Great Lion of God Read online

  “Of what are you thinking?” said Deborah with suspicion, for she disliked her husband’s expression when he was communing with himself. It made her uneasy and too conscious of her youth in comparison With his thirty years.

  “I am a Pharisee,” he replied, “and we believe in reincarnation. So I was contemplating our son’s former existence, and from whence he came, and why he is here with us now.”

  Deborah arched her pretty brows in scorn. “That is nonsense,” she said. “He is flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and spirit of our spirit, and there was none like him before, nor will there ever be again one like him.”

  “True,” said Hillel ben Borush. “God never repeats Himself, no, not even in a leaf or a blade of grass. All souls are unique from the beginning, but that does not deny that if they are eternal—as we assert—their lives must be eternal also, moving from flesh to flesh as God wills. The acquisition of knowledge never ends. Its imperative is not ended in the tomb.”

  Deborah yawned. Tomorrow she must go to the Temple for the presentation of her son, and the thought annoyed her. It is true that the Sadducees also obeyed the ancient law, but they laughed at it secretly, though honoring it as a tradition. How could she explain the ceremony to her Greek and Roman friends in Tarsus? They would be amused. She discontentedly smoothed a fold in her stola, and looked with a small resentment at her son.

  Hillel knew why she had been bestowed upon him. The Sadducees might not believe in any life everlasting, or even in a God, and were purely secular and worldly, but they were often insistent on their daughters marrying a pious man. They were like men who prudently invested in what they sheepishly considered might eventually prove a good investment. Or they gave their daughters as hostages to a God in Whom they did not believe, but Who might astoundingly exist, and Who was rumored to be wrathful.

  Hillel had large and shimmering brown eyes, a white and ascetic face, a prominent nose like the Hittites, a golden beard and golden brows, and a domed forehead from which rose the gilded crest of his hair, partly covered now with the skullcap which exasperated Deborah. He had broad shoulders and strong white hands and sturdy legs, but he was not so tall as his wife. This also made her discontented. Had not a Grecian gentleman bowed to her once and quoted Homer: “Daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair!” Hillel also wore those foolish curls in front of his ears and invariably his prayer shawl—or so it seemed to young Deborah—for he was constantly praying. The ceremonies of Judaic life were profoundly baffling to her, as well as almost completely unknown. Times changed; the world moved; the truths of yesterday were the laughter of today. God was a quaint hypothesis, interchangeable with the gods of Greece and Rome, with a slight flavor of Babylon and Egypt. It was a serene and laughing household in Jerusalem, where Deborah had been born, a cosmopolitan household. She regretted leaving it for this household where Pharisees moved and debated gravely and looked at her with covert disapproval and averted eyes, almost as if she were a member of the Ionian courtesans, like Aspasia.

  Once Deborah had said to her husband, “Do you consider me another Aspasia?” She never understood why he had burst into the wildest laughter she had ever heard, and had then embraced her tenderly and had said, “No, my darling. I should never call you an Aspasia.”

  A peacock screeched furiously outside. He was very jealous of the black swans in the spring-fed pond in the garden, for he knew that they were greatly admired. Hillel winced; he had sensitive hearing. He said with an absent sense of caution, “That creature sounds like an ill-tempered woman. He has awakened the child.”

  Deborah felt a thrill of unkindness toward her husband for this remark, which denigrated her sex. She lifted her head with hauteur and said, “Then I will remove my disturbing presence also, so you will not be reminded of women.”

  “Deborah,” said Hillel, but Deborah could move like a child and she was gone in an instant through the light and shadow of the columns outside, which guarded the outdoor portico. Hillel sighed, and smiled. He was always offending Deborah, who was an adorable small girl—he never thought of her as an adult woman. He had heard from his bookshop that a little known manuscript of one of Philo of Larissa’s earlier works had been discovered a year ago, and copies were expected in Tarsus. He would send for one tomorrow; it would please Deborah, and, alas, it would flatter her. She would not understand a single word, poor pretty child. On the other hand, she had admired a necklace of fiery opals she had seen in her jeweler’s shop, though had prudently caviled at the price. Which should it be? Philo of Larissa or the opals? Hillel, in mercy, decided on the jewels. Two heavily laden ships had made their way from Cilicia to Rome without encountering the enthusiastic and ubiquitous Cilician pirates—who had not been entirely destroyed by Julius Caesar and his successors—and Hillel had been heavily invested in those vessels and their cargo. He had made a handsome profit. Therefore, Deborah would have her fine opals.

  The peacock screeched again, and the child in his ivory and ebony cradle complained. The nursery was filled with the newly awakened scent of the night-blooming jasmine, though the sun had not yet set and its reddish light struck on white marble wall and on the white and black marble floor. The shadow of a palm tree blew against the wall nearest the young child, and he quickly turned his head and gazed at it, and Hillel marveled. A child so young, so newly born, and he saw! It was said that an infant did not truly see anything but light and shadow before he was two months old, but of a certainty this child not only saw but comprehended. Hillel did not in the least feel fatuous and too fond as he bent over the cradle and clucked at his son. “Saul,” he said, in the softest voice. “Saul?”

  The boy had not yet been named in the Temple, but a man held his son’s name in his heart before that. Hillel and the infant were alone in the large and gleaming nursery. Hillel’s face and golden beard shone as if the light of his own spirit illuminated it. He felt a passionate love, and immediately murmured a prayer, for above all one must love one’s God with all one’s heart, mind and soul, and that love must surpass any human love for any human creature. Hillel hoped for a moment that he had not offended his omnipresent God nor incurred His wrath, which could fall upon this innocent morsel in his cradle.

  The child turned his head quickly again and looked up at his father, who leaned over him. As Deborah had said, he was not beautiful; he was almost ugly. He was smaller than the average babe, even at his age, yet he had a broad and sturdy body, naked except for the cloth about his loins, and that body was not fair as were the parents’ but slightly ivory in tint as if he had been exposed to the sun. The nursemaids had mentioned a young Hercules, which had pleased Deborah, but Hillel thought of David, the warrior king. The muscles of the little chest were strong and visible under the sweating skin, like minute plates of armor, and the arms were the arms of a soldier. The legs, equally strong, were, however, bowed like one who has ridden a horse since childhood. The toes flexed vigorously and with a kind of rhythm, as did the square little fingers. They seemed to move with purpose, and not aimlessly, thought Hillel.

  He had a round head, virile and solid, but overlarge for his body, and big red ears. Unfortunately, his hair, thick and coarse, was even redder. It was not a charming tint, as was the hair of Deborah. It was that particular shade of raw and audacious color which usually aroused mistrust among superstitious Jews. Moreover, it grew far down the wide powerful cliff which was the child’s forehead, and this gave him a pugnacious appearance, like an irritable Roman.

  The effect of irritability was enhanced by his most peculiar eyes. They were round, huge and commanding, under the red brows—which almost met across a nose even more suggestive of a Hittite’s than Hillel’s. (At least, thought Hillel, it is not a cherry of a nose like a peasant’s.) But the startling impression of the eyes lay mostly in their color, a curiously metallic blue, like the glitter on a polished dagger. The blue was concentrated as well as intense, and the auburn lashes, long and shining, did not diminish it.
There was a strenuousness and force in the eyes, not childlike, not wholly innocent, but aware and stern. Hillel, though a Pharisee, did not entirely believe in the transmigration of souls, but he wondered now, as he had often wondered lately. Saul’s eyes were not an infant’s eyes. They met his, he was certain, with conjecture and recognition. “Who are you, my son?” he whispered, with uneasiness. “From whence did you come? What is your fate?”

  The child stared at him, but not blankly. The mouth, the wide thin mouth like an exasperated man’s, stirred, but no sound came from it. Then it set itself tightly, and the child looked away from his father and contemplated the dance of vivid light and shadow between the columns of marble. He seemed to be reflecting. Hillel felt a little awed. What moved in that infant brain, what thoughts, what dreams, what determinations, what memories? The small chin, firm and dimpled and puissant, appeared to gather itself together with resolution. Saul withdrew himself.

  Gaia, the little Grecian nursemaid who was Deborah’s own servant, came briskly through the farther bronze door into the nursery, her sandals clattering quickly on the stone. She was hardly more than a child herself, but very competent, with her flowing light brown hair and pale eyes and merry face and lilting step. She wore a long thin tunic of a rosy cloth, bound with blue ribbons about her slender waist. She bowed to Hillel, who raised his hand in automatic blessing though the girl was a heathen, and he greeted her kindly.

  “The nurse awaits the child, Master,” she said. Hillel had had the vision of Deborah suckling her son, but Deborah had decided otherwise. No Greek or Roman lady suckled children any longer, nor did enlightened Jewish ladies who had duties and responsibilities beyond the mere demands of the body. Hillel had been extremely disappointed. He thought the picture of a mother nursing her infant the most beautiful in the world. Certainly his own mother had suckled her children and he remembered the warmth and tenderness in the nursery and the crooning and the evening light caught in his mother’s hair, and the round morning freshness of her body. He had raised no complaint to Deborah, who at this hour was furbishing her mind in the library, for he was too kind and gentle a man. He knew this, and deplored it. The old patriarchs had been held in awe by their wives and their daughters in the past, but alas, Hillel was no patriarch.

  So, without a word he watched little Gaia gather up the infant in her arms and he heard her remark about the condition of his napkin, which the other nursemaid had apparently neglected, and she rolled him deftly in the linen sheet and carried him out. As the girl reached the door the boy suddenly uttered a loud strange cry, not a childish wail or a whimper, but a humiliated and disgusted cry. He seemed almost to be saying, “I detest my present state and weakness, and I shall not long endure it!”

  I am fanciful, like all new and proud fathers, thought Hillel, and he went out into the outdoor portico and then stepped down into the gardens. It was time for his evening prayers in the warm and scented silence. As a pious Jew, he knew that these prayers should be prayed in a synagogue, but he and Deborah lived in the house her father had bought for them in the far suburbs of Tarsus. (“My daughter is of a delicate constitution.”) There was no synagogue under less than an hour’s energetic walking, and Hillel was just recovering from malaria which left his strong legs somewhat weak, and his heart palpitated on effort. He was not a horseman, and he disliked effete litters, and though he owned a large car and a smaller chariot he disliked them little less than he did the litters. A man was made for walking. He would not have rejected a humble ass, but this Deborah would not endure, and Hillel was a man of peace. Men might talk of the unbending patriarchs but husbands were not so valorous.

  Hillel looked about in the calm and luminous early evening. His house, in the suburbs of Tarsus, was held in constant quietude, a tranquil hush, even when the slaves and other servants were working busily or laughing or singing—for it was a happy household. Even the discordant cries of peacocks and swans and birds of prey sounded musically here, part of the murmurous background of palms and citrons and karobs and sycamores and fragrant shrubs, and a gentle benignity appeared to pervade during the hot spring storms, and the roaring summer thunder. The house and its extensive and beautiful grounds appeared protected, and this was remarked on by Greek and Roman friends who laughingly vowed that Hillel was under the loving guardianship of woodland deities and fawns and nymphs. Certainly the house was in a hollow section of land, verdant, fed by springs and little rills even during the driest seasons, and in the fertile and luxurious valley of Issus, that fruitful vast area in Cilicia Pedias, which had been joined to Syria and Phoenicia by Julius Caesar.

  The country estate rolled in the softest green waves about the house, crowned by copses of thick dark emerald trees which made cool hollows of refuge during the hottest days, throwing their shadows on dense grass and formal beds of flowers and small red paths or graveled footways. Here fountains, bright amber in sunlight, hissed and gurgled, the illuminated waters pouring from gleeful marble hands or from horns of plenty or even from the mouths of exotic little beasts. (There had been a small statue of a little boy in one of the fountains from which the water arched, but Hillel had decided, in his Pharisee sense of what was obscene, to have it removed, to Deborah’s annoyance.) Hillel, in keeping with the Ten Commandments, would have had the “graven images” removed from the fountains and grounds—images erected by the former Roman owner—but here Deborah tearfully and vehemently prevailed, and became so agitated that Hillel, always the compromiser, yielded. He also compromised by not looking at the graceful statues in grottos and arbors and fountains, and avoiding direct confrontation with their classic and beautiful faces, but sometimes his naturally perceptive and appreciative eye wandered involuntarily. When sternly reproached by his more rigidly religious friends, he would laughingly change the subject. Unlike the gentle men, he could infuse a tone of quiet authority and character into his voice, which silenced even the most choleric or rebellious, and his brown eye would glow with a fixed and steady coldness. Once halted by this, the quarreler would never again contend for his own views or rebuke or criticize his host or master, but forever afterwards would hold Hillel not only in respect but in some fear.

  A great natural pond lay in the very center of the grounds, flashing blue and purple under the sun, and becoming a shield of silver under the moon. Here floated the arrogant black and white swans, and the curious and highly colored ducks from China, seemingly made of angular painted wood, who occasionally disputed lordship with the swans over the water. During the migration periods of red-legged white storks flying to Africa or returning, these fowls would often halt at the pond to devour the fish with which it was sedulously stocked, and the singing frogs, and the clouds of insects. The regal peacocks drank here, and jeered at the swans, and so did the small denizens of the land. Fed by clear springs, and released into tiny brooks and rivulets—which freshened the earth—the pool was always clear and pure, with its rocky little walls in which blue and gold and crimson flowers, and even ferns, grew with colorful abandon. Sometimes the slaves waded here on hot evenings, to the combined indignation of the usually quarreling inhabitants, catching iridescent fish in their young hands and then releasing them with laughter. The former owner, who had visited the Orient, had erected a very complex and ornate little arched bridge over the narrowest part of the pond—which had the shape of a pear and it gave an exotic touch to an otherwise too formal setting. Dragon shapes and serpents and vines twined together in the teak of the bridge, and the animal shapes had eyes of silver or lapis lazuli, and the minute fruit of the vines were delicately fashioned of jade or yellow stone. The younger slaves would often lie on the arch of the bridge to examine with wonder and delight, freshly discovering new intricacies of the artist’s work, and marveling over inlays of carved ivory.

  There were small awninged retreats under the thick trees for refreshment, striped in blue or red or green, and Hillel came here to meditate after a twinge of conscience following his admiration of beauty.
Deborah could also retire here with her friends from the city and from nearby estates, decorously to sip spiced or perfumed wine and partake of fine little cakes and fruit. When Hillel would hear their high and tripping voices he would flee, though Deborah would later speak of discourtesy and the duties of a host. Hillel had a wise way of avoiding women.

  The estate had cost Deborah’s father a considerable fortune, which he was not averse to discussing with Hillel, and he had furnished it with slaves and other servants and had sent one of his best cooks to serve his daughter. “One must remember that my child, my sweetest only daughter, is accustomed to refinement and comfort, and could not tolerate privation.” This was accompanied by a meaning hard glance over the affectionate smile, and the father-in-law would consider that he had instilled meek acceptance in Hillel. But Hillel, the tolerant compromiser, would smile inwardly.

  So Hillel, this early evening, stood in his flowering, green and pleasant gardens, folded his hands and murmured aloud, “Hear, O Israel! the Lord our God, the Lord is One! O, King of the Universe, Lord of lords, we praise You, we bow before You, we glorify You, for there is none else.”

  He pondered on that with his usual awe. “There is none else.” The endless universes were pervaded with God’s grandeur. The uttermost star was charged with His glory. The worlds—endless like the sands of the sea—sang His praises. The smallest golden wild flower, clinging to the rocky side of the pool, dumbly, through its color and life and vitality announced His power over the smallest and the humblest, as well as the most majestic, and His invincible life, His omnipresence, His circumambient pervasion. Each blade of grass reflected His occupancy. His altars were not only in the Temple and the synagogue, but in every morsel of earth, in the silver bark of trees, in the clattering fronds of palms, and in the rainbowed darting light of the wings of birds and insects. His voice was in the thunder, the spark of His wrathful eye in the lightning, the movement of His garments in the winds. His breath stirred trees and bent grasses. His footsteps revealed stone and mountains. His was the cool shade, the clusterings of shadows, the cry of innocent beings, the rising evening mist, the sudden exhalations of cooling flowers, the scent of freshness of ground and water. “There is none else.” Nothing existed but God.