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179
captivity
At times like that, Uri was
happy that, through chance,
thanks to a grandfather he
had never seen, he was able
to help his family. His father
had also never seen his father,
because Joseph was just a few
months old when Thaddeus
died at the age of twenty-
five—five years earlier than
the average life span for a
slave (those long years of
hard labor he had sweat out
to pay his redemption bond
cannot have done his health
any good).
If a Jew was scheduled to
receive his monthly grain ratio
on a Saturday, or a Jewish
feast day, he was allowed,
under one of the still-active
decrees of Augustus Caesar, of
blessed memory, to go pick it
up on a Monday, or whenever
the holiday ended; the decree
had not been repealed by
Tiberius, even after he had
expelled the Jews. There
were Jews with a tessera
who had kept a low profile in
the vicinity of Rome during
those months, but brazenly
stole back into the City. The
municipal administrators, long
faced, had to dispense their
allocation, because without an
order of exclusion they were
obliged to do so. There were
some banished Jews, it was
said, who threatened to bring
a lawsuit against the reluctant
official, and in the end the
official had given way, even
though he could have called
out the sentinels to arrest the
hectoring Jew. The world was
crazy; it always had been, and
it would remain so until the
coming of the Messiah.
In truth, Joseph could have
been a Roman citizen himself,
because three children of his
had been born there, and
Augustus’s decree that the
parents of three children
should be awarded citizenship