The Testament of Queen Helena
In the third decade of the Common Era, Helena, the queen of Adiabene, a small vassal state on the Upper Tigris in the Parthian Empire, converted to Judaism along with her sons Izates and Monobaz. Mentioned in the Talmud and by Josephus for her piety and generosity, Helena made numerous gifts to the temple and imported food from Egypt and Cyprus during a famine in Palestine. She lived in Jerusalem for many years, and although she died in Adiabene, she was buried in the holy city.
This translation of a parchment text written in Aramaic appears to be an early medieval copy of an older work. It was discovered in 2006 at Saint Catherine’s monastery at Mount Sinai, preserved within the binding of a New Testament codex. Elisabeth Meller, who discovered the text during a restoration project, surmises that it was originally preserved because of its title, which may have created the false impression that it had been written by Helena the mother of Emperor Constantine. Dr. Meller conjecture that at a later date, when the text was read and found to be non-Christian, rather than simply discarding it, it was used during the initial binding of the codex.
The text begins by quoting from the apocryphal book of Tobit, and includes references and allusions to Psalms, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Micah, and Zephaniah, along with themes that link it to New Testament prophecies and possibly to later Jewish mystics and their visions of God’s chariot. Meller speculates that the text is a copy of the original, making it one of the few known mystical texts written by a Jewish woman in antiquity and afterwards, and also one of the earliest autobiographical documents of its kind in our possession.
1 I, Helena the Queen, walked in the ways of truth and performed many acts of charity for my people, and yet, two nights before the beginning of the great festival of Tabernacles, my heart was heavy and I could not sleep. After tossing and turning I called Deborah my maidservant, who lit four lamps in the lampstand beside my bed. Sitting awake, hoping to find comfort, I turned to the scroll of psalms that had been given to me by my teacher Eliezer ben Simeon, but my eyes skimmed over the words without taking them in, and my mind kept returning to the marketplace that afternoon.
I had made my way to the market stalls at the foot of the temple, along with Deborah and two attendants, to purchase for our household an etrog and the right branches to weave into a lulav for use during the holiday. The market was crowed with residents and pilgrims, jostling from stall to stall, hunting for bargains, hunting for the perfect etrog, perfectly formed, perfectly colored. Some were nestled in straw, others in cloth, some in leaves and others sat in neatly carved olivewood boxes, waiting to be purchased. I went directly to the stall of my favorite vender, a man whose family had been growing etrogim on the same land for more than three hundred years. As always, upon finding his stall, he greeted me warmly and respectfully, and pulled from beneath the stall an etrog he had been saving for me, resting like an egg in a small silver nest. It was warm in my hands, fragrant, a brilliant yellow, its shape perfect, its stem thick and securely attached. As Deborah paid his assistant, the old man wrapped it up for me in cloth and bowed deeply, thanking me for honoring him once again.
All of that was joyous. It was what followed that haunted me in the night. As Deborah and I turned to go, a burly man in the robes of a minor priest caught my eye for a moment and nodded, curtly. As I turned I could hear him say to his companion, “She may buy the most expensive fruit in the market and give the greatest tithings to the temple, but when the end of the world comes, she will still be counted as a daughter of Persia and not Israel.”
I couldn’t tell if he’d said those words thinking that I was out of earshot, or if he said them deliberately, to wound me. Even though Eliezer and later the high priest had reminded me that Pharaoh’s daughter had converted, that Ruth, another convert, will be the ancestor of the messiah, and that I myself will have a treasured name among the people of Israel, I still felt a sharp stabbing in my heart. To this very day there are houses in Jerusalem whose families will not share their tables with me or my sons, and there are elders and scholars in Jerusalem who have condemned us for our conversions, in the name of the very same God we all serve.
With a sigh I went back to my scroll, but the words of David the King brought me no comfort. Finally, exhausted, I turned to blow out the lamps, and was startled to see a tall figure standing beside my bed. My heart skipped a beat and I sat upright. “Master,” I whispered, to the tall familiar form of my old beloved teacher Eliezer, so many years dead and yet standing there beside me, in the same brown robe with black stripes that he always wore, appearing as solid as he had when he was alive.
A gentle smile played across his dark and deeply lined face. “Shema Yisrael,” he said, in Hebrew with a heavy Persian accent, once the only sound of Hebrew that I knew. Those words cut through my sorrow and dissolved it. “Hear, Israel.” For what I saw in his kind face and heard in his words was the answer to my unspoken prayer. What I heard in those two holy words from Torah was his reminder of my place among our people, his assurance that I too am a part of Israel.
I was both afraid and filled with joy at the same time. “Master,” I said to him again, nodding my head, bowing, wanting to ask him why he was there, wanting to ask him how it was that he had come to me in my hour of need. But he silenced me with a single gesture, and then he raised his right hand and pointed his forefinger toward my chest. All at once my heart was filled with a brilliant golden light that was visible to me within my ribcage as if I had another eye, one that could see from within. Stunned, awed, looking down, I brought my hands toward my chest, where I could feel a deep pulsing warmth. But when I lifted my eyes toward my teacher, wanting to ask him what he had done to me – he was gone. I lay awake till dawn rose softly pink in the sky, feeling and watching that inward light slowly fade, till all that was left was the memory of it, engraved upon my innermost being, on the deepest core of my living breathing flesh.
2 That year during Tabernacles the city was filled with joyous pilgrims, and I opened my home to as many visitors as it could contain. The temple was crowded and, being myself uncomfortable in crowds, I chose to remain at home while my guests went off to join the throngs of celebrants for the midday sacrifices. During the heat of the first day of the Water-Drawing Festival, I received guests in my audience chamber, a long procession of them, old friends and new friends, priests and elders and their families.
And yet that afternoon, having sent my visitors and guests off to the temple, listening to the sound of people in the streets, I knew that already there were men raising stacks of wood in the outer temple courtyard. In a few hours the holy city would be filled with young women and men dancing through the night, seeking their destined mates. And I was filled again with a melancholy, a sense of deep sorrow. My own beloved husband had been taken from me, and I sat upon my marble throne, a queen alone, my children miles and miles away in our homeland. All is vanity, it seemed to me, nothingness. I have had my time of joy, and this is the season of my despair. Too much did I love my husband to ever marry again. No, I am alone, soon to return to my empty bedchamber. And just as the day ends, as the sun sinks into the distant sea, I thought, so too do I drift down toward the end of my life.
I remember how I sat, with my face buried in my hands, and I remember how I heard, slowly moving toward me, the sound of footsteps on the marble floor. I looked up, startled, to see a tall thin woman in a long red shawl draped over her head and thrown across one shoulder, slowly coming toward me. I looked at her, confused and annoyed, for the doors to my audience hall were closed. “Who are you?” I asked her, “and how did you get in here?”
The woman smiled, nodded, and said, with laughter in her voice, “I am Huldah of ancient days, who sat by the stairs leading into the old temple, draped in my cloak and prophesying to all the people.”
Had I not seen with my own eyes the solid form of my old master, my beloved teacher, the one who led me to this blessed path, I would not have believed her. But I knew the truth of her words. I could feel it, I could see it in her large dark eyes.
“But why are you here? Why have you come to speak with me in my sorrow, at this time of great rejoicing?”
Instead of answering my questions, Huldah said to me two Hebrew words, the next two words of our most sacred prayer, beginning where Eliezer left off. I was stunned, for in saying them she pronounced the holy name of God that schoolboys whisper among themselves, that everyone knows but only the high priest says aloud, once a year, in the Holy of Holies, while the rest of us say in its stead, “Adonai,” Our Lord.
“Adonai Elohenu,” she said. “The Lord is our God.” And in that moment I understood – that she had come to remind me that my longing for my dear departed husband had filled the chambers of a heart that should be instead devoted to the Divine Beloved, to God, to the Lord of all creation.
Again, my aching heart was comforted by an unexpected visitor. But instead of vanishing as Eliezer had, the prophetess took a step toward me and raised her hands in front of her, palms uplifted, as if to make an offering. Then she spread them in an arc in front of me and it was as if she had removed by that gesture the scales that covered my eyes. I could see all around me a radiant golden light that filled my audience chamber. Looking out the open windows to my garden I saw that it too was aglow with that same marvelous light. And into the midst of the light Huldah stepped – and vanished, just as Eliezer had, right before my eyes.
I rose and walked to the windows. Although it was not yet evening, not just the garden but the city beyond it and the sky above it as far as I could see was bathed in that brilliant golden light. I knew it was a supernal light that I was able to see, the primal light that God created on the very first day of creation. Trembling, I sank to my knees in silent prayer, watching the light till it slowly faded from around and before me.
3 Near the end of the Feast of Tabernacles, on the last evening of the Water-Drawing Festival, in the last hours of the day, I sat beneath an arbor on the roof of my palace, looking out on the city, a spool of golden thread lying in a sea of white in my lap. Transfixed by the spiraling smoke rising up from the innermost courtyard of the temple, I knew that the priests were beginning the evening offerings. How curious, I often thought when I stood in the women’s balcony of the temple – how before my conversion, as queen of my people, I had access to all of the holy places. And yet here where my heart belongs, even though the high priest has called me a pious woman in Israel, I am excluded from the inner courtyard and the temple itself.
The mingled odors of sacrifice and sweet incense wafted up and over the roof, and for a moment in the stillness I could faintly hear the chanting of the priestly choir. Content again, I took up the spool of golden thread and turned back to my work. Spread out in my lap was a robe of the purest white silk, a robe whose collar I was embroidering, the robe a gift for the high priest to wear the following day for Hoshanah Rabbah.
Needle in hand, I went back to my task, with delicate stitches weaving around the collar a tendril of grape vines. Branch by branch, leaf by leaf, I had been working on this project for weeks. The gold thread, imported from Rome, was difficult to work with, and the fine fine cloth, come all the way from China, was so delicate that a needle piercing it in the wrong place could easily damage it. This was work that required great concentration and I had requested of my servants that no one disturb me except for an emergency. I wanted to finish before the last light faded, the new day began, and before I went in to dine with my guests.
I stitched in another leaf, another bit of vine, then another leaf. But suddenly, as we sometimes do, I felt that someone was standing behind me. I could feel that someone’s eyes upon my back and turned, afraid that something untoward had occurred.
Standing behind me – no, that is not the right word, for he was not standing at all but floating in air a hand’s breadth above the floor – was a messenger of God, a luminous angel cloaked in white, his large golden wings spread out behind him. I call this angel he, and yet there was nothing male in his form – nor anything female either. He or she was not unlike the eunuchs of my father’s court, both female and male, and yet neither.
Remembering the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah, I was about to call to my servants to bring him food, but the angel silenced me with a swift gesture and then bid me to rise with a voice that I heard in the middle of my mind. I put down my sewing on a small table beside my chair, rose and moved toward the angel. Then it spread its wings and stepped toward me, wrapped me in its arms and carried me aloft, over the city, up and over the great shining outer walls of the temple courtyard. We circled from north to east, from east to south, from south to west, spiraling inward till we had come to the court of the priests. I could see them below me, offering the evening sacrifices, as the angel swooped low and carried me above the curved stairs to the entrance of the temple, through the Porch into the Holy Place, through the great blue and purple curtain and right into the Holy of Holies. Then we shot up from there, from that dark empty space, up through the rooftop, till we were high above the temple. As if they were ants, I could look down on the gathered throngs, on the swarms of people filling the city and the temporary lodgings that filled every street and alley and spilled out beyond the city walls.
Only later did I wonder why I wasn’t afraid. People do not swoop and soar like birds, and yet there I was, high above the temple, high above the spiraling smoke of the offerings, so high above that I could not hear the sound of the priests chanting, nor the voices of the worshippers responding.
All at once, again in the middle of my mind, the angel spoke to me. “I say to you now, Helena the Queen, that just as the former house that stood on this hill was destroyed in days of old, this temple too shall rise up in flames and be destroyed.”
Hearing those words in my mind, for the first time, I was truly afraid, and I clung to the angel’s strong body in horror. How, I asked myself, how could this temple so august and mighty, so magnificent and vast – how could it fall? I shuddered, remembering the ancient prophecy of Micah. For there it was beneath me, the vast complex designed by King Herod, with work still being done upon it, which is already one of the largest and grandest temples in the world. How could it fall?
The angel did not answer me. Instead, there was a great wind, a great silent wind, and then I could hear everywhere around me, echoing off the edges of the cosmos, the last two words of our most sacred prayer. I cannot bring myself to say them as I heard them, cannot bring myself to say God’s holy name. I can only say the final two words of this prayer as I must. “Adonai Echad – The Lord is One.”
I expected to see, as had the prophets of old, a vision of God upon His heavenly throne. But instead, all at once, the light in my heart began to shine and the light in the world blazed up again. And I knew that the two lights were one and the same, a radiant golden light that fills all of creation and ripples on forever. And I knew that I had always heard those words incorrectly. I had heard them as, “The God that we worship is the only God there is.” But there, high above the temple, high above the city, high above the world and looking down upon on it, bathed in golden limitless light and filled with it, I knew what those words really meant. “This God that we call The Lord is the living heart of a greater Unity that we can name Echad, One.” And I knew that all is One, from and in and with this Being whose vast eternal infinite Oneness is greater than any human being can ever understand or imagine.
As the truth of those words penetrated to the very center of my own heart, I found myself back on the roof of my palace – sitting in my chair, with my sewing on the little golden table beside me. I turned, looking around me for the angel, but he was gone. Nor have I seen my teacher, the prophetess Huldah, or that nameless angel again, in all of these ten years since that feast of Tabernacles.
And this is my testament as I lay dying, given to my youngest son Hananiah to write on parchment. These are the words of a pious lady, who was blessed to see what few have seen before – the light of One who has compassion upon all the world, who has blessed the children of Eve from days of old, shown faithfulness to Israel, and raised me up and renewed me in love on a day of festival. May these words be a blessing to all who read them.
The End
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