Fire Defends Solomon From the Assembly's Ban

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The Argument Over Menashe

The list was doing damage before it ever reached the hard names, since a man's share in the World to Come is not a thing a room can weigh gently. Yerovam went down without trouble, and Ahab after him, and Bilam and Doeg and Ahithophel and Gehazi followed, because nobody in the Great Assembly needed persuading about any of them.

Menashe stopped the room. Rabbi Yehuda would not give him up, because Chronicles says the man prayed and was heard and was carried back to Jerusalem to his kingdom, and if repentance on that scale buys nothing, then nothing anyone does buys anything. The others granted him the kingdom and would go no further, since being restored to Jerusalem and being restored to the World to Come are two different ledgers, and the king who had filled that city with what he filled it with does not get both.

So Menashe stayed on the list, and the room found out that it could do that. A serious man had argued for a name and the name had gone down anyway, which left the pen warm for whatever came next.

Someone Said Solomon

Nobody had to explain the proposal, because the scroll of Kings lay open in front of them and every man there had read the end of it, the foreign wives and the high places raised on the hill east of the city. Once the name was out of a mouth it sat on the table like a stone none of them wanted to pick up.

Half of them understood at once that if Solomon could go on the Assembly's list, then no king in the record was safe. The other half thought that was the entire point of keeping a ledger, so the pen went toward the parchment.

David Went Down on the Floor

Then the likeness of David prostrated itself in front of them, a form of the father face down on the floor of the chamber, holding the posture a beggar holds, while the scholars above it went on deciding about the son. It should have ended the session, but somebody said the sight proved nothing about the boy's accounts, and the pen kept moving.

Fire came out of the Holy of Holies. It came the way fire comes out of a doorway, with no hand behind it and no lamp to blame, and it ran along the floor toward the table where they were sitting, so men got up and shoved their benches back against the wall. Not one of them let go of the argument, since a room that has just refused Menashe on principle does not care to be moved by heat.

Then the voice came, and it did not argue theology with them at all. It quoted a proverb about a workman: "Have you seen a man diligent in his work? He shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men." Seven years of building, the cedar and the gold and the dedication of the house, all of it pressed into one line about a craftsman and where a craftsman is entitled to stand.

The oldest man in the room said what a father owes a son, which is circumcision and redemption and Torah and a trade and a wife and a portion of land, and what a son owes back, which is a gift carried up to the father's house. This one, he said, brought the house itself.

They heard the old man, and they heard the voice, and they went on writing.

The Verse From Job

What stopped them was not the fire.

Somebody read out the line from Job instead. Should He then requite it according to your mind, seeing that you refuse? The man holding the pen sat with that for the length of a breath, and what he understood in it had nothing to do with Solomon. He had come into the chamber to write down heaven's accounting and had been keeping his own the whole time, since he had crossed out a bowed father and a burning doorway and a voice over the ark, all three, on the grounds that none of them said what he had already settled. The refusing in the verse was his.

He set the pen down, and the room went quiet in pieces, one man at a time, the way a room does when its loudest part stops first.

The fire drew back toward the sanctuary door and went wherever fire from that door goes, and the likeness of David was no longer on the floor. On the table the list lay open with seven names down the column in a good hand, and after Gehazi the parchment stayed empty, and the ink dried on the nib while nobody reached for it.