Noah Covered the Blood and God Hung the Bow in the Cloud

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The First Blood on Washed Ground

The ground outside the ark still smelled of silt when Noah cut the throat of a young ram. His sons stood close enough to be splashed. The blood ran down the wet slope into a hollow the flood had scoured out, and Noah went down on his knees in it, dug both hands through the mud, and buried the pool before it finished soaking in.

Shem asked what he was doing.

"Cover the blood," Noah said, still kneeling. "I have been commanded to testify this to you, and to your children, and to all flesh."

Ham and Japheth waited for the rest. Their father had spent a year listening to water shove against a hull, and he came out with rules he would not bend. The first was about meat.

Do Not Eat the Soul with the Flesh

"Do not let the soul be eaten with the flesh," Noah told them. The soul sat in the blood. A man who swallowed the one swallowed the other, and he had turned himself into the sort of creature the water had just scrubbed off the earth. Then Noah opened the account that would stay open behind them forever. "So that your own blood, which is your life, will not be required at the hand of any flesh that sheds it on the earth."

Every soul poured out would be sought back. Not from men only. From the ox that gored, from any animal that killed a man and walked away from the puddle it had made.

Then he told them what the dirt does when it drinks.

"The earth will not be clean from the blood that has been shed upon it. Only through the blood of him who shed it will the earth be purified, throughout all its generations."

The slope under their sandals had been rinsed of an entire generation, and the water took a year to drain. Noah had watched it go down through a window.

"Work judgment and righteousness," he said, "that you may be planted in righteousness over the face of the whole earth, and your glory lifted up before my God, who saved me from the waters of the flood."

God Hung His Bow in the Cloud

God answered the altar smoke with a sign, and He put it where every living creature would have to look at it. He set His bow in the cloud. The waters would never again come over the earth to destroy it. Whenever the sky went black and then cracked open into color, the promise reasserted itself over people who had not asked for it.

The sign came with a date attached.

It stood ordained and written on the heavenly tables that the Feast of Weeks be celebrated in that month, once a year, to renew the covenant every year. Not commemorated. Renewed. The bow needed no upkeep, but the covenant hanging under it had to be picked up by hand every twelve months, on the exact day the tables named.

The festival turned out to be older than the men swearing to it. It had been kept in heaven from the day of creation until the days of Noah, twenty-six jubilees and five weeks of years, angels holding the day open while the earth below had nobody left to hold anything. Noah's sons swore to take over the counting.

Abraham Repeated the Charge to Isaac

The charge traveled down the generations. Abraham, old, called Isaac in and said it again almost word for word, the way a man repeats an instruction he is afraid will die in his mouth.

"Be on your guard, my son, against blood. Be on your guard exceedingly. Cover it with dust."

Blood is the soul, he told him, and he did not stop at the butchering. He went straight to the courts. "Take no gifts for the blood of man, lest it be shed with impunity, without judgment."

A payment can close a case. It cannot clean a field. The earth cannot be cleansed from the blood of a man except by the blood of the one who shed it, so a purse pushed across a table only teaches the next killer the going rate.

Then the old man's voice turned, and the warning came out the far side as a blessing. "That you may be accepted before the Lord, the Most High God, for He is the defense of the good, and that you may be preserved from all evil, and that He may save you from every kind of death."

They Kept the Words and Lost the Day

Later there were tables set on a day heaven never marked. The bread was right. The blessing was right. The hour was wrong. Men named the great name out loud, in the correct cadence, and the bow hung over them anyway, a promise they had stopped answering on time.

Commandment and covenant went first. Then feasts, months, Sabbaths, jubilees, all judgments, slipping out of their hands like coins through a torn seam. Men rode out with bows and swords to force them back into the way, and the forcing worked on nobody. Blood soaked into fields that no hand knelt to cover. One man killed another. Those who survived did not turn. They reached across a boundary line for what belonged to a neighbor, and they called the hour appointed because they had already sat down to eat.

The bow stayed in the cloud above those fields, exactly where God hung it, holding a promise open for people who had stopped counting the days on which they were supposed to pick it up.