A FRAGMENT

Below them the fields stretched like dark velvet. Here and there the small fires of shepherds

glowed, and the grand moon behind them silvered the sheep so that they looked like clouds floating above

a dark sea. And the stars, the bright stars so icy cold. Silence except for crickets, and the night air damp

and heavy settling on all.

Antiphon had brought a blanket, which he tugged around this shoulders. “You’re not cold?”

Judas shook his head. “Keeps me awake.” He turned to the Greek. “What are doing with us,

Antiphon? Why have you joined with us?”

Antiphon shrugged. “I like adventure. I told you that.”

“You might have had just as much adventure with your own people, attacking us. And I think

you’d be much more likely to be on the winning side if you had.”

“So. But I like the lost cause. And a desperate fight is much more amusing than an overwhelming

rout.” He smiled at Judas. “I’m sure you agree with me, my friend, or you wouldn’t be sitting here beside

me.”

Judas snorted and shook his head. He rubbed his hands together against the evening chill: perhaps

he should have brought a blanket. “But why us, Antiphon? Why us?”

One of his hands emerged from the blanket. Antiphon had found a long twig, and now pushed

around the bare ground between his feet, tracing little patterns. “Oh, I’ve had a fascination with the Jews

for many years. You might say that they’re a hobby of mine. I kept running into Jews for some reason.

And I liked them. I liked their food, and their singing. I liked the look of their women: modest, yet ripe

and beckoning. I liked the way the men drank wine without getting drunk. I liked their jokes. Wherever I

went I’d find myself wandering through the streets, until I came to some Jewish enclave, and I’d go to an

inn and feel like I was home. But I could never be Jew: I’m too attached to my foreskin.”

Judas laughed, and then covered his mouth, embarrassed. “Not to worry, friend,” Antiphon said.

“I don’t really think the Greeks mean to kill us all tonight.” He waved his stick toward the vast valley
below. “Here we are protected for awhile: the hills behind us too treacherous to climb, the valley too open

to view. We’re safe here.”

“Until the flocks run out of grass,” Judas agreed. “We are led by their needs, like our fathers were

led by the pillar of fire from the Ark.”

“Ah yes, the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Testimony. Whatever became of that box,

Judas? I’ve always found it a fascinating oddity.”

“I’ve heard some say that the prophet Jeremiah carried the ark across the Jordan and hid it in a

cave at Mount Nebo. Doubtless the Lord will reveal its location in his own good time.”

“In a dream no doubt, given to some child of obscure parentage. Your god enjoys that sort of

thing. He’s very strange, your god. I think that’s why I find the Jews so charming. Your god is

remarkably strange.”

Judas shifted uncomfortably. Antiphon had been a great help, and might even one day be his

friend, but he didn’t like it much when Greeks started mocking the Lord of Hosts.

Antiphon noticed. “I mean you no harm with my musings, Judas Maccabees. But since I have

fought beside you, and bled beside you, perhaps you’ll indulge me? For I have some questions about your

god, and you might know their answers.”

“I’m no scholar. Let’s find a priest.”

“Now there’s the thing, Judas. Among my people, the priests make it their task to learn every

little thing about the gods they serve. Not so among the Jews. Your priests speak only of rules, of clean

and unclean. How to kill, how to burn. Of their god they speak very little, except of his wrath if some

detail gets fudged. Who then knows your god?”

“One of our poets maybe, or a prophet? I’m not sure what answer you seek?”

Antiphon chuckled. “Our gods all have stories. Every schoolboy knows them. They live together

on a great mountain and argue all the time. They pop down among us in human form, and start wars, or

create elaborate tasks for us, or perilous journeys, and trick us mercilessly, or give us treasures or
kingdoms. Of course the gods most relish ravishing any attractive young virgin they might spy from their

great heights. Pretty virgins drive make them crazy.

“Your god, by contrast has no such stories. No virgins. No treasures. No tricks. He never puts on

a human form to walk among you. How does he appear to you? In a dream. Or in a flaming bush. Or a

face or voice in a cloud or smoke.

“And in these insubstantial forms, he gives your people the most elaborate directives. Do this and

this. Make this vessel so many cubits and so many wide. Make it out of acacia wood and locust beans.

You know the sort of thing.

“And it’s not enough for you god simply to say his demands. No. He writes them down, with his

own finger of fire, and into stone! I seriously doubt that any of our gods could even sign their names, let

alone engrave commandments.”

“It is a testimony to his greatness,” Judas said. He wasn’t sure where Antiphon was leading.

“Yes, the greatness of your god. The greatness of the Lord of Hosts. That’s another aspect so

different than our gods. Your god moves the wind, and brings fire and plagues, and fills rivers with blood,

and parts the sea. So sweeping and so grand.”

“As Moses told Pharaoh, the Lord of Hosts is Great God,” Judas agreed. “Moses revealed to the

Egyptians the power of the Lord, until Pharaoh at last relented and set them free?”

“But why, tell me friend, must he do all these great acts? All to get one king to say one word. So

powerful a god, yet he couldn’t coax a simple word from the lips of single man? And instead must wipe

out hundreds of children, and fill the streets with death? Why visit the punishment for one man’s

obdurance on an entire nation? Yet that is your god in a nutshell.

“Wind and clouds and seas he commands with ease. Getting someone to change his mind seems

however a task quite beyond him. In fact, I am so surprised that he has managed to find a whole tribe of

priests who do nothing more than minister to his needs.”

“What needs? Our lord needs nothing! He is the lord of all!”

 “Yes that’s as may be, but still, he likes the smell of burning, doesn’t he? Incense. The flesh of

lambs and goats and cattle and birds. He’s set up elaborate demands so he can have the smoke of their

carcasses every morning and all day. He seems quite incapable of getting this himself. Our god Zeus

might do the same by throwing a thunderbolt at his intended victim. But your god needs humans to attend

his needs. I can’t imagine what he’s doing now the Temple is in disarray.

“In point of fact, where is your god now? Do you have any idea? He used to live in a little box,

but you say yourself that box is now hidden. Then he took up residence in the House built for him by

Solomon. Broken and destroyed, and then rebuilt. I suppose he came back when it was done. But now,

surely, he finds it too obnoxious to remain, filled with as it is with sex and swine. So where is he? Where

has he gone?”

Judas stood and looked at Antiphon’s face in the moonlight. He studied it so intently that

Antiphon, who felt as though his soul was being weighed by the Jew, grew restive and turned away from

his gaze. “If any other Greek had said these words, Antiphon, I might have thought them no more than the

goading of a sophist. But your eyes tell me that you ask in sincerity despite your words. And you and I

have shed blood together: our blood has mingled in the soil of this land which makes us brothers. So I

will answer you as a brother.

“The Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, the Creator of the Universe cannot be contained, whether

in an Ark or even a temple. He lives on high, his throne resting on the wings of cherubim, or so we say in

our songs. But the truth of the matter is a harder thing: For the Lord, by reckoning, is no more to be found

in the sky than to be found in the temple. Those who seek him there will surely sorrow.

“Where would one find the Creator except in his Creation. He sweeps the skies and seas because

he made them. They do not obey his will, the express it. He is in spark that lights the flame that lights the

fire, he is the wet within the water. He is in the clay that makes the bowl, and the will that holds the clay

together, and the shape of the clay that gives the bowl its purpose, and the emptiness that gives the bowl

its meaning. He is the space between your fingers as much as in your hand; he is in the black between the

stars. He is the sun, and the tree, and the leaves of the tree, and the shade it casts upon the ground, and the
ground itself. He is in each grain of sand and the space between the grains. He spans the space between us

both. He is the hearing in our ears, the wisdom in our words. He is the light and the dark, the fullness and

the void.