Aaron did not answer immediately but eventually came out with, “Tiberias.”
“Why are we not avoiding Samaria?” Uri asked.
Aaron sighed.
“Because that’s the order,” he said, and promptly moved off to the front.
They proceeded all day, not even stopping for lunch; anyone who felt hungry had to eat on muleback. We’re in a hurry, Uri thought. I wonder why.
He did a quick calculation. In four days’ time it would be Yom Kippur. Every Jew who lived within three days’ traveling distance of Jerusalem would now be preparing to set off. From this area they would reach it in two days. Tomorrow they would be passing through a region from which people were just setting off southward to Jerusalem. It’s odd, Uri thought, but we’re going in exactly the opposite direction.
He shuddered.
It was the same as the shiver that had gone through him in Rome when he had grasped that he had to reach Jerusalem for Passover, but he did not understand why he was shuddering now. This was not the same kind of journey. He nevertheless felt some presentiment; there was no knowing what it was, but it was unsettling.
The next day they reached the border between Judaea and Samaria. There was nothing marking it, but the party became tenser than they had been up till then, and Aaron was even more taciturn than before, if that was possible. That night he split them up into shifts to stand guard, estimating time from the arc of the moon across the branches of a tree. Uri was allocated to the dawn shift, but he spent much of the night awake thinking. We are creeping along like robbers, he thought. If it was necessary to stand guard, then the safe passage they’d bought from the robbers had expired, so from now on it was other robbers that had to be feared.
He still knew nothing about his traveling companions, merely that the two men in white-tunics consistently buried their excrement under a mound of earth. What could had enticed them into this, he wondered? Did they also long to go to Alexandria? Or were they, perhaps, guilty of some misdemeanor and paying for it by having to take part in this delegation?
In the morning they moved off, still northward.
At the edge of a village they noticed that people were congregating: old people and children, men and women gathered around two carts loaded with animals and produce. They must be setting off for the festival in Jerusalem, Uri thought. Aaron resolutely jogged in front as they took the path leading into the village.
When they were near the group of people, Aaron jumped off his mule.
“Peace be upon you!” he greeted them.
“And upon you!” a few of the people answered.
Uri narrowed his eyes; he could not see the faces clearly.
“For the festival?” Aaron asked.
“Yes, the festival,” they replied proudly.
“We’ll meet up there,” said Aaron.
“We’ll meet there!” they replied.
Uri’s group carried on northward.
He swayed as he walked, half-asleep when he was suddenly startled into full consciousness.
Those people were setting off southward whereas we are still headed northward. Why, then, had Aaron said that we would meet up with them at the festival? That can’t be true!
On the path they encountered a larger group, which was driving livestock and a cart, but they were headed north.
This was already Samaria! These people were not striving to reach Jerusalem but their own ruined shrine in the north, at Mount Gerizim.
Was that where we were headed?
The temple of the Samaritans had once stood on Mount Gerizim, which they had built in defiance of the Temple in Jerusalem that had been demolished. There they had made sacrificial offerings of incinerated meat to appease a wrathful Lord, and before Herod the Great it had been destroyed by John Hyrcanus, then the king of the Jews, and since lain in ruins. However, the Samaritans kept making sacrificial offerings among the ruins even now, and they hated the Jews, with whom they shared a common God and language.
They had difficulty making further progress along the path, continually changing course because of pedestrians, forcing the mules to trample untrodden shrubland, listening to the joyful singsong. Like the Judaeans, the Samaritans chanted psalms; they were taking sacrificial animals and produce to the ruins of their own temple.
These people are not going to harm us, it occurred to Uri; they believe that we too are going to make sacrificial offerings at their temple, that we are not hostile Jews but their brothers.
A cunning dodge, that: a Jew from Judaea could hardly be safer in traveling in Samaria. Presumably we are also saving ourselves a substantial detour on the way to Tiberias.
But what about the way back? Shall we be coming back at the time of the Festival of Booths, like good Samaritans? But traveling is forbidden for them, too, at that time.
By the afternoon every path had become clogged with people, and the mules, unused to such activity, constantly tugged this way and that, balking and coming to a standstill.
These people struck Uri as being happier than those on the road from Caesarea to Jerusalem.
A prophet with a flowing beard went along in the center of one group, yelling hoarsely, with people joining in.
“The Ark of the Covenant!” they shouted.
Aaron held back until he was in step with Uri at the end of the line.
“Move it! We’re making progress too slowly. Don’t fall behind.”
“What are those people shouting?” Uri asked.
“You can hear them yourself,” Aaron said, pressing on to the front.
That evening they were unable to find a place for themselves, so they made camp among a throng of people.
A divine miracle has occurred, people kept on saying, joyously, both to themselves and to each other. The Lord has had mercy on us, God is with us, blessed be the Eternal One. They bowed to the north and prayed, saying a short Sh’ma, and they never wearied of proclaiming that those alive right now were joyous because the Ark of the Covenant had turned up. It was a miracle, a miracle! The Almighty had worked a miracle: the Ark of the Covenant had been found!
Uri shuddered.
He had already given some thought to the Ark of the Covenant on the journey. It was as if his thinking about it had caused people to start talking about it. They wielded shovels, sticks, and swords; serious men and shriveled elders and irrational children and wailing women. The Ark of the Covenant was in the depths of Mount Gerizim; the depths of the Holy Mountain were concealing it. It only had to be dug out.
So that was what we were going to do — dig it out!
They prayed and chanted throughout the night; it was impossible to sleep.
By daybreak Uri had formed a clear picture for himself.
The Lord had appeared in a dream to a certain Matthew, a prophet, and informed him that the lost Ark of the Covenant was hidden by Mount Gerizim, and also told him exactly where it was to be sought. Upon awakening Matthew doubted whether he had really spoken with the Lord in his dream, but when he turned his gaze on the mountain he saw a burning bush in its depths at exactly the spot the Lord said the Ark of the Covenant had been buried centuries ago. Matthew raced over and began digging, but he realized that he alone was not equal to the task, and he set to preaching to the populace what the Lord had told him, calling on them to dig alongside him. He had been preaching the words of the Lord for a week now. The Lord was well aware when to announce the secret because the people would be flocking there for the Day of Atonement anyway; indeed, many had set off earlier than usual. Everyone would dig, and the Ark of the Covenant would be found, and with the Ark of the Covenant, power! Because the Lord is seated on the Ark of the Covenant, and in this way he would raise the Semites of Samaria above all peoples, blessed be His name!
As to what kind of man this Matthew was, no one had anything to say; obviously they did not know him. But the important thing was not so much who this prophet was but that the Lord God had appeared to him in a dream.