Samael Agreed to Every Condition If Ten of the Mighty Were Destroyed

Click for full size

The Terms Read Out to His Face

The warnings came first. Then the conditions, one after another, and Samael stood and heard every one of them. What he was permitted to do. When. Whom he could touch and whom he had to walk past. He is not a free power. He is an appointed one, and the appointment arrived with limits spoken to his face.

He took all of it.

"I have taken all upon me," he said, "provided only that ten of the mighty shall be destroyed."

Then he named them. Not a quota to be filled later by whoever happened to be standing nearby. Ten men, by name, in order, the way a creditor reads a list he has already written out.

The Ten Names

Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph. Rabbi Judah ben Baba. Rabbi Jeshbab the scribe. Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon. Rabbi Hozpit the interpreter. Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua. Rabbi Hanina ben Hakinai. Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha. Rabban Simon ben Gamaliel. Rabbi Eliezer ben Dama.

The man who carried that list back down had heard his own name inside it. Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha stood eighth in the reading. He did not learn that Rome would kill ten teachers. He learned the order, and he learned where he came in it, and he came back and repeated the whole thing anyway, including the line with himself in it.

None of the other nine knew. That is the part the list does not soften. The nine went on teaching, ordaining, arguing over clean and unclean, walking to the study hall in the morning, while the account against them had already been agreed to somewhere they could not see.

What It Looked Like From Below

From below it looked like Rome.

Iron combs opened Akiva while he stretched out the word One, and his students asked him how far a man was supposed to go, and he answered them with his flesh coming off. Hananya ben Teradyon was wrapped in the scroll he had been caught teaching from, and they set the wool over his heart wet so that his dying would take longer, and he told the men watching that the parchment was burning and the letters were going up into the air. Judah ben Baba ordained five students in a valley between two towns because Rome had made ordination a capital crime, and when the soldiers came into the valley he told the five to run and stood in the gap himself until he was pierced through like a sieve.

Every one of those deaths has a Roman name attached to it, a governor, a decree, a season of reprisals after the revolt. The soldiers thought they were enforcing policy. They were paying an invoice.

Where Samael Keeps What He Is Given

His country is not a pit under the earth. It is the liver.

The organ sits in the body and takes what the blood carries. Its veins are his camps and his troops, and every defilement that moves through them ends there, collected, held, kept out of the rest of the body. That is his function and that is his skill. He is the place where filth is put so that the thing it came out of can go on living.

Which is why one animal a year walks out of the sanctuary alive.

The Goat and the Land Cut Off

Two goats stood in front of the priest. One went to the altar. The other stood there while the whole weight of a year was laid on its head, and then a man led it out past the last houses and let it go into country nobody farms.

The Torah says the goat carries their iniquities away with it. The Hebrew for their iniquities holds another word inside it, so that the same letters can be heard as the iniquities of the perfect one. Only one man in the Torah is called perfect, and it is Jacob, sitting in the tents while his brother hunted. So the goat that walks out into the wilderness is carrying Jacob's household on its back, the whole line of them, out to a land under a decree, into the territory of the one who agreed to every condition provided ten of the mighty were destroyed.

Nobody follows it. The man who led it out turns around and walks back toward the smoke of the altar, and the goat keeps going, smaller and smaller, until the ground it is crossing belongs to somebody else.