The Deathless Scribe and the Golden Grass of Baruch's Grave

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The Eagle Came Down Over the Graves

Baruch was on his knees pouring out thanks to God when a shadow crossed him. An eagle was falling out of the noon sky, not stooping on prey but coming down to him, deliberate as a servant on an errand. It settled and said it had been sent as a messenger. In its grip it carried a letter for the exiles and a cluster of figs, and the figs were soft and green as if picked that morning, though sixty-six years had passed since any hand had gathered them.

The bird flew on to a poor patch of ground outside the walls, a Jewish burial field that Nebuchadnezzar had granted the prophet Jeremiah only after long begging. A funeral was coming toward it, mourners bent under a bier, carrying their dead far from home. The eagle cried out over them. "I have a message for thee, Jeremiah! Let all the people draw nigh to receive the good tidings!" A bird that spoke could be a madness of grief, so the eagle gave a sign. It touched the corpse on the bier, and the dead man opened his eyes and sat up among the living. The people broke, and their voices ran together into one cry. "Save us. What must we do to return to our land?"

The Book He Read to the Captive King

Baruch had never wanted the front of any room. He was the scribe, the hand behind the prophet, the man who wrote down another man's thunder. But Jerusalem was ash now and Jeremiah's voice was thinning, and someone had to speak into the silence. So Baruch spoke. He wrote letters, one of admonishment to those still in the land, and two for the tribes carried off, one for the nine and a half and one for the two and a half, and the eagle bore the first across the desert.

Then, five years into the ruin, sitting in Babylon among the captives, he made a whole book. It held penitential prayers, the raw pleading of people who knew what they had lost, and hymns of consolation for the longest nights. Return to God, it said on every page. Return to His law and you will not be left here. On a fast day he read it aloud to King Jeconiah, whom some called Jehoiachin, and to all the people, and the whole exile mourned and remembered and turned its face back toward the God who had let them fall.

The Prayer He Dared to Say for His Enemy

Then Baruch asked something that caught in the throat. A collection went around the camp, coin and silver, and with it the people gathered the silver Temple vessels that Zedekiah had made after Jeconiah was dragged into captivity. All of it Baruch sent back to Jerusalem, to the high priest Joakim and the remnant, with instructions. Buy sacrifices. And pray for the life of Nebuchadnezzar, who had burned the House, and for his son Belshazzar.

Pray for the man who did this. Baruch swallowed the hard word and gave it anyway, because a people praying under a roof, even a conqueror's roof, was a people still alive to pray, and he meant them to live long enough to go home. After that the account loses him. He does not appear among the exiles who sicken and die through the foreign years. Among them it was said he had not truly died at all, only been laid aside like the figs the eagle carried, kept whole against the day the exile would end.

The Prince Who Wanted Ezekiel's Tomb

Generations turned, and a Babylonian prince grew hungry for the grave of the prophet Ezekiel, whose tomb stood in that country. He summoned a Jew, Rabbi Solomon, and demanded to be led to it. The rabbi named a smaller door first. "Try to enter the tomb of Baruch, which adjoins that of Ezekiel," he said. "If you succeed there, then perhaps you may approach Ezekiel, the teacher of Baruch."

The prince set his men to open Baruch's grave. The first who laid a hand on the stone dropped dead where he stood. So did the next. The ground would not be forced. An old Arab of the region gave the only counsel that fit. "Call upon the Jews, for Baruch was one of them, and they still study his books." So the Jews of the district came, and not with tools. They came with ta'anit and t'fillah, fasting and prayer, with teshuvah and tzedakah, repentance and open hands. They humbled themselves at the stone, and it opened as gently as a book falling open. Inside lay Baruch on a bier of marble, whole and unmarked, as though the breath had gone out of him that same hour and not an age ago.

The Grass That Only Shone at Night

The prince, staring at the uncorrupted man, decided it was not fitting for Baruch and Ezekiel to share one grave, and ordered the bier carried into the city. His strongest bearers took hold. Teams of animals were harnessed to it. The bier moved a little more than two thousand ells and would go no further, rooted as if the earth had reached up and closed a fist. The prince read the sign. He set the bier down where it had stopped and ordered a house of study raised over the spot, so that where Baruch would not be moved, his books would be opened forever. And the prince and all his court left the gods of their fathers and took the God of Baruch for their own.

The grave kept one last secret for the patient. Grass grew over Baruch, common by day, but its blades were dusted with gold, and the gold would not answer sunlight. Only in the dark did it catch and shine, so the seekers learned to come by night, mark the shining places with a stake, and return at first light to gather what the night had shown them. Not far off, two thousand ells across the plain, the low gate of Ezekiel's tomb widened of its own accord whenever the crowds pressed in, so that no pilgrim who came for the teacher was ever turned from the door beside the scribe.