The Serpent Sent on a Mission to the Town Gate

The city gate threw a long band of shade across the dust, and in that shade Rabbi Jannay sat hearing cases. A dispute over a boundary stone. A widow's claim against her late husband's brother. The ordinary traffic of a town settling its quarrels in the cool of the morning, while goats complained somewhere behind the wall and the smell of bread came down from the ovens.

Then something moved in the road that did not belong to the road.

The Thing That Crossed the Road With a Purpose

A serpent came out of the scrub on the far side and started across the open ground toward the town. Jannay had seen snakes before, lazy ones sunning on warm stone, frightened ones pouring away into a crack at the sound of a foot. This one moved differently. It went in a straight line, head lifted, as though it had been given an address.

A boy throwing stones drove it off its course. The serpent turned aside, slid along the wall, found the next gap, and resumed the same line toward the houses. A donkey balked in its path. The serpent went around. A cart rolled across the lane and the creature waited, coiled and patient, then poured itself under the wheels and came on again, never once turning back, never once losing the thread of where it meant to go.

Jannay set down the case before him. The widow waited. The boundary stone waited. He watched the snake the way he would watch a witness whose story was holding together too well.

A Judge Recognizes Another Court at Work

"This one," he said, half to the men around him and half to no one, "is going to carry out its mission."

The word landed strangely in the gate, where missions were the business of couriers and kings. But there was no other word for what was crossing the dirt. The serpent was not hunting. It was not fleeing. It was delivering. Somewhere ahead of it was a name, and it had been let loose against that name, and nothing the town put in its way could turn it from the errand.

Jannay had spent his life weighing testimony, ruling for one man and against another, sending verdicts out from this very gate. He knew what it looked like when a sentence had already been passed and only the carrying-out remained. He was watching a sentence walk on its belly through the dust, and the sentence was not his.

The serpent reached the shadow of the first house and was gone inside the lanes.

The Word That Walks On Its Belly Was Old

Long before this morning, the same creature had been let loose against another name, in a garden, with a question in its mouth. "Yea, has God said?" it asked, and the word for yea, aph, was also the word for anger. The serpent that opened with aph was already, from that first hiss, prepared for its end. It spoke, and it was readied for the curse before the curse was spoken.

It was not the only one. The chief baker opened with aph when he leaned toward Joseph in the prison and said, "I too was in my dream," and three days later he was hanging from a tree. The company of Korah opened with aph against Moses, "yea, you have not brought us to a land flowing with milk and honey," and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them mid-complaint. Haman opened with aph at his own feast table, boasting, "yea, Esther the queen let no one come with the king but myself," and the gallows he was bragging beside became his own. Four of them opened with anger, and through anger every one was destroyed.

So when Jannay saw the serpent moving with purpose toward the town, he was watching the oldest instrument in the world go back to work. The creature that had been prepared for punishment in the garden had not been retired. It had been kept.

The Report Comes Back Up the Lane

He returned to the widow and the boundary stone. He gave his rulings. The morning ran on as mornings do.

Then the noise changed. It came up from the inner lanes the way grief always travels in a small place, a single cry and then a chain of them, doors opening, names called from rooftop to rooftop. The crowd at the gate turned toward it.

The word reached Jannay where he sat. So-and-so the son of So-and-so had been bitten by a serpent in his own house, and was dead.

No one at the gate had heard a sentence read against the man. No court had summoned him. There had been no witnesses, no accusers, no two who agreed, none of the slow careful machinery that Jannay served all his life so that no man should die on a whim. And yet the verdict had been delivered, exactly, to a single name, and the one thing in the world that could not be turned aside had been the one chosen to deliver it.

Jannay sat in the shade of the gate where men brought their small quarrels to be judged, and understood that another gate had judged this one, and had sent down its sentence on a belly through the dust, past the boy and the donkey and the cart, straight to the door it was sent to.