“No, not that. But she does want you to meet her in Jerusalem in October at the Feast of Tabernacles. Pilate undoubtedly will go again this year, and Herod too; after beheading the Wilderness prophet and possibly involving Galilee in a war with Aretas, Antipas will surely want to go up to the Temple to worship the Jewish Yahweh; it’s the only way left—aside from dropping Herodias—for him to strengthen himself with his subjects.” He paused and leaned forward, smiling. “I’ll have to take my century up to Jerusalem, Claudia, as I do on all such occasions when multitudes of Jews assemble there, and I’ll try to bring Longinus over to Tiberias to make the journey to Jerusalem with me. If you’ll promise to join us there, I’m sure I can promise you I’ll have the centurion with me when I come.”
35
Almost overnight Jerusalem had been transformed.
Through the long drought of the summer months the ancient city had grown more drab with the deepening of fine dust upon its houses, its public buildings, and even upon the resplendent Temple itself.
But now, with the coming of autumn and the annual great Feast of Tabernacles, Jerusalem had bloomed into a veritable forest of greenery. As far as Claudia could see from her perch high on a balcony of the Tower of Antonia—down into the adjoining Temple area, along the terraced rise of Mount Zion, southward to sweltering Ophel and beyond the always smoking gehenna of Hinnom’s vale to the bluffs above it on the Bethlehem road, and eastward past the Brook Kidron and the Garden of Gethsemane up the slope of the Mount of Olives—stretched an almost unbroken canopy of green boughs now beginning to wilt. Balconies, roof tops, the grounds about the Temple walls, every unfilled small plot of the cluttered soil of Jewry’s holy city, were covered with these improvised, temporary dwellings.
The Feast of Tabernacles, Tullia had explained to her mistress, was the Hebrew festival marking the end of the harvesting season and the early beginning of the rains. It was an occasion of national thanksgiving to Yahweh, one that commemorated the Israelites’ years of wandering in the desert wilderness where, after their escape from Egyptian bondage, under the leadership of their great law-giver Moses, they had dwelt in booths—they called them tabernacles—made of branches hastily woven together.
“And to this day,” Tullia had concluded, “in accordance with the instructions in our sacred writings, every Jew during the Feast of Tabernacles must leave his house and for eight days live in a hut made of the branches of pine or myrtle or olive or palm.” The festival occasion, she further pointed out, was one of rejoicing for Yahweh’s deliverance of His children from slavery and His establishment of them in their promised land. To honor Yahweh, the celebrants would offer sacrifices each day and follow a prescribed order of worship and praise and thanksgiving. These ceremonies, Tullia declared, were carried out in great dignity and with reverence. Nothing she had ever seen in Rome, the maid was certain, would excel them in pageantry.
“Mistress,” she pleaded, “why don’t you move from the Palace of the Herods for a day or two to the Procurator’s apartment in the Tower of Antonia? From there you could look down on the ceremonial rites being performed at the Temple, and no one would need know that you were watching. And though it would have no interest to you as a service of worship, it should prove entertaining in the same way that the theater in Rome is diverting.”
“It might be amusing at that,” Claudia had agreed. “And there’s nothing else to do in Jerusalem anyway. But how is it, Tullia,” she asked, and her expression clearly revealed her puzzlement, “that you know so much about these festival customs? Even if your forebears were Jewish, you were brought up in Rome, and surely you couldn’t have learned all this at the synagogue on Janiculum Hill.”
“But, Mistress, through the years I have read our sacred scriptures, and I have heard much talk of our laws and customs. And you must know that an Israelite, though he may never set foot in Israel, if he is a true child of the faith, is loyal to our one God.”