Meditation of Gad Yaton

MEDITATION OF GAD YATON

On the Possibility of Retribution, and the Arc of Justice

The reader who has followed this history from the Cosmology of Taautus to the destruction of Carthage may ask: was there no justice for the Phoenicians? Were the mills of the gods so slow that they never ground at all?

I cannot answer with certainty. But I can observe a pattern.

From the Galilean hills, where the blood of old Canaan still ran in the veins of the people, a man arose. He spoke Aramaic, the cousin-tongue of Phoenician. He walked to Tyre and Sidon and healed a Canaanite woman's child, praising her faith. He performed his first miracle at a wedding in a village that had once belonged to the tribe of Asher, which never expelled the old inhabitants. He taught a doctrine of universal love that dissolved the boundaries between Jew and Greek, slave and free, Canaanite and Israelite. He condemned the collaboration of the priests with the empire. And when the empire executed him, his teaching did not die. It conquered the empire.

Was he a Phoenician? The blood of the old coast may well have run in his veins. Galilee was a land of mixed peoples, and the Canaanites had never been fully expelled. But I do not need to prove his lineage to see the pattern. The people who were crushed by the empires produced a teaching that outlasted the empires. The people who were called faithless produced a faith that would convert the world. The people who gave the alphabet found a different kind of voice — a voice that spoke not in inscriptions on stone but in words that changed the human heart.

The Romans destroyed Carthage. They did not destroy the Phoenician soul. It returned, in a form they could not have imagined and could not resist. If this is not justice, it is something like it. And I, Gad Yaton, looking to the horizon that my ancestors sailed, can ask for nothing more.

Gad Yaton