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Blind Wanderers Kissed the Blood of Zekharya

Blind survivors begged to be led to the prophet Zekharya's blood in the Temple courts, and the lame asked to be rolled in it until their clothes were soaked.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. Blood That Would Not Still
  2. The Lame Ask for the Same Stain
  3. Every Age on the Same Stones
  4. What the Garments Kept

The blind man put out both hands and caught a stranger's sleeve.

Blind Wanderers Kissed the Blood of Zekharya Click for full size

"Take me to the blood," he said. "To the place where they killed Zekharya."

Around them the streets still held lad and elder on the stones, mixed without rank, as the day of wrath had left them (Lamentations 2:21). Sword-dead lay quiet. Hunger-dead still seemed to listen for the smell of food beyond the wall. The blind man did not ask for bread. He asked for the stain.

Someone led him. His feet found warm places in the dust. When they reached the courts where the prophet had been struck down for rebuking the people, he fell forward and pressed his mouth to the ground that would not stop speaking blood.

Blood That Would Not Still

Zekharya had died inside the Temple precinct for words the city refused. His blood, the tradition says, did not rest. It seethed. It waited. It answered only when slaughter enough had come to match the crime. By the time the walls fell, the city's own catastrophe had become the payment the blood demanded, and still the place of the killing drew bodies the way a wound draws flies.

The verse later named the wanderers without naming their prayer: "The blind wandered in the streets, having been sullied with blood, so that one could not touch their garments" (Lamentations 4:14). The midrash hears the sullied garments as choice as much as accident. People went to the blood. People wanted the contact.

Guilt that cannot be undone sometimes still wants a place to put its hands.

The Lame Ask for the Same Stain

Those who could not walk called from doorways and doorsteps of houses already empty.

"Bring us there," they said. "If we cannot walk to the blood, bring the blood's place under us. Roll us in it."

Helpers lifted them. Garments soaked through. No one could touch those clothes afterward without coming away red. The lame did not clean themselves. They treated the prophet's blood as the last holy thing left in a city that had killed its rebuker and then burned around the crime.

Young men who still had sight watched and did not laugh. In a street full of mixed corpses, kissing blood no longer looked stranger than dying for the scent of goats.

Every Age on the Same Stones

Jeremiah had said the wrath would pour on infant and youth, man and woman, elder and those whose days were few (Jeremiah 6:11). The fulfillment lay under the wanderers' feet. The blind stepped over a child. The lame were carried past a grandfather. The sword had been faster than famine for some; for others the field's near produce had finished the work. None of that sorted the ages. The street held them all.

So the pilgrims of blood moved through a city already arranged as a single indictment. They were not tourists of horror. They were Israelites trying to touch the first murder that made the later murders make a kind of terrible sense. If Zekharya's blood still seethed, then history had not been random. It had been an answer.

Answers that large do not comfort. They only organize the pain.

What the Garments Kept

Evening came with the same west-wind smell of roasting that killed the starving by inches. The blood-kissers did not turn toward the wall. They stayed by the courts until their clothes stiffened. When they rose, no one offered them clean cloaks. Touch itself had become a problem. The verse's last clause had become house law: one could not touch their garments.

A woman who had led the blind man wiped her hands on stone and still found red under her nails. She looked at the Temple's broken lines and understood, without a sermon, that the city had been led to this place long before the enemy arrived. The enemy finished what the murder began. The blind finished what the enemy left unfinished: contact with the proof.

Night covered the streets. The seething, if it still seethed, did so under darkness. The garments kept their stain into whatever exile waited beyond the gate.

A boy with one good eye refused the pilgrimage and then followed anyway, afraid to be alone with the ordinary corpses. At the courts he saw the blind man kiss the ground twice, as if once were not enough to pay a debt. The boy tasted metal in his mouth without tasting blood. Fear can counterfeit a flavor.

Someone whispered that the prophet's blood had waited years for this volume of answering death. The whisper did not sound like comfort. It sounded like a door locking behind the city. If the murder had called the siege, then every kiss on the stain was also a confession that the first blow had been local.

ZekharyaJerusalemTempleBloodDestructionProphetLamentationsGuilt
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From the tradition

Sources

3 sources

The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Eikhah Rabbah 4:17Eikhah Rabbah

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022 · CC-BY

Eikhah Rabbah, the midrashic commentary on the book of Lamentations, gathers the grief of the destruction and reads each mournful verse as a window into a deeper account of the city's fall. This passage takes up the haunting line (Lamentations 4:14) "The blind wandered in the streets, having been sullied with blood, so that one could not touch their garments." The sages connect the bloodshed of Jerusalem to the murder of the prophet Zekharya, who was slain within the Temple courts for rebuking the people, and whose blood, according to the tradition, would not be stilled and went on seething until a vast slaughter answered for it.

The midrash then turns the prophet's blood into a measure of the people's strange devotion and despair. The blind among them, hearing of the place where Zekharya was killed, cry out that someone should guide them there so they might embrace and kiss the spot, fulfilling the words "the blind wandered in the streets, having been sullied with blood." The lame and disabled, unable to walk that far, ask instead that someone bring them to Zekharya's blood so they might roll in it, which the verse marks when it says "so that one could not touch their garments," for their clothes were soaked through. The reading transforms a description of horror into a portrait of a people drawn helplessly toward the very bloodguilt that sealed the city's doom, each phrase of the verse matched to a class of sufferer who lived out its meaning.

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Eikhah Rabbah 2:24Eikhah Rabbah

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022 · CC-BY

Eikhah Rabbah is the classical midrash on the book of Lamentations, the scroll read on the ninth of Av that mourns the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. This passage takes up (Lamentations 2:21), "Lad and elder lay on the ground in the streets, my young women and my young men fell by the sword. You killed on the day of Your wrath, You slaughtered, had no compassion." The midrash dwells on the opening image of young and old alike struck down where they fell, lying together in the open streets of the ruined city.

To explain why the catastrophe spared no age, the sages reach back to the warning the prophet had given long before the fall. They cite (Jeremiah 6:11), where the prophet, overwhelmed, declares: "I am filled with the wrath of the Lord; I am too weary to contain it. Pour onto the baby in the street and onto the gathering of youths, for men and women alike will be captured, the elderly with those whose days are numbered." Jeremiah had foretold a judgment that would fall upon every generation at once, the infant in the street, the bands of young men, husbands and wives, the aged whose days were already few.

The midrash reads the verse in Lamentations as the fulfillment of that prophecy. Because Jeremiah had said the wrath would be poured upon the baby in the street and upon the gathering of youths, therefore in the day of destruction lad and elder truly "lay on the ground in the streets." The poet's lament is not a fresh complaint but the realization of a warning that had gone unheeded, the prophetic word made terribly literal in the streets of Jerusalem.

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Eikhah Rabbah 4:12Eikhah Rabbah

Retold in our words. Read the original at the link below.The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022 · CC-BY

Eikhah Rabbah, the midrash on Lamentations, expounds the verse, "Those killed by sword were better off than those killed by hunger, for those would bleed, ruptured from the produce of the field" (Lamentations 4:9). The plain sense is grim: death by the sword is swift, while death by famine is a slow wasting. The Sages press the strange phrase about being "ruptured from the produce of the field" and read into it the actual experience of the besieged in two destructions.

During the destruction of the First Temple, the midrash says, the starving of Jerusalem would die from the scent of thistles. The thistles growing wild had to be cooked a long while before they could be eaten at all. When the enemy outside the walls boiled them, the smell drifted into the city, and the famished, whose bodies had nothing left, would be undone by that aroma of food they could not reach. The longing itself killed them.

In the later destruction of the Second Temple, the midrash continues, there were no thistles to be had. What did the enemy do then? They brought goats and roasted them to the west of the city, so that the scent of roasting meat carried over the walls. The smell infused the starving residents, and they died of it, just as the verse said, "ruptured from the produce of the field." The Sages thus hear in a single line of Lamentations a precise and terrible portrait of how hunger, sharpened by the nearness of food, claimed those whom the sword had spared.

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