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From the Prologue of "Nails"...

     While the chest dried, Joseph went outside and found a small shovel near the cottage’s garden, which was now flooded from days of constant rain. In the wet, soft dirt, he began digging a very deep, dark hole. He struggled against the muddy water that continued to run into the hole, no matter how much he shoveled out. He worked feverishly in the pouring rain, his clothes soaked to his skin, digging deeper and deeper into the soft earth. He then gathered several buckets full of stones and rocks with which he used to line the bottom of the hole. The thunder continued to pound and echo off the adjacent hillsides like an earthquake as he worked on to create the place in which he would later bury the chest that held his treasured purchase, the items that had cost him the two-year’s wages of a Praetorian guard.

     A few days later, as Joseph was attempting to leave the country to begin his new life, he was ambushed; brutally attacked and viciously beaten along the road that leads out of Kiriath Arba. The would-be robbers left his bloody, naked body in a roadside ditch and took all of his belongings. He died there alone, just as the rain began to subside and the sun was peeking through the retreating clouds. His body was found the next morning by some travelers on the way to Jerusalem.

     The local townspeople attributed his death to the common thieves of the region. Common thieves who would quickly turn hired assassin for the right price…the price paid by the Jewish council to cleanse the land of yet another blasphemer.