Image of the Week: Escape to Egypt
This illustration, painted in 2018 for a Christian publisher, pictures Mary and Joseph fleeing from soldiers sent by King Herod. Like most people in first-century Judea, Mary and Joseph were Jews living under the vicious rule of an egomaniacal, possibly syphilitic monarch, who was driven in his madness to forestall prophesy by killing every baby boy born under the appearance of a certain star over Bethlehem. This nightmarish echo of the Egyptian Pharaoh's edict, roughly 1400 years earlier – to drown every firstborn male in the Nile – would not have escaped the parents of baby Jesus. Now Egypt was the only sanctuary they could reach in a desperate attempt to save their child. Under the oppressive authority of Rome, Herod and his sons were unimaginably brutal, slaughtering tens of thousands of people, including their own subjects. Herod the Great was so paranoid and power-crazed, he even executed members of his own family, including his beloved wife Mariamne. His reign of terror is described in the Book of Matthew in "The Massacre of the Innocents."
This story was especially vivid in my mind as I started this assignment, as I had just finished listening to The Source by James Michener, for the second time. This epic work of historical fiction follows the history of the Galilee from 10,000 BCE to the 1960s. Each chapter is a novella that covers one century.
It just so happens I was listening to the chapter about the reign of Herod in my car one day as I drove to my mechanic's shop to have my oil changed. I accidentally left my car stereo on when I shut off the engine, and the story continued when the mechanic, a young man who apparently had an ear for history, pulled my car into the garage. He decided to listen while changing my oil. I returned an hour later to find him visibly shaken. "Jesus," he said, unaware of his pun, "what time period are you listening to? Did this stuff really happen?"
According to Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian who escaped Roman-occupied Judea and lived to write about it, yes, it did. But we don't really know what took place back then, and what was retrojected into the story later. As one wise Christian teacher put it, history is shaped in the process of "meaning making."
I brought my own protective instincts as a mother into my portrayal of this story, and tried to convey the terror Mary and Joseph must have felt. In doing so, I created what might be called a "visual midrash." A midrash is an interpretive story about a story in the Bible, one which spins new flesh on the spare bones that are left to us. That's my job as an illustrator: to bring the past alive; to express the human condition; and to make stories written long ago relevant to our lives today.
A good and safe week to all!
D Yael Bernhard