Ben-Hur: A tale of the Christ
“Oh, I see now why the Greek outstripped us,” said Judah, intensely
interested. “And the ark; accursed be the Babylonians who destroyed
it!”
“Nay, Judah, be of faith. It was not destroyed, only lost, hidden away
too safely in some cavern of the mountains. One day—Hillel and Shammai
both say so—one day, in the Lord’s good time, it will be found and
brought forth, and Israel dance before it, singing as of old. And they
who look upon the faces of the cherubim then, though they have seen the
face of the ivory Minerva, will be ready to kiss the hand of the Jew
from love of his genius, asleep through all the thousands of years.”
The mother, in her eagerness, had risen into something like the
rapidity and vehemence of a speech-maker; but now, to recover herself,
or to pick up the thread of her thought, she rested awhile.
“You are so good, my mother,” he said, in a grateful way. “And I will
never be done saying so. Shammai could not have talked better, nor
Hillel. I am a true son of Israel again.”
“Flatterer!” she said. “You do not know that I am but repeating what I
heard Hillel say in an argument he had one day in my presence with a
sophist from Rome.”
“Well, the hearty words are yours.”
Directly all her earnestness returned.
“Where was I? Oh yes, I was claiming for our Hebrew fathers the first
statues. The trick of the sculptor, Judah, is not all there is of art,
any more than art is all there is of greatness. I always think of great
men marching down the centuries in groups and goodly companies,
separable according to nationalities; here the Indian, there the
Egyptian, yonder the Assyrian; above them the music of trumpets and the
beauty of banners; and on their right hand and left, as reverent
spectators, the generations from the beginning, numberless. As they go,
I think of the Greek, saying, ‘Lo! The Hellene leads the way.’ Then the
Roman replies, ‘Silence! what was your place is ours now; we have left
you behind as dust trodden on.’ And all the time, from the far front
back over the line of march, as well as forward into the farthest
future, streams a light of which the wranglers know nothing, except
that it is forever leading them on—the Light of Revelation! Who are
they that carry it? Ah, the old Judean blood! How it leaps at the
thought! By the light we know them. Thrice blessed, O our fathers,
servants of God, keepers of the covenants! Ye are the leaders of men,
the living and the dead. The front is thine; and though every Roman
were a Cæsar, ye shall not lose it!”
Judah was deeply stirred.
“Do not stop, I pray you,” he cried. “You give me to hear the sound of
timbrels. I wait for Miriam and the women who went after her dancing
and singing.”
She caught his feeling, and, with ready wit, wove it into her speech.
“Very well, my son. If you can hear the timbrel of the prophetess, you
can do what I was about to ask; you can use your fancy, and stand with
me, as if by the wayside, while the chosen of Israel pass us at the
head of the procession. Now they come—the patriarchs first; next the
fathers of the tribes. I almost hear the bells of their camels and the
lowing of their herds. Who is he that walks alone between the
companies? An old man, yet his eye is not dim, nor his natural force
abated. He knew the Lord face to face! Warrior, poet, orator, lawgiver,
prophet, his greatness is as the sun at morning, its flood of splendor
quenching all other lights, even that of the first and noblest of the
Cæsars. After him the judges. And then the kings—the son of Jesse, a
hero in war, and a singer of songs eternal as that of the sea; and his
son, who, passing all other kings in riches and wisdom, and while
making the Desert habitable, and in its waste places planting cities,
forgot not Jerusalem which the Lord had chosen for his seat on earth.
Bend lower, my son! These that come next are the first of their kind,
and the last. Their faces are raised, as if they heard a voice in the
sky and were listening. Their lives were full of sorrows. Their
garments smell of tombs and caverns. Hearken to a woman among
them—‘Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously!’ Nay, put
your forehead in the dust before them! They were tongues of God, his
servants, who looked through heaven, and, seeing all the future, wrote
what they saw, and left the writing to be proven by time. Kings turned
pale as they approached them, and nations trembled at the sound of
their voices. The elements waited upon them. In their hands they
carried every bounty and every plague. See the Tishbite and his servant
Elisha! See the sad son of Hilkiah, and him, the seer of visions, by
the river of Chebar! And of the three children of Judah who refused the
image of the Babylonian, lo! that one who, in the feast to the thousand
lords, so confounded the astrologers. And yonder—O my son, kiss the
dust again!—yonder the gentle son of Amoz, from whom the world has its
promise of the Messiah to come!”
In this passage the fan had been kept in rapid play; it stopped now,
and her voice sank low.
“You are tired,” she said.
“No,” he replied, “I was listening to a new song of Israel.”
The mother was still intent upon her purpose, and passed the pleasant
speech.
“In such light as I could, my Judah, I have set our great men before
you—patriarchs, legislators, warriors, singers, prophets. Turn we to
the best of Rome. Against Moses place Cæsar, and Tarquin against
David; Sylla against either of the Maccabees; the best of the consuls
against the judges; Augustus against Solomon, and you are done:
comparison ends there. But think then of the prophets—greatest of the
great.”
She laughed scornfully.
“Pardon me. I was thinking of the soothsayer who warned Caius Julius
against the Ides of March, and fancied him looking for the omens of
evil which his master despised in the entrails of a chicken. From that
picture turn to Elijah sitting on the hill-top on the way to Samaria,
amid the smoking bodies of the captains and their fifties, warning the
son of Ahab of the wrath of our God. Finally, O my Judah—if such speech
be reverent—how shall we judge Jehovah and Jupiter unless it be by what
their servants have done in their names? And as for what you shall do—”
She spoke the latter words slowly, and with a tremulous utterance.
“As for what you shall do, my boy—serve the Lord, the Lord God of
Israel, not Rome. For a child of Abraham there is no glory except in
the Lord’s ways, and in them there is much glory.”
“I may be a soldier then?” Judah asked.
“Why not? Did not Moses call God a man of war?”
There was then a long silence in the summer chamber.
“You have my permission,” she said, finally; “if only you serve the
Lord instead of Cæsar.”
He was content with the condition, and by-and-by fell asleep. She arose
then, and put the cushion under his head, and, throwing a shawl over
him and kissing him tenderly, went away.
CHAPTER VI
The good man, like the bad, must die; but, remembering the lesson of
our faith, we say of him and the event, “No matter, he will open his
eyes in heaven.” Nearest this in life is the waking from healthful
sleep to a quick consciousness of happy sights and sounds.
When Judah awoke, the sun was up over the mountains; the pigeons were
abroad in flocks, filling the air with the gleams of their white wings;
and off southeast he beheld the Temple, an apparition of gold in the
blue of the sky. These, however, were familiar objects, and they
received but a glance; upon the edge of the divan, close by him, a girl
scarcely fifteen sat singing to the accompaniment of a nebel, which she
rested upon her knee, and touched gracefully. To her he turned
listening; and this was what she sang:
THE SONG.
“Wake not, but hear me, love!
Adrift, adrift on slumber’s sea,
Thy spirit call to list to me.
Wake not, but hear me, love!
A gift from Sleep, the restful king,
All happy, happy dreams I bring.
“Wake not, but hear me, love!
Of all the world of dreams ’tis thine
This once to choose the most divine.
So choose, and sleep, my love!
But ne’er again in choice be free,
Unless, unless—thou dream’st of me.”
She put the instrument down, and, resting her hands in her lap, waited
for him to speak. And as it has become necessary to tell somewhat of
her, we will avail ourselves of the chance, and add such particulars of
the family into whose privacy we are brought as the reader may wish to
know.
The favors of Herod had left surviving him many persons of vast estate.
Where this fortune was joined to undoubted lineal descent from some
famous son of one of the tribes, especially Judah, the happy individual
was accounted a Prince of Jerusalem—a distinction which sufficed to
bring him the homage of his less favored countrymen, and the respect,
if nothing more, of the Gentiles with whom business and social
circumstance brought him into dealing. Of this class none had won in
private or public life a higher regard than the father of the lad whom
we have been following. With a remembrance of his nationality which
never failed him, he had yet been true to the king, and served him
faithfully at home and abroad. Some offices had taken him to Rome,
where his conduct attracted the notice of Augustus, who strove without
reserve to engage his friendship. In his house, accordingly, were many
presents, such as had gratified the vanity of kings—purple togas, ivory
chairs, golden pateroe—chiefly valuable on account of the imperial hand
which had honorably conferred them. Such a man could not fail to be
rich; yet his wealth was not altogether the largess of royal patrons.
He had welcomed the law that bound him to some pursuit; and, instead of
one, he entered into many. Of the herdsmen watching flocks on the
plains and hill-sides, far as old Lebanon, numbers reported to him as
their employer; in the cities by the sea, and in those inland, he
founded houses of traffic; his ships brought him silver from Spain,
whose mines were then the richest known; while his caravans came twice
a year from the East, laden with silks and spices. In faith he was a
Hebrew, observant of the law and every essential rite; his place in the
synagogue and Temple knew him well; he was thoroughly learned in the
Scriptures; he delighted in the society of the college-masters, and
carried his reverence for Hillel almost to the point of worship. Yet he
was in no sense a Separatist; his hospitality took in strangers from
every land; the carping Pharisees even accused him of having more than
once entertained Samaritans at his table. Had he been a Gentile, and
lived, the world might have heard of him as the rival of Herodes
Atticus: as it was, he perished at sea some ten years before this
second period of our story, in the prime of life, and lamented
everywhere in Judea. We are already acquainted with two members of his
family—his widow and son; the only other was a daughter—she whom we
have seen singing to her brother.
Tirzah was her name, and as the two looked at each other, their
resemblance was plain. Her features had the regularity of his, and were
of the same Jewish type; they had also the charm of childish innocency
of expression. Home-life and its trustful love permitted the negligent
attire in which she appeared. A chemise buttoned upon the right
shoulder, and passing loosely over the breast and back and under the
left arm, but half concealed her person above the waist, while it left
the arms entirely nude. A girdle caught the folds of the garment,
marking the commencement of the skirt. The coiffure was very simple and
becoming—a silken cap, Tyrian-dyed; and over that a striped scarf of
the same material, beautifully embroidered, and wound about in thin