De Lussac called himself an archaeologist, although he had no academic qualification in archaeology and to boot he had started out in life as Jean de Lussac, Isaac came much later. His formal training was in teaching, however, his training was quite unlike that of the average teacher. He had the traditional upbringing of an upper class Bordeaux family of devout Catholics. He attended a religious school until the age of eighteen and then with the encouragement of his parent entered the Seminary of the Society of Jesus. At twenty three he was ordained and sent to Indo-China to bring Christianity and the French Language to France’s colonies. In Saigon he was set to work at a Jesuit college teaching French and French history to the children of the colonies administrators and planters together with the children of wealthy and privileged Vietnamese as the sun was setting on France’s colonies in Asia.
De Lussac’s work together with his gift for languages was greatly appreciated and as the French ceded their place to the Americans with the intensification of the Vietnam war, he was transferred to a safer and more senior teaching position in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. In Cambodia he discovered the ruins of Angkor and archaeology, visiting and exploring the little known temple sites deep in the jungle whenever the occasion presented itself, developing a passion for the message carried through time by the stones left by an ancient civilisation.
Unfortunately for him the American war overflowed into Cambodia and he suddenly found himself in a drab suburb in the north of Paris, where his work included teaching French to North African immigrant workers and their children in Aulney-sous-bois. It was a dismal prospect for a young man used to the smiling respectful Asians of Indo-China. Not discouraged he set about learning Arabic and discovered Islam a religion he knew little of. His only relief were the long French vacations, when could join summer camps at archaeological digs in France and Italy, where he was appreciated for his methodical though pedantic approach, something sought after in a branch of historical investigation where the smallest item of evidence could be of great significance.
In 1970 another door opened and to his great joy he was dispatched to East Jerusalem to work with Palestinian refugees. His arrival in the Holy Land, the land of Jesus Christ and the Bible, was another turning point in his life, when he found himself straddling the fault lines that lay between the three great religions of the Book.
He was fascinated by the distant history of the Holy Land and whenever he could he joined archaeological campaigns, however his proximity to Jews and Arabs, Judaism and Islam, slowly began to transform his vision of religion raising profound questions concerning the precepts of Christianity. The breaking point came with the Six Day War in 1973 and the battle for Jerusalem, he witnessed first hand the bitter fighting betweens the Israeli army and the city’s Jordanian defenders, when the Jews unexpectedly found themselves in possession of the Holy City for the first time in almost two thousand years, for de Lussac it was a event inspired by the hand of God.
His found himself in disagreement with the philosophy of the Society of Jesus and after a bitter drawn out conflict he abandoned his calling. In his mind he had been forced to leave, something that was to mark the rest of his life. Now speaking Arabic and Hebrew he found part time work with a small monthly publication Biblical Archaeology, he also worked as a freelance translator making a modest living, with his newly discovered freedom, not having a fixed position, he was able to satisfy his interest in archaeology and biblical history, which as time passed became his ultimate vocation. However, in spite of his religious training and acquired archaeological skills he was not a formally trained archaeologist, which mattered in a land where archaeologists of all schools flourished and where each one dreamed of a discovery that would confirm or infirm biblical history, the glory of 19th century amateurs had passed. Exploration and excavation required permits, permits required credentials and money, and money required sponsors.
The years passed and he achieved the rank of assistant archaeologist, living in rudimentary base camps at often isolated sites, he passed his time writing obscure articles and reports, and as time slid by he grew more and more introspective as he began to realise he would never make the history books, the field was too crowded, too specialised, he had neither the academic nor the technical qualifications to stand out from the crowd and to his disadvantage he was a poor communicator, growing more and more vindictive towards his more successful colleagues as time passed.
His feeling of rejection grew, de Lussac had not realised it, but the order of Jesuits had been his home, offering him spiritual comfort, food, shelter and brotherhood. He was now isolated and alone.
He rarely returned to France, his family had not forgiven him for his decision to quit holy orders. When his father died he returned to Bordeaux for the funeral, it was then he stumbled on a birth certificate amongst his fathers papers – that of a boy named Isaac Stern, born in Bordeaux on the same day as himself. Digging further he discovered a set of adoption papers. He was dismayed to discover he was an adopted child – the de Lussacs were not his natural parents. The mother he loved, now his stepmother, confessed he was the son of a Jewish family that had deported to Germany and had perished in the Nazi death camps, leaving him to the care of the de Lussac family, who adopted him and brought him up in the Christian faith.
As the discovery of his origins sunk in, he was not displeased to discover his Jewish roots, it gave him a mission, a new attachment to the Promised Land, which was now the land of his ancestors. On his return to Israel he changed his name, he was now Isaac and claimed the same rights as any Jew becoming an Israeli citizen, though not abandoning his French nationality.
With the inheritance he received from his father, his financial position eased and spent the summer with a group to study the Roman acqueducts of Istanbul. Back in Israel he returned to his work with the monthly publication Biblical Archaeology, but he now with a keener knowledge on the importance of water to a large ancient city fresh in his mind. One evening he climbed the Mountain of Olives overlooking the Old City, there he tried to visualise the natural flow of water in ancient times, he knew that the Temple of the Jews, according to common Jewish belief, would have been situated on the Esplanade of the Mosques on the summit of the Temple Mount. He also knew of the importance of the purification rites in the Jewish religion, but something seemed illogical as he looked out over the Holy City, water flows downhill and not uphill, that was until the invention of the mechanical pump, moreover to lift significant quantities a powerful driving force for the pump such as a steam engine was necessary. Those inventions came almost seventeen centuries after the Temple had been destroyed by the Roman Titus in 70AD.
The idea continued to nag him until some days latter he left to write an article on an excavation at Massada. The dig was at a site where one of the Roman Legions that had besieged the citadel had been camped. The archaeological team was housed in a series of tents and temporary porter cabins on the nearby banks of the Dead Sea. After a long day of interviews and visits under the burning sun he spent the evening preparing his notes, finally turning in when the last of the lights in the camp went out.
That night in his sleep troubled by the stifling heat he heard the gurgling of cool flowing spring water and a voice spoke to him – Seek the path to my tabernacle, follow the waters of Solomon, there my house will rise up again. He woke with a start, he was drenched with sweat. He rose from his camp bed and staggered outside, the night was still, the sky was a bright dome filled with a myriad of shinning stars. The words rung in his head, had he imagined them – follow the waters of Solomon – no, they were a sign, a commandment.
After once again flicking through the thick volumes of The Temple, printed and bound by a copying service, a mass of almost three thousand pages, O’Connelly realised, as painful as it was, he was going to have to plough through de Lussac’s work in more detail. Laura had already summarised it as a tautology of references and biased historical facts, obviously designed to suit the confused archaeologist’s t
heory. De Lussac’s had discovered nothing new from an archaeological point of view, it was no more than a theory based on his analysis of documents that dated back to the nineteenth century, when the British officers of the Palestine Survey Fund explored the underground structure of the Haram, cross-referenced to biblical and rabbinic texts, which he entirely took for historical fact. De Lussac had not even verified the facts, he could not, as all investigation beneath the Esplanade was forbidden by the Wafq. In addition no other historical description of the cisterns and water system had ever been attempted.
The question that remained for O'Connelly was, did it matter? The answer was obviously no; de Lussac was just another visionary who had developed a personal theory that could never be verified. If de Lussac wanted to transform his work into a book, then why not, and if Mann wanted to publish it, that was up to him. What interested O’Connelly was whether it was a credible base for his novel, a fictional story built around real or supposed facts, identifiable by its readers. Successful fiction writers had always successfully woven disputable historical facts into their books and that was what mattered to Hertzfeld and the Bernstein Publishing Company, a good story for a successful novel, which with the right kind of promotion would sell millions.
Israel was a good subject from many points of view, O’Connelly reasoned, it was after all the Holy Land, the source of the three great religions of the Book, with two or three billion believers, and even if the Jews represented a tiny fraction of that number they certainly held considerably more influence. Then there was the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which hit the international news headlines on an almost daily basis, reminding the world of the tragedy just in case it had forgotten, and on a broader scale there was Islam and its impact on the Western world that indirectly manifested itself in the Iraq War, Afghanistan, Iran, the Twin Towers and last but not least oil, the very foundation of the world’s economy and industry.
14
The Promised Land