Wednesday, August 30, 2006

THE 7TH CENTURY BC

A river swings and riddles its way through the city; plenty of stagnant pools inundate in swirls of transient smells, whirlpools tell the passage of fish fishing, the sun is brightly shining, and in some places you can see many ways deep into the troubling waters, we could be anywhere in the world, we are however in the land of Chaldea, a place that meant the end of Assyrians, those magnificent cultural and powerful tormentors, that were doomed here, by name and by destiny.

A small canoe like boat, obviously held together by poverty, makes its way, within, we find a collection of water snakes that have been unfortunate enough to find themselves readied for human consumption. Snake eaters were everywhere in these lands, it was not considered a delicacy it was as cattle are to you today, this little boat, with an eight year old boy that was working hard enough to be a man, and his mother were doing their daily load, to then deliver it to the city dwellers; they themselves were not city dwellers, they lived in the caves, near the sandy foot hills that lined the city, one could not be a city dweller on income from snake trapping.

“Are we going to catch that one” The boy said this as he could see a very long green and black patterned snake swim before the boat, they were parallel to each other, the mother provided propulsion using a stick to move forward while the boy kept the boat parallel to the snake by using a paddle, they hardly spoke to one another mother and son, they mostly seemed to signal with their eyes and eye brows, gestures, even slight head movements could insinuate entire paragraphs of meaning, this was part of the snake catchers traits, the silence it was said would ensure a minimum disturbance of the prey before its death. Our child’s mother strikes the blow, she waits, and waits, tracking snake, it has to surface for air, it lifts its head, having no other real predators, it thinks the boat inconsequential, then the blow to the head collapses upon it, and boy hastily dives into the river waters to wrap some rope around its body, and between mother and son they pull the thing on board, and spend the next three hours cutting it up so it fits and to ready it for market.

It is late afternoon now, the boat comes to the edge of a landing spot, the boy ties the boat to a stump, and the mother, motions her head so that he will stay by the boat guarding their snakes from pruning thieves. The boy sits, looks at the broken up snakes, the blood mixing with the warm river water that has climbed onboard, the boy lets his toes touch and wiggle into snake skin, he likes the mushy feeling, he looks at the sun, attempts to stare directly at it in a sort of blind defiance, then he turns to see his mother, her long and dark skinny body, covered by a single robe that is also green and black like the snakes body, showing only her ankles, the only remaining tribute of her former beauty; she is arguing away some merit of payment, her hands showing tense discussion, then she walks away from the trader, her head saying that it hasn’t been a good payment settlement, but her flustered moment ends as soon as she catches the eyes of her son, she yells, they may talk in silence on the boat, but when on land they speak in shouts, “Habakkuk, get those things of our boat, can’t get any good money for it today, get it off boy before the price keeps going down with the sun.”

Yes, this is our boy Habakkuk, here in the seventh century to provide prophetical witness to the downfall of the Assyrian empire. Today, this boy and his mother would make little money from their snake catch, unfortunately the legal prosbul that would be passed in the first century BC was not yet in place, so boy and his mother would not be able to borrow some money, because debts could be forgiven every seven years, and so the snake catchers could barely keep the nine brothers and sisters some how fed for now.