The Craftsman Who Cannot Paint Inside Water and the God Who Can

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Hannah's Voice Filled the Sanctuary at Shiloh

Hannah stood in Shiloh with the child she had begged for now weaned and left at the sanctuary, and she did not weep. She sang. "There is none holy like the Lord," she said, "for there is none besides You, and there is no Rock like our God." The priests heard a woman who had once moved her lips without sound. Now the words came out full and hard, like a hammer on an anvil. She had asked heaven for a body and heaven had made one inside her own, and she had felt it turn.

The sages who carried her song forward heard one more line folded inside it. Read the word for Rock, they said, as the word for Fashioner. There is no fashioner like our God. And having said it, they went looking for a craftsman who could answer the claim.

The Painter Set His Figure Upon the Water

Bring in the best of them, a man who could grind a pigment finer than dust and lay a face on a wall so alive the eyes seemed to follow you across a room. Set him a task. Draw a figure, they said, not on plaster, not on stone, but inside water.

He tried. He touched his brush to the surface of the basin and the line spread and thinned and drowned. He tried again with a heavier hand and the color sank in a brown cloud and was gone. Water takes no image. Water holds nothing still.

But on the first day of the world, when the deep lay dark and unshaped, the voice over it said, "Let the waters swarm." And the water that would not hold a painter's single line filled with fins and scales and a thousand moving forms, each one fashioned inside the very element that had swallowed the painter's brush. A form within water. The craftsman stood at his ruined basin and had no answer.

In the Dark Water No Lamp Could Reach

Then set him a harder task still. Work in the dark.

Every artist he knew needed light. Take away the lamp and the finest hand in the land is a blind man smearing color he cannot see. But the child that Hannah carried had been shaped where no lamp reaches, in the sealed dark of the womb, in water inside a body inside the night. A form within a form, made in secret, and the One who made darkness itself worked there as easily as at noon.

The painter had never made a thing he could not see. Here was a maker who colored an eye by touch in the black, who set the small teeth in their rows, who turned a back and folded the innards in behind it, and folded in with them a soul. Two things, the sages said, that no sorcerer and no painter has ever made: the soul, and the innards a body hides. Both of them, when they are finished, praise the One who made them.

One Drop of White and One Drop of Red

Look at what the painter needed and what the Maker used. The painter mixed a dozen pigments for a single face, black for the pupil, white around it, red for the gum, white again for the teeth, a wall of little jars. The Maker took one drop of white and one drop of red, and from those the whole child came, the black center of the eye and the white ring around it, the white tooth and the red gum, every color drawn out of two.

And the painter built his face the only way a man can, piece after piece, the head first, then an ear, then a limb, hour upon hour until it was done. The Maker did not begin at the head and work down. The child came whole, all of it in a single act, eye and spine and hidden organ and breath, formed together inside the dark.

The Form That Turned and Praised Its Maker

There was one thing more, and it was the thing that ended the contest.

The painter's figure stayed on the wall. It did not walk. It did not see the man who made it. It could not hear him call its name, and when he died it hung there dumb and outlasted him and said nothing. His work would never once thank him.

The child in Hannah's arms had walked out of that dark water into the light. It saw. It heard. It would go from one end of the world to the other on its own feet. And one day, grown, it would open its mouth and bless the One who had colored its eyes in the black. "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, His holy name." The Holy One had made a form that turned and praised its Maker. No painter had ever done that, or ever would.

So Hannah had it right in Shiloh, and the sages let her word stand. There is none besides Him. There is no fashioner like our God.