The Source

by James A. Michener

As he stood that morning on top of the tell whose secrets he must probe, he was no ordinary man, come to the Holy Land with enthusiasm and a shovel; he had won the title archaeologist only at the end of a long period of subtle training. At Harvard he had learned to read Aramaic, Arabic and ancient Hebrew scripts. During graduate work with Professor Albright at Johns Hopkins he had mastered Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs until he could read them as an average man reads a newspaper.

He had written one of the papers which had helped prove that there had been two issues of Jewish shekels: one used in the initial Jewish revolt led by Judah the Maccabee, 166 years before Christ; and a second minted during the final revolt of Bar Kochba, 135 years after Christ. As a result of this paper he was known as a numismatic expert.

All these skills, plus others like ancient architecture and the conduct of war in Biblical times, which he had acquired pragmatically during his various digs, he was now ready to apply to Tell Makor, but the location of his two trenches was so important that he intuitively postponed the decision.

“An archaeological dig is proposed in western Galilee for the summer campaign of 1964 and succeeding years. Qualified experts are welcomed if they can pay their own transportation to Israel.

Food, lodging, medical care provided, but no salaries.”

‘Jewish tradition claims that Josephus escaped by night from Makor.’

After 1291, when Makor fell to the Mamelukes, the site vanishes from history.

Makor. Source.” “Any significance?” the Englishman asked.

the tell I had in mind contained a Crusader’s castle. This man to my right repeated, ‘A castle?’

Sometime around 3500 B.C.E. men not yet identified had built the thick outer wall by throwing together huge stones in haphazard piles. Two thousand years later, well before the age of Saul and Solomon, some other unidentified group had built the sturdy middle wall. And two thousand five hundred years after that, at the time of the Crusaders, the inner wall had been erected, and it was a European masterpiece.

“We found the cornerstone of a Christian church,” Cullinane replied. “Great day for the Irish.”

“The most Hebrew thing we’ve found yet,” Cullinane explained. “The kind of horned altar they speak of in the Bible. This could date back to the time of King David. He may even have worshiped at it, although I doubt that he was ever here.”

Carbon-14, on the other hand, is an unstable, radioactive substance heavier than normal carbon. It is formed in the earth’s upper atmosphere and finally mixes itself into our atmosphere in the almost imperceptible ratio of one-trillionth of a part of Carbon-14 to one part of Carbon-12. But even such a slight trace of the heavier carbon is detectable in all things that live or have ever lived; as long as they continue to live they absorb Carbon-14, but at the moment of death they absorb no more. Carbon-14 would be of no significance to archaeologists except for a peculiarity which makes it invaluable. At the death of a living organism, its Carbon-14 content, which is non-stable, begins to disintegrate, losing half its remaining total every 5,500 years. For example, if the ram’s horn that Jemail Tabari dug out of the fire-level at Makor were found to retain only half its Carbon-14, it could be dated roughly 3535 B.C.E., plus or minus 330 years, so that the ram which grew the horn must have died sometime between the years 3205 B.C.E. and 3865 B.C.E.

Laboratories determine the Carbon-14 content in a sample by counting the number of Carbon-14 disintegrations per minute per gram of ordinary carbon. Living samples give off 15.3 such disintegrations a minute; those that died in 3535 B.C.E. give off half that number, or 7.65; and those that died in 9035 B.C.E. yield 3.83 disintegrations per minute. Unfortunately, material that died more than 50,000 years ago yields such a diminished rate that present instruments cannot accurately measure the disintegrations, so that dates earlier than 70,000 are largely guesswork, although a similar substance, potassium argon, promises to yield reliable dates back to two million years. Cullinane had submitted his carbon samples to two different laboratories—he had more than forty to choose from, in countries from Australia to Switzerland—so that one result could be checked against the other.

him on the street and drive a spear through

‘And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.’

“A man who had known God, who had created a nation, who had laid down the law that all of us still follow. And when he dies you say of him, ‘He could still function in bed.’ Ours is a very gutsy religion, Cullinane.”

Of the nearly nineteen hundred Canaanites only nine men escaped the slaughter, plus fifty women and some two dozen children.

The complaisant town of Makor with its amiable gods could never have produced Yahweh; that transformation required the captivity in Egypt, the conflict with the Pharaohs, the exodus, the years of hunger and thirst in the desert, the longing for a settled home and the spiritual yearning for a known god … these were

“In Makor we are far from the sources of Yahweh, but in Jerusalem we could live near the sanctuaries of his holiness. In Makor we share the world with Baal; but in Jerusalem, Yahweh alone reigns. In our little town the great kings are not; but in Jerusalem, David lives, and to be near him is to be near the sun.”

“When you waken in the morning in Jerusalem, doesn’t it thrill you to be at the center of the earth? Where Yahweh dwells?”

“But the Holy Land never became real for me until I read about the Crusades. For weeks I went around making believe I was in the boat that brought Richard the Lion Heart to Acre.”

“And we of Makor, who have worked so hard to dig this tunnel, hereby dedicate it to be the David Tunnel.”

In 336, at the age of twenty, Alexander the Great ascended his throne and began his conquests, so that for the next seven hundred years everyone from Sparta to India experienced Greek culture and most spoke the Koine, a Greek dialect common to all countries; but the distances in the new empire were so vast, and so few citizens could have direct contact with Greece, that a kind of substitute Greek culture developed, the Hellenism born of men who loved the Greek ideals of beauty but who interpreted them in Egyptian or Persian or Syrian terms.

Damascus road, heading west toward Ptolemais, and as they ran it was easy to see from the long, rhythmic