Mary Read online

  You'd think that when you live here, everyday familiarity would dull the aura of these places. Not so. Instead, you incorporate them into your sense of time. You leap millennia in a sentence, even in a thought. The Via Dolorosa is where Jesus carried the cross and where there's this blue-fronted antique store full of old postcards and poor man's icons made of tin. The Mount of Beatitudes, overlooking the Sea of Galilee, is where Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount and a perfect place to spend the night in the convent guest house. The Temple Mount is the site of both the first and second temples of Yahweh, but it's the two Islamic domes—the Dome of the Rock and the El-Aksa Mosque, gold and silver—that create its grace and majesty today. The flagstone floors, subterranean flights of stairs, and grim-faced Eastern Orthodox nuns in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the site of the crucifixion, make a film buff think of the classic movies of Sergei Eisenstein from the 1920s and 1930s.

  Everything is anachronism, not in the usual sense of being out-of-date, but in the more precise sense of being out of its place in time. Or rather, in two times at once: simultaneously past and present.

  Sometimes, in fact, it seems there is no such thing as the past at all. In this history-soaked part of the world, you could well argue that history does not even exist.

  Nothing is ever done with. Nothing ever past. Stones and slingshots, the weapons of biblical tales, were the weapons of the Palestinian Intifada in the late 1980s. For years, the most popular Israeli sandals—basically just strips of leather on a leather sole—were called tanachiot, "biblicals." Jewish settlers' claims to the land are based on Hebrew texts that originated 2,500 years ago. The hatred and violence on both sides are of epic Old Testament dimensions. And in Nazareth, the most bitter source of tension in the past few years, pitting Moslems and Christians against each other, has been the attempt to move the shrine of a nephew of Salah ed-Din, known as Saladdin to westerners. The nephew was mortally wounded on July 4, 1187, when Salah ed-Din's forces decidedly defeated the Crusaders at the battle of the Horns of Hittin, and he was brought back to Nazareth to die. The idea of moving his modest shrine would be insult enough to Moslems; adding insult to the injury is that the move was planned in order to create more parking space for the marbled Basilica of the Annunciation nearby.

  This is the way of the Middle East. The past reverberates through the present; the present cannot shake off the past. There is none of the distance usually required for the historical view. Yet for me, this compression of time seemed to help rather than hinder.

  When I began to think about who Mary really was, I could see her reflection all around me. Not in plaster statues and gold-flecked holy cards, nor in the richly decorated icons of the Eastern churches, nor even the masterpieces of Renaissance art. These were the Mary of devout imagination: a figure divorced from her time and her place, stripped of individuality and personality, of background and identity, of her language and even of her real name.

  But Maryam was very close. I could see her face everywhere I looked. It was in the olive-skinned and dark-eyed faces of Sephardic Jewish women of Yemenite or Iraqi or Syrian or Egyptian descent. It was in the faces of Palestinian Arab women in the small peasant villages of the West Bank—the ancient areas of Judea and Samaria. It was in the worn faces of Beduin women herding flocks out in the hills of Galilee and Judea and the Negev. These were Middle Eastern faces, belonging to people speaking two languages very similar to the one Maryam spoke: Hebrew and Arabic, sister languages of Aramaic.

  Two thousand years may have passed, but Maryam was still very much alive in this land.

  Knowing the lay of the land was only the start. I began to read deeply in history, anthropology, archeology, biblical studies. And the more I read, the more I was amazed that no such biography as this already exists. Because though it is true that few of the usual biographer's tools are available, that does not mean there is no way to reach Maryam. We have a wealth of knowledge about the societies, cultures, religions, and politics of the Middle East in the first centuries B.C. and A.D., all of it serving to open up our ideas of who Maryam was.

  The great British historian R. G. Collingwood maintained that writing history requires both empathy and imagination. He did not mean spinning tales out of thin air—far more than enough of that has already been done in the case of Mary, both by those who worship her and those who seek to tear her down—but taking what can be known and examining it, following the strands of the story until they begin to intertwine and establish a thick braid of reality.

  The story begins, then, in Part One, with what Maryam saw, heard, and experienced in her day-to-day life as a peasant Galilean living under foreign rule. It grounds her in her physical, social, and political context—in her real culture—and so allows us to see the world, as it were, through her eyes.

  Part Two looks at all the issues to do with her pregnancy, starting with how much was known at the time by village midwives and healers, including Maryam herself. It explores the meaning of virginity and its relationship to fertility. And of course it examines the paradoxical possibilities as to the father of Maryam's child, whether human, divine, or even both.

  Part Three focuses on Maryam as a mother, but far beyond the classic image of Madonna and child. Starting with the crucifixion of her son—how does a mother bear such a thing?—it looks at her role in the burial and resurrection, where loss is transformed into renewal, and then follows her into active and productive later life.

  The picture that develops is of another woman altogether from the one I grew up with, surrounded as I was by images of her in the English convent school I attended for twelve years: statues in the corridors, portraits of her on "holy cards," the ever present rosaries, hymns, invocations . . . I grew up, that is, with an anodyne, alabaster image. She was always in the same pose, standing with arms slightly outstretched, eyes downcast, mantle falling from head to shoulders to wrists. A modest Mary, never shown pregnant, let alone nursing her child. So modest that in what now seems a cruel stroke of irony, the convent—Saint Joseph's—was named not for her, but for her husband.

  I took her for granted, as children do. She was simply there. To be sure, I heard stories of her appearing to children at Lourdes and other places. I even sneaked into the convent chapel to see if the life-size statue of her there would talk to me, though I realized instantly that it wouldn't. Not to me, "the Hebrew girl."

  It didn't occur to me then that she too was a Hebrew girl.

  This may be the answer to the question "How dare I?" Perhaps my own biography is what gives me license: as a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, as a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun, as an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organized religion. Or perhaps I take my license as a woman for whom there is no heroism in "meek and mild," or as a psychologist seeking understanding, or as a journalist seeking out the real story. But if I had to point to one single motivating factor, it would be the old kabbalistic ideal of tikkun olam, "repairing the world."

  This is what I want: To repair the world of Mary, and weave it anew into whole cloth. To give her back to herself, starting with her real name. To restore her strength and her intelligence, and see her as the multifaceted human being she was before she became an icon: a peasant, a healer, a nationalist, a mother, a teacher, a leader—and yes, a virgin, though in a sense we have long forgotten.

  It occurs to me now that perhaps this book is my way of finding that Mary did speak to me after all—not the gilded image in the convent school, but the wiry, dark-skinned, hard-muscled Maryam, barely out of adolescence when she gave birth, her face lined by hard work and harder experience, etched deep by violence and struggle, survival and loss, determination and courage.

  There is nothing meek and mild about Maryam. She is neither pale nor passive. She emerges as far more than we have yet accepted her as being: a strong woman of ability and wisdom who actively chose her role in history, and lived it to th
e fullest.

  Part One

  Her World

  1

  Maryam wakes with the rustle of the pre-dawn breeze, sharp and cold. Grabs a bite of sheep's cheese and flat bread dipped in za'atar, the crushed wild oregano that is the spice of peasant life in the Middle East. Fills a small goatskin with water from the clay jar set into the hard-packed dirt floor just inside the door to the house.

  The air is fresh outside. A coating of dew makes everything sparkle in the half-light. She pauses a moment to breathe deep, automatically checking the sky. The direction of the wind, the color of the sunrise, mist down in the valley or clouds on the horizon—any or all of these will determine which way she takes the herd. The decision is hers. It's her job to find good grazing among the thorns, to get the animals into shade on the hottest days, and in the late afternoon to bring them back to the village for milking and then to the spring, where she'll haul up pail after pail, pouring the water into a stone trough as thirsty snouts jostle each other for position.

  She moves lightly, with the ease of healthy youth. Her thin sandals aren't much protection against sharp rocks and thorns, but she doesn't even notice cuts and scratches. They'll heal. The sheep nuzzle her thighs while the goats hang back, and she urges them on with a short, guttural "krrrr," a switch of acacia in her right hand to help keep stragglers in line. Once she's gained distance from the village, she'll tie a piece of rope around her waist and hike up her shift, giving her legs freedom to move so that she can run after strays or climb down into a ravine to retrieve a trapped lamb.

  It feels good out here in the open, away from the jumble of stonewalled houses built one onto the other, threaded through with courtyards and narrow stepped alleyways. The tiny, dark rooms have only small openings high in the walls for ventilation, and the air inside is thick with the musty closeness of old straw and sweat, of dry dung piled up near the hive-shaped oven for fuel, and of dust. Always the dust.

  At night the floor is thick with bodies. Grandparents, parents, children, cousins, uncles, aunts, all lie one next to the other on thin straw pallets. At least in summer they can take their beds and sleep on the roof, under the reed canopy where herbs and raisins are laid out to dry. The air is better there, and you can hear the whole village on nearby roofs. You know who snores, who moans in sex, who tosses and turns, who has nightmares, whose child is ailing, who sits up through the night unable to sleep, listening to the howling of wolves and jackals, the donkeys braying in alarm, the sheep and goats shifting uneasily in their pens.

  During harvest times they leave the village completely. Take their pallets and move to the fields far below in the valley for barley and wheat, or out along the hillside on the stone-walled terraces for grapes and olives. That's when the night world opens up. The full moon shines so strong that you can play with your own shadow. A woman can stitch her embroidery by that light. A boy can hit a rabbit with his slingshot. A shepherd girl spot a mountain lion, or a watchman in the vineyards a wolf hankering for ripened grapes.

  Such nights, it seems as though someone has sprinkled silver dust over the whole landscape—a sky goddess, perhaps, opening her hands and laughing as she watches it drift on down. Not Yahweh, for he is beyond imagining. Not for him something so playful as sprinkling silver dust over the hills of Galilee.

  New moon, when there is no moonlight at all, is just as good in its own way. Then the whole sky is almost solid with stars, and Maryam gets to play the celestial magician: she stands as tall as she can and spreads her arms wide, so that the whole of the Milky Way seem to stream from one upturned palm into the other.

  Her grandmother tells her that if you know astrology, as the priests do in the great temple far to the south in Jerusalem, you can read all manner of secrets in the stars. Auspicious times, omens, the future. But to Maryam there seems little point in that. If the fates are already cast, you can only accept your lot, and that's that. If they are not . . Ah, if they are not . . .

  She knows this is no way for a peasant girl to think, yet these open-air nights of harvest moon and starlight give her a sense that much more is possible. That there can be more to life than sitting and waiting for what will happen anyway. "That's the way things are," the old men say when she asks why her mother had to die in childbirth, or why her cousin has crooked legs and has to crawl instead of walk. "It's written," they say, gesturing in a wide arc above their heads, "written in the sky." They speak with the respect of those who cannot read for the totemic power of writing. And with a shrug of helplessness in the face of such power: "What can we do?"

  She isn't sure yet, but something in her resists accepting the inevitable. She learns from her grandmother, the village healer. She gathers herbs for her out in the hills, watches as she grinds them and soaks them in oil, goes with her as she tends to a sick child or makes a splint for a broken bone. Not that the old woman is always successful, but still, Maryam senses that you don't have to die early, and you don't have to live crippled. That there are things humans can do. Actions they can take. That not everything is fate, even in a small, insignificant village like Nazareth.

  Nestled into a fold in the southernmost hills of the Galilee, Nazareth seemed to blend into its landscape so well that you'd never know it was there unless you looked for it. Few people did. It wasn't a world-famous place as it is now; it hadn't yet become the home of Jesus. In fact it was so insignificant to all except the two or three hundred people who lived there that it never even merited a mention in the Hebrew bible.

  The literal meaning of its name is "small fort," and it probably began that way, thanks to its commanding view over the broad Jezreel Valley far below. You could look down and see camel and mule caravans moving slowly along the valley floor, for this was an extension of the famed Silk Road, and served as the main east-west route from the Jordan River to the city of Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast. The caravans carried precious cargoes like silk and saffron, luxuries the peasant villagers had never experienced. They came from another world in the east, and went to yet another one in the west. If the Nazarenes thought of them at all, it was in the same way they thought of the spring migration of storks flying overhead. They could be seen but not touched. They were just passing through.

  Nazareth's stone-walled houses clustered together so tightly they seemed to be clinging to each other for shelter. As in the scores of other small villages dotted around the hills of Galilee, they were set high above the valley floor for one very good reason: that was where the water was, two thirds of the way up the hillside. Wherever there was a spring, there was a village—wherever, in a water-starved land, there was any amount of water emerging from the rock. Like Nain across the valley to the south, which you could glimpse at night—if your eyes were healthy and not infected—by the glimmer of an oil lamp through an open doorway, the flame guttering even in the still night air. Or Bethlehem, just five miles along the ridge to the west. Not the Judean Bethlehem, near Jerusalem, but the Galilean one, larger and older than its southern namesake.

  All these villages were off the beaten track below—literally beaten, for tracks were worn into the earth by usage; the Romans wouldn't lay the first paved roads in the region until more than a hundred years later. True, Nazareth was "only" some seventy miles north of Jerusalem as the crow flies, but humans aren't crows. In Maryam's time, those seventy miles were more like seven thousand today. Jerusalem, with its magnificent temple, was another country. Even another world.

  The track up from the valley was a narrow, foot-worn path following the contours of the hillside, snaking this way and that in a long series of hairpin turns. Mules and donkeys negotiated it easily. Humans too, so long as they had strong legs and ankles. Stones and thorns etched deep scratches into their feet, but they never noticed unless one of the thorns embedded itself and festered. They'd have been amused if they could have seen a health-club buffed modern visitor panting for air and water, making a big deal out of the climb. Amazed at the special hiking shoes, the high-tech tr
ekking pole. The children would have gathered around to stare and giggle. After all, an hour or two up a steep hill was nothing unusual. Many of the villagers did it every day, going down to the fields in the valley to tend the wheat and barley, then up again as the light began to fade. They knew how to let their stomachs and thighs do the work, keeping a slow, steady pace as their legs moved smoothly from the hips in a fluid stride. Knew to hold a pebble on the tongue to keep the lips closed and the saliva flowing.

  The track led straight to the spring, where the women gathered in the heat of the afternoon. They'd glide down the rock-hewn steps with large clay jars balanced on their heads and often an infant slung in a cloth hammock across their backs. This was the heart of the village, the place to linger and chat; it was where they could imagine for a while that there was not a whole world of tasks still to be done before sunset. But even this small luxury waned as the summer drew on. Anxiety began to crease the women's eyes as they watched the flow of water slow, decrease to a trickle, and in drought years, stop. Then they could only hope there'd be enough stale rainwater from the past winter collected in the village cisterns. Enough at least to drink, if nothing else.

  In this climate, where from April through September the earth dries, parches, cracks, goes bone hard and brittle, moisture was everything.

  The very language was determined by it—the consonants guttural, in the back of the throat, the vowels soft and deep, issued through a mouth half-closed. To be a Palestinian peasant was to be an expert in conserving moisture.

  These were people who knew what it was to be without water, to look on helplessly as crops browned and shriveled. They had to haul the water they drank, and their backs and shoulders knew exactly how much it weighed. They ladled it carefully out of the tall, narrow-necked jars at the entry to each house, then savored every mouthful, swirling it around in their mouths.