Gaboha ben Pesisa Read One Verse and the Nations Fled the Court

The dust of Alexander's army still hung over Asia when three delegations reached his camp in one week, each carrying a grievance against the same small people. The Ishmaelites came first, then the people of Afriki, the children of Canaan who had fled west across the sea, and last the men of Egypt with their account books. They did not want gold. They wanted a verdict that would pry the land of Israel out of Israel's hands and lay it in their own.

The elders of Israel heard the docket and went pale. A war they understood. A lawsuit argued in a Greek court, over verses the plaintiffs had learned to quote, was a thing they had no answer for. They sat in the study house and said nothing useful to one another.

The Least Man in the Room Asks to Speak

A man rose whom the elders barely counted. Gaboha son of Pesisa was no famous head of an academy, no name the nations had heard. He asked for the right to plead the case, and the elders hesitated at the smallness of him.

He read their hesitation and answered it before they could shape it into a refusal. "If I lose," he said, "you can tell the world that only the least among you was beaten, and the Torah itself still stands undefeated. If I win, you will say it was our Torah that won, and not a man at all." Then he warned himself in their hearing, the way a man does before walking onto thin ice. He would not cede a single furrow of the land. They gave him the case.

Gaboha walked into Alexander's court alone and unrolled a Torah scroll before the throne.

The Firstborn's Claim and the Hand of Abraham

Alexander looked down at the three delegations and asked the only question a judge needs. "Who brings a claim against whom?"

The Ishmaelites spoke first, and they were clever. They did not beg. They quoted. By the Torah of these very Jews, they said, the firstborn takes a double portion of his father's house, and Ishmael was the firstborn of Abraham. Let the king read their own law and rule by it. The double share of Abraham's estate, the land included, belonged to Ishmael's seed.

Gaboha did not flinch at his own scripture turned into a weapon. He bent over the open scroll and turned to the place where Abraham settled his house before his death. "May a man not do as he wishes with what is his own?" he asked the king. Then he read it aloud, the line that no patriarch could later overturn. "Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac." All that he had. The whole estate, sealed by the father's own hand to one son.

The Ishmaelites pressed back. And the gifts, they said. What of the gifts Abraham gave the other sons? Gaboha turned a finger to the next verse and let it answer them. "But unto the sons of the concubines that Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, eastward, unto the east country." Gifts, and a road out of the country. The portion had been paid in full, in the patriarch's lifetime, by the patriarch's choice. The claim before Alexander was a second helping at a table already cleared. The Ishmaelites had no verse left, and they stepped back.

The Slave Has No Land to Sue For

The men of Afriki came forward in their place, and their suit looked stronger. The land is named for their father in the Jews' own books, they said. Again and again the scrolls call it the land of Canaan. A thing is named for the man who owns it. Give us back what bears our name.

Gaboha let them finish and then went back, far back, past Abraham to the morning after the flood, to the vineyard and the curse old Noah spoke over Canaan when he woke. "Canaan was declared a slave," he said, "a slave of slaves to his brothers." He looked up at Alexander, and now the verse cut in two directions at once. A slave owns nothing. Whatever a slave holds, his master holds. Canaan was cursed into bondage under the sons of Japheth, and the king on this throne traced his own line up through Japheth.

"The land is ours," Gaboha said, "and these men are slaves of my lord the king." The plaintiffs had walked in to claim a country and learned, in a single breath, that by their own scripture they could not even claim themselves.

But Gaboha was not finished with them, and what came next emptied a continent. As Canaan's children, he told them, they owed the long arrears of their bondage. Pay the wages of every year your fathers failed to serve, he said, before the Israelites ever set foot in the land, and only after that account is settled will we trouble the king about real estate. Alexander gave the men of Afriki three days to prepare their reply.

At the end of three days they were gone. They did not return to argue, and they did not even return to gather their things. They abandoned their fields and their vineyards and fled the country whole, rather than open a ledger that would never close.

The Wages of Two Hundred and Ten Years

Egypt remained. Their claim wore the face of justice and a long memory. When the Israelites went out from among us, they said, they carried off our silver and our gold. The scroll says it plainly, that they emptied Egypt. Order them to give back what they took.

Gaboha turned the demand inside out. Six hundred thousand men, he said, broke their bodies in Egyptian service for two hundred and ten years. Reckon the wage of one laborer for one day, multiply it by those men and those years, and set it against a wagonload of borrowed vessels. Egypt would not collect a debt. Egypt would be ruined paying one. The men of Egypt heard the arithmetic and had nothing to add to it.

One after another the nations had brought Israel's own book to court as a sword, and one after another the unknown man had turned the blade around in their hands. Three suits answered, the land left where the patriarch's hand had sealed it. Gaboha rolled the scroll closed on the floor of a Greek court and walked back to the elders who had nearly been too proud to send him.