Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women

The Scribe

203 The children of Solomon’s servants: the children of Sotai, the children of haSoferet (the scribe), the children of Peruda. —EZRA 2:55* Silence within silence, says Soferet. Silence within silence, all is silence. What profit does a woman get from all the words she speaks beneath the sun? One generation goes, another comes, and the earth remains the same forever. The moon waxes and wanes, and returns to the place where she began. . . . Only that can be said which has already been said; only that can be heard which has already been heard. What is new is rendered inaudible, so that it is as if nothing new is whispered beneath the moon. —SOFERET 1:1–5,9 I, Soferet, was Solomon’s scribe in Jerusalem. When I was young he sang The Song of Songs, and my ink was like the wing of a bird against the sky. When I was a mother of young men and women, he declaimed the Proverbs, and I wrote in thick liner. My letters were the branching pillars of a cedar house. Now I THE SCRIBE k * Author’s translation am old, and he writes as if I were not here. Now my letters are like the spindly cracks in a thin skin of ice. My mother, Batrinah, was the lowliest of concubines. She was one of those David set aside in living widowhood after his son Avshalom raped them. During the days when David had fled and Avshalom occupied Jerusalem, Avshalom took the king’s concubines , who had been abandoned in the palace, and lay with them as a sign that the king’s authority was now his. When David returned, he set the ten women aside in a guarded place, nevermore to embarrass him by seeing daylight. There were ten such women, closed into a stone box as if they were jewelry too precious to be thrown away but too much out of fashion to be worn. Their house was quiet. They walked heavily from room to room, redecorating, remembering. In the evenings they would tell stories or drink or both. Some nights one or two of them would cry, wordlessly, or laugh with a sound like mustard, hot and powerful. My half brother, Sotai, and I were the only children born before David fled Jerusalem and left ten concubines in the palace to face Avshalom alone. We shared our father’s chin and fleecy hair; but in other respects, we took on the character of the house, which ignored David as much as possible. The priests came to educate us: It was a sop to our mothers, who would have no new children to lay at their breasts, no men to warm them, no palace intrigue to occupy their minds. Early in my life I discovered that I loved words. I loved the clean feeling of setting unambiguous shapes down on paper, shapes with meaning. The pen was my adventure. When I was twelve I rejected the name I had been given, Peruda, and insisted on being called Soferet, the scribe. After six months of argument I had my way, even with my mother, Batrinah, who had named me for someone she held dear. I was the most stubborn of children, but I could learn. Long after my half brother, 204 S I S T E R S A T S I N A I Sotai, had gone to serve as a clerk in the king’s palace, the priest Azarya continued to visit me with his scrolls and tablets. I think perhaps he did not want this, but my mothers insisted, and Azarya was too polite to let his feelings show. They were all my mothers, of course, all feasting their eyes on me, their one daughter. In a stoic way, I loved them back. Azarya showed the words I formed to other priests. No one paid attention to the brusque poems I wrote or the parroted fragments of history, but they did note the perfect form of my letters. I was praised throughout the city: a girl scribe, a supernatural novelty. I had a great ear for dictation. I did not forget words or misspell them in haste. When I was seventeen, I dressed in the finest robes available to me, turquoise castoffs from a once-favored concubine, and asked to be presented to the king as a clerk. No one had heard of such...