guards and brought me in with him, assuring me that there would be no risk to me. Such was the faith I had begun to put in him by then that I believed him.
The camp was not nearly as ramshackle a place as I’d expected, having been built not by Antipas but by the Romans, with their typical efficiency and precision. They had been motivated in this less by philanthropy than by strategy: the colony was set on the promontory that stood over the Arbela caves, and was a way of keeping the caves, which were accessible only from above, out of the hands of therebels and bandits who normally inhabited them. Several barracks-style dormitories ran along the length of the promontory, with a courtyard and common kitchen at the centre of them. Apparently before the Romans had turned the place over to Antipas, as they eventually had, they actually supplied food for the residents and encouraged large communal meals and a sharing of tasks as a way of maintaining some sort of discipline and order. Now, however, the residents were dependent on the generosity of their relatives in bringing food and on the honesty of the guards in delivering it.
What was surprising in the camp was its air of normalcy: people went about their business, cooking and cleaning, carrying water, even farming a bit of field there, with only the slightest sense of hush and shame at their afflictions. Clearly Yeshua had brought an air of hope to the place. He encouraged cleanliness and had set up special areas of segregation to monitor various ailments and work towards a cure; and he treated people from an entirely medical point of view, with none of the condescension that the priests in Jerusalem showed in sending the afflicted off to their quarantine, nor indeed with the least concern for their uncleanness. When I asked him how he reconciled his approach with the proscriptions of the scriptures, he said merely that our forefathers had found their own way of expressing things that could not otherwise have been understood then.
When he had finished his rounds in the camp proper, he led me down to the caves. This was where the worst cases took refuge, those without hope. The whole mountain face at Arbela was riddled with these caves, which were accessible only by a steep footpath, one that here and there required you to scrabble against the rock face; already as we nearedthe end of it there was an overwhelming stench of putrid flesh, people moving like wraiths against the caves’ darkness. It was from here that Antigonus, the last of the Maccabees, had fought Herod the Great, Herod finally resorting to swinging grappling hooks down into the mouths of the caves from above in order to drag his enemy out from them. But for the lepers who had now retreated to them, the caves had become their permanent homes, not because they had been forced into them but because shame had driven them there. So it was that once their disfigurements had rendered them hideous they repaired from the barracks above to this forsaken place, where they lived out their final agonizing years wondering what sin of their fathers or themselves had brought this horror on them.
Yeshua was surely the first visitor from outside the camp whom many of these people had seen in months or years. He told me they had shunned him when he’d first come, out of shame and their concern for his own purity. But now at his approach they came together quite openly, gathering on a little rock shelf that jutted out from the cliff face. It was an astounding sight, these dozens of lepers congregating there, men, women, and even some children, many of them so gnarled-limbed and deformed they were hardly recognizable as human. But what was surprising in lepers was that as putrid and corrupt as their outward form might be, their mental faculties were not affected in the least, so that you were suddenly astounded to hear from out of their mass of rotting flesh a perfect human voice. Thus it was that Yeshua did a most simple and
The camp was not nearly as ramshackle a place as I’d expected, having been built not by Antipas but by the Romans, with their typical efficiency and precision. They had been motivated in this less by philanthropy than by strategy: the colony was set on the promontory that stood over the Arbela caves, and was a way of keeping the caves, which were accessible only from above, out of the hands of therebels and bandits who normally inhabited them. Several barracks-style dormitories ran along the length of the promontory, with a courtyard and common kitchen at the centre of them. Apparently before the Romans had turned the place over to Antipas, as they eventually had, they actually supplied food for the residents and encouraged large communal meals and a sharing of tasks as a way of maintaining some sort of discipline and order. Now, however, the residents were dependent on the generosity of their relatives in bringing food and on the honesty of the guards in delivering it.
What was surprising in the camp was its air of normalcy: people went about their business, cooking and cleaning, carrying water, even farming a bit of field there, with only the slightest sense of hush and shame at their afflictions. Clearly Yeshua had brought an air of hope to the place. He encouraged cleanliness and had set up special areas of segregation to monitor various ailments and work towards a cure; and he treated people from an entirely medical point of view, with none of the condescension that the priests in Jerusalem showed in sending the afflicted off to their quarantine, nor indeed with the least concern for their uncleanness. When I asked him how he reconciled his approach with the proscriptions of the scriptures, he said merely that our forefathers had found their own way of expressing things that could not otherwise have been understood then.
When he had finished his rounds in the camp proper, he led me down to the caves. This was where the worst cases took refuge, those without hope. The whole mountain face at Arbela was riddled with these caves, which were accessible only by a steep footpath, one that here and there required you to scrabble against the rock face; already as we nearedthe end of it there was an overwhelming stench of putrid flesh, people moving like wraiths against the caves’ darkness. It was from here that Antigonus, the last of the Maccabees, had fought Herod the Great, Herod finally resorting to swinging grappling hooks down into the mouths of the caves from above in order to drag his enemy out from them. But for the lepers who had now retreated to them, the caves had become their permanent homes, not because they had been forced into them but because shame had driven them there. So it was that once their disfigurements had rendered them hideous they repaired from the barracks above to this forsaken place, where they lived out their final agonizing years wondering what sin of their fathers or themselves had brought this horror on them.
Yeshua was surely the first visitor from outside the camp whom many of these people had seen in months or years. He told me they had shunned him when he’d first come, out of shame and their concern for his own purity. But now at his approach they came together quite openly, gathering on a little rock shelf that jutted out from the cliff face. It was an astounding sight, these dozens of lepers congregating there, men, women, and even some children, many of them so gnarled-limbed and deformed they were hardly recognizable as human. But what was surprising in lepers was that as putrid and corrupt as their outward form might be, their mental faculties were not affected in the least, so that you were suddenly astounded to hear from out of their mass of rotting flesh a perfect human voice. Thus it was that Yeshua did a most simple and
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