Page 17 of Unveiled Tamar’s Story (Mysteries & Wonders of the Bible #1)
She made her lips turn up. “Thank you, Bithnia. There are no words to express how grateful I am for all your help. I am in your debt.” And that, perhaps, was the rub. She wanted to be in no one’s debt. She wanted to have to rely on no one. She wanted to be the one others relied on.
That, however, didn’t seem to be her lot just now.
Moments later, their whole group was stepping out into the morning light.
They turned immediately away from the knot of Roman soldiers, though not before she saw that their numbers had dropped from the five voices she’d heard when Livia found her back down to three.
They’d gone silent, settling into their useless watch again.
She glanced away quickly, but then Mariana looped their arms together and leaned in.
“You will want to check that impulse while you are dressed like a wealthy married Roman woman. Modesty is expected, yes, but those men are beneath the status you are wearing. Do not glance away as if the sight of them burns your eyes.”
Tamar forced a smile. “You cannot know how odd this is to me.”
“Perhaps not exactly, but do you think it has been easy to move to a hostile land, where the locals look at me as though I am a monster? To give birth to my children here, where I have to send for a Roman midwife because no Jewish woman will help me? Do you think it is easy to explain to one of the only friends I have here that I have decided not to serve her gods?” Mariana shook her head, and the morning light gilded her face with gold.
“You are a woman with more authority than most, beloved and respected by your community. For the first time in your life, you are experiencing disdain—but for something not your fault. It is a trial, yes. But it will soon be over. Your family will welcome you home the moment you return. Some of us do not have that promise.”
Tamar frowned at the pretty young Roman. “Your family won’t welcome you when you return to Rome?”
It took Tamar a beat to recognize the look Mariana sent her—a look no one ever sent her, at least not recently.
A look that accused her of being naive. “We made our choice to follow the Lord and the teachings of Jesus knowing full well it would mean being cut off from our families when they learn of it. We will, of course, try to persuade them of the truth of the one true God when we eventually return to Rome. But it is more likely that we will never be accepted by them again. We will never be fully accepted by the Jews, either, thanks to our Roman birth. So we will likely never be accepted by anyone.”
Tamar turned her face forward under the guise of watching her step as they followed the path winding its way back down toward Jerusalem. She didn’t like the questions Mariana’s story raised in her mind.
She’d never had to choose God over family.
Serving God was part of her family, something that bound them together.
Would she have chosen it still, had it torn them apart?
Would she choose service to the Lord over her parents, her siblings, her nieces and nephews?
Would she choose it if it meant losing them all forever?
“I admire you,” Bithnia said from behind them, softly. “You and your husband have made a brave choice. I know that God will reward you for it—in heaven, if not on earth.”
By instinct, Tamar bristled. Heaven was for them . For the children of Abraham. It was the place where Abraham and Isaac and Jacob waited to welcome them. Didn’t Bithnia fear she’d be struck down for daring to extend the welcome to anyone else?
But there had been many converts to Judaism throughout history. God would probably welcome them too…wouldn’t He?
It was far too early in the day after far too uncomfortable a night to make any sense of such questions.
Bithnia went on. “I heard Jesus promise that He is the way to the Father. That whoever believes in Him will live forever in heaven. I have been clinging to that. My family are mostly Sadducees. They believe there is nothing beyond our life on earth. They claim that this is all the Scriptures promise, that if we honor God here, we will be rewarded with long life and wealth. But that always felt so…empty.”
Tamar glanced back at her young friend. She’d known, of course, that the women under her direction came from all sorts of Jewish families.
Some from Pharisees, like her own. Others from Sadducees.
Others from less prominent sects, or sects within the main ones.
She made no effort to differentiate. In the weaving room, the only thing that mattered was that they served the Lord with diligence and respect.
Theological differences were to be left at the door.
She’d had no idea that Bithnia was raised to believe only in the here and now.
She’d had no idea that she longed for more.
Tamar’s brother Jeremiah, the second eldest of her brothers, would have grinned and said this girl had better marry a Pharisee so she could embrace the hope of a resurrected life with the Lord.
Bithnia, it seemed, had sought that comfort in a different way. Not in a husband who would let her believe as her soul yearned to do. But in a Teacher who promised it to all who would listen.
She shifted, wishing she could pull her arm from Mariana’s without causing offense.
The Rabbi had caused a considerable stir in the region, she knew that.
She’d only heard Him preach once, and it had struck her as sound enough teaching.
Perhaps that was why, a week ago, she’d let herself get caught up in the excitement when He returned to Jerusalem, riding a donkey as if He were a prince arriving with a message of peace.
Still, she hadn’t been able to argue with her eldest brother when he insisted Jesus was guilty of sacrilege either. How could she, hearing statements like the one Bithnia had just shared?
No man should claim to be the pathway to God.
No man could be. Anyone who thought he was such a pathway, who thereby set himself equal to God, was at best a madman, and at worse a criminal deserving the death Caiaphas had arranged.
Such heretics had to be eliminated, lest they drag all of Israel down.
That was the lesson her people had learned through centuries and millennia of oppression.
When they turned from God, when they let people—their own or their pagan neighbors—lead them astray, they paid the price. They lost the favor of God.
Heretic . It wasn’t a word to be taken lightly, and the mere whisper of it had been enough to make her and the rest of her family present in that crowd a week ago shake their heads and slink away from any further mention of Jesus of Nazareth.
He’d said nothing sacrilegious in the single sermon she’d heard, but if He was going about saying things like that , then He was a danger to them all.
But she didn’t much fancy siding with Caiaphas on anything just now. Which made her insides a muddle.
Mariana and Bithnia were still talking, Bithnia having asked Mariana what the Roman view was on the afterlife.
Tamar paid little attention as Mariana described bathing in the River Lethe, which removed human memory, and then being ushered into one of the various places in the underworld, determined by how virtuous a life one lived on earth.
She didn’t chime in as Bithnia explained the Hebrew understanding of Sheol, which wasn’t so dissimilar.
It was all the Sadducees would ever grant—that departed souls gathered in a place deep down, but that it was what the very word meant: hollow.
It was an empty place. Not one of comfort, nor of reward.
No paradise. Just…there. A gray place, a place of shadows and emptiness.
She much preferred her own sect’s insistence that God would raise the faithful in the last day.
That He would even grant access to His presence beforehand to those who lived virtuously.
Elijah, after all, hadn’t been caught up in a chariot of fire just to be delivered to nothingness, had he?
Moses’s body hadn’t been buried by the hand of God Himself, only for his soul to be consigned to nothingness.
David, who had chased after God’s own heart and found it, claimed in his psalms that God lifted the soul from the deepest Sheol to dwell in His presence.
They reached the end of the garden path, their feet once more on the plain that would lead directly to the city. Tamar didn’t mean to slow her pace, but she must have, because Mariana cast a questioning look her way.
She couldn’t bring herself to answer. All her life, Jerusalem had been home. Those walls and gates had represented safety, security, and belonging.
Suddenly they were something very different. They towered above her, a clear warning. Inside lay danger. Inside lay enemies who sought her life. Inside lay a ripped veil that had torn her world apart.
Her heart thudded painfully in her chest. How had this happened? Why had it happened? Why was she the one who stood to bear the punishment for something so beyond her control?
The walls offered no answers.