent flapping slightly as a wind moved through the camp. It seemed to her that the wind carried to her the sound of a faint moan, as if from the hill. Then a quiet, gasping sob, the grief of a bereaved woman. Perhaps visions came to her ears this day and not only to her eyes. Or perhaps she only imagined it. “A supplicant,” she said. She could not say a heathen, nor explain why it suddenly seemed so important to her that someone see to the girl. She had no time to argue with Hannah.

  Hannah gave a small nod. “I will see to her. Good Sabbath, navi.” She paused. “The other wives are dining with us. Will you join us?”

  “Not tonight,” Devora said.

  Then she walked swiftly, almost at a run, toward her husband Lappidoth’s tent. All through the camp, the priests’ songs were falling silent; the Sabbath had arrived.

  And then Devora did run, forgetful of dignity.

  THE MAN WHO DEFENDED HIS CATTLE

  DEVORA HAD been twelve the first time she had seen him; he had been twenty. She was traveling alone on her way to Shiloh after the dead had devoured her mother’s camp and all her kin. By night she lay in the weeds, shivering. By day she moved with caution, listening for any moaning dead and keeping away from any cart paths or any living men she saw, who might be tempted by a girl alone and without the protection of her tribe. It was easy to tell at a distance whether a figure striding through barley or tall grass was living or dead, for the dead staggered and lurched, but either the living or the dead could be dangerous to her. She was the only one left of all the men and women and children she knew; the fourteen others in her camp were dead. She was weak from hunger, and she hurried from one small pond or mud hole to the next, anxious for water.