Ben-Hur: A tale of the Christ
One of the women took the baby, and went to Mary, lying near, and put
it in her arms. Then the bystanders collected about the two.
“It is the Christ!” said a shepherd, at last.
“The Christ!” they all repeated, falling upon their knees in worship.
One of them repeated several times over,
“It is the Lord, and his glory is above the earth and heaven.”
And the simple men, never doubting, kissed the hem of the mother’s
robe, and with joyful faces departed. In the khan, to all the people
aroused and pressing about them, they told their story; and through the
town, and all the way back to the marah, they chanted the refrain of
the angels, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will
towards men!”
The story went abroad, confirmed by the light so generally seen; and
the next day, and for days thereafter, the cave was visited by curious
crowds, of whom some believed, though the greater part laughed and
mocked.
CHAPTER XII
The eleventh day after the birth of the child in the cave, about
mid-afternoon, the three wise men approached Jerusalem by the road from
Shechem. After crossing Brook Cedron, they met many people, of whom
none failed to stop and look after them curiously.
Judea was of necessity an international thoroughfare; a narrow ridge,
raised, apparently, by the pressure of the desert on the east, and the
sea on the west, was all she could claim to be; over the ridge,
however, nature had stretched the line of trade between the east and
the south; and that was her wealth. In other words, the riches of
Jerusalem were the tolls she levied on passing commerce. Nowhere else,
consequently, unless in Rome, was there such constant assemblage of so
many people of so many different nations; in no other city was a
stranger less strange to the residents than within her walls and
purlieus. And yet these three men excited the wonder of all whom they
met on the way to the gates.
A child belonging to some women sitting by the roadside opposite the
Tombs of the Kings saw the party coming; immediately it clapped its
hands, and cried, “Look, look! What pretty bells! What big camels!”
The bells were silver; the camels, as we have seen, were of unusual
size and whiteness, and moved with singular stateliness; the trappings
told of the desert and of long journeys thereon, and also of ample
means in possession of the owners, who sat under the little canopies
exactly as they appeared at the rendezvous beyond the Jebel. Yet it was
not the bells or the camels, or their furniture, or the demeanor of the
riders, that were so wonderful; it was the question put by the man who
rode foremost of the three.
The approach to Jerusalem from the north is across a plain which dips
southward, leaving the Damascus Gate in a vale or hollow. The road is
narrow, but deeply cut by long use, and in places difficult on account
of the cobbles left loose and dry by the washing of the rains. On
either side, however, there stretched, in the old time, rich fields and
handsome olive-groves, which must, in luxurious growth, have been
beautiful, especially to travellers fresh from the wastes of the
desert. In this road, the three stopped before the party in front of
the Tombs.
“Good people,” said Balthasar, stroking his plaited beard, and bending
from his cot, “is not Jerusalem close by?”
“Yes,” answered the woman into whose arms the child had shrunk. “If the
trees on yon swell were a little lower you could see the towers on the
market-place.”
Balthasar gave the Greek and the Hindoo a look, then asked,
“Where is he that is born King of the Jews?”
The women gazed at each other without reply.
“You have not heard of him?”
“No.”
“Well, tell everybody that we have seen his star in the east, and are
come to worship him.”
Thereupon the friends rode on. Of others they asked the same question,
with like result. A large company whom they met going to the Grotto of
Jeremiah were so astonished by the inquiry and the appearance of the
travellers that they turned about and followed them into the city.
So much were the three occupied with the idea of their mission that
they did not care for the view which presently rose before them in the
utmost magnificence: for the village first to receive them on Bezetha;
for Mizpah and Olivet, over on their left; for the wall behind the
village, with its forty tall and solid towers, superadded partly for
strength, partly to gratify the critical taste of the kingly builder;
for the same towered wall bending off to the right, with many an angle,
and here and there an embattled gate, up to the three great white piles
Phasaelus, Mariamne, and Hippicus; for Zion, tallest of the hills,
crowned with marble palaces, and never so beautiful; for the glittering
terraces of the temple on Moriah, admittedly one of the wonders of the
earth; for the regal mountains rimming the sacred city round about
until it seemed in the hollow of a mighty bowl.
They came, at length, to a tower of great height and strength,
overlooking the gate which, at that time, answered to the present
Damascus Gate, and marked the meeting-place of the three roads from
Shechem, Jericho, and Gibeon. A Roman guard kept the passage-way. By
this time the people following the camels formed a train sufficient to
draw the idlers hanging about the portal; so that when Balthasar
stopped to speak to the sentinel, the three became instantly the centre
of a close circle eager to hear all that passed.
“I give you peace,” the Egyptian said, in a clear voice.
The sentinel made no reply.
“We have come great distances in search of one who is born King of the
Jews. Can you tell us where he is?”
The soldier raised the visor of his helmet, and called loudly. From an
apartment at the right of the passage an officer appeared.
“Give way,” he cried, to the crowd which now pressed closer in; and as
they seemed slow to obey, he advanced twirling his javelin vigorously,
now right, now left; and so he gained room.
“What would you?” he asked of Balthasar, speaking in the idiom of the
city.
And Balthasar answered in the same,
“Where is he that is born King of the Jews?”
“Herod?” asked the officer, confounded.
“Herod’s kingship is from Cæsar; not Herod.”
“There is no other King of the Jews.”
“But we have seen the star of him we seek, and come to worship him.”
The Roman was perplexed.
“Go farther,” he said, at last. “Go farther. I am not a Jew. Carry the
question to the doctors in the Temple, or to Hannas the priest, or,
better still, to Herod himself. If there be another King of the Jews,
he will find him.”
Thereupon he made way for the strangers, and they passed the gate. But,
before entering the narrow street, Balthasar lingered to say to his
friends, “We are sufficiently proclaimed. By midnight the whole city
will have heard of us and of our mission. Let us to the khan now.”
CHAPTER XIII
That evening, before sunset, some women were washing clothes on the
upper step of the flight that led down into the basin of the Pool of
Siloam. They knelt each before a broad bowl of earthenware. A girl at
the foot of the steps kept them supplied with water, and sang while she
filled the jar. The song was cheerful, and no doubt lightened their
labor. Occasionally they would sit upon their heels, and look up the
slope of Ophel, and round to the summit of what is now the Mount of
Offence, then faintly glorified by the dying sun.
While they plied their hands, rubbing and wringing the clothes in the
bowls, two other women came to them, each with an empty jar upon her
shoulder.
“Peace to you,” one of the new-comers said.
The laborers paused, sat up, wrung the water from their hands, and
returned the salutation.
“It is nearly night—time to quit.”
“There is no end to work,” was the reply.
“But there is a time to rest, and—”
“To hear what may be passing,” interposed another.
“What news have you?”
“Then you have not heard?”
“No.”
“They say the Christ is born,” said the newsmonger, plunging into her
story.
It was curious to see the faces of the laborers brighten with interest;
on the other side down came the jars, which, in a moment, were turned
into seats for their owners.
“The Christ!” the listeners cried.
“So they say.”
“Who?”
“Everybody; it is common talk.”
“Does anybody believe it?”
“This afternoon three men came across Brook Cedron on the road from
Shechem,” the speaker replied, circumstantially, intending to smother
doubt. “Each one of them rode a camel spotless white, and larger than
any ever before seen in Jerusalem.”
The eyes and mouths of the auditors opened wide.
“To prove how great and rich the men were,” the narrator continued,
“they sat under awnings of silk; the buckles of their saddles were of
gold, as was the fringe of their bridles; the bells were of silver, and
made real music. Nobody knew them; they looked as if they had come from
the ends of the world. Only one of them spoke, and of everybody on the
road, even the women and children, he asked this question—‘Where is he
that is born King of the Jews?’ No one gave them answer—no one
understood what they meant; so they passed on, leaving behind them this
saying: ‘For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship
him.’ They put the question to the Roman at the gate; and he, no wiser
than the simple people on the road, sent them up to Herod.”
“Where are they now?”
“At the khan. Hundreds have been to look at them already, and hundreds
more are going.”
“Who are they?”
“Nobody knows. They are said to be Persians—wise men who talk with the
stars—prophets, it may be, like Elijah and Jeremiah.”
“What do they mean by King of the Jews?”
“The Christ, and that he is just born.”
One of the women laughed, and resumed her work, saying, “Well, when I
see him I will believe.”
Another followed her example: “And I—well, when I see him raise the
dead, I will believe.”
A third said, quietly, “He has been a long time promised. It will be
enough for me to see him heal one leper.”
And the party sat talking until the night came, and, with the help of
the frosty air, drove them home.
Later in the evening, about the beginning of the first watch, there was
an assemblage in the palace on Mount Zion, of probably fifty persons,
who never came together except by order of Herod, and then only when he
had demanded to know some one or more of the deeper mysteries of the
Jewish law and history. It was, in short, a meeting of the teachers of
the colleges, of the chief priests, and of the doctors most noted in
the city for learning—the leaders of opinion, expounders of the
different creeds; princes of the Sadducees; Pharisaic debaters; calm,
soft-spoken, stoical philosophers of the Essene socialists.
The chamber in which the session was held belonged to one of the
interior court-yards of the palace, and was quite large and Romanesque.
The floor was tessellated with marble blocks; the walls, unbroken by a
window, were frescoed in panels of saffron yellow; a divan occupied the
centre of the apartment, covered with cushions of bright-yellow cloth,
and fashioned in form of the letter U, the opening towards the doorway;
in the arch of the divan, or, as it were, in the bend of the letter,
there was an immense bronze tripod, curiously inlaid with gold and
silver, over which a chandelier dropped from the ceiling, having seven
arms, each holding a lighted lamp. The divan and the lamp were purely
Jewish.
The company sat upon the divan after the style of Orientals, in costume
singularly uniform, except as to color. They were mostly men advanced
in years; immense beards covered their faces; to their large noses were
added the effects of large black eyes, deeply shaded by bold brows;