The First Book of Samuel - SAREJESS (chrysanthemum read aloud TXT) 📗

and worship of Zeus, Apollo, Isis and even the goddess of the city of Athens, the wise Athena, were closed. Priests of these gods were put out to earn an honest wage while the followers of the Nazerites grew in number, churches were erected everywhere.

This had been a very sad time for Demetrius who was a staunch believer in Zeus and Athena. He said at the time the gods were good enough for my family for thousands of years, they were good enough for me. They blessed me now I am told by purple decree that I must cast them off, but like all other citizens of the Pax Roma he had undergone the baptism into the new faith.

At first he had stubbornly resisted, but after a time he had given in, seeing that there was not much chance of the old god being restored. He began to change until the present when he was one of the most devoted members of the church of Athens; an old man with a white beard and hair who rose before dawn much like he always had to worship Athena now he rose to greet each day in the name of his savior Jesus.

Drinking some wine he said to his old friend Samuel “I wish you would agree to be baptized old friend. You will see it is the only sensible thing to do. Forget about the past. Jesus can change all that for you.” Samuel listened as the old Greek spoke then politely declined, saying he preferred to remain an agnostic Jew. The old Greek wanted to say some thing more but was interrupted by the appearance of Iona, the devoted slave who had been taking care of Samuels needs for so many years she had matured into a plump middle aged woman who lived to serve her master. Life had been good to her under Samuel she had learned to read and write. Her main function was to see that the inn was run well and nothing was left to get out of hand. Now she approached with a tray of sweet meats and pastries for the old men.

Thus through an accident of domesticity, Samuel missed the chance to be baptized into the faith of the Carpenter once more.


CHAPTER SEVEN
Egypt 543 AD
Samuel had been traveling in Egypt for some time before he found the place he was to call home for the next sixty odd years. It had been a few hundred years since any Jew had lived in Egypt. At the end of the war with Rome the entire Jewish community at Alexander had been removed and taken into captivity.

Now he found himself in Alexander he had visited the pyramids at Gisa and stared in wonder at their great size. he had wondered how many of the stones had been laid in place by the hands of his ancestors who had once been enslaved by the wicked pharaoh?

He had arrived one day at Karnack he had wandered from temple to temple. Here he still found some old die hard Egyptians who worshiped the gods of their fathers. But they were a dying breed. Egypt had been decaying for a long time, now the Coptic Christians worshiped Jesus at converted temples who Samuel had once heard and known. How strange Samuel thought that Jesus a Jew should be worshiped as a god in the land of Egypt the oppressor of Israel.

Samuel found an old shop in one of the busy streets of Alexander and after much haggling, he convinced the owner, an old olive merchant that he could make a quick and good profit by selling his shop to Samuel. Once the bargain had been struck and the olive merchant began packing a few belongings, Samuel asked him what he intended to do now that he had some money. In fact Samuel had paid far more then the old building was worth. “Me, I am off down the Nile to spend my days on the old family farm. I’ve wanted to go back there for years just never had the money. Now I do.” the grey haired merchant said as he pushed his smiling wife out the door.

Samuel set about converting the shop into an inn. First he hired a serving woman and a man with a strong back. He set them to work cleaning out the shop and adjoining buildings with a fine tooth comb. By the end of the first week there was a marked difference in the appearance of the building. The walls both inside and out had been given a coat of fresh white limestone paint, a new sign hung at the door proclaiming to the world that the inn was open for business.

Samuel’s next order of business was to arrange supplies of various foods and beverages for his expected guests. He arranged a lucrative contract with a wine merchant from Thebes, who would, over the coming years, bring him some of the best wines to be found in the world. It was this merchant who suggested that Samuel use the cellar of the inn as a place to keep these wines cool. He obviously knew his business. Egypt was a land over which hot winds blew bringing heat from the desert with the winds from the desert. A man's thirst grew and it would not be long before word got round that fine chilled wine was available at the inn. Within a week Samuel had a regular clientele who paid freely for the chilled wines. Ice was brought from the regions far in land from the mountains beyond Nubia where ice never melted on the mountaintops. Once placed in the cellar, it lasted for months keeping the wine and the stored foods fresh.

The serving woman whom Samuel had hired in his first week in Alexander turned out to be some thing of a master chef, producing combinations of roasted lamb and olives which was a great favorite if served with a side order of Barley. Barley grew in abundance in the Nile delta at certain times of the year. Samuel had watched the farmers who lived in this region and he had become aware that they had several planting seasons in the year. He noted that this type of farming had most probably been going on for thousands of years in Egypt.

The popularity of the inn grew steadily with new guests arriving daily, most of his guests were travelers from other lands who would stop to visit the wonders of old Egypt and wonder at the strangeness of it all. From Rome and Constantinople, came robed priests to visit the growing church, from Syria came merchants, and from Africa strange black men who were interested in the wonders of the stars. They would spend days observing the movement of the stars before buying grain and leaving once more on the long camel train which would wind it's way south to the dark continent. From the east came Arabs, from the far North came Iberians who were a mystery to most serious men and who would laugh uproariously at times but also tended to be sullen. These Iberians would bargain vicariously, with the local merchant’s business ever at the forefront of their minds.

The inn was a microcosm of nations of the known and unknown world.

Egypt 592 AD
AD 592 Egypt the start of a journey
For some time now Samuel had been wondering what was going to happen to him. He had been alive for six hundred and thirty years. His life had been filled with more experiences then one could ever possibly hope to have in a lifetime. He had already lived several life times. His forty years in Egypt had already brought to him untold wealth and yet he lacked that which would fulfill him. He was a man alone in the world. Occasionally he would take a wife but it hurt to watch the women with whom he shared his life, growing old and passing away. He had done this a number of times, each time it hurt just as much no matter how many times it happened, thus for the last hundred years he had lived alone, never sharing his feelings with anyone. Now he found that he wanted to search for the meaning to his life. Samuel wanted to try to find the reason he lived so long. He knew he had been cursed, yet he was looking for peace and the underlying reason of the curse and if possible to find the salvation which eluded him.

Thus early in the year of our Lord five hundred and ninety two he put his house in order. He appointed a steward to oversee his staff at the inn while he would set out to visit the religious temples of Egypt. He thought maybe to make the acquaintance of the older gods of the Egyptian Parthenon; he knew that Judaism did not hold the answers to his quest. So, on a fine winter morning, Samuel joined a caravan of Bedouins who planned to travel across the desert to a number of these sites. He had dressed pretty much as the Bedouins did for this trip; their reason for this trip was to see the sites. They had traveled across the deserts from Arabia and they wished to see for themselves the great buildings of the ancient pharaohs. The group consisted of men, women and children. These desert people were free of any concerns, as to the religious meanings of the buildings they might visit. They worshiped the moon god Allah, who unlike the God of Israel and the Christian faith was not a jealous god.
Thus they set out a happy caravan. Riding a camel was a new experience for Samuel and not a pleasant one, he found. By the end of the first day he was hot tired and dreaded climbing again upon the great beast which was his mode of transport. The heat from the sand of the desert was overpowering, rising in waves to greet you. It was known that people had died in these deserts due to losing their way and the lack of water, thus all Bedouins who traveled the desert always made sure to carry enough water. By midday he was feeling entirely roasted, taking a sip of water, he noticed that one of the Bedouins was approaching him with some thing in his hand. It turned out to be a small pebble which the Bedouin assured him would to keep the moisture in his mouth. This little trick would help Samuel through the long ages in which he would still live.

Riding a camel across the desert was some thing new for Samuel. Although he had been alive for nearly six hundred years he had never yet had the opportunity of riding a camel. He found it a strange and unusual experience. Samuel had ridden donkeys and horses in his life but now as he approached the great pyramids of Gisa, he found himself rather uncomfortably perched on the back of one of these ships of the desert. He had been warned that it would be hot during the middle of the day and that he should rather take a trip to these great monuments later in the afternoon when the wind from the Mediterranean Sea would sweep inland, cooling the hot desert.

Samuel had been living in Egypt now for a number of years. He was saddened by the fact that the Christians who now lived in Egypt would dismantle parts of older temples to serve as building blocks for their churches. This was happening more and more often now days. When he had first arrived in Egypt, there had been a great number