My current writing project, a historical novel chronicling the story of Exodus based on what we know from biblical archaeology, is told from the alternating points of view of two non-biblical characters named Aram and Tal. Aram, writing in a secret scroll, apprenticed in his youth as a scribe for a member of the Council of Elders during the plagues and the flight from Egypt. He reports on the turmoil that resulted when Moses took over the Council, and details his own doubts as to the miraculous nature of the Israelites’ escape. His twin sister Tal, a widow who has led an unorthodox life as an entertainer for caravans, periodically breaks in with her own remembrances.
This past month I got to a moment when Aram was penning a rant about how every Israelite priest wants to rub people’s noses in humility, from the first and last words out of their mouths every day to what they eat and what they must say when they excrete. This, dear reader, is still a thing. There’s a lengthy Hebrew blessing, called the Asher Yatzar, that is supposed to be recited at the end of a fruitful bathroom break:
“Blessed is God who has formed the human body in wisdom and created many orifices and cavities. It is obvious and known before You that if one of them were to be opened or closed incorrectly, it would be impossible to survive and stand before You at all. Blessed is God, who heals all flesh and does wonders.”
The question is: Would ancient Israelites from around 1250 BCE have said anything like this on such a joyous daily occasion?
Most of the laws of Judaism, which are interpreted differently by various movements within the religious community, were published during the Roman Empire, not the pharaonic era. They are a product of rabbinic debate codified in the Talmud, which claims to be the Oral Law received by Moses on Mt. Sinai at the same moment that he was given the Written Law, the Torah.
This Oral Law was never supposed to be committed to paper, but when Babylon threatened the Jews with extinction an exception was made to prevent the utter loss of the culture. The toilet prayer appears in the Talmud, not the Torah, and is attributed to a famous teacher named Rabbi Abaye.
In Tractate Berakhot 60b of the Talmud, Abaye composes the invocation cited above as an objection to an earlier bathroom prayer volunteered by an unnamed rabbi. The older appeal requests that the angels who accompany a man at all times leave him alone in the outhouse for a few minutes and then return to him when he exits.
This idea, that minor divinities watch over us at (almost) every moment of our lives, is still around and seems much more universal to me than praising God for creating all of our bodily crevices. Since we can assume that there was such a thing as personal gods in earlier iterations of Judaism, e.g., in the story of Rachel stealing her father’s “household idols” (Gen. 31:34), I decided it was okay to incorporate into Aram’s diatribe his resentment of being told to beg supernatural beings for a little privacy whenever he carried out postprandial bodily functions.
On a personal note: When I graduated with an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1987, my mother gave me a complete set of all the tractates of the Talmud in English and Hebrew. I’ve paged through a few sections out of curiosity over the years, but I never actually used it in my writing until this month. Thanks, Mom (and her husband Asher Arian, of blessed memory).
Occasional factuality. Usually, as in the case above, I have to extrapolate pretty hard from the evidence in order to imagine what the world of the Exodus might have looked, smelled and tasted like — and what the people who lived in that world thought and felt about it. But sometimes archaeology provides solid answers. One such answer came up recently in a Biblical Archaeology Review article about a city fortified by King Solomon called Gezer, about halfway between the Mediterranean coast (where the Philistines lived) and Jerusalem.
Many of the later biblical stories — the less famous ones, like how King Hezekiah saved Judaism in the eighth century BCE by building an underground water tunnel (II Kings 20:20), have already been confirmed by archaeologists. But evidence of Solomon’s building projects in the kingdom of Israel, which predate Hezekiah by centuries, is pretty scant. The BAR piece describes Solomon’s typical six-chambered city gate at Gezer, mentioned specifically in I Kings 9:15.
These finds do not confirm that “King Solomon was a historical figure”; he might have been “a construct of later generations.” But they do push back the earliest moments of biblical corroboration much closer to the time that interests me as a novelist.
Which eases my worries, potentially leading to a relaxing of the orifices…
