Shout It Not in Gath

As the High Holidays again approach and the season of introspection--as Israel continues to fight in Gaza, here is a story about a Philistine's inner world.

By Michael Oren

If I hear that ram’s horn bleating again, a sound like an old man whining or a mangy cat in heat, I might just go insane. Tear my own tent down, twelve-foot poles and all, and fling my chainmail around the camp to be cut up for jewelry. And yet the horn keeps tooting, a pestle in the mortar of my ears, and all I can do is draw my furs around me, shroud myself in lions and bears and wish that they, and not I, would have to wake up soon and do battle.

For I never wanted to be a warrior. Never wanted to run a sword into some poor peasant’s groin or thrust a spear through his eye. Who in their right mind would derive joy from such things, much less honor? There is pain enough in this world—from childbirth and shattered hopes, hunger and loneliness and loss—without my javelin adding to it. And I never desired to have the weight of my people laid on my ability to kill, the crushing expectations of violence.

No, a musician’s life was befitting for me. Plucking a lyre or blasting a horn made of brass, not bone, blaring fanfares to the gods. Or, better yet, a builder of edifices impermeable to time, that would remind people eons from now of the man who looked to the mountains and looked to the trees and thought, “I can rival all that,” and proceeded to do so in stone. A saddler, a blacksmith, a farmer, or a priest—anything but what I was fated to become. A remover of heads and extremities.

But more than character, more than brains, destiny is dimensions. At nine feet tall, nobody was going to give me a trumpet much less a harp or let me anywhere near a scaffold. No, all I’d be given was armor. A hundred pounds of it, bronze helmet, a bronze sword and greaves—a veritable ad for the age—and a shield too heavy for bearers. What I got was my name exalted in the temples of Gaza, shouted in the streets of Gath. I had my pick of Ekron’s virgins and the choicest of Ashkelon’s wines. And for what? For adding music and beauty to life or brutally shearing it from others?  For bringing people together in love or separating so many from their limbs? And they call our culture civilized.

For though vastly more advanced than our enemies, we still have a fixation on blood. On war and war not for safety’s sake but for glory and its myths. Its passion. Virgins, wines, are ephemeral things, but combat—especially one-on-one—is eternal. Or so we believe. So I was made to understand from the earliest age when already I towered over my parents.

“There is a boy who’ll one day lead us in battle,” our neighbors said. “There is a boy who’ll someday vanquish our foes.”

And foes we had, aplenty. From Egypt to the sea, they came, from Assyria to the dunes, and now these. The hill people who seem never to have encountered a chariot, the yokels who believe that just because their snip off their foreskins and pray to an unseen god they have a right to pillage our cities. And we fought them. At Aphek and Sephela and now here, on the Border of Blood. I slaughtered them, jabbed and thrust and cleaved until my beard was dripping with gore. Yet still they came and still I butchered them, for what choice did I have? When did I ever?

Not now, certainly, as I gaze at them at the far end of the valley, a ramshackle army with not a courageous soul within. So it has been for forty days, each one beginning with that infernal ram’s horn, nasal and frail, awakening me. Each one spent smelting in my metal skin, my helmet a seething cauldron. “Choose a man and have him come down to me!” I bellow. “Give me a man and let us fight each other!” I roar, according to the time-honored script.

But no one moves, not in their ranks nor in mine, patiently arrayed behind me. I holler, I heckle, while beneath the bronze, my body steeps in sweat. Strands of music swarm through my head and images of rising scaffolds. Each day finds me wearier, barely able to wield my weapons, yearning for an end to it all. But there is no mercy, apparently, not in our enemy’s heaven nor in ours. And this, perhaps, is my hell. Condemned by height to unending savagery, to immortality without life and fame without fulfillment.

Among the enemy, meanwhile, nobody moves. Nobody dares, still thinking this giant invincible. I hate them for it, the fear that keeps me slogging out here day after day and hollering my prearranged challenges. Disgusted, I turn back to our own fighters who part to let me through. But then, from somewhere behind me, a sound. A voice, young but determined.

“Why are you running?” it asks.

I turn, almost laughing, for I’m far too tired to run, but curious also. Who would be so crazed as to challenge me now, drained after a day of hesitating and more than a month of stalemate? But perhaps someone knows, somebody discerns the withered heard behind my breastplate, the scales that almost tip me. I turn and the laugh cannot be muzzled.

“You must be joking,” I say to the boy. A good-looking kid, supple-limbed, gingery but wrapped in nothing but a shepherd’s cloak without a strip of armor upon him. “Come here,” I bark at him, “and I’ll your flesh to the birds and wild animals.” Which usually suffices to scare them.

But no. Instead of scurrying, the boy starts prancing back and forth, going on his god and how he will let this whippersnapper defeat me, without sword or spear, and cut off my head for all of humanity to see. “This day I will give your carcasses to the birds and the wild animals,” he threatens, confident if not original.

How easily I could divvy him up, further redden his hair, and replace his beauty with viscera? Instead, I study him. A youth much as I longed to have been, free to choose his way in life, to strum a harp or raise a palace, to love and indulge, and adorn the world with poetry. I watch him dance and an exhausted envy descends on me. My shield bearer struggles forward but I merely dismiss him. My sword stays nestled in its sheath.

Behind me, I can feel the tension mounting. No doubt he’s just playing with him, they’re thinking. Surely this will be fun. But their jitters turn to panic as the boy produces a home-crafted sling, the kind for fending off foxes, and fits it with stone from his bag.  

“Kill him!” my compatriots call. “Slice him to ribbons!”

But I can scarcely hear them now. I see not the valley or the darkening sky above it. Ashkelon, Gaza, Gath—all have suddenly vanished. There is only the boy, grinning now, and the sling inscribing crowns above his head. The boy who is not my enemy anymore but just perhaps my deliverance. I stand, I straighten, and slowly remove my helmet.

There is no more shouting. No more beating of shields and spears and the screams of the pierced and the torn. Only a soft, whirring sound that rapidly grows louder yet soothing. That, at the very last instant, turns into a ram’s horn sweetly signaling freedom.