The Snow Beneath the Throne Built Eden and the Earth

The Clot of Snow Beneath the Throne

Before there was ground to stand on, there was only water and the Throne of Glory riding above it. The waters spread in every direction with nothing to break them, no shore, no stone, no name to call out across the surface.

On the first day the Holy One reached beneath the Throne and lifted out a lump of snow. He held it over the middle of the waters and let it fall. Where it struck, the surface thickened. The snow did not melt. It spread and hardened and rose, and dry land surfaced in the center of the deep. "Be earth," He said to the snow, and the snow obeyed.

But the new earth would not hold still. All that first day the waters climbed over it and pulled it apart, dissolving the land back toward the sea, dragging it loose like a ship with no anchor on the open water.

The Stone Cast at the Center

So He took a single stone, the Foundation Stone, and cast it down at the one place where the Temple would one day stand. The stone sank to the bottom of the waters and gripped. On it the whole world was founded, pinned at its very middle so that everything else could be built outward from that point.

Then He called to the earth by voice. He spoke and the land heard its summons and froze where it lay, no longer sliding here and there across the deep, no longer drifting like a vessel cut loose. It stood. The waters that had chased it all day were rebuked back into their basins, and the dry land kept its place.

When the first light broke, it did not shine everywhere at once. It rose first over a single strip of ground, the Land of Israel, and from there it poured outward to fill the rest of the world. The Holy One wrapped Himself in that light as a man wraps himself in a tallit, drew majesty around Him like a robe, girded strength about Him like a belt, and the world that had been water and snow a moment before held firm under His glory.

The Garden Already Stood

What the waters did not know is that the same supernal snow had been used once before, long ago, in a work older than the world it now anchored.

One thousand three hundred sixty-one years, three hours, and two moments before heaven and earth existed, the Holy One had already reached beneath that same Throne, drawn out the same snow, and pressed it into soil. From it He made the ground of Gan Eden. He set its plantings, raised its firmament, laid its earth beneath. The garden touched this lower world and did not touch it, for it floated above all the lands, finished and waiting while the place that would become the sea was still only water.

Its firmament shone like sapphire brick, lit with every color, and the Name of the Holy One was cut into the middle of it. Four rings hung at the four corners of that sky, four wheels turning in each ring, and a single pillar rose from the garden's snow-made floor straight up to the face of the Throne. A cloud of glory covered it. Upon it stood the angel Gabriel, dressed in linen.

The Garden That Waited Empty

Once each day Gabriel took hold of the rings. The pillar turned, the firmament turned with it, and the letters of the explicit Name pushed out of the sapphire, sparkled, climbed, and sank back. A voice went out across the garden. "Direct yourselves, camps of holy righteous ones. Happy are you that you merited this. Who has heard such a thing, and who has seen such things?"

But the canopies stood empty. The chairs of precious stone waited unoccupied. The couches were spread for no one. The houses built within the garden, walls of cedar, beams of clear glass and refined silver and olive wood, held no penitents and no converts and no martyrs yet, because not one soul had lived and died to come and fill them. The garden sang its daily song to an audience of angels alone, with a pillar rising and falling and a Name flashing in an empty sky.

The woven surface of its floor held the dew with which the dead would one day be revived. The Tree of Life stood five hundred years tall over a spring of living water, and a single river went out from Eden and split into four heads that would one day wander the world below. All of it stood ready. All of it stood still. The first righteous soul had not yet been born to walk in under its shade.

Two Works of the Same Snow

So the snow beneath the Throne did its work twice. Once it became a garden suspended above everything, complete down to its rivers and its empty couches, hung in the air for thirteen centuries and more with no one inside it. Once it became the floor of the world, thrown onto the chasing waters, pinned by a stone at the place of the Temple, frozen into stillness by a single command.

The garden waited above for its first guest. The earth held firm below for the first feet that would walk it. And between the two, the Foundation Stone sat at the center of the deep, the one fixed point where the upper snow and the lower snow would forever answer to each other.