Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

Chapter 18

As the days passed I came to love the morning study hours. The three Rabbis were known as “The Elders” and the oldest of the three was the great teacher, himself a priest now too old to go any longer to Jerusalem, and he told us the most wonderful stories I’d ever heard. His name was Rabbi Berekhaiah bar Phineas and he was always at home in the early evening if we wanted to visit him, any of us boys, near the very top of the hill in a spacious house because his wife was rich.

In the mornings, we repeated and learned to memory much of the holy books just as we had in Alexandria, but here it was always in Hebrew, and when we talked it was often in our tongue, and we could very often get Rabbi Berekhaiah to tell us about his adventures if we tried.

In the evenings, he sat in his library, with the doors open to the court, a modest room as he always said, smiling, and it was if one compared it to Philo’s great library, but it was a warm and inviting place to me. He was there for any question, and no matter how tired I was from work, I went up there at least to sit at his feet for a little while. The servants were gentle, they served us cool water, and I could have stayed there for hours listening to him tell his tales, but I had to go home.

The youngest of the teachers, who did not speak up very much, was Rabbi Sherebiah, and he was also a priest, though no longer could he go to the Temple either, as he’d suffered a terrible mishap once on the road up from Jericho when robbers had attacked him as he went to fulfill his duties in the Temple. They had beat him and his brothers and he’d fallen from the cliff and in the fall his lower leg had been crushed, and was taken off by the physicians in Jerusalem.

He walked on a peg, but this could not be seen for his robes, and seemed a whole man with a quick healthy ma

The Rabbi between them, who made up the last of The Elders, the Rabbi who had received us in the synagogue, was Rabbi Jacimus, and he was a great Pharisee, though all three Rabbis wore blue tassels on their robes, and Rabbi Jacimus was very strict in all his habits which he tried to teach to us.

All of the family of Rabbi Jacimus, and there were many of his uncles, brothers and sisters and their husbands and their children, were Pharisees and they dined only with each other, as was the custom with Pharisees, and the customs of Nazareth were not always what they would have. But everyone went to them for judgements. And two of the brothers of Rabbi Jacimus were village scribes who wrote letters for people, and even read letters for the very old who couldn’t read so well. These men wrote up other papers which had to be done, and they were often in their courtyards very busy with such copying with a man or woman standing over them saying what had to be written. Or worse yet screaming and crying over what was being read to them.

These three teachers were the judges in disputes, but there were other very old men, men who seldom left their homes due to their age, who also came together with them if something had to be done.

In fact, sometimes people came to ask Old Justus, our uncle, his view of things. Now Old Justus couldn’t speak, and I could see plainly, as could all of us, that he didn’t know what was being said to him, yet people would come and pour out their woe to him and he would nod. And his eyes would bulge, and he’d smile. He loved people talking to him. And this made the people happy and they went away thanking us and thanking him.

My mother would shake her head. Old Sarah would shake her head.

Now I should say a lot of people came to Old Sarah. Men and women came to Old Sarah. Sometimes it seemed to me that Old Sarah was so venerable as they said, by virtue of her age and her cleverness and her quickness, that she was neither man or woman to people anymore.

And it was by listening to some of this outpouring that I learned a lot about the village, a lot I wanted to know and some things I didn’t want to know.

I learned a lot of things from the other children of the village, from Blind Marya who was always in her father’s courtyard and full of laughter and ready talk, and from the boys who came to play, Simon the Fool, who really wasn’t a fool, but who laughed all the time and was very kind, and Jason the Fat, who was fat, and Round James and Tall James and Bold Michael, and Daniel the Zealot, who was called that because he went at everything “in a fury.”

But from no one did I really learn the answers to the questions that were now eating at my heart. I struggled to remember the things my mother had said to me. I did this while I was working at something, like the slow polishing of a table leg or while we were walking up the hill and down to the school. But even then we were all talking or singing, and I couldn’t really think. I did remember, really, what she’d said. I remembered it in pictures. An angel had come, an angel to my mother, and no man had been my father, but what did such a thing mean?

I thought when I could, but ours was a busy life.

What time there was from work, I went to the Rabbis. I didn’t want to leave them at all. Rabbi Berekhaiah was curious about Alexandria and asked me many questions. He liked to hear me talk, and so did his wife Miriamne, who was the rich one and not so old, and her father, whose hair was white, was often in the room listening to us talk.

Rabbi Berekhaiah had read the scrolls of Philo given him by our family, and he had questions about Philo which I answered, saying always how kind Philo had been, and how he’d taken me to the Great Synagogue just to see it, and how Philo studied the Law and the Prophets and spoke on them as a Rabbi himself, though he was a bit too young perhaps, said some. And I told all about Philo’s house and how beautiful it had been, insofar as it was proper to say so.

A carpenter had to be careful what he said about the houses of those for whom he worked. A house was a private place. I’d always been taught that. But Philo’s house had been full of young pupils, and the Rabbis of Alexandria had come and gone there, and so it seemed all right to describe the patterns of the marble floors, and the racks of scrolls to the ceiling.

We talked too about the harbor of Alexandria, and about the Great Lighthouse which I had seen most clearly when we’d sailed away. And I told of the temples, which even a good Jewish boy couldn’t help seeing as they were everywhere and very fine, and of the marketplace where one could buy almost anything in the world, and one heard people speaking Latin as well as Greek, and so many other tongues.

I could speak some Latin, but not much.

They were happy to hear about the ships, too, and we had seen so many in Alexandria because it had not only the seafaring ships that went to Greece and Rome and Antioch and the Holy Land, but also the riverboats coming in from the Nile.

Sometimes I thought that I saw Alexandria more clearly than ever in these talks because in answers to the questions of Miriamne and the Old Rabbi, the father-in-law of Berekhaiah, I had to remember so much. I spoke of the library, which had been rebuilt after Julius Caesar had been so foolish as to burn it. And I spoke about the special Festival of the Jews when we had celebrated the translation of the Law and the Prophets and all the sacred books into Greek.

Now here in Nazareth, no one was going to teach in Greek, but many spoke Greek, especially in Sepphoris where all the soldiers of the King spoke it, and most of the craftsmen, and these Rabbis spoke it and read it. They knew the Scripture in Greek. They had copies of it. They said so. But Hebrew was the language of our learning here, and our tongue, Aramaic, was the daily tongue. In the synagogue, the Scripture was read out in Hebrew, and then the Rabbi explained it in the common tongue. That way, if someone didn’t know the sacred language, he or she could still understand.