Elijah (5 page)

Abinadab swallowed but answered quickly. “Yes, I suppose that is true. But land is more sacred in Israel than cloaks. It is a greater law.”

“The choice is yours. You can have power measured by the value of cloaks or by the value of fields.”

“I see your point.”

“One more thing,” the prophet continued. “How do you keep the people from taking you before the elders who are at the gate?”

“They do take me sometimes.”

“And how do you retain their cloaks, then?”

Abinadab again spoke firmly. “The elders are friends of mine.”

“You bribe them?”

“No.” His voice rose in anger. “I have never bribed an elder. I would not bribe a judge of my people.”

“Then how do they rule in your favor?”

“They know my point of view. They are convinced, as I am, that a cloak is poor collateral when it can be picked up each night at sundown.”

“And how did they come to agree with you so fully?”

“They have become my friends. We talk at parties and in one another’s homes. We attend religious functions together. I give them gifts on special occasions. They are my friends.”

The two Baal servants glanced at each other. “Why don’t you be honest with yourself?” they chided their host. “You
are
bribing the elders. Admit it, and Melkart will show you the way to power.”

Abinadab leaned forward. “You sit as my guests in my house and dare accuse me of dishonesty?”

Meor-baal laughed. “Don’t be angry, Abinadab. We only seek to clarify our meaning. I fear that your worship of Yahweh has dulled your senses. You really don’t believe Yahweh’s teaching that men should not accumulate wealth at the expense of the poor or weak, but you cannot tear away from the laws of Israel. So you hover between one view and the other. You strain Yahweh’s laws enough to satisfy your business needs, but not so much that you break away from them completely. The result is that you remain a very small fish compared to what you could be.”

“All right. I will listen to what Melkart teaches.”

The priest sat up and pointed his finger at Abinadab. “First, let me hear you admit that your friendship with the elders and your gifts to them are a form of bribery.”

Abinadab stared at Meor-baal for a moment. Then he spoke in a low tone. “All right, I suppose it is a form of bribery.”

“Now,” the priest responded, “we are getting somewhere.”

“Whose cloaks are these?” the prophet asked.

“They belong to men of Dor. Baana, Shammah, several others.”

“And if you did not keep them each night they would not pay you well.”

“That is a fact.”

“Then you could claim the cloaks by default.”

“Yes. But what do I want with cloaks? It is more profitable to lend money than to sell cloaks.”

“But suppose you allow the owners to keep their cloaks at night and they do not pay on time. Would that no put them in a difficult position toward you?”

“Certainly.”

“You said you had a fine mind. Let Melkart come into your mind. Think like Melkart. Think like the god of Power. Lie back and think. We will be silent.”

The priest and the prophet lay back on their pillows. Abinadab watched them, his brow furrowed in surprise. He sat for a moment staring at them. Then he murmured, “I don’t know how Melkart thinks. That is why I asked you to come.”

“Lie down,” the prophet ordered.

Abinadab pulled the pillows from behind his back and arranged them on the rug. He lay down on his side, facing the two guests.

“Lie on your back,” the prophet said.

He shifted to his back.

“Now think. Think about what you said. Think about the power you have now. Think how you can use that power to get what you want.”

Abinadab lay quietly. For some minutes he could not focus on the subject. His thoughts for so long had been on the securing of loans, most of them small, and the proper handling of his business affairs.

It was a statement of Meor-baal’s, an interruption of his reverie, that sparked his mind. In the dead quiet Meor-baal spoke slowly, with heavy precision: “Those men who dashed madly in their lust worship fertility. They pray for its increase. They wish for power, too, and worship it. But all they need do to worship fertility is to turn their bodies loose. To worship power, they must do more. Power will not come to the man who but worships it, only to the man who exercises it. You gain power through action.” It was Meor-baal’s only interruption through the entire night, but Abinadab caught the words as though they were hung in the air at that point in his destiny by Melkart himself.

He rolled the words and tasted them in his mind. Faces formed, faces of men who owed him money, faces whose eyes could not see as far as his, faces who had other possessions that, accumulated, meant power to the man who accumulated them. There was Baana, the happy one, whose wife was known for her figcakes and her barren womb. There was Shammah, Banna’s close friend, who lost his wife some months ago, and whose two daughters were almost of marriageable age.

The faces paraded before his vision, all of them men who owed him money. A plan began to form. As a gesture of good will to the discovery of Baal by Dor’s citizens, he would return each cloak to each man, and he would offer them extra money to buy oxen, more tools, better seed, and storehouses for the produce that would come from the newly-blessed fields. Their fields would be his collateral. He would foreclose immediately if any could not pay. The first foreclosure would be hard, but he would do it. He would be strong.

Chapter Three

Zebul’s fleshiness was apparent even under his copious priestly garments. His thick, short-fingered hands protruded from huge sleeves, and deep-set eyes peered from shallow caves over puffed cheeks. His heavy beard and long hair covered most of his face and neck. He was a man who had grown confident through years of leadership, for he had come to believe that he really was a cut above the average man.

His garments were regal. He wore a blue robe, woven without a seam, bordered with blue, purple, and scarlet ornamentation in the design of pomegranates alternated with tiny golden bells. The bells made tinkling sounds as Zebul occasionally shifted his weight from one foot to the other. A vest covered the robe from under his arms to his waist. The vest, scarlet like the ornaments, was interwoven with gold thread. It was held at the waist with a matching girdle. Across his chest was a breastplate, opulently adorned with jewelry. His turban was of simple white linen, pinned at the front with a large jewel that designated his high office. The real high priest in Jerusalem wore in place of such a jewel a gold plate inscribed, “Holiness to the Lord.” Zebul conceded this single difference in dress out of practical deference to the people, who believed there was only one true high priest of the Hebrews.

He was brooding. Bad enough to be relegated to a seat below the priests of Baal at the king’s table, but to be threatened with expulsion altogether was horrendous beyond words. Zebul was the highest ranking priest in Israel. In fact, he conducted himself as though he indeed were Israel’s high priest in spite of his Judean counterpart. He had risen to his present position because he had a knack both for the mechanics of the priesthood—which functions he carried out with great efficiency—and for the machinations of politics.

Zebul stood in the shade of the city wall and looked down the north side of the hill of Samaria. He gazed intently at the progress of building the great temple, but he took little notice of the workmen’s efforts. He was wrestling toward a decision. The worship of Baal had spread throughout Israel like the heat of the sirocco wind. The past year had seen altars built to Melkart and holy places built to Asherah all over the land.

His problem was not moral. He had long since given up such bounds on his personal ambition. In fact, his nearness to holy things never had touched the emptiness of his soul, an emptiness he long ago had accepted simply as a part of life.

Zebul’s nervousness was evident, if one could see him well in the shadow of the wall. He had a quirk of rubbing his knuckles against his ring. Leaning against the city wall, he weighed the course of Israel’s future and tried to consider the facts objectively. He could see two courses of action.

The first course called for great personal sacrifice, but quite conceivably he could be well rewarded eventually. Should he cast his lot unequivocally with the Yahwists and intrigue against Jezebel? If Baalism were defeated, he would be in an enviable position in leadership, provided that he could outwit Jezebel, Meor-baal, and other intelligent minds of the opposition long enough to survive.

The building being raised below him represented the other alternative. The temple walls rose imposingly to the sky.
Strange irony
, Zebul thought,
that the Phoenicia that lent stonemasons to Solomon to build the magnificent Temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem should lend others now to build this temple to Baal
.

The Phoenicians indeed were brilliant in the use of stone. Straight level trenches had been cut into the sloping hillside to receive the foundation stones. Before the walls had begun to rise, the arrangement of stones resembled two long, parallel stairways joined by stone fences on each end. The entrance was at the south end, nearest the city wall. The main floor would extend level to the back of the temple. The hollow space beneath, created by the slope of the hill, was designed for priests’ quarters.

Zebul often had come to watch the building’s progress, as roughly squared stones were hauled on donkey-drawn carts from a nearby limestone quarry to the workmen, who marked them with red chalkline, square, and plumbline to exactly the required size and texture. Already the stones had hardened to a glaring white. Two huge obelisk columns were being raised on either side of the entrance by a system of ropes. Once erected, they would join the fertility of the earth to the goddess of the heavens who gives so bountifully to men.

Strange how the gods fight
, Zebul thought.
Each claims to give the same gifts to men—happiness and prosperity. Yahweh could learn something from Baal
. He smiled at the thought.
Why should men choose to live austere and holy lives to receive Yahweh’s blessings when they have the same promises from Baal, who demands only sacrifices and the consort of beautiful women?

He paused and reflected, caressing his ring more rapidly. Funny how lust is so integral a part of religion. A religion often is rejected or accepted simply because of its view of sex. He chuckled. “Is truth then bound up in sex?” he asked himself aloud.

Zebul had not forgotten his history learned from the chronicles of the kings. The Israelites never really had followed Yahweh faithfully for very long at a time. The baal gods of the brooks and valleys and hills and trees always had claimed their fancy. People, after all, follow the god of the time. Occasionally there is a certain temper, a certain indescribable mood that permeates the air, causing men to become conscious of their wrongdoings and ready to respond to the prophet’s challenge. At other times, though, the prophet’s effort influences only a few. Those few may keep the name of their god alive, barely, but the prophet’s sweeping influence must await that changing, undefined, and completely unpredicatable and independent mood. Zebul watched a dust devil swirl near the temple, as though its movement would reveal to him the mood of his time.

That the name of Yahweh would remain alive was no question to the astute Zebul. The schools of prophets, the priests, the elaborate laws and ritual that were woven into the very fabric of Israel’s society all were insurance enough for such confidence. Whether Yahweh worship would revive and become aggressive during
his
lifetime was the question. Baalism held the day. Its aggressiveness appealed to young people and encouraged their natural rebellion against inherited values. Its rituals were even more elaborate and much more sophisticated than those of Yahweh worship, a difference that men—especially young men—often mistake for depth.

Zebul walked slowly past the work project, carefully avoiding the debris of construction. Below the new temple, the road had been widened from a footpath to a lane that was able to accommodate carts traveling in opposite directions. He liked to think among the king’s grapevines in the valley, but the plants were not yet high. Zebul wished for the beauty of climbing vines that would arch overhead to form a passageway when summer came. Then the green of the leaves would be offset by the dark color of the Sorek grapes. He passed through the vineyard toward his second choice for seclusion, the pink-blossomed oleanders growing next to the wadi.

With his stubby hand, Zebul brushed the dirt from a large rock. He clapped his hands to rid them of the dust and sat down, arranging his robes carefully. The little wadi rushed with springtime water, gathering from even smaller tributaries as it made its way to the Great Sea.
To make as much difference to the sea,
he thought,
as the words of Yahweh’s servants make to Israel.

The big priest rested fat forearms on fat thighs. His rich robe drooped apronlike between his legs as he continued his analysis, which gradually was evolving into a decision. He stared at the water, reading its story. The people of his day looked on religion as serious, but they smiled at the deprecations of the prophets. If the people only would become angry, perhaps the prophets would have some chance of success, but a tolerant, dismissing smile, that is devastating.