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right hand this evening, casting dark looks alternately at Deborah, who did not flinch but loftily ignored him, and darker looks at the perfumed David. He would flap his hand when David spoke in his musical and cultured accents—in Greek, of course—as if waving away a cloud of inconsequential gnats, and he would make rude sounds as he chewed, and would gurgle as he drank the wine. (A veritable pig, thought Deborah, without charity.) Only when Hillel spoke did the rabbi give any attentiveness to the table, and stop stuffing his mouth with large portions of bread or examining each dish with intense suspicion as if it were poisoned or unfit for the pure intestines of a pious Jew. He was bent and gnarled, though curiously fat and shaped like a turnip, and had a long black beard without a sign of whiteness in spite of his age, and his expression was black and fierce as were his eyes, and his nose was deplorably huge and predatory, resembling a Phoenician’s. His clothing was of the coarsest linen, and of a dull dark brown, and Deborah was certain that he smelled rankly, which was not true. He was rich and learned, and feared in the Temple, and was often in Jerusalem, and spoke of himself as the poorest and humblest of men, and was arrogant, opinionated and intolerant, though very eloquent and wise when it pleased him. He was also what David called a “heresy-hunter,” and devoted ferociously to the Law and the Book, and therefore an anachronism in these enlightened days. Deborah loathed him.
    It enraged her to learn from her husband that Reb Isaac would not only instruct young Saul in the proper pious studies of a Pharisaical Jew—he was already instructing the lad—but would be Saul’s mentor and would choose his menial trade. He was a. weaver of goat’s hair. Surely, Deborah would protest with tears, even a Septuagint Jew no longer believed that all Jews must not only be learned but must embrace a humble trade involving the hands and sweaty labor, no matter how rich and distinguished of family. It was ridiculous. Did Hillel, himself, now practice his trade of cabinetmaking? It was true that it pleased him to carve a small chest on occasion, or a chair for the nursery, or a little table, but did he pursue it sedulously, as the Law demanded? No, indeed. “One never knows,” Hillel would say mysteriously, but he never explained what one might never know. It was infuriating.
    Tonight Deborah was happy. David was her favorite brother. She was vexed that Hillel, when David was a guest, invariably invited that obnoxious old Pharisee to his table. She did not know that Hillel found both Reb Isaac and David abrasive to his temperament, and that he found himself irritably honed by them and relieved from his own amity by annoyance. (Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to be a Roman, to be filled with materialistic certitude and no doubts, and to tread the ground firmly and not to discover questions in the earth.) Between the two stones of Reb Isaac and David ben Shebua, he sometimes felt the rough grinding of an elusive answer which, he reasoned—he was always reasoning—might not be an answer at all but only his abraded sensibilities become tender and sensitive and skinless.
    He looked down the table at his son, little Saul, five years old, sitting silently beside his mother. He smiled affectionately at the child, but Saul was listening to David with that strange intentness of his, which was most unchildlike. Surely not a handsome lad, but curiously dominating for all his short stature, his breadth of chest and shoulder, his muscular arms and the strong bowed legs. His eyes had become more strenuous and alive as he grew, and they resembled cold but brilliant blue enamel over iron. His audaciously red hair was cut in the short Roman fashion, like a soldier’s, and his big pink ears flared out from his round and virile skull. Deborah might deplore his Phoenician nose, and hint of wantonings in Hillel’s impeccable