Chapter summary
At night, tormented, Pontius Pilate plays with the dog Banga on the veranda, while Afranius sets the plan in motion: he sends soldiers and carts to Golgotha to collect the bodies of the executed, dresses in civilian clothes and goes to the Lower City to arrange something, for a few minutes, with a woman named Nisa. Judas of Kerioth, who has just received thirty tetradrachms at Caiaphas's palace, meets Nisa in the market and, enchanted by her, she feigns indifference and says she is going for a walk outside the city. He agrees to follow her, at night and from a distance, to a cave in an olive grove in Gethsemane, escaping on the way the guard who was watching him. When he arrives, two men leap out of the darkness, ask how much he received, snatch his purse after hearing him offer it in exchange for his life, and stab him. A third, hooded, supervises the scene and hands over the note that the assassins wrap together with the purse and throw over the wall of Caiaphas's palace, to make it seem Judas was killed by admirers of Yeshua.
Pilate falls asleep near midnight and dreams that he walks beside Yeshua along a path of moonlight, thinking he would do anything to save him, while Yeshua tells him that from now on they will always be together; he wakes with the execution in his memory. Afranius arrives and reports the murder as if the guard itself had failed to protect Judas, asks to be tried and dismissed, and shows the bag with blood. He explains that Judas, distrustful, was killed outside the city, in Gethsemane, where he had supposedly gone to hide money, and that the bag was thrown into Caiaphas's courtyard. Pilate praises him, dispenses with punishment, orders only the guards who lost Judas to be reprimanded, and hears that Yeshua's body was taken to a cave by Matthew Levi, who claimed the right to bury him, and that the three were buried together, with marked rings on their fingers. Pilate gives Afranius a ring, "as a keepsake," and asks him to reward the guard at the burial.
Next he receives Levi, dirty and tired, who sits on the floor so as not to soil the armchair. Levi hands over the parchment with Yeshua's words, which Pilate reads, and refuses food, money, and the offer to serve in the procurator's library at Caesarea, because Pilate would be afraid to look at him after having killed him. Pilate replies that Yeshua said, before dying, that he accused no one, and that Levi, unlike himself, is cruel. Levi then declares that he will devote the rest of his life to killing Judas. Pilate tells him there is no need: Judas was killed that very night. When Levi asks who did it, he replies: "It was me." Levi accepts, in the end, only a piece of clean parchment, and dawn finds Pilate asleep.
Analysis
Pilate does not order Judas's death in public: he hands the execution to Afranius and waits on the veranda with Banga. What moves him is Yeshua's phrase about cowardice and the guilt of having condemned a man he judged innocent. The result is an act that can only be done in secret, the justice that the law would not allow him to carry out in broad daylight, and that he confesses to Levi when Levi swears the same vengeance.
The scene mirrors the very scheme Judas used against Yeshua Ha-Notzri: he too is lured by feigned affection and sold for money, and the narrative echo is deliberate, because it gives the traitor back the exact logic of his betrayal.
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