Chapter summary
A storm falls on Yershalaim at the end of the afternoon of the execution, while Pontius Pilate, sleepless and nervous, drinks alone on the palace veranda and waits for a visit from Afranius, the head of his secret service, the hooded man who attended the execution and who arrives soaked. Pilate invites him to dinner, toasts Caesar, and asks about the mood in the city: Afranius assures him it is satisfactory and that Bar-Rabban, the prisoner released at Passover, will be watched. Pilate then asks whether Yeshua Ha-Notzri is really dead, and Afranius confirms it. He reports that Yeshua refused the drink offered before the crucifixion and repeated what he had said before the soldiers, that of all human weaknesses the worst is cowardice. It is the phrase that decides Pilate's fate in the entire novel: he asks why Yeshua said it, hears that Afranius did not understand, and moves on to other orders. He orders Afranius to bury the bodies of the three dead in secret, so that no one ever hears of them again, and asks him to refuse any promotion that would take him out of Judea.
Pilate changes the subject and asks about Judas of Kerioth, the young man who betrayed Yeshua for money. Afranius replies that he will receive his payment that night at Caiaphas's palace and that he works in a currency exchange house of a relative. Pilate reveals, in confidence, that he has received a warning that secret friends of Yeshua will kill Judas that very night and return the betrayal money to the high priest's house. He asks Afranius to take every measure for Judas's safety. Afranius observes, calmly, that the plan is nearly impossible to carry out in a single night of festivity, but Pilate insists, relying on his intuition, which has never failed him, that they will kill him that night. Before dismissing Afranius, the procurator recalls an old debt, that of some beggars to whom he wanted to give money when he arrived in Yershalaim and had no coins, and hands him a heavy bag of coins. Afranius says the procurator owes him nothing, and Pilate insists on the pretext.
Analysis
Pilate receives Afranius, hears from him Yeshua's phrase, and moves on to a request he does not explain: protecting Judas. The text gives the measure of what moves him in two gestures: he changes the subject as soon as he hears the word cowardice, and he insists, against Afranius's calm assessment, that Judas will be killed that night. It can be read as remorse seeking to make amends. Or as a plan that is carried out in the next chapter, and that is already announced in his certainty.
He only said that, of all human weaknesses, the one he considers worst is cowardice.
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