THE DEPARTURE.
It was late in the evening: the slaves extinguished the seven-branched
lamp and laid the cushions for beds in the porticoes which surrounded
the inner court. All retired speedily to rest, that they might set out
the earlier on the following morning. But the mother still lingered on
the spot; her grief increased as the time of departure drew nigh;
weeping she embraced her child, and said, “Call me Mara, for I am a
sorrowful mother in Israel.” Helon in silence leant upon her bosom, till
Elisama came, and said to her: “Bethink thee of what our prophet
saith,[18] 'Rachel weepeth for her children and refuseth to be
comforted. But thus saith the Lord, refrain thy voice from weeping and
thine eye from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded and thy children
shall come again to their own border.'” He forced her away into the
inner apartments, and himself lay down on one of the cushions in the
portico.
Footnote 18:
Jer. xxxi. 15.
Helon did not attempt to sleep. Wishing his uncle calm repose, he
ascended the roof of the house where stood the _alija_, a small
apartment like a turret, dedicated to secret meditation and prayer. From
the roof there was an extensive view over the city of Alexandria; on the
north to the Mediterranean, on the south to the lake Mareotis, and on
the east to the Nile and the Delta. Here he had often stood when a boy,
and with restless longing had looked towards the Holy Land. It was a
clear, calm night of spring. Refreshing odours arose from the
surrounding gardens. The countless stars shed down their twinkling
radiance upon him, and the moon’s new light was mirrored in the lake and
the canals of the Nile.
Before him lay the city of Alexander, justly styled in the days of her
highest prosperity, the Queen of the East and the Chief of Cities. In
what stillness she now reposed, with her towering obelisks! How deep the
silence and the rest which wrapt her 600,000 inhabitants, and her five
harbours, by day so full of activity and noise! The house was near the
Panium, from which the whole city could be seen at one view. There stood
the Bruchium which, besides the royal palace, contained the Museum,
rendered the chief seat of the learning of the times, by its library of
400,000 volumes, and by being the residence of the learned men, whom the
munificence of the Ptolemies had collected around their court. Here
Helon had sat for several years, at the feet of the philosophers. He
thought on those years, and, as he compared them with his present hopes,
he exclaimed:
Better is a day in thy courts than a thousand!
I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of the Lord
Than dwell in the tents of sin.—Ps. lxxxiv. 10.
“Truly the tents of sin,” said he to himself, as he paced the roof,
“even when I think on my own people, who live here in high favour. Let
them be called Macedonians if they will, let the sons of the high priest
be the commanders of the army, let them hope for still greater
distinctions from Cleopatra’s favour, it is still an exile and Israel is
in affliction. Their schisms in doctrine and laxity of morals are too
plain a proof of it.”
He went into the alija and brought out his harp; the plaintive tones
resounded through the still air of night as he sung
By the rivers of Babel we sat and wept
When we thought on Zion.
We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.—Ps. cxxxvii.
“Here we ought to hang them upon the pyramids,” continued he. “The
controversy which destroyed the harmony of our social meal this evening
still jars upon my soul. Praised be God, that Jeremiah sojourned with my
forefathers, that they like myself have continued Aramæan Jews, and have
not gone over to the Hellenists.”
The _Diaspora_, or body of the Jews dispersed in foreign countries, was
divided at this time into Hellenists and Aramæan Jews. The Hellenists
had adopted the Greek, at that time the universal language of the
civilized and literary world; the Aramæan Jews used, even in foreign
lands, the Hebrew, or rather a dialect of that language, called the
Aramæan. The latter attached themselves to the temple at Jerusalem, the
former worshipped at Leontopolis in Egypt. A division once begun is
easily extended to other points. With the Greek language the Hellenists
had adopted Grecian culture, yet wished still to continue Jews, and
hence arose the necessity for uniting philosophy with the law. The only
way in which this could be accomplished, was that which they adopted, of
attributing the doctrines of Grecian wisdom to the law, as its inward
and spiritual meaning. In this undertaking the Egyptians had led the way
for them. Egypt is the native country of allegories. For a long time
past the popular religion had been very different from that of the
sacerdotal caste, and they stood to each other in the relation of the
letter to the spirit; of the image to the reality. The Hellenistic Jews
had adopted this Egyptian mode, and three classes had been formed
amongst them. One party openly renounced both law and allegory, living
without the law, which indeed it was impossible to observe exactly any
where but in Judea. Another outwardly conformed to the law, but did so
for the sake of its hidden and spiritual meaning. A third set were
contented with this spiritual meaning, which they arbitrarily annexed to
it, and concerned themselves no further with the literal observance. No
little confusion had arisen from this variety of opinions, and the
incessant controversies to which they gave rise.
Helon had been hurried by the prevailing spirit of his age and country
for some years into the vortex of allegory. A youth of such an ardent
temperament and high intellectual endowments, connected with the most
considerable families of the Alexandrian Jews, could scarcely escape
this temptation. Had his father been alive, he would have been a
constant monitor to him against the danger—but since his death on the
journey to the Holy Land, Helon’s danger had increased, with the
increase of his liberty. It seems too as if it were necessary that those
master spirits, who are destined successfully to oppose the errors of
their times, should themselves for a while be involved in them. The
scattered intimations which the law itself affords opened to him a new
and attractive field, which he was eager to explore completely. He was
advised to make himself acquainted with the Grecian philosophy, as the
source of the knowledge which he desired, and for this purpose he
resorted to the Museum. His first instructor here was a Stoic, who
demanded from him a greater rigour than even the law had required, but
at the same time taught him, that the knowledge of God was not
necessary. Helon forsook him, and applied himself to an acute
Peripatetic; but his thoughts seemed more occupied with his pecuniary
remuneration, than with the high rewards of wisdom and philosophy. Helon
lost no time in seeking another teacher. A Pythagorean required, as a
preliminary, a long study of music, astronomy and geometry, and Helon
thought that the knowledge of the truth might surely be attained by a
less circuitous process. At last a young and lively Greek of the name of
Myron, whom he had known as a child, introduced him to a Platonic
philosopher. In him he seemed to have found all of which he had been in
search. He perused with Myron the dialogues of him whom his disciples
called _the divine_. Those were hours never to be forgotten, in which
his doctrine of reminiscences, of virtue that is not to be taught or
learnt, of That which is, first irradiated his mind. About this time he
became acquainted with a wise Jew, who was also a Platonist, and
profoundly skilled in the interpretation of the law. He could answer
every question which Helon wished to ask respecting the sense of
scripture. He explained to him the seven days of creation, and the ten
commandments, in their spiritual import; and taught him much respecting
the world of ideas, which he had not found even in Plato. His new
teacher represented the divine intelligence, not as an attribute of God,
but as a being having a distinct existence, and called it the image of
God, his first born son, the highest of the angels and the primeval man.
For a long time his fancy rioted in these speculations, to which he was
so entirely devoted, that if he continued to observe the law, it was
owing to the pure and simple manners to which he was accustomed in his
father’s family. But every thing which only gratifies the understanding
loses its charm, especially with men of lively and ardent temperament,
when it loses its novelty. When Helon’s first transport, at the
enlargement of his views, had subsided, and cool reflection began to
resume her sway; when he perceived that Myron could, with equal ease,
explain and vindicate the worship of Jupiter, Bacchus, and Apollo—the
Orphic and Dionysian mysteries—and all the idolatries of polytheism, by
the aid of the same principles which his teacher had applied to the
interpretation of scripture; suspicions were awakened in his mind that
these principles could not be true. That which converts falsehood into
truth, he thought, can never increase the force and evidence of truth.
The promises which were given to Israel, the threatenings and warnings
of Jehovah against participation in idolatry, recurred to his mind. The
image of his deceased father was daily held up to him by his mother, as
one who had abhorred the system of the Hellenists. A feeling of pride in
his own nation, as the chosen people of Jehovah, was awakened in his
bosom, and he could no longer take pleasure in the society of Myron.
He began now to remark the endless varieties and inconsistencies of
these allegorical interpretations. Every one, full of the persuasion of
his own wisdom, expounded the divine word according to his own fancy.
Helon could not but perceive that all this wisdom was an arbitrary,
self-invented, human system of doctrine respecting divine things, in
opposition to which, not only Plato but the whole tenour of scripture
taught him, that God only can be our instructor in things relating to
himself, and that human reason must here rely upon revelation. This
revelation he found in the law, delivered to his nation upon mount
Sinai, under circumstances the most impressive and sublime. While this
train of thought tended to alienate him from the Hellenists and their
system, his mother one evening remarked to him with sorrow his slowness
in fulfilling the divine precepts. At first he was so much offended by
it, that he replied to her remonstrance only by a sarcastic look, and
retired to his books. But conscience did not allow him to rest. Suddenly
the divine denunciation occurred to him, “The eye that mocketh at his
father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall
pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.”[19] He was deeply
moved, and now saw with opened eyes the abyss of immorality, to the edge
of which this new wisdom had conducted him. He had long desired to be
free from the burthensome duties of the law, and he had now transgressed
against the first commandment with promise. He felt to what this heathen
philosophy, this partial culture of the mind, was bringing him; and in
the lives of its professors he saw, in all their rank maturity, the
vices, of which he discovered the seeds in his own heart. They lived
without a law, sunk in heathen vice and immorality. He now perceived
that nothing but the most faithful obedience to the law could make him
truly happy, that in this way only he became a partaker in the promises
of God to the upright, and that the passion for allegories had corrupted
his mind instead of enlightening it. These reflections determined him to
return to the faith of his fathers.
Footnote 19:
Prov. xxx. 17.
He now felt himself once more at home under his paternal roof; his
former filial reverence for his mother returned; his father’s spirit
seemed to smile on his conversion; and the experienced counsels of his
uncle proved much more than an equivalent to him for all the wisdom of
the Museum. All the joys and the longings of his childhood returned upon
him; the feelings of the present moment seemed to be linked immediately
to the remembrances of his boyish days, and all that had intervened
appeared like a period of delusion. His desire to behold Jerusalem came
over him again, in all its original vividness: it had been the strongest
of his early feelings, and the very names of Canaan, Zion, and
Jerusalem, had held a mysterious sway over his imagination. His mother,
as he sat upon her knees, had told him of the place, towards which he
was taught to lisp his prayer; of the thousands who went up to the
feast; of Moses, David, and Solomon; and had represented Egypt as a land
of exile, another Babel, in comparison with the land of his fathers. He
often saw her weep when she spoke of Jericho and her native city, and
related how she, when a maiden, had gone up in the choir of singers to
the festival, but must now remain in a strange land. As the severest
punishment for his childish offences, he used to be told, that it would
be a long time before he would be fit to accompany his father on a
pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and the reward of his proficiency and his
obedience was the promise of a sight of Jerusalem. When Jews from the
holy city visited Alexandria, and, as their custom was, came to see his
father, it was a festival for Helon; he regarded these strangers with
scarcely less veneration than his fathers had done Jeremiah, and tried
all the insinuating arts of which he was possessed, to induce the most
courteous among them to tell him something about the land of his
ancestors. It was the land of promise, the theme of sacred song, the
theatre of sacred history. When his father was in a cheerful mood, he
used to relate anecdotes of his pilgrimages, beginning and ending every
narrative with the words of the children of Korah:
The Lord loveth the gates of Zion,
Whose foundation is in the holy mountains,
More than all the dwellings of Jacob.
Glorious is it to speak of thee,
O city of God!—Ps. lxxxvii.
The journey from which his father never returned, was to have been the
last which he made alone—on the next, Helon was to have accompanied him.
His grief at being obliged to remain at home, his mother’s tears, his
father’s solemn farewell, as it were prophetic of the fatal event; his
mother’s daily remarks, “Now they are in Hebron, to-day they will reach
Jerusalem; to-day the passover begins, to-day it will be over;” their
joyful expectations of his return, and the overwhelming intelligence of
his death, had all combined to leave an impression on his mind, which he
had with difficulty mastered for a time, and which now revived with
uncontroulable force. Since his return to the law of his fathers, a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem had been his dream by night and his thought by
day. Leontopolis, the character and proceedings of the Hellenists, and
even the conversation at this evening’s entertainment, all conspired to
convince him, that Egypt was no place for the fulfilment of the law. It
was now the predominant wish of his soul to become a true Israelite, a
faithful follower of the law, and a worthy member of the people of the
Lord, and he felt that only in the Holy Land could he become so.
All these reflections and retrospects of his past life filled the mind
of Helon, as he laid down his harp upon the parapet of the roof, and
paced up and down in strong emotion. At times he stopped, and fixing his
eyes on the north-east, almost persuaded himself that the clouds which
he saw there were the hills of Judah. In the mean time Sallu, who, like
his master, had been unable to sleep, had silently placed a lamp in the
alija. Helen was attracted by the light and went in. A roll lay
unfolded; he looked into it, and opened at the splendid description
which an exile at Nineveh, of the tribe of Naphthali, makes of the holy
city. (Tob. x.) “O Jerusalem, the holy city! Many nations shall come
from far to the name of the Lord God, with gifts in their hands. Blessed
are they that love thee, and rejoice in thy peace. Let my soul bless
God, the great King: for the Lord our God will deliver Jerusalem from
all her afflictions. The gates of Jerusalem shall be built of sapphires
and emeralds and precious stones; thy towers and battlements of pure
gold: and the streets of Jerusalem shall be paved with white marble, and
in all her streets shall they say, Hallelujah! Praised be God who hath
exalted her, and may his kingdom endure for ever. Amen.”
“Hallelujah,” he exclaimed, “that before me an Egyptian Jew could put
such words into the mouth of a captive at Nineveh.” He hastened to his
harp, and placing the footstool under his foot, turned towards the Holy
Land as he sung
O Jehovah, thou art my God, early will I seek thee.
My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee,
In a dry and thirsty land.
Would that I might see thy sanctuary,
To behold thy power and glory.—Ps. lxiii.
He knew by heart all the psalms which had any relation to Jerusalem, and
no sooner had he finished one, than his fingers and his voice, unbidden,
began another.
When Israel went out of Egypt,
The house of Jacob from a people of strange language,
Judah was his sanctuary,
Israel his dominion.—Ps. cxiv.
His own pilgrimage to Jerusalem seemed to him like the departure of
Israel from Egypt fourteen hundred years before, and he was transported
at once to those remote ages with so lively a feeling, that the psalm
seemed to him to spring fresh from his own soul, and to have been
dictated by his own emotions. The forty-third Psalm occurred to his
mind, and with the raised look, but subdued voice of humble devotion, he
sung—
Send out thy light and thy truth and let them guide me!
Let them bring me to thy holy hill and to thy tabernacles!
Then will I go unto the altar of God,
Unto God my exceeding joy.
Yea upon the harp will I praise thee,
O God, my God!
Why art thou cast down, O my soul,
And why art thou disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall yet praise him
Who is the health of my countenance and my God.
The tones of the harp gradually died away, and Helon remained absorbed
in gratitude and devotion towards Jehovah.
At length he arose to perform his evening prayer. Since his return to
the law of his fathers, he had been rigid in the performance of this
duty, and without discriminating accurately, in the fervour of his new
zeal, between the commands of God, and the usages established by
tradition, he would gladly even have added to their length and
frequency. There was at this time a distinction commonly made among the
Aramæan Jews between the _righteous_ man, who only aimed to fulfil the
law as it was left by Moses; and the _pious_ man, who, not content with
this, endeavoured by the performance of other ordinances to attain a
still higher degree of the divine favour. At an earlier period of
Helon’s life, it would have seemed to him a superfluous trouble, to
endeavour to deserve the character of the righteous man; now, nothing
could satisfy him, but to aspire to the rank of a pious man.
The washing of the hands preceded prayer, because nothing impure was to
appear before the purest of Beings. Helon next covered his head with his
mantle, a sort of tallith. This mantle had at the four corners fringes,
which were called zizis, consisting of eight double twisted threads of
wool, whose azure colour had a reference to the heavens, with five
tassels for the five books of the law. The use of these fringes had been
commanded by God himself to the children of Israel, “That they might
look upon them and remember all the commandments of the Lord and do
them, and seek not after their own heart and their own eyes.”[20] He
next bound the phylacteries, called tephillim, on his forehead and his
left arm, in such a way, that the strings of the first hung upon his
breast, and the latter were wound seven times round the fore-arm, then
across the fore-finger and the thumb, and finally three times round the
middle finger. These phylacteries were little cases, containing strips
of parchment, on which the following sentences of the law were written.
Deut. v. 11, 13-21. Exod. xiii. 11-16. Deut. vi. 4-9. and Exod. xiii.
1-10. of which the Lord had commanded “They shall be for a token upon
thine hand and for frontlets between thine eyes.”[21] In the phylactery
for the forehead there were four strips, in that for the left arm only
one.
Footnote 20:
Num. xv. 38.
Footnote 21:
Deut. vi. 8.
He now placed himself with his face towards Jerusalem and prayed the
_Kri-schma_, a prayer which consisted of these three passages from the
books of Moses; Deut. vi. 4-9. in which it is commanded to love and
honour God alone; Deut. xi. 13-21. where the promises are given for the
fulfilling of the law; and Numb. xv. 37-41. where it is required that
the commandments be diligently kept. He concluded all with a prayer to
God, as being, in every act of religious worship, the beginning and the
end, the centre to which every thing tends.
Having performed his devotions, he descended with a cheerful heart from
the roof, and laid himself beside Elisama in the portico. At the first
cock-crowing he arose; for strengthened and animated by hope he had
little need of sleep.
He went first to the alija, and having repeated the ceremonies of the
preceding evening, and again concluded with an act of praise to God, he
roused the slaves and bade them lead the laden camels to the gate. His
mother came, with eyes red with weeping, from the apartment of the
women. The sun was rising at that moment, and Elisama approaching her,
tried to console her with the words of the eighty-fourth Psalm,
The Lord God is a sun and shield,
The Lord will give grace and glory;
No good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.
O Lord of Hosts
Blessed is the man that trusteth in thee!
“Yes,” she exclaimed,
Turn thee unto me and have mercy upon me,
For I am desolate and afflicted.
The travellers were invited to take some food, but Elisama declared that
only the servant in Israel took food early in the morning, and to others
it was a disgrace. The mother, however, was not to be dissuaded, and
compelled them to take dates, figs, and honey. “Greet thy father’s
grave,” said she to Helon. “Let thy first visit be to the valley of
Jehoshaphat.” Sallu led out the camels. He was full of joy, and every
moment touched his ear-ring as a badge of honour. The mother embraced
her son, and weeping said to him,
The Lord bless thee and keep thee!
The Lord make his face to shine upon thee
And be gracious unto thee!
The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee
And give thee peace!
“Go then,” she exclaimed, “God be with thee on the way, and his angel
lead thee!”
Helon tore himself from her, and, accompanied by his uncle, descended
the inner court. He had scarcely reached the outer, before the
delightful expectation of visiting Jerusalem had already gained the
ascendency in his thoughts over the sorrow of departure. And when from
the end of the street he had cast back a look on the parental house, and
blessed once more his mother and the alija, he proceeded with alacrity
on his way, repeating to himself,
Blessed is the man who puts his confidence in thee,
And thinks of the way to Jerusalem.
No farewell to home is ever less painful than the first.