Temple Gates Sank Rather Than Serve Babylon

They came back for the doors last. The basins and the fire pans and the lamps had gone north at midday, roped onto carts under guard. What still stood in the smoke of the Temple court were the gates. A Babylonian officer looked up at them and saw the best prize left in the city. Timber and bronze, tall enough to hang across a road at home. Every pilgrim in Judea had walked through them with a basket on his shoulder.

Click for full size

He sent men with chains.

Chains on Empty Air

The gates sank. Not thrown down. Not levered off their pins. The posts slid into the paving as if the courtyard had turned to water under them. The bars went with them. The hinges after that. When the chains hit, there was nothing above the stone but a seam of loose dirt and the smell of burning cedar drifting off the ruined roof.

The officer swore. He kicked the seam. Dust lifted and settled on his boots. The doors that every feast had opened were gone, and they had not gone onto a cart.

Dirt Under the Spear

He drove a spear butt into the seam and got dirt. He set men digging. They found more dirt, and under that, stone. They dug until the light went. Then they stopped, because a soldier knows the hour when he should not report what he has been doing all afternoon.

Everything else in the House had allowed itself to be carried. The gold had gone. The vessels had gone. Only the doors had refused. They would not stand in a foreign capital with a general's name painted across them and idols set on either side. They would not serve Babylon.

Jeremiah walked the court while the ash was still warm. He put the line down as fact. Her gates have sunk into the ground. He has ruined and broken her bars (Lamentations 2:9). On the ground it was the only object in the city that had chosen.

The Song That Would Not Travel

The sons of Korah had sung about that pavement for centuries. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, they sang, and great in His city, and they meant this city and nowhere else. What God had done in Jerusalem He had not done among the nations. The psalm was not portable. Neither was the door.

Jeremiah had already carried the other half of it through the streets, to anyone who would sit still. The evil begins at the city called by My name, and do you imagine you will go unpunished? You will not (Jeremiah 25:29). Where the Name sat thickest, the fire started. The doors of that House put themselves in the dirt rather than ride north as proof for the other side.

People walked into exile with the memory of the threshold. The bronze stayed. A child asked where the gates had gone. No one pointed at a wagon. They pointed at the ground.

Six Things Still Waiting

In a later house of study, Rabbi Levi counted on his fingers. Six things the Holy One has not yet remade. New heavens. A new earth. A new heart. A new spirit. A new name for the Messiah. A new name for the city.

The last one made the room go quiet. In this world a man who pronounces the explicit Name of God is liable to death (Leviticus 24:16). In the world to come, Levi said, the same guard will stand over the name of Jerusalem. A new name, spoken only when the city is new.

The buried doors wait for that name. They went down on the day the old name was still in force, and they will come up when the new one is spoken over the same hill.

A Cry Sent Downward

The doors are still down there. Buried in place. Waiting. When the House stands again they will rise out of the dirt and find their posts and know the footsteps coming toward them.

Once a year the congregation says so without quite saying it. At the end of the Day of Atonement, in the last hour, when the light has gone orange and everyone in the room has been standing too long, they cry out together: open for us the gate, at the hour of the closing of the gate.

The words are about a day running out. They also travel downward, to timber and bronze under the paving of a courtyard that no longer exists. The people who say them have not stopped expecting the doors to answer.