Genesis
Sisters of Alexandria, you have requested an account of my years in Palestine, and so I pledge these scrolls to you, a gift from sister to sister, in appreciation for all your works. Some of you, my Sisters, are interested in the war, and want to hear heroic tales of Zealots. Some of you mourn Churban HaBayit (Destruction of the Temple), and wish to join my grief with yours.
I know that some of you, too, yearn for the Lost Wisdom. You are curious about magic; and I will teach you what I know. As my most beloved disciples, these things are for your eyes alone.
Our Academy is dedicated to the womanly promulgation of all the jewels of civilisation. This work must be part of that goal.
In my memory, the story began on that night when I came to my senses on the sandy hill west of the ruins of old Babylon. Everything before that seems a far distant past. It was on that cold ground that my destiny was cast, the Evening Star shining down upon my dusty shawl and bloodied robe, a magical fox questioning my actions with a probing gaze. I’ve had to trace the story backward from that moment, as for many years my mind blocked the memories of what had gone before.
I cannot report to you that event, Sisters, other than by starting from the beginning. I cannot confess to you my behaviour on that night before I tell you the story of who I was, for I was very different then as a girl from the old crone you know now.
As you know, I was born in the Land Between the Rivers, in the city of Babylon, which is called Seleucia on the Tigris by the heirs of Alexandros (Alexander the Great).
My father, Itamar son of Nebazak, was a keeper of the royal archives of the Parthians. It has been the tradition in our family for eighteen generations by virtue of our scholarship. We are in Babylon since the Captivity.
My mother, Sherah, suffered a grave illness in the years after my birth, and there are many years between me and my younger brothers.
Some moons passed her with no moonblood, other moons she bled so heavily she took to bed. Sometimes when she lifted something heavy, she would cry out in pain and curl into a ball on the kitchen floor. Father was so careful when he embraced her, it seemed as if he was afraid even to touch her. Of course, no one ever explains such things to children, but I later described the symptoms to Ima Devorah, and she said it sounded like scarring on the womb. When Mother conceived and delivered the first boy, Adam, the birthing must have cleared away the scarred tissue from her body. When she recovered, she had three more sons in a row, each born before the elder was weaned.
My father gave me a Greek name, Sophia. It was the fashion in those days among Babylonian Jewry to have Greek names, and Father, a Pharisee of the old school, had ever a soft spot in his soul for the Greek arts. Sophia is a Greek word. It means wisdom. I believe my father saw the true course of my spirit when he so named me. Mother was too ill to dispute it, though I think she would have done.
Grandmother lived with us as nurse all during my mother’s illness, remaining as minder to the boys, and as she aged, I was expected to replace her in that role. She constantly scolded me to do this or that ‘for Mother’ or ‘for your brothers’ and scolded me with the same words she scolded the slaves. The boys saw me as a maidservant. Not only did I have to do all the work, but I got no respect for it. My brothers asked me to fetch them things without saying ‘please’ or ‘thank you’.
When my first brother was born, Mother told Father, ‘no more Greek names’. The babe was to have ‘a proper patriarch’s name, like their father’, as if her hitherto son-less condition had been the result of some foreign curse worked by her husband’s choice of name for a daughter. Adam was the name he chose, and the brothers that followed were Yonah, Mikha’el, and Ya’akov–proper patriarch’s names.
My mother having much on her hands with the boys, I was taken most days by my father to the archives, where in idle moments he taught me to read, to write, and to hunger for the knowledge stored therein. Tucked quietly into a back corner with a codex or scroll; few of the scholars even knew I was there.
It was in those days that I developed the habit of reading silently, which many scholars find strange. It was of necessity in order to disappear into the shadows as I did, so as not to be a nuisance to the men, but also, I liked to think upon the meaning of the texts inside my head and not be distracted by the sound of the words. There is something very sacred, I feel, about the written word. While I’m reading something, I don’t want anyone else touching it. Spoken words have their power, of course, but when it is written, it is forever.
My father was a quiet, bookish person, as besuits an archivist, and he was not dismayed to have a daughter for a pupil. My uncle, however, was not happy about the matter. He oft complained to his sister my mother of the unsuitability of a girl’s devotion to such pursuits.
I worshiped my father’s quiet nature and took refuge in it. My mother, though, bewailed my special love for him. At home, he was her devoted husband, but during the day he belonged to scholarship and to me. My uncle thought my filial love unnatural, and he was always attacking our peace. When I was younger, it was ever to urge me to go home to my mother. He came to the archives so many times, my timid father had to ask the governor’s guards to stop him at the gate.
My mother was terrified of him. My father, however, could usually shrug him off. He had such a gentle character he could rarely even see conflict. He would defend me, in his own mild way, usually by saying something like ‘let the child develop the talents HaShem (God) has given her’ or ‘she causes no harm, let her follow her own path’. And surely, he could outquote my uncle on any matter of Scripture or the Law.
My mother and uncle had been inseparable, it seems, before her marriage; even his own wife was second to her in his attentions. The only two offspring of aging parents, they had done everything together since infancy. Uncle, being the elder, had the last word on everything. When Grandfather died, Uncle had already taken in hand the running of the family property, so Father was free to enter his own father’s occupation.
The real separation of brother and sister, though, came when Mother took ill. The experience brought my parents to cling to one another in worry. Since then, Father has obeyed Mother’s every wish, to the dismay even of Uncle. Since she recovered and has been producing for him sons, Father’s admiration for her knew no bounds. Uncle was jealous.
His wife my aunt was one of those extraordinarily competent housewives, bursting with sons, three of them, who worked the fields and animals with their father. Our household’s status in the Jewish community was due to my father’s position–and his father’s before him–in the archives; but our prosperity was due to the richness of my grandfather’s land, the strong arms of my uncle and cousins, and the keen husbandry of my aunt.
She always had everything firmly in hand, and Uncle, at a loss as to his role in his own household, was always meddling in ours. Father was too gentle to protest; and Mother, tied down with the boys, would usually welcome the intrusion, and leave him to it. If ever I complained, it was ‘he is your uncle’ or ‘he is only doing his duty by you, child’.
I have few memories of good times with my mother. I picture her constantly big with child, her face always busy around the hearth surrounded by constant noise and the smell of babies’ dirty rags. Once she began having all those sons, she saw it her duty to pull me into the women’s world, and whenever she had a moment free, she showed me how to make barleycakes, to cart wool and to weave, but she rarely talked to me about things I wanted to talk about. She would joke with Grandmother, ‘the girl would rather bury her head in a scroll and bid the rest of the world to fly away.’ But I did not laugh. The more fastidious she was in her instructions, the more I pulled away.
I search back through my life to find a picture of my mother to cherish, and my mind goes all the way back to an afternoon when Adam was asleep and Yonah yet unborn in her belly. The house was quiet.
Mother called me into the courtyard under the citron tree and poured us both a cup of pomegranate juice, her long sleeves brushing gently against my hand. There were no men around; we were alone and uncovered in our female intimacy.
We Jews were no different in our style of life from the Parthians. Our house was alike theirs, three stories high and made of sun-dried bricks–for there is little stone in the region–faced with glazed or enamelled tiles of brilliant colours. There were no tiles on the roof, and the beams and pillars of the vaulting were made of palm wood due to the scarcity of timber in the land. We twisted ropes of reed around the pillars and adorned them with colourful designs and painted our doors black with tar. In our courtyard, the corners were adorned with rows of six-petalled rosettes of sculpted plaster painted bright colours.
We Jews of property dressed more like our rulers than like our cousins in Palestine with their stiff embroidered woolens. The cloth of my mother’s robe was fine and loose and a long belt tied it between her breasts and around the waist above her swollen belly. Outside our gates, she would wear an elaborate turban tied with strings of beads with a veil covering her hair. In the courtyard she wore only an underveil, which lifted in the breeze, and I looked upon her face.
The tree was full of fruit, and they reflected a yellow light upon her cheeks and the black ringlets of her hair. The breeze gave me a breathful of her perfume. The blossoms were still abundant, and the buzz of bees somehow accentuated the silence of the quiet afternoon. The six-petalled plaster rosettes in the corners had been freshly painted by the slaves in vibrant blue and yellow, still wet enough that I could smell the linseed oil in the paint. All the columns had been given a fresh coat, as well. Never would Grandmother have suffered a single barleycorn’s-span of the house to fall into disrepair.
I feared Mother would put me to labour picking citrons, but she was too tired to think of work. She stroked my hair and asked me, ‘Daughter, what is your favourite fruit?’
I lifted my cup and said, ‘pomegranate. It is the fruit of knowledge.’
‘My thoughtful daughter, I should have known you would choose for meaning rather than taste.’ There was not the reproach in her voice then that there would be in later years.
‘And yours, Mother’?
‘The citron. By itself the taste is bitter, but with a spoon of honey it is a drink for lovers.’
‘So, you, Mother, too, choose for meaning.’
She laughed, and began plaiting my hair. We spent the rest of that delicious hour in silence or chatting of this or that while she gently fixed my tresses.
Whenever I think of my mother, it is that face, ringed in yellow light, I see.
Father, of course, I picture at the archives, and there are many tender memories.
When there were no enquiries from scholars, we would sit together at a table, each at our copying. He would let me roll and store scrolls and called me his ‘apprentice’, which made me feel so proud. I was not supposed to refer to ‘our little game’ at home, of course, which would never have occurred to me to do. But for me, it was no game.
Father bathed in perfume, too, a different scent from my mother’s. He wore a white linen tunic reaching to the ankles, a woolen robe and a white mantle, and tzitzit (ritual fringes) in blue and white wool on the four corners of his hem. We were not strict about mixing linen and wool. He walked with a staff with a carved wooden head, and from his girdle dangled the impressive clay seal of the government with his name and title on it. He wore the wrappe turban appropriate for his age, entwined with red ribbons to indicate his rank, and long hair and a full beard, though Parthians are often clean-shaven. We dressed like our rulers, but we were not ashamed to wear the evidence of our faith. Jews are highly respected in Babylonia. Once Uncle stopped intruding, I never once at the archives heard a word of disrespect spoken to my father.
When not safe at the archives, I escaped when I could from the household and from the town, though it was entirely forbidden, to a cave I had discovered in the hills beyond the walls, where I went in search of healing herbs and other treasures. Here, I would read scrolls surreptitiously borrowed from the archives, some my father would not have approved of. I always returned them–all except one.
As our house was located just inside the southern wall, it was close to the Antioch Gate, where traders entered when they came from the east. I could easily slip in and out with the crowd, as long as I never left it too late. The gates would be closed an hour or so after sundown, and often traffic in the hours just after dusk was slighter and the guard less vigilant. I was skilled at making myself unnoticed by intermingling with the throng. A few times he spotted me, but he must have considered me to be with someone.
The regular grid-like streets of Seleucia emptied into the valley where the bed of the old Tigris touched the edges of town, where the docks were. A canal connected the two rivers at this point, and a bridge at the end of the canal crossed the Euphrates. Further to its south was the old Babylon and the ruins of the Temple of Esagil behind Nebuchadnezzar’s walls. The Euphrates was no longer navigable this far north, but there was much foot traffic. South of the walls and the old city, there was a smaller, older bridge. My cave was on this side of this bridge, before crossing the river, directly south of the Uras Gate where the hills began.
The cave was my sanctuary, and no one, no one knew of it but me. There, when I was not called to chores and my parents believed me elsewhere in the compound, I would gaze at the sky and say aloud the prayers that were in my head. Inside, I built a chapel from the rock, adjusting the walls with boulders and setting up stones in the interior to catch the light and to reflect the tones of Holy Songs.
I kept my scroll there. I call it a scroll, though it is only a fragment, because it is part of a larger work. It is ancient, and I know belongs by right in the archives; for that reason, I never told my father. HaShem took my hand to it, and I know He means for me to have it.
The story of that night, when I left the warmth of home and set off into the wilderness with a merchant caravan–the night the angels came for me–traces back to that cave, singing with the Elohim, and a magic spell gone wrong.
