No Sculptor Can Shape a Child From One Drop as God Does

Click for full size

The Man Formed Front and Back

No sculptor of flesh could have managed it. When God bent over the red clay on the sixth day, He did not work the way a potter works, one side first and the back left for later. He laid His hands on the figure behind and before at the same instant, and the man rose from the ground with a face turned each way, male and female pressed into one body. Every wild beast, every bird of the field, He had shaped with a single forming. This one He formed twice over, once for the world that was beginning and once for a world not yet made. Part of him reached back before the beginning: the wind that had moved over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:2), before there was light, was already his soul, waiting for the clay it would fill.

The man opened his eyes last of all the creatures. "After He had made every beast and every bird," Adam said, "He made me." He had come into a world already crowded, already fed and watered and singing, and he understood that he had been held back for the end, the final work of a long day, the one the Fashioner had labored over from first light to dusk.

One Drop, Three Hundred Colors

A king who wants an image summons his artisans. They grind their pigments, a dish for every shade, and after all their mixing the painted face stares back and says nothing. It cannot praise the hand that made it. It cannot make a face of its own.

The Rock (tzur, צור) works otherwise. From one drop, a single bead of white, He raises up the peacock, and out of that colorless bead come three hundred and sixty-five kinds of color, the blue throat and the hundred eyes burning in the tail. And not the peacock only. From one drop of white He assembles a human being, the bone and the blood and the wet machinery of a face, and when the work stands up it does not stay mute like a painted board. It stands before Him and praises. His image goes on to make an image of its own: the woman He forms bears a child and forms another like herself, a maker made out of a drop.

Nine Months in the Sealed Dark

Shut a grown man in a bathhouse and leave him a single day, and his spirit begins to fret inside him, the heat pressing, the walls close. But the Fashioner takes a formed thing no larger than a folded hand and shuts it in the dark of the belly for nine months, and its spirit does not fret. He keeps it there. He holds its breath for it. Curled in a place with no light and no air a grown man could use, it is fed without eating and kept without waking, and the small heart goes on beating in the black. If the woman's seed comes first, a son takes shape in that dark; if the man's comes first, a daughter.

The Law Whispered in the Dark

And the child is not only kept. Before it leaves the womb it is taught. In the dark the Fashioner leans close and tells it what to eat and what to refuse, this is clean for you and this is unclean (Leviticus 11:29), the whole of the Torah spoken over it while it floats unborn. The child takes the commandments upon itself there, in the belly, before it has drawn a breath or seen a face. Only when it has accepted all of them is it brought out. A woman conceives and bears a child (Leviticus 12:2), and the newborn comes into the light already bound to a covenant it agreed to in the dark, exactly as the first man came last into a finished world and knew he had been made on purpose.

Job on the Ash-Heap

Job, scraping his sores on the ash-heap, watched the world do these things and could not hold them in his mind. He saw a woman labor and bring a whole man out of her own body. He saw a ship ride open water and not go under, moving finger over finger across the deep. He looked at a child that had been a single drop and was now a person with a name, and the wonder of it ran past the edge of everything he knew. "I will fetch my knowledge from afar," he said (Job 36:3), because the thing in front of him, a life fashioned out of nothing his hand could point to, came from a workshop no eye had entered and no craftsman of flesh could copy. There is no Rock, no Fashioner, like this one.