Temple Gates Sank Rather Than Serve Babylon

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

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He sent men with chains.

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

Nothing Left to Load

The officer drove a spear butt into the seam and got dirt. He set men digging and they found more dirt, and under that, stone. They dug until the light went and then they stopped, because there is a point at which a soldier decides not to 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, and they had refused for the honor of the Holy One, which is a strange reason for a hinge to have. They would not serve a foreign capital, would not stand in one with a general's name painted across them and idols set on either side.

Jeremiah found the line for it while the ash was still warm. Her gates have sunk into the ground. He has ruined and broken her bars. It sounds like the last word in a catalogue of losses. It is also, read a second way, the only object in the city that got to choose.

The City the Fire Started In

The sons of Korah had sung about that ground for centuries. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, they sang, and great in His city, and they meant the city and nothing else. What God had done in Jerusalem he had not done anywhere among the nations. The praise was not portable.

Neither was the reckoning. Jeremiah had already carried the other half of it 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. Where the concentration is highest, the accounting starts.

So the fire started in the one place on earth that had been singled out, and the doors of the singled-out House put themselves in the dirt rather than be evidence for the other side.

Six Things Not Yet Made

Isaiah had promised more than repairs. New heavens and a new earth, not patched but made. A new heart and a new spirit handed to people who had run out of both. A new name for the Messiah. And a new name for the city, which is the strangest of the six, because Rabbi Levi drew the obvious conclusion from it: in this world a man who pronounces the explicit Name of God is liable to death, and in the world to come the same guard will stand over the name of Jerusalem.

Six things unmade and waiting to be remade. Heavens. Earth. Heart. Spirit. The name of the Messiah. The name of the city.

Between the buried doors and that list runs the whole length of the exile. The people carried memory north. The ground kept the bronze.

Open for Us the Gate

The doors are still down there. That is the claim, held for a great many centuries without embarrassment: buried in place, waiting, and when the House stands again they will come up out of the dirt and find their posts and know the footsteps coming toward them.

Once a year the congregation says so out loud 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. It sounds like a plea about a day running out.

It is also a message sent downward, to timber and bronze under the paving of a courtyard that no longer exists, from people who have not stopped expecting an answer.