The Tongues of Men or Angels

Twenty Years before the Crucifixion

The rock badger goes where it will. It fears neither man nor beast. It is said that a rock badger will take on a leopard and make it back away. The leopard would be near certain to win, but it senses that the price of victory might be too high. If blinded, it would lose in any case: a sightless predator is the walking dead. And God armed the rock badger with whetted claws, armoured it with unyielding skin and gave it bravery beyond human comprehension.

Saul followed the rock badger across the scrub. It trotted, stiff-legged, nose to the air not to the trail. No objective in mind. The badger travels on a whim, and if someplace it finds something to sustain it, then that place becomes where it was going all along.

Saul would have liked to be like the rock badger, equipped with that self-fulfilling wanderlust; fearless and strong. Not yet knowing that one day he would be. This Saul, the boy, was still slight, not puny, but not one to scare a single soul. Certainly not a rock badger. The badger looked back at Saul — neck bending round almost to its stumpy hindquarters — un-nervous, barely curious. Blank black eyes stared, the beast perhaps coming to a decision as to whether the energy expenditure required to lose Saul, or chase him away, would be worth the stealth benefits accruing to a solo hunter. Seemingly the badger decided that Saul could stay for now and set off once again, on its low-slung lope, towards it knew not where.

The rock badger led Saul to and through a copse of dark pine where it might have been night, except for the scattered sunbeams that broke through the canopy onto a floor sponged with epic ages of dropped needles. Emerging onto a field at the other side, the badger cocked its head, then bolted into some goat’s-thorn scrub, perhaps smelling snake or rat within, leaving Saul alone to face a brace of boys of about his own age: ten or so years old.

‘Jew,’ one of the boys said, a single-word sentence, which managed to be both definition and accusation.

The Jews of Tarsus did not dress markedly differently from the region’s other inhabitants. Nonetheless, the other inhabitants could generally spot a Jew. Though to an outsider both would look more alike than apart, they remained separated in internal eyes, through subtle differences of cloth and cut. Even leaving aside the concealed cut the Jews regarded as of such high importance.

Of course the Jews were hated. Wasn’t Joseph hated for being the favourite son? How much worse, then, to be the favourite race. And to refuse to worship other gods, any of the other gods who represent the city-state and the people. To be a Jew in any of the Greek-founded cities, which speckled most of the known world, was as much as to be uncivic. Holding a separating religion above and apart from the common faith of the populous. Many good Greek families and individuals had a patron god or a favourite god, but they didn’t despise all the other gods, as the Jews did. Only the atheist Jews showed this disdain. And the Jews sent taxes back to a temple in a far-off land, enriching a distant exchequer in preference to the place that hosted them. And many Jews wouldn’t dine outside their race, through fear of breaking their obscure and arbitrary dietary laws. Rules that came, it was rumoured, through Israelite origins as a tribe of travelling lepers, cast out and forbidden to eat at the tables of others. And the Jews were lazy, resting every seventh day. And the Jews were too industrious, thriving while others struggled. It was widely suspected that the Jews prospered only because they practised insidious nepotism, each Jew promoting the interests of his fellow Jews. And the Jews were too fecund, outbreeding through their lascivious nature or because to them abortion counted as infanticide and to them infanticide was a sin; they refused even to expose unwanted offspring. And the Jews did not cremate their dead, instead sticking them in the ground, like Egyptians or mole rats. And the Jews practised circumcision, an outward show of difference; a sever from the penis and from the polis. And despite this wilful separation, Judaism was a missionary religion: the Jews sought continually to swell their ranks with converts, drawing decent people into their excluding fiefdom, which already comprised a tenth of the population of most cities. It would have been well to be rid of the Jews entirely. But since the time of that Jew-lover Augustus, the Jews had been protected by Roman law. And the Jews were numerous.

Normally they were numerous. At the edge of a copse, where the black pine met an oxen-tilled field, for example, there was only one Jew. A small Jew, held to the floor by two boys, with his head pushed painfully down. A hand against his chin, forcing open his mouth.

‘Lick it,’ one boy said. ‘Lick it, then tell me that the dirt here tastes good, better than in Judaea. Tell me that you worship a donkey and Judaean soil tastes of donkey shit.’

To Saul, the Tarsean ground did not taste good at all. It tasted of humiliation and blasphemy. And because even slight things can be strong, if pushed in the right direction — take a feather or a fibula — Saul managed to force himself up sufficiently to land a clumsy blow. A wild thrash that, from sacred destiny or beginner’s luck, caught his assailant in the eye. This first boy stumbled back from Saul, leaving his companion, still sitting upon Saul’s legs, temporarily bewildered by events. Confounded long enough for Saul to clutch up a handful of pine-needled dust and fling it at his face. Both attackers were then as good as blinded: one from the blow, the other from the dirt. Neither saw Saul stand and grab a fallen bough that Divine Providence or gravity had presented, but both boys felt the swing of it.

Saul was advanced in the Israelite religion well beyond many of his own age, zealous for the traditions of his ancestors. And he had the Zealot’s look, as he wielded the branch. The fanatic’s maniac glint. The look of a beast that might well go down, but would not go down alone. His two foes scrambled in a tangle of arms and legs to be the faster departed.

‘I will be great,’ Saul shouted at their heels. ‘You’ll grow up to be porters and labourers. Then you’ll see what soil tastes like! You’ll be fucking farm hands and I will be a famous Pharisee in Jerusalem.’

The rock badger plodded out of the goat’s-thorn bush, a still twitching snake between its teeth. The rock badger knows that you do not have to kill the leopard: you need only make it fear for its eyes.