The Source

by James A. Michener

He loved animals and initiated the practice of never slaughtering one member of a family in the presence of others, of never killing a kid and a dam on the same day, lest the creatures be offended by injustice as well as by death.

Kid and Mother

And he came upon other phrases that jolted him regarding the story of Jesus; these made him go back for a second reading: “If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder … thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with

Deuteronomy

“Perhaps, but why a Jewish translation?” “The other thing that’s wrong with the King James Version is that it’s purely Protestant in its choice of words. You Catholics discovered that early, so you held to your Douay Version, which was just as lopsided on the Catholic side. And all the time, the book you’re wrestling over is a Jewish book, written by Jews for the instruction of Jews in a very Jewish religion. We can be forgiven if we feel that we ought to have a translation which takes these things into account … especially with Deuteronomy.” “So now you’ve slanted everything into a Jewish bias.” “We didn’t, but that’s not the point. Do you know Isaiah 7:14?” Cullinane was always impressed with the way Jews could cite the Bible, and now Eliav repeated the Old Testament words that lay at the heart of New Testament Christianity: “ ‘Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.’ ” Cullinane consulted his Protestant Bible and satisfied himself that Eliav had quoted accurately. But then the Jew said, “Now look it up in the Jewish translation,” and there Cullinane found the word virgin translated as young woman. “On what authority did they make that change?” he asked in some surprise. “Look at the original Hebrew,” Eliav suggested, handing him a third version, and in the original language of the Bible the word virgin was not mentioned. It had been introduced by Christian scholars as a device f...

IsIah 7:14

In the beginning the great hole had to pass through the accumulated rubble of the mound, and the diggers uncovered relics first of the bronze age when the Hebrews were bringing El-Shaddai to the site, then of the earlier copper age when Canaanites were erecting monoliths to Baal, and finally of the stone age when the Family of Ur was first erecting its menhir to El.

The Ages

“Gomer, widow of Israel, for the last time I command you. Speak the words I send you. Israel has gone whoring after false gods and must be destroyed. Makor has built walls of vanity upon foundations of sand and they shall be thrown down. Your people worship Baal and lust after naked goddesses and in captivity they shall suffer. Tell your son to remember not Babylon but Jerusalem. Gomer, speak these things.” “Thank you, Yahweh,

Gomer

“And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee … This is my covenant, which ye shall keep … Every man child among you shall be circumcised … And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations … And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant … And Abraham was ninety years old and nine, when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin … And all the men of his house, born in the house, and bought with money of the stranger, were circumcised

Covenant

Then she added, “It’s something you won’t understand. But we cannot believe in any kingdom, neither of our own making nor of Rome’s. We hold that the true kingdom is of God and will come only with the Messiah, so even if Herod had been Jewish we wouldn’t have accepted him. There will never again be a Jewish state in Israel, for we are destined to live under the yoke of others, offering our testimony not to principalities but to God.” I was unwilling to follow her in these philosophical discussions, so I turned the talk to happier days.

Jewish Kingdom

Rab Naaman of Makor, the old man was called, a white-bearded rabbi who had lived to be a hundred and three. In his ancient years, when he weighed less than ninety pounds and could scarcely be heard through his ashen beard, he had discovered a student much like himself, a peasant who till the age of forty could neither read nor write but who had developed into one of the leading scholars of Jewish history—the legalist Akiba—and these two self-made men conspired to save Judaism; for they assembled the law whereby Jews could live now that the external focus of their religion, the temple in Jerusalem, was no more. Once all Jews had lived either in Galilee or the south, but now only a small percentage did so, for the Romans had driven the majority to Spain, to Egypt, to Babylonia, to Arabia and to countries not yet named. How scattered they were, how powerless, yet always bound to Israel by the work that Rab Naaman and Akiba had performed.

Akiva

“Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.” That was all God said; possibly He did not want a mother sheep to be abused by knowing that its offspring was to be cooked in her milk, which would double her anguish, as it were. Or the restriction might have been imposed because Canaanites to the north indulged in this practice and anything a Canaanite did was to be avoided. At any rate, God had reiterated the simple directive, and it fell to the rabbis to

Milk&Meat

In those years the Jews in cities like Gretz lived pretty much as they wished. Fanatic Christians sometimes howled against the commingling of Jew and Catholic, but no restrictive measures had yet been promulgated, so that a distinguished banker like Hagarzi could be accepted as one of the city’s important citizens.

Beginning of German Antisemitism

The mob was after Jews but could not have explained why. In the obligatory Easter sermons they had listened to ill-informed priests crying, “The Jews crucified Jesus Christ and God wants you to punish them.” From learned discourses delivered by bishops they had discovered that in the Old Testament, Isaiah himself had prophesied that a Virgin would give birth to Jesus Christ, and that the Jews had stubbornly rejected the teaching of their own Book: “For this sin they shall be outcast forever.” And in their daily life they watched as the Jew lent money, which honest men were forbidden to do, and some had known at first-hand the interest which moneylenders charged. But stronger than any of these complaints was the inchoate suspicion, not often expressed in words, that in a world where all decent men were Christian, there was something intolerably perverse in a group who clung obstinately to an earlier religion which had been proved an error.

German Antisemitism