The Epic of Saul

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

The deep tones ceased, and once more silence fell
Between those two amid the silent night.
But Sergius, lightly rallying soon to speech,
Said, with a ready, easy sympathy:
"There seems indeed to breathe in such a strain
Some solemn joy, but the solemnity
Is greater, and my spirit is oppressed.
Not less your poets differ from the Greek
In matter than in manner, when they sing.
How high you make your deity to be,
Beyond the stature of the gods of Greece!
Homer has Zeus compel the clouds, forth flash
The lightnings, and the thunderbolts down hurl;
The mightiest meddler with the world, his Zeus,
Yet of the world the mighty maker not.
But your Jehovah reaches even to that,
As with his fingers fashioning yonder heaven,
And fixing in their station moon and stars.
And he in human things concerns himself!
The Epicurean gods are cold and calm;
On high Olympus far withdrawn they sit,
And smile, and either not at all regard
Our case, or, if so be regarding, smile
Still, unconcerned, our case however hard.
Your Hebrew God is much more amiable,
But much more probable that Olympian crew;
Nay, probable not at all is either; dream,
Fond dream, the fable of divinities
Who either care, or care not, for our case.
We are the creatures and the sport of chance,
Puppets tossed hither and thither in idle play,
A while, a little while, fooled to suppose
We do the dancing we are jerked to do—
And then, resolved from our compacture brief
Into the atoms which once on a time
Together chanced and so were we, we drop
Plumb down again into the great inane
Abyss, and recommence the eternal whirl!
There is that Epicurean cosmogony,
An endless cycle of evolution turned
Upon itself, in worlds forevermore
Becoming, out of worlds forevermore
Merging in their original elements:
No god, or gods, to tangle worse the skein
Inextricably tangled by blind chance!"

Saul was affronted, but he held his peace,
Brooding the while his jealousy for God.
At length, with intense calm, he spoke and said:
"The Hebrew spirit is severe and says,
'The fool it is who in his secret heart,
Rebelling, wills no God.' 'The Hebrew spirit,'
Said I? Forget those unadviséd words;
For to speak so is not the Hebrew spirit.
God is a jealous God; His glory He
Will to another not divide; and God
Himself it is, the Living God, and not
What, Gentile fashion, my rash lips miscalled
'The Hebrew spirit,' that charges atheism
With folly. God His prophet psalmist bade
Write with a diamond pen on adamant
That stern damnation of the atheous soul:
'The fool hath in his heart said, God is not.'
This tell I thee my conscience so to cleanse
Of sin in saying 'The Hebrew spirit' for God."

With tolerant wonder, Sergius heard and said:
"A strangely serious race you Hebrews are;
I do not think I understand you yet.
I shall be glad to-morrow, if so please
Thee likewise, to renew this night's discourse."
So they descended from the hill and slept.

The herald Dawn, white-fingered, from the east
Had signalled to the stars, 'He comes! He comes!'
And these, veiling themselves from view with light,
Had all into the unapparent deep
Retired, and left the hemisphere of heaven,
Late glowing with their fixed or wandering fires,
One crystal hollow of pure space made void
To be a fit pavilion for the sun,
When forth from their encampment rode the twain,
Fresh as the morning from the baths of sleep,
And keen with hunger for the forward road.
"The allotment of my tribe," said Saul—"my tribe
Is Benjamin—in measure such, bare rock
And rugged hill, hardly through age-long toil
Of tilth so clothed as we have seen them clothed,
In terrace above terrace of won soil,
With verdure—that, we leave behind, to cross
This day the fatter fields of Ephraim."
Then Saul to Sergius rehearsed in short
The tale of Hebrew history, how God,
Having his fathers out of Egypt brought,
With sign and wonder thence delivering them
And hither led them through the parted sea,
And past the smoking top of Sinai—
Touched by the finger of God to burn with fire
And thunder and lighten more than man could bear
To see or hear, in sanction of His law—
Had lastly parcelled out this land to them
In portions by their tribes to be their rest.

While Saul to Sergius so discoursing spoke,
Over their right the sun, long since uprisen,
Climbed the steep slope of morning in the sky.
And now the summit of a ridge those twain
Reach, whence, straightforward looking, they behold,
In light so bright, through air so fair, a scene
Of the most choice the eye can rest upon.
A wide and long champaign of fruitful green,
On either side hemmed in with skirting hill,
Stretches before them to the bounding sky,
Where Hermon, scarce descried through distance dim,
Silvers with frost each morn his crown of snows.
Descended, they therein, through billowing wheat
Wind-swayed, might, to a watcher from the hill,
Seem laboring like two swimmers in the surf,
And hardly, in the fluctuation, way
Making whither they went; yet swiftly borne
Were they, and easily, onward. Soon Saul said—
And therewith pointed to two mountain peaks,
Seen towering on the left to lordly height,
Twin warders of a lesser vale between,
In stature twin and twin in symmetry—
"Ebal and Gerizim yon mountains are,
And these between the vale of Shechem lies,
Theatre once of oath and sacrament
Enacted by my nation with dread rite.
'A strangely serious race', thou yesterday
Calledst us Hebrews, strangely frivolous race
Surely were we, if somewhat serious not,
For we are heirs of serious history.
Yon natural amphitheatre thou seest,
Circled and sloped against those mountain sides
With spacious interval of plain enclosed;
There was the oath of our obedience sworn.
On Ebal half our tribes, and half our tribes
On Gerizim, stood opposite, and midst,
The tribe of Levi, God's peculiar tribe,
Stood in the vale about the ark of God,
Whence Joshua, our great captain, read the law—
He and the Levites, ocean-like the sound—
With blessing or with curse by God adjoined
As disobedient or obedient we.
This was when scarce our fathers had set foot
Hitherside Jordan in the promised land;
They from their stronghold camp came here express
To swear such solemn covenant with God.
Six hundred thousand souls of fighting-men,
With women and with children fourfold more,
Ranged on the one side or the other, joined
To them that mustered in the middle vale,
All heard the threatening or the gracious words,
And all, in multitudinous answer, said
'Amen!'—the tribes on Ebal to the curse,
And to the blessing, those on Gerizim,
Replying—choral imprecation dire
Upon themselves of every human ill,
If disobedient found, of promised good
Acceptance at the price, acknowledged just,
Of whole obedience to God's holy law.
It was as if Jehovah had adjured
All things, above, below, His witnesses,
'Hear, O ye heavens, and thou, O earth, give ear,
While thus My people covenant swear with Me.'
The host of Israel, though such numbers, heard—
These mountain-sides redouble so the voice."

"Theatric sacramental rite most weird,"
Said Sergius, "thou hast described to me.
Sure never elsewhere did lawgiver yet,
With ceremony such, a people swear
To obedience of his laws. The laws, I trow,
Subscribed and sealed with signature so strange,
Strange must have been. Example couldst thou give?"

"Of all those laws," said Saul, "doubtless the law
To Gentile ears the strangest, is the first;
That law it is which makes the Jew a Jew:
'Other than Me no god shalt thou confess;
'Image, resemblance, none, molten or carved,
'Of whatsoever thing in heaven, or earth,
'Or hidden region underneath the earth,
'Fashion to thee shalt thou, or bow thee down
'In service or in worship unto them;
'For I the Lord thy God a jealous God
'Am, and I visit the iniquity
'Of fathers upon children, chastisement,
'In long entail, on generation linked
'To generation, following hard the line
'Of such as hate Me, endless mercy shown
'To such as love Me and observe My law.
'Curséd be he who dares to disobey';
And Ebal, with its countless multitude,
Thundered to Gerizim a loud 'Amen!'
While heaven above and the wide world around
Hearkened in witness of the dreadful oath."

Saul ceased as mute with awe of memory;
And something of a sympathetic sense,
Communicated, also Sergius made
Silent in presence of such history.
Not long, for, rousing from his reverie,
And looking up before him nigh, he sees
A city with its walls and roofs and towers.
"Neapolis!" exclaims the Roman voice,
The Jewish, in tone different, "Sychar!" said.
"Neapolis! And here I halt," said Sergius;
"Sychar! And forward through Samaria, I,
Not pausing till this hateful soil be passed,"
Said Saul; "perchance to-morrow met again,
Beyond, we may together forward fare."

So there they parted with such slight farewell;
Nor after met, until, two morrows more
Now spent in separate travel, they had reached
The bursting fountain of the Jordan, where,
Forth from between the feet of Hermon born
Forever—in the joy and anguish born,
The certain anguish and the doubtful joy
Tumultuous of an everlasting birth—
Leaps to the light of life that famous stream,
Like many another child—from Adam sprung—
To run his heedless, headlong, downward course
And lose himself at last in the Dead Sea!
Here was what life, all-welcoming, lusty life,
Doom of what deadly worse than death was there!

A city here the tetrarch Philip built,
Or raised to more magnificent, which then,
In honor of dishonorable name
Imperial, Tiberius Cæsar, he
Called Cæsarea, and Philippi too
Eponymous therewith for surname joined;
But Paneas, earlier name, clung to the place,
As to this day it clings in Banias.