The King’s Daughterby Tala Bar |
Table of Contents Synopsis Chapter 12 part 2 appears in this issue. |
Chapter 12: The Last Sacrifice
conclusion |
* * *
No wonder women did not love BatSheva. She was not a very clever woman, and of rather lowly origin, and she found no interest in their company. Most of her time at the women’s house she spent joking and flirting with the guards and looking after her children; she was, I think, the only one in the House who had more than one child. Being a simple woman, she must have been greatly flattered by the King’s attention. All her existence depended on men’s appreciation, and having experienced David’s love, she might not have noticed that her first husband — who was missing from home a great deal anyway — had been sacrificed for its sake. BatSheva, I must say, believed deeply and strongly in the Goddess and saw and accepted the course of her life as a result of Ashtoret’s management.
Although the story of their attachment begins with David’s strong and continuous desire for BatSheva, it did not end there. For a few years during his rule in Yerushalem, the annual human victim was a person from outside David’s family. After Sha’ul’s children, whose death was the result of an urgent political need, Uriya’s sacrifice was nothing but convenience. Rumors started to run that when David finished with Sha’ul’s family, he would start looking for victims elsewhere; every man, they said, would be in danger of losing to the King either his wife or any other of his loved ones, or his very life — or both.
David, as a political man, was sensitive to rumors. When BatSheva’s first son was born, he found it an opportunity to sacrifice his own flesh and blood without doing it to anyone of great importance. The baby’s young age made it easy for him to cross that mental obstacle; but that action had another dimension — suddenly, for the first time in his life, David was jealous for the woman he wanted particularly, when he saw her love turned from him to her son. On the whole, David was not prone to jealousy, mainly because he did not appreciate any woman enough to be jealous; but BatSheva, as I have said, was a special case.
David, however, did not take into account BatSheva’s reaction to the sacrifice of her child. It is quite clear to me that although flattered by the King’s attention, BatSheva was really much more attached to her children than to him. On that occasion, she began to fear that any son she would bear the King would be sacrificed, and, almost by an animal instinct, she tried to avoid any contact with him.
The next spring after her son’s sacrifice, she became too ill (either physically or mentally) to take part in the Sacred Marriage. David had no choice but to promise her to let her children live, for it seemed that his need for her overcame any other feeling; to strengthen that promise, he even declared that BatSheva’s next child would inherit the throne. How much the King really meant to fulfill that declaration I cannot tell. Still, when that second son was born, David gave him the name Yedidya — “Friend of Yhwh.” It denoted dedicating the child to his god, at the same time recalling his own anointing, and thus marking the continuation of kingship under the auspices of Yhwh. It was the first indication of the intention to transfer the kingship from father to son, in sharp opposite to any previous custom.
* * *
If there was any doubt of BatSheva’s love for Uriya, or even for David — on whom she depended very deeply — there was no doubt of her love for her son Yedidya, the fugitive from the sacrificial knife. But that child really deserved her love; all the women in the house, where the boy lived until the age of seven or eight before his mother agreed to give him into the hands of David’s men for his education, loved and admired him for his beauty and wisdom. Yedidya himself returned their love; like both his mother and father, even as a child he had demonstrated his being attracted to the opposite sex.
In appearance, Yedidya was a cuddly boy of shining colorings; in character, he was a gay, lovable child who had begun showing the first signs of wisdom and understanding for which he was to become famous. That wisdom was all his own, uninherited from his simple mother, being much deeper and subtler than his father’s cleverness.
* * *
When David’s two sons competed for the throne, Adoniya was already a grown man and a veteran soldier; he was a strong and independent man, with more than a few supporters and followers. Adoniya never felt he needed the help of his mother, who was a small person in body and soul, estranged from the King and unable to assist her son in any way.
Yedidya, in contrast, was a boy of thirteen or fourteen, beloved by many of the poeple who knew him. He was helped much by his mother, who had many sympathizers among the men at court. BatSheva’s charming ability came to her aid even with a man like the prophet Natan, who was Yedidya’s teacher; Natan admired not only his bright student, but also his pretty mother... and who says a prophet is not a man?
In the end, the man who determined more than anyone else David’s decision in choosing his successor was Adoniya himself. One day BatSheva, full of excitement, burst into the common hall of the Women’s house. “Have you heard? You won’t believe it, but Adoniya intends to kidnap Avishag!”
Some of the women cried out together: “To kidnap Avishag? That is terrible!” pronounced one.
“Listen, that’s fantastic! That is the most interesting intrigue I’ve heard lately!” shouted another.
“It’s not true!” Haggit squeaked; “they always tell tales about him!”
If the rumor was true or not, it reached the prophet Natan, who passed it on to BatSheva to be used as a weapon for her own purposes.
* * *
When I reflect on the way Ahino’am tried to influence the course of history in her actions and her personality, I am astonished at the great power which fell unheedingly into her hands, and how in the end she could not manage to use it for her benefit. Avishag was born in Shunem in the Valley of Yizre’el, and was a relative of Ahino’am’s; it was my mother who had brought the girl to the Ashtoret temple in Yerushalem as an apprentice. Avishag was as dark as Ahino’am, but unlike my mother, she was pretty in her dark complexion — it must have been about her that the poet said, “I am dark and lovely.” Her appearance was much more womanly than Ahino’am’s: She was taller, her stature straight and graceful, her breasts full and her belly round; her black hair was long and straight, reaching her waist; her black eyes elongated and glittering, her hooked nose brave and her mouth generous.
It was a wonder that with all her sensous beauty, Avishag could not stir David’s blood, but it seemed he had exhausted all his strength in the pleasures of his youth. But the people around him were all caught in the charms of that new — and virtually untouched — concubine of David’s. Adoniya did not only want to use Avishag’s position as Ashtoret’s priestess and the King’s concubine to gain rights for kingship; he also desired her as a woman to make love to. But his plan — or supposed plan — to kidnap her signed his sentence. When confronted by BatSheva and Nathan, David had no choice but to order the preparation for Yedidya’s Sacred Marriage with Avishag next spring, and the crowning of his younger son.
Before that time arrived, however, Daivd posed one condition to the future King — to let him die in his bed. To get Ashtoret’s worshipers to agree to that condition, they posed one of their own — to change Yedidya’s name to a more suitable one for Ashtoret. That was how the future King of Israel had received the name of ‘Shelomo’, after the god who had given his name to his city of Yerushalem.
Shelomo’s real fortune was seen when at that same year, at Midsummer, the King died a natural death in his bed, in Avishag’s arms. As I said, David always got all his wishes. It was natural that he would be declared Ashtoret’s victim of the year, because the charisma which had enveloped him, the myths woven around his figure, were enough for the people to accept that sacrifice, to declare David as the immortal image of Naaman himself, and every king ruling after him would identify with him.
Adoniya, who, like most military men I had known, was not very clever, did not give up his plans to kidnap Avishag. For that reason he was pursued by Shelomo’s people, who caught him at last and sacrificed him the next year. But that was the last sacrifice; Shelomo fulfillled his father’s wish to replace human sacrifice with that of animals. Even in that, David had his wish.
The kingship in Yerushalem of David and Shelomo — in spite of the latter’s change of name — deepened the worship of Yhwh in the city and in the area of Binyamin. I foresee that in the future all Ashtoret’s followers would have to travel north in order to be free of the house of David and the rule of the God of the Desert. In the end, I suppose, the People will be divided into two factions, perhaps even have two separate royal houses: the tribe of Yehudah following Yhwh, and the rest of Israel worshipping Ashtoret.
* * *
My words are arriving at their end, almost with my last breath. After David’s death, Tamar came up before Shelomo and asked his permission to leave the Temple. When she came to tell me about it, the indifference in her voice was painful for me to hear. More than ever she looked remote from the physical world, from its intrigues and troubles. Her beauty, which had always had a spiritual aura, had began emitting a sense of distant, alien awe; it seemed that in spite of her unchanging bright appearance, she was preparing herself to enter the services of the Goddess of the Underworld.
“I am going to the Galil,” she announced. Her voice sounded monotonous, with barely a trace of life in it; its thin tremor was beginning to thicken, and I thought that soon she would be able to utter with no difficulty the low, muted voice of an Underworld Sibyl.
“I am so sorry, Tamar!” Tears sprung into my eyes. Was I somehow unintentionally the cause of my daughter’s fate? “
“No, Mother!” She called me thus for the first and last time of her life. “You should not be sorry. I am truly happy, because I feel that that is the fate for which I had always been destined.”
We hugged for the last time, kissed each other, and when she left the room she took with her the last connection of my life with the outside world.
I am holding the statue of Ashtoret tight to my tired body. With autumn winds, always my favorite season, I hope my spirit shall fly away, to join all the ghosts of the people I have known in my life who are roaming She’ol. I rely on Avishag to see to it that my body lies in the Temple, next to those of Ahino’am and David. Thus, the late king will lie in the cave in company of his most important wives, the two representatives of the Goddess, the marriage with whom granted him the right for kingship — the young image of the Love Goddess of spring, and the old image of the Death and Birth Goddess of midsummer and autumn.
David was a strong man, who lived according to his own wishes and ambitions, tied in his navel to the faith of the Desert god Yhwh. But in the end, it was the Mother goddess Ashtoret who had determined his fate as Naaman’s image, as the eternal hero of the myth guided by his mother Ashtoret. Still, his death also signed the end of that faith in Yerushaelm and Binyamin. I know that after my burial the Temple will be closed, and no one will worship Ashtoret there ever again.
Last night I saw Ahino’am in my dream, carrying a baby on her arms.
“Mikhal, we are waiting impatiently for you, Avino’am and I,” she said, raising my son toward me. I know now that in a day or two Ashtoret will take me to her bosom.
“I am coming, Mother!” I was able to answer at last.
Copyright © 2005 by Tala Bar