Daughter of Jerusalem by Joan Wolf Read Free Book Online

extremists who lived in the wilds of the Judean desert. I simply couldn’t imagine Daniel as one of them.
    Daniel said, “Listen, Mary, this is what my father agreed to. We can’t marry until I have become a scribe and can support you, but we can become formally betrothed at Shavuot.”
    I was dizzy with happiness. Lord Benjamin had said
yes
. I had heard him with my own ears.
    “There is one other stipulation,” Daniel went on. “We must keep our betrothal a secret until after Passover. Samuel and Naomi are having their betrothal ceremony right before we leave for Jerusalem, and my father doesn’t want us to do anything that might draw attention away from Naomi.”
    This seemed reasonable. It was certainly true that my betrothal to Daniel would cause more of a sensation in the family and the town than Naomi’s to Samuel.
    I felt like jumping up and down and screaming for joy, the way Dinah did when she was happy. “The Lord has answered our prayers,” I said.
    Daniel grinned. “We’re going to be betrothed.”
    I grinned back. “We’re going to be betrothed!”
    We were holding hands and laughing like idiots when Lord Benjamin came back into the room.

Chapter Seven

    I kept my promise to Daniel and told no one but Aunt Leah about our betrothal. She knew how I felt about Daniel, but we never openly spoke about it—except for her guarded comments that I should be careful where I bestowed my heart. Her astonishment when I told her of Lord Benjamin’s approval told me just how much she had doubted we would ever get it. But she was almost as happy for me as I was for myself.
    “Daniel is such a fine young man, Mary,” she said, holding my face between her hands as we stood in our tiny bedchamber. Her brown eyes were serious. “You must try to be worthy of him.”
    I knew I would never be worthy of Daniel. No woman could be. But he loved me, and if he searched the world over, he would not find a single person who could love him more than I did. I knew I had been blessed by God to have Daniel’s love in return. “I’ll try my best,” I promised.
    She held me to her and said with awe, “I never thought this could happen. Good for Benjamin.”

    Samuel and Naomi had their betrothal ceremony two days before the family left for Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Every year the families from our town would make up a caravan and travel together. It was safer to journey in numbers, and it was also more fun.
    The warming weather had dried up most of the winter mud, and the roads weren’t yet dusty. The sun was just right, warm on our heads and shoulders but not too hot. The hillsides of Galilee were covered with wildflowers, and the stretching fields of barley and wheat glittered like splashes of sunshine under the blue arch of the sky.
    Almost everyone walked, but most families had donkeys to carry their tents, food, and the fine linen clothing that they would wear to the Temple. There were many other caravans on the road, and we filled the air with our singing. The little ones sang the pilgrimage songs I had taught them, and the joyous sound of hundreds of voices rose toward the heavens as we marched along the well-worn path that followed the Jordan from Galilee into Judea.
    At night, around the cooking fires, the men would talk about the success or disappointment of the flax harvest and how good or bad the fishing had been, and—as always when a group of Jewish men got together—they talked about how much they hated the Romans. Second to the Romans, they hated Herod Antipas, the Galilean king, because he collaborated with the enemy. And they hated the most prominent symbol of the occupation, the Roman procurator who ruled Judea, because Rome had banished the Jewish king, Herod Archelaus, for incompetence.
    I liked to eavesdrop on these conversations because Daniel was passionate about politics. He was passionate, too, as were most of the other men, about his hopes for the coming of the Messiah.
    Daniel had often