The Apple Merchant of Babylon 4
Again, In the Beginning
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Before There Was Anything
Moe started to get really into his story, especially once he decided that the only way it would work was if his One True God controlled the entire universe from the very beginning. This would take a bit of explaining. It would also require a killer introduction, a beginning that would knock the reader's sandals off. But where to start? He looked again at his previous draft, the one that began Let there be Life! He needed to add something more here, something about the primordial Chaos, the dark waters out of which Chaos rose to threaten all of creation. Creation, yes, that was it. What if there were nothing before the One True God came onto the scene? What if the One True God was above and before Chaos? Not after some battle, but before any thought of Chaos ever occurred?
Several months ago he included an Indian quote in his ill-fated ecumenical edition of The Holy Mountain. The Sanskrit poet wrote, Only the god in the highest heaven knows how everything was first created. And then the poet added, Or maybe he doesn't know.
In Moe's version, God knew.
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Of Dust, Clay, & Silk
But then Moe had to decide whether the One True God created humans out of clay (the way Aruru moulded Enkidu in Gilgamesh) or out of dust. Creating humans out of dust seemed a much finer way to begin. Dust reminded him of the star dust that had been drifting through his dreams, tiny sparkling bits of matter that were also spirit and that floated through endless stretches of time and space. Dust also provided a powerful literary echo of the famous dust to dust soliloquy found in the Saga of Shamash, the great epic that had been written five thousand years ago and would be recited until the end of time. He reminded himself that at some point he should also work in the story of Utnapishtim and the Animal Boat. It was always a good idea to work in stories that his readers would never fail to recognize.
In his final chapter he would confess everything, telling his readers that what he wrote down was either borrowed from previous stories or was pure conjecture, pure poetry. Oceans parting. Magic Mountains. They were just romantic metaphors.
Of course his educated readers would suspect this all along. I mean, he put in different versions of creation and insane details about how to complicate your life with impossible rules and regulations. He put in such obviously crazy things like men living for 800 years, trees lighting up without so much as a spark, gigantic bodies of water parting so that wagons and rolled-up tents could cross without getting wet. No one in all of Mesopotamia, from the headwaters of Mari to the floodwaters of Ur, ever confused such stories with fact.
Moe even thought about writing his laws and stories on papyrus, so everyone would see for themselves that laws get old and stories need to change. He didn't want to make the mistake of Hammurabi — as if laws should be engraved into stone, as if what changes should pretend to be eternal. Only God was eternal. But then again, writing on thin sheets of vegetables was just silly. Papyrus lasted three hundred years, at best. Hammurabi was right: better to stick with the tried and true.
Yet still it worried him that some dunderheaded literalists would forget how to read, and would take his stories literally. So he decided to spell it out: What you're reading is a prose poem masquerading as fact, trying to explain the Inexplicable God in human terms. As if that could be done! In his sixth book, which he would call Teshuvah (Return or Repentance), he would explain this in detail, just in case the cabal of mystical sods they called priests hadn't already made it clear to everyone.
In Teshuvah he would also return to common sense and to the imagery of dust, from which humans were created and through which they travelled on their metaphoric never-ending journey to find their home. He would confess that his words were insubstantial, like the desert dust that floated through this world of mirages. Like the dust that floated through the empty corridors of outer space.
He would end with a poem about a line of silk drifting outward from a silkworm, which became a line of caravans returning to Babylon from distant China across the Taklamakan. Above the caravan hovered a dragon in the sky, wrapped in a robe of Yangshao silk and biting a mulberry. The dragon hummed a Sanskrit word as he drifted upward, away from the metaphors and business dealings of the human race, into the blackness of space. Akasha.
But then he realized no one was likely to understand all that. People believed what they could relate to: family, parents, brothers, uncles. Apple trees and family trees. Only Indians and Persians were any good at metaphor. Mesopotamians were practical people. In any case, Indians and Persians were the enemy, the middlemen who gouged him in every deal, as if taking a bite from each apple he sold with his blood and sweat.
What did it matter anyway if man was made of clay or if he was made of dust, as long as people could see what he meant by the One True God? Perhaps he should even make God look and sound the way man would look if he were the Father of all Time and Space. In Heaven as it is on Earth. Keep it simple, easy to understand. Focus on the literal and on the narrative. Leave out the metaphor and the poetry. Forget Teshuvah.
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Adam & the Snake
Moe felt on more solid ground when it came to writing the family history part of his story. This was because his grandfather Adima was full of stories about their past. Moe remembered how as a child Adima would sit him on his knees and tell him about their family's trajectory from the southern savannah to Memphis, and about how he travelled as a young man from Memphis to Eridu, arriving at last in the great city of Ur. Yet when Moe tried to get more details from the old man, he realized that Adima had lost much of his mind. A great deal of what he said was complicated and confused.
Adima became adamant about the strangest things. For instance, he insisted that he was the one who started it all. And by it all Adima meant the entire history of their family. Moe wondered what happened to the earlier part, which he used to talk about but now seemed to overlook. What about the part where he had a crummy job as a gamekeeper in the savannah, and travelled on worker caravans by himself all the way to Memphis? And what happened to the story about how he and his brothers fought a cedar monster in a twisting valley south of the Taklamakan?
But now Adima insisted that he was The Original. Number One. Not only that, but his people descended directly from Heaven! Out of respect for the old man's final wishes (it couldn't be long before he made his journey down into the dusty shadows of Irkalla), Moe decided to let him have his way. He'd keep in the part about Adima being the one who started it all, although he’d probably omit the part where Adima saved the world from the depraved Viper of Ur. There was only so much he could expect his readers to believe.
In a last ditch effort, Moe tried to get at least a few clear facts about their family's time in Egypt and the great valleys of the Northeast. Grandma, tell me, which city did you come from? Did you come from north of the Caspian Sea, or from some land further to the East? But the old man cut her short. Adima made him swear to write that he was their family’s first and only figure, that there was no question of northern valleys or Caspian Seas, let alone Yellow Rivers. He alone had started everything. He alone had stood up to Semjaza the Snake.
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Semjaza the Snake
Adima foamed at the mouth and spat at the engraved image of Semjaza. He then broke into tears, holding in his trembling hands the wedding portrait of his mother next to the sinister fiend. (Actually, Adima never had a step-father, but Moe figured this was Adima's way of avoiding the uncomfortable truth.) Adima's tears dripped onto the clay engraving, smudging his mother's eyes and elongating her nose. Adima literally wept into the past, and in his weeping transformed it into a watery mess. He blubbered in the general direction of Heaven: To think of my beautiful mother — married to that sneaking cheat of a Semjaza!
The old snake was a legal scholar and a politician, one could see that all too clearly in his phosphorescent green and blue eyes.
His words dripped venomous honey, and his litigious sophistry hypnotized everyone around him, just like the snake in the old tale, Kaa and the Forty Lawyers.
According to Adima's mother Sheejee, Semjaza would go to the brothel, debauching his wedding vows with Nubian tarts and whores, and then argue his way out of his devilry by saying that it was a natural urge. Semjaza said that monogamy was an insult to the nature of man. He said that we shared this urge with goats and sheep and monkeys, and she had no right to stop him. He would say to her, The lust of the goat is the glory of God. Imagine!
Adima burned with shame and anger when Semjaza brought his Nubian whores home with him. Too often he heard his mother cry under the fig trees in the depth of the afternoon.
It was of course Sheejee who told Adima about their One True God, who she called Shangdi. She told him about how He would wreak vengeance on the evil forces of Semjaza. Sheejee also said that the whores Semjaza slept with ought to be stoned to death. Their children ought to be hurled into the darkness, or at least made to live in the garbage heap on the outskirts of town.
Sheejee added that her children didn't come from Semjaza. They weren't seeded by the Evil One, but came to her from Above, from Shangdi. Fully formed, like chickens from the market. There was never any question of an egg.
Adima screamed, The Semjaza clan are whoresons — worms crawling through a pomegranate! Semjaza is a demon, with horns and a tail!
Adima’s eyes then suddenly misted over with kindness, as he explained how his progeny was saved from the scourge of the evil one. He repeated the story Sheejee had sung over his cradle of reeds and bitumen, the one in which their family had burst from the sky in a sun shower, forming a sparkling pure realm of crystal waters surrounded by fig trees and singing angels. They were the fruit from a perfect tree. They came from on high, and landed on The Golden Bough. Far from the Semjaza worms. Adima had no father, except the great Father in the sky.
Then Adima's finger shook like a lightning rod in the air. He screamed at his grandchild as if he saw a demon perched on his left shoulder: The fruit must never be picked from the tree!
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The Journey West
Moe soon realized that he couldn’t get anything coherent about his family history from his grandfather. What the poor old guy said was in many ways poetic, yet his story was clearly the incoherent ravings of a senile man who was about to meet his Under Taker. Moe figured he’d pretty much have to make up the genealogy.
So he got out his old clay map, chipped on the sides and deeply grooved around the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates. He chiseled more lines this way and that, till his imaginary forebears pretty much covered all the main thoroughfares of the civilized world. The centre of this world was of course Babylon, a point he stressed by chiseling family names around Babylon and its famous Tower — that ambitious yet doomed United Nations building located downtown next to the river.
Within the Tower were the Wise Men of the Northeast, speaking to each other in Assyrian, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Hittite, Demotic, and two or three dozen other minor languages like Aramaic, Persian, and Greek. The men wrote on thin silky paper from China, elephant bark from India, lined papyrus from Egypt, and of course the clay tablets that would never fail to transmit knowledge as long as humans continued to breathe.
In the highest floors and at the end of the most secret corridors of the Tower mysterious Wise Men whispered to each other in the magical code that started it all: the sacred incantations of Sumerian. They whispered something about the coming of a Great Soul, the son of God Himself.
As Moe chiseled away, he heard in the background the fantastic names Adima mumbled in his sleep, and then shouted at the moments of his most intense senility. Moe took these words, that flew out from the old man's frenzied brain, and chiseled them between the familiar names on the map. He thus dotted the countryside with words he'd never heard, yet which sounded strange and powerful. Mixed into the Akkadian and Assyrian names that everyone knew so well, these names started to take on a sort of reality, a sort of historicity that Moe felt was the hallmark of all good fiction.
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The Lost Tablets of Ramses II
Moe gave his beloved, delusional grandpa some opium from the highlands and tried to settle him in his bed. This calmed Adima somewhat, yet the old dying man still tried, more softly than before, to give his grandchild some final advice:
Round up the kinsmen and strike out for a new frontier! Aren’t you sick and tired of being treated like a slave in this whorehouse of an Assyrian Empire? To hell with that punk, Tiglath-Pilesar!
But don't go back to Egypt — no! Go west instead, as far as you can from the cursed Elamites, who you should exterminate if ever God so pleases to give you the chance. Your cousin Dawid was right to say that God would bless whoever wiped that race of idolaters from the face of the earth.
Go West, young man! Find a patch of land to the west of the despicable Moabites! Destroy all traces of those who might pretend it was theirs — such as the filthy Edomites and the barbarous Philistines!
Adima then let out a long string of curses and blood-lust pledges against every known people of the earth. These were so violent and cruel that Moe wrote an executive commandment forbidding any family member to set into writing any such bullying and militant carnage. Moe underscored this point by using Adima's ethnocentric rant as a cautionary tale. First he summarized, in the most diplomatic of terms, Adima’s advice:
Be sure to slaughter every people along the way, for who knows what nefarious claims they might make afterwards to the land they once stood on. If they can no longer stand, toward what court of justice can they walk to make their case?
Then Moe wrote a lengthy chapter, The Late Great Ozymandias, Ramses II, in which he meticulously disassembled every possible claim to religious exclusivity. He wanted to make sure that people would condemn the reasoning of his grandfather and that they would never accept the notion that God desired to smite, bludgeon, demolish, or otherwise annihilate innocent populations for any reason whatsoever. He wanted to make it absolutely clear that those who promoted such a wrathful understanding of Deity would themselves be subject to His wrath.
Unfortunately, centuries later (sometime around 666 BC), the road from Babylon to Jerusalem was not only long and winding, but also quite bumpy. The tablets, which were now so numerous that six legions of full-time scribes could scarcely keep track of them, were not as securely fastened as they should have been. Several tablets, now referred to as The Lost Tablets of Ramses II, bounced onto the hard pavement on the outskirts of the prosperous garden city of Gomorrah.
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Honest Abe
After three years of toiling away on his tablets, Moe finally completed his task. He placed the tablets carefully in a big wheelbarrow and brought them over to his uncle Abe to get an informed evaluation. Initially Moe had told Abe that there were only ten tablets, but these had expanded into several dozen, what with revisions, redactions, burning bushes, smitten idolators, parting seas, Egyptian escapades, the ravings of Adima, and yet more tablets falling from the crowded skies of myth and landing on his writing desk. He was drowning in stories, and needed a wheelbarrow as big as an ark just to hold them all.
Abe was disgruntled at the thought of reading so many tablets. But Moe was his favourite nephew. Hadn’t the boy kept it a secret when he caught Abe with the milkmaid Lakshmi, who he had kept as a mistress ever since the family fled from Uruk in disgrace? And hadn't Moe kept it a secret when he found his cousin Noach sprawled all over his sister's bedroom, drowning in an ocean of booze? Oy veh, such a family!
Moe was also his oldest and most devoted customer, and Abe didn't want to give him any reason to take his business to the Indian or Persian traders, under the pretext that Abe didn’t support his literary aspirations. So Abe agreed to read the tablets, even though there were so many of them. He swore to Moe that he’d keep an open mind.
Yet what Abe read was one of the most bizarre series of tablets ever to be written in the two thousand years that man had been chiselling cuneiform into clay. Their tribe’s god was the Only True God — from Heliopolis to Elam? Babylon was a den of prostitutes and thieves? He imagined a divine commandment that would close the shop one day a week? What dangerous nonsense was this?
Only yesterday Abe had signed a deal with a cartel of Indian traders. The deal gave their family a 30% option and a 20% discount on all of their merchandise crossing the Zagros Mountains.
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