had left for Jerusalem to help maintain order during the upcoming Passover celebrations. The few guards left behind would have been no match for these dedicated revolutionaries.
The band followed their leader into the olive grove below me. Individual shapes emerged as the dust clouds settled. I tried to spot my brother, thin-shouldered, his gait a prowl, but many of the young men looked like him. Silent except for some coughing as they caught their breaths, the rebels slumped against the olive trees. Their sacks of weapons and coins clunked onto the ground.
I’d never before seen their leader, Judah ben Hezekiah, though I’d heard much about him. He was a Galilean from a village north of ours. It was said that, as a boy, Judah had witnessed his father’s beheading by King Herod’s soldiers, and that he had vowed then to carry on his father’s work. Some called him an Anointed One or a resistance chieftain; others said he was merely a thief. Though Judah ben Hezekiah appeared to be not much older than Lev, he had a powerful build, far more muscular than my brother’s. Bloodstains, rust-colored like his hair, spattered his tunic.
I crawled down through more rows of vines and got myself very close to the group. A tremor of hushed exhilaration rippled through their ranks. They had looted a treasury and an armory of the Emperor Augustus. Tiny Galilee had hurled its sling at the Roman giant. The weapons amassed to subjugate our people would now liberate us. A whoop of triumph, Lev’s voice, shot up from the olive grove.
“Shut up,” Judah snarled.
I spotted my brother when his leader kicked him in the stomach. Lev’s startled moan echoed in my throat.
“No celebrating until we get to the caves of Arbel!” Judah rasped. “Get up! We have many miles to go to reach safety.” He paced back and forth among the reclining men. “Stand! Fall into formation!” he commanded. When a few resisted, he taunted them, calling them “women.”
Judah’s stony eyes scanned the hillside for intruders. I squeezed myself under a staked vine, trying to make myself invisible. Leaves scraped my forehead. I held my breath and waited for the blow of Judah’s foot. How could I shield myself from Judah’s censure since even my brother had been unable to? Though I assumed that Roman generals treated their soldiers cruelly, I had not expected a Jewish leader to brutalize his own fighters.
The rebels, grumbling, stood, shouldered their sacks, and set out. Peering out through the greenery, I saw Judah draw his sword and raise it over his head like an army’s standard. Its blade reflected the rays of the rising sun. “No master but God!” he proclaimed.
The ragged column set off, heading northeast, with Judah in the lead. Lev fell in at the rear. He was hunched over, trying to keep up, with one hand dragging his sack of plunder and the other clutching his stomach. Immobilized by fear, I could not run after him. But I like to think he looked up and caught a glimpse of me—or knew I’d be on the hillside—because he removed his hand from his stomach and threw a kiss in my direction.
I scrambled back to the top of the ridge and balanced atop its two highest rocks. A wind whipped up, sealing the freedom fighters into their dust cloud while I watched the whirl of sacred purpose move on without me.
Preparations for Flight
Returning to the village quivering with rage at myself, at Lev, even at The Holy One, I stubbed my toes on the very rocks and roots I’d avoided earlier. I’d been left behind, certainly by Lev and perhaps by The Holy One as well. Did I lack the courage to answer His call? Or had I not been chosen because I was a girl? But The Holy One knew that I was different from the other girls. I was smarter, faster, and stronger. I wasn’t meant for the small life of a village woman. I was capable of so much more!
Nazareth was still asleep as I ran through it. Pressing my ear to the door covering of our two-room house, I listened with relief to the sound of Father’s fitful snoring. I tiptoed to my mat in the back room, lay down, and curled myself around my newly hatched resentment, as if it were an eaglet fallen from the nest and needed my protection to stay alive.
Father’s habit was to rise before me for prayer and study and then to rouse me to prepare our breakfast. But this morning, as I was still pretending to sleep, loud voices in the courtyard outside our doorway disturbed us both.
“Wake up, Micah!”
“We are in grave danger.”
“You’re the rosh ha-knesset. You must do something.”
“It’s time for action, not reflection!”
Father hated to be pulled away from his studies. I heard him sigh loudly, and the parchment scrolls crinkle as he rolled them up. The shouting outside grew more insistent. Quickly, I put on my own tunic and folded up my mat. As I emerged from my room, Father was plodding to the doorway to face five agitated men.
“What’s all this shouting about?” he said distractedly. He rubbed at the ache that resided in his hip.
Aaron, one of Father’s pupils, spoke first. “Some shepherds have just awakened the whole village with their shouting about a band of fifty men they saw fleeing from Sepphoris. These men lugged heavy sacks, though what those sacks contained or who the men were, the shepherds couldn’t say. But they were sure that Judah ben Hezekiah led them.”
“Judah ben Hezekiah?” Father smoothed his long, unruly beard with his ink-stained fingers. “They’re certain it was he?”
“They said they would swear so on the Torah,” said Aaron.
Father straightened up and spoke with uncharacteristic force. “Gather all the information you can. Speak to everyone. The whole village must assemble. This very evening.”
After the men left, Father asked me where Lev was. I shrugged and busied myself with the breakfast preparations, practicing the lie—not really a lie—that I would tell if he or anyone asked me about the raid. “I’m only a girl. How could I know anything?”
And why would I know anything? After all, girls learned only domestic skills, and these were taught by women. Most boys hardly spoke to their sisters, unless it was to order them around. But my brother was different. Our mother had died when we were very young; Lev was four and I was two. With our older half-brother Chuza living in Jerusalem, and our father often absorbed by his teaching and the village’s knesset affairs, Lev and I were frequently left to ourselves as we grew up. My brother taught me the lessons boys learned: how to throw a sling, pin a wrestling opponent, debate the lessons of the Torah, and keep an accounting of money. He shared with me the knowledge of the world beyond our little village that he was able to gather. As long as I had finished my chores, Father allowed me to observe when he instructed Lev and the other boys in reading and writing; but it was Lev, in private, who showed me how to form the letters on a wax tablet and to read the words of the Torah from the scrolls. We had always kept each other’s secrets. I loved him fiercely.
As it turned out, I wasn’t called upon to lie. A ripe apricot lasted longer than a secret in our village. By late afternoon, everyone knew the names of the three young men from Nazareth who had joined Judah’s band. Also the six from the town of Japha, the two from Gaba, and the three from Besara. Everyone had also learned that Judah and his followers had looted Sepphoris’s treasury and arsenal and killed five of its guards during the raid.
In the evening, we gathered in the village’s common area around the olive and wine presses, the same place where we met twice a week to pray, trade, and conduct village business. Our knesset had twelve elected leaders, including Father. Usually our assembly was a happy time, but today fear and anger furrowed
