be?”
Adam wasn’t sure what to answer, but Claudia interrupted. “Something religious, no doubt, right Adam?” She said. “A Baal statue, or some hymn dedicated to Asherah?” Adam thought he could detect a suppressed smirk, and it set him on edge.
“Most people in Judah probably prayed to the Canaanite gods,” he said, “even if they worshipped the God of the Bible. Just finding a statue wouldn’t really teach us anything new, but it might get us on television, right Claudia?” He paused for a reaction, but if she noticed his jab, it didn’t register on her face. He turned toward Maggie. “But if we found something more revealing, something that gave us an insight into Canaanite religion, that would be something, wouldn’t it? When a Canaanite prayed to his god, what did he feel? The prophets were constantly hectoring the people to leave off their worship of other gods, but we have nothing in the words of the people who worshipped them. What was it that drew them? What was so attractive? Was it beauty? A sense of security? Of comfort? Of belonging?”
“This is an old disagreement Dr. Drascher is drawing you into, Maggie,” Claudia said. “He thinks he can get into the minds of these people. He thinks if he’s clever enough, he can interpret fragments of inscriptions or snippets of poetry and think like a Canaanite, or like someone from Judah.” She fixed Adam with her gaze. “It can’t be done. We have artifacts. We can get their age and where and how they were made. We can discuss the political or economic structure of a settlement. We can talk about what they ate and how large their families were and what kind of house they lived in. But that’s all. It should be enough.”
Adam didn’t offer any response. He just wiped the sweat off his forehead with his callused hand. He didn’t want to discourage Maggie, but more and more, this spadework that he had once loved so much felt futile. There’s only so much time a grown man can play in the dirt, he thought, looking for buried treasure and coming up with nothing. And here he was out in the August heat; another summer had almost gone. His tenure deadline was coming closer and closer and he had little to show for all his work.
They dug in silence for almost half an hour. Claudia looked like she might have something, but she kept her head down and Adam didn’t ask. He turned to see how Maggie was faring and he saw her take up her brush to clear away a bit of loose dirt without risking damage to whatever lay underneath. He heard her mutter, “¡Ay, Dios mio!” and then she looked up and called to him, “Professor! Would you take a look at this?”
Adam nodded and moved alongside her to see what she was pointing at. He didn’t get his hopes up. A couple of times before on the dig, Maggie had found blank, uninformative pieces of pottery. Once, she had uncovered a piece of a very plain knife. Claudia had kept copious records on them, but even she hadn’t been very excited. Now Claudia wasn’t even looking up from her work.
“What have you got?” Adam asked. Maggie showed him the squared-off corner of red clay pottery that she had exposed. It lay nearly horizontal in its bed of dirt. “Good eyes.” Adam told her. “Be delicate with that, now. Take your time with it.”
“Do you want to take over?” She asked. “If I ruin this, I don’t think my stipend would cover it.”
Adam shook his head. “If it turns out to be something your stipend wouldn’t cover, neither would my salary. Shift over. I’ll get the finer tools and we can both work on it.”
“What have you found?” Claudia asked.
“No way to know yet,” Adam said. “There’s a fragment of something buried here, maybe an ostracon. It’ll be a while before we’ve got it out.” Adam photographed the piece where it lay, and then he and Maggie worked together with brushes and picks of varying caliber. She spoke to him in whispers as if she were afraid her voice would disturb the ceramic. The labor was slow and painstaking, but Adam felt himself caught up in Maggie’s enthusiasm and the time passed quickly.
They finally unearthed a flat piece of ceramic, straight and approximately ten inches long, almost undamaged. Adam and Maggie noted the precise placement of the tablet: its location and depth, the angle at which it had lain in the ground, and the features of the dirt surrounding it. Adam then took the artifact in his hands and examined it. The tablet was covered in writing in the ancient Hebrew script that was in common use before the Babylonian Exile. The writing would have been done while the clay was still damp. Adam could almost picture the thin stylus held in the hand of a professional scribe or a priest, its tip cutting each line of the deeply engraved letters. The tablet could only have been preserved if it had been baked, and the color suggested it wasn’t made in Tel Arad. The clay was too dark. That suggested the tablet was fired in a kiln and then brought here.
Adam scanned the text. Most of the inscription was still clear. He felt his grip tighten involuntarily when his eyes struck on a cluster of letters about a third of the way down the tablet that spelled “Refaim.” Healers! His heart began pounding so hard that Adam thought the others might be able to hear it, too.
Adam looked over at Claudia, but she hadn’t looked up from her spadework. Adam had been fascinated by the Healers since he first encountered them in grad school. They were figures of the Canaanite underworld, but they also appeared in several places in the Bible. For a short while, Adam had considered writing his thesis on them, but he had realized even without Claudia’s admonitions that the topic was a career killer. It was clear that there would never be enough evidence to draw solid conclusions from just the few texts that have survived on the Refaim. Still, for someone like Adam, the call to understand how the Canaanites saw the afterlife was strong. He looked at the tablet again. “Qirvu elai Refaim,” it said. “Come to me, Healers.” If only it were that simple—as if you could just ask for the dead to appear and you would feel their presence and know that you remained connected to them. Even as a child, Adam had lost belief in anything that could make loss less permanent.
“Professor?” Maggie was pulling on Adam’s sleeve. She must have been trying to get his attention for a while. Adam hadn’t heard her say anything. He wondered how long he had been lost in his thoughts.
Adam didn’t want to tell Maggie what he had seen just yet. It would take too long to explain, and he didn’t want her to get too excited until he could confirm what the rest of the text said. Besides, he admitted to himself, he had caught a glimpse of something that had been buried for thousands of years and he wasn’t quite ready to share it. Adam took a deep breath. “The writing looks very old,” he said. “It’s consistent with our time period. Nice find! Do you know the old alphabet?” He was pretty sure she wouldn’t. They teach only the modern, Aramaic style of writing in Hebrew classes. “Well, you’ll want to learn it. I’ll show you when we’re back in New York.”
Claudia looked over. “There’s writing? Can you make out what it says?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Adam said. “Probably just a snippet of religious poetry. I doubt you’d be interested.”
Claudia scurried over to look, ignoring his sarcasm. She gave Maggie a high five. “Let’s see how you recorded the find.” She nodded approvingly as Maggie displayed her documentation of the tablet. “We’ll have to celebrate!” she said. “The legal drinking age in Israel is eighteen, isn’t it?”
Maggie smiled broadly. “It is.”
“I have a bottle of champagne back at the hotel,” Claudia said. “Let’s work until dinner and then we’ll have a toast.”
Adam took out his phone; Claudia stepped beside Maggie and put her arm around her shoulder to pose for a picture. The three of them were still grinning when Adam’s phone rang. He jumped at the sound. The phone was only for emergencies; everyone he knew in Israel was at the dig. Adam’s first thought was that it could be his grandfather, but he almost always waited for Adam to call, especially when Adam was away. With a stab of guilt, Adam realized he had let almost two weeks pass since they last spoke.
Adam shielded the screen from the sun’s glare as best he could with his hand. The call was from Danny. Adam had a bad feeling. Almost two decades before, for reasons that had always escaped Adam, Danny had ceased to be just a kid from the neighborhood