The Woman Who Walked to the Temple on Carpets

She would not walk on the ground.

That is where the story of Miriam bat Baitus begins, in the years when Jerusalem was still the most powerful city in the land and the wealth of its great families seemed like a fact of nature, as permanent as stone. When Miriam wanted to see her husband in the Temple on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, she did not simply walk through the streets. Her servants laid out carpets from the entrance of her house all the way to the entrance of the Temple Mount, so that her feet would not become irritated by the road.

The detail is not meant to be impressive. It is meant to explain what is about to happen.

Her husband, Yehoshua ben Gamla, had not become High Priest through scholarship or piety. He had become High Priest because Miriam's money was enormous enough to purchase the appointment from the king. Eikhah Rabbah 1:47, compiled in the land of Israel sometime in the fifth century CE, records this matter-of-factly, the way you mention the price of something to explain its value. The carpets, the appointment, the fortune: all part of the same picture.

The rabbis of Midrash Rabbah were thinking about a verse from Deuteronomy when they told this story: "the tender and delicate woman among you, who would not venture to set the sole of her foot upon the ground" (Deuteronomy 28:56). The verse comes from the great catalogue of curses, and it does not describe a woman of elegance. It describes a woman so sheltered from hardship that she has become incapable of bearing it, which means that when hardship finally arrives, it will destroy her absolutely. The carpet-laying is not a sign of status. It is a sign of fragility being mistaken for strength.

Yehoshua ben Gamla died. After that, the Sages took up the question of what Miriam was owed from his estate. Among the provisions debated was her daily allotment of wine: two full se'a every day. The Sages wrestled with the ruling, since they generally did not apportion wine directly to women. Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba quoted Hosea 4:11 in partial explanation: wine, Hosea warned, could lead the heart astray. But others offered practical reasoning. Rabbi Yehizkiya and Rabbi Abahu said the wine was for her cooked dishes, not for drinking. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said wine was medicinal, that it increased milk for nursing women. They granted the wine. They measured out her comfort. Jerusalem was still standing and provision still felt like a reasonable answer to need.

Then the siege came.

Rabbi Elazar ben Rabbi Tzadok swears by the consolation of Jerusalem, the most solemn oath available to a man who loves the city, that he witnessed what happened to her. They tied her hair to the tails of Arabian horses and pulled her, alive, from Jerusalem to Lod.

The verse he reads in her regard is from Deuteronomy. The tender and delicate woman. The one who would not set the sole of her foot on the ground. The carpets were gone. The Temple was gone. The appointment and the wine and the estate were all gone. What remained was the road, and the horses, and the dust she had spent her entire life avoiding.

Eikhah Rabbah does not tell us what happened to her after Lod. It does not need to. The story ends at the moment the distance between who she had been and what she had become became visible all at once.