The Source

by James A. Michener

The cypress, that tall and stately tree which marched along the edges of open fields serving as a dark pointer to the sky, was a splendid tree in whose narrow body birds loved to nest, and it produced each season a crop of small cones about the size of a thumb-tip, remarkable for the fact that each contained nine faces cleverly fitted together to hide the seeds inside. There were never eight faces and never ten, but always nine, ingeniously matched in a manner that could not have happened by accident. Some spirit within the cypress had consciously willed its cone to appear as it did, and if this were true of the tree, why was it not also true of the field in which wheat grew?

Proof that God is real!

“A man is never old if he can still be moved emotionally by a woman of his own age.”

Herod, conspiring to win the Jewish throne, started by killing thousands upon thousands of Jews.

How then, in spite of these successes, has Herod degenerated so miserably? Was he haunted by some evil spirit determined to destroy his grandeur? Or did his hatred and suspicion of the Jews slowly derange his mind? Some say that a snake wormed its way into his belly, gnawing at his vitals, but Shelomith and her Jews claim that their god has

placed a special curse upon him for having usurped the throne of David. I have my own theory.

How many Jews did Herod slay in his years of madness? How many columns did he erect during his years of greatness? Neither number can be identified. I, who attended only a few of the massive slaughters, must have witnessed with my own eyes six or eight thousand of the kingdom’s best people hacked to death.

How terrible the tragedy became! Of my friends, one in three fell to the tyrant: Antigonus dragged down by the rumor of a fishmonger; Barnabas slain because he held land the king wanted; Shmuel, the uncle of my wife and a trusted Jew, beheaded on the accusation of a drunken Greek sailor; Leonidas, Marcus and Abraham, all dead for no reason that I know; the poet Lycidas and the songwriter Marcellus slain as members of a conspiracy whose outlines were not defined; Isaac and Yokneam dead merely because they owned silver. I could continue but the roll call is meaningless, for any family in Judaea could equal it, with different names sacrificed to different charges.

Herod would kill a million Jews, if it were necessary, to keep Caesar Augustus placated.

Then Josephus, at the threshold of that scintillating career which would bedazzle Rome—he would betray the Jews of Galilee and would hide with forty survivors from Jotapata in a cave and enter with them into a suicide compact, manipulating the straws so that he could die last, and when all but one lay about him with their throats cut, he would flee; he would surrender to Vespasian, and at the moment when the Romans were to kill him he would astound that general by shouting like an ancient prophet that he foresaw Vespasian as emperor of Rome, and Titus, too; as a result he would be informally adopted by Vespasian and would take his name, under which he would help the Romans crush the Jews in Jerusalem and destroy the nation; in Rome he would live in a house of Vespasian’s as an honorary citizen of the empire with a pension; he would be the personal confidant of three emperors in a row—Vespasian, Titus, Domitian—and he would outlive them all; under their patronage he would write extraordinary books that vilified the Jews and extolled the Romans, but at the same time he would write notable apologetics on behalf of Judaism, so that much of what we know of the Jews during a period of four hundred years comes from his gifted pen; and he would die at last, having described himself repeatedly as trustworthy, brilliant, devoted, and heroic beyond the norm—it was this young general who stood at the edge of the well and extended his hand to Yigal, saying, “I shall rouse the countrysi...

Josephus was a traitor and became a Roman citizen

Nor was it unusual that the town had not heard about His crucifixion on a hill outside Jerusalem, for that event was in no way unusual; one Jewish king had crucified eight hundred of his subjects on one afternoon while getting drunk with his concubines on a public platform in the middle of Jerusalem, to which his guests had been invited to enjoy the spectacle.

In fact, he discovered that the Christians revered Mary almost as much as the Arabs did, and this was reassuring. At the same time, however, he discovered