3 STARTLING START
Hathach tapped at the city’s back gate. Had he been dreaming? Made a big mistake, maybe? The small door creaked open.
Outside were three camels, saddled, all loaded with small boxes and bags as well as being loosely strung together with slip knots. On one of the camels sat a servant, but the Prince hadn’t come. Well, it wasn’t quite eight hours yet.
Hathach and Melzar stepped through the door and closed it behind them.
“Is this Melzar?” the servant sitting on the camel asked. But it was the voice of the Prince!
“Y-yes,” Hathach replied. “Is that you behind the veil, Prince?”
“Ah. I wanted to be able to ride easy so dressed like this—but you know these nomad veils are musts for sand storms. Here, I brought two extras—maybe you can put them in with your things to use when you need them. And if you’re not expecting anyone else, let’s go as far as we can while it’s dark and cool. As we go, I’ll explain why we’re making this trip.”
Hathach had almost forgotten. Last night, after his visit to see the Prince, he had rushed home and got out the news to Melzar that the three of them would be heading west this morning. What had seemed like a reckless quest until yesterday was actually taking shape right before their eyes today. It seemed this Yahweh God would show Himself to them after all—He was helping them make this trip, not just having a prince give his permission for them to do it, it but he was riding along with them!
“Prince, before you tell us about your reason for making this trip, we must tell you what happened before it,” Hathach said, and told him about their star-gazing findings. “We can’t get away from the notion that a King is going to be born in Judea, and we must be there to witness it.”
“Yahweh sent that Star I saw in the window,” Prince Beorn told Melzar. “Just then, Hathach said he wanted to know about Yahweh God. It was as if Yahweh Himself looked down at me and said, ‘You dare not deny his request to seek Me!’ So I had no choice but to grant you permission, you see?”
“So…you saw a big, bright star that Yahweh sent…” and Melzar closed his lips. Hathach saw Melzar’s face and finished the sentence for him.
“Just exactly what does the star mean?”
“Messiah. The Messiah will be born. I will explain more later.
The wind has picked up, I’m afraid. Can you get those veils, Hathach? I think a sandstorm’s coming.”
Not a moment too soon. No sooner had they dug the hoods out of their things and clapped them on their heads, the trio was lost in a cloud of gravely darkness. Eerie, swirling, “bottomless” darkness. Hathach wondered how people survived sandstorms without veiled hoods. He was glad Prince Beorn had come along on this trip. It would not be the only time on this trip Hathach would have this thought.
That is, Hathach thought it was his trip that he had chosen Melzar for and Prince Beorn had come along; he had no idea this could be a trip planned by Yahweh God for which Beorn, Melzar, and Hathach, had been chosen.
As soon as the winds died down, Hathach and Melzar let out a hugh sigh of relief. Sky! They could see the…what? The prince was telling them to get back on their camels and move to higher ground. Hurry, he said; he would explain later.
“He always ‘explains later.’” Melzar thought, as they went up the side of a slope and reached a clump of palms at the top. They had just come out of a sandstorm, and the sky was beeooti…wait…a cloud was racing across the sky, and it was getting dark fast. The blowing sand of a few moments ago was replaced with roaring downpour of water.
“Take cover! Flash flood!” Prince Beorn’s deep voice sounded small.
The three men and their camels huddled as compact as they could under the trees, watching the water shooting past them. It came crashing through the channel where they had been standing just moments earlier, twisting, lifting boulders, uprooting trees in the way. But after the storm raged awhile, almost as suddenly as it had started, everything stopped. There were swirls of sand everywhere, and the gulley they had been in…well, it was no longer a “channel,” being pretty much filled up with mud and sand.
“I hope everybody likes rabbit stew; that seems to be what Yahweh has provided for dinner tonight.” Prince Beorn’s smiling voice said.
Rabbit stew? Yahweh provided?
The Prince came walking down from the top of the hill where they had taken refuge during the storm, pulling something out from behind his back. He was holding two rabbits by their feet!
“My father taught me that after sandstorms, flash floods are very likely. Animals also know this, so the ones in the desert—who happen to be on lower ground when sandstorms hit—usually head for higher ground right afterwards. I never thought I could catch a “cape hare”, but Yahweh has blessed. ‘In the Mount of the LORD it shall be seen,’ (Gen.22:14) I was gathering herbs when I saw a hare, injured in the sandstorm, dying at the foot of a bush. Its mate would not run away, so I caught him too. We can have rabbit stew for dinner tonight, yes? Neither of you are allergic to rabbit, are you?” They shook their heads.
Prince Beorn was full of surprises.
4 It Must Be the Rabbit Stew
Well, that evening, he asked not to be called “Prince” any more, just “Beorn.” The rest of the trip, it was decided to forget rank, position, all that; just go by “Beorn, Hathach, Melzar.”
While eating rabbit stew, Beorn was asked to tell about himself, and this is what he said:
Beorn’s father was a black Arab nomad, his mother a Jewish woman who taught him about Yahweh and read to him from the sacred writings of the prophets. Because Beorn is half black, many people think he is 100% black. He could probably fool people into believing he was an Egyptian. Beorn grew up learning many of the ways of the Nomad and life on The Wilderness of Paran. However, Beorn’s father died, and his mother returned to the land of her birth, Israel.
Here, Melzar interrupted Beorn. “That was too bad. If you hadn’t come up to Israel, but stayed down south, you wouldn’t have been brought all the way to Babylon as a slave, right? You would be free as a bird today in the wilderness you grew up loving. The Babylonian Kingdom extended quite a ways, but I don’t think anyone would’ve gone as far as Paran! I was starting to think this Yahweh God was great, but…it seems He let your father die then let you be exiled as slaves. I don’t know. Sounds like He handed you some pretty sad circumstances.”
“…Melzar, you say, ‘That’s too bad.’ But not my mother.
She said Yahweh always does good for His own, for reasons we may not even be aware of ourselves at the time. Later on, we’ll always look back—always—and marvel at how Yahweh arranged it all perfectly. For example—you know our relatives, the family down south that were ‘so lucky’ not to get taken to Babylon as slaves, like me? Well, we heard later, a band of thieves raided that area, raped and murdered Then they burned the farms to the ground. Mother and I escaped all that.
And Melzar, look; now I am a Prince. Is that really…so…bad?”
“Hmm.” Melzar had to rethink that one.
“Don’t think too hard, Melzar.” Beorn rolled his eyes at him, taking his empty plate off his hands; “What I’ve found out is that it’s not really that important that we get it all figured out anyway. The important thing is that we let Yahweh be in charge, that we keep coming back to Him.”
Beorn went on to say that when he was made prince, his mother had not been allowed to come along. So from that point on, mother and son had been separated.
By the time he became prince, she walked with a limp, Beorn remembered. On the day he was taken to his new post; she had hobbled over to her corner of the room; and reached for her treasure under the pillow: the sacred writings! He would not—he could not—take them from his mother. He had put his hands behind his back and shook his head desperately, but she had pressed them against his chest.
“Beorn, take them. Keep them,” his mother had said; “Yahweh will keep you. And wherever you go my darling son, you will be right here in your mother’s heart.”
And Beorn could not push her away.
“So you took the writings?” Melzar asked. Beorn nodded.
“One of the most precious things my mother gave me.” Beorn managed to say.
“One of?”
“Her name. Another precious gift. My mother’s name is to me…like a pearl I take out and look at from time to time to soothe my soul.”
“Her name?”
Hathach had been watching the two talk. Never before had he seen Melzar like this. He usually went halfway through a sentence, pressed his lips together, said no more; that was the extent of the young man’s effort to communicate. But with the prince--perhaps he had identified with some of the hardships Beorn had had to endure and felt safe with him; Melzar freely expressed himself and anything he was curious about.
“Yes. My mother’s name.” Beorn paused—the three men had been washing their bowls and began putting them back among their supplies. He shook his head and smiled at a memory, saying,. “Oh, she was strong.” They turned and leaned against the camels’ backs. All this time, Melzar waited.
“You will not laugh?” Beorn finally asked.
“I am not laughing now,” Melzar said.
“My mother’s name is Arla.”
“Pretty name, Arla,” Melzar said, sincerely.
“I know. Sounds pretty, but that’s all it is to most people. There is another story about why it is special. Will you listen?” Beorn didn’t move his head gazing at the stars; only his with his eyes he peered towards Melzar.
“I am listening.”
“Mother told me long ago in the writings of the prophets of a slave Hagar who was cast out in the desert with her son, given only a pitcher of water. They almost died, but Yahweh led them to a desert spring. The slave said, Beer-lahai-roi, which in my mother’s language means ‘Well of the Living God Who sees’.”
“Beer…?”
“To help me remember that story, whenever she told that story, my mother made a funny face, threw up her hands, and said, ‘Barla-hairoi!’ We pretended she was tongue-tied and I had to help her remember her name was ‘Arla’ and the place was ‘Beer-la’. We died laughing. Maybe it’s ridiculous, but…
It’s not a bit ridiculous, Melzar thought.
After that, whenever something happened I needed to remember that people don’t understand but Yahweh sees and does—and will provide a way out—it was like a password. I would say, “Arla”, and my mother would say, “Hairoi”. –when we moved to Negeb where not everybody around had the same color skin as me…when most of our belongings were stripped from us when we were brought to Babylon…that day after carrying that little girl on my shoulders over the cesspool…when I left for my post as prince, and Mother couldn’t come along, instead of ‘good-bye,’ we said ‘Arla,’ and ‘Hairoi’. People around thought we were saying goodbye in Hebrew.
Beorn pretended to chuckle; Melzar didn’t.
I like talking with you, Melzar,” Beorn coughed; “I don’t think I talked with anyone like this before.”
Then, tossing some bedrolls over to his companions, he advised, “Let’s get some sleep. We need to start off again early in the morning. Oh—and be sure to make your bedding off the ground where it’s cooler and safer from desert varmints.
Hathach said to himself, Beorn thinks he never talked so much before? If he only knew about Melzar! It must be the rabbit stew….
