The Hairy Ones Israel Fed and the Boy Who Read Them Down

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The First Page and the Leaping Shapes

The scroll came open across the boy's knees and the room went loud.

Nothing in it had moved. The teacher stood where he had stood since morning. But small hooves scrabbled across the back of the boy's neck, the smell of goat and singed hair came down over the page, and the first line of writing slid apart under his eyes like silt off a stone.

He flattened his hand on the parchment to hold it down.

"There is something on me," he said.

"Se'irim," the teacher said, without looking up. "The hairy ones. They leap on a man the first day he opens the words. Like goats turned loose on new grass."

The boy could hear them chewing.

"In the burnt cities where nobody sweeps, they dance," the teacher said. "Isaiah saw them dancing there. They have found somewhere new."

The boy asked where such things came from, and the teacher sat down, because that answer was older than the schoolhouse.

Blood Poured Out for Things That Gave Nothing Back

There had been altars. Not the great one in Jerusalem. Small ones. A flat stone on a hilltop, a hole scraped in the dirt beside it, and a man coming up at dusk with a kid goat under his arm, fingers dug into its throat to keep it quiet.

He cut it over the hole and let the blood go down into the ground.

The sun had at least ripened his barley, and the stars had steered his uncle home from Tema. Bowing to those would still have drawn anger out of heaven, a lesser anger that leaves a door open. He bowed to none of them. He fed the hole, and what drank there had never grown a stalk of anything for anybody.

Sheydim, the old word calls them. No-gods. Things that avail nothing at all.

They took payment anyway. A sheyd gets into a man and settles there and rides him, and the household learns to watch his hands.

The Molds That Went Out From Jerusalem and Shomron

What the fathers fed had no names anybody could look up. Even the nations did not recognize these gods. New arrivals, freshly come, and no priest in Tyre could name what they came from.

Which is why the caravans were so strange.

Clay molds went out packed in straw, north and west, and the workshops that got them pressed metal into the hollows and sold what came out. A trader would turn one of the finished figures over in a market in Sidon, look at the horns and the little braced legs, and say to the man beside him, "This is a Jewish image."

He was right. The patterns came from Jerusalem. The patterns came from Shomron. Two cities that should have exported nothing but instruction were tooling emptiness for the trade, and when a conqueror's hand swept those idol-kingdoms off the map, the workshops had no argument.

Ahaziah Sends to Ekron and Elijah Meets the Runners

Generations later a king fell.

Ahaziah went through the lattice of his upper room in Shomron and landed badly, and from the bed he could not get out of he did what his fathers had trained him to do. He picked men who could run and sent them to Ekron to ask whether he would live.

They took the road out of the city. A man was standing in it.

"Is it because there is no God in Israel," Elijah said, "that you are going to inquire of the god of Ekron?"

The runners turned back without the answer they were sent for. They carried a different one, and the king heard he would not be getting up.

That was the loud version. The quiet version happened in houses at night with the shutters closed, a woman with a voice in her belly, a man who could bring thin speech up out of the floor for a dead relative the customer had paid to reach. Whoever kept such a spirit in Israel stood under a death sentence. The business went on anyway, because the dead are cheaper than a judge and they never say no.

The Spirits That Cannot Bring Up Their Own Dawn

"Inquire of the ghosts," the neighbors kept saying. "Inquire of the familiar spirits."

What Israel was handed to say back was a question. Should a people not inquire of its own God? The nations keep gods who are dead, and their makers resemble them the way a casting resembles its mold. Whoever clings to the Lord is alive, the words go, present tense, this morning.

In the study house Rabbi Yochanan and Resh Lakish pulled at the same half verse from Isaiah, about those for whom there is no dawn. Rabbi Yochanan read it against the nations. No dawn for them.

Resh Lakish went further down. "The ghosts and the familiar spirits cannot bring the dawn up even for themselves," he said. "They are set in the dark, fixed in it. And a man is paying them to tell him about tomorrow morning."

Somebody asked whom to go to instead.

The answer had a street address. Go up to the priests, and to the judge who is in office in those days, and stand there while they teach.

Rabbi Bana'ah Names the Two Ways the Words Can End

The lamp had burned low. The boy had not taken his hand off the parchment, and the hooves were still there, lighter now, the way a flock goes quiet once it stops being afraid of a field.

"Rabbi Bana'ah used to say there are two ways this ends," the teacher said. "Learn the words for their own sake and they turn into an elixir of life inside you. Life to those who find them, healing to all his flesh. Learn them to get called a name in the market, and the same words are a killing drug."

He tapped the line the boy was pinning down. The verse promises teaching that comes down like rain, ya'arof, and Bana'ah heard in that word the other thing it does, the neck of the heifer broken in the wadi where nothing is sown.

"Many she has laid low," the teacher said. "All her slain are a mighty host."

The boy looked at the first word for a long time. Then he read it out loud.

Something on his shoulder shifted its weight, the way a goat shifts when it is deciding whether to stay.

He read the second word.