Honey From the Rock Until the Wine Turned to Serpent Venom

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The Feast on the High Places

The rock had no seam in it and nothing green growing out of its side, and Israel set its mouth against the stone and drank honey.

The high places ran on above them, ridge after ridge, and they rode the crests and ate the shoots of the field as they went. There were four shoots and each one was an exile. They chewed what was put in front of them.

Then oil out of flint, running down their chins.

The boar came up out of the forest while they were still eating. It went through the vineyard shoulder first, tearing vines out by the root, and the crawling thing of the field came behind and fed on what was left standing. Israel stayed on the heights with honey still on its mouth.

After the boar came men. They took Eretz Yisrael field by field and held it, and when Israel went and asked them for one perutah (פרוטה), the smallest coin there is, it was like clamping a press onto flint and waiting for oil.

The Cup the Nations Poured

The strangers had wine and they poured it generously.

The vines were out of Sodom and the planting was out of Gomorrah, and the clusters hung bitter on them. A man who drank went warm on the first swallow. On the second the wine moved in him, low and unhurried, the way a thing moves under dry leaves.

Their great ones had learned the craft from the first serpent, the one that stood in the garden and talked Adam and Eve out of the single tree forbidden them, and nothing had been lost on the way down. When those great ones came out to be seen, the dread of them went ahead like a shadow crossing a nest.

The venom was not only in the strangers' cup.

Among Israel the careful men carried it, the moderate ones, the fearers of sin. The heads of the people, the men who took the front seats in the assembly, would turn one day on those who trusted them and strike like cruel asps.

Moses Holds Up the Bent Staff

Moses stood in front of them and called them a crooked and twisted generation.

He gave them the staff to look at. A man carries a bent cane into a workshop and lays it on the bench, and the craftsman warms it and works the crookedness with his hands. Sometimes the wood comes. Sometimes it will not, and he sets it in the press and leans his weight in until the frame creaks. If the press fails he takes up the adze and cuts the bend out in chips.

If the adze fails, he does not argue with the wood. He carries it to the fire.

Generations later the sentence came out of Ezekiel's mouth in the order the craftsman had used his tools. "I will place you in the hands of brutish men, artisans of destruction," he said. "You will be consigned to the flames."

The Sword in the Market and the Fright in the Chambers

The sword came into the marketplace at the hour when the stalls were fullest.

Tables went over, oil jars broke and ran between the stones, and people got out through the alleys. One man stood in the open with the road clear in front of him. He could have gone. He stayed where he was, hands hanging at his sides, and the fright got into him and finished him standing up, and no blade came near him.

The altars had gone up in the thoroughfares where anybody walking to the well could count them, and Jeremiah counted them. "For as the number of your cities was the number of your gods, O Judah," he said, "and as the number of the streets of Jerusalem have you made altars to the shame, altars to sacrifice to the ba'al."

The chambers were the other half.

Behind bolted doors, in rooms with no window onto the street, each elder of the house of Israel sat in his own chamber of pictures and did in the dark what he would not do in the road. They said it to one another and believed it. "The Lord does not see us. The Lord has left the land."

The doors held. The fright came in anyway and did to them sitting there what it had done to the man in the market.

The King Turned Back at the Grave

A king came into his province with a list of names.

He had been wronged there years before and had come to collect. He went house to house with the list, and at the third door they told him what he had not planned for. The men were dead, and the third of them had been dead the longest.

He sat his horse in the road. Then he turned the animal around and rode home, because a king's arm reaches exactly as far as a man's life and not one hour past it.

"I live forever," God said.

The measure of the Holy One is not the measure of man. What is not exacted from the living is exacted from the dead. What is not exacted in this world is exacted in the world to come. Dying carries a man out of the province and does not carry him out of reach.

"When I whet the flash of My sword," He said, "My hand takes hold of justice."

The stroke goes out quick as light off a turned blade, and for all its speed it lands where it was aimed and nowhere beside it. The men who held the land and could not be made to give up one perutah will have their storehouses opened, and what comes out will go down sweet, like honey and like oil out of the rock.