Great Lion of God by Taylor Caldwell Read Free Book Online Page A

shall mutually agree, and you will be an honored member of the household.”
    So Aristo had become a freedman with a handsome salary, and he was, at this time, purchasing some juicy olive groves for the day when he would be old. But he never forgot that on the moment the Roman praetor had declared his freedom Hillel had looked at him with the soft sorrow of a brother, and had vaguely shaken his head. Later Hillel had said to him, “It is a fearful thing to be free before the Face of God, for the Lord, blessed be His Name, mercilessly demands all things of the free, but is merciful to the enslaved and asks nothing.” He added, “God is very whimsical. But do not the Greeks declare that also?”
    Aristo sometimes watched Hillel ben Borush at his prayers in the garden and he would wonder. How stern and terrible was the God of Israel! He often discussed the gods of Greece with his master, discoursing on their grace, laughter, gaiety, merriment, feasts and foibles, and their elegant adulteries, and their blithe and capricious interference in the affairs of men. Once Hillel had said, “To each people God manifests Himself in a unique form—though with this thought of mine you will not find agreement among the majority of devoted believers. He is protean. As the prophets have greatly tried to teach us, but to no avail, alas, God is a Spirit, without form and without body, omnipresent, omniscient, circumambient, in all things which live. He presents one Face to one man, and a different Face to another. We need but say, all men together, that the Lord our God, the Lord is One, though His manifestations are multitudinous and myriad, and who are we to declare, with anger and certitude, that only our pale vision is correct?”
    “The Unknown God,” Aristo had replied. “We Greeks speak of Him.”
    “Forever unknown,” Hillel had answered, with a peculiar sadness. “Yet—” He hesitated, and did not continue. But suddenly his heart had lifted as a leaf lifts and he experienced, momentarily, that strange wind of ecstasy he had infrequently known from childhood. Had it come to him first when he had been told of the Messias?

    “No,” David ben Shebua was saying tolerantly to Reb Isaac, “I do not call myself a Stoic, but like Zeno I prefer the Cynic school, though he, certainly, formulated the Stoic philosophy. I prefer to call myself an Academic.”
    “Hah!” said Reb Isaac, squinting at him. He tore a piece of cold bread apart and stuffed it into his mouth and chewed noisily. (Where was the accursed baker of this house? The bread had a flat and insipid taste. The old man scowled.) He well understood that David was now baiting him as he had baited David, and he rose with some interior enjoyment to the battle. So, this smallness, this perfumed banality, thought him an ignorant man, did he? “You are not even an Academic. You are a nothingness, for you have no real opinions of our own but those you have stolen like flowers in the gardens of your masters. You have no learning of intensity and deepness, for you have denied and abandoned the roots from which you have sprung. You are like a bird with a slit tongue, which repeats all it incontinently hears and renders it again, without comprehension. You are not a Greek, with serpentine philosophies, or a Roman with brutish hubris, and you are not a Jew with a knowledge of God and of man. What are you, then?”
    He shook his finger at David and leaned over the table toward him and his black eyes glittered. David flushed with humiliation.
    “You are the betrayer of Israel,” said Reb Isaac. “But, are you a Greek, you man who is not a Jew? Or a Roman, an Egyptian, a Briton, a Gaul, a Scythian, a Vandal, a Syrian, or any other heathen? You will tell me that you are a Roman citizen. But that does not say what a man is, himself, in his heart and his soul. He is more than his house, or even his name. He is, surely, more than his wealth or his learning. But, David ben Shebua, can