Four Kings Crowned Themselves Gods and Heaven Pulled Them Down

The first to say it aloud was Hiram, prince of Tyre, standing on his island fortress with the sea breaking white on every side. He had ringed his city with cedar and silver, and the ships of the nations came bowing to his harbor. So he lifted his chin above the waterline and announced what the wealth had taught him. "I am a god," he said. "I sit in the seat of God, in the heart of the seas."

The sea did not answer. But the word was loose now, and once a man crowns himself it is hard to take the crown back.

The River That Belonged to No One

Down in Egypt, Pharaoh heard the same music. He stood over the Nile at flood, the brown water sliding fat and slow past his feet, the whole black soil of his kingdom fed by it. Other men prayed for the river to rise. Pharaoh did not pray. He looked at the water that made his country live and decided he had made it himself.

"My river is my own," he said. "And I made myself."

That last phrase is the one that turned the heavens. Not I am rich, not I am strong, but I made myself, as though he had reached back before his own birth and called himself into being out of the mud. A man who claims to be his own maker has cut the one cord that holds a creature to its Creator.

God let the boast stand a while. Then He answered it in a language Pharaoh would understand.

God Makes a Rival God

He went to Moses, the fugitive shepherd who stammered and hid behind his brother, and He said, "See, I have made you a god to Pharaoh." The words landed strangely in Moses' ears. He was no divinity. He was a man with a staff and a stutter and a price on his head in Egypt.

That was the whole point. Pharaoh had appointed himself a god. So God appointed a counterfeit of His own, a true one, to walk into Pharaoh's court and out-god him. If the throne of Egypt wanted a deity, it would get two, and only one of them could turn the river to blood. Every plague that followed was an answer to the boast at the water's edge. You made yourself? Then save yourself. The Nile that Pharaoh claimed to have created ran red, then bred frogs, then stank, and the self-made god could not lift a finger to stop the unmaking of his own handiwork.

The Madman and the Boy King

There were others who reached for the same crown. Nebuchadnezzar, who burned the Temple and dragged Judah into chains, looked up at the clouds over Babylon and said, "I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the Most High."

Heaven let him climb in his own mind. Then it pulled him down, not to the grave but to the grass. The king who wanted the clouds was put out to pasture like an ox. His hair grew matted as feathers, his nails curled into claws, and the beasts of the field came and looked at him and saw one of their own and bit him. The lord of the earth became food for the things that crawl on it. He ate grass for seven years, a god grazing in a meadow, until the kingdom inside his own skull was emptied out.

And there was Joash, the boy hidden in the Temple, raised by the priest Jehoiada who had saved his life. While the old priest lived, Joash stayed a man. But Jehoiada died, and the princes of Judah came and bowed low to the young king and called him a god, and the boy who owed his very breath to the Temple opened his mouth and accepted it. He listened to them. That was his whole crime, a moment of listening. Soon after, his own servants struck him down on his bed, and the judgments fell on the head that had let itself be worshiped.

Four men. Three from the nations, one from Israel. Each one took the title, and each one found that the title was a noose. The crown of godhood does not sit on a mortal skull. It tightens.

The Fire That Would Not Go Out

Long after Pharaoh drowned and Hiram fell, the sages of Israel sat with the prophets and traced the pattern forward. Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat read the verse, "When the report reaches Egypt, they will tremble at the report of Tzor," and he heard something larger than two old cities in it. Tzor, Tyre, he said, is not only the island of Hiram. Spelled one way it is the harbor town. Spelled another, stripped of a single letter, it is the wicked kingdom, the empire that oppressed Israel and was named for the word tzar, to oppress.

And what was prophesied for that empire? The very plagues of Egypt, run again on a longer reel. Egypt's water turned to blood, so Tzor's streams would turn to pitch. Egypt burned with fire from heaven, but Tzor's fire would be worse, a flame that "will not be extinguished night and day," that burns while everyone sleeps and burns while they wake. Why so relentless? Because that kingdom had stopped Israel from the one thing meant to be done day and night, the study of Torah, and a fire that never rests is the wage for stealing a people's nights and days. They burned the House of God until smoke filled it. So their own smoke "will rise forever."

It is the same story, told in a wider frame. A power swells until it forgets it is only a power. It mistakes its river, its clouds, its harbor, its army, for proof that it answers to no one. Then the river reddens, the grass grows, the harbor floods with pitch, and the smoke goes up and does not come down. The throne in the heart of the seas was always borrowed. The lease, in every case, came due.