Baruch Sent an Eagle Over the Euphrates With His Last Letter

Click for full size

The Scribe Asked to Die Before the Walls Fell

The city was still standing when God told Baruch son of Neriah that it was finished.

It was the twenty-fifth year of Jeconiah. Baruch had spent his life taking down another man's words, every oracle Jeremiah spoke, ink in the cracks of his fingers. This time the voice came with no prophet in between, and it opened with a question. "Have you seen what this people is doing to Me?"

The ten tribes in the north had been dragged off long before, pushed into idols by kings who left them no room to refuse. Judah and Benjamin had managed something worse. They had forced their own kings to sin. The rot climbed up from the streets to the throne instead of falling from the throne down.

Then the sentence, flat as a clerk reading it out. "I bring evil upon this city and upon its inhabitants. It shall be removed from before Me for a time. I will scatter this people among the nations."

Baruch went down on the floor.

"Have I come into the world for this purpose, to see the destruction of my mother? Take my spirit first. Let me go to my fathers rather than watch this."

Nothing took his spirit. He stayed on the floor, breathing, in a condemned city that did not know it.

The Prayers Were Holding Up the Masonry

What came next sounded like an evacuation order. Warn Jeremiah. Warn the righteous. Get them out of Jerusalem.

"Your works are to this city as a firm pillar," God said. "Your prayers as a strong wall."

The stone circuit, the towers, the iron-braced corners, all of it ornament. The load was carried by a handful of men who kept praying. Once they walked out the gate, the masonry was only masonry.

Baruch heard the arithmetic and pushed back. "How shall the name of Israel be remembered?" he asked. "To whom shall Your law be explained?" Then he said the worst of it out loud. Would the world go quiet again, back to the silence before anything was made, as if no people had ever stood here.

The City That Was Older Than Paradise

The answer did not defend the walls. It moved them.

The Jerusalem Baruch could see from his window was not the one God had meant. The true city was prepared before Paradise was planted. Adam was shown it before the first transgression and lost the sight of it with everything else. Abraham was shown it at night, standing between the halves of his split animals. Moses was handed its pattern on the mountain like a builder's plan.

"On the palms of My hands have I engraved you."

Baruch did not argue. He got up and went to find the men.

Jeremiah came. So did Adu and Seriah and Jabish and Gedaliah, men with property in a town that had weeks left. Baruch walked them down into the Valley of Kidron, below the walls, where the ground is stone and graves, and repeated all of it. The verdict. The scattering. The promise.

They cried out together, then sat there fasting until evening while the doomed city above them waited for its angels.

The Angels Reached the Vessels First

When the siege ring closed, the first thing over the wall was not a Babylonian.

The angels of the Most High came down onto the fortifications and took them apart, pulling up the iron corners no ram and no sapper could have shifted. But they did not let the wall drop yet. First they went into the sanctuary and gathered the vessels, the lamps and the basins and the censers, and put them into the earth where no hand could reach.

Only then did heaven let go. The wall came in. The house was stripped, the Temple burned, the survivors roped together and counted.

The Chaldeans walked through the gap believing they had made it. They tallied their plunder in a sanctuary already emptied of everything worth carrying, and never learned the difference.

Mercy and Peace, Written in the Ash

Baruch knew his own death was close. Nine and a half tribes of his brothers were scattered past the water, with no city left to write home to.

So the scribe did the one thing a scribe can do with a ruin. He sat down and wrote.

"Mercy and peace," it began, which is a strange greeting from a man sitting in rubble. Then: "I bear in mind, my brethren, the love of Him who created us, who loved us from of old, and never hated us, but above all educated us."

Twelve tribes out of one father, he reminded them, tied by one bond however far the empires had thrown them. Then he asked for the hardest thing a beaten people can be asked. Accept that the sentence was just. What they had suffered was less than what they had earned, and affliction taken as correction turns hope permanent.

And then he took the empires apart, one clause at a time.

"We see the prosperity of the nations, though they act wickedly. But they shall be like a vapor. We consider their cruelty, though they remember not its end. But as a wave that passes they shall be broken."

Vapor, and a wave that breaks. The man writing that had watched his own Temple burn, and he was the one calling the winners temporary.

The Eagle Went East Over the Water

The last of the letter was a list of things not to lose.

Remember the law and Zion. Remember the holy land and your brothers in it. Remember the covenant of the fathers. Do not let the festivals and the Sabbaths go. Hand this letter to your children the way your fathers handed you the traditions of the law.

He closed with no comfort in it at all. "For if He judge us not according to the multitude of His mercies, woe unto all of us who are born."

Then he rolled the sheet, bound it, and carried it out to an eagle.

The bird took the weight and went up off his arm, east, toward the Euphrates and the tribes on the far bank, gone so long that most had stopped expecting news from home. Baruch stood in the ash and watched the wings shrink until the river swallowed the shape of them.

Then he went back into the broken city, still breathing, still not permitted to die, kept back for something that had not happened yet.