Chapter 1

Retiring to his private quarters, the King resumed his contemplation of the conundrum. What manner of emergency could have induced the proud and pompous Herod to ignore the age-old enmity between their nations?

For fifteen centuries, notwithstanding they were neighbours according to the map—their frontiers facing across an erratic little river that a boy could wade in mid-summer—the Arabs and the Jews had been implacable foes. This ancient feud had not been rooted in racial incompatibility, though there was plenty of that too. The antipathy had derived from a definite incident that had occurred long ago: so very long ago that nobody knew how much of the story might be mythical. But—let the tale be half fact, half fiction—it accounted for the bitter hatred of these people.

According to the saga chanted about the Arabian camp-fires by wandering minstrels, a wise and wealthy migrant had ventured from Chaldea to the Plains of Mamre. It was a long story, but the minstrels never omitted their elaborate tribute to Chaldea as a land of seers and sages, oracles and astrologers. In Chaldea men dreamed prophetically and were entrusted with celestial secrets. Abraham, distinguished above them all for his learning, had received divine instructions to make a far journey southward and found a new nation.

But the prophecy was in danger of lacking fulfilment, for the years were passing and the founder of the new nation was childless. Sarah, his ageing wife, was barren.

To solve this problem, the perplexed idealist had won the consent of his wife to permit his alliance with a beautiful young native in their employ. A son was born to them. They named him Ishmael. He was a handsome, headstrong, adventurous child, passionately devoted to his desert-born mother, whom he closely resembled. Sarah, naturally enough, did not like him. Abraham admired the boy’s vitality and courage, but Ishmael was quite a handful for the old man, whose hours of pious meditation were becoming increasingly brief and confused.

To further complicate this domestic dilemma, Sarah surprised everybody by producing a son of her own. They named him Isaac. He was not a rugged child. His eyesight was defective; so defective that in his later life he had gone stone-blind. He was no match for his athletic half-brother. For a little while they all tried to be polite and conciliatory, but the inevitable conflict presently flared to alarming dimensions. Sarah no longer made any effort to control her bitter hatred for young Hagar and her tempestuous son. ‘These impostors,’ she shouted, shrilly, ‘must go! Today! Now!’

With appropriate misgivings Abraham conducted Hagar and their indignant boy to the rim of his claim, gave the bewildered girl a loaf of bread and a jug of water, and pointed south toward the mountains. Not a word was spoken. Abraham turned and plodded slowly toward his little colony of tents. Hagar did not look back.

When the vagabond minstrels sang the old story, which, as the ages passed, lost nothing of the magical in the telling, they declared that Ishmael grew to full manhood that day. This may have been a slight exaggeration, though enough had happened to hasten his maturity. He swore to his mother that from now and henceforth for ever he and his seed would be at enmity with everyone else descended from his father’s house.