God Knows Read online

  Samuel was prepared to settle right off for Eliab, the firstborn. But God was speaking my language when He told Samuel a book must not be judged by its cover or a man by his countenance or height. All of my brothers were taller than I. Abinadab and Shammah were passed over in turn. It was the same way right down the line with the rest of the seven.

  'No more?' Samuel was disgruntled. 'Is this all thy children?'

  They sent to fetch me.

  The tall, thin, gloomy man I found waiting for me when I arrived back home certainly was hairy. If you believe that Esau was a hairy man, you should have had a look at Samuel in his long robe, with all that black and graying hair drooping out from almost every visible inch of him. Apart from sunken dark eyes that were fervid and sad and a narrow patch of forehead that was wrinkled and yellow, it was impossible to tell where the flesh and bone of his face left off and the stringy growth from his scalp and cheeks began. He was not so disagreeable a sight to me once I came to know him better, although I was never at ease in his company and I cannot say I really liked him. His mother, Hannah, mumbling like a drunkard at the altar of the tabernacle of Eli, had vowed that no razor would come upon the head of her son if God ever allowed her to bear one. You could bet without risk that the promise had been kept.

  His manner that day was arbitrary and short-tempered, his voice was dry, and there was nothing remotely like exultation in the manner in which he greeted me as the person he had been sent to find and anoint. The words with which he explained himself were uttered tonelessly. He did not seem at all the sort of traveler who might enjoy a good joke or take a moment for friendliness or small talk.

  'The Lord hath repented Himself of having chosen Saul king,' he said, uncorking his horn of oil, 'for he hath not always followed all His words and performed His commandments. This day He hath rent the kingdom from Saul and given it to a neighbor who is better than he and who is more after His own heart. That neighbor is you.'

  You'll be interested to know I was flattered. But Samuel was already leaving. I ran to catch up.

  'Does that mean,' I cried, 'that I don't have to keep the sheep anymore or let myself be bossed around by my family? Does it mean that you and everyone else have to do whatever I command?'

  'It means,' came the tart retort, 'that you and everyone else always have to do whatever I and the Lord command. For the Lord and I are more powerful than anything on earth, more powerful than all of the armed might of Saul. Saul has not always obeyed every command. Therefore, we have rejected Saul and chosen thee.'

  I was struck suddenly by the presence of his red cow. 'The heifer, the heifer,' I blurted out in a rash heresy typical of my audacious personality. 'Your red cow. What did you need it for? How come you and the Lord are so frightened of Saul if you've really got all that power?'

  'Don't mix in,' Samuel answered in a rasping voice. 'Do you want to be king of Israel or don't you?'

  Well, you know the answer I gave to that one. 'When can I start? How soon does it happen?'

  'When it happens.'

  'Can I tell people?'

  'Tell nobody,' he cautioned, turning pale. 'Your words will put us both in danger.'

  I told everybody.

  'If you don't stop talking about it,' came the threat from my brothers, 'we'll put you down a well and sell you into slavery in Egypt.'

  Even illiterates like my brothers and sisters knew a little bit about the story of Joseph and that epochal journey down into Egypt and could espy the similarities48 in situation between me and the central character.

  And a constant threat I endured through childhood was to have done to me what was done to Joseph if I didn't mind my sheep and my manners and go to bed when told and make no noise about the house when anybody else was trying to sleep. They sure did hate the sound of my playing and singing when they were trying to rest. Neither my brothers nor my sisters took any interest in my music or writing and, to the last days of each, were unanimously unimpressed by my famous elegy and impervious to the virtue and stately beauty of the many psalms and saying with which I am rightly credited. Like Joseph, I was the glittering prodigy in a large family of older, primitive, unappreciating boors. To call them Philistines would be a slander--against the Philistines, who were really quite advanced. Uncircumcised, but advanced. Doubtless the vanity and snobbishness characteristic of Joseph and me were continual incitements to the animosity of the others; but I was never as bratty as he, and I believe I had more than a coat of many colors and a good way with interpreting dreams on which to base my early presumption of superiority.

  Still, Joseph is a collateral ancestor with whom I can easily identify and sympathize, even at his infantile worst, although he certainly put them all through the wringer, didn't he, once they journeyed down into Egypt during the famine to buy food and he found himself with their lives in his hands. He recognized them; they did not identify him. But revenge was not that sweet for him. Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick, but I don't think he knew that.

  Fighting tender emotions he could not always contain, he tantalized his brothers with a fine drawn-out cruelty before disclosing himself in the end as their long-lost brother and affording them haven in Egypt. What was the point? He didn't enjoy it. If you keep in mind how long it took those days to go down to Egypt from Canaan by foot, and then trudge back and forth again, you realize he must have kept them sweating on tenterhooks for almost half a year with his bewildering frame-ups for theft and spurious accusations of reconnoitering and with his unnerving demands. More than anything else in the world, he wanted to feast his eyes on Jacob again, and see, kiss, and embrace Benjamin, his younger full brother. By prolonging the suspense and terror, he was needlessly delaying the reconciliation he himself was yearning so dearly to consummate. Where were the laughs? After each new frightening setback he engineered for them, he went flying away with his eyes bathed in tears to cry by himself in his chambers. Even that same aged father he revered he subjected to an agony of heartbreak and dread, and he came close to bringing his gray hairs with sorrow down into the grave by asking for Benjamin as a hostage.

  'Joseph is not,' Jacob had warned with foreboding when left with no alternative but to send Benjamin down into Egypt with the others, 'and my son is left alone to me of my marriage with Rachel. If I am bereaved, of my children, I am bereaved, and my gray hairs with sorrow soon will be brought down into the grave.'

  With humble integrity, Judah offered himself as prisoner instead, describing to Joseph the danger to their father. Listening, Joseph's heart broke. He could maintain the deception no longer and he kissed all his brethren and wept upon them. At Jacob's death Joseph had him embalmed, and how the eyes of those rustic nomads must have opened at their first exposure to that Egyptian practice! For Joseph, it was already familiar stuff.

  What goes on in families that they perpetrate such heartless deeds upon each other? God knows I've been guilty of much in my time, but I've never been guilty of anything like that. And my children have been just as50 bad as Jacob's, with the things they've done to each other and to me. It could be that the spoiled child in all of us never grows up and that the feelings of Joseph for his father and his brothers were no less confused and confusing than were Saul's to me, or towards his real son Jonathan. Or than mine for Saul. Or mine for God, and His for me: we can't seem to make up our minds. I was sorry for Saul all the way and I am sorry for him now. I worshipped and idolized Saul, for he allowed me at last, for a little while, to be able to love myself unembarrassedly to the fullest, until he began to hate me unfairly with that malignant and psychotic mistrust and I was finally forced to run from his murderous anger. My drive was to excel rather than to subvert, and I don't believe I deliberately ever said or did a single thing to weaken his position.

  And I know I certainly never went nearly as far against any of my brothers as Joseph did against all of his; but mine, of course, never went that far with me. They mocked, they growled, they ordered, they nagged, criticized, and interfered.
But they never seized me with the intent to kill me, imprisoned me in a well, and sold me instead into slavery to a caravan of traders crossing down through Canaan from Gilead into Egypt. They did not come with my bloodied coat to my thunderstruck father and report I had been eaten by an animal. That part was ugly. I was young when I killed Goliath, and after that I was no longer in their power and they were in mine. I gave them all what protection I could when they dispersed in panic from Bethlehem at the rumors that Saul was planning a blood feud against my whole family, and they made their way as best they could to the headquarters I had established in the cave at Adullam. My mother and father I placed in the keeping of the king of Moab on the other side of the Jordan. All the rest in the families of my brothers and my sisters I took with my two new wives and my six hundred fighting men and their full households when I crossed over into Gath in the service of King Achish and his Philistines.

  'You worked and fought for the Philistines?' people to this day will be aghast to recall.

  'You're goddamned right I did,' I could reply in warm temper. 'And my men would have stoned me to death if I hadn't.'

  Now that's another good part of my struggles with Saul that you aren't likely to find in Chronicles, are you? They bowdlerized us both. What difference does it make now? I came through when it counted, didn't I? So did Joseph and Moses, and God should give thanks to all three of us for helping Him make good on His promises to Abraham. I did it with the sword. Joseph did it by translating a confounding dream of the Pharaoh's about stalks of corn and fat cows and skinny cows into a familiar two-word precept that might have earned him a stinting accolade from Sigmund Freud and ignited a flash of esteem in the eye of every trader in commodity futures. The interpretation?

  'Buy corn,' said Joseph.

  'Buy corn?' said the Pharaoh.

  'The dream,' said Joseph. 'The dream wants you to buy corn.'

  When the famine struck, only the storehouses of the Pharaoh were full. Hungry people came with money from round about the lands of Egypt and Palestine to buy the food they needed in order to live. When the money failed, they paid with cattle, horses, and asses. When the livestock was gone, they paid with their land, and then with themselves. The Pharaoh owned it all, except for the land of the priests. Joseph decided on a fifth for the Pharaoh of everything produced, and lo-- among the other amazements of their civilization, the Egyptians had also devised feudalism and sharecropping.

  A fifth? Not even I could get away with that much, or ever wanted to. Solomon did want to, but had to settle for a twelfth and brought the kingdom to the brink of collapse with his reckless and vainglorious expenditures. He reached for everything and lavished all on himself, and his imbecilic heir gave the shattering blow to all hopes of restored national amity with a jeering public utterance as soon as he took possession of the throne following Solomon's death.

  'My little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins,' said the princely Rehoboam fatuously to a populace already restive from exploitation. 'My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.'With scorpions yet, that moron. As smart as Samson he was, and half as civil. Who did he think he was talking to? Overnight, the work of Joseph, Moses, God, and me had disintegrated into explosive chaos and ruin. Civil war again, and the empire I had created was once more split in two separate countries.

  Moses got nothing but abuse from every side for all his trouble. Joseph, at least, got permission from the Pharaoh for everyone in the families of the sons of Jacob to move down into Egypt, where all of the good of the country awaited them. But these shaggy tent-dwellers from Canaan were in for another discouraging surprise when they arrived with their cattle and perceived at once that assimilation into this cultivated society was going to be impossible. They were an abomination. Egyptians wouldn't eat with them. Not because they were Jewish, mind you--they themselves hardly understood that. All they knew was that they were the sons of Jacob. They were shunned because they were cattlemen, shepherds. To the polished Egyptians, every sheepherder was an abomination, every nomad. Thus, there could be no room for them at any of the inns of Egypt until Joseph requested and secured from the Pharaoh pleasant pastures in the land of Goshen upon which the sons of Jacob, who was53 now also called Israel, could settle with their wives and their little ones and their tents and animals, and eat, as a grateful Pharaoh gave assurance, the fat of the land. The genius of Joseph for oneiromancy had saved the country from starvation and enriched the Pharaoh beyond his wildest fantasies.

  Four hundred years later there arose up a new Pharaoh over Egypt who knew not Joseph. The Egyptians had short memories, didn't they? He cast the descendants of the children of Israel into slavery under hard taskmasters and it fell upon Moses, poor soul, to lead us out. He never asked for the job and he got no pleasure from it.

  'Take off your shoes,' was the first he heard of it from the burning bush. 'You're standing on holy ground.'

  There went the rest of his life. To talk the Pharaoh into releasing the Hebrews from Egypt was going to be hard enough. To organize a harmonious resistance movement and persuade the Hebrews to follow him out was not going to be much easier. To follow? Maybe. Without argument and faultfinding? Impossible. Like striving for the wind.

  'Who-who-who-who--'

  'Stop that, Moses,' said the Lord. 'I fixed your stammer, didn't I?'

  '--am I that they should continue to believe me? Ho w-how-ho w--'

  'Moses!'

  '--shall I answer when they ask for a name?'

  'I AM THAT I AM.'

  Moses stepped back with a look of pain. 'Again I AM THAT I AM?'

  'Why not?'

  'They look darkly at me now and mutter curses already. What-what-what--'

  'Will you stop that?'

  'What will they say when the hardships increase?'

  'Vey is mir' is what they did say when the hardships increased, which translated means 'Woe is me.' The Pharaoh bore down harder as they toiled in the field and labored with mortar and brick.

  'I'm still hardening his heart,' the Lord replied when Moses objected. 'And don't you dare tell Me again that it makes no sense. That's a commandment. I'll take care of the Pharaoh, you take care of the people. I think you're going to have your hands full.'

  That was no lie. What would have happened had Moses said no?

  As though taking note of the volume of conversation that necessarily lay ahead, God did give Moses a brother named Aaron into whose mouth they could put words, then a sister named Miriam to pitch in as a prophet. Otherwise, with Moses slow of speech, the ten plagues could have amounted to twenty and the forty years of wandering to four hundred.

  In departing from Egypt, they wisely avoided the way of the land of the Philistines and headed southward through the way of the wilderness of the Red Sea. Moses took the bones of Joseph with him. The grumbling and kibitzing he deplored were aggravating him from the start, along with that peculiar ironical statement, shaped in the form of a rhetorical question, which we Jews invented and with which we have been identified since the day Cain responded: 'Am I my brother's keeper?'

  'What's the matter?' was the snarling recrimination with which the crowds descended upon Moses when they saw the Egyptian chariots racing after them. 'Are there no graves in Egypt that you had to lead us away to die in the wilderness?' That was another good one.

  By the middle of the second month the whole congregation was murmuring in hunger against Moses and Aaron and missing the good old days of bondage in Egypt where they sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full. Moses was defensive. The Lord sent manna.55 They preferred the fleshpots and bread. God gave them some quail. And poisoned them for eating it.

  And He spake. And He spake and He spake and He spake a lot to Moses, and then He spake and spake to Moses some more. There was so much spaking it's a wonder Moses had time to walk. And not one word of thanks or praise, not one word ever. And never anything to anyon
e afterward about missing him when he was gone. The good Lord just never seemed to tire of speaking to Moses, blowing up over one thing or another with his threats of mass annihilation and laying down the laws one day after the next all through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. He wrote them on stone with his finger; for him that was easy, but Moses was the one who had to bear the heavy tablets down the mountain. And that time that he smashed them when he saw the golden calf, he had to go all the way back up the mountain for another set. Forty years this went on, with God wrathful and fulminating and the people recalcitrant, stiff-necked, and disobedient. Till that day arrived when--weary enough to want to wash his hands of it all, I'd bet--he hiked up Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah for his look across the Jordan at the Promised Land he was barred from entering for some undisclosed trespass neither I nor anyone else has been able to figure out. And shortly thereafter, though his eye was not dim nor his natural force lessened, Moses died, and no one even to this day knows the place of his sepulchre.

  Some Promised Land. The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO. Our winters are rainy, our summers hot. To people who didn't know how to wind a wristwatch He gives underground oceans of oil. To us He gives hernia, piles, and anti-Semitism. Those leery spies returning from56 Canaan after their first look described the place as a land that eats up its people, a land inhabited wholly by giants. The reports were false but not altogether off the mark. True, there were figs, pomegranates, and clusters of grapes so heavy they could be borne back only on a thick staff shouldered between two men. But the land does tend to eat up its people. Still, it's the best that's been offered us, and we want to hold on to it.