Obil, Keeper of Camels

by Lucia Chase Bell

Some people said that Obil served the evil priests—which was far from the truth; others, that he was a tool of Herod, more silent than lightnings out of summer heat, and as sure to kill. It was, besides, insisted with whisperings and shudderings that he served only himself, and that somewhere deep among the awful crags by the Salt Sea a wondrous treasure sparkled, hidden by the red hand of the robber, Obil.

Yet there were some, away out in the hill country beyond Hebron, as you go toward Beersheba, who could tell of years when Obil had tilled a few fields there under the kindly sun and had kept cattle of his own on the gentle hills.

With his young wife Miriam he had paid tithes and kept the pleasant feasts. In not one humble home did the Sabbath candles ever burn brighter. No one’s son had been brought up with more loving regard for the plain things of the law than the child of Obil and Miriam, from the very first. These things they knew in Hebron. But there was in Obil—here the heads came closer together under the mantles—in Obil there was a Strain of wild desert blood, strong in his race from the time of the first Obil, the Ishmaelite, Keeper of King David’s Camels, and master of the great caravans that went from great Hebron down to far Havilah.

Since he was a child, when his father took him on a chance journey far to the South, the desert-lust had come upon him year by year, driving him from his home till the lust was satisfied and he could return.

While he was gone, Miriam his wife, the soft-eyed, the meek one, tended the doves, the lambs, the goats and cattle.

Faithfully she taught their little son of the prophets, and of all the heroes of his race; of the great priest Simon; of Judas the Hammer, and his army.

When Obil came home, as the boy grew on, it came to be that he always took the boy on his knee, first breath, and asked for his tales of the heroes. And the boy loved to tell them as he stumbled after his father in the furrow, or lay with him in the cool evening under the vine at the door.

Every one marveled at this child as he recited long strings of the sayings of the sages, and prayers and psalms, and at the star-eyed reverence with which he would touch the name of the Most High on the little folded parchment that Miriam had placed on the lowly door-post of their home. Not only to his father but to every one the boy loved to tell his burning tales of the heroes and the prophets, until often it was whispered, “Perhaps God will raise up even this child, the son of Obil, to be liberator of Israel,—who can tell?”

Perhaps, all unguessed by themselves, this hope was the reason that, to those who knew the little family of three, it seemed a strange and evil thing, certainly unblessed of God, that so suddenly and silently each year Obil should go away out of sight.