The Fig Skin and the Death of Miriam bat Boethus

The servant came back through the door for the third time that morning with nothing in his hands. Miriam, the daughter of Boethus, whom the old tellers also spell Baythus, sat among the silver and the gold that had bought her name across Jerusalem, and she did not yet understand that none of it could be eaten.

"The fine flour," he said. "It is all sold."

She waved him out again. "Then bring the white meal."

He ran. The streets he crossed were not the streets she remembered. Roman earthworks ringed the walls. Inside them the storehouses stood as black skeletons, because the city's own fighters had burned the granaries to force a starving people into the fight. The people boiled straw in water and drank it to keep upright. The servant pushed through them to the market and found the white meal gone in the time it had taken him to ask. Only the coarse barley remained, and he turned and ran home once more to ask whether she would take it.

The Relay of Missed Bread

By the time he had her answer and returned, the barley too had vanished. He came back a fourth time with his palms open and empty, and the sight of those empty palms did what the siege engines outside the wall had not yet done. It moved her from her chair.

"Bring the carob," she said. He went. The carob was gone.

She rose. Her ornaments still circled her wrists and her throat, gold on gold, because a wealthy woman did not walk out into Jerusalem undressed, not even a Jerusalem that was eating its own straw. She would go herself. A servant could miss a chance. She would not.

The Richest Woman in the Streets

She went out in her finery into a city that had nothing left to sell her.

House after house, she knocked and was answered by faces she did not recognize as the faces of her neighbors. They had grown sharp and hollow. They had nothing. Stall after stall, the boards were bare and the merchants were gone or dead. The gold on her arms meant exactly as much to them as it would have meant to the stones underfoot. She had crossed into a country with only one currency, and it was bread, and there was no bread.

The same hunger that had emptied every house was now inside her own body, bending her toward the ground. She kept walking. She had measured her whole life in weight, talents of silver, vessels of gold, and now the only weight she could feel was the lightness of her own stomach pulling at her like a hook.

The Fig Skin in the Gutter

By the gate she saw it. Someone before her, days before perhaps, had eaten a fig and dropped the skin into the filth of the street. It lay there in the muck where a thousand feet had passed it by, the one thing in all of Jerusalem that nobody had yet been desperate enough to take.

Miriam, the daughter of Boethus, the richest woman in the city, bent down in her gold and her silver and picked the fig skin out of the gutter. She put it in her mouth.

The rot in it turned against her at once. Her body, which had never tasted anything that had not first been weighed and chosen and approved, could not hold it. She sickened where she stood, there at the gate, in the dirt, with the wealth of a dynasty still hanging from her arms.

The Gold Thrown into the Filth

She knew she was dying. With the strength that was left she tore the ornaments from her wrists and her throat, the gold and the silver that had been the proof of who she was, and she threw them out into the street to lie beside the fig skin she had eaten.

"What use is this to me," she said, "when it cannot buy me a mouthful of food?"

The bracelets rang on the stones and lay still. She died beside them, in the muck of the gate, a woman who had never in her life gone hungry until the day hunger was the only thing the whole city had to give her.

The rabbis who carried her story forward heard in her dying cry an old verse made flesh. The prophet Ezekiel had written of a day of wrath, "They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be as an unclean thing." Here it was, cast into the street with her own hands, gold gone as worthless as the rotted skin of a discarded fig.

The City That Burned Its Own Bread

Outside the wall, the general Vespasian waited, and inside it the fighters who had torched the storehouses still believed the fire would harden the city into victory. It hardened it into a graveyard. The same siege that drove a patrician woman to the gutter drove an old sage named Yochanan ben Zakkai to have himself carried out of the city sealed inside a coffin, the only way the living could pass the gates the zealots had closed. He went out as a corpse to save what could still be saved. She went out in her ornaments and found there was nothing left to buy.

One survived the fall and one did not. The difference between them was not the gold. By the end the gold was the same on both, worth a fig skin, worth a handful of muck, worth nothing that a mouth could swallow.