The Golden Grass That Defended Baruch the Scribe From a Prince

The grass on the grave grew gold, and only the worthy could see it.

By daylight the leaves looked ordinary, a thin green spread over the dust outside Babylon. But under the stars the blades caught a sheen that did not belong to any living thing, a dust of gold lying along each edge like frost that would not melt. Men learned to come at night. They knelt where the glow was thickest, pressed a stone into the soil to mark the spot, and returned at first light to gather what the dark had shown them. The bright grass kept the grave of Baruch, scribe of the prophet Jeremiah, the man who had written down the fall of Jerusalem with his own hand.

The Scribe Who Watched the City Burn From the Outside

Baruch ben Neriah had not been allowed to die in his own land, and he had not been allowed to perish with his people either. The day before the Babylonian army broke the walls, God commanded him to leave Jerusalem. His righteousness was a shield, and a shield could hold off a decree God had already sealed. So the holiest scribe of his generation was sent out the gate while the city still stood, so that nothing in him could delay its ruin.

From a rise beyond the walls he watched. Angels came down with fire and set it to the stones, and other angels went into the sanctuary and took the holy vessels and hid them away, the lampstand and the ark swallowed into the earth against some far-off day. Baruch sat down in the dust and fasted seven days, and the grief in him had no floor.

Then the visions began. God unrolled the whole of time before him, the ages of the world running past like dark and bright waters, the suffering of Israel and the reckoning of the nations that had poured it out. He was shown that the empire burning his city would itself be dragged to judgment, and that at the end of all the waters a redemption would come that no enemy could undo. And he was told a stranger thing about himself. He would not taste death like other men. He would be taken and kept, preserved out of reach, held safe until the last day.

A Prince From Babylon Wanted the Tomb of the Prophets

Centuries turned over the grave. The gold grass still glowed, and a little distance off stood the great tomb of Ezekiel, Baruch's teacher, overarched by a mausoleum that King Jeconiah had raised after Evil-merodach loosed him from his chains. The names of thirty-five thousand Jews who built it were carved into its walls. Pilgrims came in such crowds that the low narrow gate widened of itself to let them pass, then closed back to a slit when they had gone.

A prince of Babylon heard the stories and wanted the place for himself. He summoned a Jew, Rabbi Solomon, and ordered him to lead the way to Ezekiel's tomb. Solomon bowed and offered a smaller door first. "Try the grave of Baruch, which stands beside it," he said. "If that one opens to you, then go to Ezekiel, who was Baruch's master." It was a test dressed as courtesy, a way to weigh the prince against the dead before the dead weighed him.

The prince and his court came to Baruch's grave and set their hands to it. The first man who touched the tomb dropped where he stood, dead before he could cry out. They tried again, and again the stone answered, and again a body fell. The grass that shimmered gold by night would not yield its scribe to a hand that came to plunder.

The Fast That Opened What Force Could Not

The prince, shaken white, went to an old Arab for counsel. "Call the Jews," the old man told him. "Baruch was one of theirs. They still read his books. Let them ask, where you cannot take."

So the Jews of the region gathered, and they did not come with levers and ropes. They came with fasting and prayer, with turning back to God and with charity given before the grave. They understood the weight of what they approached. When at last they laid their hands on the stone, it opened without a death, without a sound. Inside lay Baruch on a bier of marble, his body whole and uncorrupted, the color still in his face, as though he had been set down to rest an hour before and not a thousand years.

The prince stared at the unspoiled scribe and decided it was unfitting for Baruch and Ezekiel to share one ground. "Carry the bier into the city," he ordered. Strong men set their shoulders to it. Teams of animals were yoked to it. They strained, and the marble did not slide. They dragged it two thousand ells from where it had lain, and there it stopped as if rooted into the world, and no power the prince commanded could move it a finger further.

What the Dead Kept That No King Could Carry Off

Rabbi Solomon read the sign aloud. The scribe had chosen his own resting place, and heaven had set it. The prince let the bier stand where it had refused to go, and on that spot he ordered a house of study built, so that the place where the dead man stopped would teach the living. Where Baruch lay down, an academy rose.

The prince did not walk away unchanged. The miracle had cracked something in him. He went on to Mecca and there became convinced his old faith was hollow, and he turned to the God of Baruch and was made a Jew, and his whole court turned with him. A grave he had come to rob had taken his religion instead.

The gold dust still lies along the grass at night and vanishes by day, given only to the ones who come humble and in the dark to find it. The scribe who wrote the burning of Jerusalem sleeps whole on his marble, holding the one thing no army and no prince could ever drag out of the ground, the visions of how the dark and bright waters end, kept until the day he was promised he would wake to see it.