King Jesus (Penguin Modern Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page B

But if the Sun, then let him be called the Sun’s name, Jerahmeel ; and if the Moon, then let her be called by the Moon’s name, Miriam.”
    “Is the Moon named Miriam among you ?”
    “The Moon has many names among our poets. She is Lilith and Eve and Ashtaroth and Rahab and Tamar and Leah and Rachel and Michal and Anatha ; but she is Miriam when her star rises in love from the salt sea at evening.”
    Joachim was seized with a doubt. He asked : “The lyre which you have in your hand is made from the branching horns of the clean oryx, but what of the strings and the pegs that secure them? What reliance is to be placed on your prophecy ?”
    “My lyre is of oryx-horn, made by the lame craftsman. The strings are fastened with the triangular teeth of the rock-badger, and are themselves the twisted guts of the wild-cat ; both of which you call unclean beasts. But this lyre was so stringed and pegged when Miriam played on it in the days before the Levitical laws were uttered. It was clean then, and it is clean now, in the hands of the Children of Rahab.”
    Joachim asked no more, and when the young man laid down his lyre he cried : “Be witness, poet, that if the Lord blesses my wife’s womb —for I am an Heir of David and her name is Hannah—and if a child is born to her, then I will make a free gift to your clan of the Well of the Jawbone, according to your uncle Kenah’s dream, and as many sheep asmy wife and I together have lived years, which is now ninety. But the child I vow to our God as a Temple ward, whether it be Jerahmeel or Miriam, and I shall call you to witness in that also.”
    Cries of acclamation and astonishment arose. Kenah presented the young man with a jewelled quiver. “You have brought us all delight with your sweet song,” he said.
    Kenah himself took the lyre. He played and sang the lament for Tubal Cain. “We are of Tubal, alas for Tubal Cain! He was hornsmith and carpenter ; he was goldsmith and lapidary ; he was silversmith and whitesmith. He ordered the calendar, he codified the laws. Alas for Tubal the mighty, of whose sons only a remnant is left! It has gone hard with us since the day that the hairy male Sun went down behind the hills and a smooth male Moon rose again without him. Yet still we honour Mother Rahab with scarlet, purple and white ; all is not yet lost, nor are we the doomed folk that we seem. Is Caleb not of Tubal? In the likeness of a dog he minded the sheep of his uncle Jabal ; in the form of a dog he discovered the purple-fish for his uncle Jubal. Caleb is the perfection of Tubal. He reigned, ceased, reigned again, and will reign once more. When the hour comes, when the Virgin of the Moon conceives, when the Sun Child is begotten again in Caleb, when Jerahmeel puts on cloth of Bozrah scarlet and all the valiant men of Edom shout together for joy, then we will be a great people again, as in ancient times.”
    Kenah’s ecstatic words fell so wide of the Jewish Scriptures that Joachim piously stopped his ears against them ; yet wagged his head out of courtesy. He continued with the Kenites in their slow wanderings northward until the appointed forty days were nearly done ; then parted from them in friendship and hastened hopefully back to Jerusalem.

Chapter Three
The Birth of Mary
    M EANWHILE Joachim’s servants had returned to Hannah at Cocheba, but without any message from him. They said : “Our lord ordered us to return home, all except the groom ; our lord appeared to be resolved on a journey.”
    When she pressed them, they told her the Temple rumour of Joachim’s humiliation at the gate of the Treasury. She grew heavy-hearted and said to Judith, her little maid : “Bring me my mourning garments.”
    “Oh, mistress, is one of your kinsfolk dead ?”
    “No, but I am mourning for the child that will never be born to me, and for the husband who has left me without a word and gone, I fear, to search for a likely concubine, or it may even be for another