Gog's Weapons Burned Seven Years Before the Dance Began

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The Generation That Grew Old Before It Grew Up

A boy three weeks out of the womb lay in his cradle with a head of grey hair. His mother counted the days twice and got the same number both times. She carried him into the lane to show the neighbors, and the neighbors barely turned their heads, because their own sons had come in from the barley that morning stooped like men of a hundred years.

The vines had failed the season before. Not a thin crop. No seed of the vine at all, and no oil in the presses, and the presses stood cracked and dry in the sun.

Then the animals began to go. Cattle dropped in the yards with their legs folded under them. Birds fell out of the air onto the roofs and stayed there. Fishermen rowed out before dawn and rowed back with nets full of dead silver, and the smell of the shore reached the town ahead of the boats.

Sons Who Accused Their Fathers in the Street

The quarrels started small and never stopped. A son stood in his father's doorway and would not step aside. "You let the covenant go," he said. "You and the elders who taught you." His father struck him across the mouth. The boy did not move, and the neighbors came out to watch, and the neighbors took the boy's side.

It ran the same way in every town, the young against the old and the old against the young, the poor against the rich, the low against the great, the beggar against the prince. One beggar walked up to a prince's gate and refused to beg. He demanded. The prince sent men with staves to drive him off, and he came back the next morning with forty men behind him and a torch in his hand.

Every mouth spoke iniquity. Every work of their hands was uncleanness and an abomination, and the earth was going to be spent paying for all of it.

Seven Pillars for the Seven Years of Gog

Wisdom had built her house long before on the mountain in Jerusalem and hewed out seven pillars to hold it up, and the pillars were not stone. They were seven years that had not arrived yet, and they belonged to Gog.

He came up in his own time. The land of Magog emptied itself behind him, and the nations came behind Magog, and the dust of the horses hung over the hills north of the city for days before anyone could see what raised it. The watchmen on the wall counted standards until counting stopped meaning anything.

Seven years the war ran. Men born into the grey-haired generation fought it and buried each other in it, and the house on the mountain stood while the armies broke against the slope.

Then Gog fell, and the noise went out of the world all at once.

The Winters Israel Warmed Itself on Spears

The inhabitants of the cities went out to the field and gathered the weapons. Swords, spears, knives, bucklers, bows, the shafts of the war carts. They carried them home in armloads and stacked them against the walls of their houses like cordwood.

Nobody put an axe to a tree that year. The orchards had come back so heavy that the branches of the figs bent to the ground under their own fruit, and a tree with fruit on it does not go into a fire while there are spears lying in the grass.

So Israel cooked on Gog's arsenal. Bread baked over broken lances. Wives banked the coals at night with the flat of a shield. A woman who had buried two sons in the seven years handed a bundle of arrows to her granddaughter and told her to feed the oven, and when the child asked how long the burning would last, the old woman said, "Seven years, and then the wedding. Whoever eats at the betrothal feast eats at the wedding feast."

The betrothal feast was already spread. Ezekiel stood over the valley of the fallen and called out to every winged bird and every beast of the field. "Gather and come," he cried. "Assemble yourselves from all around to My feast that I am preparing for you." They came down out of the sky and in from the hills, and they ate the flesh of the mighty and drank the blood of the princes of the earth, and at that table they were satiated with horses and chariots.

The Circle Where Every Finger Pointed Inward

The righteous came up after that, into the world that comes after this one, and they did not come up slowly.

They ran. They came with the quickness of young women beating timbrels in a procession, and old age did not follow them in through the door. God was already standing at the head of a ḥola, a ring of dancers, holding the place where a leader holds it. The circle closed. It turned.

And every one of them lifted a hand toward the center and pointed with a finger, the way a child points at a thing long promised and finally shown, and they sang it out together. "For this is God, our God, forever and ever. He will guide us beyond death."

The words went two ways in their mouths. Beyond death, and also no death at all. He will guide us in this world, and He will guide us in the world to come.

The circle kept turning, and no one let go, and the fingers stayed up.