The Day the Holy One Strips the Sun of Its Sheath

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The Second Firmament and Not the First

The two great lights were carried up past the first firmament and not set down there, and every creature that would ever breathe owed its life to that decision. God fixed them in the second. Between one floor of heaven and the next lay five hundred years of walking, the floor itself was five hundred years thick, and higher still the host of heaven stood in the firmament above the heavens.

Put the sun in the first firmament, one story above the barley and the wells, and nothing underneath it survives a single afternoon.

The heavens carried that knowledge and said nothing about it for a long time.

A Pool of Water Set in Front of the Fire

Height alone was not enough, so the orb was given a covering. Rabbi Natan called it a pouch and laid the verse down beside it, "He set a tent for the sun in them." A tent pitched inside the firmament, the fire bedded in it the way a blade beds in a scabbard. In front of the opening stands a pool of water, and it has stood there since the fourth day.

Sunrise is the fire coming out of the pouch. The water takes the first of it.

What crosses the pool is weather. What would cross without the pool is a furnace opened onto a world made of straw, and so the Holy One breaks the strength of the sun in that water every morning before one ray reaches a rooftop. The heat that gets through is the heat farmers curse in the field. It is the leftover.

The Morning No Shadow Could Be Found

Once a year the arrangement shows its edge. On the first day of the summer solstice the sun stands square overhead and there is no shade anywhere in the world. A man looks for his own shadow and finds it crushed flat under his feet. The ox tied beneath the terebinth stands in the same white light as the open field, and the psalm says out loud what every body in that field already knows, "Nothing can shelter from its heat."

The Sea Answers From Behind Its Line of Sand

The other great power under orders lies flat along the coast.

It could take the land in an hour. Twice a day it climbs the beach and stops, and the thing that stops it is a strip of wet sand a child could kick apart. From the wall at Tziddon a watchman sees the water refuse a town it could erase before the evening meal is cleared.

Then the fortress of the sea speaks for itself. "I have not labored, and I have not borne, and I have not raised youths or reared maidens." Nothing drives it. It holds the line without a single reason to break it. The voice that drew that line answers with a question it already knows the answer to. "Will you not fear Me, will you not tremble before Me, who have set sand as a bound to the sea, an eternal law, not to be broken?"

The water slides back down the shingle. "Be ashamed, O Tziddon."

The Sages Argue Over the Last Fire

In the study hall nobody disputed that the sheath comes off. Malachi had settled that much. "For, behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace, and all the criminals and all those who do evil will be straw." What the sages fought over was whether anything else would be burning that day.

Rabbi Yannai and Rabbi Shimon said there would be no Gehenna (the realm of judgment after death) in the future at all. One day, one open furnace, the sun let out of its pouch, and the wicked gone the way stubble goes when a field fire crosses it.

The Rabbis refused that. Gehenna is a real fire in a real place, they said, and they had their verse ready, "The utterance of the Lord, for whom there is fire in Zion."

Then Rabbi Yehuda bar Ilai put a third thing on the table, worse than either. No scorching day and no pit. The fire comes out of the bodies of the wicked and eats them from the inside, and he read it out of Isaiah. "Conceive stubble, give birth to straw, your spirit is a fire that will consume you." A man walks around carrying his own furnace and never once suspects the load.

The Sheath Comes Off

On that day the Holy One strips the sun of its pouch.

There is no pool in front of it. Whatever stands in the light stands in all of it, the whole face of the thing kept at one remove since the day it was hung, and the day that is coming burns them. The straw does what straw does.

In the same unbottled light, at the same hour, something else happens. For those who feared the Name a sun of righteousness rises with healing in its wings, and they go out and grow fat like calves of the stall. The identical fire. One crop of people goes up as stubble and the other walks out into it unhurt, blinking in all that light.

Above them the heavens, which had held their five hundred years of distance since the fourth day and never once said why, open their mouths and declare His beneficence. They had known from the beginning what a first-floor sun would have done to the world beneath them, and they had carried it at the correct height, with the water standing ready, every morning of the age.