As the days passed, I grew stronger. I was no longer tied to my pallet but could move around. I began to help Naomi a little with the household chores. We continued our evening talks on the roof of the house, where I continued to sleep unless inclement weather interfered.
Naomi told me the stories of her faith. The more she talked of her strange god, the more I wanted to hear. It was as though I had a deep spiritual thirst that the stories of her god seemed somehow to quench. Yet, I knew I could not accept the things she said about this god Yahweh until one question was answered, a question I was still afraid to ask.

As I lay on my pallet looking at the stars, I often remembered the night in the dessert when I had talked to this Yahweh and petitioned Him for protection in the name of Samson. I had reminded this strange god that Samson had directed me to go to Hebron and learn of Him.
“Protect me long enough to do that,” I had said.

And it seemed that somehow this desperate entreaty must have been heard for I was in Hebron being taught about Yahweh by His servant Naomi. But if I believed that Yahweh had heard my petition, then I had to believe that He had also heard my angry withdrawal of that request. My own words echoed over and over through my mind. “I will not lie here and die to appease any god, not even the god of Samson. Do you hear me, Yahweh? I withdraw my petition for your protection. I do not need you. I have my own strong will and that is enough.”

“How could any god ignore such blatant rebellion?” I asked myself. “Surely he had brought me here just to taunt me with my own frailness. When would his wrath at my outburst bring my destruction?”

The question I wanted to ask Naomi but could not without revealing my past was, “How can a god ignore the rebellious spirit of a woman such as I and give her another chance at life and happiness?”

Then one day, Naomi told me the story of Rahab the harlot. She was a Gentile, someone who was not one of this Yahweh’s chosen people. Yet when the Israelites invaded Jericho, this woman and her family were spared destruction. The god Yahweh extended His protection to the wanton woman and her family because she had done a good deed on behalf of Yahweh. She protected the Israelite spies from the rulers of Jericho and, for this act of faithfulness, Yahweh was willing to spare her.

This story gave me hope. If I could do something for Yahweh, then perhaps he would forgive me my outburst in the desert. Perhaps I would be spared his wrath just as Rahab was saved. All I had to do was find some way to please, or in my mind appease, Yahweh.

That was when I began to make plans to leave Naomi’s home. I told her that I was a wealthy widow. I told her that I wanted to purchase a large home with enough rooms so I could house those seeking asylum because of an accidental slaying. It would be a sort of Inn where they could stay while they made more permanent plans. I explained that I had learned the lesson of sharing at her knee and that I wanted to repay her and Alian’s generosity by helping others in need.

Naomi was not impressed with my plan. She pointed out that I was a young and comely woman. She reminded me that most who seek asylum in Hebron for manslaughter are men, and that it would be inappropriate for me to invite them to share my home.

Stubbornly I asked, “And do you only practice your healing arts on women? If a man needs nursing, do you share your home with him like you shared with me?”

“Yes, Salome,” Naomi answered. “But I am an old woman. What man would want to seduce me? Besides Alian comes to stay with me if I am nursing a man.”

“I have sufficient money,” I countered. “I can hire a man to protect me.”

“Then the gossips would say the man was your secret lover, and the arrangement was to allow him to stay with you,” Naomi asserted.

“Then you can come and live with me,” I declared. “You can heal any physical hurts and perhaps even tell your stories of Yahweh to soothe their souls.”

“A woman cannot teach a man the ways of God,” Naomi replied softly. “The belief that I am a harmless eccentric would not allow me that latitude. Besides, I am old and have lived in this same home since I married. All of my memories are here.”

“Could you not give them up to be of service to Yahweh?” I challenged.

“And who is to say giving them up would make me any more of a service to Yahweh?” Naomi chided. “I have served Him for years in my humble abode.”

Sticking out my chin, I announced, “If you will not help me, I will do it anyway. I am already an outsider here. People may gossip, but they cannot hold me to the dictates of Yahweh when I am clearly a pagan.”

“Child, child,” Naomi said patiently. “You will only be considered a pagan and an outcast if you choose that path. You have the beautiful jeweled phylactery among your possessions. Surely a pagan would not prize such an adornment. If I tell people you are a proselyte who married an Israelite and forsook your gods to embrace ours, you will not be treated as a pariah. Perhaps some good man will even offer to wed you. Do not throw away your future out of misplaced gratitude.”

“And would you tell your friends and family a lie?” I asked heatedly.

“What lie?”

“That my husband was an Israelite and I a proselyte.”

“I just assumed that your dead husband would have been an Israelite because only an Israelite would have a phylactery. Since yours is so ornate and costly, I assumed it was a gift from your beloved as a sign of your acceptance of Yahweh.”

“And would a convert to Yahweh know so little of the god she has chosen as her own?”

“You are young. I assume your marriage was ended shortly after it began. Your husband may not have had time to teach you the ways of his God.”

As Naomi looked into my eyes, I felt almost as though she were willing me to accept her version of my past – as though she were presenting this fabrication so I could embrace it as my own. But I could not.

“The phylactery was a betrothal gift,” I said. “True, my beloved was an Israelite, but I was not a proselyte. I never wore the gift. I kept it only as a reminder of a good, loving man.”

This was as much as I was willing to say. It was as close to the truth as I could come without unveiling my past in all its sordidness.

With a sigh, Naomi, concluded, “At least sleep on this before you make an irrevocable decision, Salome. I too will consider your proposal. I will even pray and ask Yahweh about this crazy scheme. Give me a few days, and you take the same. Then we will talk again.”

I agreed to Naomi’s suggestion, but I had no intention of actually considering another alternative. I was certain that only by harboring other outcasts would I have any chance of appeasing the god Yahweh. Naomi said he was a god of mercy, and so I would show mercy to those who sought refuge. Perhaps somehow Yahweh would ignore my rebellion if I were doing something that reflected his nature.

For two days I pretended to meditate on Naomi’s negative views of my plans. I worked companionably by her side. I listened to her stories and made conversation as usual, but in my mind I schemed, trying to come up with arguments that would convince her to join me in my attempt to show mercy and earn a reprieve from Yahweh.

On the second night, I lay on my pallet on the roof and examined the stars. I wondered if an astrologer could really read the stars and discover truth, and perhaps even give sage advice about the future. I was thinking about the struggle of wills between Naomi and I when a star fell towards earth, painting a fiery path before fading into oblivion. I pondered whether that star represented my life, a brief brilliant flame quickly swallowed up by darkness. The thought left a vague feeling of apprehension. I fell asleep wondering if some pernicious god had already doomed me and was now playing with my life for his own amusement.

My slumber was anything but restful. I dreamed a strange dream, not a nightmare but a disquieting saga that heightened my trepidation. I would wake in the darkness my mind mulling over possible meanings of the portentous manifestation. Each time I would tell myself the dream meant nothing, that I had nothing to fear; but each time my uneasiness grew.

In my dream I lay beside a pool in the middle of an oasis. Even though I knew without a doubt I was lying on the ground, I was also hovering above watching the events in my dream unfold. A luminous stairway rose into the darkness near my body. A being descended the stairway from above and stepped off near my prostrate form. I call this person a being because it had the appearance of a human, yet it was more ethereal. I could not identify a gender because its face was radiant, making focusing on its features difficult. The only traits I could discern clearly were eyes that seemed to penetrate to my very soul. Suddenly I arose from the ground and grabbed the being, and we began to wrestle. As we struggled, my face began to age until my countenance resembled that of Naomi. Then the two wrestlers separated and faced one another in a crouch. The one that I knew to be me, but who looked like Naomi, said, “Since you cannot best me, you must bless me.” The other smiled at me, its eyes seeming to be filled with a heavy burden of sadness. Slowly the being straightened from its aggressive stance, reached out its hand and touched my hip, saying softly, “You are truly Salome.” Turning, the incorporeal form ascended the stairway. I stepped toward the shining apparition, and as I did pain shot through the joint where I had been touched, awakening me from the dream.

Over and over I experienced the same dream. Each time I awoke, I would tell myself this was only a dream and fill my mind with other scenes designed to replace the disquieting ones. This was a trick I had learned as a child when I awakened, experiencing a nightmare in which my father was the villain. I taught myself to either replace the frightening aspects of a nightmare with pleasant thoughts that would lead to pleasant dreams, or to command the Delilah of my dreams to turn on her tormenter and inflict pain in the dream. Neither tactic worked on this night. Always the dream remained the same.

The next morning when I went down to assist Naomi with meal preparations, my limp was more pronounced. She looked at me with concern and asked, “Have we overdone your exercise, Salome? Your limp is more conspicuous. Sit down and let me examine your heel. Perhaps the infection is returning.”

“That won’t be necessary, Naomi,” I replied. “The pain is not in my heel. I seem to have slept askew. My hip joint is sore, but I am sure all I need is to walk around a bit and work out the soreness.”

Naomi watched me with concern in her eyes, but she said nothing until after we made bread for the day and sat under a tree to partake of our morning repast.

Then she asked, “Did you sleep poorly, Salome? There are shadows under your eyes, and I note the agitation has returned to your eyes. What troubles you, child?”

Laughing shortly I proclaimed, “You don’t miss much do you? Sometimes I wish your senses were not trained so highly. You seem to read not only physical symptoms but emotional and spiritual ones as well.”

“They are all interrelated,” Naomi responded quietly. “They cannot be compartmentalized.”

“Is that so?” I said caustically. “How do you know?”

“Years of experience,” she stated with a sigh. “Sometimes I successfully treated a physical symptom but found it kept returning when the person experienced an emotional trauma. Other times I could not ease the physical pain with medicine, but prayer worked wonders. Over the years I discovered that allowing a person to talk, while praying with or for them while I treated the physical ailment with herbs or massage, had the most success.”

“In what realm do you categorize dreams?” I asked. “Are they emotional or spiritual? Can they be interpreted as the sages claim?”

“There are instances in our history where Yahweh used dreams and dream interpretation,” Naomi said. “Again, I do not know if you can separate the emotional and spiritual components. Also, true interpretation only comes from Yahweh. Sometimes He grants enlightenment. Most of the time, though, a dream is just a dream and has no apparent meaning. Why do you ask?”

“I had a dream last night,” I answered.

I proceeded to tell Naomi of my dream. As I talked, Naomi visibly paled until I thought she would swoon at my feet. Halting my narrative, I reached out my hand to steady her and said, “What is wrong, Naomi? Is this dream so terrible that it strikes fear into your heart?”
“No, no, child,” she choked out. “Bring me a drink and I will explain.”

Naomi drank deeply from the dipper of water I brought. As she did, some color returned to her cheeks. When she finished, her voice was no longer hoarse and indistinct.

“As you told me your dream, I knew that Yahweh had spoken,” Naomi stated. As I breathed a sigh of disbelief, she hurried to complete her thought, asking me to withhold judgment until she had finished.

“I believe this dream to have a spiritual message for two reasons,” Naomi continued. “First, it is a combination of two dreams experienced by my ancestor Jacob. He was a crafty, rebellious boy. He tricked his brother Esau out of his birthright and his blessing. His mother advised that he flee to her brother to avoid Esau’s wrath. On the way, he had a dream in which a ladder appeared from Heaven. Angels ascended and descended the ladder. Yahweh spoke to him and reaffirmed the covenant He had made, first with Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, and later with his father, Isaac. Jacob learned that Yahweh was with him, despite his actions. He named the place Bethel because he believed it to be the gate of Heaven."

“Years later when he returned home, Jacob again slept at Bethel. This time he wrestled all night with a man. He demanded that the man bless him because he could not best him. The man touched his hip and dislocated it. He then blessed him by changing his name from Jacob, which means supplanter, to Israel, which means one who persevered with God. Jacob realized that the person with whom he wrestled was at the very least a messenger from Yahweh, if not God himself.”

“You can see the similarities to your dream. You too saw a ladder descending from Heaven, but instead of angels ascending and descending, one being came down the stairway. When the being stepped off the stairway, it became like the man in Jacob’s second dream. The being wrestled with you and eventually injured your hip and gave you a blessing.”

“But why would Yahweh give me a dream I would not understand?” I questioned. “These stories are not a part of my spiritual heritage. The dream meant nothing to me. All it did was fill me with unease.”

“True,” Naomi said. “But you are living under my roof. You have been learning of Yahweh under my tutelage. He knew that I could provide insight based on my knowledge of my ancestry and Yahweh’s actions in the life of my people.”

“So why not just give you the dream?” I asked.

“Therein lies my second reason for believing the dream came from Yahweh,” Naomi said slowly. “He did give me the dream, or almost. That is why I was so overcome when you recounted your dream. My dream differed from yours only in one aspect. I wrestled with the being and when we struggled, my countenance gradually lost its wrinkles, becoming youthful and taking on the look of your face, Salome. Only Yahweh could so clearly send a message to two people.”

“But what does it mean?”

“I cannot tell you everything it means for you. For some reason Yahweh seems to have placed a veil over my understanding of what you must learn from the dream. I am certain of what the dream means for me, and that meaning involves you. I believe that Yahweh is telling me to leave this place and take up residence in this home for outcasts you plan to establish. He seems to be saying that doing so will give my life new vigor.”

“So does my face aging mean establishing the home will cause me to age prematurely?”

“I honestly don’t think so, Salome. Somehow I think the aging has more to do with your wrestling with God than with us opening a home to help outcasts. But as I said, a shroud seems to obscure what the dream means in your life. I think you will find your answer only as you allow Yahweh to speak to your soul.”

“Then I may never receive his message. I am not his daughter. He does not speak to my soul. I will always be the rebellious one, the supplanter. I will never receive his blessing.”

“Then why did the being say, ‘You are truly Salome?’ Salome means peace. If you are truly Salome, then somehow you will find peace. Someone who remains a rebellious supplanter can never find genuine peace.”

At that moment I longed to tell Naomi of my true identity. I was certain that deception was the shroud that kept Yahweh from revealing the complete meaning of the dream. I was afraid, though, afraid she would turn away from me in loathing and scorn. I craved love and Naomi’s acceptance of me was the closest thing to love I had experienced in my adult life, except for Samson. I had spurned his love and poisoned it. This time I was determined to keep my past to myself. I was not willing to risk seeing the compassion in Naomi’s eyes turn to hatred.