Gospel & Universe 🍎 The Apple Merchant of Babylon
The Genealogy of Mortals
Ancient Babylon
Moses was a skinny man, nervous and unpredictable. He didn’t have big bones or big muscles. He was the type you’d find in a library, and not on some desert trek, with camels or dirt. He had a small, narrow nose, and piercing, icy blue eyes.
His grandparents Adima and Sheejee lived in the ancient city of Ur, yet they came from somewhere else. All Moses knew for sure was that they had always been dirt poor and that they always followed the male line. Whatever the women had done, after three generations, was a complete mystery. His grandmother Sheejee told stories about mountain valleys and misty lands beyond the Eastern Desert, yet these were overwritten by Adima’s stories about savannah south of the Nile, wicked pharaohs, and evil gods with hyena faces.
Most of Adima’s recollections of the cities he had travelled through were not complimentary. Horrible beasts flew in the skies and dire warnings were everywhere.
Adima’s take on their family history was that they were poor but noble, ever-respectful of the law, and favoured by Yahweh, the God in the highest Heaven. Horrible beasts may attack the cities of unspeakable evil, evil councillors may tax the poor to the bone, and evil rich men may take advantage of every slave girl in their possession, yet God would ultimately smite these cities and justice would prevail. Adima’s version of genealogy also included a midnight escape with the help of a washer-woman, a perilous voyage across a desert, several miraculous revelations, a long journey across water in the pouring rain, and the promise of a new land for the extended family.
On the wall of their wattle home in the slums of Ur, Moe’s grandparents painted a scene which explained their view on life. They were the dry sticks on a sacrificial pyre. They were the ashes that rose from the flames. In the end, they offered themselves to the sky.
The Sacrifice of Noah, by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione !609-64), in the Palazzo Bianco, Genoa (detail of photo by RYC)
When Adima and Sheejee were too old to work, their son Yaakov brought the whole clan north-west to Babylon, which for millennia had been a crossroads for all kinds of tribes and peoples.
“A locator map of Hammurabi's Babylonia, showing the Babylonian territory upon his ascension in 1792 BC and upon his death in 1750 BC.” 2008, by MapMaster (Wikimedia Commons).
In the last several centuries, Babylon had been overwhelmed by peoples from the north and south, and was still being swarmed from the West by diverse tribes, who had been pushed from their lands by all sorts of Greeks, who the refugees called the Barbarians from that Western Hell.
Map of the Sea People invasions in the Aegean Sea and Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Late Bronze Age, The Sea Peoples, from Cuneiform Tablets to Carbon Dating - "From PLOS ONE, an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, Source: David Kaniewski, Elise Van Campo, Karel Van Lerberghe, Tom Boiy, Klaas Vansteenhuyse, Greta Jans, Karin Nys, Harvey Weiss, from Wikimedia Commons
In Babylon, Yaakov met a sweeper-woman of exceptional beauty. Her name was Zikirta, and her family history was a mythic one: apparently some of her ancestors fought an epic battle between Good and Evil. Evil was finally defeated by the Son of Light, who then built a golden bridge to a Better World. Yaakov and Zikirta both believed in the theme of suffering and of escape from this world to some better place. This belief helped them through their early years, when they were scratching a living doing odd jobs and selling castaway fruit and vegetables on the outskirts of Babylon.
Yaakov and Zakirta decided that it didn’t matter where they came from or what their religions said, as long as their belief in a better future and a Higher Truth helped them to survive. Zakirta said that they were living in a New Age, and as a result they needed a New Age philosophy. While their families may have worshipped different gods, hadn’t they been worshipping the same God all along? We’re all children of God, they’d say, although which God they never said. Their last word on the subject was, There is only one God.
On the wall of the dining room, they hung a long thin clay tablet, on which was chiseled their new philosophy, coloured with sunny yellow paint:
As Moses’ parents moved up in the world, they bought a house five minutes walk from the centre of town. It had an old storeroom that Yaakov cleaned out and filled with shelves of tablets. The family library grew year by year. Eventually it contained every famous story written in the last two thousand years. They had the seven canonical versions of Gilgamesh, all fifty volumes of The Epic of Shamash, as well as all sorts of odd stories from Egypt about cat people and alligators that could talk, which gave Moses the creeps.
Moses loved nothing more than reading stories and then inventing alternate endings. He did this day and night, until finally Zikirta told him to get a job. “At least get out of the library and help your father in the store. Pomegranates don’t sell themselves you know!”
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Next: Moses and the Apple Merchants of Babylon
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