The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel Read online

  The Book of God

  The Bible as a Novel

  Walter Wangerin Jr.

  To my family:

  Thanne, Joseph, Matthew, Mary, Talitha

  NOW COMES EZRA the priest down from the old palace mount, carrying the scrolls in his arms. He enters the square before the Water Gate and passes through a great congregation of people all sitting on the ground.

  At the far end they have constructed a wooden platform. They’ve built a pulpit for this reading.

  Ezra ascends the platform, steps to the front, and unrolls the scrolls.

  Spontaneously the people rise up.

  Ezra blesses the Lord. All the people raise their hands and answer, “Amen!” “Amen!”

  And then, when they’ve sat down again, Ezra the priest begins to read.

  “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

  “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

  “And God said, ‘Let there be light.’

  “And there was light.”

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Prologue

  PART ONE The Ancestors

  ONE Abraham

  TWO Rebekah

  THREE Jacob

  FOUR Joseph

  PART TWO The Covenant

  FIVE Moses

  SIX Sinai

  SEVEN The Children of Israel

  PART THREE The Wars of the Lord

  EIGHT Joshua

  NINE Ehud

  TEN Deborah

  ELEVEN Gideon

  TWELVE Jephthah

  THIRTEEN Samson

  FOURTEEN The Levite’s Concubine

  PART FOUR Kings

  FIFTEEN Saul

  SIXTEEN David

  SEVENTEEN Solomon

  PART FIVE Prophets

  EIGHTEEN The Man of God from Judah

  NINETEEN Elijah

  TWENTY Amos, Hosea

  TWENTY-ONE Isaiah

  TWENTY-TWO Jeremiah

  PART SIX Letters from Exile

  TWENTY-THREE Ahikam Utters a Curse

  TWENTY-FOUR Ahikam Must Make a Decision

  TWENTY-FIVE Ahikam in Jerusalem

  PART SEVEN The Yearning

  TWENTY-SIX My Messenger

  TWENTY-SEVEN Nehemiah

  TWENTY-EIGHT Ezra

  TWENTY-NINE The Yearning

  PART EIGHT The Messiah

  THIRTY Zechariah

  THIRTY-ONE Mary

  THIRTY-TWO John the Son of Zechariah

  THIREY-THREE Andrew

  THIRTY-FOUR Mary Magdalene

  THIRTY-FIVE Simon Peter

  THIRTY-SIX Son of Father

  THIRTY-SEVEN To Jerusalem

  THIRTY-EIGHT Jesus

  THIRTY-NINE The New Covenant

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  Books by Walter Wangerin Jr.

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Share Your Thoughts

  PART ONE

  The Ancestors

  ONE

  Abraham

  I

  AN OLD MAN entered his tent, dropping the door flap behind him. In the darkness he knelt slowly before a clay firepot, very tired. He blew on a coal until it glowed, then he bore the spark to the wick of a saucer lamp. It made a soft nodding flame. The man’s face was lean and wounded and streaked with the dust of recent travel. He began to unroll a straw mat for sleeping but paused halfway, lost in thought.

  Altogether the tent was rectangular, sewn of goatskins and everywhere patched with fresher skins of the goat. Across the middle a reed screen hung from three poles, dividing the space into two compartments, one for the man, one for his wife. These two were all that dwelt in the tent. There were neither children nor grandchildren. There never had been.

  A vagrant wind slapped the side of the tent so that it billowed inward, but the man didn’t move. He was gazing into the finger-flame of the lamp.

  Old man. Perhaps eighty years old. Nevertheless, this present weariness did not come from age. In fact, the man had a small wiry body as light and as tough as leather. Nor was his eye diminished. It watched with a steadfast grey light, awaiting interpretation. It was not an old eye, but a patient one.

  Not age, then. Rather, the man was made weary by this day’s travel and yesterday’s war.

  His only relative in the entire land of Canaan—even from the Euphrates River in the east to the Nile in Egypt—was a nephew who had chosen the easier life. Though the old man himself lived in tents, Lot, his nephew, dwelt in the cities of the Jordan valley, the watered places, fertile places, desirable, sweet and green. But lately four kings of the north had attacked and defeated five cities of the valley. One of these was Sodom, the city Lot had chosen. Among the prisoners whom the northern kings carried away, then, was Lot.

  As soon as the old man heard that his kinsman had been taken captive, he armed three hundred and eighteen of his own men, mounted donkeys, and pursued the enemy with a light and secret speed. In the night he divided his forces. He surprised the northern kings by striking from two sides at once. He routed them. He drove them home. And all their plunder, all their prisoners he brought back to the cities that had been defeated: Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, Zoar. Lot was free again, and again he chose Sodom for his dwelling—though the men of the place had a reputation for extreme wickedness.

  That was yesterday.

  Today the king of Sodom had offered the old man all the plunder he’d returned, but the old man refused.

  Today the Priest-King Melchizedek had come forth with bread and wine to honor the old man, and he honored him saying:

  Blessed are you!

  Blessed, too, be the God most high

  who delivers your foe into your hand!

  And today the old man had come back to his tents, again, near the oaks of Mamre, tired.

  Today, in the evening, his wife had baked him a barley cake, though he ate scarcely anything and she herself ate nothing at all.

  “Is the young man safe, then?” she had asked.

  “Yes,” he told her.

  “And his children?” she said, looking dead level at her husband. “How are the children of the man who lives within the walls of houses?”

  “Safe,” said the man.

  “They are home, then?” she said. “Lot sits contented among his children, then? Lot looks upon the consolation of his old age, then, because he has an uncle who saves him when his own choices get him into trouble?”

  The old man said nothing.

  “Because he has a good uncle?” she continued. “A generous uncle? An uncle whose wife never did put the first bite of barley cake into the mouth of her own child?”

  It was then that the old man arose and left his food unfinished. He trudged through the dusk to his own side of the tent and entered and pulled the flap down behind himself and lit the lamp and fell to staring at the single flame, the straw mat only half unrolled in front of him. He was very tired. He was kneeling, sitting back on his heels. He maintained that same posture, unwinking, unsleeping, through the entire first watch of the night. All sound had long since ceased outside. The encampment slept. His wife, finally, had fallen asleep on the other side of the reed screen. She was sleeping alone.

  Then, in the middle of that night, God spoke.

  Fear not, Abram, God said, calling the old man by name. I am your shield. Your reward shall be very great.

  Abram did not move. He did not so much as shift his eye from the orange lamp-flam
e. But his jaw tightened.

  God said, Abram, northward of this place, southward and eastward and westward—all the land as far as you can see I will give to you and to your descendants forever.

  Still motionless and so softly that the wind outside concealed the sound of it even from his own ears, Abram breathed these words: “So you have said. So you have said. But what, O Lord God, can you give us as long as we continue childless?”

  A wind took hold of the tent-flap and lifted it like a linen. The lamp-flame guttered and went out.

  God said, Come. Abram, come outside.

  On his hands and knees the old man obeyed.

  God said, Raise your eyes to heaven. Look to the stars, Abram. Count them. Can you count them?

  The old man said, “No. I cannot count them. They are too many.”

  Even so many, said the Lord God, shall be your descendants upon the earth.

  With the same gaze as he had earlier turned upon the lamp-flame Abram gazed toward heaven. Now there was no wind at all. The air was absolutely still. Nothing moved in the land, except that the man could hear the sighing of his old wife inside her compartment.

  He said, “Is it required then that a slave born within my household must be my heir?”

  God said, Your own son shall be your heir.

  Abram said, “How shall I know that? How can I know, when you have given us no offspring?”

  Then the word of the Lord came to the old man.

  Abram? said God. Have you seen how a king will by a covenant establish his promise with his servant? Tomorrow, Abram. Tomorrow prepare the beasts. I am the Lord who brought you here to give you this land. Tomorrow I will make my covenant with you—and thereby shall you surely know my promises to you!

  ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING the old man rose early. Without an explanation to any in the household, neither to his wife nor to his servants, he took from his herds a heifer, a she-goat, and a ram, all three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.

  These beasts he led to high ground, to a bare and lonely place where he tethered them.

  Abram bound his robe to his waist and the sleeves to his elbows so that nothing hung loosely. He took a long copper knife and with quick cuts to either side of their necks he slaughtered the animals. They sank down and died without protesting. Then the old man drove the knife into the heifer at the top of her breastbone. Mightily he yanked the blade downward, cracking bone, slicing flesh, and cutting the carcass into two separate parts. He did the same for the goat and for the ram, though he did not cut the birds in two.

  The halves of each animal Abram laid on the ground opposite each other, creating, as it were, a pathway up through the center of their bodies.

  By late afternoon blood and the raw meat had drawn birds of prey to the sky above this lonely place. They circled lower and lower on watchful wings. Finally, in their hunger they dropped and tried to land. But Abram ran at them, shouting and waving his arms. The old man exhausted himself that day, driving the great raptor birds back from the carrion, protecting the animals of the covenant of God.

  But then as the sun was going down it was more than mere weariness that came upon him. A deep sleep seized Abram. Dread and a marvelous darkness swept over him, and he sank to the ground, helpless.

  When the sun was altogether gone and the whole world had descended into perfect night, there came a smoking firepot sailing through the dark—a furnace of smoke and a flaming torch. As they passed between the halves of the animals, the Lord God made a covenant with Abram, saying, To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites and the Jebusites.

  WHEN ABRAM RETURNED to his tents the following day, he bathed himself carefully and buried his clothes.

  But he told no one where he had gone or what he had done or why he’d come back caked with dried blood.

  II

  SARAI, FOR HER PART, was even more anxious than her husband regarding the promises of God. Abram had already entered his eighty-fifth year, and she herself was seventy-five.

  And lo, O Lord: we are as childless as the day you first gave hope to my husband and me!

  That hope had been planted a full ten years ago. Sarai was intensely aware of time. She had suffered the passage of every barren month since the coming of the promises of God. For the Lord had said to Abram, I will make of you a great nation. But a nation begins with the birth of one child.

  Where is this child? Often the old woman placed her hands upon her sunken belly and thought, Where is my child?

  SARAI ADMITTED THAT she had been unrestrained in laughter and dancing when the Lord God interrupted their quiet lives. It became the gossip of their city—”Old Sarai thinks she will bear a baby yet!”—and it might have been an embarrassment to Abram, if he had not already planned to leave.

  They were living in Haran at the time, far to the north of this dry place, on the river Balik. Not in tents, in houses. Family and friends surrounded them, and though they were childless, by the time Abram was in his seventies they seemed content. Long ago Sarai had ceased to speak of children. She sincerely believed that she had accepted her sad fate.

  But one night Abram came and woke her, his face ashen, his eyes smoky and enormous, his voice ghostly.

  “Sarai, Sarai,” he whispered, “prepare to leave.”

  “Leave? Where? Is your father sick again?”

  Terah was failing in those years, often calling his son to his side.

  Abram did not acknowledge the question. He looked like a blackened candle wick, rigid and breakable. “The Lord God has commanded me to go to a land which he will show me. Sarai,” the man said, his voice issuing from his throat like wind from a cave, “he has made marvelous promises. He says he will make of me a great nation, and bless me, and make my name great so that I will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, he said. And him who curses you I will curse. By you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves. Sarai, get ready. We’ve got to go—”

  And then when Abram had departed into the night, Sarai began to pant. She bowed her head and covered her face with both hands and burst into tears. Agreat nation starts with a single child!

  Sarai, Abram’s wife, was going to have a baby.

  She could scarcely stand the sweetness low in her womb. A baby! Let people gossip about her strange behavior, her impossible expectations. Nothing bothered Sarai now.

  Indeed, she traveled from Haran without complaint—she and Abram and his nephew Lot, their servants and their cattle. No matter that no one knew where they were going. The God of her husband was leading them. And a glad anticipation made the old woman young again. Blood flowed brightly in Sara’s face. No matter that they now became wanderers living in tents. No matter that, when Abram and his nephew had to divide their flocks and families, Lot chose houses in the cities of the Jordan valley, while her husband continued to roam in tents. None of this mattered—because she had received the promise of God: she who had been barren was about to bear a baby.

  But that was ten years ago.

  And the bloom had long since faded in Sarai’s face.

  Moreover, womanhood was as dead as leather within her, and the miracle itself seemed a withered thing now.

  Yet God had aroused the desire inside of Sarai, and it would not lie down and die again. Every night it plucked at her heart: Where is it? Where is the child of my own womb? No, Sarai could never again be content with her fate—not after laughter and dancing and trust and all the changes the promise had caused in her life.

  Therefore, she took matters into her own hands.

  Sarai remembered a custom of Haran, a certain way by which to solve the problem of a woman’s barrenness. Perhaps Abram had left most of his past in that land, but the promises of his God must not be left behind, so neither would Sarai leave behind this final chance for a
child of her own.

  “Abram?” she said. “I have an idea.”

  They were sitting outside and eating supper several days after he had returned all bloody from some private ceremony. He had not explained the blood and she hadn’t asked. They were in the latter part of the meal. Sarai had cut a melon into parts for him, and he was eating them slowly.

  “What is your idea?” he said.

  She cast her eyes to the side, now cutting melon for herself. “I would not object,” she said, “if you liked my idea and acted upon it. Another woman might object. I would not. In fact, I would be grateful.”

  Abram put a sticky finger to his tongue. “What is your idea?” he said.

  “You know my maidservant, of course,” she said, carefully cutting the rind from her fruit.

  “Yes.”

  “Hagar. The sturdy woman whom we brought north from Egypt. That one. Young, she is. A good servant.”

  “Yes,” said Abram. “I know her. What is your idea?”

  “Now, then, are you finished with the melon? Have you had enough?”

  Abram simply sat and gazed at his wife.

  Finally she laid the pieces of her own fruit aside and wiped her hands and folded them in her lap and lifted her eyes to her husband.

  “When certain wives are unable to bear children,” she said, “they bring their maidservants to their husbands. They invite their husbands to go in to their maidservants in order that they, the barren wives, might in this manner get children of their own. For if the maid bears a baby upon the knees of her mistress, the baby becomes the child of the mistress. Abram, if you wished to do such a thing with Hagar my maidservant…I would not object.”

  For a long time the old man continued to gaze at the old woman. She lowered her eyes.

  “It was just an idea,” she said.

  Abram said, “Bring her to me,” and he rose and retired to his room in the tent.