The Covenant
The old man sat in the centre of the tent, glowering. His striped robe lay carelessly on his shoulders, the waist-belt untied, his bare legs ropey with lean muscles, dark with hair not yet turned as white as his flowing beard. He hooded his eyes and brooded, watching the three women, his wives, as they bustled about the tent nervously. He followed the movements of the youngest one, Rebeka, as she fluttered around, re-arranging his bed, the coverings, drawing the old matted straw out, piling it in a heap under the watchful eye of her mentor Hagar, who knew just how Ab-ram liked his bed. Not too stuffed so he found it difficult to rise from its depth in the mornings and not too brittle so that pieces chafed his skin through the loosely-woven fabric that covered it. As though sensing his mood their voices, often raised in light banter, were hushed and only simple directions, often-repeated reminders, punctuated the uneasy silence.
Rebeka, he thought, had been a poor choice. He should never have listened to his brother. A closer alliance between the two houses yes, but not through Rebeka. There was that about her that invited men's glances. Lithe and handsomely dark, the flowing robe that covered her could not hide the suggestion of lush flesh which lay beneath; she moved too sensuously, her eyes, dark and large, promised that which she could not give. Little wonder, then, that I-sak walked so often by the women's tent. Not to see Sarai, his mother, but to furtively watch Rebeka. How far had it gone? Ab-ram wondered and flushed with a new wave of anger.
His eyes glazed over and he momentarily forgot the women, recalling yesterday's confrontation with the tribal men. E-nor and his brother Mar-duk, he was certain, were the instigators of the growling protest which, left unchecked, threatened to become a revolt. They had always agitated for the keeping of swine. They had shorter memories and less respect for tradition than he. They scorned the ancient malediction visited upon their great forbear, that "Thy sons' sons will consort with swine!", the meaning of which could not be lost on those wishing to perpetuate their line. Sheep were their mainstay and so it would remain.
He had promised them a sign, some significant indication that the new God that spoke to him in his trances would undertake to be their sole totem. And now he wondered, could he induce the God to do this thing? To protect and enrich them, bring them to a state of comfort, a belief in His ineffability?
A spasm of pain washed over him as his stomach rebelled from the morning meal, and he passed wind.
A titter from the women brought him back to the present and he glared at them. "Go! Be you gone with your women's airs and your nattering patter!", he ordered, raising himself and towering over them.
Rebeka looked worriedly at Sarai who motioned the other two to leave. They quickly gathered up the discarded straw and in their haste tripped over their robes, leaving a litter trail behind them. Ab-ram kicked angrily at the strawbits, raising a fine layer of dust. "And you?" he said to Sarai.
"Soon enough", she replied calmly, rising to stand before him, her wizened face still carrying traces of her fabled beauty, questioning his anger. He sighed, lifted his hand to her shoulder and pulling her close, rested her head on his chest.
As always her touch, her steadfastness soothed him; her calm manner instilled him with confidence. The past intruded; even when he ordered his sister to become his wife, his wife to be transformed to his sister, she had remained by his side. Fear of the hegemon called Faro caused him to disown the flesh that had cleaved to his, yet she had never rebuked him. She had followed him from Chaldean Ur acknowledging him her master in all things. Now, these late years should have brought them surcease of discontent, of troubling decisions.
If only their son, the image of his mother in her young days, were not the tribulation he was, a weight would be lifted. But Sarai would hear no ill word of the boy, and he would not make her unhappy.
"Is there something?", she asked, drawing back, her dark eyes searching as no one else could, within his. He looked away uneasily, fearful that she could read his thoughts as she sometimes seemed to do.
"No thing is wrong", he said finally. "Other than I must persuade the others that our way is the way and the others are false."
She nodded. "What will you do?"
"Wait for the voice again. It no longer visits my dreams, so it is to the man-thing that I must turn for advice."
An obvious revulsion washed over her face. "That abomination!" She spat three times to ward off evil - not believing in its efficacy entirely, yet not wishing to leave herself vulnerable to unknown malicious powers. "Wait", she said. "Yesterday I found a ring of the mystic growth under a large Terebinth. I dried them and ground them and will bring them to you in a fermentation."
He agreed not to consult his oracle, the newborn manbaby Rebeka had borne, her first. As was customary, its head had been taken, anointed, and left in sacred oil to speak when advice was needed of it. The women always complained, but no leader of men could be without the Teraphim. Every few years a new one was needed as the old one gradually disintegrated, becoming one with the holy oil.
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As the day wore on, the heat became more intense and activity ceased. Men, women and children made for the still, yet cooler air of the tents. The fragrance of myrtle rose on the sultry air. Children's chattering voices were stilled in afternoon sleep. Ab-ram, alone in his great tent since the morning, still sat and thought about the problem facing him. Nothing had been resolved and he was tired of trying to summon the wisdom of the years reputed to be his, to his aid. He rose and painfully slid his feet into the thongs of worn leather sandals, then awkwardly bent and fastened them, his fingers stiff with disuse. But he was unwilling to summon one of the women to help. He was wearing now a chiton of dazzling whiteness, the linen fine and kind to his tired flesh.
Walking out of the tent, he stood for a moment in the furnace of the still air, momentarily blinded by the fierce intensity of the sun sitting high now in that great bowl of the sky, and merciless. It had been a long time since he had been foolish enough to expose himself at this time of day, but he had been overcome with a sudden compulsion to walk through a nearby olive grove. He flung the cowl over his head and strode laboriously over the dun, cracked earth, a lizard scuttling out of his path, frightened from its shelter under a nearby rock.
Lifting his eyes past the great cypresses throwing their meagre high-noon shade over the line of tents, his eyes followed the long swoops of two vultures over the nearby hills. The hills appeared verdant and sheltered from that distance. He wondered about the sheep; whether a lamb had strayed.
Arrived finally at the grove, he cast about for a likely resting place, selected a gnarled old specimen, its leaves defiantly glowing the splendour of its life's aspiration despite the rotten state of its trunk, bleeding sap, inviting invasion from hordes of insects, and under it he slid to the ground. His back resting on the trunk, Ab-ram thrust his legs before him and watched a retinue of termites busy with the work of moving a dead unfeathered fledgling inexorably closer to their nest. He felt revolted at the dry shrivelled thing that had once held life, teeming now with the large insects determined to use it in the perpetuation of their own cycle. "And so it is with me", he sighed. "No sooner than I relinquish my authority will my enemies feast with Termagant on my rotting carcase."
The question was, how to persuade his people of the rightness of his vision? How describe to them the fleeting image come to him of the dark unknowable that was the Divine Spirit? Elohu, the Spirit of the One, the Only. That something, some gesture, some consecration would be necessary to bind him and his people to the Great Power, that Seminal Being, was obvious. Some sign was paramount to his being finally able to convince his reluctant followers - but what could that sign be?
The intense dry and burning heat seemed somehow magnified in the grove. Surely, it would have been better to have remained in his tent. Somehow, though, he felt, there was a possibility of communion out here, with the Divine Spirit. Not here perhaps, but on higher ground where such a one might reside, closer to the heavens. The hills? He raised his eyes and looked to the hills. For sacrifice, what? His bell-wether, a faultless and spot-free white specimen? Even so, not enough.
Ab-ram's eyes narrowed, his head seemed to be bursting with the fierceness of his concentration. Suddenly the answer was simple. Solving both his problems, temporal and spiritual. Ah, but was the intent without blemish? Who, he convinced himself, would ever know? His heart thudded, then skipped like a wild bird attempting to escape confinement.
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I-sak walked behind his father, an early morning mist dissipating before them as they approached the well-worn pathway leading to the nearest and highest of the two hills. Mountains, they called them, but they were merely tall mounds on the arid landscape.
"My brother was aggrieved that he was pressed into service. He mislikes tending the sheep", I-sak observed mischievously, glad to place his brother Ish-mael in a poor light; flattered that their father had this time chosen him, the younger son, to assist on this solemn occasion. Ab-ram nodded, noting the slur, but choosing this time to ignore it.
The trail wound tortuously around the hill. I-sak footsure, the shepherd, and Ab-ram, long unaccustomed to the demand, stumbling on the gravelly pathway, stopping now and again to draw breath, his chest fiery with the effort. Strapped to the sides of the ass were the necessary paraphernalia - two flasks, gurgling their contents, a large flat stone, some ground mandrake, a flat bread and cheese for their mid-day meal. Last, wound in linen, a ceremonial knife of obsidian blackness and a sprig of hyssop plucked from the foot of the mountain.
"But my father", I-sak had earlier observed, "the sacrifice? Where is it?"
"The Great Spirit will provide", Ab-ram had replied, not elaborating, his face an enigmatic mask.
"But my father ..." I-sak had begun his objection again - surely it was best to arrive prepared rather than trust to chance? But a curt "be silent!" cut him off.
They climbed the slope slower now, near the summit where the cedars were no longer symmetrical in shape but grew deformed yet defiant on the inhospitable mantle of rock barely sifted with soil.
Ab-ram drew laboured breaths, the sound stentorian, rasping his throat.
A harsh sound above them, familiar yet still startling, tore through their separate thoughts. Both raised their heads, stopping for a moment, glad of the rest, to look upon the rusty black form of a great rook, its harsh beak giving voice to a warning of trespass. The bird rose into the air, rising toward the pitiless sun. They watched as it became a mote above them, then noticed that a curtain of clouds, dark and menacing, drifted toward them, and around it, billowing grey clouds. It was as though the bird had changed, become dark water vapour and still stood over them, transformed, watching, jealous of its territory. But rains, seldom as they blessed the land at this time of year, were welcome and surely the glaring sun would soon be obscured by the scudding clouds and give them relief from the oppressive heat.
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They were shortly at the summit and tethered the ass to a gnarled cypress where it could feed upon the sparseness of grass. Ab-ram directed his son to remove the stone and place it on the ground. The sun was hidden now and its fingers of fire no longer touched them. Still, breathing was difficult. Silently they both slaked their thirst with wine. That same wine into which Sarai had sprinkled her dried morels. Already, I-sak's head was light and he walked with a delicate precision, obeying his father in the placement of the ritual objects; the euphoria granting him a girlish grace.
When the hyssop had been placed just so on the flat stone, and the obsidian blade sprinkled with oil so it glimmered as with a life of its own, reflecting the dark clouds above, Ab-ram urged more wine on his son, then sat and watched drugged sleep overtake the youth. In repose I-sak's face became the youthful trusting Sarai's and Ab-ram's heart was wrenched with misgiving.
A light breeze made itself evident, rustling the leaves of the sycamore, bringing relief to the two figures, one unaware, the other too painfully aware. Ab-ram looked to the sky and saw it was now completely veiled with clouds and oddly, the black cloud sat over them still, a dark squatting thing, unmoving. He sighed, then moved his son with the great effort that was required, on his back over the stone, and raised I-sak's chiton to his chest, revealing his naked form.
Ab-ram sat back on his haunches and took into his hand the ceremonial knife, rubbed his thumb carefully along its cruel edge. Great Spirit, he implored, let this be the end of your promises, let this mark the start of your commitment to us, to my people. No other sign can I think of that will indicate to you, oh Unseen One, my abandonment of the hegemony of other gods, my belief in only You, You who will make this existence finally explicable.
As though in reply, thunder rumbled above him, and he believed.
In a lesser hallucinatory fog than his son, Ab-ram believed that the voice that visited his dreams, his drug-induced trances, would utter finally the words to seal commitment. Even through his euphoria, a thought given to his sly triumph - ah, even the gods, even the greatest of them were amenable to flattery, could not delve into the true intent of homage; this sacrifice. This thought he banished from his mind, angry at its independent impudence; unworthy of the sacred moment.
Ab-ram raised his arm and began to plunge, but some thing stayed his intent. Through the pulsing thunder he could hear a voice. Clearly, he could hear a voice! Could he not?
"ABRAHAM! HEAR ME! I AM THAT WHICH IS! YWHWH IS MY NAME. DO THOU, ABRAHAM, AS DO THE EGYPTOS AND OFFER HENCEFORTH EVERLASTING PERPETUITY'S FLESHLY COVERING. SO IT SHALL BE A BOND BETWEEN ME AND THINE TRIBE."
Perplexed, thwarted, but awed and frightened by the lush richness, the awe-inspiring command of the voice, the mystery of its emanation resounding through his head, he could not but obey.
Reluctantly, confused and inwardly seething with impotent rage, he nonetheless obediently sliced his son's foreskin, then poured holy oil over his son's body to purify it, and consecrate the offering.
c. 1978 Rita Rosenfeld
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