The Bundle of the Living and the Sling Beyond the Firmament

Abigail came down the ravine on a donkey loaded with bread and roasted grain and dressed sheep, and she saw four hundred men climbing toward her with swords on their hips. At the head of them rode David, and his jaw was set to kill. Her husband Nabal had spat on David's messengers and sent them away empty, and David had sworn to leave nothing of Nabal's household breathing by morning.

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Abigail slid off the donkey and fell on her face in the dust of the road. She did not beg for Nabal. She spoke instead of David's own soul, and what she said cracked open a door in the sky.

"The soul of my lord," she told him, "will be bound in the bundle of the living, kept close with the LORD your God. But the souls of your enemies he will sling out, the way a stone leaves the hollow of a sling."

The Bundle Bound in the Highest Heaven

The bundle Abigail named is no figure of speech. It hangs in Aravot, the seventh and highest heaven, where the storehouses of the world are kept in the open like grain in a barn. There sit righteousness and justice and the giving of alms. There stand the storehouses of life and the storehouses of blessing, sealed and full. And bound in among them, gathered like sheaves after a harvest, rest the souls of the righteous, waiting.

To be bound in that bundle is to be kept where nothing is spilled and nothing is lost. A soul set there is not stored the way a coin is stored. It is held the way a living thing is held, close against the one who keeps it, in a heaven so high that peace itself is warehoused there. When Gideon built his altar he called the place by a single word, "The LORD is Peace," and that same peace is stacked in Aravot in bins that never empty.

The Spirits Who Have Not Yet Been Born

The strangest storehouse in Aravot holds no one who has ever lived. In it wait the spirits and the souls that have not yet been created, crowded at the edge of time, each one a person the world has not yet met. Every birth still coming draws a soul down out of that room. Every cradle that will ever be filled is filled from there.

Beside them stands a vessel of dew. It is the dew the Holy One has set aside to wake the dead when the ages turn, the moisture that will fall on dry bones and make them stand. So Aravot keeps the whole span of a life at once, the not-yet-born packed in one storehouse and the dew for the already-dead in the next. The bundle of the living runs from before the first breath to after the last.

The Two Who Were Slung Past the Firmament

Not every soul is bound. Some are thrown.

Doeg knew Torah. The sages did not deny it. He could argue law from morning to night, and Ahithophel beside him was sharper still. Doeg used what he knew to steal the sheep and kill the shepherd and turn the sword on Israel, and when the question was asked whether so learned a man might still be saved, the answer came back hard and flat. There is no salvation for him. Knowledge had not bound his soul into the bundle. It had only made his choosing worse.

Then there is Esau, the father of the kingdoms that would grind Israel down through the centuries. When the Psalmist cried "Grace me, O LORD, grace me," the sages counted three letters of grace in the word and heard three kingdoms in them, three faces of one old hatred, all of it running back to the brother of whom the prophet said, "And Esau I hated." Doeg and Esau are not bound in Aravot. They are flung out past the firmament, hurled beyond the sky that holds the storehouses shut.

No Place in All the World to Set Them Down

A slung stone does not rest in the sling. It is loosed to fly, and the souls of the wicked fly the same way, cast from one end of the world to the other with nowhere the arc allows them to fall. They are like chaff, the sages said, the light husk the wind lifts off the threshing floor and scatters until there is nothing left to catch. Doeg's learning cannot weigh him down enough to land. Esau's kingdoms cannot build him a floor.

The end of the arc is downward. The wicked return to Sheol, and not to its upper rooms but to the lowest rung of it, the deepest pit under the pit, the gate of death out of which the Psalmist begged God to lift him and from whose depths only mercy pulls a soul back. Still, the door out of Aravot is never bolted from spite. A nation that falls silent before God, that stops its boasting long enough to listen, is granted a beautiful share and is not thrown at all. The sling is loaded only for those who knew the weight of what they did and swung the sword anyway.

So the two destinations hang over every life at once. On one side the bundle in the high barn of Aravot, where the righteous are kept close and the unborn wait their turn and the dew stands ready for the dead. On the other side the open sky past the firmament, where a soul is loosed like a stone and finds, from one end of the world to the other, no place to come to rest.