The Salamander Blood That Kept Hezekiah From the Fire

What Was Made at Twilight

In the final hour of the sixth day of Creation, just before God rested, there was a problem. Ten things existed that did not fit anywhere in the natural order God had been assembling all week: things that were needed but had no place in the world as built. God made them then, in the margin before the Sabbath, the narrow slot between the ordered world and its first rest. Among them: the rainbow, the manna, the mouth of the earth that swallowed Korah, the rod of Moses, the writing on the tablets of stone, the shamir, and the salamander.

These were not afterthoughts. They were preparations. The world would need them, and they were made before the world was old enough to know it needed them.

The Blood That Remembers Flame

The salamander is born from fire. Build a fire in the same hearth and keep it burning continuously for seven years, and from the heat accumulated over that time something will emerge: a small pale animal whose body carries the memory of all those years of flame. Kill it, and the blood it yields will do what fire cannot do to the one who wears it. Smear it on skin and that skin becomes untouchable by fire.

Hezekiah's mother knew this. Her husband Ahaz was the most faithless king in the line of David, a man who had consecrated his own son to Moloch, who burned the child alive in the god's fire as an act of devotion to a false god. Ahaz came for the infant Hezekiah. He had in mind to do the same. But Hezekiah's mother had obtained salamander blood and had anointed her son with it before Ahaz arrived. The fire burned. The child did not. Hezekiah walked out of Moloch's flames without a mark on him and grew up to become the most righteous king of Judah, the man who destroyed the idol altars and restored the Temple service.

The Worm That Cut Stone

The shamir was the other twilight creature: a worm, or something like a worm, no larger than a barleycorn, whose touch split stone and iron and hard wood. There was no substance it could not cut. Nothing built of matter could resist it. Solomon learned of its existence when he began building the Temple and discovered that the Torah forbade using iron tools on the altar stones: the stones were to be brought to their finished shape without metal cutting them, without the instrument of war touching the instrument of worship.

The demons knew where the shamir was: in the keeping of the prince of the sea, who had given it to the hoopoe bird for safeguarding. Solomon's servants found the hoopoe's nest and covered it with glass. When the hoopoe returned and found its young blocked by the transparent barrier, it fetched the shamir to cut through the glass. The servants drove the bird off, took the shamir, and brought it to Solomon. With it the Temple stones were dressed without the sound of iron tool in the entire complex during construction. The shamir did the work that hammers and chisels were forbidden to do.

The Worm That Was Lost

After Solomon died, the shamir was lost. No one knows where it went. Some traditions say the hoopoe bird carried it back to the sea from which it came. Others say it is still somewhere in the world, waiting for another task that requires a stone to be split without the hand of a human being lifting a blade to it. The Temple the shamir helped build was destroyed. The shamir that could not be destroyed by anything material went back into the margin between the natural and the miraculous where it had always belonged.

The salamander and the shamir were companions from the beginning: both made in the last hour of the sixth day, both things that existed outside the categories the rest of creation provided for. One protected a king from his own father's faithlessness. The other built the house where God would accept worship. The time required to produce both, seven years of fire for the one and the patience of the deep sea for the other, says something about what the tradition thought they were worth.