IV
The children of Israel which came into Egypt were seventy souls; but now the Lord has made us as many as the stars in heaven. And the king of Egypt said unto his people 'behold the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Come on, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply and it come to pass that when there falleth out any war they join also unto our enemies.' And so they did set over us taskmasters to afflict us with their burdens and they made our lives bitter with hard bondage in mortar and in brick. And we sighed and groaned by reason of the bondage and our cry had come unto the Lord. And the Lord stretched out his hand and brought us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage. And when the King of Egypt and his army overtook us by the Red Sea, Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and the waters were divided and the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground and the waters, were a wall unto them on their right hand and on their left. And the waters came again upon the Egyptians and covered them; they sank to the bottom as a stone."
This was the story as the Israelites told it, but the Egyptians laughed at them:
"Nothing of the kind has happened: no king of Egypt ever perished in the sea, and the leader of the Jews whom they call in Egyptian Mosu—Child, Son—is not a 'Son of God' at all, as they imagine, but the son of a slave, a wicked sorcerer, murderer and thief, who ran away into the desert to the Midian nomads and then secretly returned to Egypt and became the leader of a robber band of Khabiri, the Plunderers, who are the same as the Jews. The Khabiri are continually rising in the border lands of Egypt. In the days of King Tutmose the Fourth there was such a rising; a band of Khabiri went to the desert of Sinai and perished there of hunger and thirst together with Mosu or Moses, their leader."
This was how the sons of Ham mocked the sons of Israel. And, indeed, not only the Egyptians but many of the Israelites themselves—for Moses led only a part of them out of Egypt—refused to believe the miracles of Exodus or to worship the new god, Jahve.
"What sort of god is it?" they asked. "We do not know him. Jahve in the Midian language means 'Destroyer.' He is the god of the nomads of Sinai and not of the Israelites, the demon of the desert, a consuming fire. His son, Moses, covered his face when he appeared before the people lest they should discover whom he was like. No, the gods of our fathers, the gentle Elohim, were different: Eliun, the Father, El-Shaddai the Son, and El Ruach, the Mother. This new god is anger, tempest, consuming fire and those three are mercy, loving kindness, dewy freshness."
And they also said:
"There has been no Exodus but there will be; there has been no Son yet but the Son is to come according to the words of our father Jacob: 'the sceptre shall not depart from Judah nor a lawgiver from between his feet until the Messiah come.'"
Hamuel, son of Avinoam of the house of Judah, a priest of El-Shaddai, worshipped the old gods, the Elohim, hated the new god Jahve and awaited the coming of the Messiah.
He was a wise man; he doctored the sick; told fortunes by throwing dice—teraphim—which revealed the divine preordination of human destinies; he received good pay for this and also made money by a traffic, of which the Customs officers knew nothing, in silphium, a medicinal herb from Lybia, and the balm of Gilead for anointing the dead. He lived in the town of Bubastis at the mouth of the Nile, protected by gods and respected by men.
He had two sons: the elder Eliav by Thamar, an Israelite, and the younger Issachar by Asta, an Egyptian.
It had happened that Hamuel went on business to the town of Mendes; there, in the temple of the god Goat, he saw a little girl priestess, Asta, and fell in love with her so much that he did not hesitate to give a hundred gold rings, utens, the price of thirty pairs of oxen, to pay for her flight from the temple: the priestesses betrothed to the god could not under the penalty of death marry anyone and especially not an 'unclean' Jew. Asta loved her mortal husband ardently, but could not forgive herself for being unfaithful to the immortal one and suffered such remorse that her mind became slightly deranged. When she gave birth to a son she imagined that she had conceived him by the god: the priestesses believed that the god Goat, the fiery-red Bindidi—Sun-Ra in the flesh and the source of virility in men and beasts—had carnal union with them. Asta whispered strange stories to the little Iserker, as she called Issachar in Egyptian, and sang strange songs to him about the golden-fleeced, golden-horned Goat that grazed in the azure meadows of the sky and came down sometimes to love the beautiful daughters of the earth.
Hamuel's first wife, the Israelite, Thamar, bitterly hated the Egyptian and her 'devil's brood, the son of the stinking Goat.' And there really was something goat-like in Issachar's face—in his thick hooked nose, thick lips, slanting yellow eyes and, when he grew up, in the long reddish curls that hung alongside his cheeks, the long parted reddish beard and the raucous, high-pitched, bleating voice.
The schoolboys teased little Iserker and called him "the red goat!" Egyptians considered red-haired people unclean because Set, the devil, was red like the sand of the desert, his kingdom: seeing a red-haired man in the street passers-by spat to avert bad fortune and mothers hid their children from his evil eye. 'It is a bad thing to be red-haired'—the little boy had known this ever since he could remember himself, but he could not decide, even when he had grown up, whether it was a good or a bad thing to be the son of the god Goat. It might be good for Iserker, the Egyptian, but bad for Issachar, the Israelite; but he never knew whether he was Iserker or Issachar and this was perpetual torture to him.
When, in the early years of the reign of Amenhotep the Fourth, or Akhnaton, as he was to call himself later—news came of the victories of Joshua in the Promised Land, a rebellion broke out among the Israelites left in Egypt. The rebellion started in the town of Bubastis. Hamuel's son Eliav, who was about twenty-five years old, had been seen at the head of the rebels' army. The rebellion was crushed; Eliav ran away and instead of him Issachar, his brother, who was completely innocent, was seized and thrown into prison as a hostage. Asta went from one judge to another giving bribes right and left; they took the bribes but kept the hostage. Then someone informed against Eliav, who had been hiding in the marshy jungles of the Delta; he was seized and Issachar released.
Soon after this Asta died suddenly after drinking some cold beer on a hot day; a few days later two maid-servants in Hamuel's house had a quarrel and one of them told that the other had poisoned their mistress. When both were cross-examined, the accused confessed that she poisoned Asta at the instigation of Thamar. The latter did not deny it and said to her husband straight out:
"I have killed Asta because she informed against Eliav. Kill me, too: blood for blood, life for life."
She spoke in this way because she worshipped the fierce Jahve, the Avenger. But Hamuel, a priest of the gentle El-Shaddai, had mercy on her and merely ordered her to leave his house for ever. That same night Thamar hanged herself and Hamuel did not survive her long—he died of grief. On his deathbed he admonished Issachar, his son, to await the Messiah.
Left alone in the world, Issachar went to Nut-Amon—Thebes—to his maternal grandfather, the priest Ptahotep, who was the keeper of scrolls in the sanctuary of Amon; there he assumed the rank of a junior priest—uab—and became a pupil of Ptamose, the high priest of Amon.
When the apostate king began to persecute the old faith, many of Ptamose's pupils proved false to their teacher either through fear or love of gain; but Issachar remained true to him.
Issachar's perpetual torment was that he could not decide whether he was a Jew or an Egyptian; through revealing to him the mysteries of the divine wisdom, Ptamose solved the question for him: the deeper Issachar studied them, the clearer he saw that the god-man, Osiris, who had been slain, and He of Whom the prophets of Israel had said: "He has poured out His soul unto death and made intercession for the transgressors" were one and the same Messiah.