The River From the Temple That Brought the Dead Sea to Life

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By the Canal of the Exiles

The hand came down on him beside a ditch of standing water. Ezekiel was sitting among the deported, where the canal called Chebar cut its slow brown line through Babylonian mud, when the weight of it seized him and carried him out of the land of his captivity. One moment there was clay underfoot and the smell of a foreign river. The next there was a mountain, and on the mountain something like the frame of a city, and a man standing in the gate whose body shone like polished bronze.

The man held a measuring line of flax and a rod. He gave no greeting. He said, "Son of man, look with your eyes, hear with your ears, and set your heart on everything I show you."

The Temple No Hand Had Raised

They walked the courts together, and the walls stood fresh as if the mortar had dried that morning, though no mason had climbed here and no quarry had been opened. This was not the house Solomon built and the fire took. This was the house of the days to come, lifted up and made new by the one who needs no builders, and no chisel had touched a single stone of it.

The gate of the inner court that faced east stood shut. Ezekiel set his hand to it and it did not move. "This gate shall stay shut the six days of labor," the bronze man said. "But on the Sabbath it shall be opened, and on the day of the new moon it shall be opened." No hand would open it. It would swing wide of itself, on the evening the work of the world stopped and on the night the moon came back thin to the sky.

Waters From Under the Threshold

Then he saw the water. It came out from under the threshold of the house, eastward, thin as a thread where it left the door, sliding past the right side of the altar. The man went out through the north gate with the line in his hand and led Ezekiel down along the flow. A thousand cubits, and he made him wade across. The water reached his ankles. A thousand more, and it climbed to his knees. A thousand more, and it rose past his waist. A thousand more, and he could not cross. It had become a river no foot could touch bottom in, a torrent to swim in and be carried.

Where it left the sanctuary the current split, and Ezekiel counted the channels. Twelve streams, one for each tribe of Israel, fanning eastward across the land. They ran down to the brook of Kidron and past it, higher than any flood the valley had ever held, down to the fords of the Jordan, out toward the Arabah, the scorched trench that falls away toward the sea of salt.

The Sea That Was Given Back Its Life

Ahead lay the water that killed. Nothing swam in the sea of salt. No reed stood at its lip. Its shore was a white crust, and the hills above it held the memory of cities burned to lime. The river ran down into that dead brine, and the brine woke. The bitter water turned sweet and moving and full. Fish crowded the shallows, kind upon kind, as many as the fish of the Great Sea. Where the stream reached, everything lived.

Along both banks, on this side and on that, trees stood that Ezekiel had no name for. Their leaves did not wither and their fruit did not fail. Every month they broke into new fruit, a fresh crop under every new moon, because the water at their roots had come out from the sanctuary. The fruit was food. The leaf was medicine. A man could pull a single leaf and carry healing in his hand.

The Argument Over Whether Anything Can Be New

Generations after the prophet sealed his scroll, men bent over his words in the study house, and one of them set the objection down like a stone on the table. "Is it not written," he said, "that there is nothing new under the sun? A river, some trees, fish in the water. All of it is only wood and water and things the world has seen before."

The answer came back sharp. The righteous will be made new, the sages said, they and every good deed their hands ever did, while for the wicked nothing new is held in store. Renewal is not paid out to the sun and the seasons like a wage. It is kept for those who trust the one whose threshold the river flows from. The new thing is not a stranger kind of fish. It is the dead sea itself standing up alive, the one water everyone had written off, roaring back with more life than it had ever drowned. That was the thing the world had never yet seen, and the thing it had been promised.

They remembered the voice the whole house was built on. "Behold, I do a new thing. Now it shall spring forth." The eastern gate opening with no hand upon it. The salt sea thick with fish. The leaves that never browned. Not a patching of what fire had taken, but something the sun had never once shone upon.

The bronze man brought Ezekiel back along the bank, past the trees, and asked him, "Son of man, have you seen this?" Then he led him up the shore. Behind them the shut gate waited for its Sabbath, and the sea of salt went on breathing.